Biodiversity in Southern California’s tech sector
May 19th, 2008 by Benjamin KuoThis morning’s funding news for Row 44 - a Westlake Village manufacturer of equipment for providing Wi-Fi in airplanes — is a reminder of what I’ve long regarded as one of Southern California’s biggest strengths: its diversity of people, industries, and companies. While many people might think of Southern California on mostly consumer internet and entertainment terms, the technology roots here run much, much deeper. Name almost any industry — hardware, software, Internet advertising, publishing, biomedical devices, pharmaceuticals, clean energy, advanced materials, semiconductors, communications, scientific equipment, storage, computer games and so on–and I can give you a list of a significant number of companies here who are major players in those industries.
It’s what you would call — if you were a biologist — biodiversity, namely, a wide range of types of species and variations (or in this case, companies) in the ecosystem (here, the economy). It’s a strength, because as folks in the tech industry know, there is a constant shift in the fortunes of not just companies but entire industries. It’s one of the great things about being in an area which isn’t completely dominated by technology. There are enough other industries here to constantly spawn out new companies — very often, technology companies — to fill some need for those other industries.
That diversity makes for sustainable growth, so that when you have a shift in either economic or funding patterns, activity doesn’t just dry up. A classic industry which sees boom/bust cycles is semiconductors, where you’ll have a number of years with an immense amount of investment, usually followed by some crash and years of recovery. It’s the same with any industry; however, if you’ve got (like we have) more than just Web 2.0 companies, and a diverse base, you’ll (hopefully) be able to see the economy swing from one industry to another in terms of growth.