Neal Bloom and Jonah break down San Diego's 2021 tech funding: 263 private rounds raised $8.87B, up from $5.28B in 2020. The region saw 21 IPOs, 195 acquisitions, and a surge in mega-rounds over $100M.
Hello. Hello, Jonah. How are you doing? What's up?
We're nearly at the end of the year. Happy holidays.
Almost counting down the days. Hey, it is 3:23 on the 23rd of December of the 12th month of the year. Love it. This is the Neil and Jonah show where we get to tell jokes. No, just kidding. We're going to do a rundown of this year in tech, a bit of a report that we put out on fresh brewed tech this week. We're going to run through it. I am Neil Bloom, an entrepreneur, investor, community builder and this is Jonah.
What's up everybody? I am just operations work in San Diego and overall just loving our tech scene here. So happy to be with you, Neil. And got one of our local favorites here, just going to pop open in June, Shine in honor of their funding and honor the, you know, the end of the year and the holidays. Let's do it.
Cheers to that.
Cheers to that.
Um, so this actually since 2014, I've been tracking San Diego funding data and other data. Originally I had my first newsletter was called SD Tech Spotlight. And I think if you go to sdtechspotlight.com, it should forward you over now to fresh brewed tech. But I've just been fascinated in business data about our community and, and this report we put together talks a little bit about growth over the last, just last year it's preliminary data because it's still not the end of the year. Right. Uh, fundings are still happening. I know we are interlock. We're, we're funding two new deals before the end of the year for sure.
Well, you, you even said a funding came in after the preliminary was posted. Something even landed after. So you don't want to call it, you don't want to put a bookend on it yet.
Right? I mean, yeah, I think the 23rd SkySafes funding came in after, after the mat. After the newsletter went out. So yeah, I want to count it all for sure. So while you're listening to this, maybe in 2021, the report may have been updated in real time by 2022, when you're listening to this in early January, either way. But we want to run through it, give you an audio version of it. There's a blog and there will be an infographic if not out when you're listening to us out very shortly. But yeah, the year in review by the numbers comes from a lot of data. So Connect has a great public database, an air table that I love to manipulate and play with. So we took a lot of data from that. I also have a ton of crunch based data that I grab as well. You and I, Jonah, have a San Diego public company spreadsheet as well. So we are tracking IPOs with that, companies going public, what's their market cap, what's their IPO raise, that kind of stuff. And then our friends over at Pebble Finance have been working with me on a San Diego public company indexing. So they actually gave me a download of the entirety of the full San Diego public company, let's call it the index compared to other Cities, other top 10 metros in the US to see how are our public companies doing too. So shout out to the team at Pebble Finance for helping us there as well. But let's dive into the details. What do you say?
Yeah, I'm into it. I might have, I'm over here in the connect report. I'll come back, I'll bounce over. It's fascinating connects.
Airtable is awesome. You just have to turn on and off things to get the full thing, but by the numbers. So we're going to mostly talk about Pratt. We're going to differentiate between public financings for public companies and private financings. So anything pre IPO we're going to count as private financings. And this is minority investment. So we'd also don't count. Like when a private equity company goes and buys a majority share in a company, this is pretty much like VC growth equity only we pull out, we delete debt financing, we delete grants, non equity assistance, anything like that.
So do you want to tell us kind of the logic behind that a little bit. We were talking about it before hitting the record button. I thought that was some good stuff there because it's like your money coming in. Wouldn't we want to count it all? But maybe not. Maybe it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, it's true because there's a lot of debt financing that actually helps companies but they got to pay it back eventually. So it kind of comes out of revenue and it's not an equity share, it's not an investment in companies and investment in the community per se. So we want to draw the line of no debt, convertible debt, though we do count because typically that converts into equity. So that one is a form of pre seed and seed investing, but pure venture debt financing, which luckily they're delineated in most databases. We pulled out debt, we pull out grants because grants, while it's not an equity investment, does help a company get off the ground. But Some of these are going to hospitals and major companies like Northrop Grumman winning a grant to do a study on blank. It's not the kind of capital that gets driven into growing a company per se, you know. So we look at pure equity investments that really are an investment in a company which is an investment in jobs, which is an investment in our city. So delete and you may all cities.
And you make a good point too because grants may not trickle back down into the community. If there's investors local living in San Diego invest and there's an exit then, then in theory that money will stick around in the community. But like you said, on top of that, building a business and funding a business in San Diego does produce jobs or kind of, kind of. Those two angles I think are super important to track, you know, this city's metrics, you know, as we kind of look for it. So that's why some of that those numbers might be pulled out when they feel like they, they still do add to the overall total. You know, it's a little bit of a different, different story they're telling.
