Orange County often doesn’t get as much attention as Los Angeles or even southern cousin San Diego.
And compared to San Francisco and Silicon Valley? Forget it. OC gets no respect.
But time and again, data reveal how off base the county’s low-profile reputation is.
Take a recent example: BusinessWeek magazine’s list of the 100 “Hot Growth Companies,” which ranks U.S. companies by the zest of their investment returns, sales and profits.
The verdict: OC not only bests its larger neighbors in the state but beats other similarly-sized areas in the U.S. That’s according to additional analysis of the BusinessWeek study by the Business Journal.
“You have an environment here that encourages risk-taking,” said Murray Rudin, an Irvine-based partner at Los Angeles-based Riordan Lewis & Haden. “You have people who have been through the entrepreneurship process and served as mentors before. You have professional services, which are used to making exceptions in working with entrepreneurs. All of that helps to grow firms.”
