Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
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When Andrew Chen first began investing in Los Angeles startups as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he says there were two areas of opportunity that the Silicon Valley venture giant left unexplored: online dating and video games.
Now, both of those industries have bloomed into some of the most lucrative in Southern California’s tech scene, if not the wider tech world.
“We’d never invest in online dating, and we’d never invest in video games,” Chen said Tuesday at the Upfront Summit venture capital conference in Downtown L.A. “In the next couple years, if you’d invested in Tinder and Bumble, they would have been really good—but for a while those were considered unattractive.”
Online dating has proven a big business for West Hollywood-based Tinder’s parent company, Match Group, which also owns and operates dating apps like Hinge, OKCupid and Match.com. Match Group went public in 2015 and now boasts a market capitalization exceeding $31 billion. The gaming sector, meanwhile, has exploded since the pandemic and has now emerged as metaverse opportunity—factors that convinced Microsoft to shell out a record $69 billion for Santa Monica-based Activision Blizzard earlier this year.
Andreessen Horowitz may have missed the early boat on both industries, but now the firm is considering a broader slate of investments led by partners like Chen, who moved to L.A. recently to devote more time to discovering local startups. Chen said he’s now spending “more than half my time” vetting gaming investments, in particular. (Disclosure: Chen is an investor in dot.LA.)
Much of the venture capital sector’s previous apprehension around gaming, Chen noted, was that the industry is “hits-driven—it’s like investing in a movie.” Yet that thinking has evolved in recent years, he added.
“What we’ve seen in the last decade is if you’ve invested in Riot or Unity or Discord or any of the many tech companies [working] around games… You end up finding it’s an awesome place to invest,” according to Chen.
With the pandemic accelerated the evolution of entertainment in a more virtual direction, and investors are now working hard to keep up.
“Our goal is to invest in what might be the next major social networks,” Chen said. “Kids and young adults are spending so much time in ‘Roblox,’ ‘Minecraft,’ ‘Fortnite’—these real-time environments where they hang out with their friends. It has the possibility to be the next social experience that could create a billion-monthly-active-user product… The next Instagram or Snapchat will look more like that.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
While the electric scooter market might appear flooded based on how many of the vehicles are scattered along sidewalks in major U.S. cities, there is yet another company on the block trying to make the case for alternative mobility solutions across the country, including here in Los Angeles.
Founded in Cambridge, Mass., in 2013, transportation robotics startup Superpedestrian launched its LINK e-scooter network in its hometown (which is also home to Harvard and MIT) in early 2020—just as the coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on demand for shared services like ride-sharing, bike-sharing and, of course, e-scooters.
That may have helped LINK gain a footing in L.A. and other locales, however, as Superpedestrian has now expanded the service to nearly 50 cities around the world.
“At the beginning of the pandemic there were a lot of people who went out and bought their own cars because they thought it would be a safer way to get around,” Superpedestrian policy and business development manager Sharon Zhang told dot.LA. “But now they’re seeing how much it costs to own a car.”
Superpedestrian’s LINK scooters arrived in L.A. in August 2021 through a program with the city’s Department of Transportation. There are currently about 3,500 of the company’s electric scooters dotted around the city—from Downtown to the San Fernando Valley and in neighborhoods like Koreatown, Eagle Rock and Highland Park—and LINK plans to ramp up to 5,000 scooters on city streets this year. Superpedestrian has also parked some of the scooters around USC and UCLA, in the hopes of building ridership among college students.
Superpedestrian deployed its first vehicles in neighborhoods that it identified as either popular for other e-scooter companies, or as having less-than-adequate bus or light-rail service and ripe for micromobility solutions. While LINK initially appealed to recreational riders, it’s increasingly being used by riders to commute to work and school or to connect with other transportation options, according to Zhang. LINK says the average scooter ride in the city is 1.4 miles and less than 15 minutes long. (Rides cost $1 to unlock the scooter, plus 39 cents per minute.) So far, the company has attracted more than 400,000 rides in L.A. covering over 540,000 miles.
Of course, LINK has to compete in a crowded e-scooter market that has exploded in popularity since the mid-2010s. The L.A. area is dominated by Santa Monica-based Bird, which went public through an SPAC deal last year, and San Francisco-based Lime. Ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft have also stepped into the market—though Ford-backed Spin announced this month that it was “beginning to exit nearly all open permit markets globally” in a bid for profitability. There are also various bike-sharing services to account for, like the one run through L.A.’s Metro system.
