Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 17, 2010

It’s not uncommon for incredibly smart and talented Phd’s or CS majors from Stanford to raise $10 million on an early-stage “platform&# that if it succeeds it will be huge. LA generally doesn’t have an appetite for this kind of investment at early stages. LA investors are more pragmatic.

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Silicon Valley Technology Los Angeles Southern California 290

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 3, 2009

LA not only produced the obvious – MySpace – but also created the whole category of sponsored search (Overture), AdSense (Applied Semantics), Local Search (City Search), comparison shopping (PriceGrabber, Shopzilla) and lead generation (LowerMyBills). Andy Sack, Dave McClure, Brad Feld & Jason Nazar (photo by Jolie Odell).

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Silicon Valley Cofounder Hawaii Semantic 228

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz , who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet’s monetization.

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Silicon Valley Southern California Los Angeles Semantic 313