Best startup companies in San Francisco

Santa Monica, Los Angeles

Background: Our startup is a team of 4 young, recent undergraduates that all lived in LA for at least 4+ years before we moved.

You hear it everywhere: Los Angeles is going to be the next Silicon Valley. The press says it every week, VCs are opening funds there, and Hollywood is collaborating a lot more with the LA tech scene for distribution power. While the title of being the next Facebook or Google down there is still up for grabs and tech founders could be considered celebrities there, LA was just not right for us.

So why the hell would a young startup comfortable in LA and already burned through half of its seed investment risk moving up to SF with no network, no guarantee of success, and no safety net?

SOMA, SF

1) We weren’t in the right industry for LA.

One of the main reasons why we moved out of LA was simply because of the industry we were in (B2B Social Media SAAS). If you don’t know, LA is most well known for the music, video, fashion, ad tech, gaming, and ecommerce industries. So being in a market where very few understand, let alone take you serious for being a young 22-year-old founder, was rather discouraging. Access to mentors or advisors in our space were limited and the customers we were trying to sell to were less tech-adoptive. The best thing to do for ourselves was to be somewhere where we could set ourselves up for opportunities to stay alive and grow, and unfortunately it wasn’t in LA.

2) We got too comfortable.

Being comfortable in a startup is probably your worst enemy. There was a combination of factors that led to us being way too comfortable. I was born and raised in LA. I lived there my whole life and home was only a matter of a few mile drive. Being near home meant there was a safety net, and safety nets are killers of passion and risk. All of our co-founders lived in LA for at least 4 years as well so we never felt out of our element and had a great network there.

That, along with the fact that we worked at an office space where we were the youngest and always the last ones to leave work, resulted in a total sigh of ‘meh’ and comfort. We didn’t feel the pressure because we couldn’t relate to anyone around us. There was no one our age to share war stories with, or vent to so we knew we weren’t alone in our tough journey. We found ourselves slaking off some days and even unmotivated for periods of time. We needed the absolute antithesis to where we were and what we felt.