Entrepreneurs

Start-up companies generally get their money from two sources: professional venture investors and, a few years down the road, stock market investors. What's the difference? Here's how one of the smartest high-tech entrepreneurs I know puts it: "Venture money is expensive money, but it's smart money. Stock market money is cheap money, but it's dumb money. " Facebook is about to cannonball itself into a vast pool of dumb money. The big social media company is expected to announce its initial public offering as soon as Wednesday.

A minute and a half isn't a lot of time, but for 11 local entrepreneurs, 90 seconds was all they had to pitch their start-up ideas to a panel of judges Tuesday. More than 175 start-ups applied to participate in the 7th  annual Fast Pitch Competition, held at UCLA's Anderson School of Management and hosted by angel investor group Tech Coast Angels. Eleven finalists were asked to compete. Among the finalists were a digital platform for making friends offline, a restaurant rewards loyalty program and an online classified marketplace.

His friends believed that Raul O. Martinez had lost his mind. Martinez had a plan to sell soft-shell tacos out of a renovated ice cream truck on the streets of East Los Angeles. "How will you sell those kinds of tacos?" he was asked. Despite the skepticism, Martinez, his wife and father at his side, parked the truck next to an East Los Angeles bar on a summer night in 1974. Martinez sold $70 worth of tacos that first night and soon afterward was selling $150 an evening.

HONG KONG - A few days ago, an art professor from northern China named Li Xu was in a small Beijing gallery in the shadow of Tiananmen Square explaining the unlikely inspiration for one of his paintings: the $2.7-billion blockbuster "Avatar. " After the 34-year-old finally caught the film last year (it first opened in China in early 2010), Li wanted to see if he could marry the serenity he felt infused "Avatar"with the aesthetic of traditional Chinese painting, his primary medium.

Cosmetics maven Cristina Carlino had an epiphany five years ago on Christmas Day. She was in a serious relationship, but it turned out her partner was not, so she was alone on a holiday hike in the Arizona desert. Devastated by her parents' divorce and seemingly alienated from her siblings, Carlino felt completely alone. In a split second, she looked up and saw a rainbow. "Something in me completely shifted, as if I had a healing."

The Small Business Administration offers a variety of assistance, including online workshops, seminars and classes. The agency also has step-by-step instructions for starting a business, including tips on market research and creating a business plan. The main national website has links to local SBA district offices throughout the country. Try them at http://www.sba.gov . Click on the tab labeled Small Business Planner for tips on what you may need to know before you start.

Suenori Takayama was born to be wild. The "Easy Rider" movie buff and motorcycle enthusiast from Kyoto, Japan, gave Japanese Village Plaza in Little Tokyo an offbeat look with the recent opening of a Harley-Davidson shop. Takayama, who owns two Harleys and a dealership in Kyoto, said he decided to expand his business to Little Tokyo in hopes of drawing not only Japanese tourists, but the Downtown business crowd as well.

Garbage and old tires litter the gray industrial area outside Farmhouse Furniture on East 59th Street in South-Central Los Angeles. Inside, the view is decidedly different. The factory is humming. Some 60 workers are milling, drilling and carving pine from dawn to midnight, producing 250 stylish beds, night stands and dressers a week.

Like many business school graduates, Jake Neuberg and Ramit Varna had big plans. Theirs didn't involve corporate offices with city views or big signing bonuses but instead the standardized test that is the bane of many high school students' existence. When they graduated from UCLA's Anderson School of Management in 2002, the two wanted to create the largest SAT preparation company in the country, even larger than long-established companies Kaplan and Princeton Review.

The Let's Be Frank food trailer parked most days outside the old Helms Bakery complex is no ordinary lunch wagon. The San Francisco company that operates the hot-dog vendor serves franks and sausages made from cows that ate only grass or pigs that were raised humanely. Customers also can choose turkey or soy dogs, all on buns from L.A. Breadworks. The small business was funded in part by venture capitalist Peter Rogers and his Dry Creek Ventures, which targets clean energy, water and food businesses.

