San Diego ranks as America's top startup hub with a $200 billion annual community impact. Investor Gregory Shepard sees low risk and high opportunity there. Two local founders share wins: Phil Kelly's Kickstarter wetsuit rack and Barbara Zeiss's Perfect Zero seltzer, which grew 500 percent in its market.
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Well, this week the world celebrated Entrepreneurs Day. It is a day set aside to create awareness and innovation among nations. And here in San Diego, we are attracting a whole lot of entrepreneurs after being named the top hotspot for startup companies. KUSI's Ginger Jeffries joins us now, and she's got some more for us. Hi, Ginger.
Hi, Logan. Yeah, that's right. San Diego is the launchpad for new businesses here in the U.S. In fact, many investors have turned their attention from Silicon Valley to sunny San Diego. The definition of an entrepreneur is someone who creates a business and takes on a financial risk. Now, according to investor Greg Shepard, that risk is low and opportunity is high here in San Diego.
Investors like me now are looking at places like San Diego where you have really talented entrepreneurs with really good ideas and a really good surrounding, meaning the people around them want to make it work. They get this community impact.
That community impact brings in more than $200 billion yearly, placing San Diego In the top 20 for money-making metro areas in the United States, Forbes magazine also named San Diego the best city in the country to start up a business. Malo, malo, oh, malo, oh, malo, oh, malo, oh.
And it means dry in Hawaiian, and that's the name of the company.
After a successful career in the Silicon Valley working in the tech industry, Phil Kelly moved to San Diego and learned to surf. But he ran into a problem: What do you do with a wetsuit?
If I was going home. Leaving it in the back of the car is great, but if you got to go to the office, meeting, or if you're going to hang out all day, what'd you do? I couldn't find a solution. I made one, got a patent for it, put it on Kickstarter to see if anybody liked it besides me. It oversubscribed in three days. Then I had to make it.
What he made was a rack to hang the wetsuit on, but Kelly also found out that people had other uses for his invention, like fishermen who use it for their poles. And now he says seeing his vision become a reality is paying off.
When I go to a surf spot and I see it and it's not one I gave them, that means that they bought it. And that's just exciting, you know, that, that you created something, you brought it to market in SoCal here, San Diego, and somebody's using it.
Barbara Zeiss took a leap of faith moving from Australia to San Diego. After working more than a decade in the fitness industry, she too found a problem and developed a solution.
We both consider ourselves being healthy people, And we couldn't really find a drink that tasted great and was low in calories when we went to the bars. So we decided to create one.
San Diego is home to more than 130 craft breweries bringing in more than $850 million in 2015. Now a new market is emerging with seltzer drinks on the rise by 500%. Perfect Zero is a pioneer in that industry and the first based here in San Diego.
We actually just won a platinum We won a tasting award for being the best tasting alcoholic seltzer in the market.
So what does it take to become a part of San Diego's booming business? The experts say have a plan and do your research and test it out on a site like Kickstarter.
If you put it up and nobody likes it, maybe you ought to keep working on it. But if you put it up and it's really, you know, embraced by the people that are there, go for it. You got something cool.
So you start out and you say, okay, you start with the end in mind. You say, what business am I trying to build? And then Why should somebody be buying my product or my business? And those two should be connected.
If you really have the dream to be an entrepreneur, I think you should try it out because you don't want to get to the end of your life and be like, oh, I wish I had done that, right?
Now, during my research for the story, I found that areas not seeing much startup business activity is East County and the South Bay. So the experts told me people living in those areas should take advantage of the high opportunity and the low competition in order to attract investors.
