Last week Timehop reminded me of a dinner I threw for 10 strangers in New York a year ago. On a lark I decided to organize a group of folks who followed me across various channels of social media so I could put some names and personalities with you all. It was a really fun night filled with interesting conversations and new connections.

One diner at the table mentioned he’d just left his gig to pursue a few ideas for companies he couldn’t shake. As the dinner wound down I wished him well on his new adventures and encouraged him to stay in touch as his ideas became more tangible. 

About 6 months ago that diner reached out to show off what he’d been working on and introduce me to his business partner. As Andrew cracked open the door on his Chelsea walk up apartment/office we were all smiles. When he introduced me to the problem they were working on I was impressed. When he introduced me to his partner Mark, I was intrigued. You see Mark was one of the founding members of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and lead all of the agencies work on mobile payments and other emerging payment technologies. He’s seen it all.

With that experience they’ve decided to take on a problem faced by restaurants and their patrons. After the meeting, they lined me up with a dinner to test out the service they’d been building and its potential was immediately eye opening.

Yesterday Techcrunch announced a small round of funding we’ve lead to bring Andrew and Mark’s creation, Cover, to market. Tho intentionally light on details, the TC piece gives a fairly good sense for where we’re going with this one. 

More details to come, but we’re happy to be adding Cover to the OATV team and thrilled to be a part of what they’re building.

Fittingly, it all started over a meal one year ago…

…”look at how rich people are living today”.

Was said as a passing comment in a recent conversation. But I couldn’t let it just pass.

Think about it.

When you imagine Gordon Gecko from the movie Wall St. what image do you have in mind? Mine is the one of the poster boy of wealth clutching his massive brick of a mobile phone while brokering another million dollar deal. That film was release in 1987. At that time, cell phones cost $2,000 and calls were 50 cents a minute.

I didn’t get my first mobile phone until 1999.

In 2012 global mobile penetration hit 91%.

The same can be said for most emergent technologies. Flat panel TVs were once the purview of the truly wealthy. Now you can pick one up with your tub of red vines at Costco. Home theaters were once reserved for the wealthy. Now a McMansion in suburbia isn’t complete with a projector and surround sound.

3 years ago, opening the Uber app and ordering a black car was a true indulgence. Far more expensive than a cab, but so convenient and such a better experience than “slumming it”. Only 3 years later and I can use Uber’s (or Sidecar or Lyft or Hailo or…) app to request a car for the price of a cab, and sometimes even less.

So what are the 1% doing today that the 99% us aren’t yet?

The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed indeed.

About two years ago I found myself in a nondescript neighborhood near the San Francisco Airport. I was parked in front of a house, which resembled most houses on the street. As I walked to the door, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. As I entered, it was clearly some sort of startup flop house with clutter strewn throughout and whiteboards where most in suburbia would be hanging faux-art.

Then I was led into the garage.

Inside was a labyrinth of sheet rock, tarps, pulsating lights and industrial lab equipment. Turns out these flop house residents were actually PhDs from various Ivy League schools building a startup to pursue a new and novel type of therapeutic drug. 

When asked why they chose to build out their own lab as opposed to working in the comfort of the labs at their various alma maters they said there was never any available time for the work they wanted to do. The labs were over scheduled and inaccessible.

That garage and that insight of limited access to equipment and expertise for new types of research stuck with and began to gnaw at me over the last few years. 

There are many reasons for stalls in scientific breakthroughs, but limited access should not be one of them.

Around the same time I found myself in this DIY garage lab, a company was started to tackle this problem of unlocking access and research resources. Their approach was to create a marketplace where researchers could post the projects they needed completed and providers could fullfil those request for a fee. Today, the company has facilitated over 1,000 transactions that each move the advancement of scientific discovery forward in large and small ways

That company’s name is Science Exchange and today we’re please to be included as they announce their latest round of funding. 

We believe they have an opportunity to become a huge marketplace as well as becoming a marketplace whose work will have a huge impact on our society. 

And we’re thrilled to be working with them to build it.

Back when we used to buy records, then cassette tapes then CDs there always seemed  to be a tiny slip of paper wedged in the case or printed on the liner notes encouraging purchasers to send a check and a self addressed envelope to the artists to join their fan club. Benefits of club membership ranged from stickers to personal notes from band members, to early access to concert tickets, to merchandise only available to those in the club. 

These fan clubs elevated the average music consumer to a new level of insider status. 

We’ve been witnessing an explosion of creativity of late on the web. These days a musician doesn’t need a record label to front the high upfront costs of big name producers and expensive studio time nor an artists need big name gallery representation to get their work in front of prospective collectors. The web provides a perfect showcase to display and promote creative works. And some fans are finding was to support these creatives, primarily on a project basis via crowd funding sites. 

