Introducing Innovation As A Service

by Howard Marks on April 10, 2013

StartEngine is Dead; Long Live StartEngine

Howard Marks

I go through musical phases, most recently being Johnny Cash. The other day I was jogging when “A Boy Named Sue” came on. The classic Cash song, actually penned by Shel Silverstein, is a far shortened bildungsroman, a story of discovery and growth for a young man. There are many memorable lines throughout the song, but my favorite has always been the following the fight between Sue and his father. Cash croons, in his warm gravely voice, “Son, this world is rough and if a man’s gonna make it he’s gotta be tough, and I knew I wouldn’t be there to help you along. So I gave you that name, and I said goodbye. I knew you’d either have to get tough or die, but it’s the name that helped make you strong.” That first line, in particular always sticks with me. This world is rough and if a man’s gonna make it he’s gotta be tough, a truer line has never been sung. It is a phrase that I wholeheartedly believe in and it applies to all aspects of our lives, business in particular. But in today’s chaotic market, since the introduction of that technological maelstrom we call the internet, it’s not just a rough world anymore. The world we live in is faster and smarter that ever before. And if a man’s gonna make it he’s gotta be faster and smarter too. Same goes for business.

For the past couple of years, Los Angeles, and the rest of the country, has experienced a business boom like never before. Hundreds of startups have sprung up, shattering the old norms and paving their new roads. But as the internet, and our economy around it, has matured, we’ve seen many of those businesses fall away. Great ideas that simply weren’t ready for the light of day, inexperience, bad luck, and a shaky economy have doomed quite a few of them. But those companies that made it through have come out stronger and smarter. From those exciting years, Accelerators formed to help and nurture this new class of young, tech savvy entrepreneurs. But Accelerators are businesses too, created by people, and neither is exempt from Cash’s maxim. If you’re going to succeed in this world you have to be tough.

StartEngine is the most prolific Accelerator in Los Angeles today.  We’ve had a number of amazing startup classes come through our now hallowed halls. We’ve had our successes, and our failures. But most importantly, we’ve learned from our mistakes. Some accelerators stuck to their founding principals and never compromised; some accelerators found wild success and great luck, others faltered and failed. It is simply the way of the world and business. We mourn their loss, but we learn from their mistakes.

What makes me proudest about StartEngine is our ability to learn, from our mistakes and the mistakes of others. StartEngine has never been afraid to pivot, a lesson we learned from the startups we fostered. We gathered the best mentors we could. We created a one-of-a-kind Entrepreneur In Residence program that shows enormous promise. We raised the amount of funding a startup can receive. We worked hard to improve the connections our startups can make and the products they produce. We help create the teams we’d like to see start companies, and for those talented people that come to us without direction, we aim to steer them correctly. We have never stopped trying new things, and have never compromised on being the best we can be. And now, we’re adding something new to the mix.

From henceforth, StartEngine will be known as StartEngine: Powered by Accenture Digital Services. I’m sure if you’re reading this article you’ve heard whispers about this transition already. Perhaps you groaned at the name or said it was a mouthful (I happen to think it rolls off the tongue nicely). You might be wary and doubtful, understandable. Don’t be. We know what we are doing and we have a great idea as to what the future is going to look like.

This is an exciting, promising, new direction we’re taking StartEngine in. People in business and marketing throw around the word “disruption” too often, never really knowing what it means to really be disruptive. We suspect this move will create that kind of real disruption so foreign to jargon spitters. This isn’t a marketing move, nor is it the first step of towards StartEngine “selling out”. This is a move forward, towards a completely new frontier.

Just like businesses need to pivot to stay viable, so too does the accelerator model need to shift to stay up with the current trend of the times. Los Angeles is this nation’s second largest city and the third largest metropolitan market on the planet. This place attracts more diverse talent than almost anywhere else and StartEngine has managed to capture and nurture a significant portion of that talent. But markets become saturated, and in Los Angeles, there are quite a few other accelerators. Not every accelerator does it the same way, but every accelerator aims to gather as much talent as possible and create the best companies it can from that pool. StartEngine has managed to capture an enormous amount of the talent in LA, but it has become apparent that it is time to move StartEngine into the next phase of its life, and that next phase is powered by Accenture Digital Services.

