Time to Double Down on Las Vegas Startups

Let’s just get this out of the way from the start, with an apology on my part, there is no getting away from the fact that my brain is going to drop gambling words in this article because it’s cute when talking about Las Vegas. I’m sorry. What we’re here for is much more serious, and that’s a deep dive of the Las Vegas startup ecosystem because in my work throughout the world consulting with cities and broader governments about how to best serve founders and investors, Las Vegas is among the most potential and I regret not yet having done one of my studies here. Share this with Las Vegans since we’re going to highlight strengths as well as what to fix.

Nobody bets bigger on an unproven idea than Las Vegas
(again, I’m sorry, just roll your eyes like rolling dice)

A railroad stop in the Nevada desert, 115 degrees in July, surrounded by nothing, and somehow this city decided to become the most visited entertainment destination on Earth. A century of compounding calculated risk, architectural audacity, and a cultural tolerance for failure that makes Silicon Valley blush.

Yet, when the conversation turns to startups, the rest of the country keep underestimating Las Vegas? I want answers.

The Las Vegas startup ecosystem ranks among the global top 100 cities in the StartupBlink Ecosystem Index, recording an annual growth rate of +4.2% in 2025. That might sound modest until you understand that most American cities outside the top ten familiar metros are barely moving at all. Meanwhile, the total valuation of Las Vegas-area startups increased from $1.9 billion in 2014 to $19 billion in 2024, according to Isaiah Steinberg and a report by UNLV’s Lincy Institute: a 10x increase in a decade. And Las Vegas was ranked the number one up and coming city in the country for pre-IPO startups in a 2023 Crowdfund Capital Advisors study. Not top ten, number one.

None of that happened by accident and yet, none of it is sufficient.

What Las Vegas has is a genuinely compelling foundation:

• A culture that respects risk-taking
• A government increasingly willing to clear the runway
• An anchor university finally punching at its weight
• A community of builders who show up every third Saturday at Tech Alley not because a tech company told them to, but because they’re wired that way.

What it still lacks is the infrastructure depth, the capital density, and the mentor flywheel that separates a city with startups from a city that produces startups at scale. That gap is closeable; understanding it starts with appreciating exactly what Las Vegas is and how it got here.

The City Born from Risk Capital

Las Vegas is not a place that was exactly planned into existence. It was gambled into existence (and this time I’m making a casino pun); this was a bet that people would drive across an empty desert on a chance. When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931 during the construction of Hoover Dam, Las Vegas built the most audacious built environment in America, one neon sign at a time.

And those signs weren’t decoration, they were invention, which we’re going to highlight herein because it’s a part of the story that actually matters in developing a starup ecosystem. As UNLV history professor Michael Green noted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, neon “stood out” in a city that itself “stood out.” The creation of Hoover Dam and its electricity allowed Las Vegas to become the City of Neon Lights, transforming it from a sleepy frontier town into tourist attraction. The first neon sign in Las Vegas is believed to have appeared between 1928 and 1930, installed by Ethel Guenter, owner of the Overland Hotel. From there, the escalation was relentless. YESCO, the Young Electric Sign Company, created Vegas Vic (installed in 1951 at the Pioneer Club) a 48-foot-tall mechanical cowboy incorporating 5,000 feet of neon tubing and electrical wiring, the world’s largest animated electric sign of its time.

The operating principle of Las Vegas as an innovation economy is that if you’re going to make a sign, make one you can see from a hundred miles out. The marketer in me is holding back tears of joy for the right lesson to founders.

The hospitality industry that emerged from it became one of the most sophisticated experience-design laboratories in human history. Hotels that accommodate 5,000 guests while running casino floors, entertainment venues, restaurants, and retail are not managed by instinct, they’re engineering problems disguised as fun. The logistics, customer data systems, surveillance and security, workforce optimization software, and payment infrastructure built or refined in Las Vegas have influenced global industries from retail to healthcare. Video poker (invented and commercialized here) is essentially our early touchscreen interface decades before anyone called it UX. Electronic gaming systems, identity AI, dynamic pricing, crowd management systems: Las Vegas has been inventing and stress-testing applied technology in hostile conditions since before “startup” was a word.