Last year we funded a small company called Artists Wanted who had built a business around contests that elevated unknown artists and photographers work into high profile gallery and large scale public showings. Along the way, participants built beautiful online portfolios of their work as well as attracted supporters who would promote their contest submissions. The “currency” of these supporters was simply soliciting votes for the artists they loved across their various social networks.

The company, now known as See.me, has seen tremendous growth since taking funding- scaling from 10s of thousands of photographers and fine artist to well over half a million members across a wide range of creative pursuits. Many of these creatives have been discovered on the site and commercial opportunities have been opened to them.

But, the native currency of the site has remained fans promoting artists work across their social networks.

Last week the See.me team quietly rolled out a new service that introduces a new form of currency into the system- financial support. From their announcement:

If you choose, you can accept contributions through your See.Me profile so that anyone, anywhere in the world can support your creative work.Think of it like the old system of patronage, but instead of one wealthy family supporting a handful of artists, millions of viewers can contribute ongoing financial support to a wide and varied community.

You can easily add rewards to encourage contributions and your supporters will receive monthly updates as you add new work and come up with new ideas. By posting new work often, you will increase the chances of earning recurring support from your community. There are no limitations on how much you can make, and you can accept contributions for as long as you like.

This idea of patronage, or fan clubs, has the common thread of building tools for creatives to directly connect with an audience that both appreciates, consumes and supports their work. By adding financial support into the system, our hope is to see a much wider range of creatives able to purse their ideas and passions full time.

The system is being phased in, but you can see a few of the accounts that have gone live with the feature now. Here, you’ll see the work of a circus performer planning to stage an underground performance for supporters in an abandoned factory in Brooklyn. Here, you’ll see the work of a blind photographer who wants to push his gallery work offering signed prints to his supporters. Here, you’ll meet a an innovative musician sharing unreleased tracks with, and planning private shows for, supporters. 

If you’re a creative looking for a home on the web to share your work and connect with your audience give See.me a look. If you’re someone who appreciates the work of creatives and likes discovering their work before anyone else, I think you’ll find many new ways to connect with and support this community.

When I came up with the idea for OATV’s Field Trip Series I had our early experience with the NYC startup community as a backdrop. Stepping off the plane at LAX last week, I had no idea how relevant that context was for the week I was about to experience.

Like most who visit LA, I was drawn to the beach and chose to stay in Santa Monica. I wouldn’t say that was a mistake, but it did teach me early on in my trip that Santa Monica is NOT LA. In fact, the greater Los Angeles area, and specifically it’s startup community can not be pigeonholed as beach bumming founders in board shorts. What became clear throughout my stay was that there is a tremendous amount of diversity in the area’s startups and startup cultures depending on which part of LA they were based.

Similar to NYC, LA’s high rent neighborhoods tend to attract the capital and well funded startups. If you’re looking for a comparable to Union Square, look no further than Santa Monica. If you’re looking for SoHo, try Venice. If you want Meatpacking, try Hollywood. And If you want Brooklyn, try downtown LA. I’m taking the liberty of applying a fairly broad brush with those neighborhood pairings but the attitudes and ethos’ of each seem to match up. LA Represent, created by @tara, @abenzer and @seanbonner, can give you a visual sense of how the city’s startup community lays out (related- sourcecode for makeing your own Represent map is available on github).

Another similarity, which may seem less obvious at first blush, is Google. I don’t think Google gets enough credit for the role they’ve played in the recent rise of the NYC startup community. Shortly after my first visit ro NYC in 2005, Google purchased an entire city block in Chelsea and proceeded to fill it with engineers. This was a massive departure from the traditional Bay Area playbook. Up to that point, NYC served primarily is as outpost for Sales and Marketing functions. Google’s move to make NYC an engineering hub not only supplied NYC startups with a massive talent pool to fish from, but provided would be founders a fall back plan in the event their startups failed. 

It’s worth noting here that Google has recently opened 100,000 sq ft. of space in Venice and is aggressively filling it with engineering talent. This is on top of the 50,000 sq ft. YouTube Production Studio they opened last year.

OK, enough about LA/NYC parallels.

The majority of my time was spent hopping between Santa Monica and Venice. This was partly a function of where I was staying, but partly a function of one trait of LA’s startup community I hadn’t fully appreciated until I experienced it- LA is an accelerator town. 

These two beach towns are home to the four horsemen of LA’s accelerators. The one grabbing headlines these days is SCIENCE. But Launchpad LA, Amplify and Mucker Lab are each providing fertile soil for some notable companies to begin to take root.

Several observations fall out of LA’s current accelerator/incubator approach to startups. First, these programs are providing a highly valuable service to local founders. As was relayed to me multiple times, they’re attracting many first time founders who find the programatic approach and shared work spaces a more appealing setting for breaking out of the corporate or agency world which, I believe, is a plus. Interestingly, these accelerators are also proving to be a magnet for bringing outside talent to LA. Tho this may prove to be adverse selection over time (“we didn’t get into YC, so we may as well go to the beach”). I think these programs are serving a real and current opportunity in LA.

