• Elvi Caperonis was laid off from her Big Tech job in July 2024.
• She used the layoff as an opportunity to focus on other ventures she'd been running on the side.
• Caperonis now runs her own career coaching, content creation, and Airbnb business.

Elvi Caperonis had a dream to work in Big Tech — and after five years and over 100 rejections, she reached it by landing a role at a prominent Magnificent 7 company in 2017.

But in July 2024 — seven years later — Caperonis was laid off.

Instead of her dream morphing into a nightmare, though, Caperonis told Business Insider that the layoff actually boosted her career.

She was able to focus on her own ventures as a career coach, content creator, and Airbnb Superhost and grow her entrepreneurial revenue to six figures in 2024, which Business Insider verified with documentation.

"Now that I work for myself," she said, "I have freedom to live life on my own terms and have discovered more profound happiness."

Working in Big Tech was exhilarating

It wasn't that Caperonis didn't appreciate her Big Tech job. In fact, she loved it.

"I saw world-class people build teams and was always on the cutting edge of technology like AI and machine learning," she said. "I was always fascinated by learning something new and having fun."

Her company felt like more than just a workplace — it was a platform where she thrived on the joy of learning and being constantly challenged, an opportunity she called "genuinely exhilarating."

The role included a lucrative six-figure compensation package, quality health insurance, remote work opportunities, and company parties.

Her LinkedIn kept growing and growing

In January 2020, Caperonis began building her personal brand and business on the side. She created content on LinkedIn to share her personal experiences and practical advice, in hopes of helping others boost their self-confidence and land jobs in the tech industry.

Thanks to a daily posting schedule — balanced with her full-time Big Tech job — and some viral posts, she grew her LinkedIn to 10,000 followers within a few months.

She began charging $150 per coaching session to help job seekers land their dream jobs at companies like Meta, Coinbase, Sonos, Microsoft, and Amazon.

In 2021, she started doing live sessions on LinkedIn to share her career insights and expertise, and in 2022, she grew her LinkedIn follower base to 80,000.

"I struggled to find new ideas but eventually shared my rejection journey in multiple posts, which in total got over 6.5 million views," she said. "It wasn't easy, but sharing my experience and the lessons I learned from it resonated with many people."

After going viral a few more times in 2023, Caperonis' LinkedIn surpassed 100,000 followers, which also brought in new clients. She started posting successful testimonials, which helped her increase her prices to $499 for a package of three coaching sessions.

In March 2024, just prior to her layoff, she secured her first official brand partnership on LinkedIn, which paid her $3,200 for three LinkedIn posts.

"This partnership provided a substantial financial boost and validated the value of my work and the reach of my personal brand," Caperonis said.

Caperonis also began co-hosting on Airbnb with her sister in October 2022 and earned the title of Superhost in 2023. This gave her another income stream alongside her coaching business, earning them $43,911 in revenue in 2023 and nearly $50,000 in 2024.

The layoff turned into an entrepreneurial opportunity

In April 2024, just one month after landing her brand partnership, Caperonis was told that she'd be laid off from her Big Tech job in July.

Instead of dwelling on the adversity, she used it as an opportunity to put her full effort into developing her side gigs.

"The layoff spurred me to tap into my entrepreneurial instincts," Caperonis said.

Coaching and content creation became her full-time job. She started engaging and posting up to twice a day on LinkedIn, and more brands reached out to her for partnerships.

In July 2024, she launched her business, Reinvent Yourself Academy, and the following month she received the LinkedIn Top Voice badge. She now charges clients $5,000 for her formal coaching program.

She is able to balance her time between her various ventures by automating her hosting business as much as possible, spending around 35 hours weekly on content creation and career coaching and five to 10 hours on Airbnb.

Having a backup plan that can't be taken away is crucial

"This journey has shown me that it's possible to turn challenges into opportunities with determination and the right mindset," Caperonis said.

If she could turn back time, she says she would've started building her personal brand on LinkedIn and her business much earlier — and planned her exit from the corporate world sooner.

"I've come to understand that it's essential to create something for yourself that cannot be taken away," Caperonis said. "Since layoffs can happen unexpectedly, having a backup plan is crucial."