The behavioral economics embedded in casino floor design alone would fill a graduate course. The culture of invention was never absent from Las Vegas; it was just hidden inside an industry that people assumed was only about vice.

Notable Companies Born From or Anchored to Las Vegas

Let’s dispense with the notion that Las Vegas only produces casinos and cocktail waitresses.

Zappos relocated from San Francisco to Henderson, then to downtown Las Vegas, turning a shoe retailer into a customer service philosophy that rewrote how the world thought about brand culture. Switch, founded in 2000 by Rob Roy, operates some of the largest and most energy-efficient data center campuses globally, providing colocation, cloud services, and telecommunications infrastructure, powering its North American operations on renewable energy. Allegiant Air built a low-cost leisure travel model from Las Vegas that now operates roughly 350 routes nationwide. Boxabl raised over $230 million from its viral crowdfunding campaigns with a prefabricated foldable home concept that could restructure mass housing. Influential, an AI-driven influencer marketing platform, raised $40 million in venture capital with its software development team in Las Vegas. Abnormal AI, the cybersecurity firm, leads Las Vegas-area deep tech startups with $534M in total funding. TensorWave, focused on AI cloud infrastructure, raised $146.7 million since its founding in 2023. Filevine, a legal operations platform, Odysee, a decentralized video sharing network, and Lucihub, a next-gen video production platform, all represent the diversifying range of Las Vegas startups.

The top industries receiving venture capital investment in Nevada, according to the launch of a Nevada Dealroom, are transportation, energy, fintech, gaming, marketing, and security. Again, I’m crying with joy that they didn’t go and do something ignorant like saying tech, B2B, or SaaS, are industries.

Cool platform: “We want to make Nevada as welcoming as possible to entrepreneurs and early-stage high growth companies while helping local startups connect with investors and other entrepreneurs,” said Karsten Heise, Senior Director of Strategic Programs and Innovation at GOED. “GOED’s innovation based economic development approach supporting startups and founders needed a statewide coverage under this initiative. We saw how successful this was in Las Vegas, so the expansion presented a great opportunity to make this data readily available and transparent to every ecosystem and its members within our state. The sharing of statistics and demographics via Dealroom’s platform will help to lower barriers to critical information and spur investment and new economic opportunities across Nevada.”

Bear with me though because all of that Dealroom stuff seems to be dead; only two years after being announced. I look forward to comments from the Las Vegas community giving us insight to what happened; best laid plans kind of thing, it would seem. Unfortunately, that might be a recurring thread in Nevada…

Tony Hsieh, the Downtown Project, and the Lesson Learned

If you want to understand where Las Vegas’s startup ecosystem is today, you have to understand what happened between 2012 and 2014 in downtown Las Vegas because I see a lesson that has been misread by almost everyone.

One of the most nationally cited ecosystem case studies originated in Las Vegas between 2010 and 2015, when Zappos founder Tony Hsieh moved his corporate offices from San Francisco to downtown Las Vegas. Hsieh turned the former Las Vegas city hall into the Zappos headquarters then launched a $350-million initiative called the Downtown Project, designed to transform downtown Las Vegas into a global entrepreneurship hub. He bought a block of condominiums and offered shared space to startups and visitors, invested in dozens of startups, and championed hundreds more through events and meetups. He created the Downtown Container Park, a shipping container reuse project supporting retail, a green space, and a concert venue.

It was the most ambitious, privately funded startup ecosystem activation in American history.

It collapsed.

Hsieh envisioned Downtown Project as a community of startups, and by 2014, its venture capital arm carried 60 or 70 investments. But DTP initially prioritized “return on community” (ROC) over return on investment. It’s said that as founding teams commingled at DTP events and worked on extracurriculars, their ventures suffered as the leadership vacuum was devastating. David Gould, a University of Iowa professor who participated, later wrote an open letter in Las Vegas Weekly worth a read. Many believe opportunity and capital was squandered like a water faucet left on all night. I’m borrowing a bit from this experience in Las Vegas, for my oft-cited concern about public funding allocated to startup hubs, innovation districts, and accelerators; that if the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing, you’re wasting money while pretending to help founders. Frank Gruber, former CEO of Tech.Co, who moved to Las Vegas in 2012, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “DTP validated Vegas as a place for starting up and fueled a lot of excitement. Startups moved here, moved to Vegas, and became part of that movement. It was bringing people together.”

