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XLA Tech Week: A Case for the CryptoMondays
Ilana Gordon
Ilana Gordon is an entertainment, culture, and tech writer originally from Connecticut. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Tech Week in L.A. is officially underway, and that sound you hear is drivers across the Westside searching for parking. Get in, losers, we’re sharing where we went and what we saw there.
Getting Prept For #LAtechweek
For a few lucky founders, Tech Week starts not with a bang, but a blow dry. Prept, a virtual styling and beauty startup that launched in March of 2020 out of Raleigh, North Carolina, has opened the doors of their Peerspace-rented West L.A. home to female Tech Week attendees looking for an aesthetic tune up.
The company’s energy is that of a Better Help or Airbnb, but for the beauty space. The Prept app matches clients with one the company’s 55 stylists or makeup artists, who design and source customized outfits and beauty looks. For the Sephora uninitiated, makeup looks also come with virtual application lessons.
On Monday between the hours of 3:00 and 4:30 p.m., women wander into the three-story house for hair, make up and styling appointments. Prept staff checks guests in on the first floor; vendors, snacks and beautification services are set up on the second. The third floor is reserved for bathrooms, but also ends up serving as a refuge for attendees looking to cram in a quick business call between events.
Founded by Nicole Teibel Boyd, Prept moved to L.A. from the East Coast about a year ago and relaunched the beta version of their app in February. Millennials comprise their target audience, and the company’s priorities are accessibility, affordability and sustainability. Nicole says Prept considers themselves label agnostic and is happy to work with whatever brands clients naturally gravitate towards.
Tech Week is only Prept’s tenth in-person event. In the two years since launching, they’ve held shindigs in cities like Atlanta and Indianapolis, but most of their work happens virtually. This part of their business model might be changing, however. In true Millennial fashion, Prept ascribes to a “we don’t say no to anything” philosophy when it comes to turning down work, and recently expanded into offering makeup consultations events for employees at companies like Lenovo.
Tech Week attendees are grateful for the beauty services, especially after the stress of trying to sign up for events. One founder says she struggled to find space, most notably in those events intended for female founders. She says she’s making it work by reaching out to old contacts, but the lack of access is creating challenges around meeting new people and networking.
CryptoMondays LA
“Are you here for CryptoMondays?” asks Kate, one of the organizers. “What's your crypto vibe?”
It’s the same question she’s asked every attendee who turns up at Clutch, a beloved Venice restaurant known for their Northern Mexico cuisine and weekly, outdoor crypto meetups.
Tech Week is temporary, but CryptoMondays are forever. Or at least for the foreseeable future. Originally founded in New York City in 2017 by Lou Kerner – who also happens to be one of the many attendees at yesterday’s L.A. event – CryptoMondays has flourished. In the last five years, independent chapters of the meetup group have sprung up in cities across the globe.
Answers to Kate’s introductory pick-up line about crypto vibes vary. The attendees tonight are builders, consultants, NFT fans, bitcoin investors, founders, Web 3.0 enthusiasts and diners who wandered over from Clutch’s adjacent patio to see what all the fuss was about.
Online, CryptoMondays describes itself as a "decentralized global community that shares a passion for crypto, blockchain and how it's going to change the world in dramatic ways." In person, Kate explains the group’s focus is on education and the meetup is intended for people of all levels of experience and involvement.
As Clutch’s back patio fills up, then overflows into the parking lot, Kate darts between the attendees, taking on the role of crypto matchmaker. She asks guests about their interests in the space, then introduces them to someone she thinks might have complementary goals. The first hour of the event passes in a flurry of networking, discussions about which blockchains people are using and misplaced cocktails.
On any given week, the L.A. chapter of CryptoMondays attracts between 50 and 200 nerds at a time. Meetups include a speaker, plus time set aside for attendees to mingle and ask questions. In past weeks, discussions have focused on DeFi crypto and decentralization and creating your own society. Kate says the group is committed to building community: political opinions run the gamut, but attendees are united by their view of what tech can do for the future.
The Tech Week event is standing-room only, but since the featured speaker, Jess Furman, only talks for ten minutes, it isn’t an issue. A music executive, creative strategist and a core member and co-lead of the Blu3 Angels Network for Blu3 DAO, Jess gives tips about early stage funding for Web 3 projects. She also discusses her passion project, which employs distributive ledger technology to create the first transparent music industry database, in an attempt to ensure unclaimed royalties reach the artists who rightfully deserve them.
