Last month, the City of Las Vegas hosted an open house for its 11,000-square-foot Downtown innovation incubator at Bank of America Plaza.
It was a festive event geared toward showcasing the strides the city has made in wooing tech firms, both large and small.
Officials have talked about their desire to continue to grow Las Vegas’ tech footprint in an effort to help diversify the local economy.
That’s no small task in an area dominated by the hospitality, gaming and service industries.
“The innovation center is now establishing a presence of a wide-range of companies in the city—everything from startups to really good-sized companies,” said City Manager Scott Adams. “From an incubation standpoint, the hope is that you get the next Dell or Microsoft. On the other hand, there are big companies that want to put their toe in the water by just being in the innovation center, like NTT.”
A Japan-based information technologies and communications firm with a presence in more than 70 countries, NTT has anywhere from several to more than three-dozen employees at the center at any given time.
Adams said NTT is the type of company that could eventually have a much larger footprint in Las Vegas.
“Our idea would be for a company like NTT to have maybe 300 employees eventually at a regional office in Las Vegas,” Adams said.
One of the appealing aspects of a tech company having a presence in Las Vegas, Adams said, is the city’s annual lineup of tech-based conferences and trade shows, most notably CES.
“I don’t think it can be overstated, the importance of having the entire tech industry here every year at CES, which is a major trade show,” Adams said. “That has helped create partnership. Some of the early partnerships for the city came out of CES, especially those in smart city technologies.”
Bill Baver, vice president of NTT’s smart platform, echoed the city manager’s sentiments.
“With all the events that take place in the Las Vegas area, our team or our customers are always in at those conferences or conventions,” Baver said. “Having space at the innovation center allows us to bring prospective customers and other people downtown to see what we’re doing.”
Other tenants at the innovation center include internet of things company Ubicquia; consulting firm Dyntek; water innovation firm WaterStart; data company Terbine; cybersecurity specialists SonicWall; and StartupNV, a statewide nonprofit startup support company.
“The [innovation center] is a very cool space,” said Jeff Saling, president of StartupNV. “There’s a certain vibe you want in an incubation space, and this has it.”
Saling said he spent most of his career working in the enterprise software realm in tech hotbeds like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin before moving to Nevada about a decade ago.
“What I found when I moved here was there was a severe lack of capital and a lack of [computer] coders,” Saling said. “I kept getting on a plane every week to go work elsewhere before I decided that I wanted to do my next startup at an incubator in Nevada. In 2016, there were more than 1,400 incubator programs around the country and none were in Nevada.”
Instead of complaining about the situation, Saling said he and a few partners founded StartupNV.
“We have kids coming out of the universities who feel like they have to go somewhere else to have a good career,” Saling said. “We have people moving here to work for different companies, perhaps in gaming or hospitality, and one of the questions they ask is what they’ll do if that job doesn’t work out.”
Saling said he’s seeing progress in the development of Southern Nevada’s startup ecosystem. In fact, since starting his firm two years ago, he said he’s heard about 300 pitches for new companies.
“We’ve had about 40 companies come through the incubation program and we have 22 in it right now,” Saling said. “Thirteen of the companies in the incubator have raised a total of about $30 million so far in venture capital.”
The problem right now, Saling said, is that none of the money raised has come from Nevada.
“Startup ecosystems work much better if a big chunk of the money being invested in the startups comes from the local community,” Saling said. “After the recession, a lot of the angel [investors] here had been hit pretty hard and they, I think, just aged out. Angel investments usually take 12 to 15 years to play out. If you’re in your 70s, investing in an early-stage company kind of loses its luster.”
Companies can apply to lease space at the city’s innovation center—officially dubbed the International Innovation Center @ Vegas—with leases offered for as few as three months.
Adams said the city is actively looking for more space.
“We’ve filled this one up and we’re out scouting for more space Downtown,” Adams said. “We’re looking for edgy spaces that would be attractive for tech companies. They don’t like traditional office spaces.”
The center was made possible through a resolution by the City Council in early 2016 to declare Downtown as an innovation district.
“We’ve turned a corner now where a lot of these companies know what Las Vegas is doing and they want to partner with us,” Adams said. “The other thing that’s happened is a whole bunch of cities know what we’re doing and they want to emulate us. We just had a big delegation here from Jacksonville, Florida, that wants to build an innovation district in that downtown.”