Silicon Beach is the nickname for the tech scene on the Los Angeles Westside: a strip of coast that runs from Santa Monica through Venice, Marina del Rey and Playa Vista down to El Segundo, with Culver City just inland. Snap, Google, YouTube and a growing group of hard tech startups all sit on it. It is not one district: each stop has its own kind of company, its own lunch spots and its own crowd. This is the map, neighborhood by neighborhood: who is there, who funds them, where founders work and eat, and how to meet them.
Where is Silicon Beach in Los Angeles?
The label gets stretched, but the core is consistent: Santa Monica and Venice sit at the north end, Marina del Rey and Playa Vista in the middle, El Segundo at the south end just past LAX, and Culver City hangs off the inland edge. Put simply, it is the coast from the Santa Monica Mountains down to the airport, plus El Segundo on the other side of it.
What matters for a founder is that these are separate worlds. A consumer app in Santa Monica, a streaming team in Culver City and a satellite startup in El Segundo can share the label and never share a room. If you are still choosing between here and the Bay, our comparison of the San Francisco and Los Angeles startup scenes covers the trade-offs. If you are already here, the job is to learn the clusters and then cross them.
Silicon Beach companies by neighborhood, at a glance
- Santa Monica: Snap's headquarters, Activision Blizzard, Headspace, Hulu offices. Consumer, media, games and wellness.
- Venice: where Snap started, plus the Westside's best coffee and breakfast circuit on Abbot Kinney and Rose Avenue.
- Playa Vista: Google in the old Hughes hangar, YouTube and Meta nearby. The big-company campus end.
- Culver City: Sony Pictures, Amazon at Culver Studios, an Apple campus and a TikTok office. Streaming and content.
- El Segundo: Los Angeles Air Force Base, Boeing's satellite plant, Varda Space Industries and a wave of hard tech startups. Aerospace, defense and manufacturing.
Why is it called Silicon Beach?
The name is a play on Silicon Valley, for a tech scene that happens to sit by the ocean. It is not unique to Los Angeles: PC Magazine reported people calling Boca Raton, Florida, Silicon Beach back in 1983. In Los Angeles it stuck to the Westside, and some people who work here would rather just say LA tech.
The name is newer than the history: USC's Information Sciences Institute has been in Marina del Rey since 1972 and helped build the Arpanet, and Google opened its first Los Angeles office in Santa Monica in 2003.
Santa Monica startups: consumer, media and games
Santa Monica is the established end. Snap is headquartered in the Santa Monica Business Park, Activision Blizzard has its headquarters here, Hulu has offices in town, and Headspace is based here too. The pattern is consumer, media, games and wellness: companies that sell to a lot of people and hire the marketers, designers and product people to do it.
For a founder that means a deep talent pool in exactly the roles an early consumer company needs, and alumni networks where a lot of Santa Monica startups begin. It also means an office market built for companies that have already raised, so most early teams work out of coworking floors. WeWork and Industrious both have Santa Monica locations, and Expert DOJO, an accelerator, has been based here since 2014.
Eat and meet along Main Street, which runs from Pico Boulevard to Rose Avenue through Ocean Park. It is the strip locals use; the Promenade is the one visitors use. Urth Caffe is the default coffee meeting. If you need to get downtown, the Metro E Line leaves from Downtown Santa Monica station and reaches 7th Street/Metro Center in under an hour.
Venice: where Snap started, and where the Westside eats
Venice is more residential than office, and that is the point. Snap worked out of a blue bungalow on Ocean Front Walk in 2012, then took leases across the neighborhood before it consolidated in Santa Monica. Those years are still the reference story for a Venice startup: small, close to the beach, and gone by the time it needs a proper campus.
What Venice has instead of office towers is the best breakfast and coffee circuit on the Westside. Abbot Kinney Boulevard is the main strip. Gjelina has anchored it since 2008, and its sibling Gjusta, a deli and bakery nearby, is where a lot of morning meetings happen. Rose Avenue is the other axis: Rose Cafe sits on the Santa Monica border, and Bluestone Lane is up the same street. A founder who lives in Venice can do three coffees in a morning without moving the car, which in Los Angeles is rare.
Playa Vista: Google, YouTube and the campus end
Playa Vista is built on the old Hughes Aircraft site. Hughes ran its headquarters here from 1941 to 1985 and built the Spruce Goose in the hangar. Google took the hangar itself and turned it into an office, and YouTube, Yahoo, Belkin and Meta all took space nearby. It is the most campus-like part of Silicon Beach, with big-company badges everywhere at lunch.
Founders come here to recruit, to land a first big-company customer, and to meet the engineers who are about to leave and start something. If you want a technical cofounder who has already shipped at scale, this is where that person eats lunch.
Runway at Playa Vista is the town square: a cinema, a Whole Foods and a run of restaurants along Town Center Drive with wide sidewalks and outdoor tables.
The inland edge: Culver City
Culver City is technically off the beach, but it is on the same E Line and the same map. Sony Pictures has had its lot here for decades, Amazon took over Culver Studios, Apple has been building out a large campus along National and Venice Boulevards, and TikTok keeps an office in town. This is the streaming and content end of Silicon Beach. If your company touches video, music, creators or advertising, your customers and hires sit here.
