Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Los Angeles Startup Community

I was just talking with someone who's new to Los Angeles and wanting to connect into the Los Angeles Startup Community.  I told them that I had recently seen several posts/articles talking about how vibrant the community has become.  As is usual, I couldn't remember where I had seen those posts.  So, I promised I would create this post to help point them in the right direction.  I will do my best to keep this up to date.

Los Angeles Startup Networking

Here are some guides to many of the different networking events around startups, technology, etc.:
and if you want to find informal networking, you might head over to CoLoft, in Santa Monica.
I'd also recommend you subscribe to So Cal Tech Central.  It brings together events and content for Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Startup Community Posts/Articles

Here are some interesting articles and posts on the ecosystem around startups in Los Angeles.

Venture Capital

As long as I'm pulling this together, here are some venture capital firms in Los Angeles that can help get you wired in.

Los Angeles Startup People

Some people to meet in the Los Angeles Startup Community in order to get wired in:
I wanted to put a bunch more, but was hoping I could get some help.  Who are the people you should meet in the Los Angeles Startup Community to get wired in?

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Visualization of Startup CTO Equity and Salary Data

A long-time friend and colleague, Steve Wexler, who is great at visualization took my Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data and produced a really need interactive visualization via Tableau.  You can find it here:
Interactive Version: Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data (US)
Explanation: CTO compensation and equity at venture-backed companies

Also review: Equity for Early Employees in Early Stage 

Probably the best thing for someone to do is to go to the Interactive Version and look things up using their specific situation.  You can click on the filters such as Founder Status (#3) and Job Title (#4) to filter to that particular data.

You can also glean additional information by hovering over a mark. For example, if you hover over the big circle in California you can see that there were 303 responses for the San Francisco Bay Area.

The larger the circle, the larger the number of responses.
For example, let’s say you are only interested in seeing non-founder CTO compensation for West Coast-based organizations with 50 or fewer employees that have been in existence for seven or fewer years. By selecting different marks and applying the “years” in business filter, you can glean that the average compensation for a respondents fitting into these categories is $201,495.

You will definitely want to choose some of the other tabs to visualize the data in different ways.  One of the more interesting to me was the equity bin analysis:
image
It shows the dramatic difference in equity for Founder/CTO vs. Non-Founder CTO for startups that have raised <$10M and are Series A or B.  Most non-founders have less than 2%.  Most Founders have greater than 5%.  It makes sense and what I suspected, but good to see the numbers are backed up.
Of course, as you would suspect, equity percentages dilute based on years in business.

Give it a try and let me know if you find anything interesting.