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The Sprawling, Booming LA Tech Scene Is Having a Moment

105 points by wj 12y ago

enraged_camel 12y ago
Cute PR piece. I've lived in LA for the past six years and I can't wait to get out. Pollution. Traffic. Crowds. Urban sprawl. Celebrity culture. Crazy property prices. Earthquakes. You name it, we got it. I'd normally be happy that the tech scene is booming, except for the fact that they are turning Santa Monica and its surrounding neighborhoods into another Silicon Valley, with all the problems associated with the latter. Hence the name "Silicon Beach," which was actually invented in the 80s to describe the San Diego area but is now used to describe Westside LA.
- Balgair 12y ago
  I'm on the Westside and add some more anecdotes: A friend's wife is a master seamstress. She did all the costumes Ender's Game with 3 other people (I bellieve). Being in the union means you get at least 1 gig a year. Another poster here talked about Hollywood being the dominant driver, and that is completely true. Many of the small engineering firms here (not Boeing, etc) are focused on cameras and other movie tech. Heck, most of the investment community here is in movies. Part of that driver means that the culture comes along with it. That means failure is not tolerated here. My buddy just graduated UCLA dentistry. Its a 4 year program. He likes to study in coffee shops. He said when he first got to LA, the shop were half full of people trying to pitch a script or movie idea. Now? He said half the people here are CEOs of some sort. Last year they had a mixer for Silicon Beach people at a bar in Santa Monica. I went, as I can at least code my way out of a paper bag, though not much more. Ok, chit chat, free beer, appetizers, etc. Then you realize that you and 2 other guys are the only engineers there. The other 50 people are all CEOs of some baby start-up or another, half with NDAs in the pockets. I talked to about 15 and not one of them knew to code, wanted me to work, and were looking to give out ~10% of the company for the work. No thanks. Went to a thing for UCLA grads centered on start-ups. It was a panel discussion with UCLA alumni and then a meet and greet. Good cookies though. I asked the question: What is your work-life balance like. All laughed. One of the guys said his boss was a good example: 5-7am workout, 7-8am kids to school, 8-5pm work, 5-9pm play with kids, dinner, HW, 9-1am email, repeat. I pointed out that meant he slept 4 hours at that rate and, though he may be able to sustain this, it's statistically impossible other people can. Buddy got an interview for a coding job around the corner from Snapchat. Nice loft, great looking secretaries, good free lunch, etc. Problem was, he couldn't figure out what they actually did as a business. He figured they were just looking for acqui-hire, something he was not interested in due to the stink of failure Hollywood fears. Traffic sucks. I grow plants on the balcony. About every week I need to spritz them down from the exhaust ash that accumulates on the leaves. Not really about tech, I know, but still, I can see just how much of a car culture LA is on my carrots. * We pay 12 for a nice little 2 bedroom. It's a steal. The westside is really going up in costs now. I talked to the apartment manager and she says when we move they'll rent for 17. The 2 new buildings going in cat-corner to us are 3k for their 1 bedrooms. LA may be cheap now, but the westside is going to SF levels soon. My lawyer friend in Los Feliz is going long on Compton. Rents are cheap there and it's 3 miles from the beach, just like the westside used to be and Venice is now. Hes got 3 units already.
  - redschell 12y ago
    Is it normal to carve out two whole hours for exercise every morning? Seems excessive. And the email. The email! A whole four hour block at the end of the day? I'm no CEO, so someone else has to tell me if this is standard operating procedure, or if this boss is just inefficient.
    - hyperbovine 12y ago
      Carving out two hours from your already ridiculously deficient sleep schedule to work out is exactly the sort of "only in LA" nuttiness that made me vow never to return there after I graduated high school.
      - cylinder 12y ago
        How is that only LA? Sounds like "only in America" to me. Here I was thinking LA had a more laid-back culture, but it's definitely the same or worse in NYC.
    - Axsuul 12y ago
      Working out for 2 hours everyday is detrimental to your results and completely ineffective. A good CEO should be optimizing every part of his/her life. Your body won't have the time to rest and recover, especially if you're building muscle. I used to work out 6 days a week--I'm now seeing better results after switching to a 3-day split.
      - hkmurakami 12y ago
        presumably it's just low intensity cardio with lots of rest in between...
