For three high school friends who grew up in Las Vegas, moving back to Las Vegas to build a startup wasn’t exactly what they had in mind when they left to go to college. Mark Johnson, Mark Cicoria, and Shaun Swanson all grew up here—and their negative and positive feelings about that experience have influenced them to venture outside of Las Vegas to study and to want to return here to not merely build a business, but to be a part of building community. With their social media company Ayloo, they’re doing both.

Johnson, Cicoria, and Swanson all attended Advanced Technologies Academy here. Cicoria describes their time spent there: “There were eight different majors that you could take there. You went there with something in mind about what you want to do. So everyone was pretty passionate. That sense of community there was really strong. It’s something that was missing, I felt, in my life, until recently.”

But before A-Tech, childhood in a city designed to entertain adults wasn’t always fun. “Growing up, I started to hate Las Vegas. I didn’t care about Las Vegas. I didn’t like Las Vegas. The environment here—everything was either fake or money-driven. If I was really into graphic design, I wasn’t really going to be able to do it here. I didn’t care where I ended up. But as I started to come back, I found a lot of things that I did like,” recounts Johnson. And a dearth of kid-friendly activities lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes. “It made us stay indoors on our computers,” say Swanson. The trio all credit that time spent playing video games and building websites for fun as integral to the direction of their career trajectories and their abilities as creators of a tech business.

And it was while at A-Tech that the seminal idea that has grown into Ayloo was developed. Johnson and Cicoria, along with a couple of other friends, created a private social media site for themselves and their friends to use called Firepilot. When the trio left Las Vegas they continued to use it to communicate with one another.

Cicoria, Ayloo’s web wizard, attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but left his studies after only one year. Instead, he took a contracting job as a developer for the Department of Energy—a position he had held while still in high school. He continued working for DOE until May of 2011. The company’s Chief Evangelist, Swanson studied physics and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and obtained a Master’s Degree in Fluid Mechanics from CalTech. He followed that by spending time studying at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Johnson majored in Graphic Design at Savannah College of Art and Design and worked in New York for the prestigious, multi-national design firm Pentagram. Naturally, he handles the startup’s design.

Despite their far-flung locations, the group stayed in touch via Firepilot. “We all went to college and we still used the site to talk for a while. I invited some of my college friends, and [Mark and Shaun] invited some of theirs, and we decided that maybe we should make a new site. We started working on Ayloo. We focused on the privacy issues. It was just for our little community. Facebook, at the time, had huge gaping holes in their privacy,” Johnson explains.

As the idea grew, so did Johnson’s desire to return home for good. He left New York because he wanted to work on Ayloo and to be a part of revitalizing his hometown. “I wanted to change the city. I didn’t really care if I could or not, I was just like, ‘I’m going to go back and try. Otherwise, I’m going to get old and die,” he says. With Cicoria already here, they continued to develop their ideas. Cicoria quit his DOE job last May and Swanson returned from France in August.

Ayloo ,“a place to have meaningful conversation with the people you know and the communities you care about,” officially launched in September of 2011. The development of the site has pivoted several times since the launch. “We were doing asymmetric sharing before Google+ launched with its circles,” say Swanson. Now the Ayloo team is focusing on reaching critical mass—the site currently has just over 2,500 users. “We’re really serious about re-focusing the site around communities,” he continues.

It’s that focus on community-building that spurs innovation for the guys. “There’s so much urban sprawl here. It’s like a field of bubble wrap. All of these little micro-communities form, but then they pop. Things are just temporary and small in scale. You don’t know about someone in the same city with the same interests,” says Johnson. Connecting those people with communities of like-minded people is the goal of Ayloo.

To learn more, check out Ayloo.net.

Not cut out to be a farmer? Then perhaps becoming a tech entrepreneur is right for you.

Okay, it’s not exactly that simple, but it is one small (or not) part of the story of how one co-founder of local startup Rumgr found his way to his current occupation. Dylan Bathurst, one-third of the trio who make up the company which enables users to quickly and easily sell items via their mobile devices, grew up on a farm in Kansas. He raised and sold cattle to pay his tuition to Fort Hays State University, and relocated to Las Vegas to take a job with Zappos.

“I was just not cut out to do farming. It was just not something I wanted to do,” says Bathurst. A youthful interest in computers, particularly hardware, led him to study networking in college and to develop his interest in web development despite a dearth of classes on the subject.

Once at Zappos, Bathurst met his fellow Rumgr co-founders Ray Morgan and Alex Coleman. Like Bathurst, neither of the two took a “traditional” route to tech entrepreneurship.