He’s right and also illustrating the problem. Bringing people together is a precondition for ecosystem formation; it’s not the ecosystem itself. What DTP did was accelerate community formation without building the management infrastructure, mentorship rigor, or capital discipline to convert that community into durable companies. We see this happen in city after city because local leaders are taking the theatrical way out, to show they are doing something, focused on getting everyone together and attracting capital; both priorities are precisely wrong. The narrative of “return on community” gave people permission to hang out and call it work. That is not startup development, that’s funded networking.

The deeper problem is what happened next. As Las Vegas became more expensive (the median home price reached around $460,000 by late 2024, about 10% higher than 2023) the scrappy affordability advantage that made “just move to Vegas and build something” viable started eroding. Rent increases throughout the city, institutional investor ownership of single-family homes, and rising living costs squeezed the lifestyle arbitrage that gave Las Vegas its edge over Austin and Denver as a founder destination. Now, it’s been noted frequently that the cost of a city is actually NOT an advantage nor disadvantage… San Francisco and New York are of course notoriously expensive while, when I moved to Austin, I laughed when people would say it’s better for startups because it’s affordable – the cost in and of itself means nothing. What matters is experienced wealth is participating so that entrepreneurs have an affordable cost of capital relative to the local economy.

So, what should be done now is not complicated, even if it’s hard. Las Vegas needs affordable coworking and residential infrastructure intentionally targeted at founder populations to bring the cost back in line with local investor participation; it needs a mentorship program with teeth that selects for startup track record rather than willingness to volunteer; and it needs patient capital from local sources willing to make the 10-year commitment the ecosystem requires to mature. The bones Hsieh built, the cultural permission to take risks, the density of entrepreneurial community organizations, the precedent that a major tech company can thrive here, are assets. Vegas needs to orient itself more to serving the operators, not the visionaries nor trying to monetize the entrepreneurs.

The Economy, the Government, and Getting the Policy Stack Right

Las Vegas sits inside a macroeconomic context that is unusual. Nevada has no state income tax and no corporate tax, making the cost of capital allocation materially lower than in neighboring California. The state ranks top 10 in the nation for starting a business. New businesses are forming, the question is whether the infrastructure exists to help them survive.

When Governor Joe Lombardo signed AB77, Nevada made history by becoming the first U.S. state to sign “Right to Start” legislation, establishing a dedicated Office of Entrepreneurship within the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development, led by Director Kyeema Peart. “By working to remove unnecessary hurdles for new, young companies, we are empowering all our residents to bring their innovative ideas to life and contribute to our thriving economy,” Governor Lombardo noted. The legislation was accompanied by AB75, the Nevada Certified Investor Act, which lowered the income threshold for accredited investors in Nevada-based startups.

Nevada’s leadership spurred bipartisan momentum, with New Mexico creating an Office of Entrepreneurship in 2023, Kansas establishing a director of small business and entrepreneurship in 2024, Michigan appointing its first-ever chief innovation ecosystem officer in 2024, and Missouri becoming the second state to enact a Right to Start Act in 2024. Nevada ran the policy playbook first and increasingly among startups, that matters for reputation, talent, and capital attraction.

The customer of venture capital isn’t the founder, it’s the investor in Funds, and every policy signal Nevada sends to institutional investors about its commitment to entrepreneurship moves the needle on that more than really anywhere else in the U.S. The question economic development professionals in Nevada should be asking isn’t “do we have the policy framework” (they’re building it) but “are we recruiting, retaining, and converting the founders who benefit from that framework into companies worth funding?”

Las Vegas’ Startup Development Infrastructure: Doing the Work

Las Vegas has more startup support organizations per capita than most American cities realize. The problem isn’t quantity; it’s coordination. Here’s what I find who matters.

