Josh James

The first exit was $1.8 billion. The second, seventeen years later, was $400 million. Between them sits most of what you need to know about Josh James as a builder of companies: he is very good at getting a Utah software business large enough to matter, and the market has valued the results at wildly different levels. Adobe announced on September 15, 2009 that it would pay $21.50 a share in cash for Omniture, the Orem web analytics company James had co-founded with John Pestana in 1996. The deal closed on October 23, 2009. Omniture had more than 5,000 customers at the time, among them eBay, Walmart, Microsoft and Sony, and over 1,000 employees. James went to Adobe as senior vice president of a new business unit reporting to chief executive Shantanu Narayen, and left in July 2010.

Progress Software of Burlington, Massachusetts agreed in July 2026 to buy the assets and some liabilities of Domo, the company James founded in 2010, for $400 million. Domo's revenue for the fiscal year ended January 2025 was $317 million, and the company had 824 employees. A 2017 private funding round had valued it at $2 billion. James told KSL that Progress could provide "a strong, long-term home for Domo's business." Whether that sentence reads as relief or regret depends on where you were standing in 2017.

James left Brigham Young University in his senior year to start the company. Fortune, in a 2014 profile, reported that he had cycled through seven majors first and that an earlier startup he and Pestana built was sold to NetObjects in 2000 in an all-stock deal shortly before NetObjects went bankrupt; Wikipedia records two other early ventures sold to Jupitermedia and Verisign. The record on those pre-Omniture companies is thin, and the figures are not published anywhere reliable. On the Omniture sale itself, Fortune put James's personal proceeds at about $130 million (2014).

Domo began in 2010 under the name Shacho, Inc. and was renamed before it launched; the product was a dashboard that pulled a company's operating numbers into one screen for the chief executive, which is the job James had just held. Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Institutional Venture Partners put in $20 million in 2011, a $60 million Series B followed in 2013, a $125 million Series C closed in December 2013 at a valuation Fortune reported as above $800 million, and by February 2014 the company had raised $250 million in total. In April 2015 a $200 million Series D set the valuation at $2 billion. Another $131 million came in March 2016 and $200 million more in April 2017, that round led by BlackRock. The losses ran alongside the raises: $183 million on revenue of $74.5 million in 2016, and $176.6 million on revenue of $108.5 million in 2017. Domo sold 9.2 million shares at $21 each in its initial public offering on June 29, 2018, and James rang the Nasdaq bell; KSL later put the market value at the IPO at $511 million, a quarter of the last private mark. The company sits in American Fork, Utah, and the honors kept coming while the stock did not: Inc. 5000 and Deloitte Fast 500 listings in 2017 and 2018, a CNBC Disruptor 50 slot in 2017, a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer award in 2015, and seven straight years on Utah Business magazine's best-companies list through 2018. James stepped down as chief executive in 2022 in favour of John Mellor, then came back. On March 6, 2023 Domo announced that Mellor was leaving after roughly a year in the job and that its founder was chief executive again, saying he was "encouraged and invigorated to lead Domo as CEO once again." Three years after that came the Progress deal.

James and Pestana coined the term Silicon Slopes and built an organisation around it to draw venture money to Utah County; BYU's Marriott School credits the pair with the phrase, and the nonprofit that carries the name now promotes the state's technology industry as a whole. James also founded the Internet Roundtable in 1999 and sits on the advisory board of Parity.org. His explanation for why the cluster took root, given to the BYU Daily Universe in 2019, was demographic: "We had the youngest and most educated population in the country. Obviously, youth are attracted to tech."

The youngest and most educated population in the country.

The faith connection is plain but not loud. James served a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Japan and came home fluent in Japanese; Fortune reported in 2014 that he tithes, and that he was raised in the Church as the son of a Marine colonel who moved the family seventeen times. He appeared as a child actor in episodes of Touched by an Angel and a Honey Smacks commercial. His awards, in order:

• Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 2006
• Fortune 40 Under 40, number 26 in 2009; number one on the Ones to Watch list in 2011
• Mountain West Capital Network Entrepreneur of the Year, 2012
• Utah Technology Hall of Fame, inducted November 30, 2012
• BYU Technology Entrepreneur of the Decade

Put the valuations on one line and the shape is clear: above $800 million in December 2013, $2 billion in April 2015 and again in 2017, $511 million at the June 2018 listing, $400 million for the assets in July 2026. Under the Progress agreement Domo itself stays a listed shell with a new name, little expense and no debt, which is a tidy way to describe a company that no longer has a business. James's statement thanked "the employees who built this company and supported our customers." He has done the founder-to-CEO-to-founder loop once already at Domo, and Omniture proved he can build something a larger company wants to buy. The open question is whether there is a third company, and who would fund it at a 2015 price.