Subscribe for free to finish this article!
Join tens of thousands of other founders, investors, and operators who subscribe to dot.LA for the most important tech news in their inbox 2x a week.
Get access to
Join tens of thousands of other founders, investors, and operators who subscribe to dot.LA for the most important tech news in their inbox 2x a week.
Get access to
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
James Segil and Alex Kazerani are two of L.A.'s most successful tech entrepreneurs, but you've probably never heard of them because for the last 20 years they've been making bets on backend tech infrastructure. Most recently they scored a $36 million fundraise for their latest venture. And now as they look back at their careers, they've opened up their playbook to dot.LA.
Segil and Kazerani are, respectively, the president and chief executive officer of Openpath, a property-tech firm that recently announced a $36 million raise to accelerate its disruption of keycards and bring its touchless-entry technology to more doors, gates, elevators and lobby check-ins — a value proposition made all the more useful in the post-pandemic era. They co-founded Openpath in 2016 along with Chief Technology Officer Rob Peters, Chief Security Officer Samy Kamkar, and Chief Revenue Officer Phil Goldsmith.
Collectively, these five have sold five L.A.-based tech companies since 1998, employed thousands of Angelenos and watched the city's industry transform from Hollywood afterthought to spotlight stealer.
"When we started in tech in 1996," said Kazerani, who moved to L.A. after graduating from Tufts University the year prior, "we were excited if once a week there was a mention of something-dot-com." Then came Silicon Beach, followed by several behemoths like Facebook, Google and Apple setting up shop.
In the years since, Segil and Kazerani have been ahead of the curve on several gigantic tech trends. And they've attracted an inner circle of tech entrepreneurs that have helped build one big idea after another. By the time they started Openpath, the founders were able to call on people they trusted from their previous companies for the first 50 hires.
Segil envisions a future where he and his fellow executives are "going to be investors, advisors, and co-founders" for the next generation of L.A. doers and entrepreneurs. Successful tech startups, after all, often beget more successful tech startups, as employees learn on the frontlines before going on to start their own ventures. Segil likens this motley ecosystem to the "mafia" of tech stars that stemmed from PayPal and other Silicon Valley companies.
When Kazerani moved to L.A. from Boston in 1996, back in the early days of the internet, he founded a web-hosting company, HostPro. This was long before cloud services like AWS and plug-and-play web design software like Squarespace made starting a website a simple, common undertaking. One of HostPro's web-hosting competitors, Geocities – also located in Southern California – would go on to be acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $3 billion, right around the peak of the dot-com bubble.
In 1998, Kazerani and his co-founder Lior Elazary capitalized on the world wide web exuberance and sold HostPro to Micron Electronics, a subsidiary of Micron Technologies, which specializes in semiconductors and today has a market cap above $50 billion. The two joined Micron, where they were tasked with building out its web-hosting division. One appealing target they found, conveniently located in L.A., was called Virtualis. Segil, a recent Harvard Business School graduate who had moved to L.A. when he was three, was its chief operating officer, working alongside CEO Chris Lyman.
But with the dot-com bubble expanding with no pop in sight, Micron wasn't the only buyer in town.
"They got a better offer from Allegiance Telecom (for $30M); they didn't sell to us," Kazerani recounted. But "as a result, James and I became friends."
By 2000, Segil left Allegiance, and Kazerani and Elazary left Micron, along with one of their first HostPro hires, Phil Goldsmith, who'd been Kazerani's college roommate in Somerville. Having ridden the wave of internet fever to entrepreneurial prosperity, the four of them, along with two other founders, bootstrapped their next L.A. tech company,
KnowledgeBase capitalized on a trend of globalization. The company aimed to help businesses share knowledge with their outsourced call centers, so that, as Segil put it, "people in the Philippines could speak educatedly about the product in Cupertino."
Again their intuition proved prescient, as KnowledgeBase sold to Talisma in 2005 for an undisclosed amount. One key lesson the founders learned, however, was that for all the work it took to build a startup with a successful exit, the size of the market matters.
"We'd worked our asses off chasing a small market," Segil said. "There are only so many call centers in the world."
Even before that realization crystallized, the KnowledgeBase founders were tempted by other potential ventures.
"Alex has ideas every five minutes," Segil said.
One such was a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) company, for which they built a prototype before deciding that it'd be best to focus on one idea at a time. This was around the time of Skype's 2003 launch, and well before the emergence of WhatsApp and FaceTime, all of which use VoIP technology.