“We’ve been asked in other markets why we’d want to be there when there were 6 or 7 other [e-scooter] companies,” Zhang said.
The ace up LINK’s sleeve, she noted, is that Superpedestrian designed and manufactured its own scooters, rather than outsourcing to a third-party company as some of its competitors do. Superpedestrian engineered the LINK scooters to be larger and heavier than some competing models; that makes them more stable on pothole-stricken streets and allows for a larger battery than other scooters, with an estimated 61-mile range in typical conditions.
Zhang said the reinforced chassis on the scooters not only provides stability but also lowers the costs of deploying them. Superpedestrian uses its own staff to charge and service the scooters—rather than employing contract or gig workers—at two L.A.-area facilities. That staff, part of a roughly 55-person team that the company employs in the area, can swap out different parts that might be damaged, rather than scrapping the whole scooter. And while the scooters are expected to last for several years on the streets, their batteries are expected to outlive other hardware pieces and can be reused with new scooters.
Vandalism is still the largest threat to LINK’s scooter fleet. Superpedestrian said they’ve received reports of the vehicles being recovered from across state lines and, in some cases, after being thrown into water; in the latter instance, some of the scooters were able to dry out and still function.
Superpedestrian also leans on its “vehicle intelligence” technology to run more than 1,000 system checks on individual scooters, which can inform technicians whether there’s a low charge level or power delivery and braking problems. Its system can also determine if a scooter is left in an unsafe location—such as blocking a sidewalk or access point—or if it’s entering an area where e-scooters are banned, in which case it will flash lights on its handlebars before eventually coming to a stop.
Later this year, Superpedestrian plans to incorporate a pedestrian defense system, which it says can determine if riders are on the sidewalk when they shouldn’t be or violating other traffic laws based on regulations. The scooters, which can reach speeds of up to 20 miles per hour, are regulated to a 15-mile-per-hour maximum, and are slowed even more when the scooter’s sensors detect it is entering a no-ride zone, such as Dodger Stadium.
Zhang said Superpedestrian is encouraged by the inroads LINK has made in L.A. and is looking to expand to other markets. In California, LINK also operates in San Diego and Bay Area cities including Oakland and San Jose.
But with e-scooters having rubbed many local communities the wrong way, Zhang added that LINK and other micromobility operators need more buy-in from stakeholders beyond city government officials. That includes not just city councils and local transportation departments, but also neighborhood councils and colleges and universities.
“Our goal is to continue to expand,” Zhang said. “L.A. is an open market for e-scooter permits, though—and the whole area can be like swiss cheese in terms of regulations.”
Zac Estrada is a reporter covering transportation, technology and policy. A former reporter for The Verge and Jalopnik, his work has also appeared in Automobile Magazine, Autoweek, Pacific Standard, Boston.com and BLAC Detroit. A native of Southern California, he is a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston. You can find him on Twitter at @zacestrada.
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On the heels of a record-setting year for Southern California’s startup environment, we asked more than 30 leading Los Angeles-based investors for their take on the city’s top venture capitalists. (Specifically, we prompted: “Which L.A.-based VCs impress you the most?”) They responded with the names of 45 peers that they admire—14 of whom made the following list by receiving two or more votes.
The results offer an insider’s view of the L.A.’s startup scene in 2022—which, even as it rapidly expands, remains an insular world led by a handful of key dealmakers, like the venture capital industry at large. This year, TenOneTen partner Minnie Ingersoll and Bonfire Ventures managing director Mark Mullen tied for the top spot, with five votes apiece; they were followed by Wonder Ventures managing partner Dustin Rosen, who received four votes. Behind them, five VCs tied for third place with three votes each, while another six investors round up the list with two votes apiece.
Like last year’s list (which also featured Bonfire’s Mullen in the top spot), the below results are sorted by the number of votes each VC received; where there were ties, we list the investors alphabetically by their last names. As always, we asked survey participants not to vote for any of their colleagues—and vetted the list to ensure they stuck to that rule.
Without further ado ado, here are LA’s top VCs of 2022, as judged by their peers.
Minnie Ingersoll, TenOneTen Ventures
Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at early-stage venture firm TenOneTen, whose recent investments include crypto travel rewards startup FlyCoin. Prior to TenOneTen, she co-founded Shift Technologies, an online marketplace for buying and selling used cars. Ingersoll also spent more than a decade at Google, where she focused on the tech giant’s fiber optic, advertising and charitable efforts. (She also hosts dot.LA’s LA Venture podcast.)
