1) they wanted everyone to be in once place 2) they're hiring a lot of people, especially customer service.
Customer service in NYC or SF would be prohibitively expensive, so if they want to be all in one place, they would have to move anyway. This is no different than Zappos being in Las Vegas or Groupon being in Chicago (I think Zappos relocated). Personnel costs when you have 50 employees per hacker become a big deal.
Portland has a ton of skilled, educated people and high unemployment, so they're going to get a lot of bank for their buck.
Portland, from all accounts, is beginning to look like a city-sized SOMA startup scene, and the city's personality certainly jives with the common stereotype of the hipster startup developer.
Vegas is certainly ideally situated for a place that wants a big warehouse, but I wonder how well Zappos are attracting tech talent. I can imagine Vegas might be a fun place to be, or it might be hell. I'd try it out for a year. It's certainly very different.
Still, there are a number of people in the company who are uprooting their lives in NYC, SF, and elsewhere, and we really appreciate that they were willing to do so.
Before we were at PIE, our company worked at cafes. I guess you could say we scaled from our home offices to a multi-tenant office to dedicated office space.
Or education programmes for customer service people, at all. Or a single "best profile", even?