When I drill down on that term, you can see why with posts like: Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals Lops A Third Of Company THQ Lays Off 100 Employees, Closes San Diego Office Citrix Cuts 10 Percent; Santa Barbara Hit And it's also interesting to see what geographies are being associated with "Layoffs" more often than others: Layoffs Woodland Hills Layoffs San Diego Layoffs Santa Monica Layoffs Los Angeles I guess this is a sign of the times. The Scott Sanfilippo Interview Media Optimization Firms Are Red Hot In Southern California in 2009 Proliferate

This morning's interview is with Mark Suster , a venture capitalist at GRP Partners (www.grpvc.com). GRP has just recently closed on a new $200M fund, and Mark has been one of the more active venture capitalists in the Los Angeles area in recent months. We caught up with Mark to hear about what kinds of investments GRP is looking at nowadays, his view on the software-as-a-service market, and how best to approach him with a pitch. It Mark has also been quite active mentoring entrepreneurs,. It

RSS ); Why You Should Start a Company in... Los Angeles By: Laura Rich February 26, 2010

was recently interviewed for an article that appeared in Fast Company titled, “ Why you should start a business in LA .” We have many seasoned entrepreneurs who have built successful companies here and made a lot of money for investors and themselves.  But But we have a great city for building technology companies. Los Angeles.  People People either love it our hate it.  All

But when I’m looking to invest the dollars that my Limited Partners have entrusted my firm with I’m going with my view. He invested $8 million in a company in the computer networking space.  They This return won’t be enough for me to justify for me partners.”  I I was going to save this post for a while but the Patzer Problem meme has forced my hand. I

Great companies are comprised of great individual point people or functional leaders. There are plenty of great leaders who work really hard and work for big companies.  And If you put on paper what it would take to be successful in your company, you’d never take the first step, which is why most people don’t . This is part of my series on  what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on  VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.

For everyone else, I excerpted the story about the time Mark had to shower with construction workers to save a few bucks so he could turn around a struggling company he founded. He's currently a Partner with GRP Partners . Before Prior to Koral, he founded BuildOnline, the largest independent global content collaboration company focused on the engineering and construction sectors, which If you've been to Mixergy before and I've earned your trust, then don't waste your time reading anything I wrote on this post. Just listen to my interview with Mark Suster and

I just completed an exercise where I went out to hire a new associate for my VC firm, GRP Partners.  I say this as somebody who recruited several Harvard, Wharton and similar MBAs at my first company (the one where I acknowledge that I made every mistake in the book).  And I feel that this skill is invaluable in both building a start-up company and in being a VC. This is part of my ongoing series called “ Start-up Lessons .” 8221;

The agreement was that both sets of investors would fund the combined entity, we would reduce overlapped costs and become a healthier company.  The first came from the CEO of iScraper telling me that they would not be able to complete the deal – their investor, Apax Partners, had decided not to proceed despite verbal assurances that they would.  We started drafting out plans for what we were going to do in order to have an orderly This is part of my new series on  what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for

The topic is: Betting Your Company On An Internet Platform? A very interesting topic, especially for those of us involved in developing for start-ups. VRM - his company - goal is to provide a Level 4 platform. Everything else is closed. Mark Suster Partner GRP Partners He's an ex-Salesforce.com employee. I'm blogging from the CalTech Enterprise Forum . At the CTO Group that I organize in Santa Monica, we've had lots of discussions around this.