Las Vegas, Visionaries flock to Las Vegas for SXSW V2V

Las Vegas, Visionaries flock to Las Vegas for SXSW V2V

Tony Hsieh is out to transform Las Vegas, and maybe cities everywhere. You may have heard of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX. I’ve written about it here, in fact. Well, the folks who set up the Interactive portion of that festival, which is the best general technology conference going these days, have set up a new event called SXSW V2V or Visionaries to Vegas, which just happened on August 11-14th in Las Vegas. The focus is on bringing active, visionary entrepreneurs who are moving ideas into reality together in Las Vegas.

That’s great for a number of reasons. First, because it’s a lot more focused and it’s easier to get there from LA than it is to get to to Austin for the mammoth SXSW Interactive Festival. And, with all the entrepreneurial activity welling up all around LA, from the Foothills to Silicon Beach, this event promises to be a yearly gathering to help entrepreneurs keep their momentum.

Hugh Forrest is the director of SXSW Interactive and he’s the one realizing the vision for Visionaries to Vegas.

This year’s first event was absolutely excellent. There were mentor sessions with luminaries in various fields who were answering questions and coaching participants during the event.

There were very interesting and valuable sessions and keynotes, as well.

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappo’s, gave a very interesting keynote titled “The City as a Startup” which you can see at the homepage of the event: SXSWV2V.com. Las Vegas is out to transform itself into an oasis for creative entrepreneurs and Tony is at the forefront of that movement. One of the interesting things Tony mentioned is that he is actually decreasing the amount of square footage per employee at Zappos’ offices. That might seem strange, since Zappos is known for their excellent company culture and for being an extremely good place to work. The reason he’s doing that, however, is to increase the number of “creative collisions.” Creative collisions refers to the way that space, layout, density and other factors in a city, or an office, can work together to spark new ideas by driving up the rate at which people basically bump into each other: creative collisions.

The big takeaway for me from this year’s event, however, was the presenter Jeff Rosenblum who created the excellent documentary the Naked Brand, more at http://thenakedbrand.com/. Jeff was not only screamingly funny, but he had a very, very important point which he clearly articulated. Transparency is happening. Due to social media, the way we are all connected, the fact that there are easily accessible ratings for everything, and so on, businesses can no longer hide behind a good commercial, or a good advertising agency, or a good Public Relations firm. Consumers are talking and transparency is happening. The really valuable point is that transparency is happening and it is much better when you do it yourself than when it happens to you! If you try to hide a mistake, or cover up a bad product, or pull the wool over consumers eyes you will be caught and it won’t be pretty. On the other hand, if you have a failure, do something wrong, put out a bad product and are transparent about it, and what you’re doing to correct it, people will think much more highly of you and you might even create fans, rather than creating enemies.
As an entrepreneur in Los Angeles I sure hope that the Visionaries to Vegas conference continues to grow and have many, many more successful years in Las Vegas. I’m already excited about 2014!

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