In the high-tech world, Southern California is almost as cool as Silicon Valley. Heather Schlegel knows this because she goes out almost every night.
Schlegel, a chronic blogger and the owner of Purple Tornado, a West Hollywood consulting and event-planning firm, attends geek dinners, techie lunches and nerd happy hours. She was so overwhelmed by the opportunities that Purple Tornado recently created an online event calendar to help people like her keep track.
Just six months ago, "it used to be two or three events a month," said Schlegel, who is known as Heathervescent online. "Now, there's something almost every day."
Her suddenly active social life can be traced to the high-tech-focused venture capital that has been pouring into Southern California. Late last year, the region bypassed New England to rank second in the U.S. -- after Silicon Valley -- for tech investment.
"There's always this false impression that L.A. doesn't have technology," said Benjamin Kuo, who runs SocalTech.com, a site that tracks the technology scene here.
According to Ernst & Young, venture capitalists invested $712 million in Los Angeles-area information technology companies in the first three quarters of 2007, up from $680 million in all of 2006 and $525 million in 2005. They invested $1.3 billion in Southern California tech companies in the first three quarters of this year, compared to $4.4 billion in the Bay Area over the same period.
Los Angeles can claim tech success stories. MySpace was founded here, as was Overture, the Pasadena search engine advertising company acquired by Yahoo Inc. in 2003. Santa Monica's LowerMyBills.com was an early player in the online advertising wave.
A lot of the recent activity has been sparked by experienced managers who broke away from those companies and started their own. John Babcock, a partner with venture firm Rustic Canyon Partners in Santa Monica, counts 13 start-ups born from those three companies alone.
Some businesses created from earlier successes include Leisurelink.com, whose president worked for Overture for more than five years, and Archetype Media, which was founded by a group that included a former executive from Web ad broker ValueClick Inc.
The social events help these techies find potential business, business partners and investors and discuss ideas for new companies. At a recent event called Lunch 2.0, hundreds of people milled around Westside office space munching tortilla chips and sushi, some wearing name tags reading, "We're hiring."
