Silicon Valley will have a burgeoning competitor. With all of the technology and social media giants cooped together in Los Angeles or San Francisco, it's hard to build a new product or service without the competitors getting a wind of it. Snap Inc., the developer of the social media app Snapchat, taking a different route by building their own Research & Development office in a remote area in Lehi, Utah, which is 30 miles south of Salt Lake City.
This new facility will allow Snapchat to develop new apps, features and even hardware away from the snooping gaze of its competitors.
Snap Inc. will not be lacking in any talent in their new office. The company will be pooling talent from Brigham Young University, which 25 minutes away in Provo. Snap has previous interactions with BYU when the company bought Scan.me, a startup established by students of the university.
Scan.me was the original iteration of Snapchat's scannable Snapcodes. Kirk Ouimet, Scan.me's co-founder, was tasked by Snap to go back to Utah, form his team and start the new office by working on a couple of projects.
The city of Lehi is where IM Flash Technologies is located. It's an enormous Intel and Micron-backed semiconductor fabrication plant. The company has put Lehi on the map by producing one in 14 of the world's flash memory chips since 2013.
The talents from BYU and IM Flash might not find the idea of moving to L.A. or San Francisco ideal to work for Snap, so their new office could help the company recruit from the area.
TechCrunch first discovered of proposals for a new R&D lab when an Apple engineer based in Utah left Apple and joined Snapchat to work in a new office relatively close to where he lives. The website also found an open job listing for a software engineer to work in Lehi.
Snapchat confirmed TechCrunch's discovery and revealed that it is forming a small team in Lehi, which will have team members with different skills. The company is anticipating the surge of local talent it will hire and said that this is expansion is due in part to the growth of not just the Snapchat but also the company.
