based companies. Affiliated and linked with other general and specific groups in Southern California Ventura Highway offers excellent opportunities for those seeking contacts to further their professional goals. The group offers an online community with a physical counterpart of meetings and networking with people in Southern California. This is will be a continually updating post. I'll be creating additional lists for educational, chamber of commerce, etc. Organizational representatives: please contact me directly for updates, etc. Attendees: If you have review comments

If you’re a startup and you don’t have a close relationship with a few law firms you’re really missing one of the most important relationships that any entrepreneur can have. This is stuff I tell people verbally at least twice / month so I’m glad to finally get it into written format. When to get a lawyer - If you plan to be a venture or angel backed I recently read a post over on VentureHacks titled, “ Top Ten Reasons Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers ” written by Scott Walker (who blogs on legal issues for entrepreneurs ).  I know that people

I am excited to be participating in and announcing the of: Southern California Tech Central This is a community of people in Southern California who have come together to help find and organize the best content from blogs, news sources and other web sites all around technology in So Cal. This site is being sponsored by the Technology Council of Southern California and my company TechEmpower . The goal is to create a place where it's easy to find current and highly relevant content. And perhaps to stimulate new connections.

As part of doing that, I've had the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of different chief technical officers from different kinds of companies over those years. This is a private group of CTOs who are responsible for software development within their companies. They are generally the senior most person responsible for custom software development, database design, database administration, web development, I've helped organize the Los Angeles CTO Forum for almost 10 years. Yes, there are some events around particular technologies.

You'll also have access to the list of attendees from all the past events you've signed up for. Mission The mission of the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum is to encourage the growth and success of technology-based entrepreneurial ventures in Southern California. Scope Through its monthly programs, the Forum provides advice, support, education and networking opportunities to technology-based ventures in the Southern California area. This is will be a continually updating post. I'll be creating additional lists for educational , chamber of commerce, etc. See also

So if you’re casually reading and don’t really care about angel financing – abort now! Good idea & plan: You must start with a good idea and a PowerPoint deck (my outline is here , scroll down mid way).  Jarl So you need to do one and have it in your back pocket ready to whip out your presentation or your laptop at any moment and go through it in case you’re asked or in case you’re not building the rapport you hope to just verbally.  It This is part of my ongoing series Pitching a VC . Last night I attended a DealMaker Media (whom I

On Ben Kuo's blog, he posted about Entrepreneurs in Southern California and pointed to a post by Will Johnson, a Southern California entrepreneur and blogger. Will's post talks about lack of interest in working for startups here in Southern California, saying: ..we probably’d don’t have the: a) same support infrastructure (meet-ups, networking events, we b) history of success; and c) abundance of start-up companies (so if one fails there is another to jump on).

With open source software (LAMP stack) and cloud computing infrastructure it just wasn’t that expensive to get your company going and founders just wanted to raise less money.  So they set up seed programs that allowed for rapid decisions for $500k or less, often done as convertible debt for both speed and cost reasons.  Because as a potential A round investor I’m thinking to This is part of my ongoing series about Raising Venture Capital . This posting was inspired by an email from Rajat Suri who wrote me an email in response to Chris Dixon’s blog post

This is part of my ongoing series on Start-up Lessons that I learned from founding two companies. I relive the moment so many times over in my mind wondering if I could have done this differently or if I shouldn’t have said or done this or that.  I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose.  It’s I HATE LOSING . I

This is purely anecdotal, but it seems like a lot of companies are hiring technology talent here in Southern California. I’ve recently seen several tweets from software development companies looking for talent. And I’ve heard from several people looking for Startup Software Developers . And we have been looking to hire several positions (but are being really picky as is normally the case). I’ll be curious to see if that bears up at our Los Angeles CTO Forum meeting tomorrow. Anyone also have the sense (or even better some actual statistics) that