Tony Hsieh

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“New Businesses — Like An Artisanal Doughnut Shop And A High-End Flower Vendor — Were ‘Bleeding Money'”

September 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Transforming Downtown Las Vegas into a technotopia always seemed a quixotic quest at best, but that was Zappos founder Tony Hsieh’s top-down attempt, a huge wager in the American capital of gambling. Unsurprisingly, the “house” has been unsparing. From Nellie Bowles at Recode:

“In a surprise all-hands meeting at the Inspire Theater a few weeks ago, Hsieh, whose $350 million in funding and vision turned 60 acres of Downtown Las Vegas into an growing tech city, told his staff he was stepping down and handing the reins over to his lawyer, Millie Chou. On Tuesday, the project laid off 30 percent of the staff.

News of the layoffs was first reported by KNPR News.

‘(Hsieh) said I see myself as advisor and investor, but I’m going to appoint someone as our strategy implementation lead,’ one source who attended the meeting said.

Another person close to Downtown Project said the new businesses — like an artisanal doughnut shop and a high-end flower vendor — were ‘bleeding money.’

‘It seems like it’s being run by kids, that’s because it’s being run by kids,’ one source said about the Downtown Project.

This person cited Hsieh’s hiring decisions, which included several family members, as a problem.

‘There are a lot of people in leadership at Downtown Project who have absolutely no business being there,’ the source said. ‘Tony is not always altogether the most wise judge of character. There’s a lot of family. There’s a lot of drinking buddies. And some poor choices were made.'”

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“Where Abandoned Liquor Stores Now Fester, Yoga Studios Shall One Day Bloom”

December 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I posted something a couple months back about Zappos founder Tony Hsieh spearheading a reimagining of raffish Downtown Las Vegas as a Jane Jacobs-ish walkable community for the Information Age. It’s a tall order. Here’s an excerpt from another piece about Hsieh and his master plan, this time from Greg Beato at Reason:

“In December 2010, Hsieh announced that Zappos.com was planning to move its thousand-plus employees from an office park in Henderson, Nevada, to the old Las Vegas City Hall, a transition that will happen sometime later this year. When it does, Hsieh won’t be commuting. In 2011, he leased 50 units in a luxury high-rise in the neighborhood, and he and some of his Zappos.com co-workers moved in. He’s hoping more will follow—Zappos.com employees and anyone else who wants to live in a lively, community-oriented urban neighborhood near his eight-acre worksite. It’s something he calls The Downtown Project. 

Primarily bankrolled by Hsieh, The Downtown Project plans to invest $350 million in up to 200 small businesses, dozens of tech start-ups, and a diverse mix of other public resources and amenities. The ultimate goal: To create the sort of dense, walkable, mixed-used Shangri-La championed by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 

Put another way, Hsieh would like to make downtown Las Vegas a more compelling social network, a feature-rich platform that encourages frequent chance encounters, fruitful knowledge exchange, and over the long term, greater innovation and productivity. Where abandoned liquor stores now fester, yoga studios shall one day bloom. 

In a town where development typically takes the form of another massive casino resort, Hsieh’s dream is a fairly radical vision. But Las Vegas has already replicated Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the New York skyline, so why not thriving urban neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission District or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg?

Call it a venture-capital take on urban locavorism.”

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“If You Fix Cities, You Kind Of Fix The World”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Las Vegas, 1895.

There’s a smart article in this week’s New York Times Magazine by Timothy Pratt about Zappos founder Tony Hsieh hoping to remake urban living in the desolate downtown of Las Vegas. It certainly won’t be a quick fix, but will it be quixotic? An excerpt:

“The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. ‘I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,’ he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided ‘it was better to interact with the community.’

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of ‘serendipitous interactions’ that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, ‘We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.’ The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would ‘ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.’ For the city itself, it would ‘help revitalize the economy.’ More important, it would ‘inspire,’ a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.'”

Las Vegas, 1941.

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