Dec. 10, 2020

Building the Southern California of Tomorrow

Building the Southern California of Tomorrow

Bill Carpou, CEO at OCTANE, the accelerator in California and General Partner at Visionary Ventures a growth stage fund is interviewed by futurist Trond Arne Undheim. 
In this conversation, they talk about how the newly formed Innovation Network of South...

Bill Carpou, CEO at OCTANE, the accelerator in California and General Partner at Visionary Ventures a growth stage fund is interviewed by futurist Trond Arne Undheim. 

In this conversation, they talk about how the newly formed Innovation Network of Southern California (InSoCal) is Building the Southern California of Tomorrow. We discuss how to build any innovation ecosystem, what the ingredients are, how to adapt to local and cultural dynamics, and how to thrive and grow. We also muse about ecosystems of the future.

The takeaway is that the future of innovation ecosystems is up in the air. What worked in the past must be continuously adapted. Attempting to make a poor carbon copy of Silicon Valley is not going to cut it. inSoCal seem to have found a cool, networked model where they pool the resources from several existing regional networks and achieve momentum that way.

After listening to the episode, check out OCTANE as well as Bill Carpou's social media profile:

The show is hosted by Podbean and can be found at Futurized.co. Additional context about the show, the topics, and our guests, including show notes and a full list of podcast players that syndicate the show can be found at https://trondundheim.com/podcast/. Music: Electricity by Ian Post from the album Magnetism. 

For more about the host, including media coverage, books and more, see Trond Arne Undheim's personal website (https://trondundheim.com/) as well as the Yegii Insights blog (https://yegii.wpcomstaging.com/). Undheim has published two books this year, Pandemic Aftermath and Disruption Games. To advertise or become a guest on the show, contact the podcast host here. If you like the show, please subscribe and consider rating it five stars.

Bill CarpouProfile Photo

Bill Carpou

CEO, Octane

Bill has held many key positions at technology companies such as Xerox and IKON, and created distribution channels and customer solutions for products manufactured by Canon, Ricoh, and H-P. Both companies also provided an opportunity for Bill to lead distressed operations back to profitability and interact with investors, including several Wall Street investment banks. Additionally, he led several acquisitions and the creation of strategic partnerships. Bill was with Merrill Lynch earlier in his career, and more recently, held an executive position within The Blackstone Group, one of the leading global private equity firms. In that role Bill led the successful growth and transformation of a key portfolio company. He has broad sales and marketing experience and during 2014, worked with several startups to provide advisory services focused to revenue growth, and increasing both profitability and overall enterprise value.