Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley? | Both Sides of the Table

Perspective from a Los Angeles entrepreneur as posted on TechCrunch:

Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country.

We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz, who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet’s monetization.

The VC partner, somebody I greatly respect said, “Yeah, we like Gil and what they’re doing. I’m just not sure you can build a great technology firm outside of Bay Area.”

via Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley? | Both Sides of the Table.

Leonard Lodish of Wharton: ‘Have a simple idea that’s hard to implement’

You might spot Leonard Lodish riding his bicycle to his Wharton office.

The 67-year-old vice dean commutes the six miles from his home in Wynnewood by bike ‘everyday’ that he’s at the University of Pennsylvania, he says, which might keep him active enough to spot the next startup exit.

Earlier this month, the second of two companies that Lodish invested early on exited for a combined total of $575 million: Diapers.com and Milo.com, both of which have Wharton ties.

Like many of the other splashiest Wharton startups in recent years, both Diapers and Milo aren’t Philadelphia companies. The powerful westward pull brought Milo founder Jack Abraham to Palo Alto, Calif., part of the Bay Area that Lodish long recognized as a place that Wharton needed to have a presence in, if it was to remain one of the top flight (and oldest) business schools in the world.

Lodish, a Cleveland native, was part of establishing Wharton West, a satellite campus in San Francisco of which he was vice dean from its 2001 founding until 2009.

Below, we speak to Lodish about the necessity of Wharton West, what he looks for in entrepreneurs, why Milo founder Jack Abraham left Philly and more.

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Technically Not Tech: Kendra Gaeta and KidZillions on branding and allowance saving

Kendra Gaeta is facing branding issues with her allowance service for kids but remains bullish on the idea. Here she presents her concept at Ignite Philly 3 on May 3, 2009 in Fishtown's Johnny Brenda's.

Updated 3:02 7/20/09 for copyright clarification

It’s KidsZillions now and legal vagaries may force that to change once more, but that doesn’t make Kendra Gaeta any less passionate about the mission.

You may have seen her present at Ignite Philly 3 in Johnny Brenda’s on May 3 (where we declared her to have given the best performance), but the allowance chore management savings site for kids that Gaeta described was then called KidsMoney.

During her presentation, she briefly alluded to the possible name change then and made the move not long after, respectfully forfeiting the brand to a juvenile financial management author with a similar mission.

Her team is now dubbed KidsZillions, but some legal advice has left them feeling compelled to make another jump.

An e-commerce company called GiftZillions owns their similar trademark, and while it doesn’t appear to have anything near the same education mission as KidsZillions, Gaeta is getting more advice that branding may be a problem there, too. (Her company is tweeting at the far less distinctive @KidProject)

“I’ve been told we could have enough of an e-commerce edge that users would see us as a kids versions of GiftZillions,” she says. “It stings a bit, that we [could] have the copyright for a name we really like and yet are told we shouldn’t do anything with it.

“But I know building the project is more important.” So that’s what she’s doing.

While the name debate continues and their Web site’s interactivity features remain in development, the company, which is part of the second class of University City incubator DreamIt Ventures, this week launched the Allowance Project, a video blog that will feature interviews of a broad, diverse cross-section of people explaining their savings and spending habits as children.

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