Every year, Utah Business and NACD Utah honor the board members of companies, nonprofits and organizations for the inspirational work they do behind the scenes to create lasting innovation and growth for future generations. Congratulations to the 2023 Outstanding Directors honorees!
Venture Capital
Gavin Christensen
Gavin Christensen ties his story closely to his venture capital (VC) firm, Kickstart. Founded in 2007, Kickstart has since raised seven funds totaling about $500M and raised $2.7B in capital. But things have not always gone smoothly for Christensen and Kickstart, and he advises, “Ultimately, you just have to choose to be optimistic. There’s a lot of good and bad.”
Christensen graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He then moved to the East Coast to work in management consulting before returning to Utah and joining a VC firm. “I was very lucky. They let me do a lot of things early in my career that I had no business doing,” Christensen says.
Christensen’s experiences with venture capital inspired him while he was getting his MBA at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago. When Christensen moved back to Utah in 2007, he started his VC fund with the support of his old VC firm.
“I thought it was going to be a $20 million fund and we were going to be off to the races,” Christensen recalls. “It ended up being an $8 million fund that took me three years to raise, living in New Mexico, commuting to Utah every week, and capital just dried up.”
The fund proved itself eventually, and Christensen raised a second, $26 million fund in 2012. Sixteen years later, Kickstart is the most active VC firm in Utah.
As its leader, Christensen enjoys the opportunities he’s had to sit on the boards of numerous companies. “The board is the ultimate product that we offer entrepreneurs,” he explains.
Christensen began serving on boards early in his career and has since tried to provide the same opportunities to others. “When you’re on the board of startups, there are a lot of amazing things that happen—lots of shocking or startling things, moments of betrayal, moments of triumph—you can experience the entire spectrum of human emotions in a week,” he says.
But there is no better way to learn. “My favorite quote is from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘If,’” Christensen says. “It reads, ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same’—Don’t get too caught up in either. We are not our successes or our failures. We are on the journey. If you want to stay grounded, you can’t buy into either too much. There’s a lot of luck.”
Christensen values board service because of the relationships he develops, and he realized early on that venture capitalism is about customer service and the human experience.
“How investors and others feel when you are interacting with them is just as important as [building] successful companies,” he says. “This is a product just like anything else. You have to think about your customer.”
Private Company
Hanko Kiessner
“First of all,” Hanko Kiessner believes, “There is no other alternative to being sustainable.”
As founder and vice chairman of Packsize, Kiessner strongly believes that “only a circular economy is morally entitled to even exist.” Otherwise, he says, we are stealing from future generations.
During his early career, Kiessner noticed a worrisome trend in packaging: “The industry was almost 50 years old, and no boxes fit the items they shipped. Not even the envelopes. We could fly to the moon but couldn’t make boxes that fit.” When Kiessner and his family returned to Utah, he resolved the fix the problem.
Packsize develops packaging solutions that produce up to 600 ready-to-pack, right-sized erected custom packaging boxes per hour. Companies like DICK’s Sporting Goods, Staples, ReadyWise and others utilize Packsize technology to save 25 tons of CO2 for every 1 million square feet of corrugated cardboard.
“Sustainability grows with awareness and education,” Kiessner says, admitting, “I’m embarrassed about my own behavior from 20 years ago when it wasn’t so clear that global warming would be happening to the degree it is now.”
Once companies become aware of the issue, Kiessner says, “It’s easy to change.” Companies can support change by tapping into abundant resources like wind and solar and stop overusing scarce resources.
Kiessner also co-founded the nonprofit organization Leaders for Clean Air to support sustainability in Utah. When he returned to Utah from Germany, he developed asthma from the smog.
As the largest beneficiary of EV charging stations, Kiessner partnered with Rocky Mountain Power to create a rebate program. Between the rebate program and donations, Leaders for Clean Air have now placed more than 3,000 free EV charging stations along the Wasatch Front.
“Three thousand is just the beginning. We want to get to 100,000 chargers so you can truly plug in everywhere you go,” Kiessner says. “We are really accelerating EV adoption and, therefore, clean air.”
Currently, Kiessner enjoys coaching other entrepreneurs and CEOs by participating on boards. “That is what I find the most gratifying, that I can live out my own learnings through the careers of others and pass on that learning,” he says.
Kiessner encourages boards to view the community, employees and planet’s well-being as a higher priority. “Board members have the responsibility to shift the direction of their companies out of unsustainable practices and into sustainable ones,” he says.
After all, companies don’t pay the cost of unsustainable practices; future generations do.
Public Company
Lynn Bleil
“I have been pleasantly surprised by how fulfilling my second career in board service has been,” says Lynn Bleil, who currently serves as a board member or strategic advisor for eight different companies around Utah and the world.
After 26 years advising CEOs and executive leadership boards of healthcare institutions with McKinsey & Company, Bleil decided to try something different. “When I took early retirement from McKinsey to move to Park City, which was about 10 years ago, I had already decided I wanted to pursue a second career in board service,” she says.
Bleil’s extensive experience made her an invaluable asset to the companies she joined. The transition was motivated by an interest in leveraging her expertise at a higher level but still enjoying the diversity and broad impact she’d grown to love with consulting. Bleil says Utah’s phenomenal healthcare drew her in, but access to the mountains, youth orchestras and world-class education sealed the deal for her family.