Yeah, and really it's, it's about comparing the same numbers year after year consistently. And this is kind of the way I've always done and compared it for, for like you know, six years now or so when you can read some other reports. And we were just doing that, looking at other cities like there's some numbers that could be way off and some of that you start to think like, oh, maybe they included like post IPO equity where a public company worth 10 billion goes and raises another 3 billion. That could really skew a city's private investments. And so certain things like that you just want to be consistent. So that's what we do here. But let's dive into it by the numbers this year 2021. First of all, like at a macro level, all numbers are up everywhere, like investments in general because the public markets were very giving this year, offering a road to exits. People were reinvesting back into early stage companies. So you'll hear a lot here about San Diego, but just know this is up everywhere. So, so in San Diego there's 263 private funding rounds and of those 263, 150 went into tech and consumer. So more than half, which is great to see that for sure that tech is taking on in terms of number of deals, we are a majority in comparison to 2020. 209 fundings were companies were funded and 109 were tech and consumers so close to that halfway mark. So tech had an increase, a net increase in number of fundings comparatively of the total fundings.
And to clarify, I think you're referring to the other sort of piece and chunk is biotech related. So we're kind of splitting those in half here because that's such a forefront thing in San Diego. But it looks like we're, I mean, very pretty close to 50, 50, I mean, maybe a little bit more skewed towards, you know, tech as opposed to biotech. Even though biotech does come in sometimes with some bigger price tags.
Yeah. In terms of number of deals, we are tech and consumer is a majority. But probably if we were to crunch dollar amount, there's probably larger dollars going per deal in biotech. And I hate that we have to split these out, to be honest, but we still have to. But in San Diego, like you said, so much is biotech, but so much of biotech is becoming tech. Like a genomics play sometimes could be data science and hardware like illuminated or a medical device, could be software and IoT the lines are blurring. And that's great for San Diego that our life science are just applied tech and it's applied to the body. What's the difference if it's applied to the body or a car, if it's, you know, an AI solution? So we will continue to split them out, but we really should appreciate and celebrate that this is better together kind of information.
That's a good point, actually. I mean, because you think about, I mean, we talk about this one a lot, but you think about like your dexcoms of the world and it's like, where do they fall? And then do we want to have them fall within one bucket or another? And maybe that's actually what's really interesting about how this whole ecosystem is evolving is maybe that line is going to continue to blur and we're going to have to kind of have some other sort of, you know, does it require a petri dish in a lab to be, you know, in biotech or, or, or not, and then it falls outside of that. Or maybe it all kind of rolls together eventually once we get a little bit more. A variety of companies kind of building and growing here, but super interesting to see and I love the diversity in our community.
Yeah. And I want to give a shout out to the one of the first people to really notice that the late great Bruce Bigelow of xconomy used to write a ton about San Diego tech community and biotech and he called it Big bio meets big data. And that's really what was kind of is happening continuously, I'd say, in four of the five legs. I don't know if pharma, I think you're seeing a little bit of applied AI for like wet lab pharma.
Yeah.
But not nearly as much as you're seeing in genomics, medical device diagnostics and digital health, which are become just tech plays in a variety of ways.
So let's look at it by quarter because this is actually kind of interesting. It's. It doesn't seem like, you know, it seems flat's the wrong word, but it seems like we didn't, you know, we didn't have one enormous quarter and a couple of slow ones. It seemed relatively consistent kind of across the year. It's true.
Usually there's, there's some very expected seasonality in funding, like summertime is quiet and holiday time is quiet. But the last two, three years have not been. So many deals happened in August this year when usually people are. VCs, are like, literally, I'm off. I'm just like out of here for August. And same in December. The last few years, deals have been done in December. So, you know, we're seeing this, this year, 76 deals in Q1, 57 in Q2, 71 in Q3, and as of this writing, 50 deals in Q4. So kind of maybe a little like 70 then 40 or 50, then 70, then 50, but still it's pretty consistent. Just like. And that's a few things, the waterfall there. Investors who have invested 10 years ago in companies are getting paid out because those companies are either getting acquired or going public. That cash has trickled back. They then raise their next fund off of saying, hey, look, we had an exit. And then they keep investing. So the fact that we're closing this flywheel from having a liquidity event for a lot of companies is really affecting more capital being poured into the community right now. That being said, San Diego has not had a lot of exits, which we're going to talk about a little bit more later. Not massive ones, but we will talk about some that have. But Overall Dollar amount 8.87 billion Privately raised in San Diego this year. I think we'll hit the $9 billion mark before end of 2021.
And this already doesn't even count. I don't believe the latest funding that just happened, you know, right as the report was getting kind of massaged and.
Kind of at least 50 to 100 million right there. Yeah, SkySafe raised. I think 30 million plus this week alone. So yeah, we might be there already. Comparatively, 2020 was 5.28 billion funding. So not necessarily a 2x but pretty close, like 1.8x kind of increase in capital startup funding. The big thing that jumped up was, well, not big, but however. Oh yeah, it was big. Hundred million dollar plus fundings. So we had 2600 million dollars plus funding rounds this year compared to 14 last year. 10 of the 26 were tech or consumer. So still a good chunk of biotech in there. But we had ten hundred million dollars plus rounds. By the way, some of those were like a $200 million Fox Freight and a $400 million Vuori and a $400 million ClickUp like, oh, that's a billion right there between three companies and two of them were already. Or one of them, two or one of them were already unicorns. I think we minted like six new unicorns just in September, October this year alone. Maybe we need a direct unicorn counter watch kind of thing going on. We might need that.
