Listen to this article 1 min
As Virta Health employees spread from the diabetes-treatment company’s home in San Francisco to its growing outpost in Colorado over the past few years, founder/CEO Sami Inkinen noticed a pronounced trend.
Workers from San Francisco would visit Colorado and then move here — relocations that happened numerous times, Inkinen said in an interview Friday. However, even with Colorado workers flying in regularly to work at the company’s Bay Area headquarters, nobody ever migrated the other way.
Inkinen announced on Friday at the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. Site Selectors Conference that Virta Health will move its headquarters to the Denver area, where it has roughly 100 workers already, and will add “hundreds” more in the coming years.
While Inkinen did not want to predict an exact number that he will hire here, the maximum $6.9 million in job-growth incentive tax credits Virta Health got from the Colorado Economic Development Commission in June anticipated the company creating 902 jobs locally in eight years.
But Inkinen was very clear on why he is moving the company’s hub from California, which he referred to as the “second-best state in America” in speaking Friday to conference attendees gathering at Empower Field at Mile High. While California has offered some advantages, Colorado stands above it in several ways that will be key for the company to meet its aggressive growth goals as it seeks to expand its clientele.
“To me, the ultimate vote of confidence is when you vote with your feet,” Inkinen told the crowd. “And for us, we feel that Colorado is one of the best, if not the best, place to scale a high-tech company.”
There were three primary reasons that Inkinen and other company leaders felt the move was necessary, he said.
First, he said, Virta Health needs better access to “superstar talent.” Colorado ranks only behind Massachusetts for the portion of its workforce that has earned at least a bachelor’s degree (42%), and the state is home to a growing cohort of 2,500 biotechnology companies employing roughly 30,000 people.
Second, the company needed to be “in an environment that is very pro-business and has minimal red tape” to scale up properly. Colorado earlier this year ranked as the No. 4 state for doing business in America in an annual study by CNBC.
Finally, he wanted to offer team members a high quality of life. Inkinen himself has moved out to the Denver area already, with his wife and two young daughters, and said they “couldn’t be any happier.”
Inkinen’s first venture was Trulia, an online real-estate marketplace that’s been credited as a disruptive force in the industry, which he launched in 2005 and took public in 2012 before it sold in 2014 to fellow online real-estate company Zillow.
He started Virta in 2014 and focused on research and development for nearly four years before beginning to offer the company’s services to large employers, health plans and U.S. Veterans Affairs clinics.
Targeting an addressable marketplace of some 100 million people — including one of every three Coloradans, who have pre-diabetes or are at risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes — the company offers a way to reverse diabetes via nutrition and telemedicine. It gets people off diabetes medicine, works closely with them on changing their diet and provides around-the-clock online support, focusing so far on the U.S. market.
Since its launch, it’s grown to 450 workers, and Inkinen said its pace of hiring in Colorado will depend on how quickly it can find the right talent. It is looking to bring on engineers, researchers, coaches, sales experts and administrators.
Gov. Jared Polis, who lauded the announcement at the Metro Denver EDC conference, said he’s excited because Virta not only will create hundreds of jobs in the state but has shown itself flexible in allowing its employees to work either from home or from the office. And it will boost Colorado’s growing reputation in the biotechnology sector, he said.
“This industry is really at its heart about protecting our lives and paving the way for new technologies,” Polis said.
Inkinen has taken chances in relocation before. He is a native of Finland, which he called “a pretty frickin’ awesome place to grow up,” but moved to America not out of a desire to leave so much as out of a belief that it might present more opportunities.
He is taking the same chance again, betting on Colorado’s workforce and the stability of the business environment in a metro area that is starting to garner a bigger national name. And local economic-development leaders are hoping his story may inspire others to do the same.
“California is a good place to live. We weren’t running away from anything,” Inkinen said. “But collectively as a team at Virta Health … we decided to vote with our feet and move our headquarters to Colorado and focus most of our hiring here.”
