I haven’t said much about SoCal Tech Group on my personal blog, but in light of its recent success I am compelled to give it a proper shout out.
The SoCal Tech Group was put together roughly two years ago by me and a few of my buddies from PhatNoise. Its mission is to help connect technical folks in the Southern California area with each other and the venture community. I am a big believer in entrepreneurship and in LA.
I remember from PhatNoise’s early days just how many times I was traipsing to the Bay Area with pitch in hand, only returning with serious doubts as to why exactly why the company remained in LA. It was NOT an asset to be in LA: all the good developers move to SF (so I was told), and being an LA startup gave most folks in Nor Cal the vibe of a slightly sleazy Hollywood party. On many, many occasions did I consider returning to the Bay Area — it’s where I grew up, after all.
In the end, for PhatNoise, being in LA did have its advantages; we had both automotive companies and the port of Long Beach nearby, which is a great asset in the hardware business.
But I also knew why I personally wanted to continue to be in LA. First, it’s a dynamic and massive city. It is a mashup of cultures and industries, all lying on top of each other. It’s also a very creative city – the arts scene here is incredible. This is a place where, on a daily basis, you’ll likely be healthily confronted by many opposing opinions, something unfortunately missing in most Bay Area circles.
Second, the academic pedigree of Southern California seems to be under appreciated. While certain communities in the US are synonymous with higher education, SoCal can’t shake its sunny reputation. But the fact is LA has been home to some of the most influential people in technology. You can start with the legendary physicist Richard Feynman at Caltech, or maybe the more recent computer science greats such as Leonard Kleinrock and Judea Pearl (both from UCLA). The founders of both Blizzard entertainment and Broadcom were UCLA students, and Andrew Viterbi – the father of modern cellular communications – went to USC. Goto.com, from Pasadena, was the first to develop a search advertising business model. The communications systems responsible for letting the Mars rovers talk to earth were designed by a good friend and classmate of mine.
But the physical scale of LA is a challenge. You don’t have the serendipitous run-ins that frequent many SF or Palo Alto startups. You can’t get an impromptu gathering of people at a coffee shop quite as easily as in other locales. So the community, in my opinion, remains fragmented and not interwoven with the city they live in.
So this posed a challenge to STG as well – how can the group break this habit of forming disconnected communities in LA? The answer would lie in social media.
When we started, socaltechgroup.com was largely brochure-ware. A set of static pages with little call to action, and since all of us founders has such busy lives, we were not able to devote much time to make the site more effective. Well, starting in the fall of 2008, I started from scratch with Wordpress as a foundation. I made pages for each of the consulting members. I made articles about the group and any events we were doing. I created Facebook and Linked In groups. I installed all the standard analytic and SEO tools for Wordpress. In short, I made ourselves known – and as a result, we have tripled our membership in just four months. We’ve been able to make great relationships, and we’ve started to help out the community by helping market events like Startonomics.
This is where I see a very practical future of the web: maybe just like in Blade Runner, Los Angeles is a look towards the city of tomorrow. A place where we live in such close quarters, yet we don’t interact. We crash, but we don’t connect. The web may be the connective tissue of people, serving groups as niche as startup entrepreneurs or as broad as entire societies. It is less about mimicking the offline world, and more about bringing people and ideas together. Regardless, this is just the beginning, and I am proud to be part of an effort that is working on this right now, and right in my backyard.