7-Time Entrepreneur Kim Folsom Supports Diverse Founders with Founders First Capital Partners

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Welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am your host Neal Bloom and I am very excited to have a longtime ecosystem partner of mine, Partner in crime, Kim Folsom, CEO and Founder of founder First Capital Partners. Kim, thanks for being on the podcast.

Delighted to be here.

We Also have a co host with us, Alex Waters from Connect all, the Jacobs Center. Alex, thanks for joining us too.

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

So can we actually go back like six years when we both were incubating previous companies at Evo Nexus?

That's correct.

It's been pretty fun to watch you stay in the fintech space but go into other areas of it. So tell us quickly what is Founders First Capital Partners?

Sure. So Founders first is a platform focused on growing and funding small revenue generating service based businesses that are led by diverse founders. And we specifically launched a campaign 2015 to address the social and economic inequality issues. So it's interesting in that, you know, it took five years for people to think that what we were doing was so relevant. But you know, we saw it a while ago so it's, it's nice to have people interested in joining the conversation.

Yeah, I feel like so many things you've worked on in the past have kind of led to this specifically. I know from Real Qualified, your previous company, you know, being an area of, if I remember right, it was around financial education. Right?

It was, it was, it was the fact that financial advisors providing education to small business owners because I just, you know, Founders first is my seventh venture and as I saw, you know, the actual wealth growth of business owners, that just wasn't happening. People think that if you do a, that automatically you're going to get D and F and D and Z. And when you ask business owners, well, why are you doing this? What is the outcome? And it's like, well, they just think that, oh, it's just magically going to happen and it just doesn't. And they don't have the resources. And my own entrepreneurial journey, this is my fifth, fifth recession I've been through. And it's so interesting to see that it has to be intentional, just as intentional. As you focus on solution, product, market, fit your team, your financials, you better focus on just like the saying goes on the airplane, put the mask on yourself first. That's just as much in that element because if you don't, you're not going to get to the outcomes you want to have.

Yeah, that's incredible. I want to dive even deeper into just the impact you're having now. Having learned so much that you have through five recessions, how did you cut your teeth as an entrepreneur? When did you first get the bug?

So I wanted to, you know, it started with my dad was in the military and when he retired he wanted to start a company. And after 22 years as a, you know, high ranking, you know, the highest rank enlisted officer, as a warrant officer. My mom was like, are you kidding me? That's not happening. And so that's the thing that started it as, you know, a Girl Scout selling Girl Scout cookies that, you know, I was a good salesperson and was trying to figure out a way to do it. And, you know, I'm, as my dad uses the term, I'm older than back black pepper. So, you know, at the time there wasn't a lot of, you know, women of color starting tech companies in the time that I graduated from San Diego State. And so it took me eight years to figure out how am I going to do it? And then once I finally did, it was like, wow, this is amazing.

Wow. Are you born and raised in San Diego?

I'm not. I'm from the East Coast. I was born in Maine, in Bath, Maine, because my dad was in the Navy and after his last tour of duty in Vietnam, that's what brought us to San Diego. And I was here until he retired in the 70s and then they moved us back to the east Coast. My parents are from Philadelphia. And then I came back to go. Finished last year of high school, go to college here and have been here ever since.

We got two East Coasters here. We got Alex from the D.C. area too, right?

Yeah, right, in Maryland.

Very cool. And my mom is from there. My whole family's from East Coast. So here we are hanging out in San Diego, talking about.

Your blood thins out. You'll visit, you know, but you know, I'm not leaving.

No more snow.

No more snow.

So the three of us have been pretty involved in not just starting companies, but the ecosystem for starting them as well. I'm curious, Kim, like starting your first one, what was the community like there to help?

Oh, my gosh. So, you know, it was in the crazy.com days and you know, you had the whole, you know, the Internet was just beginning and you know, you had the traditional software companies. Like, you know, remember, I don't even know if this organization exist, but there used to be the Software Industry Council and, and then there was the Internet Roundtable. And so that was the new kids on the block, if you will. And you know, there were companies like mp3.com, website story, you know, all of those guys and me, you know, starting our companies at the same time. And it was a. It was the best way of describing it. It was the wild, wild west. You know, you had also Tech Coast Angels, you know, that group and they are way, way, way different. And I think they've gone through probably four different incarnations than when they were in the, in the 90s. But it was a crazy, crazy, you know, cowboy days, you know, type of thing.