    - faster 12y ago
      Two hours could include driving to the gym and back, which could mean a 40-minute workout depending on traffic. Or it could be a trip to the beach to surf. If you haven't driven around LA, it's really hard to imagine how long it takes to get places. I remember being in stop-and-go traffic for 40 minutes at 11pm on a Thursday, for no obvious reason. People who drive in LA don't talk about distance to their destination, they talk about time.
- wj 12y ago
  To each their own. I lived in Santa Monica and Malibu for 14 years. Left last year for family reasons. Wish I was back.
  - philmcc 12y ago
    I moved here (Culver) from Florida 3 years ago and I love it. The critiques people launch are generally true, but also avoidable. The easiest way to love LA is simple. Move here, sublet til you find a job, then move into an apartment < 10 minutes from your job. (Or, if that's not doable, try to move opposite the flow of traffic.) Moving here, picking a place, and then finding out that you have a 90 minute commute is just a recipe for hatred. As far as the people -- Yes. There are a lot of self-serving actors, actresses, directors, etc. But there are 9.9 million people in this town, which means that even if the people you are inclined to like are a minority, there are hundreds of thousands of them. And the neat thing is, when they find you (and you them), you'll appreciate each other even more.
    - wj 12y ago
      Very true regarding living near where you work or commuting against traffic. I did the latter and then worked from home after I stopped commuting and both contributed immensely to quality of life. Though I suspect that to be true anywhere.
    - mullingitover 12y ago
      > There are a lot of self-serving actors, actresses, directors, etc. Talking to people from NYC, I frequently hear comments about how nice people in LA are. I think the gist of it is that people in 'the industry' have a serious need to network in order to find new work, since projects come and go. So unlike in NYC, where random strangers have nothing to offer you, here every burned bridge is potentially a career-killing blunder down the road.
    - cylinder 12y ago
      Thanks for sharing a positive viewpoint. But this doesn't seem sustainable. Your job will eventually change, and since LA isn't a nuclear city at all, you may now have a much longer commute. And what if your friends are in other neighborhoods? Or you want to go to an event across town? I've also heard the schools in LA proper are pretty terrible, so if you want to have a family you need to go to outer suburbs which implies long commutes. Could you counter my concerns about this? It's really a shame that LA ended up so poorly designed; it's in such a beautiful setting and has one of the best climates in the world.
nhashem 12y ago
I've lived in Los Angeles in 2004, and I liked this article a lot. But I think there's another aspect that I think the OP overlooked: The dominant industry here will always be Hollywood, where the price of failure can be literally devastating. If your startup fails in the Bay Area, it's not too hard to become a line engineer at another company. If your hedge fund fails in NYC, it's not too hard to get another job at another fund, PE firm, or commercial bank. In some cases, these "failures" are looked at as badges of honor, and likely gave you a lot of hands-on experience you can directly apply to your next job. But if you fail in Hollywood, you're looking at however many years lost of your life, when you were making no appreciable money as a bartender or barista, with likely no applicable skills to any other industry. I found it amusing the OP described LA rent as affordable -- which by NYC or SF prices, it definitely is! -- yet LA also has the worst income/rent ratio of any city in the US, by far[0]. This is not due to rent being too high, but due to income being too low, because everyone here is broke while they're trying to write screenplays and go on auditions. It's really hard to live here without having friends involved in the entertainment industry, so in other words, it's really hard not to see this up close. And even if your friends work on the production or post-production side, it's not much better. At least you have a steady salary, but you're probably also working for a huge megacorp studio that literally embodies every single Office Space cliche. Or you're working for a production or post-production vendor that has to jump through ridiculous hoops and work ridiculous hours to get business from said studios. And while that steady salary is nice, it's still not nearly enough if you want to ever actually do own property some day. So, I wonder how much of that also tempers the goals and dreams for LA startup entrepreneurs. I know it's something I think about often. [0] http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-6681/ http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-668...
