Tech talent flocks to Tahoe

Tired of the San Francisco Bay Area lifestyle, Doug Erwin left Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom and headed for Tahoe to live among the pines and snowboard to his heart's content.

But Erwin is no ski bum.

Since settling in Incline Village, he has launched two companies with partners - Internet Business Applications, a software programming contractor, and Advanced Fluidix, a biotech outfit that has developed an at-home male fertility test.

Welcome to the Tahoe technology scene - where the lure of mountain scenery, small-town living and nearby ski slopes is creating an inviting nest for a variety of tech startups.

Although Tahoe doesn't have enough tech companies to qualify as a cluster, it does boast quite a number of software engineers and executives who bought second homes or moved to the area permanently from Silicon Valley.

"Tahoe has one of the larger collections of high-end executive talent in the world," says Jack Schwartz, a former software company executive and founder of Sierra High Technology Ventures LLC, a venture catalyst firm.

Some of the technology talent works from home offices or at small outposts for companies based elsewhere.

Some executives, such as Sierra Angels founder Bob Goff, have transitioned into investing in companies.

And some are launching new ventures.

Eric Severance, a former executive who moved to Tahoe for its quality of life, cofounded SoundPix three years ago in Incline Village.

The company develops software that enables consumers to enrich digital photos with sound.

SoundPix employs under dozen people now, but expects to employ three to four dozen within five years, Severance says.

"It's possible to be in a place like this, thanks to all the modern communication methods," he says.

"And we're not totally out in the middle of nowhere.We're close enough that it's easy to interface with the Bay Area."

Chris Sennings and Gerald Novotny, meanwhile, launched Informatouch in Zephyr Cove two years ago.

The company is a technology solutions provider for 50- to 150-room hotels, providing guests with high-speed Internet access, video-ondemand and directory services featuring local advertisers.

The company has transitioned from development to operational mode and now has 10,000 hotel rooms under contract, Informatouch President Rick Diamond says.

He projects the company, which now has 11 on staff, will employ 35 by the end of next year.

Another Tahoe tech company is Opticomp Corp., a maker of fiber optic products in Zephyr Cove.

It occupies a 6,500 square-foot facility with a 2,000 square-foot clean room and a full-service optoelectronic testing laboratory.

No one knows exactly how many technology companies are at the lake.

Goff says quite a few were in the embryonic stage in 1997 when he founded Sierra Angels, which invests in early-stage companies.

"Most of them were below the radar screen," he says.

"We became aware of them one at a time."

The Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, a statewide non-profit agency, is doing research now to put together a directory of technology companies in Nevada.

Although it's hard to beat Tahoe's quality of life, growing a technology company there has its challenges.

One limitation at the lake is space.

That's not a big problem for a tiny company.

But once a business grows to more than a few dozen people, it may be tough to find competitively priced space around the lake.

"Tahoe is more of an incubator," Severance says.

A location over the hill in the Reno or Carson City areas makes more sense for bigger companies.

Northern Nevada also doesn't have the base of high-tech employees that more mature markets have.

Erwin's company, Advanced Fluidix, handled that challenge by locating its business operations at Tahoe and its laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., where the company's other cofounder had connections and it was easier to find high-level, specialized employees.

The region is working on growing its own talent, Goff notes.

Sierra Nevada College, for instance, has started entrepreneurial and advanced computer science programs to help feed northern Nevada companies.

Another challenge for technology companies is the relatively young network in Nevada of business services for them, such as law firms that target early-stage companies.

"It's not that the business infrastructure doesn't exist, it's just the access to it is not well-known," Goff says.

And northern Nevada doesn't have the venture capital firms that the Bay Area does.

"Even if there's not a lot of funding going on in the Bay Area, there's deal flow," Diamond says.

But Erwin says his company's location at Incline was actually an advantage in that regard.

Advanced Fluidix got $750,000 in its first round.

The venture capital firms may be based in Silicon Valley, but a lot of executives at all levels are at Tahoe.

Because Incline is a small town, it's easier to get access to people who can provide advice and direction to resources.

"Here, you can run into them at Starbucks," Erwin says.