Zappos and the value of "collisions"

Zappos is an on-line shoe store---right? Well, yes, but lately they've gotten into a couple of sidelines, including urban planning. So how does one go from shoes to sidewalks? As it turns out, it’s part of the business plan.

Tony Hsieh started Zappos in 1999, settling in Henderson, Nev., a suburb of Las Vegas. The company grew fast and became well-known as a great place to work. But Hsieh felt like there needed to be something beyond a great corporate culture selling shoes to happy customers, so he went after another “C": community.

In 2012, Hsieh began moving his company to the old downtown in Las Vegas, investing $355 million in buildings, venture capital and people through the Downtown Project.

So what can Sarasota learn from downtown Las Vegas? Lesson number one is that our small city by the Gulf of Mexico will never replicate what Vegas has in terms of an in-town large airport, casinos and throngs of people. But we have tourism, warm weather and a pent-up desire to do great things. Here are a couple of awesome things to glean from Zappos' accomplishments:

1) There is a Vision: When is Sarasota going to take the time to do this? What is the vision statement? Zappos shows that if a city or county can’t muster the troops to come up with a guiding sentence, then a company can. The Downtown Project's vision statement is: “Transform downtown Las Vegas into the most community-focused large city in the world.” This is the type of statement that will drag everyone else in: the Chamber, the civic groups, the colleges, the business community---everybody.

2) Bring Together Communities of Passion: It's been said that “community development is more about people than real estate.” Sarasota has a lot of people passionate about a lot of things: art, habitat, rowing, education, North Port, etc. But let’s be honest---Sarasota has largely disconnected circles of passion. Who or what can bring the circles together so the former circus performer, the college president, the bird watcher and the student from Michigan rally around community?

3) Density: The Downtown Project leans heavily on the concept of serendipity (or chance encounters). These unscripted interactions are how community happens and ideas get formed, spread, refined and implemented. For downtown, they envision density at or above 100 units per acre. As any good tech company would, they cite data on performance, density and activity on the street, in bars and other places where collisions of people and their passion occur. Sarasota's big question is whether this amount of density can be supported, in what form, and how to keep those units occupied year-round.

4) Transportation: Vegas has a heavily-used bus system and bizarre monorail. Given the density vision, the Downtown Project knew they could not rely on cars and land for parking. So last week, a new facet called the 100 Project was launched to build a new kind of shared transportation system.  This system deploys car and bike shares, Uber rides and---most notably---100 Teslas for members to hire out. This will be fun to watch and bust the mentality that public transit is the only way to provide mobility without cars.

5) Co-Work and Collisions: The Downtown Project is cross-pollinating sectors such as technology, fashion and art. But Hsieh also talks about the tourist co-worker in the "City as Start Up" speech. This visitor doesn't live in downtown Las Vegas, but spends a concentrated amount of time inventing, interacting and hob-nobbing. Hseih describes “collisionable hours” as a metric---how much time a person is open to serendipitous encounters. Cafes and bars provide the setting, as do sidewalks, parks (and park benches), PTA meetings, film festivals, talks at Ringling College and gallery openings.Sarasota can take away a couple of lessons:

1) Creative Tourism – Tour companies set up a string of excursions all the time. What would the "chance encounter" visitors' guide look like (with a little beach thrown in)?

2) Homeowners Associations – Seriously. I have met some of the most creative and innovative people in master-planned communities. Many are driven by the need to reduce common area costs, so there is a lot of experimentation with solar, geothermal, transportation and better landscaping. But it is hard to collide much beyond the walls of a gated community. What would bring someone from Palmer Ranch downtown to talk and tinker (or vice versa)?

3)  Mobility – The Downtown Project does not ignore transit, but rather seeks to expand the mobility net for people who otherwise are not living or working on top of a bus or monorail stop. Sarasota is perfect for such experiments given the amount of tourism, the colleges and growing interest in biking and the Legacy Trail. The future of mobility is not only the farebox, but the smart phone.

"The City as Start Up" is a 30-minute presentation and is worth watching.