By Katie BennerThe New York Times
LOS ANGELES — Blaine Lourd has long helped the movie stars, professional athletes and heiresses in Los Angeles manage their wealth. Over the past few years, he has also noticed millionaires who made their money in technology begin to dot the west side of the city.
“What we have not had is our Google moment,” Lourd said, referring to Google’s initial public offering in 2004, which produced a horde of new millionaires in Silicon Valley.
Now such a moment may soon be upon Los Angeles. Next month, Snap, the parent company of the disappearing-message app Snapchat, which is based in the Venice neighborhood, is set to go public — and in the process mint a wave of tech millionaires and billionaires in a city better known for its well-paid Hollywood stars.
That prospect has Angeleno real estate agents, money managers and luxury goods purveyors excited for a potential business windfall, akin to what their Silicon Valley brethren 375 miles to the north have seen time and again with tech IPOs.
“When it comes to tech companies, for the wealth managers and real estate guys, no one has really rung the register like the Snap thing that’s about to happen” to Los Angeles, said Lourd, whose wealth management firm, LourdMurray, is based in Beverly Hills. “My theme is that Snapchat is the moment.”
Snap has said it was aiming to sell its stock for $14 to $16 a share, putting the company’s value at $19.5 billion to $22.2 billion. That would make Snap among the biggest public tech companies by market capitalization to have its headquarters in the Los Angeles area.
At that valuation, Snap’s two young founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, would walk away with holdings worth more than $3 billion each. Timothy Sehn, Snap’s senior vice president for engineering, would own shares valued at as much as $110 million. And dozens of other Snap employees could become overnight millionaires.
To capture some of these soon-to-be wealthy techies, Los Angeles real…