LAS VEGAS—There's been a lot of hubbub about the effort tech whiz Tony Hsieh and his crack team of acolytes have put into revitalizing downtown Las Vegas.
In case you missed it, Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, in January 2012 announced that he was putting $350 million into the Downtown Project, which would fund new businesses in an economically depressed part of the city seven miles north of the Las Vegas Strip. He also wanted to create a tech hub in a city better known for gambling and tourism, which some journalists dubbed the newest "techtopia."
This fall, the Downtown Project laid off 30 employees. Some Downtown Project employees who hadn't been laid off left of their own accord. David L. Gould, who had been a professor at the University of Iowa until Hsieh convinced him to move to Las Vegas and take the title "Director of Imagination," wrote a public resignation letter blaming the layoffs on “a collage of decadence, greed and missing leadership.”
“While some squandered the opportunity to ‘dent the universe,’” he wrote, “others never cared about doing so in the first place. There were heroes among us, however, and it is for them that my soul weeps.”
At the same time, local and national media seized on the suicides of three separate entrepreneurs who worked for the Downtown Project or whose projects had been funded by it. One of the startups, Ecomom, had a particularly nasty and public crash.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dollar350-million-might-not-be-enough-to-save-las-vegas/ar-BBi8VfW?ocid=iehp
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