Start me up!

Thoughts on the Las Vegas entrepreneurial ecosystem

One of the best assignments in higher ed I had was running the entrepreneurship program back at Washington State University. That was a blast…building that into a highly ranked program, getting our undergrad business school students to team up with engineering students, building a new capstone course for MBA students that helped them to write business plans around great ideas, beefing up the annual business plan competition, and working with amazing students, faculty, staff, and volunteers from throughout the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

While in that assignment I connected with some alum out in Seattle and advised them on a venture capital fund they intended to build and launch that would be aimed at intellectual property coming out of universities across the country. That caused me to visit university tech transfer offices and national labs around the country and I learned a LOT about what worked and what didn’t…and signed up a bunch of universities and labs to participate in the fund once it launched…but, it didn’t launch. The team was set to launch the fund in 2007 and the country then went into one of its worse downturns in history…talk about terrible timing…

I got along really well with a few of those guys who helped with the design of that fund, and together in about 2009 we created Xecutive Advisory Partners (XAP), a boutique venture capital firm and business accelerator. Over the ensuing 15 or so years, XAP has helped countless start ups to launch, pivot, and/or to get off high center and get traction…this was a great experience for me, and a nice alternative to the daily grind I found in my day job(s) as business school dean and, later, university president.

I feel that the entrepreneurial spirit was in me right from birth, given my family’s background as a long line of Italian immigrants with small businesses…but the XAP experience really brought this to the forefront for me…and it continues today. One of the XAP partners and I are actively involved with a start up we helped to launch and get funded, Assaya. This incredible young company, co-founded by two of the smartest people I have ever met, Craig and Clas, is set to disrupt and democratize the health diagnostics market with inexpensive, digital, cloud-based, point-of-care-anywhere, diagnostics powered by machine learning at the “edge.”

I’ve retired from my Claremont presidency and am back full-time in Las Vegas (Henderson, to be exact…and Dragon Ridge, to be even more precise)…and I’m finding that my entrepreneurial itch is taking precedence. As I mentioned in a prior post, I’ve agreed to be a Fellow at the Lincy Institute at UNLV, a noted public policy think tank that manages the university’s partnership with Brookings. My first project is a study of the start-up ecosystem here in the Las Vegas valley…and in my preliminary field research I am finding that the ecosystem here is alive and well…thriving, in fact…though perhaps a bit fragmented and not well known.

One of the components that needs to be grown is access to local capital for early stage ventures here, particularly in tech and biotech. This town is incredible in terms of rolling the dice (literally) for LARGE hospitality, entertainment, sports, and real estate ventures, but is still relatively “young” in terms of birthing its own tech and biotech ventures that grow, find success, and stick in the local ecosystem. The company, Switch, comes to mind as one of the few noteworthy examples (think large, eco-friendly data centers)…

…which is why I have been helping the “Blackfire” economic development team at UNLV (Bo, Zach, Jamie, and others) to envision their first venture capital fund aimed at inventions coming out of the university. Back while I was president at UNLV we worked hard to achieve Carnegie R1 status, to become one of the nations top 130 or so research universities (out of over 4,000 plus universities in the country)…we wanted to grow UNLV into the highly impactful idea factory that we knew it could become…and that Southern Nevada needed. Well, UNLV is now “R1” thankfully and credit goes to everyone at UNLV over many decades who worked hard to make that happen…and so the Blackfire team, appropriately, wants to now create a fund aimed at the university.

I am so excited to be helping the team to envision and launch this fund…and here’s why. While I was a doctoral student back in the business school at the University of Arizona in the late ‘80’s, the local organization that hired perhaps the most students out of the business school at the time (at least MBA graduates, that is) was Raytheon…and these were coveted job opportunities. When I returned some 20 plus years later to that business school as dean, things had changed. The local organization that was then among the firms hiring most of the graduates (especially MBA students) was Ventana Medical Systems…a University of Arizona spin-out focused on cancer diagnostics. It was bought by Roche, who opted to leave it in Tucson (Oro Valley, specifically) and continue to grow it there and focus it on tissue diagnostics broadly speaking…really good jobs and incredible economic impact…and a great, global partner for the university located right next door…WOW!

I’d like to see us here in the Las Vegas valley do the same…let’s launch some more of these tech and biotech firms right here…literally battle born…and grow them here…and keep them here…and create more of these great jobs and economic impact…and maybe save some lives in the process…and help to diversify our local economy to make it more resilient, dynamic, recession-resistant, and sustainable. I can think of no better place to do this than here…now…in the most dynamic place in the country, if not the world…start me up!