00:00:01 [Music] moving the needle on founder failure one conversation at a time i'm your host lucas poles and welcome to startup 2.0 by spark xyz join us each week as we give you access to some of the top investors and entrepreneurs around the country to help you think through and overcome some of the top challenges that start-ups i think there's no better place in the country to be investing than los angeles what is the problem that you're solving and for who like what is that specific pain point sometimes when a company is not

00:00:31 listening to its customers and just thinks it knows better than it customers has a really really hard time finding product market fit i want to see somebody that that isn't gonna stop you know this person you just feel like they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna make it work [Music] andy welcome to the show thanks lucas excited to be here yeah it's great to have you on i really appreciate uh the breadth of experience that you'll be able to uh to to bring to us today and so oh look at time out breadth of

00:01:05 experience that sounds like i'm old careful careful uh we're already gonna have to do a cut because i'm already i'm already uh i'm already messing up but it's supposed to be fun that's we're gonna this is gonna be your best interview ever oh i'm very excited i'm very excited uh so i guess so okay with that not old uh short breath of experience let's let's talk about let's talk about your background yeah yeah so um you know just to keep it simple i think about my professional career kind of in three

00:01:41 chapters so um chapter one i went to business school at harvard city engineering at dartmouth uh was gonna become a corporate titan um and one of my goals was to take a company public and super fortunate to get you know connected to the right i'll call it a spin out versus a startup in literally five years uh into that we had taken a company public and uh it was kind of a technology services company and i really fell in love with the technology versus the corporate uh so then committed the next really 15

00:02:15 years of my life of building ventures um spent time um you know running a number of venture venture-backed companies uh worked at idealab was very fortunate to be involved in i think what is their most successful company called overture services that invented paid search as we all know the monetization engine behind google uh and then um kind of stolen my venture path ran a venture fund with some business school buddies called momentum ventures you invested in maybe you know 18 tech uh analytics driven companies

00:02:48 mostly in b2b um you know took active roles in the board kind of had to jump in as management and then um so that was kind of the end of chapter two and then chapter three is really focused on community impact work um so i felt you know have benefited so much from southern california and loved the region though it's not without its flaws um really felt to somebody who um had found their way here it's time to get back so i wear two hats now i'm a part-time elected official i'm the vice mayor of the city

00:03:22 of pasadena a city council person but my day job is is running the alliance for southern california innovation and hopefully get a chance to talk about that so um yeah that's it's pretty yeah lots of experience oh great in that different experiences yeah definitely uh and we'll definitely be diving into uh some of the vc stuff uh after especially your transition from operator to vc but let's uh i guess let's start with socal alliance so uh let's walk through what is it what is its goals uh uh yeah so um

00:03:57 i know like like me you share could have great enthusiasm for what is going on in southern california uh and you know something company has come a long way i remember you know 15 years ago when i was in the startup world literally i could name every vc you know and count them on two hands uh it was very small community um we've come a long way since then um and the you know we're kind of by most measures kind of number three in terms of um innovation ecosystems in the united states after silicon valley and

00:04:30 kind of a close second to new york you may have seen in the most recent um nvca venture monitor that um southern california now could have matched the bay area in terms of dollars of a venture capital deployed in our region close to 20 billion so we're literally probably 10 or 20 x where it was you know 15 years ago which is great progress that being said when you look at the incredible richness of southern california from its um extraordinary research institutions to its you know a large population probably by many

00:05:02 measures the largest of engineering talent engineering phds we produce you know by far actually more entrepreneurs than the metro new york area not not quite silicon valley level but i think we're we under um kind of we don't quite punch at our weight classes the way i like to describe it um another analogy is you know kind of a eight-cylinder engine operating on five cylinders um and so how do we get you know uh that that engine or um that capability to to really get um realize that we can be kind of the

00:05:37 global leader that i think we have the potential to become and um i think of innovation is really um kind of the fuel to problem solving um and it could be i see you have a space in the background like how do we help bring you know civilization to new planets like how do we solve mobility problems you know how do we solve biochemistry and you know there's so many capabilities that innovation or something problems innovation can address i think southern california has you know all those ingredients

