Serial entrepreneurs in Southern California
March 20th, 2007 by Benjamin KuoOne thing I often hear when I talk to venture capitalists in the region, is the need to encourage serial entrepreneurs in the area–both by funding their companies, as well as finding them “the next thing” at local firms. Serial entrepreneurs — who have “done it before” are considered a precious resource here by VCs, because they’ve gone through the entire cycle of starting a company, building it, and selling it. Talking with entrepreneurs over the past few weeks–recently with Jason Feffer, CEO of SodaHead.com , who was at MySpace; Scott Jarus, CEO of Cognition (J2 Global); Jake Winebaum at Business.com (Disney Online); Richard Rosenblatt at Demand Media (MySpace/Intermix); it becomes apparent that despite what you might hear, Southern California indeed has a great pool of executive talent that has had experience growing and building great companies. Of course, we do lose some to Bay Area firms–notably, today, Mitch Lasky of JAMDAT just moved North to become a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, and recently Jason Calacanis of Weblogs/AOL went to Sequoia Capital, but often, they come back. For example, Stuart Macfarlane of InsiderPages.com–Insider Pages is a firm that started in Pasadena but was moved up north by its VC backers–is now back in LA at Momentum Venture Partners. You’ve also got folks like Suresh Nihalani at ClearMesh, who founded Accelerated Networks, ended up commuting every week to Silicon Valley, but moved back.
Actually I think the bigger problem in Southern California is that many of the potential serial entrepreneurs are too successful, and just end up retiring and don’t jump back into the startup game in an executive role.
