7 ms·

Reno Wants to Be Silicon Valley's Back Office

66 points by rck 12y ago

hornd 12y ago
Reno is an awesome town. Most of the people I've talked to who have been to Reno have only ever seen the "trashy" casinos and run-down areas along S Virginia St., but if you dig deeper you'll find there's much more depth. They have an up and coming art scene, some great restaurants and bars, and perhaps most importantly a population of passionate and extremely friendly people who absolutely love their town and want it to succeed. Go Reno!
- avelis 12y ago
  When visiting Reno when I was living in San Francisco. I see huge potential for that city. But it would need to invest in incentivizing startups to grow out of Reno vs the bay area which is a 3hr drive. If UNR has a CS department then it needs to reach-out to it's current student body and make considerations for creating a market for tech in Reno.
  - ktsmith 12y ago
    UNR has a tiny CS department. There is a small startup community in Reno but it's not very developed and there's not a ton of support for it. If you've been in a hackerspace in SF and then visit the one in Reno you'd be hard pressed to say they were the same thing. It's also hard to find any startups that are doing anything interesting here.
    - avelis 12y ago
      I appreciate the insight! The innovation sector is not limited to software/internet businesses. There is also digital entertainment, advanced machining/robotics, and bio pharmaceuticals. With the announcement of Tesla's gigafactory in the greater Reno area I would make this the best opportunity to create an intersection of innovation that Reno can be starting point for. Maybe Reno should host a tech conference. Or even the next formula-e race circuit. Just ideas. I see so much potential for Reno. :-D
      - ktsmith 11y ago
        Very late response to your comment here (sorry) so I doubt you'll see it but I wanted to respond anyway. There are VERY interesting things going on in Reno, especially at UNR. MEMS research, solar cell research, biology, biotech, computer vision etc. There's also Sierra Nevada Corp in Sparks which was founded by two former UNR graduate students and is a very successful aerospace company. They are working on their own re-usable space craft in the dream chaser project: http://www.sncspace.com/ss_space_exploration.php http://www.sncspace.com/ss_space_exploration.php Robocoin (bitcoin atm) is here but it's been rather disappointing. One of the big flaws with this area is that casino gaming and mining have been the biggest draws on the talent pools for engineering. Gaming isn't the big money maker for the state that it once was and innovation wasn't a huge part of the business in the first place.
- ktsmith 12y ago
  Downtown is trashy and rundown. The riverfront has been redeveloped and they make an effort to hide the homeless but the actual problems here aren't being addressed at all. Midtown has as many businesses (especially bars and restaurants) closing as it does opening. Those great commercial real estate rates aren't going to last and some business that make mid town what it is are already moving around/out because of increasing rates. Wages here are depressed and the median family income is low when compared to the cost of housing, transportation and food. There are also not many job opportunities should you need to change jobs. The recent sale of IGT has started another exodus of tech workers which are already in high demand and low supply. You won't see local businesses raising wages to attract or retain these people though.
MattyRad 12y ago
I graduated from UNR in Computer Science and had the good fortune of finding a great job in Reno. Rent is incredibly cheap, the average commute time to get anywhere is 15 minutes (I80 and US395 intersect the city), there's no income tax, there's every type of recreation you could want within a 45 minute drive... I could go on. Downtown can still appear pretty trashy, like the article states. I suppose that's the nature of having big casinos there, but I hope it is able to clean itself up. I could sing Reno's praises all day, and I count myself very lucky that I was able to find a good job here. I have incredibly high hopes for the future of this city, a lot of great things are happening!
- chubot 12y ago
  I was there 4 years ago and I liked how you could bike everywhere. That was surprising to me. The weather was also great for the days I was there. If you don't mind me asking, what kind of job do you have? Programming I assume?
  - ktsmith 12y ago
    Reno averages just over 250 sunny days a year. Being in the eastern shadow of the Sierras and at ~4500 ft (4505 ft at the university) does lead to heavy snow which makes the roads unusable for bikes. Public transportation is not sufficient for most people. The drought has made this not much of an issue the last few years though. This is high mountain desert so you can have very hot days and very cold nights. There is a good mixture of weather and we get most of the four seasons. There are many great outdoor activities nearby with the Pacific Rim Trail and Lake Tahoe as two good examples. It's a nice place to have a family but it also has a large number of problems that are not being addressed.
alxndros 12y ago
It's interesting to see how many places in the world are trying to bring about their own Startup Row esque thing. Interesting to see where it will flourish.
- avelis 12y ago
  Startup tech operates in a traded economy. It can flourish anywhere, it just needs a couple key items for it to sustain the culture.
devonkim 12y ago
There's tech companies planning to add a little hope for Vegas and Reno alike with datacenters being opened up in the area due to the super low costs while still maintaining some general proximity to southern California. Unfortunately, all these announcements of companies opening up datacenters in random, low-cost areas of the US such as North Carolina seem to imply that these will bring the same sort of tech jobs as Silicon Valley in some way when this is pretty unlikely to actually add permanent jobs that are much more than commodity McDonalds-level employment. Modern datacenters are basically fancy warehouses and are engineered for maximum autonomous operation (I think we have robots that can rack & stack 1U and 2U boxes now actually depending upon server vendor). These places are typically being constructed by people barely making more than minimum wage and can barely spell Cisco, and they're not going to be the ones actually running anything either except occasionally fixing up shoddy work that probably doesn't even meet the really relaxed electrical and commercial building codes. But once these DCs are up and the cables installed, they're managed pretty much remotely as a rule and the jobs of racking and stacking are fast disappearing. Sometimes your network guy has to drive out to the DC, sometimes people engineer around entire racks failing due to a PDU going down, anything to avoid putting a higher-paid engineer on the ground there. There's almost no Fortune 500 I know of that has a datacenter that isn't trying to decommission most of theirs, so while each DC being raised up is theoretically more jobs in disadvantaged areas, this comes at the cost oftentimes of losing 2-3 more datacenters with 2-3 times more jobs in slightly higher costs of living areas like Missouri, southern Virginia, Michigan, and Indiana.