StartUpNV is Nevada’s only statewide business incubator and accelerator, headquartered in Las Vegas with operations in Reno and rural counties. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit statewide accelerator and business incubator supporting scalable local companies through mentorship, education, and access to capital. Co-founder and Executive Director Jeff Saling, who has four successful startup exits of his own, built it from literally $2,600 in donations after his co-founder was killed by a drunk driver less than 36 hours after their public debut. Since their first grant in 2019, StartUpNV has been awarded more than $4 million in additional grant funding, plus donated space from the City of Las Vegas and University of Nevada, Reno. Their affiliated funds (FundNV, AngelNV, and the 1864 Seed Fund) represent a structured capital stack from pre-seed through seed stage. Saling told Vegas Inc: “We have the start of something great. We have everything it takes. It’s not quite as mature as any of those places — it’s not the same and we don’t want it to be the same. We want it to be our version of it.”

StartUp Vegas is the grassroots community organization running LevelUp, the community pitch event and an annual event at CES that puts Las Vegas startups in front of a global audience (I like the parallels to SXSW in Austin). It’s a 501(c)(3) focused on the bottom-up community formation that accelerators all fail to manufacture.

Tech Alley is the monthly “meetup of meetups” bringing together up to 15 different technology, entrepreneurship, AI, UX, venture, and industry meetup groups into a single free event, typically drawing 150 or more attendees to what has become the de facto networking spine of the Las Vegas tech community. It operates on almost no budget and generates enormous relational capital. Chris Foltz was here in AgTech, Tyler Williams, Jamie Schwartz, and Kurt Walker, represent the kind of community builders without whom ecosystem events stop happening the moment the institutional funding dries up so try to catch them. These kinds of people are the substrate every major ecosystem is built on.

UNLV’s Office of Economic Development and its Black Fire Innovation hub at the Harry Reid Research and Technology Park is one of the most meaningful university assets in the region. Jamie Schwartz, who serves as Director of Industry and Business Engagement for UNLV’s Office of Economic Development and as Associate Director of the UNLV Research Foundation, has made herself a constant connective tissue between the university and the broader entrepreneurial community. As the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada noted in their Las Vegas ecosystem assessment, Schwartz is “a constant leadership presence at events and programs; she presents at Tech Alley, leads university entrepreneur events and is central to the emerging technology transfer strategies being implemented to improve connections between the university and the entrepreneurial community.” She’s also helped launch Black Fire Capital, an early-stage venture fund for startups within the UNLV ecosystem; exactly the kind of university-adjacent capital model that Boulder, Austin, and Pittsburgh used to build their flywheels.

In an interview with CanvasRebel magazine, Schwartz described an early career lesson that applies directly to ecosystem building: “I started to think about what mattered to business owners and it occurred to me that my intention needed to shift from meeting my goals to meeting theirs.” Anyone building programs for founders who hasn’t internalized that shift, is building programs for themselves, not for the ecosystem.

Jason LeDuc runs Jason LeDuc Leadership Consulting from Las Vegas, drawing on a 20-year career as a United States Air Force officer who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. LeDuc served as an instructor for Air War College and Air Command and Staff College, preparing officers from the US Air Force, Army, Navy, and international militaries to take on senior leadership positions. Upon retiring, he received his MBA with a focus on New Venture Management from UNLV and he too now works across startups, nonprofit organizations, and veteran entrepreneur communities, bridging the military leadership model into the startup world in ways we need to encourage more. As the Las Vegas Chapter Lead for Vets in Tech, LeDuc is building the pipeline between military talent and startup roles. At Tech Alley during Global Entrepreneurship Week, he was celebrated as “a rare talent for drawing out meaningful insights and highlighting the heart behind the work,” which I highlight not so much to celebrate his work, though we should, but because we’re here to help ecosystems improve and this is a great example of what all good ecosystem media does: documenting the human infrastructure of the community so it can be found, followed, and emulated (most startup ecosystems struggle because the media isn’t doing their job).