00:06:05 and you know we do a um a decent and respectable job and a better job but i think we we're far from where we'd like to be so the alliance's mission is really to think about the region from that lens and um what are the the kind of opportunities to kind of put those pieces together right kind of i think of the ingredients here how do you make a cake if you have the green ingredients if you want to create something really extraordinary you need to blend those ingredients and so we're that super connector

00:06:32 right that um kind of inventories and connects and hopefully energizes and catalyzes uh the region um and we do that really through you know a partnership model right so there's no way that you know a small not-for-profit organization is going to move you know a 1.4 trillion dollar economy in 20 million people so it needs to be very much a leveraged model so we you know work across stakeholders and initially it was focused on the r1 universities and you know janet napolitano who was in the chancellor of

00:07:03 uc was very active in our early formation and we brought in obviously um great institutions like usc and caltech and the claremont colleges um because a lot of ip comes out of that intellectual property innovation that doesn't make into products and companies right this missed opportunities so we originally kind of started with our focus there and now have expanded the lens to kind of unifying i'll call it kind of leading innovation corporations you know so the disney's the warners the pimco's the

00:07:32 amgens the edwards the kaisers the edisons those are all um key partners of ours primarily their chief innovation and chief technology officers and um of course this all kind of targets against entrepreneurs and startups um and they are a number of you know tremendously important organizations that support startups across southern california um you could think of you know in um in san diego there's connect in orange county there's octane and um uci beale pod innovation here we have lava and never so they're all kind of very

00:08:06 localized but they're all fragmented so we work very closely with those organizations and um also the investors so uh as you're aware we have a program that we recently announced bringing top venture capitalists together and so if we could kind of weave that fabric together right we think that is the the magic of is if kind of southern california is we have the threads but it's not kind of woven into a fabric and so by getting people to kind of share a vision and excitement around the region we think we have an opportunity to kind

00:08:37 of once again elevate it and kind of create opportunities for all of us like you know an amplification model yeah yeah no it's super uh obviously great work uh i think that there are uh what's the best way to put it uh you're right the ecosystem is hyper hyper fragmented uh it's also the diverse i think what's you know if it was all in one place and very homogeneous then we wouldn't need an alliance right but when you're really spread out and you're very diverse and you're kind of working in your own little bubble

00:09:06 um it's hard to get collective impact and i think um you know really great innovation is is a highly collaborative activity and so um because of just the nature of the landscape you need to have intentionality and we're kind of like an organization that brings intentionality of bringing those pieces together yeah which i find super interesting and it's great that i mean even you looking at like southern california right so la and san diego but even just in la there are different pockets like pasadena has its own pocket la has its

00:09:38 own other like santa monica has its own pocket and so even there's definitely a lot of work to build uh to bring them together but uh definitely i think it's kind of like um and we're really fortunate as you know we have a boston consulting group as a strategic partner uh we're one of their largest pro bono clients uh in southern california and some early kind of heat mapping work you did but they did just is really on point with what you just said is that southern california is not one place it's a network of places

00:10:07 and they identified i think it was 14 innovation centers of excellence and what's cool is that they all have their own dna right they're kind of complementary not competing um but they operate independently so if we can elevate uh what's happening in those communities and you know innovation happens in a place you know it'll be work in our lab or at a coffee shop um but they kind of don't necessarily um connect together they get critical mass so we we're kind of that glue that takes all those those micro

00:10:38 communities um helps stand them up if they're not there activate them and then then connect them into a powerful network they're really kind of interesting model and as an engineer like how do you use this kind of systems model right the systems problem uh and we want to be that kind of that connector or that glue that makes the system work yeah so i mean i guess i bring to another thing that you just previously mentioned around uh universities so uh from my perspective i think that the the ip that comes out of the