Sensing they were onto something, they pitched it to Lyman, who bought it along with Samy Kamkar and named it Fonality. Kamkar stuck around until 2010, and by the time Lyman left in 2011, Fonality was worth nine figures.
Kamkar is a colorful character who's developed a following of his own and has helped to bolster Openpath's reputation. In 2005, the former high-school dropout-turned-security-guru designed a worm that infected over one million Myspace users. Although the impact was benign – infected users' profiles displayed the phrase "but most of all, Samy is my hero", and they unknowingly sent Kamkar a friend request – the early social networking site had to temporarily shut down to address the issue.
Openpath Chief Security Officer Samy Kamkar
The Openpath chief security officer has written about security vulnerabilities in the Wall Street Journal and commands a significant following.
"If he tweets about us we get more traffic than from TechCrunch," Kazerani said.
In 2006, as Kamkar and Lyman kept building Fonality, for which they raised over $20 million, Kazerani, Segil, Goldsmith and Elazary began brainstorming their next idea. They worked out of the Fonality office, which had lent them a conference room and three cubicles.
"We like changing industries," said Kazerani, reflecting on how he and his team have decided what to pursue next. "We think it's an incredible learning opportunity and exciting endeavor. We like disrupting. And we're trying to be meaningful, if not own the entire category."
"(When you're ideating) you have to let the river flow, (and) go with it," Segil added. "But there's a moment as an entrepreneur when you have to stop the flow and make a decision."
Back in the Fonality offices, captivated by the early popularity of YouTube, which had recently launched in 2005, they stopped the flow at the hypothesis that the world of entertainment was moving towards internet-enabled, on-demand viewing.
"We bet the entire entertainment infrastructure would switch to IP (internet protocol), so we deployed data centers in 70 locations and 40 countries," Kazerani said. These data centers became the backbone of EdgeCast, which helped to manage data traffic scurrying around between content distributors and the users who wanted to watch at the click of a mouse. Elazary could only work part-time while he pursued a graduate degree, so he brought in Rob Peters, who'd completed a triple-major at CalTech when he was 16, and was eventually made EdgeCast CTO.
Validating their vision that internet video was the next big thing, EdgeCast would go on to carry over 5% of all internet traffic, with clients like Disney, Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter.
"When we started we had little clients; Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter were small. As they grew, we grew," Kazerani said. EdgeCast eventually expanded to 400 engineers and was acquired by Verizon in 2013 for $400 million.
It was while working at Verizon, following that acquisition, that Kazerani, Segil and Peters confronted the problem they would ultimately aim to solve with Openpath: they were laden with keycards.
"When we look at what we want to do next," Kazerani said, "we look at industries that require disruption and we look at a pain point that we have felt...That's how we started Openpath: we actually suffered through it."
Looking back, Segil and Kazerani believe founders must put skin in the game to earn their keep and build an environment of equality. It's not enough to simply be there from the beginning; the effort and investment must be sustained. They also say building teams with complementary skills is a big help.
"When you divide and conquer, you can each excel as opposed to compete (with each other)", said Kazerani.
They also counsel building a culture of trust in which people are willing to share and listen to each other's constructive criticism – and where people have good reason to know that it is coming to them in good faith. One-third of Openpath's office space is meant for people to hang out and do things together, they said, and long tables allow the team to eat lunch together like a family.
"They take the business seriously, but they don't take themselves too seriously," said Kieran Hannon, Openpath's chief marketing officer.
Despite their repeated entrepreneurial success, Kazerani says startups aren't easy.
"Don't start a company," he advises, "unless you can't sleep well because you have to do the idea, and you're scared that somebody else will do it, and you're up for the grind."
It helps, of course, to have a team to grind alongside you.
"I don't think I'd want to do it solo," reflected Segil. "One reason I've enjoyed it is doing it with people you really like. It makes life a lot more fun."
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
According to a Forbes report last April, both the viewership and dollars behind women’s sports at a collegiate and professional level are growing.
In 2022, the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament had record attendance levels, breaking records set back in 2004, and largely driven by the new and rapidly growing women’s NCAA tournament. WNBA openers this year saw a 21% spike in attendance, with some teams including the LA Sparks reporting triple-digit ticket sales growth, about 121% over 2022’s total. In 2023, the average size of an LA Sparks crowd swelled to 10,396 people, up from 4,701 people.
