Silicon Beach: Los Angeles booms as startup hub

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21709564-cheaper-location-tech-companies-takes-los-angeles-booms-startup-hub

by martincmartin • 10 years ago

93 95 10 years ago

ariwilson• 10 years ago

I've been living in West LA since 2008. It's certainly exploded recently in terms of startups as Google, Snapchat, Riot Games and SpaceX have expanded their presences.

The West LA area has always had a strong tech presence from the gaming, advertising, and defense industries though, going back many decades.

Hydraulix9894• 10 years ago

I was kicking around the idea of looking for a tech job in LA a while back. The names you mentioned seemed to be the ONLY ones worth pursuing. It's just not the same as San Francisco.

danielmorozoff• 10 years ago

You can always work at jpl

LAMan5000• 10 years ago

Yeah, I moved here about two years ago.

The other big difference between LA and SF is like, the penalty for not working close to where you live is absolutely brutal. Taking BART or the subway is moderately annoying, but driving from the Silver Lake to Venice every day is absolutely horrifying.

So in Venice you got Google and Snapchat, although apparently most of Google is getting moved down to Playa Vista, you got a handful of small startups, lots of VR companies led by people with media rather than technical backgrounds (maybe that's fine?), and that's about it.

Nearby you got EA in Playa del Rey (kill me), you got some old companies in Santa Monica and a couple more startups that don't seem interesting necessarily.

Even SpaceX is a pretty far cruise from the Santa Monica/Venice area, but there are a bunch more companies that hire engineers in that El Segundo area, but not necessarily ones that you would want to work at.

It's interesting, certainly, and I think the Snapchat IPO will lead to a lot of rich guys suddenly turning angel and so on. LA has basically never had any real exits until very recently (dollar shave, snapchat), which has limited the development of the ecosystem. Every old guy in LA is like "did you know I founded Myspace?" Based on my time in LA, I would have to estimate the number of founders of Myspace around 3-500. Also stamps dot com.

In summary, I would say LA is pretty much like New York City circa 2005.

The complete secret weapon of LA though is UCLA. The quality of graduates coming out of UCLA computer science is staggering, and from the hiring side, they're not competed for or recruited as heavily as say Stanford kids.

exBarrelSpoiler• 10 years ago

Curious synergy between this article and the San Jose Mercury story about SF Bay Area commuter traffic now being worse than LA's.

Bahamut• 10 years ago

It's nowhere near as bad - I live in the Valley & have a nice 20-30 min commute into the office with otherwise pretty tame traffic around just about every day in my 2 1/2 years in the area. Meanwhile every visit I have had into LA had pretty bad traffic at many times you'd expect it to be normal, including after 10 am on a random Tuesday and ~1 pm on a Sunday.

There is far worse traffic in many of the worst traffic areas in the US than the Bay Area, I'm still confused as to why some try to perpetuate this myth on here.

santaclaus4• 10 years ago

Rush hour on the bay bridge is hell on earth.

mturmon3• 10 years ago

Visitors say this. I don't buy it...I feel like LA natives avoid these kind of traffic disasters by avoiding peak times and knowing traffic patterns.

angst_ridden• 10 years ago

As a Venice OG, I can say they've been ruining what used to make the place unique. Then again, having a Silicon Valley clone has helped my real estate valuation.

farright• 10 years ago

Question: if other groups are so proud of rejecting people in tech, why should people in tech be expected to be welcoming towards outsiders. The way I see it, if you get to have your cool hip location for yourself, we should get to have our trillion dollar industry for ourselves.

untog• 10 years ago

Because your trillion dollar industry requires an ever-increasing number of customers, and their neighborhood does not.

dwaltrip• 10 years ago

With great power comes great responsibility.

boulos4• 10 years ago

I enjoy that your newly created account uses the handle farright.

kesselvon• 10 years ago

Once tech moves in, a place stops being cool and hip. Just like tech gutted San Francisco.

muad2• 10 years ago

Venice is just rich people trying to pretend they are poor.

adamnemecek• 10 years ago

If anyone here wants to grab a $BEVERAGE sometime, hit me up. I just moved here and I'm looking for like minded people. Email is in my profile.

mikeflynn• 10 years ago

I too have recently moved to the area and I'm hiring a new team. Any Clojure devs in LA?

ithayer• 10 years ago

There are several clojure shops and a bunch of clojure devs lurking around, hit me up, email is at gmail, prefixed with hn username.

sumobob• 10 years ago

I'm not a practicing clojure dev, javascript by day, clojure by night.

base698• 10 years ago

Me! Shipped one thing in production with clojure but haven't had a chance to do anymore. There were a few startups from LA at Clojure West.

cjensen• 10 years ago

Silicon Alley[1], Beach[2], Desert[3], Forest[4], Gulf[5], Peach[6], Prairie[7], Taiga[8], Wadi[9].