00:11:08 universities is a really big mess that i feel like we've been we've had for a while and i feel like the universities are slowly starting to wake up that they're throwing out all of this ip and not getting anything really back for it um what are you doing specifically kind of with them to kind of bring them into the full to help drive a lot of those innovation changes you know and you know we are fortunate to have kind of that richness in terms of number of research universities um those universities receive somewhere

00:11:37 between six and seven billion dollars of grant funded research an amazing breakthrough intellectual property is created there in laboratories at you know ucla and ucsd and all this stuff and um and the question is how do you productize that how do you get it out um and it's a little bit like you know the tree falls in the woods and no one's able to hear it do you hear anything and if a great idea is solved but no one takes the intellectual property and creates a business or a product it's like opportunity missed so two things that we

00:12:08 do specifically in that area one is we run a annual kind of big innovation showcase called first look socal where we source attempt to be 60 to 70 teams across southern california and they're teams that are built on intellectual property coming out of research universities that are prepared to spin out ready to be companies and you know for every team there's probably you know 50 100 500 projects going on so these are ones that are kind of getting to be incorporated and you know have maybe someone dedicated it

00:12:40 could be a postdoc or something like that um so we choose um from those 60 or 72 teams we choose 30 over a two day period we um showcase those to investors in first look socal that's episodic happens once a year um recently because of that um in we found and we heard this from our corporate members um is that they were they found that interesting but maybe they only saw one company that was doing you know robotics or ai and those are their interest areas so we um recently launched a program called

00:13:14 strategic university research expo where we on a monthly basis thematically search those same you know 15 or 20 universities and r d centers around a theme and bring out qualified teams to showcase on a very specific topic so we just did one on vrar we're doing on on um applied robotics uh we alternate month to month on life sciences so we have one on small molecule oncology um in the the life science track we do with with a group called um oh my goodness biocom who because this subject matter expertise

00:13:51 so um the the challenge of those things it's kind of a matching process like that could really be great through it of innovation on let's say space exploration but you know you're a software company um so part of our kind of magic i hope is to have a big enough network that we can you know target those matches right in those kids intellectual property to people who are trying to solve sort of problems so those are two examples around trying to create pathways of breakthrough innovation to get out of

00:14:17 universities into the hands of companies startups people who can translate that that know-how um into impact right products that change the world yeah no that's honestly it's uh very fascinating uh you're definitely getting after it uh well done um okay so you're you're very good at seeing the uh addressing specific problems within the actual ecosystem so what are some of the additional gaps maybe that you actually see within the ecosystem right now that uh that could uh that you're maybe targeting to fill

00:14:53 uh as we kind of progress over the next couple years and i think you know you you've seen this been around um the ecosystem has since kind of the center of gravity actually moved a bit uh you know not to really date myself but you know uh i'm gonna sound like al gore but the commercial internet was kind of invented and pasadena when you think of the history of earthlink and city search and etoys these are like idea lab i mean it was you know 1.0 uh i think when we got through the great recession which now with the

00:15:24 pandemic i know it's like what's the next thing called um you know the center of gravity around kind of tech innovation move to sunken beach yeah and i think part of this is recognizing um that that innovation is happening across the region right you go down to el segundo and you go to you know there's the starburst accelerator and tech star is space down there and you go to you go down to orange county and the the med tech work that's being done down there is extraordinary i mean so i think getting people to understand

00:15:51 that kind of diversity and richness and really distributed nature of innovation i think people will get it right they don't want to the place and um and i love sloka beach but it's it's only just kind of the tip of the iceberg with respect to the story um and i think we we have a very diverse ecosystem and i think um because that's hard to characterize and one of the challenges we have and we're working on is you know how do you tell the southern california innovation story because it's not as simple you know we

00:16:19 just do software if we do bub [Music] so how do you come up with a moniker uh and i think it's really about diversity and convergence right you can't have convergence everything is the same right for us we have all these areas of expertise uh and i think it's makes that kind of cross-pollination of you know how does ai fit here how does digital health work in a healthcare system so i think we're kind of more um looking for horizontal problem solving across different industries because we're not homogeneous in that