Yeah, like when they achieve it or get there.
Yeah, we might need our own like little blog. Like we obviously need a sound too, you know, besides the. Yeah, the IPO sound. In either case, $100 million fundings were up. And just to speak to the crazy valuations that were up alongside that, you saw companies who had previously raised like 25 million on like 100 or $200 million valuation six months ago, and within six months raising 100 million on a billion dollar valuation, same company. So it is a little wild, I would say right now. And as an investor myself, I would be okay with things cooling down a little bit in 2022 for things just come back down to earth.
Do you have a metric on this? And if not, we can try to pull it through it on Twitter. How many companies in this orbit were hitting two rounds of funding within the full year of 2021? Because there was a couple, I think that came through like, hey, we just closed this round and ops, it's open and oh yeah, it closed again and no one even knew. And it's like six months later.
We should do that. Let's pull that. Let's find that. That's that number of companies. There is multiple rounds in a year in San Diego alone. Let's do that. Yeah, let's not get crazy. But yeah, so. So like we said, two $600 million plus rounds in 2021, 10 were tech or consumer companies. In last year, 14 companies raised 100 million plus and four were tech companies. So tech is still growing I think proportionally in that amount for sure. Nearly 2x yeah.
Do you know real quick, do you know if is this are we rising tides lifting all boats scenario or San Diego conf movement? You know, more or less than kind of everybody. Or maybe we need to dig into.
That a little more from $100 million round. I do not know what the average city did in that regard. We should dive can dive further into that. Something I wanted to check out is there's this big trend over the last few years of more capital going into less companies and all into later stage. And what scares me about that is not filling the top of our funnel. Right. We need to keep creating new companies which get funded, which create jobs. And so I just wanted to look at over the last few years, you know, are we still creating companies? Maybe we should have pulled 2019 data as well. But I have 2021 and 2022 pre series A. So this is pre seed. Seed seed extension and name your title, whatever you want to hear seed. Plus there's all sorts of titles here and even titles at this point of rounds are a little crazy because you could be raising a $10 million seed and someone else could be raising a $5 million Series A. But in either case Series A does signify usually like the start of all VCs coming in and kind of taking over on future fundings. Before that it could be a mix of angels, maybe some pre seed VCs. So anyway, in 2021 we had 85 companies raise pre series A for 244 million in funding. 2020 we had 81 companies raised pre series A for 161 million. So almost the same amount of companies but a significant amount more of capital because these rounds got so much bigger inflated per se. But I think it's at least a good sign that 80 plus companies got funded pre Series A in both years. And it's a great sign.
Yeah, it's actually really interesting though because you'd expect with almost maybe 80 million more getting deployed that you know, I might have expected there to be more companies or more people taking bets on earlier companies or other sort of riskier companies because there's money available. But like you said, yeah, four more companies in the previous year. And that sort of before a round funding is a little peculiar. It kind of follows that that theme that you're describing where people are, you know, there's more money but there maybe maybe a little more risk averse. I don't know if that's the right way to put it or it's funneling into certain types of companies and you know, missing some of those earlier, earlier opportunities. So they're going to need money somehow. You know, glad that you guys are out there doing, doing that work too. But you know, if you don't get them past, you know, those, the seed, pre seed and seed extensions, they may not get to that next phase unless they find a new strategy to get, you know, get money and you know, not to die, you know, move into a crypto world. But there might be other strategies to get funding and maybe we go, you know, maybe the narrative does change and it actually is, is good for San Diego companies. So I think really time will tell. But definitely an interesting metric to track.
Definitely. I had heard this metric though that 400 startups start a year in San Diego. I never could find out where that data was from. This data seems to say, you know, 80 companies get pre seed, pre series A funding per year. Which I don't find the 400 number where that extrapolates to that. Maybe it's you know, 400, maybe there's small business in there. Maybe there's like companies who are still kind of in a research phase like in a lab that have got grant funding. But I'd love to find and really blow up the 400 number and see where that's coming from.
Yeah, it's interesting because it's, it seems. Well, it is really interesting. 400 I would imagine. I would have to imagine that means businesses in general or does that seem way too low for, you know, if you're starting to include, I don't know, bars and restaurants and other things of that nature. Like that doesn't feel like a high enough number before the 400. So that's a metric to really dig in deeper. I kind of feel like more companies would start. Maybe not though. It's, it's maybe not.
