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Following five years in a senior product marketing manager role at Google and YouTube (which stemmed from her previous role at Applied Semantics), Eva Ho has dove headfirst into the LA startup community. Currently, she’s a mentor at MuckerLab, VP of Enterprise Sales and Operations at Factual and a managing partner at Susa Ventures. Ho said she will be spending more time getting Susa, which just launched at the beginning of the year, off the ground in 2014. Built In LA caught up with Ho to hear what she is most excited about going into the new year:
What does Susa have in store for 2014?
Susa is a relatively new fund, but we are very active investors. We have made 12 investments to date and plan to do many more in 2014. We spend most of our time sourcing the best deals as well as supporting our portfolio companies with operational and technical help. I am always looking to invest in the best entrepreneurial minds in data-driven companies. If you are working on a world-changing idea or startup, we would love to talk to you.
How do you assess the LA startup community and what should we be doing more of in 2014?
The LA startup community is more vibrant than ever before. This is due to a number of forces that include: its natural strengths in entertainment and digital media, a scrappy and tenacious startup culture, decreasing costs to start a business, explosive icons like Snapchat and a new tech-captivated mayor.
This has made LA an attractive and fertile place for great startups to call home. Also, we have more second-timers, serial entrepreneurs and investors who are providing more emotional, instructional and financial infrastructure for the seedlings to grow and thrive.
In 2014, I would like to see:
1) LA’s politicians and government do more to create infrastructure around office space, mass transit, etc. to provide more congruence and density for startups.
2) More investment dollars coming into LA to make it possible for more scalable platform and long-term vision companies to exist. Move the focus from early cash flow to more game-changing, longer gestation plays.
3) More courageous and less risk-averse founders who are thinking bigger and building more impactful technology.
4) Culture shift from being Silicon Valley’s ugly stepchild to embracing and owning our community. Instead of hyping our “beach,” let’s ship amazing, useful products.
5) Better coordination among UCLA, USC, Caltech to pool efforts and drive greater engagement and knowledge sharing.
6) More startups and VCs build stronger alliances and ties with Silicon Valley. We need to move from a provincial mentality to be more inclusive and aligned with the valley. This can only be done through very consistent and concerted efforts to build trust and shared value.
What’s something you learned at Google and YouTube that you think the startup community can learn from?
Think big, take more risks, don’t accept status quo. Don’t settle for "We are the Uber/Instagram/Airbnb for [insert app].” Aim to be the next Uber, Instagram and Airbnb.
Factual’s founder Gil Elbaz was also at Google via the Applied Semantics acquisition. How does Factual’s culture compare to Google’s?
The transition was easy because Factual shares similar philosophy and cultural DNA to Google. We undertook a bold mission to make lots of foundational and mission-critical data accessible to the best developers so they can build things more quickly and cheaply. We feel privileged to have taken the best lessons from Google and married it with our own magic to create what we think is an enduring and useful company.
