Rents Hit Close to Home for Technology Engineers

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If you want to work at and live near a billion-dollar tech company, it’s going to cost you. But less if you live in Los Angeles, rather than San Francisco.

A new study of rents and engineering salaries conducted by online rental-listing company RadPad Inc. of Culver City and online job-listing website Anthology of Seattle found that median monthly rents for one-bedroom apartments a half-mile from billion-dollar-plus tech companies took a larger chunk of paychecks in San Francisco than in Los Angeles.

Of the 10 San Francisco tech companies studied, mid- to senior-level engineers would be expected on average to pay at least 42 percent of their salary to rent apartments that close to where they work.

Because San Francisco is denser, less car friendly and better connected with mass transportation, it’s appealing for workers to ditch their vehicles and pay to live closer to work, said RadPad Chief Executive Jonathan Eppers.

The average $3,312 monthly rent for an apartment near a so-called unicorn in San Francisco is almost twice the $1,845 a month a tech worker would expect to pay in Los Angeles. The relative advantage of Los Angeles is clearer when factoring in salaries: The average annual pay of mid- to senior-level engineers in San Francisco is $135,000 compared with $118,000 in Los Angeles.

Granted, there are more billion-dollar ventures up north than there are here, and so there could be greater upward pressure on all sorts of living costs.

Locally, Snapchat engineers make an average of $125,000 a year. Because the company’s Venice offices are also in the heart of a booming residential market, that engineer would pay Bay Area-level rates for a nearby apartment: The $2,740-a-month rent in the area would match the 42 percent of salary paid by San Francisco tech workers.

“Snapchat has really changed the economics of Venice because they are paying a lot-higher wages,” Eppers said. “They are attracting highly skilled people and they are paying them a lot.”

On the lower end, an engineer working at Hawthorne’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, makes on average $107,500 annually, and with nearby apartments renting for $950 a month on average, after taxes just 23 percent of their salary would go for rent. Renting an apartment within a half-mile of SpaceX’s headquarters, of course, is an exercise in the hypothetical.

Charging Up

UBeam Inc. of Santa Monica said it would begin shipping its wireless-charging product within the next calendar year.

The company’s technology promises to wirelessly charge devices at a distance of up to 15 feet by converting electricity into ultrasonic waves, transmitting the energy through the air and converting the energy back into electricity within the device.

UBeam is scrambling to establish its technology as the industry standard ahead of San Francisco’s Energous Corp., another startup that uses radio waves to transmit energy.

Energous has a working prototype, the WattUp, but because it uses radio waves, it must be deemed safe by a multistage Federal Communications Commission review before it can come to market. Thus, uBeam is looking to pull ahead.

“We’re at a massive inflection point,” said 26-year-old uBeam co-founder and Chief Executive Meredith Perry. “We are about to head into a completely new phase of growth.”

UBeam plans to double its roster of 20 employees in the next 12 months by beefing up its ranks of transducer, acoustic and software engineers. Perry said she’s also looking to move the company into a bigger office.

In order to ease the transition into production, uBeam said last week that it had hired Jeff Devine, a former Cisco Systems Inc. vice president of supply chain management, as chief operating officer and former Palm Inc. global operations finance executive Monica Hushen as chief financial officer. It will be Devine’s job to scale uBeam’s wireless charging technology production.

“When we were seeking out an operations candidate we were looking at someone with decades of experience from taking a product from prototype to production,” said Perry. “(Devine) is going to be the one that’s going to help us take this from our small shop to what will become our massive multimillion-(unit) production next year.”

New-Media Hire

Internet media company AwesomenessTV has hired Shelley Zimmerman, formerly a vice president of scripted programming at Warner Bros. Entertainment, as its new head of scripted series.

The move is another indication of the convergence of digital media and traditional television. AwesomenessTV got its start as a YouTube multichannel network in 2012, and was quickly acquired by DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. for $33 million the next year.

Though it continues to produce millennial-oriented video content for the Internet, the company also has struck deals for the small screen, including shows “AwesomenessTV” for Viacom Inc.’s Nickelodeon and “Richie Rich” for Netflix.

Zimmerman will lead the company’s push to produce even more original series.

Staff reporter Garrett Reim can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 232.

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