Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

The New York Times has an interesting article this morning entitled Silicon Valley Meets ‘American Idol’ talking about the X-Prize Foundation and its efforts to drive innovation using cash prizes. Interestingly enough, the X-Prize Foundation is actually based in Santa Monica, and the article quotes Bill Woodward of Santa Monica-based Anthem Ventures and UC San Diego’s Paul Kedrosky.  The X-Prize Foundation, which includes Silicon Valley heavyweights Larry Page, Elon Musk (now at El Segundo-based SpaceX), J. Craig Ventor and others, also includes locals like Gil Elbaz (Google/Applied Semantics, out of Santa Monica) as a trustee, and Mark Goodstein (formerly of Idealab/X1 Technologies), as a managing director.

 I’m not one for self promotion, and I’m usually the one giving the interviews, but the other day I was on the other side of the table for a radio interview on CASH 1700 AM in San Diego for the show I’m There For You Baby with Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry. They’ve got a great show if you’re an entrepreneur looking for some inspiration. Podcast version can be download below, or they’re on Saturdays in the San Diego market:

My interview on I’m There For You Baby

One of the interesting problems I have heard of from employers in the area is the fear of new employees relocating into the area about job security. Time after time, I hear that it’s often tough to recruit people, and particularly executive talent — particularly out of Silicon Valley — because they’re afraid there just aren’t enough technology firms here.

I think the problem is really more perception than reality.

At socalTECH we have a job board which allows people to post jobs offered in the local region - Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Irvine, etc. — and because of that I’m always talking to HR managers and recruiters. It’s interesting, but I consistently hear from companies that there are more technology jobs here than you can find people to fill. I talk with companies every week who just can’t find people locally to fill the many positions they have open. Just over the last couple of weeks, I had this same conversation with half a dozen companies, asking me if I knew anyone looking for a position. I think job seekers just don’t realize the wealth of job opportunities here.

As for executive talent, if you ever take 7:20am Southwest Airlines flight from Burbank to San Jose, you’ll find a planeload of executive talent all heading off to their offices in the Bay Area. Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo, actually lives in Los Angeles and commutes to the Bay Area. It’s also nice to hear stories like Tommy McGloin (now CEO of local firm DoctorsDirect.com) who was GM of AOL’s MapQuest division–where he commuted for 10 years out of Los Angeles — who finally got tired of the commute and decided to start something on his own here in the area. I’m sure there are more examples.

The reality is there are lots of companies with lots of positions open in the area, and who are eager to fill those positions.

I recently interviewed Richard Rosenblatt at Demand Media about his new company. For those who don’t know Richard, he’s the former chairman of MySpace and CEO of Intermix Media, and brokered the sale of Intermix to News Corp. Business 2.0 ran a piece recently on Richard and Demand Media and he suggested it would be worth reading for some background, in addition to the interview I did with him Monday, so I thought I’d pass it on here.

MySpace Broker’s $220M Encore

I’m Benjamin Kuo, founder, editor, and publisher of socalTECH.com. The purpose of this blog is to highlight some of the other coverage of Southern California technology companies (aside from our own coverage on socalTECH), share some of my personal thoughts and insights into the market, and provide a way to interact with readers and others in the community.

I won’t be duplicating the day to day coverage we already provide in socalTECH, but instead hope to illuminate Southern California’s high tech industry and share some additional thoughts.

Despite a lot of great success stories, like MySpace, Overture, Rent.com, LowerMyBills, Shopzilla, ValueClick, Move.com, Proflowers.com, Userplane, and many, many others, there’s still a somewhat persistent (but wrong) idea that Southern California is not a technology center.

You often see posts like this one (from Paul Graham) talking about technology centers and Silicon Valley dominance — where he mentions Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York–but glosses over Southern California’s huge presence in the industry. You also get arguments like this one on Wikipedia where you have people claiming that the only technology firms in the region are MySpace and branches offices of Silicon Valley firms like Yahoo.

The fact is, the area is now number two in terms of venture funding in the nation — ahead of Boston and only behind Silicon Valley–according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, and is home to a lot of brand name, technology firms like Broadcom, Buy.com, Citrix Online/GoToMyPC, Conexant, Day Software, Emulex, eHarmony, Gateway, Gemstar/TV Guide, Idealab, Ingram Micro, Internet Brands, Iomega, JAMDAT Mobile, Jazz Semiconductor, Filenet, QLogic, Qualcomm,Viewsonic, and WebSideStory — just to name a few. Both Yahoo and Google maintain several operations here, and the number of companies acquired by Google alone from Southern California is huge.

Anyway, I’ll be posting here on occasion, and I’d also like to encourage any other Southern California, technology-focused bloggers to let me know, as I’m trying to create a blogroll pointing to other relevant venture capital or high tech blogs of interest to our readers.

Ben

Haven’t edited this one yet. Go to my bio on socalTECH for more info on me.