Morgan grew up in Las Vegas and graduated from Green Valley High School. He followed that with a brief stint at College of Southern Nevada, but dropped out. At Zappos, he worked in front-end website development and then on the mobile team where he helped create the Zappos app for iPhone and iPad. Despite his lack of a degree, Morgan’s career hasn’t suffered. He has worked continously developing his tech expertise throughout his life. “I’m primarily self-taught, but so many people have helped me along the way,” he says. But he also recalls with a laugh, “My parents were totally annoyed by it. They were like, ‘Get a real job. Stop playing on the computer.’”

The third member of the team, Alex Coleman, is a California native who studied at Cal State Long Beach. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do at first, but ultimately I found the path that I wanted to take. That was in Studio Art.” Studio Art–not programming, networking, web development. He received a degree in Studio Art and focused on Graphic Design. Colemean relocated to Las Vegas just a little over a year ago to work at Zappos.

These seemingly non-traditional paths aren’t really that unusual. A story in the latest issue of Desert Companion cites the liberal arts backgrounds of several local business leaders including gaming industry heavyweights Jim Murren and Glenn Schaeffer. No MBAs there. There is no straight-line direct path in any field, and there isn’t one in technology. Tech superstar (or superhero) Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College. Mark Zuckerberg famously dropped out of Harvard, as did Bill Gates. We all know this.

Lazy? Not Exactly

The origin of the idea behind Rumgr is suitably inauspicious for an app that can easily one day replace the old-fasYhhioned garage sale. Bathurst was getting ready to move and “me being lazy. . . I didn’t want to move it. I wanted to sell it. But I’m not the kind of person who wants to get up early Saturday morning have a garage sale,” says Bathurst. “I thought, ‘I’m a smart person. I’ll start taking pictures with my iPhone and start posting all of my stuff to Twitter. I’ve got a few hundred Twitter followers, maybe someone there will buy it from me.’”

The simplicity of that process versus already established online sale platforms like craigslist and eBay intrigued Bathurst, sparked his imagination. “I was playing around with it. Tinkering with the code a little bit on my phone, like at the jellies, but I never really came up with anything solid,” he says. Then a friend suggested pitching the idea at the first Las Vegas Startup Weekend.

Startup Weekend was the start of the conversation between Rumgr’s trio of cofounders. “I didn’t have any master plan for it going into startup weekend,” says Bathurst. “I just had the one idea ‘let’s build a marketplace for your phone.’ Together as a team, we came up with what is now Rumgr, and built it from the ground up in that weekend.” The team also won $5,000 during the weekend, which covered the nascent company’s initial costs.

That was June. What followed was an ongoing commitment to developing Rumgr into a viable entity. Bathurst, Morgan, and Coleman began meeting after work and working into the wee hours of the morning on the app. They knew that it needed to be reworked, so Morgan rewrote the iOS. They made it scalable, a solid platform to build on, released Rumgr to the app store, and started “hustling local media to get the word out around Vegas,” explains Bathurst. Getting the word out worked. They group started to see more and more items listed for sale on the site, items being sold, and discussed. Rumgr was for real.

Since then, items ranging from knick-knacks and Storm Trooper masks to industrial ice machines and fire hydrants have sold on Rumgr. And Morgan and Bathurst have left Zappos to work full-time on their startup. “It was shocking to see people we didn’t know were selling things using this app. It really helped people buy and sell used stuff. It opened our eyes. ‘Let’s go for this. Let’s put in the effort,’” says Morgan.

The company is now looking to raise capital, but money isn’t the only catalyst for entrepreneurial action. Leaving a company that you admire (or moved here to work for) isn’t an easy decision. Passion is a key element in having the courage to follow that entrepreneurial path. “We initially thought that once we raised some money, we would quit our jobs. But we decided not to wait. We thought, ‘money or no money, let’s rock and roll,’” Bathurst explains.

Rumgr is continuing to refine its product, taking into account user feedback, working on bug fixes, and streamlining processes. They’re also planning to expand their team through hiring, considering creative ways to generate revenue using the app, and looking to expand into other markets. And despite their relatively short journey from the generation of an idea to this point, they are facing the future with a hope and a broad outlook at possibilities for Rumgr—and a reasonable amount of humility and trepidation.