This next step forward for StartEngine is simple. Accenture Digital Services is advising StartEngine and its startups, we are offering our entrepreneurs a new opportunity to find success. Accenture Digital Services, with its global reach and gigantic size, will open up new paths few entrepreneurs could imagine, paths that could never be established through traditional means of networking. Their global reach will give our entrepreneurs the access they want to the companies that need them most. We will continue to offer our accelerator services for those entrepreneurs who wish to take a more traditional route towards success. But for those entrepreneurs looking for something a little different, we will offer them the Entrepreneur in Residence program, an opportunity to spend some time in house working hand-in-hand with Accenture Digital Services to create new ideas and digital solutions to some of the biggest problems in the world. It will give those entrepreneurs who have the drive but not the idea the time to figure things out. It will give the smartest and most talented people in Los Angeles an opportunity to test their skills with the most difficult and pressing problems facing larger companies today. This move can only benefit StartEngine and Accenture Digital Services.

We are not, and will never, “sell-out”. We are not becoming corporate. We will not compromise on what makes StartEngine great. What we will do, is move bravely into the future with as many new opportunities for success as possible. The world is a rough place that moves quickly; Accenture Digital Services will help us succeed no matter what the market might throw at us. This move is a win-win. If you don’t think so now, think about it again in a couple months when you’re struggling to keep pace with both of us. This is StartEngine done right. This is StartEngine powered by Accenture Digital Services.

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Raising The Entrepreneurial Boom

by Howard Marks on January 27, 2013

As wave after wave of LA’s innovative leaders make their mark by forming game-changing companies, the area once given the moniker of Silicon Beach (partly as a paean to its northern-lying progenitor) is quietly carving its own identity–even usurping the tech glitz of fabled Silicon Valley, long recognized as the cradle of virtual civilization

The greater Los Angeles area is disparate and gigantic. There is no easy way to describe the region, its people, and its culture. Hence, negative stereotypes (the easy answers) that have come to be associated with Los Angeles must be dispelled. More important, the ludicrous assertion that Los Angeles is what Hollywood makes it out to be, is patently false. That Los Angeles is mythologized. That Los Angeles is a veneer painted on the city’s surface with the clumsy hands of a distracted world. The city that thrives beneath the false exterior, supplied by people who have never once stepped foot on LA soil, exists in such a state because it doesn’t care. Los Angeles doesn’t care that the world thinks it is full of fakers, rich rude kids, backstabbing actors, leathery nutcases, entertainment executives, surfers, soul-searchers, and immigrants. Why? Because Los Angeles is too busy being better than anyone can imagine.

I will be the first to admit it: Los Angeles used to be a city full of those negative stereotypes come true. It was dirty, violent, corrupt, and downright strange for a while. But, in the early ’90s, something started happening to LA. Whether it was the wake-up call delivered by the Rodney King incident, the startling rise in gang violence, or simply the shuttering of the last automobile plant in the area, I can’t be sure. But LA got the message. At some point, the city of Los Angeles decided that it would no longer be the Los Angeles everyone else said it was, and instead decided it would be the city it wanted to be. It allowed Hollywood and the entertainment industry to continue capitalizing on its negative reputation, building its image overseas and through media. Los Angeles told the entertainment industry to make a cult of themselves, and the world bought it. Hollywood caught the collective attention of the planet while LA quietly did things that actually mattered.

