The Lucid Story | Building a Category-Defining SaaS Company with Ben Dilts, Karl Sun, & Dave Grow

Ben Dilts, Karl Sun, and Dave Grow are the founding team behind Lucid Software, one of the most successful SaaS companies to emerge from Utah. From a scrappy student-built prototype to a global platform with tens of millions of users, Lucid redefined how teams collaborate visually in the cloud.

Ben built the first version of Lucidchart while still at BYU. Karl, an early Google product leader, saw the future of collaborative software and joined as an early advisor and executive. Dave left Bain for what was supposed to be a six-month stint that turned into a decade-plus journey leading the company as CEO.

In this episode, they break down the Lucid journey from early product insight to scaling a generational company and shaping the Utah tech ecosystem.

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00:00 The broken tools that sparked Lucid.
05:20 Building the prototype on nights and weekends.
10:30 Thousands of users in weeks.
22:10 The round that got away.
28:00 Betting the firm on Lucid’s Series A.
34:30 The $100M decision that almost didn’t happen.
42:00 Hiring only “great,” never “good enough.”
58:30 Core values that scaled to 1,000+ employees.
01:06:20 Staying in the weeds as a CEO.
01:14:40 Speed as a competitive advantage at scale.
01:22:00 Why most companies underestimate how long winning takes.
01:29:10 From scrappy underdog to market leader.
01:36:30 Catching the next wave: AI and the future of software.

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Ben Dilts is the co-founder of Lucid and the architect behind Lucidchart, which he built from scratch while still at BYU after spotting a massive gap in team collaboration. Nearly two decades later, he remains deeply embedded in the product and code, driving Lucid’s technical vision and pushing the frontier of collaborative software.

Karl Sun is the co-founder and former CEO of Lucid, and an early Google product leader who helped pioneer cloud-based collaboration tools. He joined Lucid in its earliest days, helping turn a student project into a global SaaS company while instilling a culture of excellence and talent density.

Dave Grow is the CEO of Lucid, who joined from Bain for a short-term experiment and ended up helping build a generational SaaS company. He scaled the business from early traction to global scale, bringing a rare combination of operational rigor and deep product intuition.

Gavin Christensen founded Kickstart in 2008, establishing the region’s first seed-stage venture fund. He has since backed many of Utah’s most successful technology companies, helping shape the Mountain West into a nationally recognized startup ecosystem.

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Kickstart is the Mountain West’s most experienced and active early-stage venture capital fund. Kickstart provides pre-seed & seed funding to ambitious tech founders across Utah & Colorado with a focus on AI, B2B SaaS, and frontier tech.

See Kickstart’s full investment portfolio here.