My Dot’s Better than Yours
I’m a friend and admirer of Joel Kotkin, so when he talks, I listen.
And when he says, as he does in the Viewpoint on the facing page, that the Great Dot-Com Race has shifted from the nerds to the content guys, from the engineers to the entertainers, and that means hip LA is whipping vanilla OC, I take heed. And I find myself nodding in agreement as Joel suggests OC’s developers ought to loosen up some, and pay a little more attention to the creative potential in some of the county’s old core cities.
Thanks, Joel. In these heady times, we need a sobering blast now and then. Helps to guard against complacency, if nothing else.
But then I step back, gather myself and say, “Hold on a minute.”
Our tech reporter, Ken Brown, observes that content is content. It’s always been there, and is merely shifting mediums as technology dictates. So technology, not content, remains the driver.
Now, clearly, if you’re 25 and single, LA is more fun than OC (or so I hear). So are San Francisco, Chicago, New York and heck, Cleveland. Nature of the beasts.
But a dot-com economy is many things: A fledgling LA rock band can be heard in high fidelity through Tom Yuen’s software plug-ins developed in Santa Ana, and a hot LA ad agency might run an advertising campaign for a website produced by a retread OC entrepreneur like Pete Ellis.
Kotkin himself tells the anecdote of how an LA-bred, Hollywood-kind-of-guy named Henry Nicholas had to bring Broadcom to Orange County because that’s where all his UCLA-trained engineers wanted to live. Then Nicholas’ partner, Henry Samueli, gives $20 million to UCI’s and $30 million to UCLA’s engineering schools. A win-win for OC and LA.
Indeed, there’s probably as much synergy as there is competition between the neighboring counties. From what I can see, both are thriving in the New Economy.
Take venture-capital investment, for example. According to numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers, VC dollars doubled in OC last year and more than tripled in LA, to $538 million and $1.8 billion, respectively. An outfit called Venture Economics computed it differently, with LA almost doubling, to $1.5 billion, but OC nearly tripling, to $1.1 billion. (See items, pages 3 and 6.)
Now, these are big discrepancies in VC numbers, and we’ll probably take a look at the reasons why in an upcoming issue. But by either measure, there’s plenty of positive momentum in each locale.
And last week, it was OC’s turn to add another company to the stock market marquee, as Buy.com went public (and doubled on its first day).
These are the kinds of arguments to have,who has the better Internet companies? After last season, it sure beats arguing over the Angels and Dodgers.