El Segundo: where hard tech moved, and the Gundo
El Segundo is the part of the map that changed most in the last few years, but the base was always there. Los Angeles Air Force Base sits in El Segundo and is the headquarters of Space Systems Command, the Space Force arm that develops and maintains military satellites. The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research center, is next door. Boeing builds satellites at a plant here that it calls the largest satellite factory in the world, and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon both operate in town. SpaceX built its Falcon rockets one town over in Hawthorne and still does, even after moving its headquarters to Texas. Mattel and Beyond Meat keep their head offices in El Segundo too.
What is new is the startup layer on top. A wave of hard tech founders, most of them building for space, defense and manufacturing, have set up in El Segundo's industrial buildings and started calling the place the Gundo. Varda Space Industries, which works on manufacturing pharmaceuticals in orbit, is headquartered here and has expanded into a former Mattel plant in town. Accelerators and investors have followed. If you are building anything with a bill of materials, this is your part of the coast.
The town is small enough to walk. Downtown El Segundo is a few blocks of Main Street with a brewery scene that doubles as the after-work meeting room: El Segundo Brewing Company, Brewport Tap House and Tavern on Main are the fixtures.
Silicon Beach investors and accelerators
Silicon Beach has its own venture firms, and they are easy to find. Upfront Ventures, one of the largest venture firms in Los Angeles, is based in Santa Monica and also runs the Upfront Summit. Crosscut, which calls itself the first and longest-running early-stage venture firm in Los Angeles, backs companies that build on LA's own industries. Expert DOJO runs its accelerator out of Santa Monica.
For the wider scene, including which companies are hiring on the Westside, Built In LA's guide to Silicon Beach keeps a current overview from LA's tech press.
How to meet Silicon Beach founders
Left alone, the clusters do not mix. The Santa Monica consumer founder and the El Segundo propulsion founder are a short drive apart and might as well be in different cities. Meeting people here means crossing those lines on purpose.
A few ways that work:
- Go to LA Tech Week with a plan. LA Tech Week runs each fall, presented by a16z, with no central venue and hundreds of independent events across the city, most of them free. Pick the events in the clusters you do not already live in. Our guide to Los Angeles tech networking events covers the rest of the calendar.
- Use the bike path. The Marvin Braude Bike Trail runs 22 miles from Will Rogers State Beach to the South Bay and links every Silicon Beach neighborhood. A morning ride or run along it is the easiest standing invitation to offer another founder.
- Find the small rooms. The Westside has plenty of groups that meet ten at a time rather than two hundred. Our guide to Los Angeles founder communities lists them by cluster, and our post on how to meet founders in Los Angeles covers how introductions actually happen here.
- Sit with people you did not pick. The clusters reproduce themselves because everyone chooses their own room. The fix is a table where someone else chooses for you.
How a Thursday table fits into a Westside week
That last point is what Founder Feast in Los Angeles is for. We run a founder dinner there every other Thursday at 7pm: five hand-picked founders per table, at a restaurant we choose, both revealed the day before. You do not pick your tablemates, which on this coast is the feature. The table is built across clusters, so the consumer founder from Santa Monica and the satellite founder from El Segundo end up passing bread. Los Angeles dinners run every other Thursday, as they do in Vancouver and San Francisco.
Membership is $39.99 USD a month and covers your seat at every dinner. You pay the restaurant for what you eat on the night. Cancel anytime. You apply once, and every member is vetted before they sit down. No panels, no badges, no pitches. Selling to the table gets you not invited back.
The dinner is the main event, and the rest grows out of it. Between Thursdays, your table keeps talking in its own chat, and every member can find and message every other vetted member in the app, which is on the iOS App Store and Google Play and works the same on the web, and members get perks kept for members: seasonal events and special offers. Our post on founder dinners in Los Angeles walks through a dinner night start to finish, and the Los Angeles city page has the details for the city.
Common questions
Where is Silicon Beach? Silicon Beach is the strip of the Los Angeles Westside that runs from Santa Monica through Venice, Marina del Rey and Playa Vista down to El Segundo, with Culver City often included. It is a coastline of separate clusters rather than one district.
What kinds of startups are in Silicon Beach? Santa Monica and Venice lean consumer, media, games and wellness. Playa Vista is the campus end, anchored by Google, YouTube and Meta. Culver City is streaming and content. El Segundo is aerospace, defense and hard tech.
Is El Segundo part of Silicon Beach? Yes, and it is the part changing fastest. The town sits just south of LAX, has built satellites and aircraft for decades, and has drawn a new wave of hard tech founders who call it the Gundo. Varda Space Industries is headquartered there.
Why is it called Silicon Beach? The name is a play on Silicon Valley, for a tech scene that sits by the ocean. It is not unique to Los Angeles, but in LA it stuck to the Westside once Google opened in Santa Monica in 2003 and Snap grew up in Venice.
Who invests in Silicon Beach startups? Local firms include Upfront Ventures, based in Santa Monica, and Crosscut, an early-stage firm in Los Angeles. Expert DOJO runs an accelerator in Santa Monica, and a16z presents LA Tech Week each fall.
Does Founder Feast run dinners in Los Angeles? Yes. Founder Feast runs a founder dinner in Los Angeles every other Thursday at 7pm. Founder Feast chooses the restaurant and builds each table of five hand-picked founders, and both are revealed 24 hours before dinner. Membership is $39.99 USD a month, you pay the restaurant for what you eat, and you can cancel anytime.
Silicon Beach rewards founders who learn the map and then refuse to stay in one square of it. If you are building on the Westside and want a Thursday where the room is chosen for you, apply for Founder Feast. It takes a few minutes, every member is vetted, and the first thing you learn is which four founders you are eating with.