- cbsmith 12y ago
  I dunnoh. I've actually found the entertainment industry has treated their tech employees pretty poorly, and I've been able to make rent by working for actual tech companies. Seems to be an easier way to pay the bills in LA.
- akbar501 12y ago
  > The dominant industry here will always be Hollywood Hollywood is the #6 industry in LA by output. #1 is real estate. In terms of employment, the government is the largest employer, followed by universities (UCLA/USC), medical (Cedars-Sinai/Kaiser) and then Fox (the #7 employer).
staunch 12y ago
Santa Monica is getting a lot better for startups. LA is not. My brother and I just moved to downtown Santa Monica from (from LA and San Diego) to work on our company. It's been awesome so far. We just got back from a really great event where Mark Suster interviewed Amit Kapur. Amit just sold his Santa Monica-based company Gravity to AOL. There's definitely a buzz here that didn't exist two years two. Our product is real and traditional technology innovation. It is not media/advertising/ecommerce. We have decided that if the support here is just too weak we're headed to SV. So far it looks like it might work to stay.
- MichaelApproved 12y ago
  You guys might enjoy working at coloft (shared office space) or keeping an eye on their calendar of events. They host a lot of interesting talks and similar events and they're based in Santa Monica, around Lincoln and Santa Monica blvd. http://www.coloft.com http://www.coloft.com
- ma2rten 12y ago
  I work for Whisper. We just moved from Santa Monica to Venice. Our new office is right next door to Snapchat and not far from Google. But unfortunately, so far, I've had zero interaction with the tech scene in LA outside of my company. Part of that is because I just moved to the US and I am just getting settled. What kind of events do you go to. How do find them? Meetup.com?
  - reillyse 12y ago
    Yea, LA definitely isn't SF where every person you meet is involved in a startup. I find it very inspiring to visit SF and get hyped up about my startup and startups in general, but I love living in LA even though I don't really meet random startup people outside of my group of friends. We don't really have an ecosystem down here.
  - staunch 12y ago
    Check web sites for General Assembly, Co-loft, Launchpad LA, Meetup, Twitter "startup santa monica." It's unfortunate that Google moved. Their location in Santa Monica was great. I'm sure it was too small though. I think it will take a long time before the Venice and Santa Monica bubbles merge.
basyt 12y ago
> “The broader mindset here is not just code,” said Bill Gross, the well-known serial entrepreneur and founder of an incubator called Idealab. “We have engineers with taste.” Shots fired.
leot 12y ago
This will probably make me unpopular. But: coding and designing (most) mobile apps* no longer is "tech". As they quoted in the article: “Silicon Valley has created the platforms. The maturation of the space is what you put on those platforms.” When a space has matured, and some group of people are deploying content to that space, then those people are not technologists any more than those deploying content to radio, TV, or cinema are. There was a time when radio and TV were tech, too. Now they're just radio and TV. Similarly, mobile apps will soon just be mobile apps, and firms that work in this space will no longer be thought of as being involved in "tech". *By definition, apps that involve considerable development of some fancy new technology still count as tech.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>When a space has matured, and some group of people are deploying content to that space, then those people are not technologists any more than those deploying content to radio, TV, or cinema are. There is a big difference between people who create content for the mass media and those who design and develop mobile apps. Suggesting that what the latter do is not "tech" is condescension and snobbery, the same kind that machine code developers have had towards assembly developers, and C developers have had towards C++ developers, and Java developers have had towards web developers. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Remember this, and it will keep you humble. edit: drive-by downvoting is the best kind. :)
  - leot 12y ago
    FTA: “LA is and always has been a city that creates mass-market products. We’re closer to culture than Silicon Valley, so we’re crushing it in social mobile. Web 2.0 might have been there. Web 3.0 is here.” -Mike Jones, CEO of Science
    - calinet6 12y ago
      You miss the point. Making a better product that is not solely a technological feat is not anti-technologist.
  - 12y ago
calinet6 12y ago
