By Writer Michael Carney of PandoDaily:
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Southern California has developed a reputation for ecommerce and consumer media startups. The association is often so strong that it overshadows and sometimes even discredits the innovation happening in other categories. While there are certainly a fair number of fashion and YouTube-related companies here, to boil the region down to just these areas sells short many great entrepreneurs.
In the past, we’ve debunked the myth that LA doesn’t build hardcore technology. Another such fallacy is that SoCal lacks a vibrant ecosystem of business-to-business (B2B) cloud companies. A recent discussion to this effect with Emergence Capital venture partner Sean Jacobsohn, following his PandoDaily article “Should you start your next company in SoCal?,” led to a deeper dive into the stats around enterprise cloud entrepreneurship in SoCal.
“We have been focused on enterprise SaaS since 2004, and until recently, nearly all SaaS companies were coming out of Silicon Valley,” Jacobsohn says. “It has been great to watch the SoCal ecosystem flourish over the last few years. The market has become less concentrated than it once was.”
SoCal is a massive region that too often gets boiled down to just LA. With dozens of pockets of entrepreneurial activity between Santa Barbara and San Diego, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that there would be significant activity in enterprise SaaS. Nevertheless, I was taken back when, after mining our own mental databases, as well as Crunchbase, Angellist, Builtin.LA, and other resources, Jacobsohn and I arrived at more than 100 such companies in the region – and surely there are others that we missed. While 54 companies are located in West LA, it’s noteworthy that Santa Barbara and Orange County each have nine, and San Diego, Santa Barbara, the South Bay, and Pasadena each have half a dozen.
