LA Venture

Peter Pham is the co-founder of Science. Science is a startup studio here in Santa Monica that partners with founders at the earliest stage of company-creation. Peter educates me and David on D2C margins and radiation-preventing underwear over tallboys of Liquid Death.

Join us at Innovate Pasadena with great upcoming guests and a podcast if you can't join us in person.

Paul is founder and managing partner at Amplify. Amplify started as an accelerator, they still have the great office space, but now Paul describes Amplify as "pre-seed with benefits". They have a heavy LA focus to their investments ($250-500k) but not funding LA companies exclusively. Paul is also a venture partner at Greycroft and a nice person.

Adam Struck is an LA seed investor from Struck Capital (checks $1-1.5M) who challenges any other VC to put in more sweat equity per dollar than he does. He also thinks VCs should be weirder. I already feel like I'm busting my butt so I will accept the weird challenge.

Kara is a partner at Upfront, a founder, and one of the most prominent investors in LA. Kara shares about the Upfront partnership (8 different UIs with the same backend), advice for founders, and her own areas of interest.

With over 100 members, Pasadena Angels is one of the largest angel investor networks in LA. Stender Sweeney is chair of the Pasadena Angels and explains how their process works, what size check to expect ($250-750k) and what it means to be "more than the money".