I'd love to see a similar little in-depth profile of all the various emerging tech hubs around the country and world. Boston in particular, followed by NYC. I see many parallels.
egypturnash 12y ago
Ah, LA. How I miss you. I don't miss the scalding desert summers when I had a job way behind the Orange Curtain. But oh, to live near the beach and have beautiful sunny days in the middle of December.
egypturnash 12y ago
Ah, LA. How I miss you. I don't miss the scalding desert summers when I had a job way behind the Orange Curtain. But oh, to live near the beach and have beautiful sunny days in the middle of December.
egypturnash 12y ago
Ah, LA. How I miss you. I don't miss the scalding desert summers when I had a job way behind the Orange Curtain. But oh, to live near the beach and have beautiful sunny days in the middle of December.
gregfjohnson 12y ago
There is a large and vital medical device corridor in the suburbs east of Los Angeles. It stretches from the Anaheim/Yorba Linda area south through Irvine and down toward San Diego. For instance, some of the best work in the world on ventilators goes on in this area. Two of the globally dominant medical device companies that specialize in this discipline are headquartered here. I was involved in a medical device startup in this area, and later switched to software R&D at a larger company. By contrast with the media glitz and general buzz described in the article, this industry is a bit straight-laced or "square". However, personally I have found that nothing compares to spending a few months on a project that will improve outcomes of premature babies in neonatal ICU's. This LA-based concentration of medical device expertise is a low-key hidden gem in this area.
- wando 12y ago
  Do you have any contacts on up and coming medical device start-ups in the SoCal area? I was at a medical device start-up down in south OC but has since moved to a big corporate one in SFV. I agree with you, its not as glitzy or sexy as the web startups but I love having the feeling whatever you made helps improve people's lives
nextstep 12y ago
New York, LA, probably others all have very fast growing tech scenes. And the worse things get in SF, the less of a lead the Bay Area has over these other cities. It is more expensive to live in San Francisco than in a nice part of New York, and way more than a nice part of LA. On top of that, San Francisco is a super lame mono-culture, increasingly comprised of mostly white and asian dudes between about 25 and 40. More and more I hear of prominent engineers moving out of the Bay Area (Steve Klabnik is the most recent that comes to mind). I think that in ~5 years, the perfect storm of municipal disfunction (aging and already shitty public transit, insane rent and minimal new construction, strong lack of diversity) will cause San Francisco to quickly become much less attractive for companies and employees.
gdilla 12y ago
LA is awesome and I'm so happy to see this happening. There is a public school quality issue but if you're single or without kids, it's a great place to be. The tradeoff is good schools are either private or long commutes away from the Silicon Beach areas (west SF valley, Chatsworth, Calabasas, Thousand Oaks, Pallos Verdes etc). In LA, they call Hollywood simply "The Industry". A lot of people I met did get burned out by 30 because of pecking order that is the industry. You can work your butt off and never grow in your career, then you realize you're still renting with roommates at 30+. It can get tough. I saw a lot of friends just leave for cheaper housing and more conventional jobs. Hollywood does abuse it's tech employees (and most of it's other employees). But even non actors have stars in their eyes and take the abuse to say they worked on XYZ movie. And so the cycle continues, lots of ambitious young people enter the Industry while the burnouts throw in the towel. And the employers get away with it.
hmsimha 12y ago
> Americans watch 5.3 hours of television a day, and they read for less than a half hour,” [citation needed] Honestly this probably isn't terribly far off, but I have a very hard time believing Americans read less than half an hour a day (unless you're strictly counting non-digitized reading, which is a useless figure anyway because many people read all of their non-web content on e-readers now) I googled around and couldn't find a source either.
BigChiefSmokem 12y ago
Here is a secret I will tell only to my HN buddies: for the right person, the studios have the money to beat most Silicon Valley giants and can definitely wipe the floor with whatever the Santa Monica startups will offer. The key is you have to love "the biz". This is LA, after all =) Source: I'm a senior software architect at a very major Hollywood studio. Microsoft once offered me a nice salary, but the studio beat them by $20,000. I love LA.
raihan 12y ago
I have yet to find good tech job listings in the LA area. Anyone have leads?