What, might you say, did LA do? Well, aside from pioneering email (thank UCLA for that one), Los Angeles has also provided this nation with the future. After spending almost a year in transit, the Mars Curiosity Rover landed at the Bradbury Landing Site on August 6, 2012. The rover was designed with various functions in mind but only one goal: planetary habitability studies in preparation for future human exploration. The Curiosity Rover was designed and built at the Jet Propulsion Lab, managed by Caltech and located in Pasadena. Ray Bradbury, the science fiction author for whom the landing site is named, was a long-time resident of Los Angeles. Figuratively, as well as literally, Los Angeles brought this country the future. While Bradbury’s fictitious first expedition in “The Martian Chronicles” takes place in 1999, the only place anywhere close to the future in 2012 is JPL. And if it’s not them, then it will be Elon Musk and SpaceX, the first and only privately owned company to make a successful payload delivery to the International Space Station.

But Los Angeles has more than just space working for it. Every day, LA wakes up and prepares, not for today, but for tomorrow. Los Angeles has had a consistent habit of investing in the future in a way I have not seen any other state or community do, except China. I guess that’s why the greater Los Angeles area has the third largest GMP (Gross Metropolitan Product) outside of greater NYC and Tokyo, why the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are the busiest in the nation, handling more cargo than the next three ports combined, and why there are more registered businesses in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the nation. And I think the fact that there are more women – and minority- owned businesses here than anywhere else in the country is more proof within the pudding. The simple reality is that the entertainment industry is the second largest industry in Los Angeles, behind international trade. Los Angeles is not the one-trick pony your cousin in Kansas thinks it to be. Indeed, your Kansas kin wouldn’t be able to buy inexpensive goods at WalMart if the ports of LA didn’t exist.

All of this economic growth comes from the major investments Los Angeles has made in education. You may not realize it, but Los Angeles is a college town that puts Boston to shame. There are over 60 institutions of higher education in the greater LA area. Caltech, UCLA, and USC are all nationally top-ranked engineering schools. Add to those three schools UC Irvine, Harvey Mudd, and Occidental, and you have six of the nation’s best universities producing thousands of scientists and engineers every year. Caltech has had a whopping 31 Nobel Prize winners grace its halls, five of whom still teach at the school. Did I fail to mention that Caltech is the school that helps manage JPL right now in conjunction with NASA? The area is loaded with engineering and aerospace talent to begin with—135 aerospace firms call LA home—and it brings in more and more each year from around the country.

Due to the heavy investment in education, larger companies began taking notice of Los Angeles. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, it was my company, Activision, that was the first big tech giant to come to LA. Soon, we spun off Jamdat Mobile, which became EA Mobile when it sold for $680M. Overture in Pasadena was purchased by Yahoo. Bill Gross, the most innovative and impressive entrepreneur I have ever met, arrived with Idealab and took the town by storm with NetZero and others. Video game producers began moving here in the early 2000s, taking advantage of the path I had begun to pave and the close ties with the entertainment industry that were possible. Blizzard and EA moved in, shifting the industry’s focus. These were more stable tech companies and the city mostly missed out on the trouble when the dot-com bubble burst. It was only after and the dust had settled that I learned how fortunate I was to be here and not in Palo Alto. The tech companies in LA grew stronger and smarter because of it, learning from the mistakes of their fallen brethren.

In 2011, Google leased an office in Santa Monica.

By the time Google arrived, the world had undergone a technological rebirth. Myspace and Facebook redefined what it meant to market and collect data. Google had long been working on analytics never before possible. Companies began taking advantage of the increase of time on and connectability to the Internet to market and display new items in inconceivable ways. Twitter had redefined news; the world had become much faster, and subcultures sprang forth from forums like memes in an election. Make no mistake, at this point in the timeline, Los Angeles had yet to make any sort of debut on the national scale – instead it remained hidden behind national tragedies and its omnipresent shield dubbed Hollywood.

