Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Reflections On 2017: Anna Barber, Techstars LA
During the holiday season, our tradition over the last few years has been to post reflections on the past year and some predictions from Southern California's "movers and shakers" in the technology industry. Today, we have a contribution from Anna Barber, the Managing Director of Techstars LA (www.techstars.org), one of three startup accelerators run by Techstars in the Los Angeles area.
What was the big news for your company this year?
Techstars has grown tremendously around the world in 2017, establishing a new venture in India and launching vertical accelerators focused on things like smart cities (in Dubai), energy (in Norway), defense (in Boston) and insurtech (North Carolina). Here in LA we ran three programs this year - Techstars Music, the Cedars Sinai Accelerator powered by Techstars, and the inaugural class of Techstars LA, which invests across all verticals. Those three LA programs alone invested in a total of 38 companies this year.
What was the biggest personal lesson you learned from 2017?
The theme of the year has to be diversity and inclusion and the lesson of the year is that the struggle to accomplish these goals in tech - and everywhere else in our economy - is only at a beginning. I hope that for the tech community 2017 will be marked as a turning point for diversity. My personal commitment as an investor is that diversity is a driving factor all the way through my process.
What are you looking forward to most in 2018?
In 2018 I'm looking forward to seeing some great new startups emerge in LA in areas such as future of work, cleantech, and blockchain, and to investing in ten more great companies. Applications for Techstars LA 2018 open on January 8.
Are there any technology innovations, gadgets, devices, software, that particularly caught your eye in 2017
Finally, what is your prediction for what will have the biggest impact on the technology industry in 2018?
In 2018 I hope we will see some maturing of what we refer to as a whole as "blockchain" but really meaning three separate things. The first, the distributed platform that supports smart contracts, which as a technology has great disruptive potential across many industries but is still early. Infrastructure, services and "picks and shovels" tech will be important here. Second, businesses built on tokenization using blockchain, which also has interesting applications for many industries, starting with gaming. And third, the use of coin offerings as a financing strategy. I'm by no means an expert in blockchain but it's an area I'm looking at for investment in 2018 and where LA should be an innovation hub.
Anna Barber is the Managing Director at Techstars LA where she invests in B2B and B2C early stage startups. Anna started her career as a corporate lawyer focused on public company transactional work and spent two years at McKinsey as a strategy consultant to retail, media and financial services companies. She served as VP Product at Petstore.com and two other early stage e-commerce companies, before transitioning to Los Angeles where she started a talent management firm and produced two feature films.
In 2006 she sat next to a woman on an airplane who became her business partner in her next startup, Scribble Press. Anna was most recently GM and VP Partnerships at Fingerprint Digital, after selling Scribble Press to Fingerprint. A certified executive coach, Anna works with her portfolio companies to build great teams, develop a sound strategy and create a strong network. Find her @annawbarber.