105 points by wj 12y ago

Cute PR piece. I've lived in LA for the past six years and I can't wait to get out. Pollution. Traffic. Crowds. Urban sprawl. Celebrity culture. Crazy property prices. Earthquakes. You name it, we got it. I'd normally be happy that the tech scene is booming, except for the fact that they are turning Santa Monica and its surrounding neighborhoods into another Silicon Valley, with all the problems associated with the latter. Hence the name "Silicon Beach," which was actually invented in the 80s to describe the San Diego area but is now used to describe Westside LA.

Balgair 12y ago
I'm on the Westside and add some more anecdotes: A friend's wife is a master seamstress. She did all the costumes Ender's Game with 3 other people (I bellieve). Being in the union means you get at least 1 gig a year. Another poster here talked about Hollywood being the dominant driver, and that is completely true. Many of the small engineering firms here (not Boeing, etc) are focused on cameras and other movie tech. Heck, most of the investment community here is in movies. Part of that driver means that the culture comes along with it. That means failure is not tolerated here. My buddy just graduated UCLA dentistry. Its a 4 year program. He likes to study in coffee shops. He said when he first got to LA, the shop were half full of people trying to pitch a script or movie idea. Now? He said half the people here are CEOs of some sort. Last year they had a mixer for Silicon Beach people at a bar in Santa Monica. I went, as I can at least code my way out of a paper bag, though not much more. Ok, chit chat, free beer, appetizers, etc. Then you realize that you and 2 other guys are the only engineers there. The other 50 people are all CEOs of some baby start-up or another, half with NDAs in the pockets. I talked to about 15 and not one of them knew to code, wanted me to work, and were looking to give out ~10% of the company for the work. No thanks. Went to a thing for UCLA grads centered on start-ups. It was a panel discussion with UCLA alumni and then a meet and greet. Good cookies though. I asked the question: What is your work-life balance like. All laughed. One of the guys said his boss was a good example: 5-7am workout, 7-8am kids to school, 8-5pm work, 5-9pm play with kids, dinner, HW, 9-1am email, repeat. I pointed out that meant he slept 4 hours at that rate and, though he may be able to sustain this, it's statistically impossible other people can. Buddy got an interview for a coding job around the corner from Snapchat. Nice loft, great looking secretaries, good free lunch, etc. Problem was, he couldn't figure out what they actually did as a business. He figured they were just looking for acqui-hire, something he was not interested in due to the stink of failure Hollywood fears. Traffic sucks. I grow plants on the balcony. About every week I need to spritz them down from the exhaust ash that accumulates on the leaves. Not really about tech, I know, but still, I can see just how much of a car culture LA is on my carrots. * We pay 12 for a nice little 2 bedroom. It's a steal. The westside is really going up in costs now. I talked to the apartment manager and she says when we move they'll rent for 17. The 2 new buildings going in cat-corner to us are 3k for their 1 bedrooms. LA may be cheap now, but the westside is going to SF levels soon. My lawyer friend in Los Feliz is going long on Compton. Rents are cheap there and it's 3 miles from the beach, just like the westside used to be and Venice is now. Hes got 3 units already.
- redschell 12y ago
  Is it normal to carve out two whole hours for exercise every morning? Seems excessive. And the email. The email! A whole four hour block at the end of the day? I'm no CEO, so someone else has to tell me if this is standard operating procedure, or if this boss is just inefficient.
  - hyperbovine 12y ago
    Carving out two hours from your already ridiculously deficient sleep schedule to work out is exactly the sort of "only in LA" nuttiness that made me vow never to return there after I graduated high school.
    - cylinder 12y ago
      How is that only LA? Sounds like "only in America" to me. Here I was thinking LA had a more laid-back culture, but it's definitely the same or worse in NYC.
  - Axsuul 12y ago
    Working out for 2 hours everyday is detrimental to your results and completely ineffective. A good CEO should be optimizing every part of his/her life. Your body won't have the time to rest and recover, especially if you're building muscle. I used to work out 6 days a week--I'm now seeing better results after switching to a 3-day split.
    - hkmurakami 12y ago
      presumably it's just low intensity cardio with lots of rest in between...
  - faster 12y ago
    Two hours could include driving to the gym and back, which could mean a 40-minute workout depending on traffic. Or it could be a trip to the beach to surf. If you haven't driven around LA, it's really hard to imagine how long it takes to get places. I remember being in stop-and-go traffic for 40 minutes at 11pm on a Thursday, for no obvious reason. People who drive in LA don't talk about distance to their destination, they talk about time.
wj 12y ago
To each their own. I lived in Santa Monica and Malibu for 14 years. Left last year for family reasons. Wish I was back.
- philmcc 12y ago
  I moved here (Culver) from Florida 3 years ago and I love it. The critiques people launch are generally true, but also avoidable. The easiest way to love LA is simple. Move here, sublet til you find a job, then move into an apartment < 10 minutes from your job. (Or, if that's not doable, try to move opposite the flow of traffic.) Moving here, picking a place, and then finding out that you have a 90 minute commute is just a recipe for hatred. As far as the people -- Yes. There are a lot of self-serving actors, actresses, directors, etc. But there are 9.9 million people in this town, which means that even if the people you are inclined to like are a minority, there are hundreds of thousands of them. And the neat thing is, when they find you (and you them), you'll appreciate each other even more.
  - wj 12y ago
    Very true regarding living near where you work or commuting against traffic. I did the latter and then worked from home after I stopped commuting and both contributed immensely to quality of life. Though I suspect that to be true anywhere.
  - mullingitover 12y ago
    > There are a lot of self-serving actors, actresses, directors, etc. Talking to people from NYC, I frequently hear comments about how nice people in LA are. I think the gist of it is that people in 'the industry' have a serious need to network in order to find new work, since projects come and go. So unlike in NYC, where random strangers have nothing to offer you, here every burned bridge is potentially a career-killing blunder down the road.
  - cylinder 12y ago
    Thanks for sharing a positive viewpoint. But this doesn't seem sustainable. Your job will eventually change, and since LA isn't a nuclear city at all, you may now have a much longer commute. And what if your friends are in other neighborhoods? Or you want to go to an event across town? I've also heard the schools in LA proper are pretty terrible, so if you want to have a family you need to go to outer suburbs which implies long commutes. Could you counter my concerns about this? It's really a shame that LA ended up so poorly designed; it's in such a beautiful setting and has one of the best climates in the world.