00:16:54 way um and that's you know it's a harder story to tell them you know we just do you know san diego has a great reputation in biotech but they also have a great reputation in wireless right and defense uh i think as humans we like to simplify this story and southern california's not really a super simple story and finally i'd say you know access to capital um as i mentioned we the region had a great year um but only you know probably 10 or 12 percent of that capital it came from local funds i think in you know you're in the

00:17:25 investment business that relationships um uh really are critical in terms of building ecosystem community support mentoring so hopefully over time we'll figure out how to get more the capital that goes into great companies coming from local investors um you know we've had a number of large funds recently announced um as you know um you know sinai march of the new fun graycroft has a new fund you know um upfront is working in a large new fund um so i'm hoping that with more capital here we'll kind of i don't want to see

00:18:00 be self-contained in insular but i think um create a little bit more of continuity of capital availability within the ecosystem yeah and then finally i think access like i do think we have a very diverse community and we have great innovators in places like riverside or south central and uh i think being intentional about creating on-ramps to include uh those groups and those you know bold thinkers uh in the innovation process and ecosystem um is imperative and um you know our mantra is you know

00:18:33 diversity in southern california's you know superpower yeah practice that not just say that right and i think um access and availability um is an important part of that so it's kind of a long answer to your question but i'm you know i'm bullish like i think we've come a long way uh and i think these are kind of next generation challenges and i know that the region is up for for tackling those and you know a lot of things like you know pledge la i think is an incredibly important piece of work and love working the

00:19:03 annenberg foundation on that and um they're people who are really leaning in um already in terms of female venture capitalists in their chapter down here and ivaho and karen ortman once again i'm really in a barber uh i think we uh really pushing ourselves to to to walk the talk yeah not 100 i think that's honestly one of my favorite things about southern california is the actual diversity simply because it creates uh it creates such differentiated products but then you also don't have uh it's a great testing ground for

00:19:37 understanding what people actually want or maybe just a simple bubble which happens a lot in silicon valley that's how actually correct you give an opportunity to quote one of my favorite people in southern california so francis arnold you may know run the won the nobel prize in chemistry about a year and a half ago the first woman to win the nobel prize in chemistry and her whole kind of innovation was around using biodiversity to solve problems so you think about kind of survival to finish but you need to have

00:20:07 diversity of around how things are working to find better solutions and so she sees diversity as kind of the fuel for innovation and i think southern california has that fuel um and once again i think long term it will be our competitive advantage it's a little harder to get anyone lined up and we're all so different so i think you know silicon valley was a little bit more homogeneous so they got kind of up and running and sprinting faster but once we get um kind of our more complex organism kind

00:20:35 of uh running on all eight cylinders i think we're gonna be a true juggernaut yeah well so do i uh it's honestly it's been wild to watch the uh evolution of l.a because like i'm one of the few people from l.a and i remember in i think it was like probably 2011 2012 someone told me like oh silicon beach i'm like what are you even talking about and so it's uh it's been an interesting uh uh a wild but very positive shift on uh on the ecosystem as we kind of graduated into that top three uh run to ruin soon to be

00:21:14 top two we're uh we're gonna take down new york soon i think we are oh man so i guess let's uh let's jump back uh uh i guess back to you a little more of your experience as we kind of run through so uh you were you've been an operator you've done uh you've done venture maybe what are some of the uh lessons learned uh from seeing both sides of the uh you know you know provide a little logic behind the path is that if you love innovation you need to be an innovator right and you do that as a entrepreneur

00:21:55 individually and then i think about like a vc you do that in their portfolio and really my passion for ecosystem building is you think about the highest level in terms of enabling innovation you create the circumstances and conditions in which innovation can happen so i kind of feel like that is in a little bit the progression i think about in terms of being a champion for innovation um and you know uh i love you know when i ran companies and you know i was always super passionate at least all entrepreneurs especially if

00:22:22 you're the founder like you got to believe in what you're doing like if it's you know some business idea that you kind of came up with because it was um you know an exercise i thought exercise versus something is internalized um often that will get you there just because you know the entrepreneurial journey is a very difficult one and if you're not deeply motivated to kind of slay all the dragons and get over all the hills um unless you happen to get extremely lucky um you probably won't make it you kind

