SoCal.Startups is built and maintained by one person, and it's still under construction. Here's the honest version of how a company ends up in this directory, and what its listing does and doesn't tell you.
Of the usual startup criteria — age, headcount, funding stage, revenue, "does it feel like a startup" — age is the only one we can actually verify from the data sources below for most listings. So that's the rule we enforce: a company has to be foundable as roughly 10 years old or younger. Anything we can confirm is older than that gets left out, even if it still feels startup-ish. Headcount and funding stage aren't shown for a lot of listings simply because the source data doesn't include them — we don't guess.
SEC Form D filings aren't exclusively startups — banks, insurance companies, real estate investment vehicles, private equity holding structures, law firms, and other professional practices file Form D too, for reasons that have nothing to do with being a startup. We filter those out by hand on an ongoing basis. If one slips through, that's a miss on our end, not an intentional call — feel free to flag it.
This isn't a complete census of Southern California startups, and it never fully will be — bootstrapped and non-VC-backed companies don't leave the kind of public paper trail that funded companies do, so they're underrepresented here unless a founder submits directly. Treat this as a growing, imperfect snapshot, not an authoritative count.