And while the nation fumed over Obama and the housing crisis – while Facebook rose and Myspace fell to the wayside, Los Angeles began strengthening its bonds within. You see, a solid foundation of talent from homegrown education will only do so much. Aside from enticing more talent to arrive each year – something Los Angeles has no difficulty doing – you also need to ensure that whatever brains are bred in the city wind up staying. Connections must be built, bonds must be forged, and slowly the city, once disparate (still disparate, what am I saying?), inched closer to a cohesive identity. The video game industry began cozying up to the entertainment industry. The mobile and tech industries then took hold of the video game industry. Soon, the other industries of the city, such as fashion and manufacturing, took advantage of the growing tech scene to get their products out easier. What Los Angeles wound up with was a network of highly motivated, incredibly talented, and constantly connected entrepreneurs who all had the collective realization that they could surf every morning, code through lunch, and make buckets of money capitalizing on the things around them. The things Los Angeles had built for them to take. The things they had to bring to the rest of the nation.

From my humble Activision, not so humble anymore, sprang Sky Dayton and others. From Sky came Jamdat, Earthlink, Viddy, Boingo and Lowermybills. Lowermybills exposed Matt Coffin to BillShrink and Ad.ly. The Myspace Mafia moved here following the site’s demise, but so gave rise to the entrepreneurial insights of Josh Berman at BeachMint, Chris DeWolfe of SGN, and Richard Rosenblatt of DemandMedia. LegalZoom’s Brian Lee took his connections and decided to change the face of online clothing retail and marketing singlehandedly. Through Lee came Teeology, ShoeDazzle, and StyleSaint. By the time Google arrived, the area was one quarter shy of tipping the proverbial Los Angeles pusher-game.

Now, just a year since Google arrived, I can tell you that the gloves have come off and Los Angeles is ready to get its hands stained. As the first wave of entrepreneurs got rich, they made a critical decision: they would stay and reinvest in the city rather than leave like they had from Silicon Valley. That first group of networkers made a commitment to the greater Los Angeles area and decided to re-invest. Accelerators became crucial to the tech startup experience; Amplify, Muckerlab, Launchpad, and my own StartEngine developed quickly. Venture capitalist groups like Crosscut Ventures and New World Ventures moved in to provide funding for the next big company. Success was easy as universities, like UCLA, began priming our accelerators with their own. Even the Mayor was forced to create a special council of innovation and industry just to keep up with the pace of the tech industry in his city. Now, there are hundreds of startups on the west side, and dozens more spread throughout the city. They stretch to places like Silver Lake and Downtown, Pasadena and Hollywood.

Now ends the Los Angeles masquerade. As the curtain of 2013 is drawn back, it will prove to reveal something startling. The entertainment industry, which the whole country has watched intently for so long, will experience a “great and powerful Oz” moment. As the new year unfolds, it will become clear how closely intertwined the fate of this city and the entertainment industry have become with the fate of technology. As we move forward, it will become clear that the tech and video game industries have become like blood veins running through the entertainment industry, keeping it alive for another generation. What is funniest to me, is how all of those people only concerned with Los Angeles as an easy-to-define-city, all those stubborn people not from LA, will fail to see this when it is right in front of their eyes. Los Angeles is built on three pillars called Technology, Industry and Trade, yet everyone too blind to see this will continue to invest in the entertainment industry, thinking it is the real money maker.

It’s easy to tell who is and who isn’t from LA now. If you’re from LA, you can see that Hollywood doesn’t need to be killed – it’s just a buttress for the pillars. If you’re from LA you know that technology, industry, and trade are what make this city great. If you’re not from LA, you keep thinking that its about the image. As 2013 comes and the boom gets bigger, it’ll be evident which side of Los Angeles will show. Every day I look at meetups and every day I am amazed at how many more are scheduled for this city. The people are restless and their minds are unquiet. The city is primed like a powder keg. Everything has come together for Los Angeles. Every piece of this place has been packed with plastique, an explosive I call entrepreneurialism. This is the year of the Los Angeles boom.

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The Top Ten Tech Entrepreneurs Based in LA – or – How LA Will Change The Country

by erikkindel on September 9, 2012

10. Brandon Beck – Riot Games

You might not want to believe it, but eSports are here to stay. The top five tournaments for StarCraft 2 in the month of June 2012 had combined prize-pools of over $150 thousand.  StarCraft 2 might be the most played eSport currently, but Riot Games’ League of Legends is garnering prize pools in the millions. This October, League of Legends is having its second world championship hosted in LA. The prize? $3 million to the first place team. If NFL sized payouts don’t prove the medium’s longevity, I don’t know what will convince you.

