Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

L.A. Stories: Mike Jones and Peter Pham Talk About the Science of Tech Studios (Video)

While swanning about Los Angeles last week, I paid a visit to a number of interesting techies, including Mike Jones and Peter Pham, who recently founded Science.

While there are a lot of incubators and accelerators out there fiddling with start-ups, the pair of well-known entrepreneurs are calling this venture a “technology studio.”

By that, they mean that Science will do a lot more, from coming up with in-house ideas to investing some of their $10 million in backing to advising on how Silicon Valley should look at investments in Southern California to even taking on restructuring of larger entities.

Science investors include Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, and it also has relationships with private equity firms for the bigger stuff.

The focus of Science, as the pair discusses below in a video interview, will be in three arenas: The intersection of content and commerce, social and mobile, and location.

As longtime entrepreneurs and Internet execs, Jones and Pham know those arenas, both the pluses and the minuses.

Jones tried his best (and, like others, failed) with the Myspace revival and also founded and sold Specific Media, Userplane and Tsavo Media.

Pham was recently helming the high-profile and controversial Color photo-sharing start-up in Silicon Valley and did stints at both BillShrink and Photobucket (a former News Corp. property, as was Myspace. News Corp. owns this Web site.).

Here’s my chat with them about their sun-dappled dreams of SoCal tech hegemony via their Santa Monica, Calif., HQ:

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google