To paraphrase a Game of Thrones put-down, if you have to call yourself "Silicon" to say you are like the Valley, then you aren't like the Valley.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Alley

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Beach

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Desert

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Forest

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Gulf

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_peach

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Prairie

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Taiga

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Wadi

adenadel• 10 years ago

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_shire

fullshark• 10 years ago

Regardless I'm happy for the tech job market to expand beyond the Bay Area.

arcanus2• 10 years ago

Don't forget silicon hills!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Texas

The city also adopted "Silicon Hills" as a nickname in the 1990s due to a rapid influx of technology and development companies.

ndonnellan2• 10 years ago

To be fair, there actually is a semiconductor industry here, so "Silicon" would be an apt description.

pj_mukh• 10 years ago

sigh Felt special coming out of "Silicon Valley North"[1] before this comment.

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/ontario-...

eggdude• 10 years ago

Don't forget Silicon Slopes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Slopes

Found the whole list on Wikipedia too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_with_%22Silicon...

aji• 10 years ago

funny Seattle only has "Silicon Canal" for the bit around Fremont where Google, Adobe, Tableau, GeekWire, Facebook, etc. have offices. you'd think between Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, Zillow, Redfin, and the countless other tech companies with headquarters or satellite offices in the area that some nickname would have sprung up for the whole region. "Silicon Isthmus" or something.

maybe we're still riding the "Jet City" thing from when Boeing was here?

bradstewart2• 10 years ago

Irrelevant, but I laughed really hard at "Silicotton Valley" on that list.

mc32• 10 years ago

Not only from the coattails point of view but also from the fact that except for maybe TX [TI, AMD, etc], most of those don't work with "Silicon" anything. They should be calling themselves either Bit/Byte/Binary or simply software -Alley/Beach/Desert/Forest... etc.

To be fair, I concede SF was never Silicon anything either and has coopted and wrested the name from the Route 237/golden triangle.

jboggan• 10 years ago

Honestly everyone is pulling back a tad from the beach itself in Venice/Santa Monica so it's probably better to call it Silicon del Rey.

mixmastamyk5• 10 years ago

Something must be going wrong up there if you're finding Santa Monica and environs cheap, haha.

santaclaus4• 10 years ago

LA and neighbors are somehow becoming the cheap west coast urban area. Seattle is now on par with LA, and Portland is quickly on track to overtake Seattle...

ilaksh• 10 years ago

That tells you something about what a clusterf*^k the Bay Area must be at this point if they think LA is attractive.

slowandlow• 10 years ago

How unfortunate, hopefully the culture in the city doesn't go stale and homogeneous.

Hydraulix9894• 10 years ago

My friends who are California natives say LA is what SF was like before tech ruined it. Venice Beach is so chill and laid back, I really loved the culture there. Sad to see it vanishing there, too, and I really empathize with the fact that I'm part of the problem.

sologoub• 10 years ago

Clearly you have never visited Venice in the 90s... I don't think anyone in their right mind would morn that.

hueving• 10 years ago

Your friends just sound like bitter assholes tbh. LA is a sprawling metropolis that makes absolutely no sense to compare to San Francisco. LA as a whole isn't 'like' anything because it has such wildly diverse areas. Do you think Santa Monica has a similar feel to Compton or Hollywood?

boulos4• 10 years ago

We call that Santa Cruz.

riffic2• 10 years ago

Los Angeles is way too huge and varied in culture to worry about that happening.

riffic2• 10 years ago

I mod a techLA subreddit in case anyone wants to share news of interest to the community:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechLA/

Some folks also tweet with the #techLA hashtag. (Keep in mind, if you tweet, the #LATech hashtag is reserved for a university in Ruston, Louisiana.)

nickthemagicman3• 10 years ago

Just joined thanks for the info!

kepano• 10 years ago

While many of the established tech companies seem to have clustered around Santa Monica, the younger companies are mostly on the east side (downtown, East Hollywood, Silver Lake, etc), far from "Silicon Beach".