Women make up half the population, but “also 50% of the folks that are walking into the stadium at Dodger Stadium, or your NFL fans are just about 50% women,” noted Erin Storck, a panelist and senior analyst at Los Angeles-based Elysian Park Ventures.
Storck added that in heterosexual households, women generally manage most of the family’s money, giving them huge purchasing power, a potential advantage for female-run leagues. “There's an untapped revenue opportunity,” she noted.
In the soccer world, Los Angeles-based women’s soccer team Angel City FC has put in the work to become a household name, not just in LA County but across the nation. At an LA Tech Week panel hosted by Athlete Strategies about investing in sports, Angel City head of strategy and chief of staff Kari Fleischauer said that years before launching the women’s National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City FC was pounding the pavement letting people know about the excitement ladies soccer can bring. She noted community is key, and that fostering a sense of engagement and safety at the team’s home venue, BMO stadium (formerly Banc of California Stadium), is one reason fans keep coming back.
Adding free metro rides to BMO stadium and private rooms for nursing fans to breastfeed or fans on the spectrum to avoid sensory overload, were just some of the ways ACFC tried to include its community in the concept of its stadium, Fleischauer said. She noted, though, that roughly 46% of Angel City fans are “straight white dudes hanging out with their bros.”
“Particularly [on] the woman's side, I'd like to think we do a better job of making sure that there's spaces for everyone,” Fleischauer told the audience. “One thing we realize is accessibility is a huge thing.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.
Here's what people are saying about the fifth day of L.A. Tech Week on social:
#LATechWeek has been on 🔥🔥🔥. Yes the events are super cool at amazing venues. But, I’m blown away by the people. I’ve met so many founders building generative AI companies from the ground up. I’m so bullish on LA right now🥳. LA is for builders #longLA
Thanks @rpnickson 📸 pic.twitter.com/B6rT2jJYIs
— Dr. Kelly O'Brien (@Kvo2013) June 8, 2023
Successful LatinxVC Avanza Summit 2023 in LA! It’s been an amazing few days near the beach w great company. Thank you to our panelists & participants.
Huge thanks to our incredible sponsors SVB, Chavez Family Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, PledgeLA, Fenwick & West, Countsy! pic.twitter.com/oVuGIgFurk
— LatinxVC (@LatinxVCs) June 9, 2023
30+ gaming startups presented at the A16z Speedrun Demo Day in LA yesterday. Great thanks to the @a16zGames team for an awesome day of events! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/DKq8IFo5QZ
— Grace Zhou (@graceminzhou) June 9, 2023
📣🤩 What’s the buzz? It’s #LATechWeek from @TechstarsLA & @TechstarsHealth joint demo day with the #Techstar HC team where our @fyelabs founder/CEO Suvojit Ghosh mentored both cohorts! #TechStars demo day highlighted 12 amazing emerging #startups in #healthtech #innovation. 🩺 pic.twitter.com/0RXClCtfDQ
— FYELABS (@fyelabs) June 9, 2023
Another successful Coffee On Slauson in the books for #LATechWeek.
Special thanks to the good people at Pledge LA, SVB and @GundersonLaw for the ongoing support and the @findyourhilltop staff for providing the space, eats & vibes. ♻️ pic.twitter.com/51cMDoEn30
— Slauson & Co. (@SlausonAndCo) June 9, 2023
The perfect combo to start #LATechWeek Day 5: pastries, coffee, and great convos with industry founders ✨
Fireside chats with @enriquealle, @wp, and @robynpark pic.twitter.com/booYPdekVV
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Of course @designerfund has the most amazing pastries at their event. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/PjyWlGTQI4
— Jesse Pickard (@jessepickard) June 9, 2023
My favorite event from @Techweek_ has to be "Modern Storytelling & Business Building." Hosted by @STHoward #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/SV1eexMJ4k
— JonnyZeller (@JonnyZeller) June 9, 2023
And the finale of the night was courtesy of the one and only @zedd for an unforgettable end to the "City of Games" party! Hosted by @a16zGames and @100Thieves #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hliI9yLKse
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Excited to be at the @a16zGames Speedrun Demo Day! Loved the energy and excitement from the companies that pitched there. It was also great to see @Tocelot and @ndrewlee at this amazing #LATechWeek event pic.twitter.com/NfLQO5lR27
— Andy Lee | andypwlee.bit (@andypwlee) June 9, 2023
Thank you to everyone who joined the Sony Venture Fund US team at #LATechWeek for our screening of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Last summer, we started building a presence in LA. Today, it's exciting to host such an event with the @Sony family and the LA VC community. pic.twitter.com/wdDm6qtHdL
— Sony Innovation Fund (@Sony_Innov_Fund) June 9, 2023
Time to eat, connect and build while @remi_rodney provided the vibes. 🙏🏽#LATechWeek @BuildOnBase @developer_dao @WeAreRazorfish pic.twitter.com/QIPh1gjvoA
— Hola Metaverso-Blockchain & New Web Tech Events 🎪 (@holametaverso) June 9, 2023
@Lux_Capital at #LATechWeek advancing the impossible to inevitable, from..
