Big, private companies in Southern California
August 13, 2009
One of the interesting things about Inc. Magazine’s “Inc 500″ list is it helps to identify all of those big, private companies — who, in another world, might have been public. It’s interesting to note the large number of Southern California firms with very big revenue numbers who are private — in fact, if you sort the Inc. 5000 California firms by revenue, it’s striking to see how much of the first page is almost entirely Southern California firms. Is there a tendency for So Cal companies to stay private longer (or, forever) instead of going IPO like their Northern California brethren?
Looking at the list of somewhat tech-related firms with greater than $100M in revenues, you see:
| Rank | Company | City | 2008 Revenues |
| 4445 | Kingston Technology | Fountain Valley | $4.0 billion |
| 3538 | Newegg.com | City of Industry | $2.1 billion |
| 134 | Vizio | Irvine | $2.0 billion |
| 1305 | DJO | Vista | $980.2 million |
| 2871 | The Linc Group | Irvine | $581.9 million |
| 1996 | TelePacific Communications | Los Angeles | $443.9 million |
| 2837 | Prometheus Laboratories | San Diego | $278.1 million |
| 1871 | Oversee.net | Los Angeles | $208.9 million |
| 3361 | Network Hardware Resale | Santa Barbara | $184.0 million |
| 3553 | Pelican Products | Torrance | $175.3 million |
| 3289 | Nowcom Corporation | Los Angeles | $172.9 million |
| 1069 | The Active Network | San Diego | $172.5 million |
| 2785 | Nexus IS | Valencia | $168.0 million |
| 4782 | Genica | Oceanside | $164.7 million |
| 1446 | MegaPath | Costa Mesa | $151.0 million |
| 39 | ReachLocal | Woodland Hills | $146.8 million |
| 379 | ESET | San Diego | $111.4 million |
| 450 | Hydra | Beverly Hills | $108.6 million |
| 4118 | Line 6 | Calabasas | $100.6 million |
| 971 | Trace-3 | Irvine | $100.5 million |
Good point, Ben. Some additional info that your readers might find interesting is that most of these companies never raised money from VCs. There are many reasons I relocated to SoCal from Silicon Valley but one of the biggest was/is the breadth and depth of our economy here in SoCal.