Do you have a story to share about life after being laid off? Contact this editor, Jane Zhang, at [email protected].

• Legora is taking the legal world by storm with its AI software for lawyers.
• The Stockholm-born startup recently signed Goodwin as a client and opened a New York City office.
• Now, as Legora bears down on the US market, its chief rival, Harvey, faces real competition.

On a drizzly spring morning stroll through New York's Central Park, Max Junestrand, the 25-year-old Swedish founder behind legal tech startup Legora, opened up about a chip on his shoulder.

He started his company over a year after the founding of Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal tech startup that has emerged as the apex predator in a fast-growing market for artificial intelligence products for law firms and corporate lawyers. Harvey has enjoyed a close partnership with the ChatGPT maker and secured major law firms as clients.

Now, as Legora bears down on new global markets, Junestrand tells Business Insider his company is gaining ground on chief rival Harvey — with less money and fewer employees.

"We're not here to be some European No. 2," he said. "We're here to play."

Founded in Stockholm in 2023, the startup helps legal professionals work smarter with a digital workspace built on top of large language models. Its application is used in nearly 20 countries by more than 250 clients, including the global firm Bird & Bird and Mannheimer Swartling, Sweden's largest law firm.

Last week, at Legalweek, Legora threw down the gauntlet at Harvey by rolling out new product features aimed at serving global tier-one firms, such as a Microsoft Word add-in. Legora said it had signed Goodwin, a leading law firm for tech deals, as a client. It also opened a new office in New York City, the company's first outpost outside Europe, where Junestrand will be based.

Not long ago, selling software to law firms looked like a losing business for startups. Lawyers worked mostly out of documents that were hard for software to read. They stored those files on physical servers on location for higher security and control over their data. But over the past few years, as even tech-averse lawyers recognize the clear potential of artificial intelligence, a new class of startups is trying their luck delivering software to the legal industry.

As a teenager, Junestrand competed professionally in video games before learning to code, figuring a career in tech could open more doors than esports. In 2020, he met his future cofounders, Sigge Labor, and August Erséus, during a volleyball game in the depths of the pandemic. The roommates shared Junestrand's fascination with machine intelligence and a desire to build.

Labor and Erséus had been toying with software that could complete simpler legal tasks, but the state of large-scale language models at the time limited its usefulness. ChatGPT changed that. "It just became blatantly apparent that this was a paradigm shift," Junestrand said. He left university, and the trio started a company, securing a conference room at a Swedish law firm to work from.

An investor shared on LinkedIn that one year ago, Legora had booked nearly $900,000 in annual recurring revenue, or the yearly value of revenue. Legora declined to share a more recent figure.

To date, Legora has raised more than $35 million in funding from investors such as Benchmark, Redpoint, Y Combinator, and Jack Altman's fund, Alt Capital.

Legora's web app looks like a cross between ChatGPT and a chart maker. Its search bar lets users ask questions about the contents of their internal data and browse the web and case law libraries. The app's killer feature is tabular review. It enables the bulk upload of documents and runs software programs called "agents" to answer specific questions about the contents of those documents.

Junestrand took BI through a demo as a pretend lawyer advising SpaceX on raising a make-believe equity round, in which the company's investors want to know about its financial health before deciding whether to write a check.

Junestrand dragged a folder containing dozens of loan agreements into tabular review. File names filled the far left column. In the next column, Junestrand wrote "loan amount" and clicked a button that expanded his prompt, telling the agents to extract the loan's value from the contract. He repeated these steps to work out the loan term.

The agents tunneled through the loan agreements at blazingly fast speeds. In seconds, the columns filled with the dollar amounts and dates. Junestrand clicked into a field and an agreement appeared in the right pane, showing the section where it gleaned the answer.

"Great software has to be intuitive," Junestand said. "Sadly enough, there's a lot of software in the legal space that looks like it was built in the nineties and doesn't prioritize design and ease of use."

Though he doesn't name them, it's easy to figure out who he's talking about. Two of the biggest players in legal tech are LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters. They boast decades of experience in creating products for legal professionals.

However, the old legal tech guard has one clear advantage over the challengers. LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters are sitting on troves of copyrighted data that feed their legal assistant products.

