they’ll be here all the time,” Pathak says, referring to a running joke from the TV sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. “But you don’t want them too far away, or when they come to stay, they’ll be here for a month. You want them close enough that you can send them home in the evening.”
What is not in dispute, however, is that the Sacramento area has a shortage of Silicon Valley-style local investors able to put significant sums into area startups. Ullrich calls it “a huge missing factor.” Cleve Justis, executive director of the Child Family Institute, says it’s “the biggest barrier” to startup growth in the Sacramento region.
When Peter Van Deventer left Intel to co-found Folsom-based data center monitoring startup SynapSense in 2006, he was able to secure most of the early funding from the two leading local venture firms, American River Ventures and DFJ Frontier. But both firms have long since scaled back their Sacramento-area investments. “There is a lot of angel and seed money, but you don’t have the classic, quarter-billion-dollar funds lying around,” says Van Deventer, who is now chairman of the board at SARTA. “So you have to hit Highway 80.”
Sacramento has also failed so far to spawn or attract the big technology-company headquarters that could help put the city on the map—the way Microsoft did in Seattle or Dell did in Austin—and give local tech workers the flexibility to move sideways. “When Google and Apple and Yahoo are constantly ripping employees off one another, you have a different capability,” says White.
Sacramento has tried to grow its own big companies, but like Boston and other hubs, it often loses these companies to far-away acquirers once they reach a certain size—witness Level One’s acquisition by Intel, or AgraQuest’s purchase by Bayer CropScience. A buyout can result in a nice payback for the founders and investors, but “you lose the biggest part of the benefit [of local ownership], which is that the leadership feels more invested in the region,” says Sanders, the executive recruiter. “If the headquarters is in Austin and the developers are here, there is no commitment back to Sacramento.”
“What we are trying to do now is hit mostly singles, but over time we need a home run,” Sanders says.
New Arenas for Entrepreneurship
But the more relevant metaphor for the city is basketball, not baseball. Sometime this month, if all goes according to plan, demolition will begin at Downtown Plaza, site of the new $477 million Sacramento Kings Arena.
When it opens in 2016, the arena will be a proving ground for new e-commerce and social networking technology as much as it will be a sports stadium. “It’s going to be cashless, ticketless, frictionless,” claims Vivek Ranadivé, leader of the Kings’ new ownership group. (Don’t underestimate Ranadivé’s tech chops: his company TIBCO supplies real-time communications software to thousands of large enterprises, and he’s credited with helping to invent computer-driven stock trading on Wall Street in the 1980s.)
“What is it that keeps a city together?” Ranadivé asks. “It’s really the gathering places, the coliseum, the arena. What we are doing in the downtown is going to be the spark that ignites the fire.”
Indeed, business leaders around Sacramento hope that the arena project will have big knock-on effects, the same way Camden Yards has boosted Baltimore’s harbor area. “The new arena is going to create a revival of downtown Sacramento and make it much more of a destination city than it has been before,” says Van Deventer. “The financial group that is now in ownership of the Kings is a very wealthy, technology-savvy organization. They want to turn the Kings into the premier technology-marketed sports company on the planet. That means they are going to do things that are very creative and innovative.”
But that’s all in the future. Meanwhile, there’s a fair amount happening already to strengthen the city’s entrepreneurial base.
Sacramento may not have any quarter-billion-dollar venture funds, but it does have Velocity Venture Capital, a $20 million fund run by general partners Jack Crawford and Jacob Jorgenson. Crawford is a Kauffman Fellow, a former PriceWaterhouseCoopers CPA, and an Ironman triathlete who believes that it’s important that early-stage companies in Sacramento have more access to local capital.
“We launched Velocity with the idea that there is this flow of entrepreneurs from Sacramento to Silicon Valley,” Crawford says. “We said, what if we could fund companies at the seed stage here, and the follow-on could come from Silicon Valley? UC Davis is doing some exciting things, but UNR [University of Nevada, Reno] and University of the Pacific are also graduating entrepreneurs who are recognizing that Sacramento has a lot of the ingredients of an innovation economy.”
One new ingredient is Velocity’s Entrepreneurs Campus, which opened in downtown Folsom on March 20. It’s a permanent home for a five-year-old accelerator program that Crawford has run in partnership with the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. The operation is funded by big corporate sponsors like Dell, Samsung, Oracle, Bank of America, TriNet, and Silicon Valley Bank. “The end we have in mind is to identify 10 of the best companies in Sacramento and Northern California each year and get them to cash-flow positive or their next funding round,” Crawford says.
Pondera Solutions, which helps government agencies detect fraud in Medicaid, unemployment, tax collection, and housing programs, is an alumnus of the program. It started off helping government agencies implement Google App Engine and other Google services, but now offers an independent product built on Google’s tools called Fraud Detection as a Service. Crawford says Pondera is typical of the successful tech startups around Sacramento, in that it chose a capital-light path to market. “You start companies that are service-oriented and not capital intensive, and as you become profitable you morph into a product company, often selling to government,” Crawford says.
The Entrepreneurs Campus will also host startup showcase events designed to bring together what Crawford calls a “fragmented” population of local angel investors. “You have a lot of individual investors [around Sacramento] who are not necessarily joining angel groups. They’re lone wolf investors. Part of what we are doing with our events is
