L.A. Business Journal
AUGUST 19, 2016
Los Angeles County tech wages are growing faster than the earnings of tech employees in the nation’s other big cities, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled in a report by downtown real estate investment firm Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
TechCrunch LA
DECEMBER 2, 2016
If you were to write a history of Silicon Valley, you could do it by looking at a series of major diaspora. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Oracle and PayPal attract top talent for years; when they reach maturity or a major liquidity event, their talent disperses and germinates into the next generation of companies. It’s quite possible that Snapchat could do the same for L.A.
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Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 15, 2016
I know the title “I promise you one of the most meaningful days of your life” sounds grandiose but I mean it and I hope you’ll read through to the end and choose to take one small, totally free action, that will change your life and likely those of others. On September 10th of this year I spent an entire day in California State Prison with people who had committed felonies and worked with them on business plans to help them create legal enterprise upon their release as part of Defy Ventures 6-mo
TechEmpower
FEBRUARY 10, 2016
“It was running fine.” In our performance consulting work, we often hear variations of the following: “Our web application was running fine with a few hundred users. Now when we run a promotion with our new partner and get a thousand users coming in at one time, it grinds to a halt.”. We’ve heard this from startup founders, product managers, development team leads, CTOs, and others who see their product gaining traction, but simultaneously see performance falling off a cliff.
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Office leases are one of companies’ largest expenses, and if your whole team is working from home with no clear end in sight, you may be wondering what to do about your lease.
Berkonomics
MARCH 24, 2016
Dave’s note: This week we welcome guest author, David Friedman, to tell us about his favorite startup CEO, and his take after interviewing her – asking for her list of attributes for startup success. . By David Friedman. I met Kirsten Mangers several years ago after she successfully sold her startup, Webvisible. Kirsten is the founder of ChickLabs , an incubator that focuses on helping primarily women entrepreneurs.
socalTECH
NOVEMBER 30, 2016
It's the age of smartphones and mobile data, where there are now apps gathering an immense amount of information about where we are, what stores we visit, and what we are doing. How do you make sense of all that data and actually help it to drive business decisions? Pasadena-based UberMedia (Www.ubermedia.com) is taking that data, and sorting through it to help businesses.
Southern California Tech Central brings together the best content for technical professionals in Southern California from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
SoCal CTO
JULY 19, 2016
I’ve had lots of conversations with fellow CTOs about the TechEmpower Web Framework Benchmarks. Some really appreciate the value that they bring to help them understand performance characteristics of different frameworks. Depending on the Technical Performance Requirements for your system, this could be really valuable information that is part of your framework selection process.
Tech.Co
NOVEMBER 7, 2016
In addition to being a tool for burgeoning startups and lucrative companies, virtual reality is also a great way to escape the stress of everyday life. Whether you’re whisking away to another planet or sitting by the beach, a little virtual relaxing can do the body good. Now, virtual reality is being used as a therapeutic meditation tool to help people find their zen and reduce stress-related health issues.
SoCal Tech Calendar
MAY 31, 2016
For today's Insights and Opinions article, we have Melinda Moore , author of How to Raise Money: The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding , who gives us some tips on crowdfunding. Instead of getting VC funding, a lot of startups and creative projects turn to the masses or the public -- often through popular crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, AngelList or StartEngine.
L.A. Business Journal
DECEMBER 30, 2016
Core Innovation Capital of Hollywood, a financial services technology investor, has raised a second fund worth $71.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 11, 2016
Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca For the first 5 years or so after I became a VC I didn’t talk much about what I thought a VC should be excellent at since frankly I wasn’t sure. I was mostly doing my job and trying to figure out how to be better every day. After a decade on the job I’ve started to speak more openly when newer industry colleagues now ask me what I’ve learned.
TechEmpower
OCTOBER 19, 2016
I want to combine the elements of multiple Stream instances into a single Stream. What's the best way to do this? This article compares a few different solutions. Stream.concat(a, b). The JDK provides Stream.concat(a, b) for concatenating two streams. void exampleConcatTwo () {. Stream a = Stream. of ( "one" , "two" ); Stream b = Stream. of ( "three" , "four" ); Stream out = Stream. concat ( a , b ); out. forEach ( System. out :: println ); // Output: // one. // two. // three. // four. }.
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 26, 2016
Many first-time founders seek advice when thinking about what ideas would be great for a startup company and receive the wrong advice that you need to focus on a billion-dollar idea. There are very few ideas that are obviously a billion-dollar idea from the start. So what should you do? I advise founders to focus on what I call “basecamp,” which is the first level of success or validation at a startup.
TechEmpower
JULY 5, 2016
If we have a long (64-bit integer) that we serialize into JSON, we might be in trouble if JavaScript consumes that JSON. JavaScript has the equivalent of double (64-bit floating point) for its numbers, and double cannot represent the same set of numbers as long. If we are not careful, our long is mangled in transit. Consider 2 53 + 1. We can store that number in a long but not a double.
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 14, 2016
There is much discussion online and also in small, private groups, about why the price of technology companies – public and private – are falling. Valuing any company can be difficult because it requires a degree of forecasting future growth & competition and ultimately the profits of the organization. And two big changes have happened that are widely known – in the past quarter the value of some very high profile companies such as LinkedIn and Twitter have fallen substanti
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 24, 2016
MakeSpace , the leading provider of next-generation storage for consumers, today announced an additional $17.5 million in funding on TechCrunch led by Harmony Partners and Upfront Ventures to double its footprint of 3 cities (New York, Chicago & Washington DC) to 6 in 2016. We raised this capital in what has increasingly become a difficult market for fund raising so I’d like to share with you some details on how we get it done.