Someone has that data. I'm looking at you sedc, I know you're listening. And ucsd, Josh Shapiro, I think you tracked this as well. Shoot us a note, show us the data. Connect. We shared this report. Connect. They sent us back. Mike Kren sent us some slides on like how we doing progress wise, which I think was important to share. And so he's got some tracking for the last 11 years where we have been as a community, as a city, San Diego. In terms of venture funding from 2010 to really 2015, we were flat at just about a billion a year in venture capital funding all the way. So that's a billion a year, billion and a half in 2016 and 2017. And then in 2018 it's really started to pick up and you can really drive that back to Mike Kren when he was at San Diego Venture Group. Now connect really focusing on getting outside capital to San Diego, bringing the VCs in and funding them. And so you can actually really start to see what would we call this, a logarithmic kind of growth from 1.5 billion in 2016, 2.8 billion in 2018, 3.4 billion in 2019, 5.2 in 2020 and then 8 point we think 7, if not 9 billion, 2021 1. I think you actually would probably see that this is what's been happening to VC funding in general across the world is this kind of growth. But the fact that Sano still could have missed out on that because we one don't have a lot of local VCs, so we had to bring it here. So we had to be shouting from the rooftop saying there's great companies to invest in here. And so we were able to get a piece of that. And that's put us in like top six city by metro in terms of VC funding in the US only behind SF, NY, Boston and LA. So pretty great because I think honestly most people would not consider San Diego a top six city in terms of a lots of things. Definitely not top six in terms of sports teams. In terms of like if you name name the top 10 popular or even populated metros, most people outside San Diego wouldn't even think San Diego is in that top 10. We are and we're getting our fair share of investments and we've got our fair share of startups. So we can't rest on that though. We got more work to do. We got companies who need to exit, who return capital and go build more. And I think the big thing that doesn't jump off the page here that is worth talking about is the kinds of things we're building here. We are building life changing technology that is literally changing lives and saving lives to shout out to SD life changing. Like we really, we're not necessarily just like building a bunch of consumer apps and games. There's some of that here. But by and far the majority of our funding goes to changing telecom like Qualcomm kind of stuff. Changing the way we get to mobility. Right. Changing the way we detect cancer and disease. That's kind of cool that we can drive more investment, which means we're driving more innovation, which means hopefully saving More lives.
That's great. And kind of looking at this data and like you said, you know, it's. I wouldn't necessarily say it's hockey stick the way that it's going and actually you should look at it, how it's growing, you know that term. I'd say it's more of a high lie. Stick with a little bit of a turn to it but maybe it keeps going. I'd be really curious, curious at what 22 looks like. You know, I mean we're kind of. It's a weird place with the pandemic. You know, going into New year, I'd be really curious to see what's your bet? Do you think we're going higher or lower? Put you on the spot for 22. Is it over eight and a half billion?
Yeah, I think we're over 10 in 2022. I think the big thing to watch is cool. First of all, here's what, here's what affect it. Is there available capital? And the answer is yes. There's so many VC funds raising capital right now, which they have three years to deploy. Right. And more three plus years. So let's say for whatever reason public markets lock up next year. Either we have a big crash or the Fed hikes interest rates and people find like, oh, I can get exits and I can get, I can make money on loans instead of like in the public markets. Right. That could be the reason that you'd see stoppage of IPOs, which would mean a stoppage of exits for VC funds, which means they'd slow down the capital deployed but they still got to deploy the existing capital they have. So for the next three years, I see a lot of early stage capital still coming to our companies for sure. I don't see that stopping. It just really depends on the exits. The end of the stage, that's what could change things. I guess the other thing that could happen is our companies could fail for whatever reason. So we have a stock market that just drops by half. Companies either stop buying. So the B2B SaaS world, you have enterprise companies who stop buying products from other startups. Sure. And therefore startups will have customers. Okay. Then they might have to shut down or they might have to weather that storm for a year or two and just take capital from their existing investors and live on. So I think capital still gets deployed for sure over the next year. Now at three years from now, I don't know where we're at. I don't know if we can maintain that growth or what the economy's doing. I shouldn't even be given this much advice because I am definitely not an economist yet.
You have two to three years. That makes sense. I mean, and also on top of that too, like you said, depending on exits. But there's also, you know, when it comes to, you know, some of the biotech or some of the things that are really big in our area, a lot of these are bets on the future or approvals. You know, so it goes one way and a drug gets approved and boom, you know, there's, there's money flowing into its company or, or you know, more exit potential or you know, maybe they don't quite hit that and you know, can go the other direction. So I think it's still plenty up in the air. But I like that, I like that number. I like, I like this number going up. I just hope it kind of gets spread amongst a little bit more variety or rather more companies. But we will see that means there's plenty for angel groups and angel networks to kind of to get their hands on to.
I think something else to look at for San Diego is the other things besides purely life sciences are a lot of infrastructure related plays like clean tech, ag tech, which is getting a lot of government investment right now, which is usually matched by private investment. Right. So you've got an electric vehicle charger network that is exploding across country because the Fed's putting billions, if not trillions into that as well as other kinds of technology related infrastructure kind of stuff like 5G towers being installed, solar and wind kind of investment. We have all that kind of tech being developed here. And if government is signaling that they are spending, meaning their customers or they're giving out grants for it, private funding will follow. So I think that's a good sign over the next few years as well. Is just like the government investment in a lot of things that we're investing into.
Yep, I like it.
