Cornerstone Technologies: Laying The Foundation Of Silicon Slopes Tech Summit

The biggest systems within the international — the Empire nation building, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera residence — all start with a cornerstone. After those homes were completed and marked the skyline of every city, it turned into clean to forget how it all began — with a stable stone that varies in size however not aid, altered to satisfy the unique demands of each structure. A foundational piece that enables an entire revel in, inflicting travelers and passerbys to study a number of humankind’s most intricate creations and sense they may be a part of something unique.

Almost 30 years in the past, Chad Fraughton and Todd Mortensen were working as engineers at wordperfect. They were a part of a group that changed into tasked with multiple responsibilities, the maximum extraordinary falling into two classes: creating emerging technology like voice recognition software program; and serving as an inner events/communications group that created occasion pushed reviews.

“We have been a collective organization that have been writers, manufacturers, administrators, showmen, technology people,” said Fraughton. “Todd and i have been each engineers by means of change however constantly checked out go back on investment, what activities could do for a employer, and the metrics behind a hit occasions.”

After wordperfect merged with Novell, Fraughton and his team pitched a enterprise inspiration for their department — they had been laid off on a Friday, however re-hired on Tuesday to start paintings with a subsidiary of Anheuser Busch, responsible for beer commercials and stories inside theme parks like Busch Gardens.

After three hundred and sixty five days some other possibility arose, tying returned into technology. A former vice chairman at wordperfect approached Fraughton approximately creating flight simulator generation, a challenge agreed to by each events. Now with a tremendously first rate circulation of sales coming in, Fraughton and Mortensen decided it changed into time to start their very own agency. They mocked up a logo and settled on a emblem: Cornerstone technology.

“We commenced Cornerstone and had been being endorsed to transport back to St. Louis,” said Fraughton. “My business associate and that i had our roots right here and had commenced small households — i used to be 23, he was 33, and we didn’t want to move. So we had been sitting in the future in a basement at one of the wordperfect buildings and we determined, permit’s take our business thought to Carine Clark.”

If this had been a comic ebook, Carine Clark — a Utah tech OG who has served as an government at Novell, Altiris, Symantec, Allegiance, maritzcx, and Banyan — will be the heroine of this precise tale arc. As Fraughton tells it, her support become a turning point inside the introduction of Cornerstone that enabled the entirety to return. Clark listened to their pitch and enthusiastically agreed they were onto something.

“while we supplied, her solution turned into simple: ‘This really makes sense, I would like for you guys to help us out,’” stated Fraughton. “That became the endorsement we wished. Beneath her route, Novell have become our first customer and that become the catalyst that helped launch us into the excessive-tech area.”

Drawing on their unique experience of generation introduction and occasion production, Cornerstone become flawlessly positioned to take gain of the dot-com increase. With guide from Clark and Novell, the late 1990s represented a fast growth duration for Cornerstone. They won notoriety for putting on top notch stay event stories and other tech corporations (like 3Com and iomega) started out clamoring for his or her services.

Fraughton, an engineer with the aid of exchange, changed into going on income calls wherein groups had been essentially pitching him on why they wished Cornerstone. What had commenced as a tiny, two man or woman outfit became now developing into some thing greater.

Speedy ahead to modern-day. Cornerstone technology has turn out to be a massive employer that owns a couple of software businesses and has come to be an enterprise main occasion manufacturing company. As a part of this all-encompassing event manufacturing, Cornerstone handles logistics and the whole lot that is going into the audio/visual experience of an occasion: lighting, video, sound, and multimedia content material layout.

“We tout ourselves as a hybrid, we’re now not a real manufacturing company, nor are we a true company — we dabble in both,” stated Fraughton. “we will articulate storylines, we will roll out strategic campaigns, however we can also supply on the middle skills that an audio and visible production company does. We’re very precise in that space.”

Cornerstone has constructed their empire from inside Utah, together with an enormous, brand-new warehouse in American Fork. Fraughton estimates that Cornerstone operates inside the pinnacle three% of hybrid agencies, servicing clients each overseas and home.

“It takes plenty of imaginative and prescient to run a company that does lighting, sound, video, staging, rigging, scenic, content material, media, writing, and scripting,” stated Fraughton. “after which breaking that down further into design corporations, meaning we have people that are targeted on production design, event design, virtual and content media design, and print design. For us, we’re a real one-prevent shop.”

The usage of this formulation, Cornerstone has partnered with some of the world’s maximum recognizable corporations: Wendy’s, Adobe, Monster strength, linkedin, ebay. And final yr, they commenced operating with Silicon Slopes as the exclusive event company of Silicon Slopes Tech Summit.