
Reno Wants to Be Silicon Valley's Back Office - rck
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-10/reno-wants-to-be-silicon-valley-s-back-office
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ngriffin731
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.

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martinald
Wow. Austin "overcrowded". It has less that 2500people/sq mi. I've heard it
all now.

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cozzyd
If it had higher density, it would probably be less congested since people
wouldn't need to drive to get to the corner store.

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reustle
Needing a car to survive is the reason I left Austin

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devonkim
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.

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fiatmoney
One thing a large datacenter project does give your town is the potential
ability to tax a big chunk of relatively immobile capital.

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devonkim
This is in direct contradiction to the numerous articles showing these kinds
of economically disadvantaged areas giving so many tax credits that the
companies will pay basically nothing in taxes to put a DC there. I'd say that
these municipalities are so desperate for jobs of any sort they're willing to
take almost nothing in taxes just to have a big DC show up by some big name
tech company once and give blue collars jobs for even a year or so. You're not
going to see big cities be able to do that kind of a desperate move for jobs,
but for a lot of rural areas they might be able to swing the money.

Thing is that Nevada doesn't have a state income tax, so the hope is that the
working age population in the area won't be discouraged enough to completely
leave. Random towns in Texas are similar due to no income tax at state level.
North Carolina, however, does have a mixed income of state taxes, moderate
sales tax, and fairly low real estate taxes.

Meanwhile, start-ups and small businesses in general will get almost none of
the same kind of treatment, so companies that are struggling to grow due to
lack of capital are forced into areas closer to their investors, whom being
wealthy, tend to gravitate toward higher cost areas of living.

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hornd
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!

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avelis
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.

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ktsmith
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.

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avelis
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

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ktsmith
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.

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MattyRad
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!

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chubot
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?

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ktsmith
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.

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kolanos
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.

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pbreit
What's the problem, talent?

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Sanddancer
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.

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ktsmith
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.

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