Other key organizations include: The Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance (LVGEA), the Southern Nevada regional economic development authority, on the startup beat since 2023 with a specific focus on startup attraction, capital access, and ecosystem data; the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED), which administers the Office of Entrepreneurship established by AB77; gener8tor, a national accelerator that established Nevada cohorts through Battle Born Growth funding; the global founder development organization, Founder Institute; the Henderson Chamber’s Launchpad, which serves early-stage founders in the Henderson corridor; and the Troesh Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at UNLV’s Lee Business School, which runs the Rebel Venture Fund, the NSF I-Corps program, and academic entrepreneurship curriculum.

The Capital Stack: Money in Las Vegas

Seemingly ironically, local capital formation is the ecosystem’s most acute vulnerability. Here we have the highest of risk tolerance in capital allocation, but it’s behind on the far SAFER bet on startups over Blackjack. Most startup investment happens locally, which is why venture capital tends to avoid regions that haven’t built local investment infrastructure first.

That’s the trap Las Vegas needs to work to escape.

Angel investors are organized through StartUpNV’s AngelNV program, which runs an annual structured angel investing education program culminating in a finale pitch event where trained investors deploy capital into vetted Nevada companies. It’s one of the better-designed angel education programs in the country precisely because it trains investors rather than just recruiting them (And that makes three times now that I’m crying with joy that an ecosystem is getting things right).

Pre-seed venture capital flows primarily through StartUpNV’s affiliated funds: FundNV (pre-seed, $100K minimum investments), AngelNV (angel syndicate), and the 1864 Seed Fund for post-accelerator companies. The adjacent Nevada Certified Investor (NCI) designation, created by AB75, expanded the qualified investor pool to Nevadans earning over $100K annually, a deliberate attempt to localize capital formation. StartUpNV estimates the NCI law could grow annual invested capital from $2 million to $25 million and create $500 million in economic activity.

The Nevada State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI), a federal program, provided Nevada with potentially more than $90 million in funding to be dispensed over ten years, with approximately $60 million toward small businesses and $30 million toward venture capital programs managed by StartUpNV. That federal-state co-investment mechanism is among the most underappreciated financing tools in the region but I’m always leery of public funding allocation to ventures directly.

UNLV’s Black Fire Capital targets university-adjacent startups. Vegas Tech Fund, an early seed fund responsible for backing LaunchKey and other notable early Las Vegas companies, demonstrated that local venture-stage capital can produce exits.

Corporate-sponsored programs through Switch, MGM, and Caesars have contributed R&D and startup partnership capital to specific sectors.

The gap that remains: Las Vegas needs two or three institutional Series A and B funds with primary operations in the market. Without them, the strongest companies that emerge from StartUpNV, Tech Alley, and UNLV either relocate to raise their growth rounds or accept diluted valuations from out-of-market investors who don’t understand the local context. This is not a Las Vegas-specific problem; it’s the problem of every emerging ecosystem trying to convince institutional capital to plant a flag before the exits are obvious. But it’s fixable with ecosystem development that fills the gaps so that capital is attracted.

What Las Vegas Gets Right and Where It Falls Short

This is the meat that I get into with cities. Here, 10 considerations are applied, drawn from research about what makes startups work (or fail) and applied to a region to help distinguish the weaknesses and opportunities to address. Here’s Las Vegas:

1. Overcoming Silos: Shared Infrastructure and Community

Las Vegas has made genuine progress here. Tech Alley’s “meetup of meetups” model explicitly addresses the silo problem by forcing different communities to share the same room. StartUpNV’s relationship with the City of Las Vegas, GOED, LVGEA, UNLV, and EDAWN reflects a cross-sector awareness that didn’t exist a decade ago.

The Nevada Dealroom platform, the joint initiative between StartUpNV and the City of Las Vegas now mapping the state’s startup activity, is an infrastructure for shared knowledge rather than siloed data. If it were active, we’d have a win here, but this platform that I mentioned and questioned previously warrants revisiting now. I’ve met with dozens of platforms promising to map and ecosystem; all of them are stuck in the technology and marketing methodologies of the late 90s: static databases requiring active participation and promotion. Hate to break it to you all, but that never works – it’s a marketplace platform (i.e. two sided requirements) and can’t live up to the promise. The only thing I’ve seen that comes close is Innovative Ecosystems, which doesn’t depend on user submitted data.

