
A tale of two tech cities: Silicon Valley vs LA - swombat
http://www.jasonnazar.com/2008/11/23/a-tale-of-two-tech-cities-%E2%80%93-silicon-valley-vs-los-angeles/
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pg
And yet oddly enough SV is where most of the most profitable startups have
been. Focusing too much on revenue at the expense of strategic vision is not
sound business sense, but premature optimization: you ride a greedy algorithm
to the top of whatever local maximum is nearest, and you're done.

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staunch
Docstoc is a rip off clone of Scribd. An LA company copying an SV company.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Scribd is Linux/Rails and Docstoc is
Windows/ASP.NET.

SV vs LA indeed:
[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=docstoc.com%2C+scribd.co...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=docstoc.com%2C+scribd.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=1)

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gojomo
"YouTube for documents" was a pretty obvious permutation to try. Do you have
evidence DocStoc saw-and-copied rather than independently-devised?

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staunch
I do know that Scribd launched, got a lot of fanfare, and then DocStoc
launched a remarkably similar thing. But that could be just coincidence. Their
CEO being an MBA? I'd call that proof!

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silencio
Los Angeles is a tech city? I've lived in LA forever, but just now started to
really notice an actual tech community..I never really felt the same vibe here
as I do in the bay. And of course it annoys me to no end that half the tech
events and startups here are entertainment related. I can see why, but I'm
still annoyed :)

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sgoraya
I would say there is a higher concentration of tech companies in the orange
county area and cities like Irvine as opposed to the immediate LA area. In
general, a lot less web startups and more biotech and videogame/entertainment
companies.

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silencio
Oh, that would make a lot more sense. I live in LA proper and don't really
venture out to meetups outside of the city. There's plenty of game companies
here (the significant other works at one), but I suppose I meant more along
the lines of Hollywood when I say entertainment.

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sgrove
There are some nice meetups in LA, though they're a bit rare. I'm a big fan of
netsquared, but mahalo meetups can be nice. Also LAWINE, depending on your
taste and knowledge.

I live in Orange County, and haven't had much luck finding suitable meetup
venues here (web-related anyway).

If anyone is in/from the area and knows of anything worthwhile, please speak
up.

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AndrewWarner
I do several tech events in SoCal through Mixergy.com. I just did one in OC
last week. It was held at a PR company's office. There's a growing tech
community in LA, OC & San Diego.

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geebee
I only lived in LA for about a year, when I worked for a small film
compositing software company that was later acquired by apple (like a genius,
I left for grad school before that happened). We were located in hollywood,
right in the middle of it all.

It was kind of fun to be in LA. It has a different vibe from SF. But all in
all, the hacker culture seemed pretty similar to me. Very friendly folks - a
dude who had an academy award (the science achievement kind) was willing to
sit down with me to explain how to use a plugin for a couple of hours.

This was back in the late 90s, before things truly exploded. Maybe it's
different now... I also didn't get around all that much, so I can't say if my
experience was typical of hollywood high tech.

BTW, Kathy Sierra had an interesting post on the "hollywood model"

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pchristensen
_"The goal is to be monetization masters who are focused on consumers and
build viral, capital efficient products, and to leave behind the full of shit,
spam artists who are snobby about not making money."_

In other words, do everything right.

