Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016.
Agilent Technologies, Inc. is a global company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that provides instruments, software, services, and consumables for laboratories. Agilent was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard. The resulting IPO of Agilent stock was the largest in the history of Silicon Valley at the time. From 1999 to 2014, the company produced optics, semiconductors, EDA software and test and measurement equipment for electronics; that division was spun off to form Keysight. Since then, the company has continued to expand into pharmaceutical, diagnostics & clinical, and academia & government (research) markets.
DoubleClick Inc. was an American advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primarily to advertising agencies and mass media, serving businesses like Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa Inc., Nike, Inc., and Carlsberg Group. The company's main product line was known as DART, which was intended to increase the purchasing efficiency of advertisers and minimize unsold inventory for publishers.
Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011, in addition to many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc.
Paul T. Buchheit is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created the email service Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former company motto Don't be evil in a 2000 meeting on company values, after the motto was initially coined in 1999 by engineer Amit Patel.
Steel Connect, Inc. is an American company that provides supply chain management services to software companies.
Michael Jones is an American entrepreneur, investor and CEO of Science Inc. In 2017, Jones was named one of Los Angeles's 500 most influential people by the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Brad Greenspan is an internet entrepreneur best known for overseeing eUniverse’s launch of Myspace.com in August 2003.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
Eric Austin Litman is an American entrepreneur and angel investor, and currently serves as CEO of the robotics health technology company, Aescape, inc. Litman co-founded Proxicom, built Viaduct from a one-man shop through a merger with the Wolf Group, and was the founder and CEO of Medialets, a mobile ad serving and advertising analytics company acquired by WPP plc.
Gil Elbaz is an American entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist best known for co-founding, along with Adam Weissman, Applied Semantics (ASI), which is known for its AdSense product. He is the founder and CEO of Factual, an information-sharing startup. He is also the founder and chairman of the board of the Common Crawl Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to democratizing access to Internet information.
Silicon Beach is the Westside region of the Los Angeles metropolitan area that is home to more than 500 technology companies, including startups. It is particularly applied to the coastal strip from Los Angeles International Airport north to the Santa Monica Mountains, but the term may be applied loosely or colloquially to most anywhere in the Los Angeles Basin. Startups seeded here include Snapchat and Tinder. Major technology companies that opened offices in the region including Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, BuzzFeed, Facebook, Salesforce, AOL, Electronic Arts, Sony, EdgeCast Networks, MySpace, Amazon.com, Apple, Inc., and Netflix. By some 2012 metrics, the region was the second or third-most prominent technology hub in the world. In the first six months of 2013, 94 new start-ups in Silicon Beach raised over $500 million in funding, and there were nine acquisitions.
Scopely, Inc. is an American interactive entertainment company and mobile-first video game developer and publisher. The company is headquartered in Culver City, California, with offices across the US, EMEA and Asia.
Amit Kapur is an American-born internet entrepreneur. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of WhoCo, a technology company focused on hiring and recruiting. He is best known as co-founder of technology start-up Gravity and as the former chief operating officer at MySpace.
Daniel Conrad Engel is an American CEO and entrepreneur who has worked in the e-commerce and software industries since 1997. Engel led customer acquisition at Picasa, Google, FastSpring, GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC. In 2020, Engel founded Santa Barbara Venture Partners, a venture capital investment fund. He graduated from Tulane University in 1998 with a major in finance and is a past member of Young Presidents' Organization. Engel sits on multiple boards of directors and advisers to tech companies. Since 2018, he has served as board member on a range of local nonprofits that address the critical issue of homelessness. Engel lives in Santa Barbara, California with his two children and his wife, Emily, an environmental activist, art historian, and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. is a cloud-based people development software provider and learning technology company. The company was publicly traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol Nasdaq: CSOD until it was acquired by private-equity firm Clearlake Capital in 2021. Cornerstone started as CyberU, which provided online corporate training and education for adults, but eventually shifted focus to human resources software.
Science Inc. is a Los Angeles–based startup studio that invests and offers expertise in corporations, in an attempt to bring them to profitability. In 2011, Michael Jones founded the organization and is the current chief executive officer. Jones spent time serving with the company's Chief Executive Officers and investors on strategy, growth, and business development.
La Salsa is a chain of fast-casual Tex Mex restaurants founded in Los Angeles, California in 1979, headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and is owned by Canadian franchisor MTY Food Group. The chain emphasizes fresh ingredients, and each restaurant features a self-serve salsa bar.
ClutchPoints is a sports media website owned by ClutchPoints, Inc. It was founded by Nish Patel in 2015. ClutchPoints covers the NBA, NFL, and MLB among other sports through a focus on team-specific fans across their editorial, video, and social content, with the latter being known in the form of creative graphics.