nhashem 12y ago

I've lived in Los Angeles in 2004, and I liked this article a lot. But I think there's another aspect that I think the OP overlooked: The dominant industry here will always be Hollywood, where the price of failure can be literally devastating. If your startup fails in the Bay Area, it's not too hard to become a line engineer at another company. If your hedge fund fails in NYC, it's not too hard to get another job at another fund, PE firm, or commercial bank. In some cases, these "failures" are looked at as badges of honor, and likely gave you a lot of hands-on experience you can directly apply to your next job. But if you fail in Hollywood, you're looking at however many years lost of your life, when you were making no appreciable money as a bartender or barista, with likely no applicable skills to any other industry. I found it amusing the OP described LA rent as affordable -- which by NYC or SF prices, it definitely is! -- yet LA also has the worst income/rent ratio of any city in the US, by far[0]. This is not due to rent being too high, but due to income being too low, because everyone here is broke while they're trying to write screenplays and go on auditions. It's really hard to live here without having friends involved in the entertainment industry, so in other words, it's really hard not to see this up close. And even if your friends work on the production or post-production side, it's not much better. At least you have a steady salary, but you're probably also working for a huge megacorp studio that literally embodies every single Office Space cliche. Or you're working for a production or post-production vendor that has to jump through ridiculous hoops and work ridiculous hours to get business from said studios. And while that steady salary is nice, it's still not nearly enough if you want to ever actually do own property some day. So, I wonder how much of that also tempers the goals and dreams for LA startup entrepreneurs. I know it's something I think about often. [0] http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-6681/ http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-668...

