I'd love to see the LA Times go back and revisit the Utah Valley region and the culture that helped contribute to this. The Utah Valley is chock full of startups with a serious inferiority complex to their big brothers in Silicon Valley, hence derivative name. More importantly, Utah is the “multi-level marketing capital of the world [1]” This kind of sales and growth tactic is not limited to the diet smoothie and cosmetics world, but is absolutely pervasive in the valley. Note- SLC and the Utah Valley may be united in the Silicon Slopes moniker, but they are about as similar as Austin and Waco, TX.

A few observations on Domo

1) The product is weak. It’s pretty dashboards with very limited “real” BI capabilities. The connectors are custom, not OOB/end user configurable – unless end user happens to be IT.

2) They seem to be aware that the product is weak, as their demos include an NDA. Until recently there was almost no “real” information available on what exactly Domo is or does. Only void marketing speak.

3) Their absurd domopalooza (or DP for short, no joke) events included artists like Kesha and Macklemore.

4) Their totally overblown marketing hype surrounds an incoherent me-too product roadmap. Rather than focusing on building a quality product they are going for checkboxes and chasing after Slack etc with features like Chat

5) They have a billboard that reads “If Hillary Had DOMO She would have won.”

I've been predicting for a while that DOMO’s hubris would cause it to be one of the first in the scene to fail spectacularly. What worries me about that prediction is the economic harm that would do to the rest of the Valley especially given the impact of MLM economics.

1- http://kutv.com/news/local/follow-the-profit-how-mormon-cult...