
The Sprawling, Booming LA Tech Scene Is Having a Moment - wj
http://recode.net/2014/06/09/the-sprawling-booming-la-tech-scene-is-having-a-moment/
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nhashem
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-2013q4-668...](http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-
affordability-2013q4-6681/)

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akbar501
> 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).

~~~
ekianjo
> In terms of employment, the government is the largest employer

Really ? Is that the only state like that, and why is it so in California?

~~~
rdl
Pretty normal for government to be the largest single employer, outside
smaller towns or cities with one huge employer.

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enraged_camel
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
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.

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redschell
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.

~~~
faster
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.

~~~
timjahn
Reminds me of Chicago. :)

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leot
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
>>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
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
You miss the point. Making a better product that is not solely a technological
feat is not anti-technologist.

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staunch
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.

~~~
ma2rten
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
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.

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gregfjohnson
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.

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wando
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

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nextstep
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.

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basyt
> “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.

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gdilla
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.

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BigChiefSmokem
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.

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calinet6
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.

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hmsimha
> 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.

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egypturnash
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.

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