00:22:50 of you you'll give up belief and it's you have to be a believer right um and i think that's one of the big challenges honestly for for entrepreneurs is um you got to be in all in right to kind of i think to build a transformation transformative company and i'm not talking about a copy gap and somebody says hey i'm going to do this in a different way um and sometimes you're wrong right maybe more often than not you are out wrong right statistically and so when when do you figure out um whether you are just wrong or you just

00:23:24 haven't tried enough times no right i don't know the answer to that because you know edison you know he never he didn't fail you know a thousand times he just figured out 999 ways not to do it yeah and i think it's really hard to figure out whether you know you're kind of barking up the wrong tree or whether you just haven't tried enough times but that's the key challenge that i you know and i'm still involved in companies and i'm still passionate about problem solving but i never kind of figured out what the right answer was

00:23:52 yeah um because at some point you know if you're wrong then you're doing yourself a disservice you actually should be working on the next one yeah but if you're you know as soon as it gets hard if you bail out like you're never getting done anyway right so what what is that that balance um so that would be you know one observation from the out from you know the entrepreneur's side from the vc side you know uh you know truth be told um i i loved um being a vc in the sense that i really loved helping entrepreneurs um

00:24:20 and as a byproduct that i probably wasn't a very good vc because i hate to say vcs um really need to value their time and kind of um sound a little cool but kind of drown the puppies in the sense of you know um most of them don't make it and i'm so empathetic to entrepreneurs that like i'm like lucas i'm going to help your company succeed and like i really should be not helping you and help you know investing in three new companies yeah so it was very hard for me to not um be overly empathetic uh with entrepreneurs uh just because i

00:24:51 i value they're they're the ones who build great companies right and i know how hard it is and uh and i know how much they put themselves out there so i think it's it's a balancing act to be a good vc to kind of you know pick great entrepreneurs but also um you know you can't hold them up or you can't kind of do the work for them um it's kind of a little bit of a darwinian game um it doesn't mean you have to be an about it but um i think it was hard for me to um you know let go of entrepreneurs and

00:25:19 not feel like i was at their side trying to win the battle yeah and then i think it ultimately is someone who's kind of looking at the ecosystem um i think what's incredibly compelling about southern california is because it's diverse we are we don't feel like we're competing uh like we feel like we're kind of looking at things from a different angle so as a byproduct of that there is a natural inclination for almost everybody to kind of uh be part of a bigger conversation like part of a bigger effort

00:25:51 and if you're you know kind of fighting for the same oxygen because you're doing the exact same thing and you're kind of a zero sum game then i i find people are not nearly as collaborative so i think um people have kind of come to realize that we have a huge opportunity here and it's a byproduct that are leaning in together in don't see this as a competitive situation but see it as a kind of a mutual benefit and kind of we're going to raise all boats and it's really great to see and i think it's frankly somewhat unique

00:26:21 uh to an ecosystem that's this far evolved where people really are are looking to to help everybody right kind of expand i think that's one of the biggest advantages that we have over silicon valley because i've seen silicon valley vcs do some crazy things because there's just too much capital up there and so i've seen someone add like founder b on linkedin so they could find founder a and invest in them and just some insane things whereas like in l.a we all pass deals back and forth to each other it's like hey i'm thinking about

00:26:53 investing in so and so uh what have you heard maybe you want to invest too maybe we'll just we'll go through and bring in a couple other people around and but it's very open and and i don't know it's not aggressive or hateful the way that it can be uh it absolutely can be up north and so i think teamwork i mean i think kind of like you know um if you have superstars then you kind of forget teamwork and certainly silicon valley is you know there's a lot of superstars whether they're entrepreneurs or vcs and

00:27:22 here i think we have a lot of hard-working capable people who are i'm trying to achieve an opportunity together right and i think it's um it's difficult for that collaboration because we're so spread out and that's where kind of our role comes in is to try to shrink the distance yeah and we have you know by bringing people together and we have a digital platform and we're working on an umbrella brand strategy it's all about kind of unifying the pieces right to get collective impact not standardizing it trying to make them

