ONE ECOSYSTEM.
BUILT FOR FOUNDERS.
Startup Ignition is a full ecosystem for entrepreneurs and founders, combining education, tools, and capital so you don't have to guess, but can build the right way.
Startup Ignition's History
Startup Ignition wasn't created in a classroom. It was built across decades of actually building companies.
JOHN RICHARDS
Takes a company public on the NASDAQ
Originally from Seattle, John went to BYU and then built companies through the 80s and 90s. One of them went public on the NASDAQ during the dot-com era, and that exit gave him the freedom to choose what to do for the rest of his life.
Becomes one of the West's most prolific angel investors
He chose angel investing. Over the next 30 years, John put his own money into 200+ startups, including early checks into Omniture, Fusion-io, Ancestry, Skullcandy, and Lyft. Multiple IPOs, billions in exits.
BYU recruits him to lead entrepreneurship
BYU asked John to come head up the entrepreneurship program. He taught there for 12 years. He also served as head of Google Fiber in Utah, helping bring it to the community.
TYLER RICHARDS
Grows up in it, catches the bug at BYU
Tyler grew up in John's house, inundated with startups. He took his dad's entrepreneurship classes at BYU, then helped run an accelerator one summer, where he discovered a real problem: there weren't enough quality software engineers for the demand.
Co-founds DevMountain, one of the first coding bootcamps ever
So he started one, with Cahlan Sharp and Colt Henrie, bootstrapped off a $9 domain name. DevMountain trained thousands of developers and became the front door to Utah's tech talent pipeline. In year four it sold to Capella Education for up to $20M.
"I want to invest too."
After the exit, Tyler came to John and said he wanted to start investing. They became a father-son angel investing team on the Wasatch Front, writing first checks into startups across Utah, responsible for a lot of the companies you see on billboards up and down I-15.
After seeing the same pattern from two different generations...
They came together to build something different.
STARTUP IGNITION BOOTCAMP
John took everything he'd taught at BYU and turned it into a 3-day intensive. Tyler joined him after the DevMountain exit. Not theory. A system. Over 1,000 ventures have come through it since, among them Limble, Pura, Dirty Dough, and Baton. See the startup bootcamp →
STARTUP IGNITION VENTURES
Tyler talked John into formalizing their angel investing into a $20M pre-seed venture fund. First checks from $100K to $1M. By a happy accident, about two-thirds of portfolio companies went through the bootcamp first.
THE STARTUP IGNITION PODCAST
John and Tyler start recording the conversations they had been having privately for years, with the founders and investors who built the companies around them. 60+ episodes in, it is an on-the-record account of how these companies actually got built, failures included. Listen to the podcast →
TOOLSUITE + FULL ECOSYSTEM
AI validation tools built on the same system the bootcamp teaches, so a founder can pressure-test an idea before writing code. Training, tools, and capital now run as one path instead of three separate stops. See ToolSuite →
WHY FOUNDERS TRUST US
OUR APPROACH
Elephants with unicorn upside.
Pattern recognition from decades of seeing what actually works.
The healthier startups win at the end of the day.
