While people from around the world are drawn to the City of Angels for its movie stars, sunny weather and food; recently, people from up north are attracted to LA for different reasons. Silicon Valley, ground zero for tech and billion dollar unicorns, has expanded farther than one could imagine. The competitive nature of the startup industry has led some adventurous young companies south to Los Angeles.
Entrepreneurs are started to get wind of the wealth of opportunities Los Angeles presents that Silicon Valley now lacks from overcrowding.
Here are some of the reasons why they are spending more time in Southern California.
1. The City Energizes the Company
Jason Zuccari, president and co-founder of the app Sweeble, is drawn to Southern California
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This gives growing companies the opportunity to get access to key area players like social influencers, financiers, technologists, and developers. Because there's so much competition in San Francisco, startups find it's much more difficult to get access to those resources.
Detert says, "In L.A., the community is much more social and requires that you embrace the entertainment industry and attend events around town to forge these powerful business relationships. We are no strangers to 14 hour days but those include being around clients and social influencers for drinks, red carpet events, and conferences." Since opening the Influential office in L.A. Detert has found that the world's top companies like being a large part of this social revolution as they can now pay by guaranteed impressions.
4. Hollywood Money
Zuccari has found that Los Angeles has a large pool of investors interested in directing money toward technology. Some of these are big stars who are interested in putting their money into promising ventures.
"It's crazy because you know how things are with people who are busy, you'll get a note at the spur of the moment, 'Hey we can meet with you in 2 hours if you're available,'" Zuccari says. "If you're six hours away sometimes it's really hard to be able to get there."
5. A Personal