00:27:50 homogeneous but trying to kind of put them together uh in a compelling way i think about it it's like a mosaic right you can have all the pieces and all the colors that are there but if you kind of sort them like oh wow this is this is amazing and i think that's our view of southern california have you seen as a semi uh as maybe one of the the silver lining of govid in that uh la is very difficult to get around it won't take have you seen uh maybe the collaboration or the ease of collaboration increase

00:28:24 uh because we've been forced to all be online uh at this point as has any of that happened or uh not so much but definitely and i have to tell you that um my car came off lease in december and i was gonna make the move uh electric you know right now i don't have a car because i'm literally not driving anywhere i could have picked out the car and i was gonna order him like my last car sat in my garage for you know 11 months and had 500 miles on it and so we were happy to get the lease back because the last 10 000 miles

00:28:57 weren't used so we aren't you know we aren't sitting in traffic this is your point and i think um the virtual world does shrink to geography right you know your west side i'm pasadena you know we have people in san diego we have riverside um and so um i i think there's going to be a silver lining and i hope there's going to be kind of a long tail on some of that um i do think um collaborations uh in relationships i should say um still um benefit from having some time together you know in three dimensions so my hope

00:29:32 is that we'll see some sort of hybrid model uh where you know before it's like hey you know you know andy wouldn't come out and see me so that means he doesn't respect you know what i'm doing it was kind of judgmental like you had to cross the rubicon to you know show that you were worthy but i think people realize that that's kind of silly um so i i think that kind of requirement will go away it's a little like facetime in an office um but i do um i am eager and i think our work will benefit from you know reintegrating um

00:30:04 in-person activities you know into the portfolio right not making an exclusive and i think we're um you know this would be balance yeah so yeah i think it's been great especially for a place that's so big and spread out um to really embrace um you know virtual uh connectivity and platforms you know like zoom yeah i have found that you've had during this time we've had to be much more intentional with uh our networking or the conversations that we end up having because whereas before we go to event we'd see

00:30:38 like five or ten uh people that we hadn't seen in a month and we just catch up it's just very easy whereas now it's like okay i have to i have to have some intentionality behind this to actually chat with someone i i remember talking to a friend of mine that's a series a fund and we ended up talking for an hour a couple weeks ago just because we hadn't caught up uh in a while and so being very intentional during this time i felt as uh also makes you appreciate the conversations you're having and i

00:31:09 think um from my experience so far and i've tried different tools and been involved in different platforms that kind of serendipitous networking that is difficult to replicate yeah um so i think you know it needs to be intentional i think if i were to critique myself i'm probably more productive in terms of being intentional in building that work but um because i don't bump into the people i already know like as a byproduct of being out there i think some of my um kind of existing relationships probably

00:31:43 have suffered a little bit because that that kind of i saw you at an event with 10 other people that would take 10 phone calls right 10 zoom meetings to see those people um so that that's probably suffered so i need to get my my ass back out in the field oh gosh so uh i want to switch topics i guess uh a little bit um we talked a little bit about uh bringing ip out of universities something that has always kind of plagued me and you definitely touched on earlier was this idea that we graduate usc caltech ucla we graduate more

00:32:26 engineers than anyone else in the country uh how what is your vision or how do we end up keeping these people in la rather than just going up to the bay or or maybe into new york like how do we just hold on to them and there is a study i think you probably saw it um i can't remember where it's one of those big um zip recruiter one of those big online platforms attract talent placement and if you look at graduating um stem students you know silicon valley keeps like you know 85 percent of of their students and we keep you

00:33:02 know like 35 um obviously you know a place like boston which is really just a university town doesn't have that many jobs maybe 35 they're even less but that would make sense i think we would like to believe southern california is you know a job center um so you know there is a discrepancy between you know where the talent's grown and you know where it's kept uh and we should have a natural advantage because you know hey southern california is a pretty good place to fall in love with yeah not today because it's one of the 10 days a