So, Las Vegas has made progress beyond most cities but falls short by what seems to be a lack of consistent intention, insufficient civic support, and poor platform decisions. The ecosystem still has too many events that serve the same audience and too few mechanisms for ensuring the outputs of one program become the inputs of the next. A founder who pitches at StartUpNV’s Pitch Day shouldn’t have to re-explain their company to the SBDC or to the Henderson Launchpad.

Cross-program founder tracking, shared CRMs, and common success metrics, none of which is difficult, accelerates Las Vegas.

Let me take a moment here to point out that I invite corrections when I do these city deep dives. I do not commit to ensuring I’ve captured everything while simultaneously promoting what’s going on and guiding what to fix. Which is to say, if I’m wrong about something, if something is missing, we do live in the age of social media and there are comments I hope you’ll use to contribute. We can only thrive through collaboration… I’ll get you all attention it’s up to you to do something about it.

2. The Missing Middle: Widening the Gap Between Early Startup and Established Company

This is Las Vegas’s most challenging gap; the market has decent pre-seed support and has proven it can produce companies worth funding. It does not have sufficient seed and Series A capital or the operational mentorship infrastructure to bridge early-stage companies through the valley of death. Companies that emerge face a genuine cliff when they’ve outgrown pre-seed but haven’t yet attracted national VC attention. Total startup funding in Las Vegas decreased by 17.36% from 2023 to 2024, with funding deals decreasing by 40% over the same period. That’s not a sign of ecosystem failure, it reflects global VC contraction, but it underscores the fragility of a market that doesn’t yet have deep enough local institutional capital to buffer against national funding cycles.

The solution is not another incubator! It’s one or two growth-stage funds operating locally with the mandate and capital to lead Series A rounds. Nevada’s SSBCI deployment should be evaluated specifically for how much it’s building this bridge versus recirculating pre-seed money.

3. Securing Long-Term Funding and Incentives for Ecosystem Builders

StartUpNV has done something remarkable here, leveraging federal grant funding and a unique equity donation model, companies in their accelerator donate 1% of their equity, and adjacent funds donate 100% of their profits back to the nonprofit, creating sustainable revenue that doesn’t depend on annual government appropriations. Still, since their first grant in 2019, StartUpNV has been awarded more than $4 million in additional grant funding.

But Tech Alley runs on essentially no budget. StartUp Vegas is a volunteer-run 501(c)(3). The community events that make Las Vegas feel like an ecosystem rather than a collection of organizations depend on the personal commitment of individuals who show up consistently not because anyone is paying them to, but because they believe the city deserves it. That is admirable and also brittle. Sustainable ecosystems find ways to fund the community layer (corporate sponsorship programs, city-level community investment, or university partnership agreements) so that the infrastructure isn’t solely dependent on volunteer energy. This is not leaving the ecosystem builders to find that close that financial support, its local leaders establishing the expectation that those of us developing the ecosystems, get funded.

4. Measuring Outcomes Not Activity, and Promoting Success So Progress Is Visible

Las Vegas stakeholders can now point to real data: the 10x growth in startup valuations, the 4.7% projected tech hiring growth (the highest among U.S. cities according to CompTIA’s 2025 State of the Tech Workforce report) and the growth in funding rounds over time.

What’s still missing is a consistent, public-facing success narrative that amplifies Las Vegas’s wins to a national and international audience. Every time a Las Vegas startup gets acquired or raises a significant round, that story should be co-amplified by local media, the city, and the relevant sector media channels simultaneously but also nationally. Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on good companies; it has a monopoly on good PR infrastructure around its companies.

Las Vegas can close that gap with disciplined storytelling, I had to do a lot of digging for this article and if that’s the case of someone like me, about your city, that means no one that matters knows what you have goign on there.

