At ILM West: The New Investment Climate

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Today at ILM West in Los Angeles, digital media investor and ex-Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty talked to his former Citysearch colleague Matt Booth about what gets an investo/VC excited in today’s environment.

Moriarty offered some fundamentals.

As an investor, “”You have to  focus on the things that you believe in and like.”

Any entrepreneur approaching Moriarty cannot think small.

“It has to be a big category,” Moriarty said. “If it is not a big opportunity, I am not going to spend much of my time on it.”

A category that gets Moriarty excited is supply aggregation. Think Ticketmaster, Amazon, OpenTable, even AirBNB.

“There are a lot of great opportunities around demand aggregation, but I like businesses that aggregate supply.”

Moriarty is also focused on platform businesses. One of his investments is Triton Digital, which provides digital platforms to terrestrial radio stations.

Finally, Booth and Moriarty talked about the start up environment in Los Angeles and Southern California, which lags Silicon Valley as a hub for tech start ups.

The big reason is that investors concentrate in Silicon Valley, which breeds an expectation to site the business in the Valley.

Moriarty noted however that most of today’s great Internet brands are based somewhere other than Northern California. Think Match.com (Dallas), Living Social (Washington, D.C.), Groupon (Chicago), among others.