Let's keep moving. Because it's not all about private funding. We also want to put a spotlight on who's writing these checks. I think for a long time we've said Santa doesn't have capital, we don't have local money. Well, we tried to be comprehensive and find every VC or angel group in town and track them down. How many deals are they writing, how many checks are they writing? Now I'm sure I'm off on some of these numbers. This was only off of crunchbase available data or if I were, if I wrote them and they got back to me in time, like tech goes angels A shock shout out for giving me numbers in time for this. But I think it's super important to see that there are local investment firms writing capital, writing checks. May not be all San Diego based, but you got to imagine they're going to have a network biased in terms of have a preferability to invest in San Diego if they can.
Quick note on that. I think that's super important. And even if they do invest outside of the city, I mean many of the people in the network are in SoCal and San Diego specifically. So maybe one half of the equation is investing outside of the community. But if they're in the community living here, that can theoretically bring the money back too. So it kind of helps the community.
True. The exits will come back here to both the LPs and GPs even if the company isn't here to. You're right. Let's just name out some of the top most active ones here from an early stage. And if you look in the report, I try to rank this from it's not comprehensive in terms of early to late stage. I'm just noticing but try to Tech goes Angels probably one of the more active early stage. Doing 25 deals for 13 million in invested capital in 2021. Shout out. I know both of us are part of that as well as Interlock Capital are also both part of that. We wrote.
There you go. Shout yourself out.
14 checks this year for 3 million invested. We were active.
Year's not done.
Year's not done. We got more to do on the latest.
You know what's surprising me on this one? Sorry, I was scrolling down to the bottom of the list. Do Qualcomm Ventures.
Qualcomm is an active, active deal. Don't ask them how many were in San Diego. That's not something they want. No, no, don't. Definitely R and D. Right department. No, just like random stuff. I were early investors in like Zoom and Fitbit and you know, they just like do stuff. They're an active VC but not a lot in San Diego. All right, More other later stage ones. Section 3228 investments they're now doing. I'm seeing biotech and tech deals that they're doing. Oh cool. JMI Equity. A late stage kind of late stage VC who have a lot of San Diego investments like Classy and Telium and Seismic. Maybe Not Teal and JMI Equity. They did 20 deals this year so they were active and they're getting after it. To a newer VC worth mentioning, Spark Growth Ventures, HEM Surrey. Shout out to him yes. Got active this year. Lots of early stage checks. Wrote 15 deals, mostly San Diego. Another one active in the early stage seed folio. Joe Gatto wrote 13 checks this year, which is great to see. These are all like pre Series A, by the way, too. This is, this is great to have local capital investing. I know we had a bunch of new funds formed this year. Moore's Ventures did fund three or four. Sorry, Terry, forgetting which one. Harpoon just raised fund three. So a lot of new capital here, being ready to deploy it as well.
All right, and real quick, yeah, all these are listed on the report. So if you want to go dig into their portfolio companies and kind of play around with what they're after, who they're. They're looking at, and maybe, you know, maybe they're fit for your startup or you're looking to invest. Each one has like a little bit of a different, you know, mix of what they're looking for. But there's some, there's some awesome ones on here and. Oh, last one to call out Logic Boost. Moving to San Diego to start throwing money around our community. Few investments, but we like what they're doing.
Yeah. Shout out to Jonathan and Chris for being a part of that. A great approach to kind of a quarterly cohort mentality that each quarter they're going to sit and help those companies for that quarter. All right, let's move over to the later stage of the equation, which is the exits. The piece that we're talking about here, the IPOs, we had a lot this year. And this is not just San Diego. This is all. All cities had a lot of exits because the markets said, hey, we like public companies and investors are pouring money in.
Yeah. And SPACs as well might have been helpful, if not now. Looking back on it may be hurtful to a lot of people's pocketbooks, but they were a factor, totally.
SPACs. Just another vehicle to get public. We had 21 companies go public this year, compared to 16 in 2020. So we sold a lot last year too. But that's because it also was a great stock market last year as well. Three of the companies were tech or consumer, retail related. Too simple. We love them here on the podcast. Nuvy Electric vehicle charging infrastructure company. And Petco. Petco kind of spun out of private equ. Private equity. Yeah.
Second time's the charm for them, right? Weren't they public and private and now.
They'Re back, which is weird because they're.
Everywhere and their names on our baseball stadium and you're like, wait, you're not public yet.