5. The Culture and Behaviors That Make Collaboration Natural, Not Forced

Las Vegas has a cultural advantage here that doesn’t get enough credit; the hospitality industry has spent decades engineering human connection at scale. The city is genuinely small in a social sense, as Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, observed, “The biggest surprise for me about Las Vegas is it’s a small town. I knew about the big city part, but the small-town aspect is truly amazing.” That small-town relationship density in a large metro is exactly the cultural substrate where startup ecosystems thrive.

The challenge is that Las Vegas’s culture of hospitality can sometimes shade into performance and that’s toxic in entrepreneurship. Startup community culture needs the willingness to give honest feedback, to publicly acknowledge failure, and to demand accountability from founders and programs alike. Successful ecosystems need startup experienced people who will tell a founder their idea doesn’t work far more than the consultant or institutional leader being encouraging while trying to figure out how to make money on IP or an engagement.

6. Including the Full Spectrum of Talent, Not Just Those Already Visible

Las Vegas has a structural opportunity: its military population (Nellis AFB, the VA hospital system, veterans’ service organizations) represents a pipeline of disciplined, mission-focused talent that most startup ecosystems would kill for. and yet most ecosystems dismiss. Jason LeDuc’s work with Vets in Tech and his leadership coaching firm represent exactly the connective tissue between military talent and startup opportunity that could differentiate Las Vegas from every other ecosystem trying to diversify its founder base by recruiting from university campuses.

7. Architecting Environments That Enable People to Perform at Their Highest Potential

UNLV’s Black Fire Innovation hub is the most sophisticated purpose-built innovation environment in Southern Nevada, complete with a replica casino floor, hotel rooms, and a sportsbook for industry-integrated R&D. Demonstrating the fact that specialized focus better serves innovations and entrepreneurs, obviously we’re in hospitality here.

The gap is the absence of a venture studio environment — a built physical and programmatic space designed specifically to help post-accelerator companies build their first product, hire their first team, and run their first sales process at the same time, in proximity to each other. The best coworking spaces in the world function as studios, not just desk rentals. Las Vegas has the real estate and the organizational infrastructure to build one. It hasn’t done it yet.

8. Aligning Government, Academia, and the Private Sector Around Shared Outcomes

The alignment architecture is better in Las Vegas than in most comparable metros. Here we again have the fact that the Dealroom collaboration (StartUpNV + City of Las Vegas + GOED + LVGEA + Clark County + EDAWN) is a genuine step in solving this problem but not suprisingly, it appears to have failed and was dropped.

So, let’s look to more: AB77 and AB75 both had bipartisan legislative support. UNLV’s R1 Carnegie Research Institution designation gives it the standing to attract federal research dollars that flow into startup formation. The SSBCI federal-state-private matching structure creates an incentive alignment between state government and private accelerators.

Where alignment breaks down and might be evident in the platform demise is that the metrics used by economic development agencies (jobs created, capital attracted, companies retained) are often incompatible with the metrics used by accelerators (companies funded, founders mentored, follow-on rounds raised) and by universities (papers published, patents filed, technology licenses). Until these three sectors agree on a shared scorecard for the startup ecosystem (and tie funding decisions to it) they’ll continue congratulating each other at events while building parallel tracks.

9. Ecosystems Accelerating Innovation and Reducing Risk by Unlocking Local Competitiveness

Las Vegas has sector-specific competitive advantages that remain underutilized as accelerators of startup innovation. Gaming technology, the R&D, behavioral science, payment processing, and experience design infrastructure built over 70 years, is a local knowledge asset that should be generating a disproportionate number of B2B enterprise software startups. Hospitality technology, supply chain and logistics (with Nevada’s position in Western distribution), health tech anchored by UNLV’s Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine, and sports technology (Las Vegas has added more major sports franchises in a decade than any other city in the country) are all defensible niches where Las Vegas founders have knowledge advantages.

CompTIA’s 2025 State of the Tech Workforce report predicted 4.7% tech hiring growth in Las Vegas, the highest among U.S. cities. That’s not happening in a vacuum; it reflects the anchor effect of Switch’s data center infrastructure, the AI and enterprise software companies starting to cluster around it, and the talent pipeline UNLV’s Blackfire program is beginning to produce. The flywheel is beginning to spin.

