In 2005, I followed in the footsteps of many other Los Angeles-based entrepreneurs. I moved our internet startup, Insider Pages, from Southern California to Silicon Valley. While we knew it would be a huge disruption to a fledgling company, we did it for some good reasons – access to capital, engineering talent, and a bubbling ecosystem of ideas, energy and innovation. It was the right move — Silicon Valley turned out to be everything we’d hoped for and more. In a few months, we’d built a top tier engineering team, attracted successful product and marketing people from other Silicon Valley companies, and had started building a network of business development relationships with other Silicon Valley firms.Now that I’m back in LA working with local entrepreneurs, I often get asked whether they too should move to Silicon Valley. My answer is: stay where you are. While Silicon Valley will always be a great place to start a company, the Los Angeles ecosystem has improved to a point that entrepreneurs can find nearly everything they need to get started here in their own backyard.

So what’s different? The biggest change has been in the local talent pool. Over the last few years we’ve seen a steady growth of highly qualified people residing in Los Angeles. The growing concentration of these people seems to be pushing us past the proverbial tipping point where they are banding together to create, manage and staff a lot of innovative new businesses. The region is reaping rewards earned after years of intense activity in the technology sector, where companies like Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing), MySpace, Activision, Shopzilla, Rent.com, Lowermybills.com, eHarmony, PriceGrabber and many others that have recruited, trained, and spun out thousands of talented individuals who are now capable of building the next generation of companies. These people are building great new businesses like Sodahead (founded by ex-MySpacer Jason Feffer), Mahalo (Weblogs founder Jason Calacanis) and ReachLocal (ex-Jackpot, Worldwinner and Idealaber Zorik Gordon). And there are more than just experienced entrepreneurs in the area. The region is seeing many more highly qualified engineers, design, product and marketing people.

A second change has been the emergence of a support infrastructure that connects these individuals to interesting companies, capital, and to each other. Brian Deagon at Investor’s Business Daily recently wrote about the growth of technology networking groups in Southern California that help provide critical connections around the industry. These groups both reflect and enable the increasing technology-focused buzz happening in Los Angeles. They are a great place to get leads for recruiting, building an advisory board or even finding leads to capital sources. In addition to formal networking events, there are an increasing number of people and firms that can help startups ranging from executive recruiters to attorneys specializing in early stage companies to local technology-focused publications that disseminate important industry information, like the popular SoCalTech. Together, these organizations and people provide the connective fiber necessary for a strong startup environment.

A third change has been the well documented influx of capital into Los Angeles. In 2007, Southern California passed Boston to become the region to receive the second highest amount of venture capital investment after Silicon Valley. It’s not just the local VC’s that are funding Southern California ventures. Investors from many other regions, especially Silicon Valley, seem to dedicating more resources to finding promising early-stage companies in Los Angeles.

For all that Los Angeles now has to offer, Silicon Valley remains a terrific place to start a tech business. It’s the center of the tech universe, packed with talent, loaded with cash, buzzed on caffeine and all night engineering pushes. However, Los Angeles has the major building blocks in place for company building, and with it, an environment and a personal lifestyle that many people prefer to Silicon Valley. You may find yourself on the Southwest flight to San Jose more often then you’d like, but you always get to return home to LA.

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