cbsmith 12y ago
I dunnoh. I've actually found the entertainment industry has treated their tech employees pretty poorly, and I've been able to make rent by working for actual tech companies. Seems to be an easier way to pay the bills in LA.
akbar501 12y ago
> The dominant industry here will always be Hollywood Hollywood is the #6 industry in LA by output. #1 is real estate. In terms of employment, the government is the largest employer, followed by universities (UCLA/USC), medical (Cedars-Sinai/Kaiser) and then Fox (the #7 employer).

staunch 12y ago

Santa Monica is getting a lot better for startups. LA is not. My brother and I just moved to downtown Santa Monica from (from LA and San Diego) to work on our company. It's been awesome so far. We just got back from a really great event where Mark Suster interviewed Amit Kapur. Amit just sold his Santa Monica-based company Gravity to AOL. There's definitely a buzz here that didn't exist two years two. Our product is real and traditional technology innovation. It is not media/advertising/ecommerce. We have decided that if the support here is just too weak we're headed to SV. So far it looks like it might work to stay.

MichaelApproved 12y ago
You guys might enjoy working at coloft (shared office space) or keeping an eye on their calendar of events. They host a lot of interesting talks and similar events and they're based in Santa Monica, around Lincoln and Santa Monica blvd. http://www.coloft.com http://www.coloft.com
ma2rten 12y ago
I work for Whisper. We just moved from Santa Monica to Venice. Our new office is right next door to Snapchat and not far from Google. But unfortunately, so far, I've had zero interaction with the tech scene in LA outside of my company. Part of that is because I just moved to the US and I am just getting settled. What kind of events do you go to. How do find them? Meetup.com?
- reillyse 12y ago
  Yea, LA definitely isn't SF where every person you meet is involved in a startup. I find it very inspiring to visit SF and get hyped up about my startup and startups in general, but I love living in LA even though I don't really meet random startup people outside of my group of friends. We don't really have an ecosystem down here.
- staunch 12y ago
  Check web sites for General Assembly, Co-loft, Launchpad LA, Meetup, Twitter "startup santa monica." It's unfortunate that Google moved. Their location in Santa Monica was great. I'm sure it was too small though. I think it will take a long time before the Venice and Santa Monica bubbles merge.

basyt 12y ago

> “The broader mindset here is not just code,” said Bill Gross, the well-known serial entrepreneur and founder of an incubator called Idealab. “We have engineers with taste.” Shots fired.

leot 12y ago

This will probably make me unpopular. But: coding and designing (most) mobile apps* no longer is "tech". As they quoted in the article: “Silicon Valley has created the platforms. The maturation of the space is what you put on those platforms.” When a space has matured, and some group of people are deploying content to that space, then those people are not technologists any more than those deploying content to radio, TV, or cinema are. There was a time when radio and TV were tech, too. Now they're just radio and TV. Similarly, mobile apps will soon just be mobile apps, and firms that work in this space will no longer be thought of as being involved in "tech". *By definition, apps that involve considerable development of some fancy new technology still count as tech.

enraged_camel 12y ago
>>When a space has matured, and some group of people are deploying content to that space, then those people are not technologists any more than those deploying content to radio, TV, or cinema are. There is a big difference between people who create content for the mass media and those who design and develop mobile apps. Suggesting that what the latter do is not "tech" is condescension and snobbery, the same kind that machine code developers have had towards assembly developers, and C developers have had towards C++ developers, and Java developers have had towards web developers. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Remember this, and it will keep you humble. edit: drive-by downvoting is the best kind. :)
- leot 12y ago
  FTA: “LA is and always has been a city that creates mass-market products. We’re closer to culture than Silicon Valley, so we’re crushing it in social mobile. Web 2.0 might have been there. Web 3.0 is here.” -Mike Jones, CEO of Science
  - calinet6 12y ago
    You miss the point. Making a better product that is not solely a technological feat is not anti-technologist.
- 12y ago

calinet6 12y ago

I'd love to see a similar little in-depth profile of all the various emerging tech hubs around the country and world. Boston in particular, followed by NYC. I see many parallels.

