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