A federal appeals court has given Viacom a second chance to prove its copyright infringement claims against Google's YouTube, reviving a high-stakes battle between entertainment companies and Internet entrepreneurs over "user-generated content" sites. The decision Thursday by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals was a partial win for both sides, but it left a few important issues unsettled as it tried to strike the right balance between competing interests. Viacom — a giant entertainment conglomerate whose assets include Paramount Pictures and Comedy Central — alleged that YouTube made more than 60,000 snippets of its content available for free, damaging the market for its movies and TV shows.

Wayne M. Hoffman, the retired chairman of Tiger International, the Century City-based parent company of the Flying Tiger Line, which was once the world's largest air cargo carrier, has died. He was 89. Hoffman died Saturday of natural causes at his home in Indian Wells, said Nissen Davis, a family friend. A former railroad attorney who rose to become executive vice president of the New York Central Railroad, Hoffman was recruited to become chairman of the Flying Tiger Line in 1967.

Former Von Dutch chief executive and clothier Tonny Sorensen — who gained recognition for popularizing a trucker cap bearing the company name and using celebrities to promote the brand — has left his own signature on his personal residence in Beverly Hills and put it on the market at $6.9 million. The gated Midcentury Modern was built in 1961 but completely redone by the Danish entrepreneur. He combined his love of minimalism and high-quality materials in the single-story, 6,000-square-foot home.

A few years ago, she embodied the rags-to-riches legend of modern China: The daughter of an illiterate farmer starts a hair salon when she is just 15, and in little more than a decade creates a business empire that makes her one of the country's wealthiest women. Now the country's "sister millionaire," still only 31 and looking much like a schoolgirl with her ponytail and straight-cut bangs, has come to symbolize something far different: opposition to the death penalty. A provincial court on Jan. 18 upheld Wu Ying's death sentence on charges of fraud and "illegal fund-raising," violating legislation aimed at fighting underground banking and loan-sharking.

Bill Chait is leading a half-dozen colleagues through a two-story factory that has been converted into lofts on the edge of downtown's Arts District. The building is the future home of his next project, a $1.2-million, 140-seat trattoria called Bestia, in the shadow of the 7th Street bridge, next to train tracks that run along the L.A. River. Among its neighbors are a furniture warehouse, a diesel gas station and an all-nude strip club. "It's the SoHo of L.A.," says Chait, a soft-spoken but steely 51-year-old with dark, side-parted hair, slightly big ears and metal-framed glasses.

The gig: Gil Elbaz is founder and chief executive of Factual Inc., a Century City company that aggregates and organizes huge amounts of online data. Factual, started in 2007, has attracted $25 million in venture funding. Claim to fame: He co-founded Applied Semantics Inc., which built technology that connects related online content. Google used it to create its landmark AdSense product that automatically displays advertisements based on a Web page's content. Google bought Applied Semantics in 2003 for $102 million.

It's the Vietnamese answer to microwave dinners. For $8 a night, the A-Dong Restaurant in Tustin will deliver to your home a three-course dinner for two packed in a special thermal container. All you have to do is cook rice. The next day, a restaurant employee picks up the container and drops off a fresh meal. In Vietnam, they call this home cooking service com thang, or monthly rice. In Southern California, these Asian meals-on-wheels have become big business for refugee entrepreneurs.

A cash squeeze is putting the pinch on growth at Tulips Floral Studio, a small flower shop in uptown Whittier. Despite her green thumb, owner Denise Portillo-Lopez has been unable to boost sales fast enough to generate a steady crop of healthy profit. The resulting cash crunch has made it difficult for her to expand the business, which she founded four years ago with her mother. Her mother has since bowed out. "I am the owner, employee, accountant, driver and cleanup crew," said Portillo-Lopez.

"Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott's Road to the Stars" is the ultimate vanity project (in the form of a documentary) for the video game guru who had $30 million burning a hole in his pocket and an equally outsized desire for a trip out of this world. It's a bit precious in its narcissistic point of view, but still a kick to watch the hopelessly devoted astronaut wannabe fulfill his wildest dream. The film traces the training, the rocket ship ride and the time he spent at the International Space Station in 2008 in one of the most expansive, and no doubt expensive, home movies you're ever likely to see, Uncle Bill's Rome adventure not withstanding.