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🏦 Stifel Bank: Helping Others Succeed
Excited to share another LA startup profile. This week’s profile covers not a founder or investor, but rather an ecosystem partner without whom, LA’s entrepreneurship scene would not be possible. If you’re a startup founder or VC in Los Angeles, I can almost guarantee you’re at most two...
✍️ WGA strike ends: 'Houston, we have a deal.'
Happy Friday Los Angeles! And an EXTRA happy Friday to Russell Palmer at CyberFilm AI for referring new subscribers to dot.la. Unless you are Patrick Star and have been living under a rock for the past week, you are aware that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Hollywood studios have reached a tentative agreement. As this is a tech newsletter, we will concentrate on two key deal points: streaming topics and artificial intelligence protections, although it's important to note that the main deal points also encompass minimum staffing requirements and pay increases. ✍️🎬🌟
💡 Creative Synergy Between Hollywood and Artificial Intelligence
Executives in the media and entertainment industry are betting that AI can be a positive force by augmenting human creativity in addition to increasing efficiency. These companies range from brand new startups like Strada, an AI-enabled cloud platform with tools for production and postproduction to more established AI-powered companies including Invisible Universe, developing family friendly franchises on social media, and Toonstar, developing irreverent adult franchises on web3. This is not to mention the incumbent Hollywood studios who are snapping up AI talent while their hands are full with a striking workforce worried about AI.
ExpertDojo: Investing in Startups from LA to the World
My name is Minh Do, and I’m helping out interviewing and writing articles about founders, investors, and builders in LA. If you want to be featured or know folks who want to be featured, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn. This week, we talked to Brian Mac Mahon from ExpertDojo. It’s a really fun interview, digging into Brian’s thinking and what ExpertDojo is up to. Keep an eye out on their newsletter for more updates coming from them soon!
✨Diverse, Impact-Driven Founders Shine at Plug In South LA's Demo Day
Plug In South LA, a Los Angeles accelerator program, hosted their 2023 Founder Showcase at Blackbird House in Culver City on Thursday night. Founders made their pitches and then participated in a short Q&A session with Plug In South LA’s founder Derek Smith. 🎬🚀🌟. Half of Plug...
📦 Crate: Get Your (Online) Life in Order
We have another founder profile for you this week. It’s a fascinating early stage consumer business with just about the strongest LA ties possible. Read on below for more!. The Founder: Anna Bofa is an LA native and Dartmouth graduate (go Big Green 🌲🌲), who has worked for some of the most successful consumer internet companies in Silicon Valley, including both Google and Facebook (pre-Meta shift).
🌴 Just Dropped: Techstars LA's Fall 2023 Cohort
Our friends at Techstars LA are welcoming 12 new companies to their Fall 2023 accelerator program, and they were kind enough to give dot.LA a first look. Read on for more!. For anyone not familiar with Techstars, it is one of the largest accelerator programs in the world, having made over 3,700 investments since inception in 2006.
📺 'Charter'ing a Course Towards a Post-Cable Era?
The ongoing dispute between Burbank-based Walt Disney Co. and Charter Communications (parent of Spectrum cable/internet) regarding the distribution of Disney's channels, particularly ESPN, could potentially unravel the cable TV business as we know it. 🖥️🤺📺. Image Source: Los Angeles Times. The dispute between Walt Disney Co. and...
🎮 Riot Games' Valorant Finals Are Another Jewel In LA's Gaming Crown
🎮💥🔫 “USA, USA, USA!” If you wandered into the Kia Forum this past Saturday and listened to the cheers, you might have thought you had stumbled into a secret Olympic Games, and honestly you’d kind of be right. Photo courtesy of Riot Games. That...
