A few blocks away from downtown Glendale – where the Glendale Galleria, the Americana at Brand and surrounding restaurants service locals and neighboring visitors – is one of city’s biggest business success stories: ServiceTitan Inc.’s 21-story headquarters.

On a June afternoon in that very building is a gathering of venture capitalists, angel investors, business developers, city leaders and entrepreneurs looking to support what may very well be the next generation of companies following in ServiceTitan’s footsteps. The event is hosted by FoundersBoost, a Los Angeles-based accelerator nonprofit that spent the last six weeks helping a handful of Glendale-based business-to-business startups develop pitch decks, pinpoint customers and grow their companies. The program culminated in a demo day, where those founders pitch to investors and look for funding.

“The tech ‘epicenter’, if you will, in L.A. is on the Westside. It’s Santa Monica and Venice in that area. There are other pockets that do have other tech stuff going on now in the South Bay and El Segundo with SpaceX’s success, and there’s a big movement of deep tech, hard tech, space tech all in that area,” says Brandon Gerson, a director of the Glendale accelerator. “There are other parts of L.A. where there are good tech movements going on and one of them is in the corridor of the Pasadena-
Glendale-Burbank area.”

Indeed, ServiceTitan’s shadow looms large over the demo day. FoundersBoost was one of the recipients of a $1 million grant the city of Glendale provided to organizations managing tech accelerators, which the city announced in October 2024. It’s the second grant of its kind from the city and yet another way, along with Glendale Tech Week, Glendale aims to build on the success of ServiceTitan and the wealth of talent it pulls into the area.

“ServiceTitan just IPO’ed and so there’s a bunch of their employees that are now starting their own thing,” says David Crawley Delgado, the tech-focused senior economic development coordinator of the City of Glendale. “Disney’s Imagineering, they constantly have spin-offs. There are those anchor companies that are already here that are starting to produce the talent pool that has the capital and has the energy in wanting to start their own thing.”

The start of FoundersBoost

When Blake Caldwell co-founded FoundersBoost in 2017, the goal was to develop something he didn’t have when he was a founder navigating the world of startup building: a way for founders to build their companies with access to all parts of the larger ecosystem it would work in, from stakeholders to customers to city officials. FoundersBoost launched in Los Angeles, Detroit, Canada and Ireland and quickly expanded to cities and countries over the globe, including Canada, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Zambia and Italy.

“We found this gap of helping companies from the earliest stage, to start up weekend, to get into funding,” Caldwell says. “…there’s not as much support there.”

FoundersBoost operates differently from other accelerator and incubator programs in a couple ways. It doesn’t take equity from the companies in its programs, allowing it to play well with other accelerator programs and venture firms – by not shaving off equity from the cap table, companies don’t risk deterring future investors from funding their startup.

“These early-stage startups have only very few resources, especially when we’re talking about underrepresented founders,” Caldwell says. “And equity and cash and time are the things that we want to equip them with after giving them the guidance. You don’t want to take those things early on.”

It also answers the question many startup founders face after the dizzying intensity of the program settles: Now what? While accelerators and incubators can be successful, it relies on having its startup actually connect with investors and partners once they are done.

“It helps us operate through VCs and others,” Caldwell says. “They can send us startups and we can send them back to them and hopefully really create an actual startup ecosystem where we’re not all doing the same work over and over and again.”

FoundersBoost isn’t the only initiative driving forward tech growth in Glendale. The company is collaborating with Hacker Fund and the Alliance for SoCal Innovation on running accelerator programs, hosting public hackathons and supporting startups. In 2019, a similar grant went to KidsX from the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and Hero House, which have successfully bolstered their own early-stage startup ventures.

‘Drive business forward’

When Brandon Gerson was tapped to be one of the directors of the SoCal B2B Glendale accelerator program, he brought with him a wealth of experience working with companies creating enterprise-grade platforms. While some of the biggest names in Los Angeles tech are consumer-focused platforms – like GoodRx Holdings Inc., Snap Inc. and Headspace – Gerson was bullish on investing in business-to-business companies.

“If you can have a product that’s truly sticky and then becomes an integrated part of a tech stack or a workflow, that is what’s really going to continue to drive a business forward,” Gerson said. “…what we’re looking for is companies that are investable, companies that are building something that is going to be part of the future economy.”

It’s a strategy employed by ServiceTitan itself – the trades-based tech company inserted itself into the world of plumbers, HVAC specialists and electricians, garnering numerous partnerships and building out its platform until the platform became all but unavoidable to encounter for someone running a trades-based business.

Much of Glendale’s increasingly growing tech infrastructure – from the flood of programs dedicated to startups, to happy hours for entrepreneurs, to Glendale Tech Week – were a long time coming. Glendale published and adopted a city-wide Tech Strategy report in 2017, which looked to increase opportunities for the city to capitalize on its nascent technology sector.

“(We’re) focusing on building out the communities and making sure that people have access to high quality talent when they need it, but then also have a network of founders where they can find camaraderie and bounce ideas off of (each other),” Delgado Crawley said. “Just making it a place where innovation and excitement exists makes it so that people want to be around and that innovation can flourish by itself.”

The impact of the tech sector on the city is clear: Two years before ServiceTitan took over the building it now occupies, food and drink conglomerate Nestlé announced it would move its U.S. headquarters out of that very building, taking its 1,200 employees with it. Nearby lunch restaurants and happy hour bars suddenly lost out on the familiar faces it saw every day, only to be replaced by the 800-and-counting ServiceTitan employees that replaced them.

“What does the tech sector do?” Delgado says. “It provides more opportunities for our students. It provides more opportunities for our residents to get involved with things, and to benefit from the advancements…and to just to make sure that Glendale continues to be a fantastic place to live and work.”