I've lived in Los Angeles in 2004, and I liked this article a lot. But I think there's another aspect that I think the OP overlooked:<p>The dominant industry here will always be Hollywood, where the price of failure can be literally devastating. If your startup fails in the Bay Area, it's not too hard to become a line engineer at another company. If your hedge fund fails in NYC, it's not too hard to get another job at another fund, PE firm, or commercial bank. In some cases, these "failures" are looked at as badges of honor, and likely gave you a lot of hands-on experience you can directly apply to your next job.<p>But if you fail in Hollywood, you're looking at however many years lost of your life, when you were making no appreciable money as a bartender or barista, with likely no applicable skills to any other industry. I found it amusing the OP described LA rent as affordable -- which by NYC or SF prices, it definitely is! -- yet LA also has the worst income/rent ratio of any city in the US, by far[0]. This is not due to rent being too high, but due to income being too low, because everyone here is broke while they're trying to write screenplays and go on auditions.<p>It's really hard to live here without having friends involved in the entertainment industry, so in other words, it's really hard not to see this up close. And even if your friends work on the production or post-production side, it's not much better. At least you have a steady salary, but you're probably also working for a huge megacorp studio that literally embodies every single Office Space cliche. Or you're working for a production or post-production vendor that has to jump through ridiculous hoops and work ridiculous hours to get business from said studios. And while that steady salary is nice, it's still not nearly enough if you want to ever actually do own property some day.<p>So, I wonder how much of that also tempers the goals and dreams for LA startup entrepreneurs. I know it's something I think about often.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-6681/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-668...</a>
Cute PR piece.<p>I've lived in LA for the past six years and I can't wait to get out.<p>Pollution. Traffic. Crowds. Urban sprawl. Celebrity culture. Crazy property prices. Earthquakes. You name it, we got it.<p>I'd normally be happy that the tech scene is booming, except for the fact that they are turning Santa Monica and its surrounding neighborhoods into another Silicon Valley, with all the problems associated with the latter. Hence the name "Silicon Beach," which was actually invented in the 80s to describe the San Diego area but is now used to describe Westside LA.
This will probably make me unpopular. But: coding and designing (most) mobile apps* no longer is "tech". As they quoted in the article:<p><i>“Silicon Valley has created the platforms. The maturation of the space is what you put on those platforms.”</i><p>When a space has matured, and some group of people are deploying content to that space, then those people are not technologists any more than those deploying content to radio, TV, or cinema are. There was a time when radio and TV were tech, too. Now they're just radio and TV. Similarly, mobile apps will soon just be mobile apps, and firms that work in this space will no longer be thought of as being involved in "tech".<p>*By definition, apps that involve considerable development of some fancy new technology still count as tech.
Santa Monica is getting a lot better for startups. LA is not. My brother and I just moved to downtown Santa Monica from (from LA and San Diego) to work on our company. It's been awesome so far. We just got back from a really great event where Mark Suster interviewed Amit Kapur. Amit just sold his Santa Monica-based company Gravity to AOL. There's definitely a buzz here that didn't exist two years two.<p>Our product is real and traditional technology innovation. It is not media/advertising/ecommerce. We have decided that if the support here is just too weak we're headed to SV. So far it looks like it might work to stay.
There is a large and vital medical device corridor in the suburbs east of Los Angeles. It stretches from the Anaheim/Yorba Linda area south through Irvine and down toward San Diego. For instance, some of the best work in the world on ventilators goes on in this area. Two of the globally dominant medical device companies that specialize in this discipline are headquartered here. I was involved in a medical device startup in this area, and later switched to software R&D at a larger company. By contrast with the media glitz and general buzz described in the article, this industry is a bit straight-laced or "square". However, personally I have found that nothing compares to spending a few months on a project that will improve outcomes of premature babies in neonatal ICU's. This LA-based concentration of medical device expertise is a low-key hidden gem in this area.
New York, LA, probably others all have very fast growing tech scenes. And the worse things get in SF, the less of a lead the Bay Area has over these other cities. It is more expensive to live in San Francisco than in a nice part of New York, and way more than a nice part of LA. On top of that, San Francisco is a super lame mono-culture, increasingly comprised of mostly white and asian dudes between about 25 and 40.<p>More and more I hear of prominent engineers moving out of the Bay Area (Steve Klabnik is the most recent that comes to mind). I think that in ~5 years, the perfect storm of municipal disfunction (aging and already shitty public transit, insane rent and minimal new construction, strong lack of diversity) will cause San Francisco to quickly become much less attractive for companies and employees.
> “The broader mindset here is not just code,” said Bill Gross, the well-known serial entrepreneur and founder of an incubator called Idealab. “We have engineers with taste.”<p>Shots fired.
LA is awesome and I'm so happy to see this happening. There is a public school quality issue but if you're single or without kids, it's a great place to be. The tradeoff is good schools are either private or long commutes away from the Silicon Beach areas (west SF valley, Chatsworth, Calabasas, Thousand Oaks, Pallos Verdes etc).<p>In LA, they call Hollywood simply "The Industry". A lot of people I met did get burned out by 30 because of pecking order that is the industry. You can work your butt off and never grow in your career, then you realize you're still renting with roommates at 30+. It can get tough. I saw a lot of friends just leave for cheaper housing and more conventional jobs.<p>Hollywood does abuse it's tech employees (and most of it's other employees). But even non actors have stars in their eyes and take the abuse to say they worked on XYZ movie. And so the cycle continues, lots of ambitious young people enter the Industry while the burnouts throw in the towel. And the employers get away with it.
Here is a secret I will tell only to my HN buddies: for the right person, the studios have the money to beat most Silicon Valley giants and can definitely wipe the floor with whatever the Santa Monica startups will offer. The key is you have to love "the biz". This is LA, after all =)<p>Source: I'm a senior software architect at a very major Hollywood studio. Microsoft once offered me a nice salary, but the studio beat them by $20,000.<p>I love LA.
I'd love to see a similar little in-depth profile of all the various emerging tech hubs around the country and world. Boston in particular, followed by NYC. I see many parallels.
> Americans watch 5.3 hours of television a day, and they read for less than a half hour,”<p>[citation needed]<p>Honestly this probably isn't terribly far off, but I have a very hard time believing Americans read less than half an hour a day (unless you're strictly counting non-digitized reading, which is a useless figure anyway because many people read all of their non-web content on e-readers now)<p>I googled around and couldn't find a source either.
Ah, LA. How I miss you.<p>I don't miss the scalding desert summers when I had a job way behind the Orange Curtain. But oh, to live near the beach and have beautiful sunny days in the middle of December.