00:33:31 year it rains uh but and we do a poor job i think we do a poor job and i um i think part of that goes back to that branding discussion i was happy you know having is like and i've helped kids get jobs locally and part of us don't even know the jobs exist so yeah you know when they came in tech the people equate tech to silicon valley um and i think we need to let them know that you know if you're if they're going to you know want to be in entertainment they they assume they stay in los angeles so

00:34:00 i think we need to you know um educate um the students that you know the universe is diverse as we just said and you know ironically there's you know more tech jobs in southern california they are entertainment jobs um but we you know entertainment has a natural advantage because it it's they're consumer oriented right everyone knows what's happening in the world entertainment people don't most people don't even know spacex is is is in southern california right and it's one of the most valuable tech firms in the in the

00:34:28 world yeah you know i said you know it's like a jimmy kimmel question you know where is spacex and i'm sure you know no one would get it right um so i think we have to get the word out that we have amazing tech companies one of our partners you know amgen which is one of the you know most amazing biotech companies in the world is you know here in los angeles edwards one of the most amazing med tech companies alteryx 10 billion dollar market cap ai company in orange county you go to the west um but you know

00:35:01 they're not household names when you're graduating and your you know your mom or dad are maybe paying your last tuition check and they're like lucas where are you going you say i'm going to you know alteryx or like never heard of that like why aren't you going to apple why are you going to microsoft so um i think we need to have a few more success stories here um and you know going public is is a good way to kind of publicize companies and obviously spax or rage and that's probably a whole nother

00:35:27 conversation but having more brand name companies that that grow um here in southern california making um graduates more aware of them i mean honestly you know i've seen this in the 15 20 years i've been in southern california even in the tech world we weren't building brand name platform companies we were building product companies that got scooped up so there was no real big company to kind of affiliate with it anyway yeah so i think as we see you know some larger companies rage capital i use you know snap is a good

00:36:01 example um you know and you know that's great uh i i mentioned alteryx they've hired five or they're eight senior people from silicon valley are coming down here yeah um so i just think it's um an awareness and you know scale problem uh and i say you know branding sounds kind of simple and magic wandy but i think as we get more success stories and celebrate those stories uh and push those to you know young energetic um graduates that will do a much better job keeping them here um but at the same

00:36:37 time they pay a huge amount of money right i was you know reading how much a 10-year facebook engineer makes it's like whoa maybe expensive in silicon valley but if you're getting paid that much money you probably survived um so it's going to be hard to compete by i think dollars and cents but i think for people who love this off on your lifestyle and the diversity as you said like um we need to do better we will do better um we can do better uh and i think you know i'm having some consistency to make

00:37:03 that a reality uh what movie you know awesome well uh yeah uh definitely great and uh i guess uh final thoughts and where can working people discover more about the uh southern california alliance yeah so um alliancesocal.org we're not for profit um and you know we are working with you know uh so many groups and it's the venture community is really excited about our work and corporates are too um and you know in the universities right those are um i'd say our job is to make elephants dance to the same tune

00:37:37 we're going to move an ecosystem it's not a you know six seven person not for profit that's going to make any difference but if we can get collaboration across the ecosystem people kind of pulling you know the ore in the same direction um the the capability of this region is you know is kind of earth-shattering um and it's exciting to be part of it and you know check out the alliance and you know come to first look or you know be an activist think about yourself not just as someone being an innovator or an entrepreneur

00:38:08 but think of yourself as part of a bigger community right i think it's that mindset this is we are building southern california and i'm part of that right you know this podcast the work you're doing as an investor uh all that stuff adds up and um if we can kind of put those on the same vector like this is you know watch out new york you're going to be in our rearview mirror because we're going to be uh the sure number two uh here in in innovation in north america no 100 uh really appreciate you coming

00:38:37 on the show and uh look forward to the great work you're doing as you continue well thanks for having us and thanks for the work you do and um you know we're along socal so um i'll prove you know we're gonna be right [Music] awesome