Interesting. So what was your first company?

My first company was a company called Seminarsource. And we, you know, pivoted to get there, but we were like a Netflix platform to help physicians get continuing ed. And so I've always had some kind of ed bent because I got introduced to the Internet while being an adjunct. I worked during the day in tech companies and at night I taught at one of the universities and I would take my students to the supercomputer center. And so my first company was a platform that helped largely physicians get their continuing ed. But the only thing, you know, the crazy thing is, you know, this was in the days when, you know, AOL was a big deal. So they were having to consume that data like video over 56k modem. And that was the bet that, you know, between Jupiter and all these other tech research companies that said that there was going to be 20% adoption of broadband. And that never came to be. But that was my first company.

Interesting what ended up happening there.

So the next recession, September, I was in the midst of an acquisition, a bigger acquisition. I ended up selling it, but it was September 11th happened. And it was interesting because our, our company was really a complement to, instead of having to travel to go to a conference to get your certification, you could do what you do on Netflix, but it was for professional education. And the last thing before this, how doctors got their continuing ed is they read a book, got a tape or something of that sort. And the last thing you want to do is go to a physician that doesn't go to get their continuing ed. And so we ended up selling our technology to a health care related facility.

You're ahead of your time. Too bad Covid didn't happen.

Always. Always.

So where did you find yourself after that? Like where, where did it go from there?

So, you know, my start, my, my journey into, you know, I say that, you know, it's like people who are in businesses are generally trying to solve some of their own kind of personal issues. So, you know, when I started my first company, I was in an MBA program at Pepperdine. That's the other thing that we share is we're both Pepperdine alumni. So I was an MPA, Pepperdine. I was a mom of a 2 year old. And then I was starting my business. Oh, and I was working Full time, then lived here in San Diego. So when I sold my first company, I decided that I was going to do some consulting and help companies learn what I learned. And so I went and worked with a couple of a handful of companies helping service based businesses become tech enabled, get some funding. While I stayed more active with my son while he was in elementary school. And then as he got probably to middle school, then I got back into some other startups again ahead of my time. I mean, we did a, you know, a version of Angie's List, but it was a company called Service Tracks where we worked with small apartment buildings to get access to qualified trade professionals. And then worked with a company called Drive Cam, you know, where I got to learn leverage a lot of my video skills. And they transitioned from what was a hardwired device to a cell based technology. And it was so interesting because we were trying to distribute video with my first company over the Internet. They chose to do it through a client server environment which was much more predictable and you could scale it to a commercial application. And eventually then went to my fifth startup which was a company called show youw How Another Video Play. But we were guides that were helping people with another recession. So in the Great Recession, that was the deal when you had the boom of Amazon, I mean before the Great Recession, Amazon was not even what it was today. And when Amazon came around, you know, the first thing they had way more infrastructure than everybody had. So they went through and went to all of these brick and mortar businesses and said, we're going to help you get online, get brick and mortar retailers and learned all different categories. And as a lot of those brick and mortar retailers wanted to figure out, well, how do I sell a product that costs more than $1,000 online so that people would feel comfortable buying a TV or you know, children's products and all of that. And that's what I did with my first with my fifth company. Show you how as we were a platform that helped people sell, you know, more expensive products online and help them with setting it up so it reduced returns.

Oh, interesting. And from there is where you then went to Real Qualified was next year.

I sold that business and then got familiar with the whole Salesforce ecosystem. And with Real Qualified we used again video data to qualify customers and being able to look at the duration and what they watch to score their interest in purchasing a product and then from there leverage to real money smarts. And that was being able to go through and use video courses to educate people about core financial risks like either Long term care, insurance related products.

Fascinating. Wow. You can see a specific vein that you like to hit on, that's for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amazing journey.

Yeah. You know, so I actually had a call at 7 o' clock this morning with some of my investors and they were saying one of our investors has been invested with me for. Actually one of them was in my first company, Seminarsource, now he's the CEO of his company. And another one was my investor from my fifth, sixth and now my seventh company. And so he was talking about how I've leveraged all the stuff that I've learned from these other companies with what we're doing now.

That's awesome. That's so great to have people that you work with and obviously trust and rely on for multiple companies. It's like, you know, building your own ecosystem around you.