Mark Mullen, Bonfire Ventures
Mark Mullen is co-founder and managing director of Bonfire Ventures, an early-stage venture firm that backs business-to-business (B2B) software startups. (Recent investments include cloud communications startup Telgorithm.) Mullen previously managed venture funds Double M Partners and Mull Capital. In January, an SEC filing revealed that Bonfire aimed to raise $165 million for its third fund. (Disclosure: Mullen is an investor in dot.LA.)
Dustin Rosen, Wonder Ventures
Dustin Rosen is the founder and managing partner of Wonder Ventures, an early stage investor in companies including L.A.-based unicorns Whatnot and Bird. Earlier in his career, Rosen founded the fashion app Pose and was a senior associate at the Mail Room Fund. Last month, Wonder launched a $31 million fund focused exclusively on early-stage L.A. startups.
Jim Andelman, Bonfire Ventures
Alongside Mark Mullen, Jim Andelman is a co-founder and managing director at Bonfire Ventures, an early-stage venture firm focused on B2B software startups. Previously, he oversaw software deals for Bay Area investment firm Broadview Capital Partners.
Anna Barber, M13
Anna Barber is a partner at M13, a venture firm focused on early-stage consumer tech companies. (Recent investments include NFT startup Unblocked.) Barber is also an advisor to the USC Marshall Venture Fund. She previously led Techstars LA as its managing director and co-founded Scribble Press, a New York-based book publishing startup. (Disclosure: M13 is an investor in dot.LA.)
Eva Ho, Fika Ventures
Eva Ho is a general partner at Fika Ventures, a seed-stage firm that focuses on sectors including AI, automation and big data. Ho formerly worked at Google and served as entrepreneur-in-residence for the city of Los Angeles.
Jeff Morris, Chapter One
Jeff Morris is the founder and managing partner of Chapter One, a venture firm targeting early-stage web3 startups. The former Tinder executive’s previous investments include Dapper Labs, Lyft, Cameo and PearPop.
Dana Settle, Greycroft
Dana Settle is a co-founder and managing partner at Greycroft, which has backed consumer-focused startups including Acorns, Goop and Bumble. The Lehman Brothers alum helped Greycroft close two funds worth nearly $700 million combined in late 2020. (Disclosure: Greycroft is an investor in dot.LA.)
Josh Diamond, Walkabout Ventures
Josh Diamond is a general partner at Walkabout Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm that primarily targets fintech startups. Diamond previously served as a principal investor at Clocktower Technology Ventures.
Buck Jordan, Wavemaker Labs
Buck Jordan is the founder and CEO of Wavemaker Labs, which funds and incubates startups in partnership with larger corporations. Wavemaker has especially targeted the food industry supply chain space—backing automated technologies at both the agricultural and food preparation stages that deploy AI and robotics.
Kara Nortman, Upfront Ventures
Kara Nortman is a managing partner at Upfront Ventures. An alum of IAC, Battery Ventures and Microsoft, Nortman previously co-founded children’s ecommerce startup Moonfrye and also helped launch women’s professional soccer club Angel City FC. Upfront raised $177 million for a new fund in January; local portfolio companies include GOAT, Creator Now and Endgame. (Disclosure: Upfront Ventures is an investor in dot.LA.)
Spencer Rascoff, 75 & Sunny
Spencer Rascoff is a co-founder and general partner at 75 & Sunny, a venture firm and startup incubator. Focused on sectors including proptech and ecommerce, Rascoff previously co-founded Zillow, Hotwire.com and real estate platform Pacaso (Disclosure: Rascoff is the co-founder and executive chairman of dot.LA.)
Adriana Saman, Clocktower Technology Ventures
Adriana Saman is a principal at Clocktower Technology Ventures, a venture firm investing in early-stage fintech startups across the U.S., Europe and Latin America. Saman was previously an analyst at JPMorgan Chase.
Sara Zayani, Global Founders Capital
Sarra Zayani is a partner at Global Founders Capital. The Greycroft alum has led Global Founders’ investments in local startups including Cann, Universal Hydrogen and Pacaso.
Do you know something we should know about L.A. tech or venture capital? Reach out securely via Signal: +1 917 434 4978.
Harri is dot.LA’s senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to harrison@dot.la.
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