Sitting amongst LA’s marquee tech companies like SpaceX, The Honest Company and Tinder is a flourishing community of startups and rapidly scaling companies paving their own paths.
Medely, for instance, created a platform to make it easier for nurses to find supplemental work, and reversely, for hospitals to find them. In five years, the company has added thousands of medical outpatient facilities in need of traveling nurses.
In the B2B software space, RingDNA’s AI-powered Salesforce integration has helped sales teams at companies like Amazon Web Services, ChowNow and Nutanix convert more inbound leads. Today the company sits more than 100 employees deep and continues to expand with open roles in content, engineering, HR, operations, sales and project management. (Check out their positions here.)
Meanwhile, MeUndies has pioneered the direct-to-consumer space with its fun prints and fair trade practices, setting the precedent for brands that have followed in recent years.
These are just a few examples of the hundreds of companies contributing to Silicon Beach’s reputation as a healthy tech hub. For more, see below.
What they do: Launched in 2012, ringDNA’s AI engine analyzes sales rep and customer conversations to help sales managers identify what works and what doesn’t. These insights have helped onboard sales reps faster and increase topline revenue.
Location: Sherman Oaks
Sales strategies revealed: Chief Sales Officer Cameron Orr told Built In that his team follows a “land and expand” strategy to make moves in enterprise prospect accounts.
“We’ll use LinkedIn to figure out whether anyone in our organization has connections within a company and leverage those. We’ll also have a rep call into the sales department of a company and talk to their inbound team about their sales process and challenges,” Orr said.
What they do: Leaf Group is a digital house of brands that includes Well+Good, Hunker, Livestrong.com, Society6 and Saatchi Art. The company went public in 2011 and has more than 340 employees globally, with more than 200 in California.
Location: Santa Monica
Investment in DEI: This past November, Leaf Group named T. Tara Turk-Haynes as vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Turk-Haynes joined Leaf Group in 2016 as the director of people and was promoted to lead its inclusion strategy and executive diversity efforts.
What they do: Medely’s marketplace connects healthcare professionals with short- and long-term jobs per diem or based on a desired location. Since 2015, more than 4,000 hospitals and outpatient facilities have joined Medley’s network to find staff.
Location: Santa Monica
Tips to grow your network: In a Built In article titled How to Build a Meaningful Network as a Minority in Tech, Aldo Gomez suggested attending events where the goal is enjoyment.
“Exploring a shared interest in a relaxed environment made me a lot more likely to follow up with the people I met, whether that be through a volunteer opportunity or a class I took to learn more about an outside interest,” Gomez said. “Then, I was able to develop some legitimate and lasting connections.”
What they do: Founded in 2014, Sure provides digital insurance programs for industries like travel, rideshare and art. Its proprietary platform supports the steps between sales and service and offers rating, quote and binding, policy insurance, premium collection, CRM policy administration and reporting.
Location: Santa Monica
Building with Python: CTO Yarden Sachs shared with Built In in Spring 2020 why Sure leans on Python for its most scalable projects, including its rate order calculator (ROC).
“ROCs are like very long math problems. They take variables, like your age and your car model, and end up telling you how much the insurance for your car costs,” Sachs said. “To get to that final cost, we need to build in a lot of factors and database lookups, and Python is perfect for making elegant and performant code.”
What they do: A digital mortgage platform, Cloudvirga offers automated workflows to help originators close loans faster and a point-of-sale solution for consumers to get approved more quickly. The company processes more than $200 billion in loans annually.
Location: Irvine
Meaningful performance reviews: Senior Talent Director Anne Hurtubise told Built In why she likes to keep performance reviews simple in order to make the most impact.
“We ask a few basic questions like, ‘Does the company recognize my value?’ and, ‘Name one thing that would impact my ability to do better work,’” Hurtubise said. “We combine these questions with a discussion about what the employee does well and areas for improvement, submitted by both the manager and the employee. We confirm areas of alignment and focus on anything a manager and employee may not view similarly.”
What they do: Flowspace’s warehousing and online retail fulfillment solution help merchants deliver two-day shipping. Its network consists of more than 1,000 warehouses that are connected by Flowspace’s logistics platform to support businesses of all sizes.
Location: Culver City
Pushing positivity while remote: To help break up the monotony of remote work, as well as the heaviness of 2020, Flowspace employees introduced Slack channels that shared random daily workouts, recipe exchanges and home tours. They also started a Friday companywide newsletter to promote positivity that includes dog portraits, feel-good news stories and remote-life tips.
“We want this to be a separate thing that people get, which takes them out of their day-to-day work and lets them take a break for a minute,” Sarah Gardner, head of people and culture, said. “It just connects them and gives them other things to talk about with their coworkers rather than just work.”
What they do: Orcas, cannabis leaves, constellations and more. MeUndies’ direct-to-consumer underwear makes all these patterns a reality with monthly subscriptions, an online shop and a physical store on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Location: Culver City
Feedback segmentation: Manager of Consumer Insights Laura Leonard told Built In about their adoption of the Qualtrics platform and the impact it has had on processing customer intelligence.
“Through automated surveys and advanced statistical tools, we are able to dig deeper into our customers’ behaviors,” Leonard said. “We then combine multiple sources into our data visualization tool, Looker. From there, we can marry behavioral information with transactional data to give us the ‘what’ and the ‘why.’”