I know something interesting to talk about is so 21 companies went public that when you go public, you raise funding. So it's initial public offering. You raise capital by offering it to the public. Those 21 companies raised $5.5 billion, which is pretty much the amount of private capital we brought in last year across like 200 plus startups. 21 companies brought in 5.5 billion in new funds for our companies this year too. So that can't be discounted in terms of also the new available capital that the public markets offer you. But expect. I'm really thinking this is the year, I'm really hoping this is the year of our tech IPOs. Like big tech IPOs. I'm looking at you Seismic and Telium, maybe even ClickUp's ready to go so soon. There are some, some companies that have just been waiting because they keep finding capital available in the private markets. Sure, why not? You don't have to answer to anyone quarterly. I totally get that. But man, will you unlock some capital for a lot of investors, employees. Yeah. So Flock Freight, maybe. Maybe you're ready at your own pace. But also I would love to buy shares in all of your companies. So the San Diego index will rise, I think in 2022. The other part of the hot side of this market that is fueling capital is just general exits in terms of M and A. So a lot of companies got acquired this year. 195 in fact, in 2021 compared to 120 in 2020. So a lot. And some big names that you'd recognize. Suza Juice, Take Lessons. Space Micro, Cubic, which got taken private by private equity for 2.8 billion. Another defense company, Citadel Defense, got acquired. New Rocket, Ukora, Echo Labs, Ecwid got acquired for $500 million. MindTouch, SenseMetrics, Power Dot, JLab, acquired for 370 million. And Perspectium. A lot of names that we know, a lot of unknown or undisclosed amounts that they got acquired for. But we hope it was good for everyone involved.
And maybe this is fairly obvious, but it's kind of funny. That's a company being acquired every 1.8 days.
Wow, you're right.
Which is kind of wild. I mean, the math works out, but it's kind of funny because it's like, did a company get acquired today? Well, maybe tomorrow. You know, it's crazy how that that seems to kind of happen.
Yeah. The other piece that seems to happen a lot here is biotech. Massive biotech acquisitions. Just recently announced an arena Pharma got acquired for almost $7 billion, which is pretty massive. They were already public. But still to see Pfizer step in. And we talked about this on last week's podcast. Just buy their way into R and D. Great to see Bio legends acquired for 5 billion video on therapeutics. I think they're acquired like days before their IPO is about to happen for one.
Oh, that's right. Yeah, kind of. They went a different direction, I think. Do they keep them private or keep them independent?
Yeah.
And it said, hey, go keep surfing and being awesome and we'll just keep you off the public market. Keep them for yourself.
And then Omnium got acquired for 800 million. Kind of a up and comer to Illumina. And that was an interesting deal to see that we talked about on about three months ago on the podcast. Okay, so another thing, fun thing we did in partnership with Pebble Finance, a fintech startup, they do. I asked them to work on like city indexes. So how do, if you were to take the entire city's public companies and spread them out and see how did they, how did cities perform? I took this, I'll be honest, I took this from CNBC's Brian Sullivan, who was born and raised in San Diego, now I think lives in New York. But he has his own power city rankings where he looks every year. How did the top 10 companies per city do? And three years ago when I saw him do this stat, he said San Diego was had the highest return of the top 10 companies. So if you were to buy the Qualcomm to the 10th largest by market cap in 2018 or 19, those 10 companies had a 68% return for the full year. And I said, all right, let's start looking at the whole city. So Brian, I know you're listening. We took it to heart and we mapped our own little power cities index by taking the entire public company index, not just the top 10 San Diego companies had a 20% return for calendar year 2021, which is pretty great, I'd say it's right there in pretty much the average of a lot of the top 10 metros. Like who else is in here, L.A. boston, SF, all pretty much in that 20 to 40% band on which which by the way is kind of insane, I would say. Right. Like you usually average, like a 7 to 8% return is kind of your stock market average. So obviously stock market did amazing this year in that regard. I think what's interesting is to compare the cities that didn't fare that well, so while San Diego, and let's take the top one first, Dallas, nearly a 40% return on their full public companies. San Diego 20%. And then here's Miami down at negative 31%. Not great. I gotta imagine a lot of them are not tech and maybe not biotech and are kind of getting pulled down by other things that the stock market was not happy with, like energy. There's not a lot of energy in Miami, but in either case, companies did not do well in Miami this year. But it's just cool to have that data. So thank you, Pebble Finance guys for throwing that data in together.
Yeah, I'm seeing Office Depot on here as one. So that's. That feels like one that would get hit pretty hard this time of year, but there's probably plenty more reasons. And actually we need to go a little bit deeper under the hood to kind of see what's going on there. Or maybe everyone just shifted to crypto and they just forgot about all their standard business. We know they're getting hot down there.
All right, let's shift a little bit because in terms of just performance. Let's talk about who's coming to San Diego. Fang is coming to San Diego. Well, all but Netflix, actually. So Facebook is rumored to be taking up, signing up for space here. Apple, who we've known has been here, we have now heard or hiring as much up to 8,000 people, which I thought was interesting. I want to know how big was Qualcomm here? And at least if you do a search of Qualcomm employees in San Diego, there's 14,000. That puts Apple at pretty, pretty large presence comparatively to the company they're trying to take over. Amazon, who's been in UTC and dozens of warehouses in Otay Mesa on the border, continues to expand. And Google Sorrento Valley campus, long been there since the Lumadine days of Brad Chisholm building and selling that to Google. They've expanded into that. I think they've taken three floors now in that building over in Sorrento. But where's Netflix? So last the fangs to have a presence here. I'm sure there's some remote workers here, but no office yet.