- ktsmith 12y ago
  Most people in Reno aren't stupid enough to believe that opening a DC will bring tech jobs. The city council certainly hopes they are though. Reno has been courting the Bay Area tech companies for over 20 years with no success. This is a PR puff piece.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    > with no success. Not entirely. "In addition to confirming that the gigafactory will employ 6,500 full-time employees, Tesla also raised its average wage estimate to $26.16 per hour. Full-time staffing for the gigafactory will comprise of: 4,550 production associates paid $22.79 per hour 200 material handlers paid $22.79 per hour 460 equipment technicians paid $27.88 per hour 360 quality technicians paid $27.88 per hour 930 engineers and senior staff paid $41.83 per hour. Wages paid by Tesla for the gigafactory will total $353.6 million per year at full employment. The figure does not include construction jobs for building the plant. Tesla partner Panasonic already started listing jobs related to the gigafactory." http://www.rgj.com/story/money/reno-rebirth/2014/10/23/tesla-lists-jobs-salaries-for-gigafactory/17753369/ http://www.rgj.com/story/money/reno-rebirth/2014/10/23/tesla...
Sanddancer 12y ago
Well, Reno already is home to Apple's tax dodg^W^Winvestment subdivision, Braeburn Capital. So, more companies coming in to having to pay decent wages only makes sense.
- ktsmith 12y ago
  It's not just apple. Microsoft Licensing is in Reno for a reason. They have an actual building and employees unlike Apple but they have the same intent. Halliburton is another name everyone would recognize that has a shell here. There are tens of thousands of business registrations in Nevada to take advantage of the business friendly tax laws.
ngriffin731 12y ago
Current Reno resident who has also lived in Silicon Valley and San Fransisco reporting in. Born and raised in Reno. Also have spent a significant amount of time in Austin. Out of all 4 of those places, Reno is by far the most fun. Between the skiing, hiking and awesome bars the quality of life in Reno is unparalleled. We have a ton of amazing local bands. A burning man party is one of the craziest parties you will ever attend. The weather can be harsh compared to California, but I personally love it. It's hard for me to imagine living anywhere else. Austin is fun, but is a swamp and overcrowded. San Francisco is also fun, but is incredibly overcrowded and expensive. SV is kind of boring, and too family-oriented for a young person. The only problem in Reno is the job market. I know a lot of talented IT pros who have trouble finding a good job. Reno's economy is dominated by Casinos and Finance. Almost all of the talented programmer I know from Reno have wound up in SV or San Francisco. UNR isn't producing enough people trained in IT fields. The tech job market is anemic. Nepotism and the "Good Old Boys Club" run deep in the Reno economy. Nevada is much more corrupt than most states. Reno will never be the next Silicon Valley or even the next Austin. We simply don't have an educational system to support it. The Bay-Area and Los Angeles are a huge brain drain on the Reno area. I think Bloomberg hit the nail on the head with deeming it "Silicon Valley's Back Office". Reno's place is a great place to do manufacturing and run data centers because of it's location and lower cost of doing business. I will probably be moving to another city soon because I simply can't find a good job or enough work freelancing in my field (Front-End Web Development). Reno is my favorite place to live, but it's hard to take a ~50% pay cut to live here.
- pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
  Another person lives in Reno also checking in. I grew up in the Silicon Valley though and recently moved here about 6 months ago. It indeed is really fun. Lot's of outdoorsy stuff to do (tons of unowned land where you can shoot guns and drive ATVs and stuff). The night life is crazy good too. But yeah... it's fun in a kind of depressing way. There's a huge unemployment/underemployment problem here. My dad who was a crazy good broker in the valley is unemployed still after 3 years of living here. My mom who was a courier in the valley is now organizing greeting cards at grocery stores making minimum wage. They'd basically be screwed if they didn't have any savings and if I wasn't able to do remote work. There's also a TON of people who just fell off the face of the earth that moved here. I've never met so many meth heads, heroin addicts and general burnouts in a higher concentration anywhere else. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places though. Reno is definitely is an cool place to live. But I don't think I would want to be here for longer than a year... that's just me though. I'm another one of those "California refugees", I guess. So maybe I shouldn't be talking.
kolanos 12y ago
In 2001 I built a data center in Reno thinking it was inevitably going to see an economic boom. Well, to be more specific, I purchased a half-completed data center abandoned by Adelphia after they went bust and completed it. Long story short, I lost my shirt and sold it two years later. I've lived in Reno on-and-off ever since, including a three year stint in the Bay Area startup scene. I'm still waiting for that economic boom. I've also lived in the Sacramento area and seen similar economic issues to Reno, only on a larger scale. If Sacramento can't make the proximity to the Bay Area work -- there's little hope for Reno. Hope I'm wrong about that.
- pbreit 12y ago
  What's the problem, talent?