You know, it is. I mean, I think about my first company and you were asking Alex, you know, after my first company, what I knew then versus what I knew now. And so many people spend so much time on, you know, raising capital where it really is so much about social capital and brand equity, having really solid trusted relationships and people that, especially as a diverse founder, that people will take the ride with you on multiple opportunities.

Yeah. So does that lead us to kind of a whole different approach with founders versus capital? Right. Instead you want to be a bit more of the service and the picks and shovels in a sense to a lot of other businesses. Now I guess you've done that with teaching, you know, other businesses how to learn, whether it's through certifications, but now it's the capital side like take us through kind of the shift in mentality that went through to start.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing that I, you know, it's like as a, it's interesting how, you know, you talked about, you know, what it was like when I did my first company in the 90s versus, you know, different. It was almost like different eras. You know, when I did the first one, there wasn't the whole incubator accelerator type environment. You just basically that was the days of, you know, you're in your garage or you're in your den grinding it out until you can get to a certain point. And you know, I found that when I started my first company that I wasn't going to get the benefit of the doubt of, oh, you know, I can just have a death and someone's going to write me a check to, to launch my company. I started with my boots drafted with 401k money, got it to a certain point, got it to a quarter million in revenue, then took debt and then got it to a certain point. And then I got equity funding after I was a million dollars in revenue and profitable. And it was just the whole thing about the relationships along the way, convincing people to take a chance on me, showing them what I could do and those types of things. And because I have always been unfortunate or fortunate, square peg and round hole, I've been asked to, oh, Kim, come talk to this group of entrepreneurs about doing blah, blah, blah. And I enjoy doing that. But I always, people go through and say, well, how did you get to be what you've done either launching six companies, exiting three, raising 30 million in venture, how did you go through and do that? And when you went through and said after 25 years and six companies, how many people have done the same thing? Very, very, very, very few. And just thought, you know, I am, you know, very nothing else. I'm super. You will never work harder than I will. I'm the hardest woman, hardest working woman you'll ever see. I may not be the smartest, but I'm the hardest working one. And so I just looked at it from the standpoint that there should be, there should be more, there should be more diverse founders that are running mid market companies. And you know, there's. So we were talking about, you know, the hype about, you know, the tech companies, the hype about, you know, raising money. But there's some interesting things. I mean, as I look at, you know, what I've done in my entrepreneurial body of work, if you will, you know, with these six companies, I hired over 500 people. And of those 500 people, they were all diverse folks. And many of these people that I put into roles in the C suite and the, you know, in managerial, you know, managing P and L, they got opportunities that they otherwise might not have had if they went to work for a larger company. And I found that if I can help leverage what I learned and worked and didn't to help others and do it in such a way that I value where they can be and not look at it from the standpoint of, well, I'm going to take one of you because I've been in so many things of okay, we got our one, we've checked that box. Look, you want some diversity, look, we've got Kim Folsom to be that person. And so that was kind of the impetus around it. I also, having raised venture money and gone through and launched grown businesses, exited them Several times and said to myself, I want to look at other models that are more built to last. Because the other thing that's come about in this current time with the, you know, COVID 19 and the murder of George Floyd, that's come to much more to the forefront is the campaign we've been on and that's the gap in economic equality and wealth. It's just gotten much more magnified. And so if you're able to grow a mid market company and own a substantial amount of it and use that as a way to build generational wealth, that's going to be huge. And so I as an angel investor in my fifth, when I started angel invest in my fifth company, I was doing that with revenue based because I was usually funding service based businesses that were led by women veterans and those types of things and really liked that model and said I wanted to do something different than some of the accelerators that I had been through because I did those that included equity. And I just said, you know, I got that T shirt, I got a few of them and I want to build some things that are going to be more lasting.

It's incredible. So what was the kind of first steps to starting founders first and how long ago did you start it?