Brandon Beck and Riot Games had a simple dream: Take the most popular sub-game from Blizzard’s WarCraft 3, Defense of the Ancients (DoTA), and make it a stand alone. They raised some money, stole some guys from Blizzard, and released the game for free. Is it the most influential free game available? I’d say yes. Is Brandon Beck a genius? Yes, again. Has he changed the world? You bethcha.

 9. Adam Miller – Cornerstone OnDemand

Founder and CEO since starting the company back in 1999, Miller has led Cornerstone through 11 years of consecutive growth.  Adam Miller transformed his company into one of the world’s leading Software-as-a-service companies, specifically in the HR world. Cornerstone has been recognized as one of the nation’s fastest growing companies by Deloitte, Inc. magazine and the LA Business Journal. Miller was even recently honored as an Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year for 2011.His IPO clocked in around 200 million and he has over five million subscribers, making Miller a corporate juggernaut in the LA area.

8. Adam Goldenberg – JustFab  

Guess how many people think $39.95 is a good monthly investment? If you said 6 million (as of April 2012), you’d be close (because JustFab is growing by nearly to 500,000 members a month). Adam Goldenberg’s JustFab is one of the new heavy hitting membership fashion sites.  Even though their business model was tweaked a little while ago to give customers additional leniency, the business is still expecting to break $100 million in profits this year, up from $25 million in 2010.

In a recent interview, Goldenberg stated that the online apparel membership program was a “bigger than $100 billion” business and that he and other companies like his were poised to “take market share from traditional retailers”. Goldenberg thinks the membership program will hit its stride in three or four years, but I think that now is as good a time as any. Given Goldenberg’s Internet marketing prowess, I’m sure JustFab will continue to shape online retail for years to come.

7. Brian Lee – LegalZoom, ShoeDazzle

Graduating Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. in Econ/ Business from UCLA and with a J.D. from UCLA Law, Brian Lee was a talented attorney. Lee could have stayed in the law business and become quite successful, but Lee had a dream. Lee wanted to create startups that would redefine what a startup could do.

His first company, LegalZoom was founded with Robert Shapiro (part of the team that successfully exonerated OJ Simpson), instantly giving his company credibility unheard of in the start up community. In 2011, Business Insider ranked Legal Zoom #27 on the list of Most Valuable Startups. His second big project, ShoeDazzle, ranked #59 on the same list, and was founded with Shapiro again, and TV peronsality Kim Kardashian. In 2012, ShoeDazzle jumped from 3 to 13 million members. If that’s not enough, ShoeDazzle runs charity shoe programs, making the company good for your closet and the country.

6. Richard Rosenblatt – Demand Media

A SoCal native and graduate of both UCLA and USC, Richard Rosenblatt led the growth of Myspace from an unknown to a household name. Most recently, Rosenblatt cofounded Demand Media, launching in 2006 with $120 million in equity and the acquisition of eHow.com. You might know Demand Media better as the people behind Cracked, DailyPuppy and GolfLink. In total, Demand Media owns 20 media networks in the US alone and is one of the best reasons why Paul Graham believes Hollywood is dead. Rosenblatt is one of the biggest reasons why I think Silicon Beach is the future of the entertainment industry in the United States.

 5. Matt Coffin – LowerMyBills.com

There are a couple of names that pop up all over the southern California entrepreneurship community. Matt Coffin, president and founder of LowerMyBills.com and SoCal Entrepreneur of the year for 2006, has an absolutely ubiquitous presence in LA.  Coffin sold LowerMyBills.com in 2005 for 300 million and took that money into the Los Angeles startup sector.  Coffin has personally invested in Machinima, Mahalo.com, Demand Media, Rubicon, Docstoc, ShoeDazzle, Deal Quad (sold to Beachmint) and so much more. It seems like every successful company in the LA area has Coffin’s signature scrawled on it.

