California’s most influential engineer wasn’t a computer scientist. He did math with a pen and paper, and probably would have thought the Internet was something used for fishing.
California’s most influential engineer did not deal with microchips. He likely had never even heard of silicon. Instead he gave people something much more important: water.
California’s most influential engineer was a civil engineer named William Mulholland. In 1913, he built the 233 mile Los Angeles Aqueduct that brought the water Los Angeles has used to go from 100,000 to 3.9 million people. The day it opened, at his inaugural address all he said was, “There it is. Take it.”
He created the oasis that would be used to launch industries. The people behind movies, aviation and the Internet all drank the water that he put there.
Since the beginning, Los Angeles has been home to innovation. Though our neighbors to the North have dominated that title for the last four decades - the tide is changing.
I live and work in Los Angeles, and this is why.
The Battle for San Francisco
San Francisco is a wonderful town. It’s 49 square miles of silicon gold (and unfortunately, it costs as much to live there).
All that computing power packed in such a small land area is good for the tech community, but it also fosters a hive mind of familiar ideas and ‘mainstream’ creativity. One VC put it best when he said that “Once Instagram came out, we entered the age of ‘Insta [your-idea-here].”
Rising real estate prices have begun to push out other industries, and with them, the city’s last hope for innovative diversity.
In parallel with the monoculture, San Franciscans have lost a lot of their ability to call garbage when they see it. Successfully launching an idea into a market of early adopters does nothing to predict how that idea will be received down the technology adoption lifecycle.
Lastly, ask any of the screenwriters in LA’s coffee shops: being in a big pond makes every fish expendable. And when you’re expendable, you’re just a little less special.
Unlike San Francisco, LA sits on top of 500 square miles divided haphazardly across 80 extremely different neighborhoods.
If you can make an idea work across LA, you’ve made it work for every major US customer demographic you’ll come across.
We’re Making Companies Over Here
Another common complaint is that LA doesn’t have the same talent that SF does. But Google don’t seem to think so. The biggest social media innovation of the decade – SnapChat is located in a sprawling campus in Venice Beach. Google, Yahoo and Facebook have set up massive offices in Playa Vista and SpaceX is headquartered off Hawthorne Blvd. Tinder sits comfortable in Beverly Hills next to the anonymous social network Whisper. The inventorsof Adsense – the product that made Google the advertising mogul it is today - were born here, developed here and now are working on their successivecompanies here. We’ve had multi million dollar IPO’s from TrueCar and the Rubicon Project. Vint Cerf sent the firstemail from UCLA. CalTech is the MIT of the West Coast.
We have tons of talent here.
The part that makes LA hard (but who became an entrepreneur because it was easy?) is that it’s a little bit tricky to find them.
The LA tech scene’s strength – as mentioned previously – is that it is spread out. Its weakness – is that it is spread out.
LA has 8 tech scenes: Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Playa Vista, Venice Beach, Pasadena, West Hollywood, Downtown LA and (bonus!) Tesla/SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne. Each of those scenes is about 30 minutes from the other one. Here is where dissenters would complain of LA’s second perceived weakness: traffic.
This is another misconception. The rap on LA is that it has the world’s worst traffic. Sadly in the US that is true, but who has the second worst? San Francisco. What’s more, the average commute in LA is actually less than our flower-wearing cousins. We just spend more of ours in traffic. The pain of spending a commuting minute in traffic is greater than the pain of spending a commuting minute moving, so even if the latter takes more time, members of our communities generally stay in their neighborhood rather than get their blood boiling on the freeway.
And yet, as our density increases, the network affects of that density will help LA grow at an exponentially accelerating rate. Getting in now, as momentum is turning for the industry, means that you get to take advantage of the supportive community, and quickly learn every name in town.
There Must Be Something in the Water
In a small but growing pond, getting in with the right people isn’t the hardest thing to do. Eytan Elbaz, one of the afore mentioned inventors of Adsense - the product that made Google make money - called me one morning to do a customer interview with me after an old friend at school passed on some contact info.
Cold emails work here. With a no good idea, I was able to grab advice from two major VC’s in town, without a warm introduction. We still hang out on Sundays.
The LA market is only going to get stronger - at an accelerating rate.
The fact that every neighborhood in LA is distinctly different from the next means that you’ll be able to test your product on every walk of life. Then, after you do your testing, you’ll be able to head to the beach.
The diversity of industries here means more creativity and variety, both in terms of collaborators and projects. The LA community has all the talent you need - you just have to look for it.
Next time you drink a glass of water, think of Los Angeles. One engineer has made billions of dreams come true here.
What could you do?
"There it is. Take it."