There are pros and cons to any geography today, many of which are being blurred by the move to (or from) remote work. We ended up in Salt Lake City serendipitously. I spun the company out of my dissertation work at the University of Utah with my co-founders back in 2013.

As we grew the company, we found a lot of great scientific and technical talent here in Utah. However, we had a harder time finding experienced, senior talent from biotech and pharma in the area. What that meant is that we had to build a really strong recruiting arm to the company, but once people commit to Recursion they tend to stay for a long time with little turnover, which is huge for us when building something this complex. We’re a proud leader of Utah’s Biohive community and believe deeply in the community we’ve created here in SLC. Not to mention all the fun things that come with being based in a mountainous state!

That said, we are now ~500 people and want to have the best talent in the world, and so we have remote staff, as well as teams in CA and Canada. And we certainly could imagine opening offices in other places in the future.