Sean Fitzpatrick, chief executive of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, spoke at Legalweek about how this data gives it an edge. "The systems are only as good as the data that sits behind them," he said, "and veracity matters in the law. It matters a lot."

Junestand thinks legacy software providers will struggle to keep pace with ChatGPT-era legal tech. He said the technology is moving too rapidly for the incumbents to evolve. He added that he made a conscious decision to keep Legora's engineering team small and nimble, so they can respond quickly to the latest models and AI trends.

As for its battle with Harvey, Junestrand believes the best product will win over lawyers, even if Harvey's ties to OpenAI help boost its brand and credibility.

"When we started, we were immediately at a disadvantage. We were a year behind," Junestrand said, referring to Harvey's headstart on Legora. "And so pace and speed of execution became the things that we optimized for."

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• Palantir launched its healthcare business four years ago, with two 25-year-olds at the helm.
• The $193 billion data giant builds AI tools for health systems like Mount Sinai and HCA Healthcare.
• Co-lead Jeremy David said healthcare now makes up 15% of Palantir's commercial revenue.

Jeremy David and Drew Goldstein had no healthcare experience when, in their mid-twenties, they set out to use Palantir's software platform to disrupt hospital operations.

Now, they're working with top health systems like Mount Sinai and HCA Healthcare, competing with dozens of healthcare startups in the AI race.

The $193 billion data giant Palantir is best known for its AI-powered military surveillance software, which it sells to customers like the US Department of Defense, and data analysis tools for finance, which it sells to corporate clients like Morgan Stanley.

But Palantir's healthcare business, which launched around four years ago, is picking up steam. David said the healthcare segment now accounts for about 15% of Palantir's commercial revenue, which reached $702 million in 2024. Palantir said it's helped hospitals save millions of dollars with its tech for healthcare revenue optimization and workforce management and improved patient outcomes with tools for everything from sepsis detection to hospital-at-home care.

David and Goldstein attribute the business's rapid growth to a combination of its robust partnerships — Palantir has signed numerous multiyear contracts with health systems such as Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General, and Nebraska Medicine — as well as its focus on AI at a time when, as Goldstein put it, "folks are worried about getting left behind, and starting to question if the partnerships they already had are actually creating any value."

Palantir's unfair advantage in healthcare is obvious: the company has a depth of resources and financial backing at its fingertips rarely afforded to healthcare startups, plus the software capabilities to build personalized AI-powered solutions for health systems.

Palantir isn't entirely pushing out other healthcare companies, however. The data company launched a partnership in March with R1 RCM, the revenue cycle management company acquired by TowerBrook and CD&R in a $8.9 billion take-private deal in August. Palantir also launched a program called HealthStart last year to equip healthcare startups with tools like Palantir's developer platform.

"It's very hard to get access to problems in healthcare because of the monopolistic electronic medical records players and the information security challenges of working with patient health information," Goldstein said. "If we could make it easier for startup teams all over the place to get access to those problems and solve them faster, and democratize that, I think that's valuable for the whole market."

How Palantir is trying to transform healthcare

Palantir kicked off its healthcare push in 2021, working with Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General, when Goldstein and David were both 25 years old.

They were given a tall task: promise these giant healthcare institutions that, in two months, they would deploy Palantir's software customized for healthcare to drive value.

"When we've been cast as the people here to fix the hospital, but we show up as two 25-year-olds, it's a hilarious position to be put in because they hate you by default," David said.

Goldstein and David, now 29 years old, set out to build software for health systems in three buckets: revenue cycle management, staffing and scheduling, and patient capacity management.

For revenue cycle management, Goldstein and David set out to automate the whole process of how hospitals capture and manage revenue — from coding to submitting claims to handling insurance denials. They decided to partner with R1 RCM because its business can help manage the whole RCM process on top of Palantir's platform. In contrast, many startups are only able to tackle a subset of revenue cycle tasks, Goldstein said.

On the workforce management side, Palantir began working with Nashville-based HCA Healthcare in 2023 to create medical provider schedules with AI, taking into consideration clinicians' preferences and other staffing constraints. Palantir says it's now deployed its customized workforce management software across about 75 of the health system's hospitals for more than 40,000 nurses.