4. Sky Dayton – Earthlink, eCompanies, Boingo

Sky is a guy that could easily go #1 on this list.  When he was 23 years old in 1993, Sky heard about the Internet and realized that it was the future. Not the next wave, not a trend; Sky didn’t look at the Internet in 1993 and say, “What an interesting passing phenomenon, I could use this to generate a modest income”. No, Sky logged onto the Internet and realized that it was the future, and he had an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

Following Earthlink’s incredible success, Sky founded eCompanies, an accelerator that helped spawn LowerMyBills.com, JAMDAT Mobile, and business.com. But Sky wasn’t finished. He then went on to found Boingo, the worldwide wi-fi aggregator and one of the largest wi-fi providers on this planet. Every time you want to use the Internet at an airport, you have to go through this man. Hell, if it weren’t for this man, we might not have the same Internet we have today.

3. Gil Elbaz – Factual

Here’s a man with all the brains of a Silicon Valley engineer and all the big ideas and known-how of an LA entrepreneur. In an alternate universe, Elbaz would be a super villain á la Lex Luthor (so much intelligence its scary), but since he’s here he’s poised to become the most important inventor and entrepreneur. In fact, The New York Times said he might be “the most influential inventor in the booming business of data collection and analysis”.

Elbaz is the cofounder of Oingo, which launched AdSense in 2000 and changed their name to Applied Semantics. Google quickly bought AdSense in 2003 and Elbaz’s A.S. team became Google Santa Monica.  Elbaz’ AdSense accounted for 28% of Google’s total revenue, or more than $2 billion. Now, Elbaz has turned his attention to Factual in an attempt to harness all of the facts on Earth.

2. Bill Gross – Idealab

There are some people who have entrepreneurship running through their veins. Gross started off selling candy bars in middle school, stepped up to selling solar power engine sets during the energy crisis of the 70s, and then moved into the software business when just out of Cal Tech.

Since 1996, Gross has been running Idealab. Close to 100 companies have come and gone through Gross’ doors, 35 of which have gone public. Yes, that means a number have failed, but his successes are too important to ignore. Picasa, CitySearch and ESolar have all gone through Bill Gross and without his steady hands, the companies, and Los Angeles, wouldn’t be the same.

1. Elon Musk – SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Paypal

What would this list be without Elon Musk? South African born, Musk bought his first computer in grade school and learned how to code, selling his first piece of software at 12. Musk pointed his big brain towards three questions: “One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space”.

Elon Musk began with PayPal (neé X.com) grown virally and bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in shares. His second venture was Tesla Motors, creating the first production electric car of the modern era.  Finally, and probably his best-known company, SpaceX is Musk’s third hyper-successful business. When NASA privatized the space-race, Musk was there with his rockets, Falcon 1 and 9, and spacecraft, Dragon, to take up the burden. SpaceX’s rockets and spacecraft were the first privately designed and built craft to put satellite into Earth and dock with the International Space Station. If there’s anyone poised to take over the world in a hyper intelligent coup, its Elon Musk. I, for one, welcome our new entrepreneurial overlord.

 

-Howard Marks

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Experience Is The Best Teacher

by Howard Marks on July 24, 2012

The old University of Bologne (founded 1088) created the first academic charter ensuring academic freedom within its boundaries. Since then, the university as we know it has come to mean any institution of higher education generally focused upon the rigorous learning of complex areas of study, like syntactic structures of Creole languages or the intersection of metaphysics and particle physics. All of this is well and good, and above all necessary (for where would our society be without poetry), but perhaps the university has been steering too many students towards the books and away from the real world.

When it comes right down to it, a university is better off creating entrepreneurs than anything else. To successfully run a university of any size (from massive ASU – 59,000 students – to Lilliputian in comparison, Harvard – under 8,000 undergrad) requires constant donations from its alums to pay for the necessary costs of sports teams, professors, grounds and cleaning up after an army of young adults. The government grants received by a university, while hefty, aren’t large enough to pay for everything, and despite their steep admissions costs (Harvard full-freight clocked in at $55,000 for a year), a university is largely dependant upon its alums to help pay for everything. The more successful the students are, the more successful the university becomes. Why, then, are more students not being funneled into the world of the entrepreneur?

