Forbes: 6 Uber Cool Companies That Achieved Success In A Beachside Paradise

6 Uber Cool Companies That Achieved Success In A Beachside Paradise

Six outstanding companies have created a sweet flavor of success in one of the most beautiful places on earth – Santa Barbara, California. Each was started by an entrepreneur who first decided where he wanted to live and then went about making money by doing what he loved to do.

Santa Barbara has become a high-tech startup mecca, rivaling cities many times its size. The latest evidence of the city’s dynamic startup ecosystem is the recent announcement by Citrix to investment significant resources in the Santa Barbara Innovator’s Program.

The community is blessed with a temperate climate (average high temperatures between the mid-60′s and mid-70′s °F), which motivates accomplished people, who can afford to live anywhere, to make Santa Barbara their home. Many of these individuals become restless in their youthful “retirement” and begin investing and advising young companies.

Combine this significant pool of sophisticated Angel capital and expertise with UC Santa Barbara’s world-class entrepreneurial program and throw in a critical mass of entrepreneurs bold enough to build businesses around their passions, it’s understandable how a modest-sized community has produced so many successful tech startups. From Lynda.com’s recent $1.5 billion dollar acquisition by LinkedIn to Bessemer’s substantial investment in Procore, AppFolio’s recent IPO and Sonos’ $130 million secondary, the Santa Barbara tech scene is unquestionably on fire.

However, less obvious is Santa Barbara’s rich history as a hotbed of lifestyle startups, a number of which have generated billions in revenue and garnered worldwide recognition.

Lifestyle businesses are typically looked upon with derision by investors, as they generally do not have economic metrics that lead to large exits. However, a number of Santa Barbara’s “lifestyle businesses” are anything but small.

As Emmy Award-winning comedian Bill Grundfest has pointed out, entrepreneurs should seek the intersection of the things they enjoy doing and the tasks which will make them money. Starving artists pursue vocations that no one will support financially while workaholics labor at jobs that are often lucrative but offer no intrinsic rewards.

Twitter: @johngreathouse

blog: johngreathouse.com

Source: Forbes