L.A. Business Journal
OCTOBER 28, 2016
Henrik Fisker has charged back into the electric-car market with a new energy storage technology.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 1, 2016
Having time to think about “leadership” at most startups feels like a luxury. It feels like something you could turn your attention to once you have tens of millions of dollars and a large staff to run operations and you could step back from it all and think about how to lead. The reality of most startups is about survival. And because running a company requires money to fuel staff and offices and acquire customers and the like, much of the time spent in early days at a start feels l
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 18, 2016
Every year at Upfront we try to analyze the venture markets. We try to look at the sources of capital, the valuations, exits and trends. We use this try to draw some context that informs our funding decisions. Of course we fund companies in good markets and bad. In venture our goal is to fund companies over a 10-year+ time horizon, which is the time it takes to build truly transformational companies.
L.A. Business Journal
OCTOBER 14, 2016
Record labels’ piracy lawsuit could be a tune-up in the fight against converting videos into MP3s.
Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 5, 2016
The funding environment for tech startups is an ever shifting ground as we go through predictable shifts that go hand-in-hand with the slowing of the overall market. The most important shift I would characterize as the market moving from “high conviction” and thus strong follow-ons to “limited conviction” and lots of gamesmanship / games of chicken … at your expense.
Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 21, 2016
Today Upfront Ventures is announcing that we’ve backed Rebecca Kantar ’s startup Imbellus , a company designed to assess human potential and ultimately change the way we teach children. We led a $4 million investment along with Thrive Capital, GLG and Sound Ventures. The news blogs will cover the what, how and how much but I want to focus on the “why” and try to be instructive of what I think makes for a great A-round startup.
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 8, 2016
Much has changed in the past four months of the technology startup world and how outsiders value the business. Of course it’s too early to predict whether this is a trend or an aberration but the smartest people I know in the industry are predicting the former. The startup industry may be “resetting,” which doesn’t mean a “crash” but rather just a resetting of valuations, timescales, winners/losers, capital sources and the relative emphasis of growth rates vs.
TechEmpower
FEBRUARY 25, 2016
Round 12 of the ongoing Web Framework Benchmarks project is now available! A race against the clock. Recently, we were notified that the physical hardware environment we have used for Rounds 9 through 12 will be decommissioned imminently. This news made Round 12 unusual: rather than wait until we can equip and configure a new environment, we decided to conclude Round 12 while the current environment remained available.
L.A. Business Journal
NOVEMBER 14, 2016
Two years after Maker Studios co-founder Danny Zappin was ousted as head of the online video firm, a group of former and current executives at his new venture, Zealot Networks, is trying to acquire the branded content company and replace him as chief executive. Zealot co-founder Robert Vanech, the firm’s former chairman and chief financial officer, said he had approached Zappin about the deal and was seeking the backing of private investors and a publicly traded media company to back the bid.
Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 1, 2016
Rolf Winkler wrote a piece in the WSJ about A16Z’s returns in which he says they “lag behind Sequoia, Benchmark and Founders Fund.” Scott Kupor of A16Z responded with a comprehensive overview of valuation methodology in a post that while accurate feels more targeted at sophisticated Limited Partners (LPs) who invest in funds. Let me offer you an insider’s take.
L.A. Business Journal
OCTOBER 21, 2016
Facebook has launched an unfriendly feud by aping the features of social media upstart Snapchat.
L.A. Business Journal
NOVEMBER 25, 2016
Software giant Oracle increases footprint with record Santa Monica office deal.
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 9, 2016
There was so much great content at the Upfront Summit but I think one held a special place in minds of most people I talked to – our panel on diversity led by my partner Hamet Watt (<– what? you’re not following him?). The message of the panel was very clear – “We don’t need your help. We want to partner with you to make money.” And I’ll elaborate on this but I wanted to start first with an important quote from Magic, said with a very positive
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 6, 2016
I talk about failure a lot because I think it can be tremendously instructive and I think that success without failure often masks underlying lessons. I even prefer to fund entrepreneurs who have experience some level of set-backs in their careers or startups because I think it brings a humility to decision-making that I find healthy. I have experienced many first-time entrepreneurs with too much hubris if fund-raising came easily and press was fawning and employees joined in droves and customer
Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 23, 2016
Kobie Fuller, Partner at Upfront Ventures We set out to build a venture capital firm that would not only be a beacon for the rapidly growing LA tech ecosystem but also one that would compete and collaborate nationally with the best firms in the country. To do that you need to have the most talented partners and operating staff because entrepreneurs (and venture capital funds) have choices about whom they will work with and the best deals go to the best firms.
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 4, 2016
In modern society we’re all over-worked and over-loaded with information and tasks and to-dos and obligations. Nowhere is this more apparent than working in a startup where you are definitionally under-resourced and trying to make big accomplishments in compressed periods of time. That’s why focus is critical. Saying “no” often to people who want to divert you from your mission becomes obligatory if you want to make progress.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 27, 2016
I was speaking recently to the team at NuOrder , an LA-based company we’re an investor in about “realism in startups” — an impromptu talk I have given to any of our portfolio companies who ask. During the Q&A I was asked about how I make investment decisions in early-stage businesses. I was asked again in an LP meeting later in the week and then again at a founder breakfast gathering we hosted yesterday.
L.A. Business Journal
SEPTEMBER 30, 2016
Russian private aviation holding company CJSC S7 Group’s purchase of Sea Launch, a rocket launch company that operates out of the Port of Long Beach, is making waves in the Southern California aerospace industry, with a legal challenge by the Boeing Co. and concerns about the Russian company’s involvement.
L.A. Business Journal
OCTOBER 21, 2016
Photographers have expanded their focus to protecting copyrights in the internet age.
L.A. Business Journal
OCTOBER 14, 2016
A previous firm of Kobe Bryant’s venture capital partner Jeff Stibel netted several lawsuits with its business practices.
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