While Palantir's 120-person strong healthcare team has worked exclusively with hospitals to date, David said he and Goldstein have been having more conversations about where Palantir could plug into other parts of the healthcare system, like by helping to manage interactions between payers and providers.

"If you can automate and improve the interface between the payer and provider, that market is hundreds of billions of dollars, and no one's doing a good job at it," David said.

Palantir's entry into healthcare hasn't come without criticism. In 2023, the company won a roughly $415 million seven-year contract with the National Health Service in the United Kingdom to create a unified patient data platform. The contract was met with a public outcry over concerns that the data would be mishandled, in part because of Palantir's work with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which human rights groups argued was used to facilitate family separations and deportations.

Goldstein clarified that a separate team inside Palantir works with the NHS, and noted that he hasn't encountered the same degree of data privacy concerns in the US.

In response to mention of the criticisms, he pointed to Palantir CEO Alex Karp's long history of outspoken support of American innovation — and outspoken criticism of Europe's pace of tech development.

"You can find about a million videos of our CEO talking about why America is a hundred times better of a place to solve problems than Europe right now," Goldstein said.

• Google DeepMind uses noncompetes that last as long as a year to stop employees from going to rivals.
• A former DeepMind director commented publicly about the issue last week.
• Several factors, including an employee's seniority and work focus, affect the noncompete length.

The battle for AI talent is so hot that Google would rather give some employees a paid one-year vacation than let them work for a competitor.

Some Google DeepMind staff in the UK are subject to noncompete agreements that prevent them from working for a competitor for up to 12 months after they finish work at Google, according to four former employees with direct knowledge of the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not permitted to share these details with the press.

Aggressive noncompetes are one tool tech companies wield to retain a competitive edge in the AI wars, which show no sign of slowing down as companies launch new bleeding-edge models and products at a rapid clip. When an employee signs one, they agree not to work for a competing company for a certain period of time.

Google DeepMind has put some employees with a noncompete on extended garden leave. These employees are still paid by DeepMind but no longer work for it for the duration of the noncompete agreement.

Several factors, including a DeepMind employee's seniority and how critical their work is to the company, determine the length of noncompete clauses, those people said. Two of the former staffers said six-month noncompetes are common among DeepMind employees, including for individual contributors working on Google's Gemini AI models. There have been cases where more senior researchers have received yearlong stipulations, they said.

"Our employment contracts are in line with market standards," a Google spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. "Given the sensitive nature of our work, we use noncompetes selectively to protect our legitimate interests."

As the AI field has blossomed in the past two years with new startups and opportunities at heavyweight tech companies, some DeepMind employees feel their lengthy noncompetes have restricted their movement.

"Who wants to sign you for starting in a year?" said one former DeepMind employee. "That's forever in AI."

Noncompete laws in the US vary by state, though noncompete clauses are unenforceable in California, where Google and several other tech giants are headquartered. New legislation introduced in 2023 expanded California law to ban the enforcement of noncompetes entered into outside the state.

In the UK, where DeepMind's headquarters is located, noncompetes are enforceable if they are deemed reasonable to protect the employer's legitimate business interests.

It can pose a serious challenge to some talent at one of the world's leading AI labs seeking career opportunities elsewhere during a boom period for the industry, particularly as some of DeepMind's competitors, such as OpenAI and Microsoft, grow their UK offices and try to poach staff.

One former DeepMind employee said they were aware of colleagues who considered leaving London for jobs in California just to get out of the noncompete.

'It's abuse of power'

The issue of noncompetes spilled into the public domain last week when Nando de Freitas, Microsoft AI vice president and former DeepMind director, posted a message to DeepMind employees on X.

"Every week one of you reaches out to me in despair to ask me how to escape your notice periods and noncompetes," he wrote. He added that employees unhappy about the terms should reach out to DeepMind leaders, including CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu and senior research director Douglas Eck, whom de Freitas said are "against it."

"Above all don't sign these contracts," de Freitas wrote. "No American corporation should have that much power, especially in Europe. It's abuse of power, which does not justify any end."

The AI talent wars

In the past, the idea of receiving full compensation without working for several months didn't seem so bad to some staff, though in the red-hot fight for talent now happening in the AI field, it risks becoming a problem.

