In his post today, Chris Dixon talks about how New York City is poised for a tech revival, reclaiming its status as a major tech hub that it seemed to lose during the finance boom of 2003-2008. Fred Wilson follows on, reaffirming that yes it is absolutely possible to build and scale a worldclass technology company in NYC, and mentions that he introduced Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, to the founders of DoubleClick to drive home the point.
I believe L.A. is also starting to reach critical mass as a great place to grow tech startups. Of course, there have been many notable successes in the Internet space here in the past decade including MySpace, Overture, Pricegrabber, and LowerMyBills.com, to name a few. However, now, led by the energy and activity of passionate entrepreneurs and VCs like Jason Nazar, Richard Rosenblatt, Mark Suster, Richard Wolpert, and others, there is a sense of community and cooperation, as well as simply a larger number of startup founders, that simply did not exist here 10 or even 5 years ago.
For example, Startups Uncensored, which Jason Nazar started and runs in his “spare time” separate from growing DocStoc quickly to become one of the leaders in the online content space, attracts a huge standing-room-only crowd every month, with truly candid panel discussions and a free beer bust after at Docstoc offices… score! Mark Suster, a successful entrepreneur turned VC at GRP Partners, runs Launchpad LA, a mentor program for founders where the existing class chooses the incoming founders for the next round. Mark is also reaching out to UCLA and USC among others to foster young engineers migrating from school to the local tech entrepreneur scene, a critical step in starting and scaling new companies. In addition, other local founders and VCs generously donate their time appearing on panels, advising younger entrepreneurs, and making introductions, and other organizations like DealMaker Media, Twiistup, etc. host excellent events that all contribute to the community.
As an L.A.-based founder participating in an incubator located in Silicon Valley, it has been suggested to me several times that I could “maximize the probability of success” for my startup by moving to Mountain View sooner rather than later. For various reasons that I will describe more in a separate post, my preference is to stay in L.A., and the growth of the vibrant and cooperative community for Internet founders here is one of the big reasons why.