Crypto vibes may vary, but the energy at CryptoMondays is undeniably positive. Going forward, interested parties can get involved with the LA chapter by attending a meetup and joining their Telegram group. The meetup’s organizers say they need to add people to the group in-person because – in true Telegram fashion – it’s recently been overrun by bots.
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Ilana Gordon
Ilana Gordon is an entertainment, culture, and tech writer originally from Connecticut. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
'In a World Where We're All Scared It's Easy to Forget There are Opportunities': L.A.'s Glitziest Venture Capital Team is Still Hunting for Deals
06:39 AM | April 13, 2020
M13, named after one of the brightest star clusters in the Northern Sky, has considerable star wattage of its own and is decidedly the most L.A. of all the L.A venture capital firms.
Co-founders Carter and Courtney Reum together boast around 170,000 Instagram followers and in more normal times frequently post pictures with celebrities at parties or from their travels around the world. Carter has been linked to dating Paris Hilton, who was interviewed by Courtney onstage at the Upfront Summit in January. Sir Richard Branson is a limited partner in the firm as is Arianna Huffington.
But, now that glitz appears on hold as the brothers grapple with a pandemic that hit right as the Santa Monica early-stage consumer technology firm was in the midst of deploying the $175 million in its second fund. COVID-19 has hurt consumer companies especially hard, including once high-flying brands in M13's portfolio like Bird, FabFitFun, and ClassPass (M13 is also an investor in dot.LA.)
But Carter, 39, says he is intent on finding opportunities in how consumer behavior is changing and intends to raise a third fund next year. "Capital will be harder to get," he said. "We're hopeful that a premium will be put on what we bring to the table."
The brothers founded M13 in 2016 after they sold their spirits business, Veev, for a hefty multiple to a St. Louis beverage conglomerate. They built a reputation of putting in very long hours and expect the same from their employees. And they also share the same enviable resume: Columbia undergrad followed by Harvard Business School topped by a brief investment banking career at Goldman Sachs.
They are also relentlessly polished and on-message. When asked during a February office visit to describe the last time they disagreed about something, they looked at each other and there was a long pause. They were never able to come up with an answer.
Before coronavirus, M13's warehouse-chic Santa Monica headquarters was a bustling hive of activity, filled with people scurrying from meeting to meeting. The firm also has an office in New York a few blocks away from Gramercy Park and a partner, Gautum Gupta, based in San Francisco.
But on March 12th, all the offices closed and workers went home, connected only by Zoom, Slack, and telephones. Before focusing on business, Carter said it was essential to make sure employees had what they needed to adapt to the new reality.
"We said we didn't want to talk about anything related to work until we had the people thing settled," Carter said.
He said it was important to realize the uniqueness of the situation. Many employees are preoccupied with worrying about loved ones and are filled with anxiety. Some know multiple people who have died.
"This is different from running a remote culture when things are great," he said.
M13 set up a #CoronaCare slack channel focused on how to take care of people during the crisis. Carter says it's more important than ever for leaders to be very clear about what they expect and to formalize processes because it is impossible to walk over and chat with someone at their desk.
"You have to get in the habit when you finish a call with someone where you agree on next steps," he said.
M13 prides itself on its culture and the Reums still want to maintain it as much as possible when everyone is working remotely. They also wants people to still look forward to "going" to work everyday, even when they are stuck at home in their yoga pants.
The firm has been doing two virtual standup meetings per day, with employees dancing or celebrating St. Patrick's Day. There's also a 30-day ab workout challenge and Carter makes it a point to spontaneously make a video call with at least two employees a day to check in on how they are doing.
Beyond the Zooms and Slacks, there is still a fund to deploy and Carter says M13 is actively hunting for deals. It helps that valuations, which had ballooned in recent years, are now coming back to earth.
"In a world where we're all scared it's easy to forget there are opportunities," Carter said. "We are absolutely still writing checks."
Carter and his team are focused on how consumer behavior is changing and what businesses will benefit, and what people will need versus what they merely want. He cites two M13 portfolio companies seeing a rush of interest that he does not think will be short lived.
"Daily Harvest is booming right because people are not able to get food from local grocery stores," Carter said. "Capsule had one of its highest sales weeks because people don't want to go to pharmacies."