No wonder why. Maybe I just LA is just la, but I mean they might be able to find some, some good details out of TJ and kind of cross the border and cool, cool content there. No, let's. Come on, come on in town. Netflix, you're invited.
It's funny that you think of Netflix as an LA company. They're Actually Bay Area based but they're very much thought of as an LA town because that's where they do all the studio filming stuff.
Yeah, fair point actually. Fair point.
Kind of. That's kind of funny though. Who else is moving here? Some startups. Tiger Graph is expanding here. They said there'll be up to 100 people here within a year. Groove, which raised a good chunk of money and moved here and then mainstay Medical expanded here from Ireland. If you remember that from a few weeks ago. We talked about that. The big story is biotech campuses, man. They're expanding big time all over from Sorrento to along the 56 and downtown. Like multiple biotech campuses. IQ HQ at the waterfront. We think Horton Plaza will be biotech. No one's really said yet but biotech, biotech, biotech campuses because they're the ones who need lab space and the tech companies are taking like half the space they normally needed to be for this.
Is kind of like crazy maybe obvious but I was at the reading room over earlier in this week and it has that over overlook. It's the patio kind of, it's 11th floor or whatever but it overlooks IQ HQ and this. It's massive. Like I kind of assumed it was big and that. That's kind of why I'm saying it's. It's pretty obvious but when you're up there looking at sort of the foundation and there's sort of they're driving you know, foundation into the ground and you're just looking at how many city blocks this is going to cover as sort of a biotech campus and in, in the middle of downtown pretty much on the water. It's really telling you comfort how significant biotech is in this community as one factor and then the other like you said with office space being converted and starting to expand kind of east of the 805 where there really is sort of the next frontier of biotech because everything else is getting kind of full really is. It's pretty significant and that's why we're so strong in the area. But that's also why people are moving here is now when you get that flywheel of tech and smart people building and, and exits in the area, you know, it's pretty desirable to be in San Diego.
Speaking of another desirable area, downtown Encinitas, a hot bustling little, little hub. A few things that are going on there. One, everyone remembers the empty Whole Foods, right? It's been empty for like five plus years. Well Flock Freight moved into the old Nixon Building. That barn also took over the Whole Foods and I hear they're trying to take over the old Solace at the Moon restaurant as well. So they'll have a little like campus right there around, right around beer garden if you know on Highway 101 right there. But right upstairs is Equid who just got acquired for like 500 million by LightSpeed in Canada. And so you've got just right there two companies that are booming. Down across the street a little north is the co working Space Union Union cowork, a bunch of tech companies there. And especially HONE is in there. Shout out Tom Griffiths who just raised 12 million to grow his team at Hone. So they're based there. And then just on the other side of that on Second Street, Bluma Shane Scaff's company took up space on second. So now you've got a bunch of tech companies, venture backed tech companies right in the commercial hub of Encinitas. I think more is going to come. We're going to throw some happy hours just in the community there to bring the companies out. But pretty excited about seeing another little, little north county hub of tech.
Yeah, it's awesome. I love even seeing flock freight on that Nixon building. You know, it's like it really tells you kind of the transition of what's happening. Kind of going from you know, some sort of surfer and CPG a little bit to tech, tech, tech, tech.
Oh and don't forget there's a vori store down sense any of this and I believe a blenders sunglasses store to another recent darling of, of the, of the consumer brand world here of San Diego. Yeah, I love that they have goggles.
Too by the way. They're doing goggle like snowboarding goggle billboards in the middle of San Diego. It's hilarious. But yeah, they're another, another amazing story.
Yeah, totally. Another cool thing that happened in the whole region. San Diego and Tijuana were named the world Design capital of 2024. What's cool is that it's named it now and it's going to build up to an entire full year of celebration explosion of showing off the culture that is this kind of mega region and how design has affected that. And it's all really led from the UCSD Design Lab and the nonprofit Design Forward Alliance. So congrats to the entire team. I know Startup San Diego played a tiny role in lending their name and saying yes, we believe in this too. But so many other organizations really put forth an effort to showcase how design affects our culture and Our community here.
Congrats to all of San Diego and tj. And I love that, that we kind of have this cross border. As a lot of people who come across the border, you know, actually both ways, really. I mean, there's manufacturing that's really growing in tj, but there's a lot of people who, you know, developers who come across the border, headed north to work for a tech company. So it's actually pretty, pretty powerful border. Curious, actually, who's holding down the award until 24?
Oh, I don't know. I don't know who. What you're saying who wanted in, like 2020? Yeah, I'm not sure. Look that up real quick.
I'm going to look it up because it looks like we're going to, but we're going to be taking it.
But yeah, I don't know who we're taking it from, but we definitely beat out Moscow for 2024. So that's, you know, I don't think it was that hard of a decision, but, you know, well deserved for our region to have it in that regard. Who. Who's our 2020 world design champ?
Well, I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing it specifically said like, this is 2020, but it does say, you know, Seoul, Helsinki, Cape Town, Taipei and Mexico City. So one of those five, if you were to throw a dart.
