As someone who moved from Boston to Reno I'm really surprised by all the hate this little city gets. I've always said that it has 80% of what I like about larger cities but only 20% of what I hate. There's a surprising amount of good food, a growing and active hacker community, it's a short drive to tahoe, and SF is just a day trip when you need it, and coming from the northeast the weather is fantastic.
At the same time people here think a 20 minute commute is outrageous, the cost of living is insanely cheap, and the majority of the city is extremely safe.
Don't get me wrong, I'm never going to argue that, as a city, Reno competes with any larger US cities. But imho it beats that hell out of anywhere that has a similar cost of living. Most people I know in larger cities tend to move an hour or two into the suburbs as they get older and end up making time to get into the city very rarely, I'd definitely take Reno over that.
I don't think Reno is the greatest place on earth, but I can never understand why people despise it so much more than anywhere else.
For my lifestyle (I like guns, and a fairly remote, large house), I'd basically prefer to live in NV to living in the Bay Area. But realistically the "commute to SF" lifestyle might work for a consultant or an employee at a late stage company, but not for a startup founder.
I really hope Tony Hsieh's Downtown Las Vegas stuff works out well.
Not to get completely off the OP, but I would be interested to hear your reasons for not thinking Reno would be good for a startup founder and specifically how Las Vegas would be different.
I don't disagree with you, just looking for an outside perspective. I've lived in both Reno and Las Vegas and have been working to build up the Reno startup community through Reno Collective coworking, Ignite Reno, WordCamp, Hack4Reno, etc. We've pulled off a lot of things and seen a lot of growth in the last few years but we know there is still a long way to go.
Either would be fine; Reno is closer to SF by car. Las Vegas has a bigger stock of houses (cheap), and a better airport -- being able to fly non-stop to basically anywhere is a big plus for b2b. Also, conferences happen in Vegas, so having a house there to use just for conferences and frontsight trips would make some sense. Las Vegas is a much bigger city, so all the other infrastructure is more likely to exist. I prefer the environment around Reno (well, the Tahoe area), and I hate Clark County laws vs. everywhere else in NV.
Neither one is ideal now, and neither has an "anchor tech company". Zappos isn't really enough of a tech company to be that. Hsieh's thing might be able to accomplish that, though. Having a pool of people familiar with startups to hire from would be great, but realistically you'd be recruiting people to relocate in either case.