66 points by rck 12y ago

hornd 12y ago

Reno is an awesome town. Most of the people I've talked to who have been to Reno have only ever seen the "trashy" casinos and run-down areas along S Virginia St., but if you dig deeper you'll find there's much more depth. They have an up and coming art scene, some great restaurants and bars, and perhaps most importantly a population of passionate and extremely friendly people who absolutely love their town and want it to succeed. Go Reno!

avelis 12y ago
When visiting Reno when I was living in San Francisco. I see huge potential for that city. But it would need to invest in incentivizing startups to grow out of Reno vs the bay area which is a 3hr drive. If UNR has a CS department then it needs to reach-out to it's current student body and make considerations for creating a market for tech in Reno.
- ktsmith 12y ago
  UNR has a tiny CS department. There is a small startup community in Reno but it's not very developed and there's not a ton of support for it. If you've been in a hackerspace in SF and then visit the one in Reno you'd be hard pressed to say they were the same thing. It's also hard to find any startups that are doing anything interesting here.
  - avelis 12y ago
    I appreciate the insight! The innovation sector is not limited to software/internet businesses. There is also digital entertainment, advanced machining/robotics, and bio pharmaceuticals. With the announcement of Tesla's gigafactory in the greater Reno area I would make this the best opportunity to create an intersection of innovation that Reno can be starting point for. Maybe Reno should host a tech conference. Or even the next formula-e race circuit. Just ideas. I see so much potential for Reno. :-D
    - ktsmith 11y ago
      Very late response to your comment here (sorry) so I doubt you'll see it but I wanted to respond anyway. There are VERY interesting things going on in Reno, especially at UNR. MEMS research, solar cell research, biology, biotech, computer vision etc. There's also Sierra Nevada Corp in Sparks which was founded by two former UNR graduate students and is a very successful aerospace company. They are working on their own re-usable space craft in the dream chaser project: http://www.sncspace.com/ss_space_exploration.php http://www.sncspace.com/ss_space_exploration.php Robocoin (bitcoin atm) is here but it's been rather disappointing. One of the big flaws with this area is that casino gaming and mining have been the biggest draws on the talent pools for engineering. Gaming isn't the big money maker for the state that it once was and innovation wasn't a huge part of the business in the first place.
ktsmith 12y ago
Downtown is trashy and rundown. The riverfront has been redeveloped and they make an effort to hide the homeless but the actual problems here aren't being addressed at all. Midtown has as many businesses (especially bars and restaurants) closing as it does opening. Those great commercial real estate rates aren't going to last and some business that make mid town what it is are already moving around/out because of increasing rates. Wages here are depressed and the median family income is low when compared to the cost of housing, transportation and food. There are also not many job opportunities should you need to change jobs. The recent sale of IGT has started another exodus of tech workers which are already in high demand and low supply. You won't see local businesses raising wages to attract or retain these people though.

