LA Tech Week: Gen Z Surf, Kabobs and NextDoor

It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in Venice Beach. There are plenty of parking spaces on the beach. The boardwalk is nearly empty except for a few Teslas, a handful of other cars, and a big blue bus that says Fun Surf LA. I’m preparing for day three of LA Tech Week among a collective of VCs, founders, and fund managers.


When I arrive, admittedly a few minutes late, those who are there to learn to surf make the gestures of rowing and standing on their surfboard in one fluid gesture. Already in the water, however, the “Buccaneers” – a growing collective of Los Angeles-based tech workers who meet on Sundays are already close to a break, wooh-ing each other as mediocre sets arrive.

The waves are small and infrequent, allowing plenty of time to talk shop and network in between. Some say it’s one of the reasons why, for guys in Silicon Valley, surfing has been touted as the “new golf.” Conversations run the gamut. Some are introductions of garden varieties. Others denote the change of atmosphere that is LA tech. Those from out of town told me they weren’t coming until they saw photos on Twitter that made “the FOMO real.” Others are still wondering who might be at the most coveted events of the week – those hosted by Andreessen.

Covered in sand and salt, I leave the beach in the direction of Tehrangeles where Launch Labs Co-founder Iman Khabazian hosts an event for game developers at Flame, his uncle’s Persian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. Launch It Labs is a Los Angeles-based company that provides game developers with a backend framework so they can focus their attention on their user interface. Under a sprawling outdoor canopy filled with fairy lights and mosaic, stained-glass chandeliers, Khabazian’s uncle serves up about 30 skewers of brochette wrapped in lavash bread. The food is outstanding in a week with sushi, sliders and a kitchen table sized wooden cutting board with three different cuts of steak.

At Flame, I also meet Oliver Montalbano, one of the co-founders of mozart – a Los Angeles-based Web3 game company that creates NFT APIs for game developers. As good as Ledy co-founders Mark Emtiaz and Mark D’Andrea who earlier this year assembled a copy of a 1928 house in the Beverly Hills apartments in the 3D virtual world Decentraland. By “The Hollywood Reporterthe $9.418 million estate was among the first of its kind to offer the option to purchase the Decentraland-built sister residence for an additional $100,000. Based on discussions with this small but enthusiastic team of game developers, it’s fair to say that the call about the future of gaming is coming from within the metaverse.

My final stop of the day takes me back to where the day began. Except this time, I’m on the roof of a hotel in Venice Beach. The luxury event is organized by Amplify.LA, Fika Ventures and Stage Venture Partners. It is presented as an opportunity to meet the first investors and founders of Los Angeles. There are at least twice as many men as women, many of whom wear Cuban-collared shirts and tapered pants that expose inches of ankle skin.

Youngest founders in attendance may be two UCLA undergraduates presenting their app talkative like Nextdoor but for Gen Z. They tell me that Gen Z, a cohort that never expects to own a home, doesn’t care that cats make too much noise in the neighborhood like their parents in mind boomer. Instead, they are interested in building some semblance of community from the ashes of the current housing crisis.

Also on the roof of the hotel is Bo Abrams, co-founder of Kommu, a housing exchange platform that wants to capitalize on this current moment of nomadic life. His idea is to give people the opportunity to leverage their most expensive asset, which in most cases is their apartments, in a peer-to-peer marketplace. Kind of like Airbnb, but each host is somehow part of your social network.

Earlier today, I caught up with Ed Wilson, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based fund Impulsum Ventures, where he helps companies create the next generation of tech royalty by investing his fund as well as through his 30-person development studio. I meet Wilson again at the event organized by Fika.

One thing I’ve wondered about throughout this week is how fruitful these types of networking get-togethers can be for the founders, investors, and entrepreneurs who attend. I get business cards being exchanged, LinkedIn QR codes being scanned, and in some cases dates being promised. But, has anyone ever established a truly viable connection?

Wilson, who is no stranger to these kinds of events, puts it in terms I can relate to. He refers to LA Tech Week and wider networking events as “rocks”. His philosophy, in a nutshell, is that you never know who you’ll meet or how you’ll meet them. Just keep lifting rocks to find out what’s underneath.

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