Snapchat star of Los Angeles

Snapchat one of the largest technology initial public offering company based on a quiet street leading to the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles. eclipsing the Henna tattoo and hemp clothing stalls.

Snapchat’s IPO is expected to be valued at $25bn  and founder and CEO Evan Spiegel is enjoying the success after luring software developers to Southern California. Several Snap employees who left the company to become entrepreneurs, including  Tianxiang Zhu, a partner at Fika Ventures who started his firm last year in anticipation of a boom of young LA start-ups.

Mr Evan Spiegel wants Snapchat to standout way from its Silicon Valley rivals, like Google, Facebook, as he turned down a $3bn offer from Facebook in 2013. The largest exit for a start-up was the $3bn IPO of e-commerce site Buy.com and Demand Media which went public at $1.4bn in 2011. Other start-ups compete with Snap for space in the Venice and Santa Monica. Several mega Silicon Valley tech companies and digital advertising agencies are opening up offices 15 minutes drive away in Playa Vista, on Howard Hughes aviation industrial site where he built the Spruce Goose Plane.

Video gaming companies like Activision, have begun start-ups in gaming or virtual reality industries. Los Angeles now train more software engineers than any other big metropolitan area in the US including Silicon Valley and Boston. The venture investment has increased in 2016 by 25 per cent to $3.5bn according to  CB Insights, a research firm.

In 2012, Michael Heywood founded Whisper, the app for sharing secrets that has grown into a content business.