Ooh, I figured all of them have won at some point in the last few decades, but. All right, we'll look it up. All right, so we've talked a lot about a lot of increases of stuff, increases of capital, companies moving here. What does that really mean for you, the listener? It really means jobs, right? Companies are growing, they're succeeding, which means they need to hire more people to continue growing and succeeding. And so there are a lot of jobs. It is a great market if you're looking for a job right now, especially in tech. And so we listed out a few of the more prominent job boards here. San Diego, Life changing. Our own Fresh Brew Tech. And then this is an interesting one, Carlsbad. The city of Carlsbad actually has put together like a whole campaign to recruit people to the city of Carlsbad to work. They'll even help you if you're in Carlsbad or wherever you are, help you recruit your friend to the community. Uh, so, so, you know, if you already love it here, bring a friend, you know, bring a friend to Carlsbad. Uh, so we put a link in there to, to showcase all the great things that Carlsbad is doing. Um, actually depending on when you listen to this, there might already be a story out that my team wrote about the same report. But spotlight on Carlsbad. Which of all the cities within San Diego county probably has the most besides San Diego as a city which encompasses most of the county for its population about a hundred thousand, it is batting above its average for sure. We're talking hundreds of millions of VC capital, multiple public companies. So Carlsbad's an interesting city to watch in the north county area. And look for our Carlsbad Spotlight that's going to come out on the Life in Action blog by Carlsbad within the end of the year too.
And bring a friend to Carlsbad. Such a good slogan.
Exactly. Lastly, non tech related but just another one of our favorite things to talk about. San Diego is once again a football town. Not a football town. We got some soccer up in the mix here now all of a sudden which is pretty cool. The San Diego loyal first year that Landon Donovan got to bring his team in front of a crowd and they made the playoffs pretty awesome. Let's not talk about playoffs how they did but they made it here. And in that time pro soccer, pro women's soccer announced a team here as well too. Um, which is pretty great and you know first to get to the team, U.S. national Women's Team champions Alex Morgan, Abby Dahlkemper join the team. That's pretty cool to see coming to San Diego. So I'm excited for some soccer in 2022. How about you?
Do you know where they're playing?
They haven't announced it yet. Everyone thinks it's USD. I think both teams eventually end up at Aztec Stadium. By 2023 though, Aztec Stadium, Snapdragon Stadium as we should be calling it is ready to host I believe the Aztecs next fall. So wow, new stadium. That's gone.
That's fast.
Super quick. I feel like the queue just came down this year.
I love that man. I'll throw this out there. Rumor mill. I heard that if the NFL expand there might be a few extra teams. I don't know if Aztec Stadium slash Snapdragon Stadium can is is big enough for a team. I would be pretty into it. I'm a sad jets fan. I need an all team. Let's get a team in here. Let's do the thing.
Sure, why not. It just feels certain people are I feel like are just not necessarily missing the Chargers for sure. I don't think anyone really is in San Diego.
They're just bring them back.
Just tired of the. Of the conversation that, that the drama that came from them leaving and so. Yeah, I hear you. You know, give people something to do besides just talk about a stadium and a team. Well, here. Let's play some sports. Let's play some sports.
Well, here, here's an alt plan. We'll forget that plan. Let's level up the loyal to the mls and then. Yes, and then they'll have them play in the stadium. Okay, I'm into that. We changed. We changed your plans.
Let's do this thing. I'm down for both, but yes, we definitely want to see the MLS give San Diego the tap. I don't know if this is public information, so I'm going to give it to you, dear listener. Anyway, of all the minor league teams in the usl, this the loyal are the most watched. So we have the most viewership in terms of the USL league, even though we may not have the best team at the moment, or necessarily the oldest since it's only like a two year old team. But San Diego is a soccer city, so I expect more of it. And that's it. That's our 2021 Tech +Fogan, and that's right.
Minus a few days. Things might happen for all we know, but that's what we got up until this point. If.
If someone goes public in the next week or raises 100 million, like you're going to screw our whole report up. And that's okay. We are willing to update this report if that happens.
If that happens. I will. I will. Shotgun 1 June shine.
Yep, I will. I will do the updating on our blog myself because our team is off for all of the week between Christmas and New Year's. I hope all of you have a good, healthy, happy, relaxing holidays and New Year. And thanks for tuning in this year. We put out over 70 podcasts, by the way, this year. And that's because you're listening and we appreciate that and you give us feedback and tell us what else you want to hear about. So shoot us a note on Twitter. Me and Joan are pretty active on Twitter or LinkedIn or reply to one of our newsletters. Let us know what you want to see in 2022 and we'll make it happen.
Tell us what you love about San Diego too. It's been awesome spending the year with you.
It's been great. Maybe in 20, in the first episode we'll do some predictions, maybe some dreams, what we wish to happen. So look for that in the new year. Jonah, let's go work on that.
Yeah, I'M into that.
Okay, well, thanks, everyone. Happy holidays. Happy New Year.
Hey, happy holidays. See you, Jonah. See ya.
