Lassonde At 25: A Founding Student Leader Returns To Run Utah Eccles’ Startup Engine

When Scott Holley first got involved with the University of Utah’s Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, there was no gleaming building. There was barely an office.

“I was working with a couple of students out of, basically, a closet-size building, and some hand-me-down computers,” he says.

That was 2001, the year the institute was founded, and Holley was one of its first student leaders, serving as the first student director of the Lassonde New Venture Development Center. A quarter century later, he’s back as the institute’s executive director, working out of Lassonde Studios, where students live upstairs and come downstairs to start companies.

On the surface, he says, everything has changed. What hasn’t is the model.

“This is for students and by students,” Holley says. The student leaders run the programs, and he offers guidance as “someone who’s been there, done that.” The real learning happens, he says, when student leaders create the space for students to “teach one another and learn by doing it.”

“And that’s been the same for 25 years,” he says.

A HOMECOMING

Holley’s path back ran through finance, consulting and a company of his own. After earning his finance degree at Utah, he started his career in investment banking and consulting, working as a strategy consultant at Monitor Group, now part of Deloitte Consulting, and OCC Strategy Consultants. He then became a managing director and founding team member of Harken Capital, a boutique investment bank. He also holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.

In June 2017, he led a search-fund-backed buyout of Eddyline Kayaks from its founders. Under his leadership, the company expanded into Canada, built manufacturing in the U.S. and Mexico, and drew an investment from RZC Partners, Steuart and Tom Walton’s private equity firm. He sold Eddyline to Jackson Kayak in February 2025.

He succeeded founding executive director Troy D’Ambrosio. His appointment was announced in May 2025, alongside another $25 million gift from Pierre Lassonde and the Lassonde Family Foundation.

A DESTINATION, NOT A DORM

Shortly before he sat down with Poets&Quants, Holley led a session of Company Launch, where undergraduates pitch their fledgling companies. P&Q sat in. Students, MBA candidates, and Holley sat in a big circle, with four student founders presenting their companies in various stages of launch, images from each pitch projected on the wall. Holley and the MBA students lobbed questions, the founders fielded them, and ideas flowed around the room.

It was the kind of scene Lassonde Studios was built for. Its ground floor feels less like a campus building than a living room. There are games, lots of couches, and plenty of places where students can study or talk or just hang out. Busy places aplenty, but also quiet corners. A help desk staffed by students points visitors in the right direction, and there’s food on hand. On the floors above, student housing holds upward of 400 residents.

Those beds are nearly full this year, Holley says, but most of the students the institute serves don’t live there. He puts that number at about 7,000 students, with programs open not only to the whole university but to the community, too.

The building is designed for what Holley calls “accidental collisions.” Students talking in the common spaces may be discussing sports, a class, or a company they’re starting.

“This is a convening place for the entire, broader community,” he says.

The results show up in the rankings. In U.S. News’ 2027 edition, released this fall, Utah’s undergraduate entrepreneurship program ranks No. 9 nationally. The Princeton Review ranks the school No. 2 in the West for undergraduate entrepreneurship. And research from Stanford’s Ilya Strebulaev this year found that University of Utah graduates have the best odds in the country of founding a billion-dollar startup, about 2.3 times the average founder.

BUYING, NOT JUST BUILDING

Holley is also bringing his own experience into the curriculum. Entrepreneurship through acquisition – buying and running an existing business instead of starting one – is “a path that I personally walked down,” he says.

In September 2025, the institute held its first summit on the topic, launching what the school calls the first ETA program of its kind in the Mountain West. The summit was a full day of workshops, talks and panels bringing students and practitioners together. The program aims to graduate two to three students a year, each with an investor network and a placement strategy. Holley also joined the Salt Lake City ETA chapter, a community group for acquisition entrepreneurs, and the institute has hosted a follow-up meetup at Lassonde Studios. Competitions may come next.

“We’re in our early days, but there’s strong interest,” he says. “So we’re going to be doing a lot more around that.”

‘THE GOLDEN AGE OF BUILDING’

On AI, Holley is an unabashed optimist.

“This is the golden age of building,” he says. “There’s never been a time like today where a student, regardless of their technical capacity or their access to monetary resources, can take an idea in their head and make it into a real thing.”

The institute’s response is to get students making things. This year it launched Dev Lab, a cohort program much like Company Launch, where students take an idea from concept to prototype to a production-ready product. Participants come from computer science, business and across campus. They get grant funding, access to programs and dedicated space in the building.

Next comes an AI lab inside Lassonde Studios, built “for students, by students,” Holley says. Students will be able to build with existing tools or create their own, using both on-site hardware and off-the-shelf language models. A larger buildout is planned over the next year.

He says he’s already seeing students build and ship products within 24 hours, then land customers 24 hours after that.

“My job isn’t really to fill their head with knowledge,” Holley says. “It’s to make sure that I give them the capacity and the space and the runway to just build.”

COLLABORATING & COMPETING

Utah’s startup scene, known as Silicon Slopes, also includes Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University. Holley says the relationship is part competition and part collaboration.

“Certainly, all of the schools compete for students,” he says. “But I’m a big believer that students need to find their bliss and follow their path.”

Each school has its own strengths, he says. BYU has done “incredibly well in software,” producing many of the state’s big software wins of the past 20 years through its networks, and he puts UVU in the same camp. The University of Utah’s edge has come from its research labs. Holley points to the computer graphics work that seeded a generation of companies, including Atari, Adobe and Pixar, along with Utah’s work in genetics, medical devices and the artificial heart. Some of the startups pitching at Company Launch build on that university research, he says.

“They’re complementary,” he says. “The University of Utah is part of that Silicon Slopes ecosystem. We’ve got our own strengths.”

WHAT’S NEXT

The institute is marking its 25th year with a bigger stage. Its annual Demo Day goes global next April, bringing back the best founders affiliated with the university’s programs from around the world.

And in fall 2027, the University of Utah will host the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers’ annual conference.

As for how Lassonde keeps up with all of it, Holley’s answer is simple.

“Honestly, we do it by getting out of our own way,” he says. “If we let these students loose, they’ll show us where to go.”

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