Why LA is Perfect For Our Startup

by Fabrice Dumans
May 30, 2017

When I started thinking about what would become Timyo, I thought about email not only as a productivity killer but as a destroyer of work-life balance. For too long, too many of us had lived under the tyranny of constant communication—feeling guilty for not answering right away on Slack, feeling crushed by the weight of emails piling up in your inbox, feeling like the only way to get ahead is to to be available to work on the weekend and nights. Even worse, the email status quo had been normal for so long that some even seemed to take a perverse pride in communication overload, as if “inbox” was commensurate to importance. We had forgotten an obvious truth, that busy-ness is bad for business.

When I decided to launch Timyo in the US, I knew I needed to pick the perfect place. The obvious choice for a tech business is, of course, San Francisco: there’s already a full ecosystem of VC with billions of dollars and an eagerness to find the next big thing, as well as tons of other entrepreneurs (all easily recognizable in the same t-shirt: thanks, Mark Zuckerberg!). In San Francisco, they know that “H2” isn’t some new kind of bird flu, but the visa that talented potential hires will need to work in the US. It’s place where people are proud to work 16 hour days, where they are happy to spend all weekend crashing and coding at the CTO’s condo in the Marina, where they spend so much time working from smartphones that they started communicating in pictures to cut down on the tapping.

 

So, of course, we came to LA.

 

Los Angeles is a perfect fit for Timyo’s ethos. When others think of LA, it’s “sun, beach, Hollywood…” and we have all of those for sure (though there are better beaches north and south and “Hollywood” isn’t really in Hollywood), but when you live in LA, real life is more about a great quality of life, a priority of work-life balance (yes, the word “work” is still involved), and entrepreneurship. That last one surprises people, because I think in recent years we’ve come to think of “entrepreneur” as synonymous with “tech startup”, but an entrepreneur is any self-starter, someone eager to make their own way, not looking for a corporate safety net or the security of a clear forward path for advancement...from actors to agents to casting directors and hair stylists, that describes pretty much everybody in LA. Soon after arriving in LA, we had the chance to meet and work with Will Arnett. Not only is he a fantastic actor and funnier than hell, he is an insanely hard-working producer with a more entrepreneurial mindset than just about anybody I’ve ever met.


In terms of hiring resources, LA is also a better fit than you might think for a tech startup. Of course, you’re going to need engineers, and there are some great ones in LA, as well as a steady stream of them graduating every year from Cal Tech and the many other good programs in Southern California. But when your mission is a complete disruption in a tool as ubiquitous as email, education is also key. Before we even started writing the code for email, we knew we were going to need an evangelist, someone to help spread the word about what Timyo was doing, and why we felt so passionately that Timyo was necessary and would be revolutionary. When I first met Chris four years ago through mutual friends, he was a freelance copywriter and screenwriter. Our first discussion was about the values that were core to Timyo’s mission and would also be central to its culture: transparency, clarity, work-life balance. He grasped immediately that the “how” of our company would be the same as the “why”—Timyo would be an example of what we wanted the work world to become. One of his first thoughts was about looking at Timyo not as a dam that is holding back the “river” (the endless barrage of email), but instead as a series of channels that instead controls and directs the flow of that river in a way that is useful to the user. This key insight became a guiding light as we constructed our messaging strategy.

 

When I asked Chris to work with us as our evangelist, he was surprised: “I’m not a tech guy!” And as I told him, that’s exactly what I wanted. He explained that he was dedicated to his own projects. I told him that that was exactly what I wanted, too, and I’m happy to report that he is continuing to succeed both inside and outside of Timyo.

 

This is LA. Where entertainment meets tech and exciting new territories are being created, explored and transformed every day. Where storytelling meets world-building and a distribution model that puts smiles on billions of faces worldwide. Where people don’t live to work but work to live, a place where Timyo is very happy to be at home

Jobs at Timyo

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