"It's becoming less popular now because there's loads of cool startups that would not be willing to wait six months-plus, so people end up missing out on some good opportunities," said one former DeepMind employee.

A former Google employee said the noncompetes prevalent in the generative AI boom are a stark contrast to those seen in the tech industry in the previous decade, when "people working on some of the highest value systems in the world" could more readily take a job offer elsewhere without being bound by such agreements.

The former employee also drew parallels between noncompetes in AI and those seen in hedge funds, where clauses have proven notoriously aggressive.

"AI is interesting. It seems to be the first time in my career that you have this insane race, like a space race," the former employee said. "People really feel like to be six months ahead, a year ahead, could make all the difference."

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• Ask almost any software engineer and they'll tell you: It's a lot harder to get a coding job now than a few years ago.
• BI spoke with two engineers who offered $10,000 to anyone who'd help them secure a six-figure coding job.
• "The market is not at all what it used to be, and you really have to differentiate yourself a little bit more," one said.

Software engineers Argenis De La Rosa and Ryan Prescott took a creative approach to their job search recently.

"I'll pay someone $10k if they find me a 6 figure software developer role," De La Rosa first posted on LinkedIn.

"I'll draft out a legitimate contract which you and I will sign, and I'll make bi-weekly payments or whatever the payment structure of the job role is, when I get paid, you get paid," he added. "It's that simple. No hidden BS."

He added in his post that it's "a nice bounty especially if you already know a company that is hiring or are a recruiter, or are a developer who wants to give a referral."

Prescott and other job seekers on LinkedIn later joined in and posted the offer themselves.

It's an unusual proposition. While recruiters often get commissions for bringing on new hires, and companies frequently give referral bonuses to employees who recommend an external candidate who gets hired, it's usually not the applicants themselves who shell out for a position filled.

De La Rosa told Business Insider he had the idea one morning as a "Hail Mary."

"I was kind of being a little bit sarcastic, but I guess everyone received it somewhat well, and I just kind of went with it," he said.

The first 24 hours after he posted were "nonstop" messages, he said. De La Rosa said he received everything ranging from "very sketchy" sales pitches to senior engineers from Big Tech companies offering referrals or mentorship.

The software engineer said he lined up three job interviews in quick succession after making his post.

"I've gotten so much career advice like polish your résumé, make a portfolio, try to send these messages to people you don't know — and that doesn't work," De La Rosa said. "This has gotten more attention, ironically enough, than trying to do what they recommend."

Prescott, who saw De La Rosa's post on LinkedIn before posting his own version of it, told BI he was initially skeptical about the idea but ultimately thought that "this could be a really good way to cut through the noise and have my voice heard."

Some people, of course, were trying to cash in on the deal. (Prescott says one guy half-jokingly told him, "I take cash or card.") But what struck him most from the messages he received was the number of people who offered to help but didn't want the money.

"It was really interesting and super heartwarming to see the altruism," he said.

'A new way to approach this market'

Many tech companies overhired during the pandemic and later conducted mass layoffs, flooding the tech job market with thousands of applicants jostling for the same jobs.

Before the pandemic hit, "you could get tech interviews left and right," De La Rosa said. Now, he has to do "so much more" and gets "such a low ROI" on his job search practices.

De La Rosa said his offer is "a new way to approach this market that's just changing in front of our eyes."

"The market is not at all what it used to be, and you really have to differentiate yourself a little bit more," Prescott said. "It basically seems like everything you thought you knew about job hunting a year ago or two years ago, do the opposite."

Employers, it seems, are "looking for unicorns," he said.

"It's not so much, can you do the job? It's can you tick every single bullet point on my job description and there's no room for error," he added.

Prescott says a proposition like his and De La Rosa's "puts more power in the hands of the candidate."

"They have the choice to decide, what is it worth to me to land this role?" he said. "The candidate can decide what it's worth and work those terms out themselves."

To De La Rosa, the math was simple: "If I give up maybe six weeks of work in exchange for an opportunity at a reputable company, I would trade that every day of the week," he said.

Setting yourself apart

Prescott ultimately landed a job after a startup CEO reached out to him and he subsequently went through several rounds of interviews. Suffice it to say, he's not paying his current boss $10,000 to work for him, so the offer in his LinkedIn post was moot anyway.