“We lived in Southern California for 20 years and commuted up to Mammoth Mountain for my son to be a ski racer,” Bleil explains, though he also wanted to play the double bass and attend a great school. “Utah had the trifecta.”
As a director, Bleil appreciates the opportunities she has to shape, explore and develop the futures and cultures of companies. “We’ve enjoyed coming to Utah and being able to have an impact in areas that we are passionate about,” she says.
But not every day on the job is fun. Bleil recalls an experience where she realized a company had a deep-seated cultural problem that was leading to more and more issues. “A management team was chasing earnings and not making the right investments in culture, talent, systems and processes. And the board got lulled along by this brilliant performance,” she explains. “That reminded me that I’m going to ask the tough questions. I will go another level down and ensure it’s not just good performance but good underlying health.”
Bleil’s most significant takeaway from her board service is that diversity matters. “It is easy to say and may sound obvious, but a diversity of experiences, perspectives and backgrounds create the right conversations that allow boards to be effective,” she says.
Nonprofit
Shawn Newell
When he was a child, Shawn Newell thought he didn’t need school—he wanted to be the next great NFL star. Experiences throughout his life would later lead him to become one of our state’s greatest advocates for equitable education.
As a first-grader in 1967, Newell was part of the third class of students to desegregate the school system in Riverside, California. “I had this struggle because after school, I’d have to go back home, and there were still members of our community that were not part of that,” he says. Newell has since promoted the Equity Lens Framework in his board member role at the Utah System of Higher Education, where he advocates for the equity of all students, staff and faculty and a safe workplace where they can thrive.
Newell is a former chair of the Workforce & Economic Development Advisory Board at Salt Lake Community College, where he served as the alumni council president and a trustee. He is a former commissioner on the governor’s Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Commission, is the co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the Salt Lake Chamber and serves as a civility ambassador through iChange Nations. He has served as the VP of the Salt Lake branch of the NAACP since 2006, where he hopes to help others create a full understanding of what the organization does.
“Most people think the NAACP is fighting for civil rights for African Americans. But it’s stated right in the letters: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—it’s for all people,” he says. “We actually work to make sure that the civil rights of all citizens are abided by. I’m really passionate about making sure that we’re creating equity throughout our communities.”
Minimizing healthcare disparities within Utah communities is another area of progress Newell fights for. It’s one of the biggest reasons he decided to get involved with the Utah Black Roundtable, where he serves as vice chair.
Newell’s service on the board of the Utah Nonprofits Association and as a city councilman for Cottonwood Heights was spurred on by the experiences he’s had in his life, he says, claiming that the people he’s met and experiences he’s had as a Utahn have resulted in his full commitment to the state. Now, encouraging community members to engage with one another in an authentic way is one of his greatest motivations.
“It’s really difficult to hate someone that you break bread with,” Newell says. “That’s one of the most rewarding things for me, is to get people to understand that we’re all in this together and that we can engage one another as humans.”
Above all, Newell believes that in order for everyone to be successful and be able to contribute, education is paramount.
“If we create systems where we’re dividing people and people aren’t able to make their own choices or have a knowledge of what’s available to them, we’re doing ourselves a grave disservice,” he says.
Lifetime Achievement
Kem Gardner
How has Kem Gardner achieved success in helping build Salt Lake City into a hub for business, the arts, healthcare, education, rodeo and public policy in addition to establishing one of the most successful commercial real estate companies in the Mountain West? Humbly.
“I once got a great piece of advice from Maurice Warshaw,” Gardner says. “He told me, ‘Kem, you don’t give very much when you give your money. You must also give your time.’ I thought that was incredible advice, to give your time and give back to the community.”
Gardner’s contributions to the community are numerous and include helping establish the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, establishing a world-class symphony and superior regional opera company through chairing the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera and serving as the trustee of Intermountain Health since 1982.
Gardner has served as chairman of the Utah Days of ’47 Rodeo for 11 years. In this role, he led the building of a new arena at the Utah State Fairpark and elevated the event to be one of the top five professional rodeos in the nation.
“I have really enjoyed making the rodeo successful because the whole community gets involved,” says Gardner, who, as a Wyoming-raised boy who always had horses, particularly enjoys watching saddle bronc riding. “It seems to me like I’ve had the best job in the world, being able to do that rodeo.”
As the original chairman of the Salt Lake Airport Authority, Gardner helped transform the Salt Lake International Airport into a Delta transportation hub with the capacity to handle 26 million annual passengers. He was also the original incorporator and finance chair of the Salt Lake Olympic Bid Committee and chairman of the 2002 Olympic Ambassadors, where he played an instrumental role in bringing in Mitt Romney to run the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Gardner has served as chairman of the Utah State Board of Regents and the United Way of Salt Lake, where he has been an executive committee member since 1998. Gardner’s charitable contributions to various industries and education are memorialized through the six buildings carrying his name.
“I’ve had some opportunities that are quite remarkable, and it’s all because I’ve gotten out of just sitting in my office and served in the community,” he says. “That’s my advice to young people as well: Get a good education, then get a job that allows you to give back and serve the community. That’s where real joy and satisfaction come from.”