Zillow Group Co-Founder Spencer Rascoff is launching a media startup, dot.LA, covering the Los Angeles tech world, according to an announcement by the company last week.
The burgeoning business, which closed $4 million in funding recently, will be led by Rascoff as executive chairman and Sam N. Adams, CEO and co-founder. The company is launching Jan. 27 with at least five journalists on staff, including Joe Bel Bruno, editor-in-chief, formerly with the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal; Tami Abdollah, from the Associated Press; Ben Bergman, from NPR; Rachel Uranga, from the Los Angeles Business Journal; and Eric Zassenhaus, managing editor for Digital and Reader Engagement, formerly with Pacific Standard.
According to the announcement, the company’s investors include executives, entrepreneurs and high-profile VCs.
“It’s finally prime time for the LA tech scene, after many years of steady growth, and dot.LA is here to chronicle and report on what is going to be an explosive decade for LA tech,” Rascoff said in a statement. “Los Angeles has so many ingredients that make a successful tech ecosystem: a culture of innovation and entrepreneurialism, world-class universities, many angel investors, venture capitalists and startup mentors. One of the only missing ingredients was journalism to highlight the incredible startups and tech companies changing the world. Now with dot.LA on the scene, Los Angeles will be able to achieve its full potential.”
“We have assembled a team of world-class journalists who are already digging into every aspect of LA’s startup ecosystem,” Bel Bruno said. “We are all excited to leverage those years of experience covering business, entertainment and technology to provide hard-hitting, timely news coverage that will shine a light on this fast-moving scene. We’ll cover new companies, funding rounds and the unique intersection of industries that make LA’s startups so interesting.”
After co-founding Zillow Group in 2005, Rascoff became CEO in 2010, and departed the post in 2019.
Suzanne De Vita is RISMedia’s senior online editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at sdevita@rismedia.com.
Let’s hope this finally makes LA a player.
I moved here from NYC end of 2017. I knew LA was pretty much at the back of the pack of large US cities as a startup and tech center, but it just didn’t make sense: great universities, Hollywood, aerospace, lots of people, great culture/institutions and what SF, NYC and Boston don’t have: fabulous weather and outdoors. When I arrived I immediately joined and started going to tech meetups. This was the eye-opener. In contrast to NYC, they were (mostly) either mediocre, insular or both. And they were spread out like a giant traveling salesman problem. And, most all, largely due to Google and Snap, a lot of stuff moved to Santa Monica. That would be the equivalent of planting the startup scene in NYC in Coney Island.
In NYC, the Meetup culture is huge to the tech community. And my couple experiences of SF suggest it’s the same there. The Meetups and SIGs there offer great tech presentations from practitioners and there’s vast diversity of subjects and applications and, most of all, people are pretty open and do a lot of interaction and come from all sectors…AdTech, FinTech, eCommerce, Engineering, etc. And they are all in Manhattan. It may seem a misguided understanding of LA, but that downtown is not the main location for SIGs and Meetups and….the startup business locations themselves seems to be what holds things back here. This is a picture of the “problem”: https://represent.la/ I heard the old May’s dept store renovation is targeted at co-working, incubator spaces for tech. All the change and upgrade to downtown may be the trick. But that’s only if LA and its startup seen takes the plunge. LA has everything to suggest it should be number 3, at least. It just needs a location.