Las Vegas continues to lure California’s elite with pro business pitch
The political winds in the U.S. have shifted dramatically since last year’s Vegas Tech Summit, but founder Teddy Liaw — who moved here a few years ago from San Francisco after becoming tired of California’s policies and politics — said he sees opportunity for Nevada under the new Trump administration.
Liaw said President Donald Trump’s policy on companies that are headquartered here but operate abroad has changed the tone of this year’s summit as companies look to deal with tariffs on imports.
“The political landscape always affects everybody’s lives so it’s absolutely changed things, and it’s created a lot more urgency,” he said. “It creates more urgency to diversify and protect Vegas. Right now the topic is tariffs, and the people who are getting affected is anybody that’s got hard goods that are made overseas, so those industries are getting hit.”
Trump’s push to reindustrialize America means many large companies are looking to build factories, plants and infrastructure on American soil, and Liaw said Nevada needs to jump on this opportunity given the state’s pro-business mantra which has it offering one of the lowest tax burdens for both individuals and companies in the country.
Piotr Tomasik, the co-founder and president of TensorWave — which works within the AI cloud computing industry —recently had the largest Series A round of funding ever in Nevada. He said executives and corporations are largely on board with the administration’s goal of expanding the private sector while also deregulating it.
“Generally (the tech world and entrepreneurs) are excited because the administration is open for business,” he said. “And initiatives they get approached with, they’re very supportive of and open to new ideas whereas perhaps in the past it’s been very dogmatic around business.”
‘Entrepreneurial spirit’
Tomasik said Nevada has an “entrepreneurial spirit” as well as easier access to local and state officials when it comes to the business sector, something that Nevada offers in comparison with neighboring California, which is one of the most regulated and taxed states in the country.
The goal of Liaw’s annual summit is to attract technology CEOs, founders and companies from all over, luring businesses from tech-heavy states such as California. Liaw said this all plays into diversifying the valley’s economy away from being heavily reliant on tourism and gaming, expanding into tech sectors such as AI and health care.
Brandon Sim, the founder and CEO of Astrana Health, relocated his health care technology company, which builds software technology for doctors, about two years ago from Los Angeles to Nevada. He aleady has 150 employees in the state and is now a resident of Summerlin. He said he noticed a migratory trend.
“What we noticed was a lot of our patients were moving further and further progressively east,” he said. “From downtown L.A. to Riverside to Victorville and all the way up the 15 to Las Vegas. So we thought if all of our patients and clients are moving, we need to follow them over.”
Health care is now the third-biggest employer in Southern Nevada, according to the latest UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research’s annual report, and will become the second biggest in as little as three years.
Former UNLV President Len Jessup who was at the summit, recently launched Desert Forge Ventures, a venture capital and private equity firm based in Las Vegas. He said the valley is still a relatively small player compared with major metros regarding various industries, and part of bringing in more companies and diversiftying the economy still comes down to the ultimate bottom line: money.
“The good news is this is still a hot ecosystem, there are founders moving in here from all over, but it lacks capital, so we want to fix that,” he said.
Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at pblennerhassett@reviewjournal.com.