But it had the desired effect: helping him stand out.

"Anything that's driving traffic to your LinkedIn profile is going to be beneficial in a market where cold applications and more traditional methods of job hunting are just falling flat because of the volume of applicants," Prescott said.

The biggest takeaway they've had from this experience?

"I would really just encourage more people to differentiate themselves in strange and remarkable ways," said Prescott. "I think it takes a degree of confidence and a willingness and ability to take risk to succeed in the market that we're in."

While De La Rosa is still looking for a full-time staff position, he's gotten contract work in the meantime.

He says he stands by "just posting publicly, even if it seems at the moment vulnerable."

"I think people resonate with that," he said. "If you're posting where you're at in your journey, I think a lot of people would generally want to help.

"The interviews I've gotten in the last week alone were more than the last four months."

• I recently visited Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, for the first time.
• I stayed at a five-star hotel in Salt Lake City and a three-star hotel in Park City.
• My rooms were similarly priced, but they offered completely different experiences.

Park City may be Utah's central ski hub, but Salt Lake City offers luxury stays at a lower price.

I visited the area along Utah's Wasatch Front for the first time in January 2025 and booked hotels in both towns that cost about $300 per night.

I spent two nights in Salt Lake City's five-star Grand America Hotel and one night in the Sheraton Park City, a three-star Marriott hotel.

My experiences at each hotel were so different that I couldn't believe they were roughly the same price.

Park City has more luxury hotels and resorts than Salt Lake City — and they typically cost more than double the price.

Home to two world-class ski resorts, Park City is a place where you can wake up and hit the slopes right away. Salt Lake City, however, is about a 40-minute drive from Park City and has fewer five-star hotels that typically come at a lower price point.

Park City has eight five-star hotels listed on Booking.com, with an average nightly rate of $760. Four-star hotels cost roughly $660 per night, and three-star hotels cost $340 on average.

Salt Lake City has only two five-star hotels listed on the same site — the Grand America Hotel, where I stayed, and the Hyatt Regency. The accommodations here cost less than half the average per night, at about $150 for three-star hotels, $220 for four-star hotels, and $310 for five-star hotels.

I spent my first two nights in Utah at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.

The Grand America Hotel was the first five-star hotel to open in Salt Lake City. It was built in 2001 for a specific reason — to host the 2002 Olympic Committee.

"One of the stipulations to bring the Olympics here was to build a five-star hotel," a hotel representative told Business Insider.

The hotel, known for hosting celebrities and professional athletes, was ranked among the 50 best hotels in the world by CN Traveler's 2024 Reader's Choice Awards.

The Grand America Hotel stretches 24 floors on 10 acres in Downtown Salt Lake City. It has 775 rooms and four tiers of accommodation, with a starting rate of $300 per night during peak season (depending on hotel occupancy), the representative told BI. That rate gets you a 700-square-foot premier room that includes a lounging area, a marble bathroom, and a wall of windows.

I stayed in the second-tier room, an 880-square-foot executive suite that cost $340 a night, though BI received a media rate for the two-night stay.

Aside from the size, the rooms are quite similar.

Then, I spent one night at the Sheraton Park City.

Sheraton Park City is a premium Marriott hotel built in 1983. Before an upgrade in 2019, it was known as the Park City Marriott.

The three-star hotel is about 10-minute drive from world-class ski resorts, Deer Valley and Park City Mountain, and the hotel has a shuttle service, making it a convenient stay for skiers.

A hotel representative told BI that the hotel has 199 rooms and four tiers of accommodation, with a starting rate of $300 during peak season.

I booked the lowest tier — a guest room— for about $300 for one night.

The Grand America Hotel had a posh European feel.

The Grand America Hotel is drenched in old-world glitz and glam. With Italian marble floors, glass chandeliers, and antique decor in every direction, I felt like royalty as I stepped into the lobby.

The Sheraton Park City had more of a southwestern mountain vibe.

The Sheraton Park City had a more modest feel. The lobby had an elevated cowboy-era look, with wood and leather furniture, a stone fireplace, and stacks of logs on the shelves surrounding it.