egypturnash 12y ago

Ah, LA. How I miss you. I don't miss the scalding desert summers when I had a job way behind the Orange Curtain. But oh, to live near the beach and have beautiful sunny days in the middle of December.

egypturnash 12y ago

gregfjohnson 12y ago

There is a large and vital medical device corridor in the suburbs east of Los Angeles. It stretches from the Anaheim/Yorba Linda area south through Irvine and down toward San Diego. For instance, some of the best work in the world on ventilators goes on in this area. Two of the globally dominant medical device companies that specialize in this discipline are headquartered here. I was involved in a medical device startup in this area, and later switched to software R&D at a larger company. By contrast with the media glitz and general buzz described in the article, this industry is a bit straight-laced or "square". However, personally I have found that nothing compares to spending a few months on a project that will improve outcomes of premature babies in neonatal ICU's. This LA-based concentration of medical device expertise is a low-key hidden gem in this area.

wando 12y ago
Do you have any contacts on up and coming medical device start-ups in the SoCal area? I was at a medical device start-up down in south OC but has since moved to a big corporate one in SFV. I agree with you, its not as glitzy or sexy as the web startups but I love having the feeling whatever you made helps improve people's lives

nextstep 12y ago

New York, LA, probably others all have very fast growing tech scenes. And the worse things get in SF, the less of a lead the Bay Area has over these other cities. It is more expensive to live in San Francisco than in a nice part of New York, and way more than a nice part of LA. On top of that, San Francisco is a super lame mono-culture, increasingly comprised of mostly white and asian dudes between about 25 and 40. More and more I hear of prominent engineers moving out of the Bay Area (Steve Klabnik is the most recent that comes to mind). I think that in ~5 years, the perfect storm of municipal disfunction (aging and already shitty public transit, insane rent and minimal new construction, strong lack of diversity) will cause San Francisco to quickly become much less attractive for companies and employees.

gdilla 12y ago

LA is awesome and I'm so happy to see this happening. There is a public school quality issue but if you're single or without kids, it's a great place to be. The tradeoff is good schools are either private or long commutes away from the Silicon Beach areas (west SF valley, Chatsworth, Calabasas, Thousand Oaks, Pallos Verdes etc). In LA, they call Hollywood simply "The Industry". A lot of people I met did get burned out by 30 because of pecking order that is the industry. You can work your butt off and never grow in your career, then you realize you're still renting with roommates at 30+. It can get tough. I saw a lot of friends just leave for cheaper housing and more conventional jobs. Hollywood does abuse it's tech employees (and most of it's other employees). But even non actors have stars in their eyes and take the abuse to say they worked on XYZ movie. And so the cycle continues, lots of ambitious young people enter the Industry while the burnouts throw in the towel. And the employers get away with it.

hmsimha 12y ago

> Americans watch 5.3 hours of television a day, and they read for less than a half hour,” [citation needed] Honestly this probably isn't terribly far off, but I have a very hard time believing Americans read less than half an hour a day (unless you're strictly counting non-digitized reading, which is a useless figure anyway because many people read all of their non-web content on e-readers now) I googled around and couldn't find a source either.

BigChiefSmokem 12y ago

Here is a secret I will tell only to my HN buddies: for the right person, the studios have the money to beat most Silicon Valley giants and can definitely wipe the floor with whatever the Santa Monica startups will offer. The key is you have to love "the biz". This is LA, after all =) Source: I'm a senior software architect at a very major Hollywood studio. Microsoft once offered me a nice salary, but the studio beat them by $20,000. I love LA.

raihan 12y ago

I have yet to find good tech job listings in the LA area. Anyone have leads?