But they’re creating other opportunities which don’t appear to be getting filled locally. Despite the rise of the accelerators and an active local angel community, there are very few active local venture funds who can write a $2-$5M Series A check. GRP is a clear exception. But, when pressed, most founders were slow to pinpoint a second. 

As an outsider, I can see this as a real opportunity to cherry pick some of the best things coming out of the city. But, to have a sustainable local startup ecosystem, there needs to be active local funds who are participating in the winners coming out of the city. Having all your cities best companies funded by Sand Hill Rd. firms may not seem like a big deal, but it’s a very difficult story for regional funds to explain to current and prospective LPs when they’re trying to raise money.

One last thought on LA startups. The website for SCIENCE reveals a prevailing attitude i heard throughout my trip. As noted on their homepage, they exist to build companies that “Solve Real Problems”. This theme of “solving real problems” as opposed to the pixie dust blowing hippies in the bay area was a real badge of honor. Rather than discussing downloads or MAUs, LA startups were far more interested in ARPU and month over month sales numbers. There was a dismissiveness for the “get big and we’ll figure out revenue later”model for growth. It was explained to me on multiple occasions that this was a town that understood SEO and SEO in all its various shades of gray and was not afraid to push some ethical limits to generate cash. To be fair, this wasn’t every company I met but a lot of them.

As my week in Santa Monica and Venice wore on it became clearer and clearer that the concentration of founders and funders is beginning to create some of the serendipitous moments that have become a hallmark for me in NYC. Case in point, while grabbing lunch at a new restaurant funded by several in the LA tech set, 41 Ocean, I ran into a startup friend who just happend to be in town and heard whispers of which early employees from hauteLook, yammer and facebook were eating at the next table over. Whispers turned to chatter as intros were made and contact info exchanged. 

Tho this concentration is critical for enabling moments like these, it is clearly creating a rift in LA. Eastsiders vs. Westsiders (with the 405 being the dividing line). We’re not talking Bloods and Crips type of rifts, but Eastsiders are very quick to point out that Santa Monica is NOT actually LA and that many of them are, somewhat, resentfully working for companies on the Westside simply because there just aren’t as many interesting or technically challenging opportunities in downtown or in Hollywood. I think this dynamic is a fascinating one. It’s this kind of creative tensions and hunger for diversity that lay a foundation for a healthy startup ecosystem. On my next trip I plan to stay on the Eastside to get a better feel for what’s happening there (spoiler alert- I’ll be back).

What was a bit surprising to me was how little leverage the LA startup community is getting out of their proximity and access to Hollywood and the scads of talent there. When asked how the two co-exist, most were quick to point towards new YouTube networks as the answer. Frankly, I think that sells such a unique assest short. Content feels like only one small element that Hollywood could add to the startup mix. When pressed most relayed that some founders and most out of town VCs were far more interested in partying with celebs than finding ways to build businesses with them.

All in all I was really blown away with the scene I see emerging in LA. The startup community there was extremely warm and welcoming. The diversity of cultures and ideas seems to be creating a genuine environment for ideas to flourish. CoWorking and Maker spaces are popping up around different parts of the city giving founders and creatives places to meet and collaborate. And with Google attracting new talent to the region, I can see LA really stepping into it’s own over the next few years.

And we’d love to be a part of helping that happen.

I’ve written here on many occasions of my first trip to NYC after founding OATV. It was a transformative experience for me and for the fund. Since that trip, we’ve built a significant portfolio of companies in NYC and had a front seat for how that startup community has evolved.

Last year I started to see that what was was happening in NYC 7 years ago is beginning to happen in more and more cities at an accelerating rate. Startup communities are forming and reshaping the cities they take root in. The secrets of silicon valley are increasingly getting distributed through transparent and scaled online networks which could care less where your mail is sent.

So, I got this idea.

We need to get out and experience these communities as they’re developing. We need to meet the faces and personalities that are making things happen in these new startup hubs. And we also need to get a deeper understanding of the cultural influences on these communities beyond their native tech scenes. 

So, my idea.

I want to spend at least one week a quarter (likely more than once a quarter) going deep on a new startup community. Sometimes it will be just me, sometimes I’ll bring along others from the OATV team. At the end of the week, I’ll return here and report on the things we saw, the conversations we had and the people having an impact on their startup cities.

What I’m hoping to get from everyone here are ideas for which startup communities I should visit. And who in those cities can help me get a feel for what’s driving their momentum.

Given I’ve been asked about 1000x in the last year when I’m going to be in LA next (and the fact that we have sub zero temps in Utah right now) my first field trip will be to Los Angeles from March 4th to the 8th.

If you are, or know, people I should be meeting to get a feel for what’s happening in LA now, I’d love to hear your suggestions for how to make the most of my week down there.

I look forward to returning with a better sense for the startup community in LA and a killer Field Trip report to share here.