A City as Start-Up: Zappos and Downtown Project
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Culture is to a company as community is to a city: it's about values, innovation, serendipity, participation, upward mobility, and attraction of smart startups and the creative class. Tony Hsieh is applying his successful Zappos corporate culture model to help build the most community-focused large city in the world in the place you would least expect it: downtown Las Vegas. Research has shown that every time the size of a city doubles, productivity and innovation per resident increases by 15 percent; but when companies get bigger, productivity per employee generally goes down. With this new $350 million Downtown Project, Hsieh is creating a unique hybrid of corporation, community, and city to drive productivity and innovation both for Zappos as well as the city itself.
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