Carter does acknowledge that many of his companies will not be as well positioned for the present reality or even the post-COVID world.
"All of us will have companies in our portfolio that will be forced to close," he said.
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Ben Bergman
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
https://twitter.com/thebenbergman
ben@dot.la
Veo CEO Candice Xie Is Bringing an Anti-Tech Bro Approach to Micromobility
06:00 AM | February 07, 2022
Image courtesy of Veo
Yet another micromobility startup will soon call Los Angeles home, bringing its two-wheel sensibilities to what’s long been a four-wheel city.
Veo, an e-scooter and e-bike-sharing startup, will open its new headquarters on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade later this month. Originally hailing from Chicago, Veo plans to hire up to 200 employees locally, as it outlined in application documents filed with local authorities. The company currently operates in more than 25 cities, including Santa Monica, and plans to launch across wider Los Angeles by the end of this month.
“With this kind of active user base year round, it’s like heaven for us,” according to Veo CEO Candice Xie. Both Xie and her co-founder, Veo president Edwin Tan, have moved to the L.A. area as part of the relocation.
Founded in 2017 as a bike-sharing startup, Veo has since expanded to include e-scooters in its offerings. It is also the only major micromobility operator run by a female CEO. Xie and Tan were inspired to launch Veo after witnessing the bike-share boom in Asia, but their ambitions were decidedly greener: Rather than sourcing cheap bikes that would eventually end up in a landfill, they wanted to build their own quality product and provide a scalable, sustainable service for communities.
Veo CEO Candice Xie.
Image courtesy of Veo
Tan, formerly an engineer for bicycle manufacturer Trek, brought his experience in manufacturing and supply chain logistics, while Xie—a former financial planner for Schneider Electric—brought her business background. They initially named the company VeoRide, as in “we all ride.”
As Veo grew its offerings from bikes and e-bikes to e-scooters in 2019, it continued its commitment to accessibility for all riders across socio-economic demographics. That’s a notable goal given how, according to a 2020 report by the L.A. Department of Transportation on the county’s micromobility pilot program, 64% of riders identified as male, 58% were aged 18-to-34 and nearly a quarter earned over $100,000.
After Veo built its first standup scooter in 2019, Xie saw an opportunity to develop a product that could appeal to a more diverse user base. “As a woman—and I cannot speak for all women—I am a more risk-averse person,” she said. “So standing there [going] 15 miles per hour, with cars riding side-by-side with me, made me a little bit freaked out.”
In 2020, Veo debuted the Cosmo, a sit-down e-scooter with a larger wheelbase and lower center of gravity. Xie said that they wanted to appeal to women who might wear high heels or skirts to work, as well as older users who would feel more comfortable sitting down. A Veo user survey last year found that women, people with disabilities and riders taking longer trips all preferred it to Veo’s standup scooter.
Xie believes that the future of micromobility is in a multi-model approach.
“I don't believe it if someone says, ‘This is the perfect scooter,’” she said. “No, it's not; we're just a couple of years into this industry. There are still a lot of things we can build from the safety, sustainability and inclusivity side.”
Veo plans to roll out more vehicle types and features, appealing to a wide range of users and use cases, in the coming months.
So far, it seems like Veo’s city-by-city strategy is paying off. It’s the only company operating in both Santa Monica and New York City—where, alongside Bird and Lime, it’s part of the Big Apple’s recently launched micromobility pilot program. (Bird was notably kicked out of Santa Monica last year, while Lime pulled out of the city in 2020.) Veo also raised $16 million in new funding last year to support its expansion into new markets.
Xie noted that cities are maturing in their approach toward micromobility after the industry’s tumultuous beginnings, with municipalities choosing companies that are willing to operate as community partners rather than chasing riders at all costs.
In December 2020, Xie took to Medium to call out other operators for prioritizing rapid growth at the expense of building a sustainable business model. She pointed out that Veo—and not Lime, as that company’s CEO Wayne Ting had intimated—was the first micromobility company to achieve profitability.
While Xie does not hesitate to throw down the gauntlet, being a female CEO is not without its challenges. She mentioned one investor forum where, as the only woman in the room, another attendee handed her his drink thinking that she was a server.
“A lot of products used by females are actually designed by males,” she said. “And I do think that’s something that needs to be improved.”
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Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
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