As he stood on a villa balcony overlooking the posh Wynn Golf Club, Teddy Liaw peered off in the distance.
On this near-perfect spring day on the Strip, an onlooker might have mistaken the pause by Liaw, an avid golfer, for a brief daydream, possibly a yearning to be on the course.
His clubs were in the private villa, just a few steps away, but Liaw had played the previous day. He wasn’t thinking about golf.
Instead, the California transplant — a businessman who moved here from the Bay Area early last year — wanted to talk about a unique plan for a fall conference in Las Vegas.
Instead of a traditional conference or trade show, which Las Vegas is known for hosting, Liaw and a small group of entrepreneurs want to host a few dozen tech industry investors and executives for a multiday showcase of Southern Nevada in September.
The idea is to use Liaw’s access to deep-pocketed investors and tech executives in the Bay Area to get more people to follow his path to Las Vegas.
“This isn’t going to be for the masses,” Liaw said. “We’re talking about a list of 50 to 100 curated people, all people that have invested into billion-dollar companies, founded billion-dollar companies, or they themselves are billionaires.”
The goal, Liaw said, is to convince a percentage of those who attend to live and work in the Las Vegas Valley, a place Liaw and his family have grown to love.
“This is a targeted experience to get people to see Las Vegas in a different light,” Liaw said. “Everybody’s been here along the 2-3 miles that we know as the Strip, but we’re going to expose people to other places. We want people to have a new perspective about living here, playing golf here, eating here…We want them to say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was in Vegas.’ This will be the anti-Strip conference; it’s not going to be at the Convention Center.”
Liaw has no issue with the Las Vegas convention scene — that’s part of what the area has to offer. But he’ll instead take the group to Allegiant Stadium for a tour, to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area and to a party at a mansion at The Summit, an exclusive community in Summerlin.
He also plans to show off a posh off-strip condo, parts of Henderson, someprivate schools and Tivoli Village, one of Liaw’s favorite hangouts.
He said a list of confirmed attendees includes Eugene Kim, one of the founders of the wildly popular Kanye West-inspired sneaker line Yeezy; Sam Yam, co-founder of artist crowd-sourcing platform Patreon; and Kevin Lin, one of the founders of Twitch, a video streaming service that was sold to Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion.
Liaw said there will only be 50 to 100 spots at the conference and that he’s sure there will eventually be a waiting list.
“This is going to be a group of founders and executives, key people, for some household name companies,” Liaw said. “Some will be people who are huge in the VC (venture capitalist) world. This is my personal network and the network of the committee we’ve formed.”
That committee includes, among others, Heather Brown and Piotr Tomasik from a nonprofit called StartUp Vegas, and representatives from the Global Leadership Organization, a community-building nonprofit that Liaw founded in 2012. Others members are: Bernard Bermudez (Senior Vice President, Enterprise Bank & Trust), Liza Fong (Co-founder, Connect Realty & Associates), Rukshana Hussian (former city of Las Vegas adminstrator), Jason Lin (Founder, Super Capital), and Ashley Lowe (Founder, Meetings.Vegas).
Tomasik is the founder of a successful tech firm called Influential, a Las Vegas startup that markets social media influencers.
Liaw, when he’s not out golfing, works a day job as CEO of NexRep, a call center company that allows its workers to operate from home.
For much of the pandemic, Liaw has worked from his rented suite at the Wynn Fairway Villas.
NexRep, though it’s technically based in Maine, has about 100 employees in the Las Vegas Valley.
With remote work as a built-in business model, NexRep has been successful during the pandemic, Liaw said.
Liaw, 43, was featured in a Wall Street Journal story from April 2021 about homebuyers who were “taking a chance on Las Vegas.”
In that piece, Liaw talked about the home he purchased — complete with a wine cellar, three-car garage, and two pools — and how he felt “safe” in Las Vegas.
Originally from Southern California, Liaw graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001 with degrees in business administration and ethnic studies.
He raves about how much more expensive a home like his in Las Vegas costs now in the San Francisco area.
He said the Bay Area “lost energy” during the pandemic, when scores of workers in many different industries across the country discovered they could work remotely from almost anywhere.
Liaw still has family in California, but he noted that it’s relatively painless to fly back, like he did recently to visit his mother for a couple of days.
Josh Leavitt, a Las Vegas entrepreneur and the CEO of Tech Alley, a network of techies who meet once per month downtown, first heard of Liaw through that newspaper piece.
Leavitt, a Las Vegas native, said he’s intrigued by the idea of a recruiting conference that focuses on landmarks off the Strip.
“I’ve heard so many times from people who move here, then discover many of the things the area has to offer, like Mount Charleston or what things are like off the Strip,” Leavitt said. “The bright lights are what people are attracted to, and rightfully so, but there’s so much more that we have to offer.”
Leavitt talked about Liaw in terms of a collaborator and visionary, in some ways the same as many talked years ago about Tony Hsieh, the late entrepreneur and venture capitalist who invested millions of dollars into various projects in downtown Las Vegas.
“Teddy is the type of guy who’s very energetic and personable, great at bringing people together,” Leavitt said. “He does something that’s fascinating — he identifies the resources that you bring to the table and he helps leverage them in a way that moves ideas forward.”
Liaw brushed off the Hsieh comparison — for one thing, Liaw doesn’t have the capacity to spend the kind of money that the late billionaire had access to — but said he respects what Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos, did to change the narrative in Las Vegas.
“Everything Tony did was amazing,” Liaw said. “He moved here, he committed to Las Vegas. Tony came to a gaming city and made it be open to technology. He did it by brute force — by putting his own money and his people into his projects. What I’m trying to do is different, but because of Tony, people know that tech is embraced in Las Vegas.”
Partly because of the economic downturn in the tourism industry caused by the pandemic, there has been renewed interest in efforts to diversify Southern Nevada’s visitor-dependent economy.
Politicians, city and local government leaders, and other community leaders have talked publicly in recent months about the need for the region to diversify its economy.
The problem is that when economic conditions in the U.S. take a downward turn, people have less money to spend on visits to Las Vegas. That, in turn, means that Southern Nevada’s economy takes a big hit.
If other sectors of the economy here were to grow — manufacturing, tech, and logistics are among the most talked about — it would take pressure off the tourism and hospitality sector.
That’s not a new problem for Las Vegas, but people like Ryan Smith, economic and urban development director for the city, believe that someone with the vision of a Teddy Liaw could help greatly.
“Technology transcends all industry,” Smith said. “If you create a startup ecosystem where companies can come in and scale new technologies, that will definitely help diversify the economy here. That will bring new money and new innovation. Vegas will always be the entertainment and, now, sports capital of the world. But if Vegas is also known for innovation, that will help diversify the job base here. I think people are starting to see that.”
The time for Las Vegas to capitalize on that potential is now, Liaw said.
“We’re bringing legit people here,” Liaw said. “It only takes one Steve Wynn to change a Las Vegas or one Elon Musk to change an Austin. Not everybody is a game-changer. We’re finding people who can, overnight, move hundreds of jobs, and that’s how cities and economies are transformed. Those jobs will create more jobs and at the end of the day, a rising tide lifts all boats.”
This story has been updated to include all members of the committee