10. How Global Best Practices Can Be Adapted, Not Copied, for Local Realities

This is where Las Vegas might learn and the most intellectual honesty to display.

The Downtown Project failed partly because it tried to transplant a Silicon Valley sensibility into a physical and cultural context that didn’t support it. That, or it was a community / social impact-oriented effort disguised as serving entrepreneurs, which requires a good old fashioned financial ROI and startup diligence, before it can accomplish something else. Las Vegas is not San Francisco; it doesn’t need to be. Boulder didn’t become Austin; it became Boulder. Medellín didn’t become Barcelona; it became a globally recognized model on its own terms.

Las Vegas’s adaptation of global best practices should look like this: take the portfolio model of the Kauffman Foundation’s research on high-potential ecosystems, the venture studio model emerging from New York and Texas, the industry-specific accelerator model (gaming tech, hospitality tech, sports tech) from London and Singapore, and the military-to-startup pipeline that Colorado Springs has been building for a decade, and run all of it through the lens of what Las Vegas actually is: a city that knows how to execute at scale, entertain visitors, and take calculated risks. That’s not a limitation, it’s a positioning advantage.

Program Excellence, Mentors, and the Founder Experience

Every organization in the Las Vegas ecosystem says it offers mentorship, be careful of that really being introductions and some networking. There’s a difference, founders feel it immediately, and these days, it can be expected that wherever founders engage, they get connected to the right mentors and investors, not those within a distinct community.

Real mentorship in startup development looks like what Jeff Saling describes at StartUpNV: seasoned, exited founders creating the support that new founders need, with a recognition that “most startup investment happens locally, and without local capital, Nevada founders might leave for California.” It’s structured, accountable, and tied to measurable outcomes.

It’s also scarce, because the people qualified to do it are busy running their own companies.

The executive ecosystem assessment of Las Vegas reinforces that the city has a vibrant multi-faceted foundation but lacks “a collaboratively driven vision and strategy to ignite a world-class innovation driven economy.” That’s not an infrastructure problem; it’s a leadership and program operations problem that seems evident in both Downtown Project and whatever Dealroom was. The intentions exist, the potential exists, and the operators exist… the coordination and the accountability structures are still catching up.

What Las Vegas needs in its program operations specifically: a curated, publicly accessible mentor network with verified track records; not volunteer lists, but active operators who commit to a defined number of hours per quarter with assigned founders. A media and marketing infrastructure that amplifies founder stories the way Y Combinator amplifies Demo Day companies. A standardized application and onboarding process across the major accelerator programs so founders aren’t drowning in paperwork to access programs that should be competing for them, not the other way around. And a culture of honest program evaluation; annual reports that acknowledge what didn’t work, not just what did.

This is Moment to Double Down on Las Vegas Startups

Las Vegas is projected to lead the nation in tech hiring this year. Startup valuations grew 10x in a decade. Nevada passed the nation’s most forward-looking entrepreneurship legislation. UNLV achieved R1 status. A dozen organizations are actively building the ecosystem’s connective tissue every single month.

None of it will compound without capital discipline, program rigor, and the willingness to be honest about the gaps. The lessons aren’t that community doesn’t matter, it matters enormously; the lesson is that community without accountability produces ineffective platforms, great parties, and distracted startups.

Las Vegas knows how to build things that shouldn’t exist in the desert; it built Hoover Dam, it built the Strip, and Formula 1 is on public streets. The startup ecosystem is a smaller, more achievable project than any of those but only if it applies the same discipline of professional execution that made those things possible.

The desert is already full of people who want to build the next thing. They’re at Tech Alley in StartUpNV’s Pitch Room and at UNLV’s Black Fire Innovation hub running experiments. They deserve the infrastructure to match their ambition.

If you’re building or investing in Las Vegas’s startup ecosystem, or you’re an economic development professional trying to figure out what the next policy priority should be, there is a book about it.

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Explore more on startup ecosystems, venture capital, and founder strategy: Why Venture Capital Avoids Your Startup Ecosystem and How Startup Ecosystem Builders Start Ecosystems.