One year ago, after the ups and downs of the first year of the COVID pandemic, I ended my 2020 Year in Review with some misgivings. Southern California’s tech startup ecosystem showed resilience during last year, but it didn’t seem to be growing at the same rate as other cities…

VCs look to invest in companies that can go public. Although M&A exits occur more frequently, public liquidity events drive the majority of value creation and returns for VCs’ portfolios. So a commonly asked question is, just what does a public company look like? The world of enterprise software is…

One year into the COVID pandemic, it has become cliché to say that we have compressed years of corporate digital transformation into the span of just a few quarters. What started as a scramble to ensure that employees could work from home has turned into a simultaneous acceleration of cloud…

New unicorns, new funds, and new real estate priorities, but where are the mega exits? — Two years ago, I spent my New Years Eve writing a recap of all that had happened in SoCal tech that year. It was an exciting time, with a slate of major exits (Cylance, Ring, and Sonos, among others), and Bird scooters were taking LA and San Diego by storm…

The steady pace of venture-backed Enterprise startup exits makes the sector the bedrock of a healthy technology ecosystem. The recent IPO of GoodRx marked another mega liquidity event for a Southern California startup, with the company going public at a monster valuation of $12.7B. Of course, this is on top…

This article was co-written by B Capital Group Senior Principal Mike Fernandez and General Partner Rashmi Gopinath. Regardless of sector or structure, organizations are increasingly confronted with ever-expanding threats in the form of cyberattacks. As recently as last year, cybersecurity ranked as the number one concern among CEOs of the…

Last month marked my five year anniversary as an investor. I first moved back to Los Angeles to join the world of venture capital in 2013, when the tech ecosystem in Southern California looked very different than it does today. Long time LA fund GRP Partners had just rebranded as…

By Mike Fernandez, B Capital Group Banks have faced a difficult regulatory environment in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. Since 2008, regulators in developed economies have levied over $321B in fines against banks, and banks are struggling to keep up with the over 50,000 regulatory changes that occur…

Los Angeles is an economic juggernaut. By some estimates, it is the third largest metropolitan economy in the world, behind only New York City and Tokyo. At $1 trillion in annual output (including the Inland Empire), Greater Los Angeles’s economy is roughly the same size as a Mexico or Indonesia…