Every university has some sort of employment program or features on-campus recruitment fairs from top companies that have good relationships with the university. Universities are supposed to ensure their students come out educated and prepared for their careers. Still, should a university prepare its students for jobs as employees of large companies, or should a university take it upon itself to ensure that its students are as successful as possible? Should a university prepare its students to have a life, which we can all do at some point or another, or take a risk? Frankly, the reward for the student and the university are far greater if the university supports the student’s risk.

This ideology is catching on in the best institutions of higher education in the country. Both Stanford and Harvard have in-house entrepreneur accelerators. UCLA has been changing their culture to be more entrepreneurial and USC has started running entrepreneurial competitions with prizes between $50,000 and $100,000. It is clear, to the top universities in the country that the risk is worth the extra capital.

But if there is one career that universities need to start pushing more, it is computer science. For decades, Stanford’s number one major was History, and then it was Economics for years. Now, Stanford’s #1 major is computer science, and large companies and startups are starting to take notice. Even the New York Times recently published an article about the power of the University of Washington computer science program amongst tech startups in the Los Angeles and San Francisco bay area. Knowing how to code means you know how to make something that already exists technologically accessible and have suddenly created a new market. Clearly, the best way for our universities to prepare our students for tomorrow is by equipping them with skills in entrepreneurship and computer science, today.

The more successful entrepreneurially minded alums that graduate from the university, the better the reputation of the university. The cycle continues and both the students and the institution are better off for it. Learning for the sake of learning is important, and the skills gathered through the pursuit of knowledge are invaluable to every walk of life, but universities are better off telling their students to strike out on their own rather than work for someone else. It’s already started happening in post-graduate studies: now, more MBAs go to startups over consulting positions.

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12 ENTREPRENEURS THAT ARE CHANGING LA FOREVER – Forbes, July 2012

by Howard Marks on July 9, 2012

The Amplify LA guys

The group of guys at Amplify.LA  have all come together and are making major moves in the LA scene. Amplify.LA was cofounded in late 2011 by Paul Bricault, Richard Wolper, Jeff Soloman, Oded Noy and David Carter and is a hands-on startup accelerator (and is actually a startup itself). These guys each have their own impressive entrepreneurial and visionary backgrounds, so together there is no telling what they are capable of.

Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis is an accomplished Internet entrepreneur, probably most known for founding Mahalo.com. Calacanis has also been an Angel investor since 2009. Calacanis actually grew up in New York where he was founder, CEO, and editor of the Silicon Alley Reporter. When the dot-com era struck, it became VentureReporter.com and has since sold to Dow Jones. Jason then became CEO and co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. (which AOL purchased in 2005 for a cool $25-30 million). He’s also the co-founder of ThisWeekIn and founder of LAUNCH and LAUNCH conference. Clearly Calacanis has already made his mark on the Internet industry. As a seasoned entrepreneur, there is no telling what he will do next.

Paige Craig
Paige Craig is a well-known Angel advisor and investor in the LA scene. Recently though, he add CEO and cofounder of BetterWorks to his resume. BetterWorks helps small and medium sized businesses reward and retain employees with big-company style employee perks and recognitions. He co-founded his first company, Lincoln Group, in 2003. Craig is one to watch because he’s an investor who has switched to the entrepreneur side. He has a strong background in knowing what works and what fails for other companies and will undoubtly be growing BetterWorks through that knowledge.

Bill Gross
Bill Gross founded Idealab in 1996 and currently serves as the company’s CEO. Idealab tests multiple ideas at once and then turns the best of the ideas into companies. Before starting Idealab, Gross founded several other companies: GNP Loudspeakers (now GNP Audio Video), GNP Development, Inc., and Knowledge Adventure. Idealab’s mission is to create companies that challenge the status quo and change the way people think, live and work; and they are doing just that.