My executive suite at the Grand America Hotel was 880 square feet and included a living room.

My executive suite at the Grand America Hotel had accents and decor that matched the upscale, European look of the rest of the hotel.

The suite had a large living room with a lounge and desk.

If I had booked the lower room tier for $300 a night, I would have had a smaller, sectioned-off seating area in addition to the bedroom.

Sliding doors in the living room led to the bedroom.

The bedroom felt elegant with antique furniture, one of the coziest king-sized beds I've ever had the pleasure of sleeping on, thanks to a customized mattress, and a small balcony overlooking Salt Lake City.

When I stay at hotels, I love waking up to a wide view of the destination I'm visiting because it gets me excited to start my day of exploring.

My room at the Sheraton Park City was 350 square feet.

My room at the Sheraton Park City had two queen-sized beds across from a dresser and a small work desk. It looked more like a typical hotel room than my suite at the Grand America Hotel. The beds were comfortable, and I appreciated the local artwork on the walls.

I didn't have a balcony, and my room's window faced another side of the building, but I imagine that rooms on higher floors offered better views.

Although it was a bit plain compared to the Grand America Hotel room, my Sheraton Park City accommodation was clean, modern, and functional. It was certainly on par with other three-star hotels I've booked.

A large walk-in closet led to the bathroom at the Grand America Hotel.

The closet felt huge. Inside, I found terry cloth robes with matching slippers and amenities like an iron, steamer, safe, and extra linens.

There was also a vanity on one side of the closet and two mirrored doors that led to the bathroom.

If I had booked the lower-tier room, I would have had a smaller closet and bathroom, yet with all the same amenities as the executive suite.

My room at the Sheraton Park City had a smaller closet in front of the bathroom.

On the way to the bathroom, there was a small closet. It had an iron and ironing board inside. Across from it, I appreciated the brightly lit sink and vanity.

My bathroom at the Grand America Hotel was spacious and coated in marble.

Handpicked Italian marble coated the floors, counters, and some of the walls in the executive suite bathroom.

The bathroom had a soaking tub, a glass-walled shower on one side, and a toilet stall on the other. It was stocked with travel-sized toiletries.

The lower-tier rooms' bathrooms are smaller, but they have the same decor and include a tub and separate shower.

My bathroom was smaller at the Sheraton Park City, but the shower felt larger.

This bathroom was decent for a 3-star hotel. There was no tub, but the shower felt larger than the one in my Grand America suite.

Inside, there were two shower heads and full-sized toiletries.

The Grand America Hotel had indoor and outdoor pools.

The indoor pool was in the 20,000-square-foot Grand Spa, which also has saunas and 18 service rooms. The outdoor pool was surrounded by trimmed trees in a courtyard.

The Sheraton Park City had an indoor atrium pool.

The pool area sat in a courtyard atrium in the middle of the hotel and had an indoor-outdoor feel. Although there was no spa at the Sheraton Park City, the pool area had a hot tub and a sauna.

The Grand America Hotel was packed with amenities.

In addition to the spa, the Grand America Hotel had a fitness center, a European-style coffee shop and bistro, a strip of high-end boutique shops, multiple bars, 24 business venues, and a 35,000-square-foot courtyard with intricate landscaping.

The Sheraton Park City had convenient amenities, too.

With two restaurants, a coffee shop, a convenience store, a fitness center, a game room, a business center, and 11 event venues, the Sheraton Park City had plenty of amenities for a three-star establishment.

After staying at both hotels, I realized I'd rather sacrifice convenience than luxury.

I thought the Sheraton Park City was worth the $300 price point. The three-star hotel would be perfect for a budget traveler who wants to wake up and hit the slopes right away.

But the Grand America Hotel was just as luxurious as hotels that have cost me $1,000 a night or more in other cities.

After a tiring day of winter sports, I imagine retiring to a lavish room for a warm bath before stretching out on a custom mattress would be worth the drive.

A nationwide tour with his co-presenter Paul Coyte was pulled last month

Kathy Griffin said the star ‘did not talk to me until show day’

Racing correspondent Sam Turner runs us through his tips for day one of the Grand National meeting at Aintree.

The European Union faces 20% reciprocal tariff rates