🛍 Consolidation Begins in Live Shopping with Popshop Live Acquisition
LA-based Popshop Live, a mobile live shopping marketplace was acquired this week by CommentSold, a Huntsville, Alabama-based live selling technology provider. Never heard of live shopping? Fear not, you are in good company. Less than a third of US adults have heard of live shopping. Prepare to be ahead of the curve. 🎥 🛍️ 💸
🏢 Crexi: The Commercial Real Estate Emporium
This week’s dot.LA Deep Dive delves into the stodgy but rapidly changing world of commercial real estate. Marina Del Rey-based Crexi is the new kid on the block, looking to transform the way buyers, brokers, and sellers do business. Crexi, a commercial real estate (CRE) upstart, emerged on the...
🍔MrBeast Legal Spat Over Sizzle and Slander
YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast, is embroiled in a legal battle with the company behind his virtual burger restaurant, MrBeast Burger. 🍔⚖️📜. After MrBeast's lawsuit against Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC), which managed the burger's fulfillment and delivery, VDC has countersued for $100 million in damages. VDC claims MrBeast failed to fulfill contractual obligations, such as promoting the burger brand, making false and damaging statements, and causing financial harm.
⛈ Sensible: The White Knight of Weather
Picture this: you’ve saved up for months for your dream beach vacation. You’ve cut out restaurant dinners, morning coffees, and those concert tickets you really wanted. You bought your flights and made your hotel reservation. You finally step off the plane in your tropical paradise, only to see that the weather forecast has changed while you were in flight. It’s now supposed to rain for the next 3 days straight…
🎬 Streaming Studios' AI Hiring Spree
In the midst of Hollywood strikes, major streamers are quietly seeking AI Specialists, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Reporter calls out numerous AI postings within Amazon, Apple, Disney, and Netflix. 🎥🖥️🙋♀️. Image source: Shutterstock. The actors fear studios will replace them with AI-generated likenesses,...
McKinsey Accelerates LA Funding Diversity🚀
In the US of A, the vibrant start-up world paints a dazzling picture of innovation and potential. However, beneath the surface of glitz and glamour lies a troubling reality—a pervasive societal inequity that takes center stage. The numbers don't lie: in 2022, Black and Latino founders were left with a mere 1% and 1.5% slice of the VC funding pie. Meanwhile, women-founded teams, secured only a slightly larger share at 1.9%. At the time of exit, White male founders average an astonishing $210 million each, leaving our underrepresented counterparts to juggle with a mere 43% of that staggering sum, $91.1 million. It's a sobering tale of missed opportunities and systemic biases, one that deserves our serious attention…McKinsey is here to address this with the InLA Accelerator🚗🤸🏾♀️👻
LA Venture's Rollercoaster 2023
The Amplify.LA Seed Reportfor the first half of 2023 reveals a decrease in LA seed funding relative to H1 2022, reflecting the global decline in venture capital. 🌍💸⬇️. Image Source: Stable Diffusion. Prompt: Rollercoaster in front of open sky. Dollars falling down. Global funding took a nosedive,...
How Women’s Purchasing Power Is Creating a New Wave of Economic Opportunities In Sports
According to a Forbes report last April, both the viewership and dollars behind women’s sports at a collegiate and professional level are growing. In 2022, the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament had record attendance levels, breaking records set back in 2004, and largely driven by the new and rapidly growing women’s NCAA tournament. WNBA openers this year saw a 21% spike in attendance, with some teams including the LA Sparks reporting triple-digit ticket sales growth, about 121% over 2022’s total. In 2023, the average size of an LA Sparks crowd swelled to 10,396 people, up from 4,701 people.
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As the curtains close on yet another exhilarating week of innovation and collaboration, we look back at the remarkable success of LA Tech Week. The event brought together brilliant minds, visionary entrepreneurs, and pioneering tech enthusiasts from all corners of the globe, transforming the California coast into a hub of creativity and forward-thinking.
LA Tech Week: Could AI Make the Art History Degree Relevant Again?
This is the web version of dot.LA’s daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene. Digital marketing agencies have already had to upend their practices to keep up with TikTok’s swift trend cycle. Now, they’re facing another challenge: AI.
LA Tech Week Day 5: Social Highlights
L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal. Here's what people are saying about the fifth day of...
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