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.

The post At ILM West: The New Investment Climate appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

With several recent tech valuations raising eyebrows — Quora at $86 million, Twitter at nearly $8 billion to name just two — a word that’s been tossed around Silicon Valley a lot these days is “froth.” Sean Moriarty, entrepreneur in residence at Mayfield Fund, told the ILM East audience, however, that not all froth is bad froth.

Moriarty’s interpretation: Froth and rampant enthusiasm exist because there are “great companies being built … real companies getting to revenue and profitability very quickly.” That, in Moriarty’s mind, is what separates present tech fervor from bubblish late-1990s’ optimism.

BIA/Kelsey’s Matt Booth, moderating the session, noted that few truly local online business have reached $1 billion in annual revenues, and two of the most prominent — AutoTrader and Groupon — are verticals. Moriarty, who formerly ran Ticketmaster, sees plenty of promise around verticals, namely travel, but also sees a marketplace that is wide and deep enough for a variety of successful local entrants.

Speaking of Groupon, the evolution of group buying is at the top of many minds in Boston this week, including Moriarty’s. His viewpoint echoes what BIA/Kelsey also foresees — necessary consolidation and inevitable attrition in a noisy space. But the bigger idea of deal a day isn’t going anywhere. “The notion of interacting with large audience with increasingly targeted offers is here to stay.”

And what about the next billion-dollar idea for entrepreneurs in the audience? There are lots of customer acquisition channels out there (Groupon and its 400 clones), but loyalty/retention tools in the vein of what Evan Cohen and Foursquare are building could serve new value.

The post ILM East: Mayfield Fund’s Sean Moriarty — Froth Isn’t Always a Dirty Word appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.