LA’s Shift from Cute to Cutting Edge

Growing up in the Silicon Valley, Los Angeles was always thought of as a cute place to visit.

“They have movie stars!”

That’s cute.

For years, Los Angeles played at being a startup hub. It seemed that everyone was more worried about how they looked than what they built, and for every interesting company, there were hundreds of cute companies worth not much more than a nod and a smile.

But somewhere along the line, that changed. All of a sudden Los Angeles realized that technology wasn’t what the “NoCal” folks were doing up north, but where future met reality.

Back in 2011, I met Walter Driver, who was launching a company called Scopely, that focused on mobile gaming. For most of his Silicon Valley counterparts, at the time, the bar was Zynga.

But Walter saw it differently:

“With what I knew about the entertainment business, I was thinking about how in almost every form of media, there’s a division of labor between the people distributing and monetizing it, and the people who are creating it. You have cable networks and showrunners. Book publishers and authors. Record labels and bands. Free-to-play games was one of the only forms of entertainment in the Western world where the people making the games were also the people distributing and monetizing them.”

With almost all of their investors being from outside Silicon Valley, we missed, and now Scopely with six consecutive number 1 games, has grown 5x in the last seven months and is doing $150 million in revenue.

Los Angeles, as a tech scene, has a unique view. Unlike anywhere else in the world, they understand all three sides of the equation. They understand the importance of the process of creation, the content itself, and the distribution and promotion of that content. And that’s not just in consumer apps. SaaS and eCommerce follows a similar path. Community driven apps. Even some high tech companies like uBeam, Hyperloop, SpaceX and Tesla could only be built in an environment where crazy is just due course of business.

And that is part of the reason I am moving there.

On a personal level, I am falling deeper in love with being a creator. Writing has fast become a focus and I want to spend more time around people that create because creation is the air they breath. I want to spend time learning from writers, directors, actors that have had success. I want to understand the business side of the movie business in ways that can only be done when you are waist deep in it all.

So in early 2016, I am going to put Taylor and the three cats in my car, jump on the 5, hold my breath at Harris Ranch, and head south over the Grapevine. I am not sure where I will settle, so would love suggestions.

Even with all that change, I am going to stay with my first love, working with founders. At Amazon, as a member of the Startup team at AWS, I get to do that daily. Trying to figure out how to bring the power of a $280B company to startups is just the type of problem I live to solve.

LA has shed the cute tag to become cutting edge, and I can’t wait to participate in the exploding entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Hey, LA, how you dooooin’?