Recognizing Stellar Leadership at the 3rd Annual Allies In Innovation Celebration

Southern California’s unsurpassed diversity of industries and innovation communities is a compelling differentiator of our ecosystem but it can be difficult to bring all of the stakeholders together, unless you host a fun dinner at a extensively restored and tastefully updated historic building in Downtown LA. Our Third Annual Allies in Innovation celebration on February 22 was attended by 80 invited guests and Alliance staff at the Herald Examiner Building, now home to the ASU California Center, to celebrate the SoCal Innovation ecosystem, reflect on our progress in 2023, as well as look ahead to impactful developments in the near future.

After the lively cocktail hour which included a tour of the architecturally significant building led by ASU’s Dulce Vasquez, the crowd sat down for dinner preceded by a short recognition program where we celebrated the progress of the Alliance and key initiatives by our partners including Banc of California, Sunstone Management, Techstars, and Michelson Philanthropies, all of whom were also generous sponsors of the evening along with UBS and ASU, our hosts.

ASU’s Charlie Lewis, who runs their venture development entity Skysong Innovations, welcomed the attendees and explained ASU’s longstanding presence and commitment to the SoCal region. In fact, they have educated over 100,000 SoCal-based ‘learners’ since 2003 across 160 degree programs at various locations in the LA area and online. ASU’s Skysong Innovations arm is responsible for commercializing the abundance of breakthrough research at ASU. They had an office in downtown Santa Monica for over a decade before moving downtown in 2022.

The evening recognition program was emceed by Andy Wilson, CEO of the Alliance, who delivered a brief overview and highlights of our programming this year. In 2023, we directly engaged over one thousand innovation leaders across 63 total convenings of which 31 were ‘events’ (mostly small invite-only leadership discussions and founder-focused networking events) while the rest were meetings of our various working groups. We’re still finalizing the impact metrics and total coverage of our engagement, which will be more fully disclosed in our annual report at the end of March.

The rest of the program featured brief remarks from each of our four honorees:

• Banc of California is the lead supporter of our SoCal Venture Pipeline (SVP) program, a relationship they inherited in the merger with Pacific Western Bank in 2023. Jade Tran, Sr. VP of Venture Banking, delivered an enthusiastic testimonial for the strength of the partnership between our organizations during this past year. The SVP program received 265 startup applications of which 21 were accepted and over 70 personal introductions were made to qualified VCs. Six amazing companies completed their fundraising in 2023 while several others received funding and are nearing the close of their round.

• Sunstone Management was the lead sponsor of our SoCal Ecosystem Leadership Forum this past year as well as a passionate advocate of innovation in the region with a focus on the South Bay and Orange County. Their efforts in 2023 supported the Long Beach Accelerator, the “Launch Beach” initiative, an economic development challenge program with USC Price in Irvine, as well as underwriting the CSU Demo Day which featured innovation from startups throughout the Cal State system. Sunstone was represented by Richard Jun, who recently joined Sunstone after 10 years at BAM Ventures, the VC firm he co-founded with Brian Lee. As the new head of Venture Capital and Chief Strategy Officer, Richard announced that they are exploring raising new venture funds for aerospace in Long Beach, shipping/logistics with the Port of LA, and life sciences with UC Irvine. These funds are still in development, so stay tuned for more exciting news throughout the year.

• Techstars has been a close partner of the Alliance for several years, sponsoring a series of corporate innovation events that have helped bring their world-class accelerator to SDSU in 2023 and recently announced (although not at our event due to timing) partnership with USC for a new program to begin in 2025. Morgan Berman, VP of Partnerships for Techstars, which is the most active seed stage investor in the world, reflected on their ongoing strategy to partner with local organizations and their renewed commitment to Southern California.

• Philanthropist Dr. Gary K. Michelson, co-founder of the Michelson Philanthropies, provided his view on solving large scale problems, especially in Life Science research, requires collaboration and coordination with a diverse multi-disciplinary group of practitioners and researchers. The USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience is the embodiment of this vision in that it provides a physical space to induce collisions of researchers from different fields who are normally isolated in separate buildings for their department that reduces interaction. Building on this vision, literally, Michelson has recently joined forces with Gov. Newsom and other philanthropists to launch the California Institute Immunology and Immunotherapy at the new UCLA Research Park in Westwood. Gary’s leadership has created new innovation assets in the Southern California region that have the potential to be immensely transformative for the region and the world.

• We closed the recognition program with a festive toast by Jordan Hayes from UBS’s private wealth management group.  

The evening concluded with a seated dinner and the buzz of relationships being forged that will hopefully continue to drive collaboration and more economic prosperity to the SoCal innovation ecosystem and the communities they serve in 2024 and beyond.