Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

One of the signs of the growing awareness of Southern California in the technology industry is a recent surge of events (both public and private) aimed at connecting the technology industry. In particular, the number of Silicon Valley-style events on the west side of Los Angeles has been increasing quite rapidly (think Lunch 2.0, Meetups, etc.). The latest of these was an event last night in Santa Monica held by DealMaker Media.

The invite-only event was the launch of a series of events in the Los Angeles area, and was held at the offices of Michael Ovitz, and catered by Ovitz’ restaurant Hamasaku. DealMaker is known for its events in Silicon Valley (Under the Radar, Dealmaker Forum, Momentum Growth Conference) and had an invite-only list of around a 100 people invited to their launch party (plus a long line on the waiting list - and apparently a bunch of other people wanting to go).

The event — which was extremely well attended despite a torrential downpour outside — was packed with venture capitalists from both Southern California and Silicon Valley, as well as entrepreneurs and executives. Among the folks I saw or talked to there were: Ross Levinsohn (now at Velocity Interactive, formerly of Fox Interactive Media); Peter Pham of Photobucket (brokered its sale to MySpace); Michael Jones of Userplane/AOL; entrepreneurs like Jason Feffer of Sodahead, Jason Nazar of Docstoc, and Adam Lilling from Biggerboat; Mashable founder Pete Cashmore; a slew of people from Google, and a huge number of venture folks (from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Clearstone Ventures, Norwest Ventures, GRP Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Steamboat Ventures, GKM Ventures, Prism Venture Partners, Mission Ventures, Stone Canyon, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, just to name a few).

Since we don’t have a technology gossip rag like ValleyWag here in the area, here’s a few photos from the event:

Above: The art gallery that is Michael Ovitz’ office and the crowd.

Left: Jason Feffer of Sodahead; a blurry Adam Lilling of Biggerboat.

VC’s galore: Palomar Ventures’ Kevin Jacques on the left, William Quigley of Clearstone Ventures on the right

Nicole Jordan of Rubicon Project/et al; Peter Pham of Photobucket (middle); Michael Jones of Userplane/AOL (right)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.