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Entrepreneur Association Conference – May 11, 2012

The Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at UCLA Anderson School of Management and the UCLA Entrepreneur Association present the 2012 Entrepreneur Conference, where MBA students, alumni, faculty, entrepreneurs, investors and key industry innovators assemble to share valuable insight on current topics in entrepreneurship, critical business skills and emerging market trends. 15 percent discount for SOCALTECH readers. Use promo code: SOCALTECH.

btw, to any event organizers out there — if you have a local conference and want to provide our readers with a discount, include them in your event submission, or email us.

(Elon Musk, center, with NASA astronauts - from SpaceX).

Here’s an interesting one for Friday: Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal, and has taken that fortune (literally) to new heights with Tesla Motors and SpaceX, actually  spends as much time in Southern California than he does in Silicon Valley (according to Mashable).  It’s actually very interesting, if you talk with folks in Southern California, they’re familiar with both SpaceX and Tesla, but when I talk to folks from Silicon Valley, they’re mostly aware of Tesla only (despite SpaceX’s huge success in getting their commercial rockets into space and soon heading to the ISS…)

I’m not sure if the folks over at Microsoft missed April Fool’s, were in a “let’s make a viral video” mood, or what, but they just announced a program to promote the use of Kinect for Xbox 360 in senior citizen’s centers around Los Angeles. In the best line ever, the video assets for the release include the best line ever (around 4:48 in): “You guys want to do Funky Town again?” (yes, those appear to be senior citizens dancing around in “bling” to Funky Town).

From a European perspective the important point here is that most acquisitions are made by US companies, and after that local job creation generally dwindles. Sometimes that is because the acquired business becomes core to the acquirer and new people are mostly hired in the US and other times it is because the acquisition goes badly and the acquired business withers.

That experience is one that folks in Southern California (and in particular, Los Angeles) have experienced first hand (think back to Geocities being acquired by Yahoo, Overture being acquired by Yahoo as well, etc.) Substitute “Silicon Valley companies” for instances of “US companies” in Nic’s quote above for an accurate description of the problem when successful companies/startups down here tend to be acquired by firms in Silicon Valley.

Although there are plenty of seminars and events around getting funding, it’s somewhat unusual to have a successful venture capitalist share his knowledge of the process. Funk helped fund such companies as Rent.com, Shopzilla, and Sandpiper Networks. Although we’re biased (Jon has been a regular contributor and supporter of socalTECH), it’s interesting to see yet another resource here for startups looking to get funded and off the ground.