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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.
'I Don't Think Anybody Could Have Imagined What Actually Happened.' Former Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke on Building the Amazon Empire
07:00 AM | May 03, 2021
illustration by Eduardo Ramón Trejo
In March, Jeff Wilke quietly stepped away from Amazon, the company he was instrumental in building from an online book retailer to one of the most valuable and influential corporations in the world.
As CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer since 2016, he oversaw the company's vast retail business, Prime, the Amazon marketplace, Amazon stores, marketing and Whole Foods.
When Wilke joined Amazon in 1999 to oversee operations the company was doing about $2 billion of revenue a year. Now it brings in about $1 billion every day and last week announced its sales grew by an astonishing 44% year-over-year.
Wilke was long considered the second most important person in the company behind Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who shocked the world by announcing his own departure in February.
Bezos called Wilke his tutor and he was seen as a likely successor, but that job instead went to Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services.
In a wide ranging conversation with dot.LA – among his first since leaving – Wilke says he has no regrets and felt it simply time to do something else.
Wilke also talked about what it was like to work for Bezos and his reaction to last month's failed unionization vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You left Amazon only a few weeks ago. What's it been like these past couple of weeks, not being at the helm of that giant operation?
Jeff Wilke: It's certainly been an adjustment and I'm still adjusting. I was there over 21 years and it's a part of me in so many different ways. I have so many connections there still and friends who are there. I spent the first two weeks learning to code in Python, which I thought would be a really good way to stay connected to the engineers that build Amazon every day and upgrade my skills since I hadn't written code in modern languages.
So you're not on the golf course. You're learning Python?
Yeah, it was super fun. It was very immersive. It was a reminder to me of how coding compounds creativity and invention.
Why did you want to depart Amazon?
I just said it was time. I didn't spend any time through the years carefully charting some course. We were building what we hoped would be a lasting, important company and worrying about the customer experience and I got to a point where I felt like it was time to do other things.
Did the job become not as fun with all of the scrutiny from Washington and organized labor and just the giant pressure you were under with all that?
The job was just as fun when I started to think about leaving, which was well before the pandemic. And it was really meaningful last year in terms of all that was accomplished. But it just felt time for me to move on.
Did you want to be the next CEO?
I never really thought about it because I always imagined Jeff doing it forever. When I was making my decision that wasn't what I was thinking about.
But when you heard he was stepping down, were you like, "I should have just stuck around a little longer?"
No. I was super excited and I am super excited for [new Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO] Dave Clark and for Andy Jassy.
Were you surprised when the other Jeff said he was leaving?
Yes
It's interesting that both of you who had been there over 20 years and in his case founded the company decided at this moment to leave. Do you think he took some inspiration from you?
(Laughs) That's hard to say but I think in many ways the last year or so has been quite a time of self-reflection for many people. It's not surprising to me that if people were maybe thinking in the back of their mind about making a change, the events of the last year would have caused them to think even harder about it. I don't know for sure why Jeff chose the particular time he chose, but he has so many things in his life that he wants to focus on, too. And I'm just really happy for him.
How do you think the company will be different under Andy Jassy?
Andy was a part of the S-team [Amazon's senior leadership group] for a long time and contributed materially to a bunch of the things that are part of the culture. He and I worked with a group of people on a couple of the revisions to the leadership principles that really have guided the company for nearly two decades. And of course the business and culture that he built with the team and AWS is a big part of Amazon and certainly a big part of the technical underpinnings of the way Amazon works. And that's not going to change at all. So I think it's a terrific team with a great mission and a lot of runway because of the businesses that they're in. I'm going to remain a fan.
What was Jeff Bezos like to work for?
You vote with your feet at work, and if I didn't think he was somebody that I enjoyed working for and that I could learn from, I wouldn't have had him as my boss for over 20 years. He and I have different strengths in different areas where we were able to help each other out by learning from each other and of course Amazon is more than just one or two or 10 people – it's thousands and now actually over a million people.
