Daily journal
daily journal about things happening here at binc and in the world around us
LA Emerging Software Marketplace
So it’s interesting. We are based here in Los Angeles and have been in business for over 5 years and only recently did we actually begin doing business in LA. I felt like for the longest time, LA didn’t really have anything THAT interesting going on. Let’s compare LA to some of our other hubs – Seattle and the Bay Area. Seattle has 3 very large and established software coimpanies that have a culture of attracting and growing incredibly bright software professionals – Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia andf Real Networks. The professionals that work for these companies develop top-tier skills and are given the opportunity to work with other crazy smart people and build cutting-edge software. As these people develop in their careers, they then leave these major organizations and start software firms of their own – thereby developing a community of software companies operated by incredibly bright and talented professionals. Currently the Seattle software community is home to several hundred software startups all with the goal of making it big and exiting successfully as either an acquisition or an IPO. This is currently a very healthy community and has been for the past several years.
The Bay Area needs no mentioning as it always was and still is the mecca of the software world.
LA on the other hand is just not a software town. This is a town where entertainment rules and until very recently, the roads of technology and entertainment haven’t merged. But in the past year or so, ever since the boom of YouTube and video over the web, Entertainment has gotten into the web game in a big way and have thus turned LA into a very exciting player in the world of software.
I need to run to take my daughter to balet practice, but more on LA emerging software market in future posts.
Exectec, LinkedIn and LA Startups
So, let me catch everybody up on everything. It’s amazing that it’s only been 2 days since I last wrote and already I feel like the news from 2 days ago is near ancient already. So when I last left this blog, I was heading over to my first Exectec netowrking meeting. This is a networking group with a pretty good membership base and reputation within the LA executive technology community. It was founded and managed by a very nice guy named Joel Ordesky who is the current CTO of Wexler Video. If anybody from LA is reading this, check out Joel and this networking group. I recommend checking it out.
Anyways, so the topic of the evening was online networking and how it impacts our professional and personal lives. The group consisted on myself, two other recruiters, Joel, and a few others in marketing and business development and a really nice guy from the M&A Team at Disney Interactive. Out of all people, I was the one who had spent the most amopunt of time using socialnetworking tools – both for personal and professional use. Which is surprising to me and kinda sad because I thought I had a bit more of a life that that. But apparantly, facts are facts. So, I spend about 3 hours per day on LinkedIn and about 1 hour per week on Facebook. The LinkedIn part shouldn’t surprise anybody because it’s my job to know people and to date, there’s no better tool to do homework on people than to use LinkedIn. Facebook took me by surprise because the whoe MySpace facade passed me by, but Facebook seemed like a great way for me to connect with my high school and college freinds and not feel like I am introding on the territory of a 13-year old who likes things that sparkle. Even though Facebook was made for high school kids, it’s plain layout still makes it an ok place for old people like myself to hang out and spend time. As opposed to going on MySpace which makes me feel like I just drank a gallon of 
Speaking of facebook, did anybody else catch this posting on Techcrunch, where Michael Arrington ranted about losing one of his top employees to Facebook. I understand that it hurts to lose anybody, especially when you are such a small company like techcrunch. But my bet is that this employee went to Facebook, not the other way around. facebook is the hot blond that everybody wants to be with. They are the flavor of the day just like Google has been the past few years. i don’t think the significance of this story is that somebody was btaken from Techcrunch because who really cares. i think the point of this story is that that Google has now seen some vulnerability and that has opened up the recruiting opportunities for some of our clients. Whereas the past few years our attempts to recruit from Google was usually followed by a chuckle and a reminder about how much money this person is now worth, the people now working for Google are starting to understand that there are a lot of excting opportunities out there in the market that can simply offer more to a talented professional than Google – in terms of money and opportunity. Facebook is only the latest and most hi-profile company to pull from Google, but we know of others who have also been very successful in their efforts. More on this later.
