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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.
How Women’s Purchasing Power Is Creating a New Wave of Economic Opportunities In Sports
05:00 AM | June 12, 2023
Samson Amore
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.”
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Samson Amore
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.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
Evan Xie
From mass layoffs to the rocky economic climate, tech workers have had a rough few months. TikTok hasn’t been immune to these issues. In July, the company laid off about 100 employees across the globe, and then cut at least 20 advertising employees one month later. In January, TikTok cut a handful of people from its HR department over the team’s “limited practical value” to the company.
But TikTok also faces a problem different from any of its competitors—the US government is assessing whether or not its platform should be banned from the country. Leaving TikTok’s current 32,000 headcount in jeopardy of mass layoffs.
Though the company’s Chinese ownership is at the root of its political dispute, TikTok’s US headquarters are in Culver City. First opened in January 2020 with 400 employees, the location brought employees back to the office twice a week in July 2022. TikTok has not released information about how many employees work out of LA, but its Mountain View office houses roughly 1,000 employees. LinkedIn lists around 1,000 LA-based employees, but that number is slightly muddled by influencers listing TikTok as their employer. Offices in New York City, Austin and Nashville round out its US footprint.
Of course, TikTok could still be bought out by another company. But it's unclear what company would pay TikTok’s fee, which ranges from $40 billion to $100 billion. Experts have noted that major tech companies like Google and Meta already run their own social media platforms, so buying a competitor would open them up to antitrust scrutiny.
Others point to Microsoft and Oracle as potential buyers. But both companies have undergone recent layoffs this year, which brings into question how many TikTok employees would be kept aboard. Microsoft has also funneled $10 billion into OpenAI, which means the company might not be interested in diverting funds to a social media platform. Whoever the new owner is, the company could potentially scrap TikTok’s Culver City office, leaving a gaping hole in LA’s tech scene.
Still, any TikTok employee who survives a potential sale may benefit from a change in ownership. Even before the company was under political fire, TikTok faced scrutiny for cultural differences between its Chinese owner and its US offices. Last year, multiple employees across the country spoke out about being pressured to adhere to China’s “996 policy,” which has employees work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Its content moderates have revealed taxing work environments that exposed them to graphic content. And even high-level executives have struggled as TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, maintained decision-making authority.
If Congress does vote to ban TikTok, that could leave thousands of employees across the country in search of new jobs. And it couldn’t come at a more difficult time. Meta, Snapchat and Twitch, among other social media companies, have all had mass layoffs in the past few months. Which means there’s already a pool of unemployed tech workers in search of work, a number of whom have decidedly turned to other fields.
It’s unclear what the long-term timeline of the TikTok ban looks like and when the government’s ultimate decision will hit employees. But LA’s tech scene might need to brace itself for a mass wave of employees seeking a new home. And this time, they won’t have TikTok to document their employment woes.
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Kristin Snyder
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
https://twitter.com/ksnyder_db
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