There is a persistent assumption in tech that the interesting things happen in San Francisco. For consumer software, that assumption has been mostly accurate for the last 15 years. But for a company building tools specifically for video creators and streamers, Los Angeles turned out to be the right place to start -- not for ideological reasons, but for the practical reason that the people you need to learn from are here.
Who is in LA
Los Angeles has a concentration of working creators that does not exist anywhere else at the same density. YouTube channels with seven-figure subscriber counts, daily streamers who have been broadcasting for years, podcast operations that have scaled to full production studios, social media managers at agencies running 40-plus client accounts simultaneously. These are not aspiring creators. They are full-time professionals whose income depends on their content output.
When you are building a product for this market, proximity to these people is a genuine advantage. Not because proximity leads to deals or partnerships, but because it leads to conversations. The kind of conversations where a creator walks you through their post-production routine and you realize that the workflow has three steps you had not accounted for in your assumptions. The kind where you see a professional editor's screen and understand for the first time how much context they carry in their head when they are scrubbing a timeline.
What LA is not
LA is not a particularly strong startup ecosystem by the metrics that matter to venture investors. There are fewer institutional capital firms here than in San Francisco, the ML talent pool is smaller, and the infrastructure for building a technology company with outside backing is thinner. For a bootstrapped company that is not currently seeking outside investment, these gaps do not matter much. The ML talent question is harder -- the best deep learning researchers are concentrated in a few cities, and LA is not the top tier for that specialty. This is a real constraint that required deliberate recruiting rather than the passive pipeline that exists in other markets.
The other thing LA is not is a monoculture. San Francisco startup culture has a set of shared assumptions about how companies should be built, how products should be designed, and what kinds of problems are worth solving. Those assumptions are useful for some products. For products built for creators who are not in the technology industry, those assumptions can pull you in the wrong direction. Building in proximity to your users rather than in proximity to your investors produces different decisions.
The practical tradeoffs
Building in LA means accepting some friction. Finding ML engineers requires active recruitment from other markets. VC conversations require more travel or more time on calls. The local startup community, while growing, does not have the same density of technical co-founder networks you find in other cities. For Scenemarrow, the tradeoff has been worthwhile: the direct access to the creator community has shaped the product in ways that would have been harder to achieve from a distance. The features that matter most to daily streamers are not the features that seemed most important when we started. That recalibration came from proximity.