I will put together a seperate post on news regarding LA startups. Stay tuned…
Happy Hannukah
Tonight is the first night of Hannukah. This basically means that I will be spending the next 7 days gorging on Latkes and Jelly Donuts. But that’ll all start tomorrow because tonight I’ll be attending my first Exectec meeting – this is basically an LA based networking group that meets once per week in Westwood to discuss all sorts of topics that may interest LA-based technology executives. Tonight they’ll be discussing social networking sites and how to best utilize them for networking purposes – I am sure that we’ll cover sites like Linkedin, facebook, plaxo and other such sites. I use all of these sites in my personal and professional networking activities. From a personal perspective, I have been able to connect with some great old friends from my high school and college days who I would have never connected with if not for these sites. From a business perspective, LinkedIn has been an amazing tool to help me find people that I would have taken me hours and hours of legwork to find. OK, I gotta go to the meeting. I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow…
You go Baby BINC!!!
Look at how good looking and fabulous our Bay Area team looks. Besides the fact that they are insanely good recruiters and are representing some of the best candidates and companies in the Bay Area, who could resist working with such a good looking crew or recruiters. Come on – if you’re in the Bay Area and amazing at what you do, give these guys a jingle. Opportunities await!!
Need Java Developers and holiday party update
Today was spent mostly headhunting for top java folks for a san francisco-based startup team. We visited with the development manager and general manager of this team last week and they are in a very nice building with a very nice office setup. Both development manager and general manager are incredibly bright with higher education from top universities and have experience working for other top web companies before joining this team. If you are reading this and are an incredibly bright java developer living in or near san francisco, send 
me an email to boris@bincsearch.com. This is an opportunity that is worth pursuing. It will give somebody the opportunity to build a mass-scale web application in a ever-so-hot digital music domain. Did I also mention that this company pays very well, so money motivated people are encouraged to apply.
The LA team is also in the midst of a devastatingly hard search for a datawarehouse developer to buildout a custom-etl environment. It seems that besides Yahoo and a few other smaller shops, most other LA companies use Informatica to run their ETL processes. I have never met a search that i couldn’t fill, but this one is honestly giving us a real run for our money. I am confident that we’ll at least find some good people for our clients to be considering, but my gut tells me that the stars will need to align for us to fill this position before the end of year. We’ll see…
We have finally booked a spot for our company holiday party and I’m happy to say that unlike the three other times, I won’t be changing my mind on this one. We’ve actually picked a pretty fun place that has great food and great atmosphere and also a great place to people watch. I bet you’re dying to find out where we’re going, but like every other startup in the world, this is a stealth mode holiday party and will stay this way until the actual day of the event. Stay tuned…
Hello World
The BINC Blog makes its debut today on the last workday of November 2007. I am very excited about beginning this blog and sharing our work experiences with the outside world. Thanksgiving just passed and the winter holidays are almost upon us. That means holiday shopping for gifts has already started and all of the holiday parties are about to begin. BINC is having our holiday party in a few weeks and we are almost finished with its planning. Last Year we took the team for an evening in vegas, but this year we decided to stay local. So the goal is to do something as close to as fun as vegas while staying local to LA. Stay tuned for more…
Today the LA team hunted for datawarehouse developers and web 2.0 executives for several new social networking clients we recently began helping. The datawarehouse developer will get to work with over 1 petabyte of data, which is one of the biggest datawarehousing environments I’ve ever heard even existed. The web 2.0 executives is with an la-startup that just got mentioned on Techcrunch – they are seeing a lot of great momentum today. This company is about to become HOT!!
The Seattle team is hunting for insanely-smart researchers in the areas of natural language processing, search and machine learning. We also just learned of a really compelling Sr. Development Manager role managing an incredibly smart group of engineers.
The Bay Area is hunting for all sorts of cool people. They are looking for smart engineers of all languages and technologies – I’m talking java, c#, wen, enterprise, mobile, gaming. Literally you are a smart engineer who is open to exploring a new opportunity, we know of at least 5-6 companies that are interested in knowing you. They are also hunting for graphic artists, product managers, product marketing managers and web developers.
Ok. it’s time to enjoy the rest of my Friday night. Till next time (hopefully no later than Monday).
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