Office Hours with Spencer Rascoff dot.LA

Spencer speaks with Ian Cinnamon, the CEO and co-founder of Culver City-based startup Apex, which manufactures productized, configurable satellite buses for the expanding space industry. As access to space becomes democratized, Apex's is poised to offer its scalable solutions to both commercial and government customers. 
Prior to Apex, Ian founded Synapse, a startup that built AI systems for the defense and security worlds, which he helped grow before it was acquired by Palantir.
Ian is an alumnus of the Y Combinator accelerator program and received his undergraduate degree from MIT and MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. (Disclosure: dot.LA co-founder Spencer Rascoff is an investor in Apex.)

Eddy Lu, CEO of GOAT, explains his pivot from a restaurant meet-up app, the ups and downs of working with his co-founder, and how insight into the sneaker vertical on eBay helped build the start-up into what it is today.
This episode was originally released in February of 2011. 

Howie Liu is the co-founder and CEO of tech decacorn Airtable, a connected apps platform that lets users build and customize apps using shared data. As a no code platform, Airtable has iterated and innovated their product by combining the features of a relational database by using an interface that looks like a spreadsheet. Since it's founding in 2012, the company has raised nearly $1.4B in funding and is currently valued at $11B. In this episode, Howie talks about starting his first company, taking part in the Y Combinator accelerator, and how selling his company Etacts to Salesforce led him to innovating and creating products with enterprise clients in mind. Liu is a graduate of Duke University.

In this episode of Office Hours, Spencer speaks with L.A.-based entrepreneur Shiloh Johnson, the CEO and founder of ComplYant, a digital tax assistant tool. The technology platform offers small business owners and entrepreneurs an easy way to handle business taxes. The fintech startup was originally bootstrapped by Johnson, who as a Black female founder thought she'd be overlooked by VCs. Since then, Shiloh raised $5.5M in seed funding through Techstars’ Los Angeles program.

Bill Gurley, Legendary Silicon Valley VC, is a general partner at Benchmark and famously known for investing early in trailblazing companies including Uber, GrubHub, Zillow and so many others. Hear this conversation with Spencer from the dot.LA Summit where they discuss marketplace-based companies, how work-from-home will accelerate business opportunity, and why startups—though they might be attached to their autonomy—should pick up the phone when a big company calls. Plus, hear Bill’s thoughtful take on big tech and antitrust.

This interview was originally published on December of 2020, and was recorded at the inaugural dot.LA Summit held October 27th & 28th. 
 
 

Growing up as the son of a nationally renowned veterinarian, Brandon knows first-hand the importance of having access to experts when your pet is sick. In 2018, Werber launched Airvet, a Beverly Hills-based digital health company for pets. Airvet works with employers and business partners to make sure pet parents get affordable and fast access to virtual vet care via video and chat. (Disclosure: dot.LA co-founder Spencer Rascoff is an investor in Airvet.)