..defense primes partnering with cutting edge defense tech startups, to..
..hardware x LLMs improving mental health.
From the rich and diverse LA ecosystem stems generational companies: pic.twitter.com/v5S5r8JtbU
— Shahin Farshchi (@Farshchi) June 9, 2023
LA Tech Week has been a blast! Met some amazing creators, founders and investors from all over the world! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/AAh9JFELhe
— Chris Germano (@netslayer) June 9, 2023
Had such a blast at LA Tech Week and hosting events for @brexHQ
Top highlights were collabing with @pulley on an Emerging Managers / Founder mixer at the @poplco House, rooftop event in Venice, creator panel with @thechangj & proper Korean food with in KTown.
Exhausted is an… pic.twitter.com/mGQnSYGPdg
— Τyler Robinson (@TyyRob3) June 9, 2023
Did you have fun at @sophiaamoruso’s launch party for @trustfundvc? #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/gbrbXRQ9Xx
— Kay (@KaySnels) June 9, 2023
y00tilty in every city with @KaylaLor3n & @cryptochrisg813.
Welcome to the LA @y00tsNFT fam! #LATechWeek #3XP week. pic.twitter.com/6wWKlsTacx
— VanG0xH (@CryptoVanGoghs) June 9, 2023
Really enjoyed #LATechWeek. Here are some observations I made 👇
— s.personal.ai (Suman Kanuganti) (@SumanPersonalAI) June 9, 2023
Thank you @TheKofiAmpadu for including me in #demoday with the latest @a16ztxo cohort! It was a real full circle moment to witness the brilliance of both @ChrisLyons & @ZMuse_ & #PledgeLA very own. She’s why we’re #LongLA 🚀💕 #LAtechweek pic.twitter.com/itkKXMxQRb
— Qiana Qiana! (@Q_i_a_n_a) June 9, 2023
@upfrontvc Gaming Founders Podcast #iLOVELA #LATechWeek @Techweek_ @KatiaAmeri @mucker @fikavc @bonfire_vc @TenOne10 @WatertowerGroup @ganasvc @IAmRobRyan @john_at_stonks @eva_ho @dereknorton pic.twitter.com/LCbaGXCoW7
— Sean Goldfaden (@seangoldfaden) June 9, 2023
Hosts Kevin Zhang, Partner at @upfrontvc, and Eden Chen, CEO of @pragmaplatform, interviewed two special guests from @raidbaseinc Stephen Lim, Co-Founder & Product Director, and Trevor Romleski, Co-Founder & Game Director. 🎙 #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hxHEAoELZ6
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Kicking off @a16zGames @100Thieves City of Games party at #LATechWeek 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/zQcZedG15f
— Jon Lai (@Tocelot) June 9, 2023
Yesterday at @socinnovation I got to have this AWESOME conversation with @iamwill — musician, producer, technology entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of https://t.co/D60y1e2JOu #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/KBxK6rXyTG
— Anna Barber (@annawbarber) June 9, 2023
I absolutely love this game. Proud moment for the team @investwithatlas. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/fPZvKXU7TC
— Tobias Francis (@TobiasFrancis) June 9, 2023
Had a blast at LA Tech Week this year with @brexHQ
From hosting & moderating my first creator panel featuring @BlakeMichael14, to a fun rooftop night in Venice, and to attending some amazing events such as Watertower’s emerging manager panel and a VC/founder tennis tournament pic.twitter.com/udjfmLHE0L
— Jonathan Chang (@thechangj) June 8, 2023
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
At Lowercarbon Capital’s LA Tech Week event Thursday, the synergy between the region’s aerospace industry and greentech startups was clear.