MattyRad 12y ago

I graduated from UNR in Computer Science and had the good fortune of finding a great job in Reno. Rent is incredibly cheap, the average commute time to get anywhere is 15 minutes (I80 and US395 intersect the city), there's no income tax, there's every type of recreation you could want within a 45 minute drive... I could go on. Downtown can still appear pretty trashy, like the article states. I suppose that's the nature of having big casinos there, but I hope it is able to clean itself up. I could sing Reno's praises all day, and I count myself very lucky that I was able to find a good job here. I have incredibly high hopes for the future of this city, a lot of great things are happening!

chubot 12y ago
I was there 4 years ago and I liked how you could bike everywhere. That was surprising to me. The weather was also great for the days I was there. If you don't mind me asking, what kind of job do you have? Programming I assume?
- ktsmith 12y ago
  Reno averages just over 250 sunny days a year. Being in the eastern shadow of the Sierras and at ~4500 ft (4505 ft at the university) does lead to heavy snow which makes the roads unusable for bikes. Public transportation is not sufficient for most people. The drought has made this not much of an issue the last few years though. This is high mountain desert so you can have very hot days and very cold nights. There is a good mixture of weather and we get most of the four seasons. There are many great outdoor activities nearby with the Pacific Rim Trail and Lake Tahoe as two good examples. It's a nice place to have a family but it also has a large number of problems that are not being addressed.

alxndros 12y ago

It's interesting to see how many places in the world are trying to bring about their own Startup Row esque thing. Interesting to see where it will flourish.

avelis 12y ago
Startup tech operates in a traded economy. It can flourish anywhere, it just needs a couple key items for it to sustain the culture.

devonkim 12y ago

There's tech companies planning to add a little hope for Vegas and Reno alike with datacenters being opened up in the area due to the super low costs while still maintaining some general proximity to southern California. Unfortunately, all these announcements of companies opening up datacenters in random, low-cost areas of the US such as North Carolina seem to imply that these will bring the same sort of tech jobs as Silicon Valley in some way when this is pretty unlikely to actually add permanent jobs that are much more than commodity McDonalds-level employment. Modern datacenters are basically fancy warehouses and are engineered for maximum autonomous operation (I think we have robots that can rack & stack 1U and 2U boxes now actually depending upon server vendor). These places are typically being constructed by people barely making more than minimum wage and can barely spell Cisco, and they're not going to be the ones actually running anything either except occasionally fixing up shoddy work that probably doesn't even meet the really relaxed electrical and commercial building codes. But once these DCs are up and the cables installed, they're managed pretty much remotely as a rule and the jobs of racking and stacking are fast disappearing. Sometimes your network guy has to drive out to the DC, sometimes people engineer around entire racks failing due to a PDU going down, anything to avoid putting a higher-paid engineer on the ground there. There's almost no Fortune 500 I know of that has a datacenter that isn't trying to decommission most of theirs, so while each DC being raised up is theoretically more jobs in disadvantaged areas, this comes at the cost oftentimes of losing 2-3 more datacenters with 2-3 times more jobs in slightly higher costs of living areas like Missouri, southern Virginia, Michigan, and Indiana.

