Entrepreneurs in Southern California
October 16th, 2007 by Benjamin KuoWilll Johnson, a Southern California entrepreneur and blogger, recently posted about the perceived lack of interest in working for startups here, saying:
..we probably’d don’t have the: a) same support infrastructure (meet-ups, networking events, etc.); b) history of success; and c) abundance of start-up companies (so if one fails there is another to jump on).
I’d argue that it’s all a perception, rather than a reality. There are more than enough meet-ups and networking events; we’ve got plenty of examples of successes in the area; and there are plenty of startups to jump to in case of a startup failure.
In terms of meetups and networking events: the major problem here is not so much the number of events — it’s the fact that there is a fragmentation in the market. I regularly run into people promoting events who don’t realize they are running an event on exactly the same night as someone else approaching the same market. LA is so spread out and populous, that you don’t end up with a single community–you end up with multiple communities who may or may not be aware of each other. In terms of networking opportunities, just looking at the past couple of weeks, there was Thursdays In The Mix on October 4th, on the same night as an Entrepreneur’s Mixer, which was followed by VentureNet on the 5th; then a OC Innovation Mixer on Monday in OC at the Hive from the Digital Coast Roundtable; then there was Lunch 2.0 on Friday the 12th at Yellowbot. And those are just a fraction of the networking events and opportunities here.
With the “history of success,” the issue is purely one of perception. There have been an astounding number of very successful companies spread across Southern California–but, because of the limited high tech press attention to this geography, you do not get the “branding” and awareness companies in Silicon Valley gets. Reading the local newspapers, all of the technology coverage is on Silicon Valley startups — at the expense of well funded, highly regarded local startups — because the local papers are pulling from the technology AP feeds which are based from mostly Silicon Valley writers. My favorite example (which I’ve mentioned before) is the folks at Applied Semantics (the company which developed the engine behind Google Adsense, purchased pre-IPO by Google). No one knows them. Even the bigger names – the Overtures, LowerMyBills, PriceGrabbers, ValueClicks, etc. — are not household names.
Finally, the fallacy that there aren’t many startups here is again, just another perception problem. There are an ample number of high tech startups here, it’s just not that many people are aware of them–again, because there isn’t the same, widespread coverage of companies here than of the latest Silicon Valley darlings.