TechAlliance aiming at Carson

A group of Silicon Valley expatriates is recruiting business people in Carson City and the Carson Valley to help draw high-technology firms to Western Nevada.

TechAlliance@NewNevada was started by five transplanted Californians who believe they can attract a critical mass of technology-oriented companies and spark the kind of synergy here that made the Bay Area a hotbed of computer-focused innovation.

The time couldn't be riper, according to Carson City attorney Roy Farrow, a board member and co-founder of the TechAlliance.

"The price of real estate in Silicon Valley is so high that companies cannot afford to expand there and their employees can't afford a place to live," Farrow said. "At the same time, many of the executives in the high tech industry have bought or built second homes in the Tahoe area and might be encouraged to look down into these valleys."

Though the nonprofit corporation got its start a couple years ago in a brainstorming session, the TechAlliance got a boost with the September 1999 award of a $100,000 federal grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce, one of eight entities to receive funding from that particular program.

The grant enabled the otherwise volunteer group to hire an executive director, former Reno television Channel 2 weekend news anchorman Michael Thomas, and to ramp up its marketing program.

"Our big coup came this spring at the annual venture capital seminar that Red Herring, the magazine that is the Wall Street Journal of the high tech industries, holds at the Resort at Squaw Creek up at Tahoe," Thomas said. "They put the top 10 or so venture capital firms together with the leading 100 growth firms.

"It's like the Aspen Film Festival of the high tech industry. They bill it as 'the place where deals get done.'

"It's not easy to get in there, but we were able to use personal contacts. Ken Hawk (another TechAlliance co-founder and a corporate officer of Reno-based internet firm iGo) called the editor, who had done a story on Ken, and got us in.

"We didn't have much advance notice to get ready and weren't part of the agenda. We circulated and passed out a lot of our cards and we got pretty good at what they call the elevator appointment - 'Okay, I can give you 15 seconds.'

"We also hand-delivered 200 copies of the Wall Street Journal with a wrapper we created about the advantages of Nevada for businesses."

Farrow said private and government entities throughout this part of the state are realizing that their economic development efforts should be coordinated rather than competitive.

"Silicon Valley is not just San Jose - it stretches through a number of communities like Cupertino and Mountain View," Farrow said. "Around here, each area also has its own assets to offer.

"Reno has airport, rail and highway connections and industrial developments like South Meadows.

"Carson City and the Carson Valley have existing business parks that serve successful operations like Cubix and Bently Nevada. There's the corporate-oriented commercial buildings being developed along College Parkway, something absolutely required by image-conscious high tech companies.

"And the area along Highway 50 stretching through Dayton and out to Silver Springs has the potential to become the high-tech industrial corridor of the future."

He said TechAlliance's vision for the Carson City area reflects the fact that the community has the largest manufacturing base in relation to its size of any area of the state.

"We want to attract the high-paying, non-polluting technical firms, rather than 'big box' distribution operations that occupy a lot of land and don't pay that well," he said.

The second key is to attract enough of a high-tech base of companies and employees that innovative ideas are exchanged among them.

"In Silicon Valley, they say you're only two telephone calls away from the answer to any problem," Farrow said. "When you have a concentration of expertise and the ideas begin to flow, it enhances any individual's efforts. It's called the crucible effect."

The third part of the TechAlliance vision for this area is to develop expertise in the people already here, to create a talented labor pool for high-tech ventures.

"We've already got a university and community college system that is committed to developing and providing programs that match employers' needs," he said.

Western Nevada Community College, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Truckee Meadows Community College are jointly building a facility at the south end of Reno, to be called the Redfield Campus, to house that type of program.