ktsmith 12y ago
Most people in Reno aren't stupid enough to believe that opening a DC will bring tech jobs. The city council certainly hopes they are though. Reno has been courting the Bay Area tech companies for over 20 years with no success. This is a PR puff piece.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > with no success. Not entirely. "In addition to confirming that the gigafactory will employ 6,500 full-time employees, Tesla also raised its average wage estimate to $26.16 per hour. Full-time staffing for the gigafactory will comprise of: 4,550 production associates paid $22.79 per hour 200 material handlers paid $22.79 per hour 460 equipment technicians paid $27.88 per hour 360 quality technicians paid $27.88 per hour 930 engineers and senior staff paid $41.83 per hour. Wages paid by Tesla for the gigafactory will total $353.6 million per year at full employment. The figure does not include construction jobs for building the plant. Tesla partner Panasonic already started listing jobs related to the gigafactory." http://www.rgj.com/story/money/reno-rebirth/2014/10/23/tesla-lists-jobs-salaries-for-gigafactory/17753369/ http://www.rgj.com/story/money/reno-rebirth/2014/10/23/tesla...

Sanddancer 12y ago

Well, Reno already is home to Apple's tax dodg^W^Winvestment subdivision, Braeburn Capital. So, more companies coming in to having to pay decent wages only makes sense.

ktsmith 12y ago
It's not just apple. Microsoft Licensing is in Reno for a reason. They have an actual building and employees unlike Apple but they have the same intent. Halliburton is another name everyone would recognize that has a shell here. There are tens of thousands of business registrations in Nevada to take advantage of the business friendly tax laws.

ngriffin731 12y ago

Current Reno resident who has also lived in Silicon Valley and San Fransisco reporting in. Born and raised in Reno. Also have spent a significant amount of time in Austin. Out of all 4 of those places, Reno is by far the most fun. Between the skiing, hiking and awesome bars the quality of life in Reno is unparalleled. We have a ton of amazing local bands. A burning man party is one of the craziest parties you will ever attend. The weather can be harsh compared to California, but I personally love it. It's hard for me to imagine living anywhere else. Austin is fun, but is a swamp and overcrowded. San Francisco is also fun, but is incredibly overcrowded and expensive. SV is kind of boring, and too family-oriented for a young person. The only problem in Reno is the job market. I know a lot of talented IT pros who have trouble finding a good job. Reno's economy is dominated by Casinos and Finance. Almost all of the talented programmer I know from Reno have wound up in SV or San Francisco. UNR isn't producing enough people trained in IT fields. The tech job market is anemic. Nepotism and the "Good Old Boys Club" run deep in the Reno economy. Nevada is much more corrupt than most states. Reno will never be the next Silicon Valley or even the next Austin. We simply don't have an educational system to support it. The Bay-Area and Los Angeles are a huge brain drain on the Reno area. I think Bloomberg hit the nail on the head with deeming it "Silicon Valley's Back Office". Reno's place is a great place to do manufacturing and run data centers because of it's location and lower cost of doing business. I will probably be moving to another city soon because I simply can't find a good job or enough work freelancing in my field (Front-End Web Development). Reno is my favorite place to live, but it's hard to take a ~50% pay cut to live here.

pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
Another person lives in Reno also checking in. I grew up in the Silicon Valley though and recently moved here about 6 months ago. It indeed is really fun. Lot's of outdoorsy stuff to do (tons of unowned land where you can shoot guns and drive ATVs and stuff). The night life is crazy good too. But yeah... it's fun in a kind of depressing way. There's a huge unemployment/underemployment problem here. My dad who was a crazy good broker in the valley is unemployed still after 3 years of living here. My mom who was a courier in the valley is now organizing greeting cards at grocery stores making minimum wage. They'd basically be screwed if they didn't have any savings and if I wasn't able to do remote work. There's also a TON of people who just fell off the face of the earth that moved here. I've never met so many meth heads, heroin addicts and general burnouts in a higher concentration anywhere else. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places though. Reno is definitely is an cool place to live. But I don't think I would want to be here for longer than a year... that's just me though. I'm another one of those "California refugees", I guess. So maybe I shouldn't be talking.

kolanos 12y ago

In 2001 I built a data center in Reno thinking it was inevitably going to see an economic boom. Well, to be more specific, I purchased a half-completed data center abandoned by Adelphia after they went bust and completed it. Long story short, I lost my shirt and sold it two years later. I've lived in Reno on-and-off ever since, including a three year stint in the Bay Area startup scene. I'm still waiting for that economic boom. I've also lived in the Sacramento area and seen similar economic issues to Reno, only on a larger scale. If Sacramento can't make the proximity to the Bay Area work -- there's little hope for Reno. Hope I'm wrong about that.

pbreit 12y ago
What's the problem, talent?