The event sponsored by Lowercarbon, Climate Draft (and the defunct Silicon Valley Bank’s Climate Technology & Sustainability team) brought together a handful of local startups in Hawthorne not far from LAX, and many of the companies shared DNA with arguably the region’s most famous tech resident: SpaceX.
Here’s a look at the greentech startups that pitched during the Tech Week event, and how they think what they’re building could help solve the climate crisis.
Arbor: Based in El Segundo, this year-old startup is working to convert organic waste into energy and fresh water. At the same time, it also uses biomass carbon removal and storage to remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in an attempt to avoid further damaging the earth’s ozone layer. At the Tech Week event Thursday, Arbor CEO Brad Hartwig told a stunned crowd that Arbor aims to remove about five billion tons of organic waste from landfills and turn that into about 6 PWh, or a quarter of the global electricity need, each year. Hartwig is an alumni of SpaceX; he was a manufacturing engineer on the Crew Dragon engines from 2016-2018 and later a flight test engineer at Kitty Hawk.
Antora: Sunnyvale-based Antora Energy was founded in 2017, making it one of the oldest companies on the pitching block during the event. Backed by investors including the National Science Foundation and Los Angeles-based Overture VC, Antora has raised roughly $57 million to date, most recently a $50 million round last February. Chief operating officer Justin Briggs said Antora’s goal is to modernize and popularize thermal energy storage using ultra-hot carbon. Massive heated carbon blocks can give off thermal energy, which Antora’s proprietary batteries then absorb and store as energy. It’s an ambitious goal, but one the world needs at scale to green its energy footprint. According to Briggs, “the biggest challenge is how can we turn back variable intermittent renewable electricity into something that's reliable and on demand, so we can use it to provide energy to everything we need.”
Arc: Hosting the panel was Arc, an electric boating company that’s gained surprising momentum, moving from design to delivering its first e-boats in just two years of existence. Founded in 2021, the company’s already 70 employees strong and has already sold some of its first e-boats to customers willing to pay the luxury price tag, CTO Ryan Cook said Thursday. Cook said that to meet the power needs of a battery-powered speedboat, the Arc team designed the vehicle around the battery pack with the goal of it being competitive with gas boats when compared to range and cost of gas. But on the pricing side, it’s not cheap. Arc’s flagship vessel, the Arc One is expected to cost roughly $300,000. During the panel, Cook compared the boat to being “like an early Tesla Roadster.” To date Arc Boats has raised just over $35 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kevin Durant, Will Smith and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Clarity Technology: Carbon removal startup Clarity is based in LA and was founded by Yale graduate and CEO Glen Meyerowitz last year. Clarity is working to make “gigaton solutions for gigaton problems.” Their aim? To remove up to 2,000 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere through direct air capture, a process which uses massive fans to move chemicals that capture CO2. But the challenge, Meyerowitz noted in his speech, is doing this at scale in a way that makes an actual dent in the planet’s emissions while also efficiently using the electricity needed to do so. Meyerowitz spent nearly five years working as an engineer for SpaceX in Texas, and added he’s looking to transfer those learnings into Clarity.
Parallel Systems: Based in Downtown LA’s Arts District, this startup is building zero-emission rail vehicles that are capable of long-haul journeys otherwise done by a trucking company. The estimated $700 billion trucking industry, Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule said, is ripe for an overhaul and could benefit from moving some of its goods off-road to electric railcars. According to Soule, Parallel’s electric battery-powered rail vehicles use 25% of the energy a semi truck uses, and at a competitive cost. Funded in part by a February 2022 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Parallel Systems has raised about $57 million to date. Its most recent venture funding round was a $49 million Series A led by Santa Monica-based VC Anthos Capital. Local VCs including Riot Ventures and Santa Monica-based Embark Ventures are also backers of Parallel.
Terra Talent: Unlike the rest of the startups pitching at the Tech Week event, Terra Talent was focused on building teams rather than technology. Founder Dolly Singh worked at SpaceX, Oculus and Citadel as a headhunter, and now runs Terra, a talent and advisory firm that helps companies recruit top talent in the greentech space. But, she said, she’s concerned that all the work these startups are doing won’t matter unless we very quickly turn around the current trendlines. “Earth will shake us off like and she will do just fine in 10,000 years,” she said. “It’s our way of living, everything we love is actually here on earth… there’s nothing I love on Mars,” adding that she’s hopeful the startups that pitched during the event will be instrumental in making sure the planet stays habitable for a little while longer.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.