East Meets West for Tech Talk

New York’s Silicon Alley Breakfast Club brought its morning schmooze-fest to Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel recently, hoping to grab the attention of Tech Coast entrepreneurs.

The event drew 130 people, many of them representatives of local Internet start-ups in search of outside funding. Coffee flowed and business cards flew as experts from New York and businesspeople from Los Angeles scouted for prospects.

Networking is becoming a big business, and the 3-year-old Silicon Alley Breakfast Club clearly doesn’t want to miss out on the action in Los Angeles. It charges people between $40 and $60 each to attend its breakfasts, where experts discuss such topics as “building better billionaires.”

Given the way things turned out at Loews, though, the club from Silicon Alley might have been in Silicon Valley.

The highlight of the three-hour event was a contest in which a handful of start-ups competed for an appointment with a venture capital firm named Acorn. Representatives of the Silicon Alley Breakfast Club judged contestants’ business plans. The prize went to Gamelet.com, a 2-year-old company that develops games for the Internet.

Gamelet, it turns out, is based in San Francisco. It was in Los Angeles looking for financial backers and business partners.

Acorn, too, is based in San Francisco. It was in Los Angeles to recruit start-ups for its 2-month-old business incubator--a type of investment firm offering office space, advice and funds in exchange for stock.

Gamelet and Acorn representatives say they plan to meet. After all, their offices are four blocks apart. As for the Silicon Valley Breakfast Club, it was pleased with the sold-out Santa Monica event and is returning to Los Angeles in March.