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Why Has LA Suddenly Gotten So Much Attention from VCs and Entrepreneurs?

Both Sides of the Table

The monetization engine of the Internet that powers the most profitable business perhaps in history was invented and perfected in Los Angeles and is what you now know as Google Ad Words. But the “monetization heart of the Internet” doesn’t stop at Overture, Applied Semantics and MySpace. ”).

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“Speed and Tempo” – Fearless Decision Making for Startups « Steve.

Steve Blank

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

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Touching the Hot Stove – Experiential versus Theoretical Learning.

Steve Blank

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. 2-way search is still in the works but I have the semantic extracted tags (thanks to Zemanta) feeding in to many search engines (activate realtime frankensearch). I was an idiot. What type of feedback do you think I should go after?Obviously

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Want to Start a Technology Company in LA?

Both Sides of the Table

so I feel I have an unbiased appreciation for BOTH Californias. LA produced Applied Semantics that created AdSense and was bought by Google. You don’t have a pool of thousands of Google engineers to hire when they’re ready to leave the mother ship. Gil Elbaz from Applied Semantics has now created Factual.

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Some Thoughts on Branding Startups and Communities

Both Sides of the Table

A market leader in content, music, entertainment, textiles, engineering, aerospace and trade. The birthplace of sponsored search (Overture), semantic search (Applied Semantics which became Google AdSense), comparison shopping (ShopZilla, PriceGrabber) and many others. An innovator in technology, especially monetization.

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Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley?

Both Sides of the Table

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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A Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley

Steve Blank

If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. California Dreaming.