The Critic

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.” – Theodore Roosevelt

I spent last weekend at The Downtown Project in Las Vegas.  Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, has undertaken a massive effort to revitalize the old part of the city of Las Vegas.  The scope and vision of the project are nothing short of remarkable.  With a personal investment of $350 million, Hsieh has gone all in.

The Downtown Project includes:

  • A new high end residential community called The Ogden where we had the pleasure of staying for free.  Yes, just for visiting the project we got to stay in a Crash Pad in The Ogden.
  • A healthcare company called Turntable Health, where members pay $80 a month to belong and get basic medical care.
  • A private school called 9th Bridge School currently serving kids from 6 months old through Kindergarten.
  • Zappos Corporate HQ, which is in the old City Hall building.
  • The Container Park, a boutique retail and restaurant development built out of old railroad container cars and new style glass cube enclosures.
  • Project 100,  a new company working on transportation in large cities.  Project 100 started with 100 Teslas in Las Vegas.
  • A tech co-working space
  • An investment fund

As we toured the area and met with different people from each of the areas of the project, it became obvious that the Zappos focus on culture and investment in community has been brought along to this new effort.  Everyone we talked to was “on message”, talking about “ROC, not just ROI.”  ROC is a Downtown Project acronym meaning “return on community”, a fuzzy metric which loosely measures the impact of an effort on the surrounding community.  For example, the investment fund will only invest in companies who have a component of building their community as a part of their DNA.  Buy local.  Hire local. Go green.  And on it went.

After about the fifth meeting, we all started to roll our eyes. Everyone we talked to was saying the same thing.  They clearly all believed very strongly in Tony’s vision and weren’t afraid to share it.

But, there was a disconnect.  All of this was happening in an area where you have posters of half-naked girls everywhere, casinos, street people, prostitutes, gambling and every other element of unsavory society.  How would this ever work, really?  We started to poke holes in all of the problems with the project.  Who would move to Vegas?  No one would have a family in downtown Vegas.  The school was too expensive.  And so on.

All of this may or may not be true, but as I rode home on the plane I began to reflect on what I had just seen.  A guy put up a substantial portion of his personal wealth to take a chance on rebuilding a city.  A city.  Not a company, not a school.  And there is no evidence of asking for government money.  Whether or not he succeeds is irrelevant, or whether he has it all right in terms of the vision.  Tony deserves our respect for being in the arena.

It takes a lot of guts to lay it all out there and let the world come to your door and judge you.  Who are we to criticize?