Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

There appears to be no shortage of technology related and events this week across Southern California, as it seems like conferences, meetings, meetups, and networking is reaching a new fevered peak. In fact–if you’re so inclined–you can spend breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late into the night at events these days. You almost never need to go home…

If you’re in Los Angeles, Digital Hollywood kicks off today at Hollywood & Highland; among the many evening events is Dealmaker’s LA networking event.

On Tuesday, you can start your day off with OCTANe’s Meet the VC event before driving up to another day of Digital Hollywood.

On Wednesday, a good portion of Southern California’s indigenous venture capitalists, investment bankers, and other capital providers with be at LAVA’s Investment Capital Conference where you can hear Jerry (of Ben & Jerry’s) talk about Ben & Jerry’s social mission; if you’re into cleantech, you might instead be in San Diego at CONNECT’s Clean Technology Venture Roundtable. In any case, West LA will be the place for (more) Digital Hollywood private parties and get togethers.

Thursday appears to be intellectual property day — with both an event in Los Angeles from TCVN, and one in San Diego from CONNECT.

Then, round out your week with either hanging out at Lunch 2.0 at Yahoo! in Pasadena, or go to the big entrepreneurship conference from UCLA Anderson, its 2008 Entrepreneurs Conference where you can hear from a ton of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, startup CEOs, and more. If that’s not your kind of event, then sit back and relax at the opera with the San Diego MIT Enterprise Forum and their High-Tech Night At The Opera.

Colin Stewart over at the OC Register has an amusing post this morning about D-Link (and OC firm) using booth babes at Interop. Having gone to more than my share of trade shows, I can tell you that (for journalists, and for real buyers) having a booth babe isn’t all that useful.

Typical conversation I have had at a trade show booth:

Me: “Hi, I’m trying to get information about your products. What can you tell me about what you do?”

Booth babe: “Uhh, I don’t really know anything about that. Do you want a pen?”

Me: “Actually, I’m really interested in writing an article about your company, I think you’ve got some interesting products. Do you have anyone here who does know something about your products?”

Booth babe: “Well, actually, I have no idea. I just got a call from my agency this morning who told me to show up to this trade show. I don’t actually know who is in charge here.”

Me: “Does anyone here know who I could talk to — maybe a marketing person or their PR folks?”

Booth babe: (calling over to her equally bubbly and well endowed friend): “Jill, do you have any idea who is in charge of the booth?”

(other booth babe pauses from fending off sex-starved IT geek hitting on her) “Umm, I don’t have any idea.”

Me: “Do you actually have any idea what this company’s equipment does?”

Booth babe (laughs): “I don’t even have a computer, or even know how to turn one on!”

Me: “Uh, thanks…”

Some events of note coming up:

Tomorrow the Orange County Venture Group has the team from Entropic Communications — one of the notable recent IPOs from Southern California — talking about their IPO process. They’ve got Patrick Henry, the firm’s Chairman and CEO; Lance Bridges, VP Corporate Development and General Counsel; plus their investment banker and venture capitalists in tow to talk about the process.

One of the major venture capital-focused events in the region–the Los Angeles Venture Association’s Investment Capital Conference — has an interesting speaker this year, Jerry Greenfield, one of the co-founders of Ben and Jerry’s (yeah, that Jerry). socalTECH is a media sponsor of the event, which in previous years has always been a good place for entrepreneurs to network with local capital providers, investment bankers, and other finance types. (Last year’s keynote was by Rudy Giuliani, pre-Presidential run). The LAVA event is May 7th.

There’s a lot of events that might be of interest to the high tech community here, as always we try to list them all on the socalTECH Calendar. Let us know if we’ve missed anything!

I’ve covered the 101 Corridor — the stretch of the 101 Freeway running roughly from the north end of Los Angeles County up to Santa Barbara — ever since I started socalTECH many years ago, and I’ve always been surprised that this area–which is heavily dominated by Amgen–has a very paltry number of biotechnology startups. Amgen, which is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, is the perfect kind of company to spawn an entire industry worth of biotechnology firms in the region. However, to date, there have been very, very few companies spun out or started by ex-employees of the company. I would hazard to say — based on Amgen’s size and influence in the industry — it has a less than stellar record of startup activity.

A few years ago, talking with many ex-Amgen employees, I heard many stories on why there aren’t more Amgen-related startups. They ranged from burnout — Amgen is known for a fairly intensive work environment with long hours and lots of responsibility–to litigation — I had heard from more than one potential startup how their plans for a startup were torpedoed by over-eager lawyers and unfriendliness to licensing any kind of IP. Plus, it appears that the company has done so well lots of employees have taken their stock options and simply retired, rather than jump into a startup. Even Amgen’s own venture capital arm - Amgen Ventures - is headquartered not in Thousand Oaks, but instead in San Diego.

However, it looks like Amgen’s recent financial difficulties and layoffs may be changing this, and the tide might be turning. A few people — including Brent Reinke of Gold Coast Business Forum/Musick Peeler & Garrett, and John Dilts of Maverick Angels — have kick-started an effort to bolster the regional biotech industry, in part to tap into the wealth of knowledge and employees out of the area.