I have been in Los Angeles for 8 years and love it here. When my co-founder and I moved up to Mountain View to attend YC there was no question that we would come back to LA afterwards.

People think of LA as Hollywood/media-driven, but it's also one of the biggest manufacturing towns in the country, the biggest port, an important hub for science/technology (Caltech, JPL, SpaceX, Tesla, etc).

There is a lot of untapped potential for startups here. Not to mention that rent is about half the price.

robomartin• 10 years ago

I don't understand why these companies flock to that general area. Traffic is impenetrable from 6:00AM until sometimes 9:00PM. If you need the 405/105/10, etc you are hosed. It can take an hour to do ten miles.

It's horrific and it can't be good for recruiting. I know excellent engineers who have been offered jobs in that area and refused due to having to devote 3 to 5 hours a day stuck in traffic.

To me this means they would have access to a much larger talent pool if they strategically moved away from that impenetrable mess. Lived and worked in the area for years, it gets old.

dima552• 10 years ago

Traffic is a lifestyle choice. There is indeed a small minority of people that have decided to sit in traffic 3 to 5 hours per day in order to live in a large and/or cheap house in the boonies somewhere. But that's crazy, and most people don't do this. You can also choose to not drive, and walk/bike/bus/train everywhere. LA is a real city and all that.

nickthemagicman3• 10 years ago

Youre right. And you forgot parking...I gave up driving here when I had to Uber from my parking spot to my destination.

I just take the trains and bike it and its actually really nice.

mprovost• 10 years ago

During my time in LA I got the impression that most of these companies are situated in a location that makes it convenient for the executives/owners who mostly live in Santa Monica or along the coast and basically don't have to deal with the traffic (possibly with the exception of the PCH).

whiskyant• 10 years ago

Rent may be half the price, but overall compensation seems to be about 25% lower too.

dmode• 10 years ago

Having lived in LA for over 2 years, I doubt the tech industry there would truly rival the valley some day. I am very happy with the emerging tech scene, but when I was in LA, it was all about "the industry" - which was a reference to Hollywood. Many conversations revolved around what it was like to work in the industry or who knows whom from the industry.

The other issue with the tech industry in LA would be that it will run geeks and nerds out of town. Appearance and looks are far more important in LA than it will be in SF.

mixmastamyk5• 10 years ago

"The Valley" in LA means the San Fernando Valley, think "Valley Girls."

jaequery• 10 years ago

I lived in LA for all my life and have worked at various places including DTLA, West LA (SM, Sawtelle), and even the SFV (Sherman Oaks). But I gotta say working at Venice (right by the beach) was truly an amazing experience. Coming to office with shorts and flip flops is a given, but heading out to the beach while getting some sun in the sands to get some Vitamin D while cooling off your head is pretty much priceless! Venice also has a pretty strong bike culture, which is pretty rare for LA standards, so you see a lot of people bike to work, which is awesome.

And some days, which is pretty much whenever we feel like it, we would just take our laptops and work right on the beach with the sun, with some towels spread out, chilling, swimming, and go for a swim and come back, then go back to work. It made me appreciate just how fun work can be and you don't have to sacrifice quality of your life just because you are working for a startup.

To me, working by the beach is seriously a no brainer, I mean more companies should be doing this! It is really hard to go back to working at an office building outside of it once you've experienced the freedom and lifestyle of being by the beach. Also, there is a big difference working close to the beach (like SM) and actually being ON the beach (Venice). I'll take the latter any day.

lqdc13• 10 years ago

I don't understand how one can focus in such an environment.

I need headphones, ideally a lot of screen real estate and for nothing to be moving in my periphery.

triplesec• 10 years ago

How do you deal with sun glare on the laptop?

rargulati• 10 years ago

I could see this being really, really great for planning/requirements meetings or code review. For those things, it's really helpful to get out of the normal work space and into a slightly different mindset. For building, I agree with the other repliers: definitely helps to be in a closed off area with minimal distractions.

oriel• 10 years ago

Can we please stop with the Silicon Beach nonsense? The only people who use it in earnest are the yuppies at networking events. It's like calling Seattle the Silicon Forest.

Silicon Beach: Los Angeles booms as startup hub

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