In those early days what did you see Amazon becoming? Did you just think it would be a big bookseller or could you have seen this global colossus?
I don't think anybody could have imagined what actually happened. Too many things had to fall into place. For instance, there was no iPhone or Android system in 1999 when I joined. People weren't carrying around what are basically supercomputers in their hands, which radically changed the way people interact with the World Wide Web. The delivery networks were not nearly as capable as they became over those 20 years. There's a ton of work to do to get costs to a point where you could afford to offer something like Prime. We didn't have a studio so the idea that we would be creating movies and TV shows as a complement to the delivery services as part of the subscription program called Prime – I think it would have been hard to envision all these things in detail.
What was your reaction to the union vote in Alabama failing by a pretty wide margin?
Jeff hit this well in the shareholder letter; the company can always be better at taking care of employees. If I were still there, I wouldn't have hung my hat on the outcome of that particular vote. I would have said there are some signals that we're receiving that say we have more work to do. We should be proud of what we've done – proud of our safety record and proud that we pay industry leading wages and proud that we have 20 weeks of family leave for people who started an unskilled hourly job on day one, which is really unheard of. So, we have all these things that we've done that are great and then there's a lot of things that we can do to get better.
What did you think of "Nomadland"?
The work camper thing was something that sort of naturally evolved. There were groups of people who had come to work only for the holiday at Amazon and they showed up in campers and they were making great money and then they left post-holiday. They started coming back every year. They really enjoyed it. They built email networks together and they coordinated their work. They asked Amazon to help with finding parking lots for the campers and we were happy to do that. But it was really an organic thing. It just sprouted up. I really enjoyed my trips to the fulfillment centers, hearing their stories and then seeing them come back year after year.
Is it hard when you order something now from Amazon and it doesn't arrive on time and you're like, "why did this happen?" Is it hard to get that out of your system after all these years?
Of course. I mean, the team knows any time there's a defect, I'm going to send an email and that's not going to change.
Part two: Jeff Wilke reveals his next chapter.
Lead illustration by Eduardo Ramón Trejo.
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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
Los Angeles Has More Tech Job Postings Than San Francisco
05:02 PM | February 04, 2022
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Los Angeles continues to beat San Francisco in terms of the number of tech jobs that employers are looking to fill—with L.A. ranking fourth in the entire country last month in open job postings.
There were 13,437 tech job postings in the L.A. metro area in January, according to data from IT trade association CompTIA. While that number was 791 fewer than in December, Los Angeles maintained its advantage over San Francisco, which ranked fifth in the U.S. with 12,147 tech positions available. Only New York City (19,265), Washington D.C. (17,499) and Dallas (14,916) had more tech jobs on offer than L.A.
That doesn’t mean Los Angeles outpaces all of Silicon Valley as far as new tech jobs, however. San Jose ranked 10th on the list with 8,498 job postings; when combined with San Francisco, that would take the Bay Area’s total tech job postings to north of 20,000, without accounting for other Silicon Valley suburbs.
L.A.’s tech job openings were led by employers like health insurer Anthem Blue Cross (340 postings), consulting firm Deloitte (219), aerospace giant Boeing (206), defense contractor Raytheon (157) and ecommerce giant Amazon (154), per CompTIA data. Software developers and quality assurance testers accounted for the largest chunk of all postings, with 4,013 positions.
The region’s robust tech job market is part of a strong tech hiring economy nationally, and a resurgent U.S. job market overall. Tech companies added 24,300 workers in January—the 14th-consecutive month of tech industry employment growth—while IT occupations throughout the entire economy grew by 178,000, according to CompTIA. On Friday, the U.S Department of Labor reported that the U.S. economy added a total of 467,000 jobs last month, with the unemployment rate standing at 4%.
“By all accounts this was an exceptionally strong start to the year for tech employment,” CompTIA Chief Research Officer Tim Herbert said in a statement.
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Decerry Donato
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
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