Silicon Valley address no longer critical to dot-com start-ups

Darik Volpa keeps a Pets.com sock puppet in his home office as a reminder that technology companies can crash and burn.

Knowing that, he’s determined to boost the prospects for his dot-com start-up.

By Sam Diaz

Mercury News

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/10179313.htm

Volpa, a former marketing executive in San Jose, started Understandsurgery.com — which uses animation to explain surgeries — in Reno last year. He chose Nevada because of its affordable business costs as well as its proximity to tech-rich Northern California.

“I looked at the pluses and minuses of starting a business in the Bay Area vs. Reno,” said Volpa, a native Californian. “It didn’t take long to choose Reno. The light bulb came on pretty quickly.”

At one time, a tech company had to have a Silicon Valley address — but those days went away with the dot-com bust, said Alison Estee, managing director of the Nevada Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. After the tech bust, “we’re less concerned with the headquarters address and more concerned with bottom lines and showing a profit quicker,” she said.

Nevada’s high-tech employment has held up well through the tech industry’s slump. The number of tech jobs in California has dropped 21 percent since early 2001 to 928,000, according to Economy.com. Nevada’s tech employment slipped 5.5 percent to almost 26,000 jobs.

While Nevada lags far behind California in high-end technical and professional fields, it has made gains in other areas, notably warehouse, transportation and call center jobs.

And to tech entrepreneurs who are mobile like Volpa, Nevada can be as attractive a place as any. “Good companies can get funded from anywhere,” said David Garcia, whose law firm in Reno handles many of the venture capital deals in the area.

Volpa and a private investor in South San Francisco initially funded Understandsurgery.com. A group of private investors from Reno have invested in the next project, understandplasticsurgery.com, scheduled to launch next month.

Volpa has even hired two of his five employees on a telecommuting basis out of the Bay Area. Web master Richard Frick lives in San Carlos. Animator Bruce Bennett recently moved from Daly City to Las Vegas and will probably move to Reno later, Volpa said.

In Reno, Volpa bought his own office building and is having it renovated. “I never would have been able to do that in the Bay Area,” he said.

Contact Sam Diaz at [email protected] or (408) 920-5021.