They’ve just announced a The Biotech Forum, a conference coming up on March 27th, focused on connecting executives, entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, researchers and scientists in the area. The keynote of the forum will be from  Beth Seidenberg, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a series of panels that will also include venture capitalists from DFJ Frontier, Prospect Ventures, and others. It should be interesting to see how the efforts turn out.

(disclaimer: socalTECH is helping to sponsor this event.)

If anyone hasn’t gotten enough of technology events, there’s a boat load of events this week focused on the technology industry in the area.

First of all, out in Palm Springs, there’s Demo 2008 — where 77 new startups from all over the country are pitching what they are doing. Tradationally, lots of Silicon Valley “buzz” around those startups comes out of the conference, which has been held down here for several years now.

Second, all over Los Angeles there are a ton of events linked to Los Angeles Technology Week. The kickoff is today at lunch with a keynote by astronaut Sally Ride. Tonight’s Tech Coast Angels Fast Pitch is always very interesting. Other events of particular note is the open screening session by the Pasadena Angels, and a session on the Future of Game Development.

For those folks down in San Diego, the San Diego Venture Group has their 2008 Venture Capital outlook scheduled for Thursday. Finally, out in the Inland Empire the University of La Verne has their third annual Venture Capital conference scheduled for Wednesday — also notably spearheaded by a number of Tech Coast Angels.

As most longtime readers of socalTECH know, we often give away free tickets to events, and offer discounted rates to conferences. Next week, there is the Opportunity Green conference at UCLA, and I thought I’d pass on a discount offer from the organizers to the event, which will cover green technology/cleantech. The event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Price Center for Enterpreneurial Studies. socalTECH members can get a $25 discount on tickets (use code “SoCalTech”) to the event, if you enter that discount code on their registration site.

I spent my lunch hour attending another Lunch 2.0 event in Los Angeles, this one at Shopzilla. There were boom-era size crowds at this event, and (unlike the first Lunch 2.0 in LA) the room was much better sized to the crush of people.

One of several questions I kept hearing from people at the event, was “why now?” That is, why does there seem to be so many startups and people getting funded, and why are people finally aware of some of the technology activity here?

I pretty much live and breathe technology 24/7, every day, so I have always felt we have a very strong technology industry; however, stepping back a bit I think there’s a growing realization by other people—aside from the hard core technology insiders–that there really is something happening here. I believe part of the “feeling” of the tech industry having a resurgence, is that there have been a slew of new companies being started by people coming out of the last generation of companies in the area — Overture, LowerMyBills, Homestore, Rent.com, etc. — and a corresponding increase in the visibility of companies in the region. As these companies grow, they are pulling in more and more people to work for them, and you are seeing some clusters of technology firms–for example, West LA–which are becoming much more apparent to “everyone else.”

I also think that the general upturn in the technology industry — after the long winter that was the dot com bust — is finally reaching the consciousness of the general public. Web 2.0 and related, consumer facing technology is starting to make its impact on the general public and to the general non-first adopters. Unlike Silicon Valley, there’s still a slight delay in the general public adopting new technology in Los Angeles.

Folks I saw in the crowd: VCs from Prism Ventures, Kline Hawkes; execs from ElephantDrive, Mahalo, and a few other startups in the area; a few investment bankers; and the guy who produces French Maid TV (if that’s your thing…)

Pictures from the Lunch 2.0 event:

Above: Shopzilla’s lobby sign

Below: Nicole Jordan and Andrew Warner, organizers of the event

Below: View of the crowd at Lunch 2.0

Dan Lyons, aka “Fake Steve Jobs”, spoke at lunch at Forbes MEET today. He’s as hilarious in person as he is in his blog. For those who aren’t familiar with Fake Steve Jobs, Lyons runs a blog which “channels” Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and is a witty and usually hilarious commentator on Silicon Valley (recent entries: Oh snap! Faceberg raises another $500 million, and You can’t make this stuff up).

I’m spending some more time today at the Forbes Meet conference, up next is an interview with Randall Stephenson of AT&T. I think the more interesting session is probably “Winning the War On Search” later this afternoon. (Last night’s gadget session was pretty interesting…).

The current Forbes MEET session is “Silicon Valley Meets Hollywood”. Youtube’s Chad Hurley, David Siminoff of Venrock, and Dan Scheinman, SVP and General Manager of Cisco are talking with Quentin Hardy of Forbes.

The discussion briefly touched on the venture capital industry, with Siminoff saying: “…It feels like June of ‘99″ at the peak of the Internet bubble. Siminoff and Hardy talk about lots of VCs “looking for an exit”. I think the $15B valuation of Facebook and Microsoft investment has some folks here shaking their heads. Earlier in the day, Barry Diller commented on Facebook and said “Paying $10 to $15 billion for anything, much less something without any revenues, is somewhat suspect.”