The tech industry in the City of Angels is booming and Dot.La, a new digital media startup, wants to tell its story.
“I think the L.A. tech scene now has all the ingredients for this booming decade,” dot.LA co-founder Spencer Rascoff said. “One of the only things missing was that steady drumbeat of local journalism that can amplify what's happening here and shine a light on all the innovation in the LA startup community.”
Rascoff attributes L.A.’s recipe for success to the city’s broad economy, where tech sits at the intersection of media, entertainment, fashion and pop culture. The city harbors companies that probably couldn’t exist anywhere else, according to the dot.LA exec, like Snap, parent company of Snapchat, and GOAT, an e-commerce shop for sneakerheads.
“The tastemakers are here, the celebrities are here, this is where brands get built,” Rascoff said.
The company started with a newsletter and plans to launch a website covering the city’s tech industry this month. Rascoff and his peers got to work as soon as they began pitching dot.LA to potential investors, strategically picking people and companies in order to create community buy-in. While the company works on expanding its coverage into social media, video and podcast, it will also be building out an events business.
“Here in L.A., there’s a ton going on in tech but it's more spread out [than in San Francisco] and there’s no organizing force to the community and no journalism,” Rascoff said. “So we think dot.LA can provide an opportunity for [someone] to become more informed about his or her career and build a network with others in tech.”
Rascoff previously served as CEO of Zillow and hopes to bring the inclusive environment he helped create there to dot.LA.
“[We were] focused on diversity and inclusion and equity and belonging,” he said said. “That’s certainly something we’re going to replicate at dot.LA, [not only] internally at the company but also in terms of the stories that we tell.”
