Nusil and Lynda.com are the king and queen of Carpinteria
During one very short year, the small, coastal city of Carpinteria has gone from an also-ran to the hottest market around when it comes to new job growth and filling commercial space. Research by the Business Times and Mark Schniepp’s California Economic Forecast shows that just two companies — Nusil and Lynda.com are mainly responsible for gobbling up thousands of square feet in Carp, which now is just about as fully leased up as at anytime since the dot-com era.
Banking on a reunion: Funari and Ortega team up
Longtime Santa Barbara bankers Joanne Funari and Eloy Ortega are reunited again. The two bankers, who founded Business First National Bank together in 2001, now have their sights set on building out the The Bank of Santa Barbara on the South Coast.
Dole investors file suit over CEO’s buyout
Wall Street trusts billionaire David Murdock of Dole Food Co. to repay his debts but doesn’t agree with his valuation logic.
Murdock succeeded in taking the Westlake Village-based firm private on Oct. 31 in a deal that valued the company at more than $1.6 billion when counting net debt, fees and expenses. At the same time, investors clamored to help Murdock take on debt to finance the deal, with a reported order book of more than $10.5 billion for only $300 million in debt.
Venture capital firm hungers for health-foods startups
Santa Barbara-based venture capital firm NGEN Partners has a new investing focus on a somewhat unlikely sector: healthy, environmentally friendly food.
Since its founding in 2001, NGEN has had a focus on funding sustainability-oriented companies. Its early focus was on energy and materials. Catalytic Solutions, a nanotechnology firm spun out of UC Santa Barbara that made emissions scrubbing cheaper and more effective in automobiles, was an early investment. Soraa, an LED lighting firm created by several UCSB professors that has gone on to receive big money from Khosla Ventures and others, remains active in the firm’s portfolio.
In good company: Co-working spaces proliferate in region
This has been the year co-working hit the Tri-Counties. With the opening on Nov. 4 of Connect Ventura in the Working Artists Ventura building, there are now co-work spaces in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.
Sonos sets tone for tech firms as it snaps up downtown space
Music equipment maker Sonos markets some of the highest-quality audio equipment around, but the company is being very quiet as it snaps up thousands of square feet of space in downtown Santa Barbara. According to the brokers at Radius Group’s economic and commercial real estate forecast on Oct. 31, Sonos has now leased about 100,000 square feet of new space over the last year, and is looking for more.