“It’s kind of a scary market to get into because of the other players. Right now, the mobile buying/selling market doesn’t exist. Right now we have craigslist, eBay. That’s the space we’re getting into. We’re going to be taking on the most well known part of craigslist. When you think of craigslist, that’s what you think of, buying and selling stuff. That market, that industry, is definitely going to be changing. We want to be at the front of that, I guess. That’s going to be a big job, but we want to see what happens. No one’s really captured that,” says Morgan.

Get the app at Rumgr.com.

When three self-described robot-building nerds take the road less travelled as they launch a technology company, where do they end up? Downtown Las Vegas.

Building a Company, a Community, and an Industry

It’s that “road-less-traveled” appeal that led Romotive to move their company to Las Vegas after a three-month stint at TechStars Seattle. Rather than follow the now well-worn path to tech success in Silicon Valley, the company’s founders opted for the chance to build more than a company. “I think what’s cool is that we have the opportunity not to just join a community, but to grow a community,” says Romotive co-founder Peter Seid of the decision to move here.

Co-founder Keller Rinaudo elaborates on the appeal of launching the company here. “Some investors told me ‘You’d be crazy not to go to Silicon Valley because that’s a proven path.’ Honestly, we’re not really looking for a proven path. There are no proven paths here. There are no standard operating protocols. Coming to Las Vegas and building a company, we’re going to be building things from scratch, from the ground up. We’re more interested in coming into a place where we have the resources to build the company we want to build, and build the tribe that we want to be associated with. That’s the opportunity that we were presented with here,” he says.

Las Vegas’ status as one of the country’s hottest new locales for tech startups has been noted lately in mainstream media stories like this one in Forbes which also notes the attraction of building a company while building a community. The decision of tech startups like Romotive to relocate to Las Vegas will be a key factor in the ongoing economic recovery of Las Vegas and of the broader Southern Nevada economy. Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Kristin McMillan says, “The Chamber is very encouraged about the growing technology scene in Southern Nevada, especially what’s happening to shape downtown.” She goes on to cite a recent Brookings Institution/Brookings Mountain West/SRI International report listing the tech sector as an area of opportunity for economic diversification in Nevada. “If you look at the recent Brookings/SRI Report, technology is front and center as one of the seven business sectors identified as having the highest potential for growth in Southern Nevada. Technology and the entire IT ecosystem will be an essential component to economic diversification,” says McMillan. The report specifically mentions opportunities in “call centers/customer service and back office/BPO/shared services; e-commerce operations/headquarters; data centers; cloud computing/high performance computing; and cyber security.”

Meet Romo

So what exactly does Romotive do? The startup enables users to turn their smartphone into a robot. They describe what they do as building “accessible, highly functional, and flexible robotics platforms that are powered by a supercomputer already carried by millions—the smartphone. Our robotics platform adds everything that the smartphone is missing—movement, accessories, and physical capabilities that a true robot needs.” Watch the videos here.

Named Romo, the robot was initially the brainchild of company co-founder Phu Nguyen. “I was I was in Tucson at U of A and Phu called me in late April or early May and said, ‘what if we can use smartphones as robot?’ and I said, ‘Okay. I’ll build one. Two or three weeks later, we had one built and applied to TechStars, and we got in. 700 companies applied and only 10 got in. We did that for 3 months and that ended in early November, and we came here,” recounts Seid. Reinaudo laughs, “That’s the fast version.”

While the company’s genesis was merely months ago, the founders are longtime friends who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. Nguyen and Rinaudo went to high school together. Rinaudo is best friends with Seid’s older brother and says, “I tutored peter when he was 9 and 10 in math. I’ve known him since he could fit inside of a locker and shut the door. . . I’ve always been best friends with Peter’s brother. Peter and I are like brothers. I think of Peter like my little brother.” The three went their separate ways for college: Nguyen and Seid attended University of Arizona, while Rinaudo is a Harvard graduate. But their love for robots which began in childhood brought them back together to work on Romotive.

Down to Business

When their time at TechStars ended in November, the trio drove to Las Vegas via San Francisco (read Silicon Valley) and got to work. Romotive shipped their first 100 robots in December and must fulfill additional orders for 1,400 units due for delivery in February. “That’s a pretty big ramp up, and we’re planning to do a full product cycle in between which means we’ll completely re-design the circuit,” says Rinaudo. After February, Nguyen, Seid, and Rinaudo will be taking orders through their website and continuing to ramp up Romotive’s operations.

Romotive’s current orders are all the result of their highly successful fundraising on KickStarter. In addition, the company is the in the process of closing a large seed stage financing with investment from Tony Hsieh, Lerer Ventures, Pivot North Capital, Stanford University, and others.