William Hsu
William Hsu is one of five cofounders of Muckerlab, yet another startup accelerator in LA. Muckerlab, however, is focused on serving Internet software and media entrepreneurs. Before founding Muckerlab though, Hsu founded BuildPoint at age 23. Before the company was acquired in 2004, he helped BuildPoint grow to 250 employees and raise over $50 million. He’s helped several other companies, like AT&T Interactive and eBay, achieve impressive numbers as well.

Mike Jones
As a junior in college, Mike Jones founded his first successful online company which was eventually sold to PBJ Digital. Since then, he’s become an expert at founding, building and selling web based companies. He’s also served as CEO of Myspace and Senior Vice President of AOL, is an angel investor and an advisor to startups around the west coast. In November 2011, Jones launchedScience, a company that develops new businesses, assists emerging companies, and transforms later-stage assests. With over 18 years of experience in developing and growing businesses, Jones’ newest business venture is likely to be huge.

Adam Lilling
Adam Lilling is a self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur and now spends his time helping out other entrepreneurs as the director at LaunchpadLA. Before joining LaunchpadLA, he started Pentagon CDs and tapes, one of the first online music and video stores which was sold to Virgin Records in 1999. He later developed Panzanga and BiggerBoat. Not a newcomer to the startup world by any means, he’s providing great insight to the novice in the industry.

Howard Marks
Marks’ entrepreneurial expertise is in building companies in the video game and online gaming industry. Most notably he is the founder and CEO of Gamzee, which are social mobile games that play on any device. He’s also the co-founder of Start Engine, an LA based accelerator that helps tech startups build a solid foundation for success. Marks got his start at the University of Michigan, where he studied computer engineering. From there, he and a business partner gained control of Activision and turned the ailing company into a video game powerhouse. Marks was also CEO and founder of eMind and Acclaim Games, Inc. Start Engine has a goal of pumping out 500 LA startups in just five years, with this level of ambition, you’d be crazy not to keep an eye on him.

Jason Nazar
In 2007, Nazar founded Docstoc with co-founder Alon Schwartz. Today he is the CEO. Docstoc is an online community to find and share professional documents; it currently houses over 20 million documents with more than 25 million registered users. Before starting Docstoc, Nazar founded Choice Speakers Inc., was a partner at Venature Capital and Consulting and created Startups Uncensored.

Kamran Pourzanjani
Bestcovery was founded in 2008 by Kamran Pourzanjani, who is also an angel investor. Bestcovery is basically a quick and easy way to find the best of everything. The company’s experts help you find the product that is best for your individual needs. Before founding Bestcovery, Pourzanjani was co-founder and CEO of PriceGabber. PriceGabber quickly became one of the most popular comparison shopping websites and had an enterprise value of about $500 million when he sold it in 2005.

Jeff Scheinrock
Jeff Scheinrock is currently the CFO at Originate, a company that invests elite engineering talent and startup expertise into high potential opportunities. Before teaming up with Originate, Scheinrock was the CEO of his own company, Scheinrock Advisory Group, which merged with Originate Labs. Scheinrock is actually a CPA with extensive experience in international financial markets, corporate finance, capital structure, acquisitions and strategic investments. He also teaches entrepreneurship courses at UCLA. With his well-rounded business background, Scheinrock is shaping the minds of young entrepreneurs in the industry.

Kevin Winston
Digital LA was founded in 2007 by Kevin Winston and is now the largest networking organization for the digital entertainment industry. With over a decade of experience in digital entertainment, Winston continues to push the envelope and better connect and inform LA entertainment professionals. Recently he organized the Silicon Beach Fest with LA companies, accelerators and venues. Silicon Beach Fest is the first startup entertainment tech conference in LA. There were over 2,000 attendees, speakers, organizers, sponsors and volunteers at the first event, and no doubt next year will be bigger and better.

Who else do you think is changing the game in LA?

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