I started in 2015 and one of the investors that actually I was talking to today, I say, you're the one who encouraged me to do this. But when I started my first company, my equity investors or my VC investors said, you know, you should consider being on the other side of the table and you know, funding companies with your operating experience. And it's like, are you kidding me? It took me eight years to finally launch my first business. You know, I make it, you know, do this. But you know, I had the, you know, so after, you know, I said, well, you know, I want to have something that's going to have a significant impact, a game changing impact. Because having been blessed enough to raise venture money from institutional investors, I learned very quickly how to take a big step, a big swing at things. I wanted to look at something that was going to be a national platform and that's going to really be differentiating some of the gaps. You know, if you're in a second or third tier city, it's so different than being in the Bay Area or New York when it comes to raising money. And you have so many people who say, oh, I'm going to move to Silicon Valley so I can get access to capital. Well, if you have a family and you're in a dual relationship, where you know, your spouse has a partner, has a career that's not happening, you're not moving to go through and do this. And so it was those different factors that we wanted to put all of those things together. And it's been an interesting journey because the other factor is we're talking about with tech. Tech is a really sexy, really hyped area. And when you say that you're going to grow and find a bunch of service based businesses led by folks that it may be their first time, it's not generally a whole bunch of people jumping up and down and doing that. So you know, we've been enjoying the fact of seeing how we've helped these companies grow, you know, 2, 3, 4x where they started adding, you know, anywhere from 2 to 10 jobs since we've been working with them. And a lot of companies that are operating and growing in this now fifth recession, I've been through COVID 19 that would be dead if it were not for changing and putting a recurring revenue model, some tech enablement and those types of things in place.

So what do you look for in terms of, I mean you mentioned a couple different types of businesses and the characteristics around what might be preventing a company from being if they're in a smaller city or things like that. But what are the things from founders that you're really like looking for?

So they gotta be coachable. I mean, and it's interesting if you've been, you know, told you can't or you know, underestimated and you know, it can be kind of a harsh shell that you build up. And so the first thing that we work to do is earn the trust with the people we work with on the one side and then the other they've got to be willing to work with a growth partner. And then the third is growth mindset. Most so many founders that we come across, they think too small, but that's okay because when we go through and share with them about some possibilities and sometimes it's like, well, gosh, I've never done this before, it's kind of scary. But they're still willing to try. If somebody works with them. That's the part that is really important, is that they're willing to try some things, they're willing to work with people and it takes time to build up that trust. The thing that we've seen with so many accelerator programs, it's like a month, 60 days, 90 days. If you don't have a huge amount of capital, it takes you more than 90 days to make a 180 day change. And so we work with these companies anywhere from six months to two years many times with making that transformation if they're willing to go through and do that. So that's something that we look for. But the other side of it is we see that there's. There's a handful of common things that a lot of these first time founders, diverse founders have. One is generally they're trying to do everything by themselves. Secondly, they're generally running companies that are purely transactional business. So it's. Their cost of customer acquisition is crazy and it's not sustainable. You know, their financial business, financial health needs a lot of work. But you know, if they're willing to work with some folks, we're willing to help them because you know, generally it's. We've been there, you know, as I tell people, you know, I was the star of six movies. Three of them were dramas and three of them were comedies. And we, I know enough to know when I. When you're starring in a drama.

That'S awesome. What are some trends you're seeing for the kinds of companies or maybe even geographies or founder backgrounds that you weren't expecting?

So let's see the people. Well, you look at just any business, you can morph into being a number of things. But in this whole COVID 19 thing, companies that were so much in person connection are hurting a lot. And when you look at the number of especially women led businesses, a lot of them catering, wedding related and all those things, those businesses were significantly devastated travel by some of that. And so they're having to gain skills in using content training elements, certification compliance and all of. Because there's so many things related to that that they can do. We've had a company and they, they started out with helping this, helping homeowners add one of these kind of granny flats if you will with their garages. And that business changed quite a bit because of COVID 19 and the sheltering in place. But then they went through and created a whole certification program to help people get prepared associated with that and now, and they've had to do it in a bootstrap method and now they're making much more revenue than they were to do before. You know, you know, a number of businesses that have been, you know, guy with a bag or woman with a bag, you know, independent consulting businesses where they flew around to different places, they're having to transition and use that content to create a series of courses related to those types of things. Because people, you Know, people are consuming a lot of content to make themselves better. When you had the unemployment rate go from, you know, low fives to 15%, there's a lot of net new skills people are looking for and getting that type of support.

So when having. You're talking a bit about your story in terms of having been through so many different kind of recessions, like, what are the things that you think are really going to be the sort of the stars that, oh, as people emerge from COVID when you mentioned, obviously the 5 to 15%, like, that's a large amount of what are you seeing that are going to help people propel beyond that.

So the thing that I've seen in every single recession is there's an adoption of a new way of doing business. Like when you think about the recession from September 11, pre September 11, there was no TSA and all that other stuff that was there. Now all this testing and all this other stuff, it's not going away. And all the data associated with it is not going away. People working from home. And so all of those things associated with that is such a huge opportunity because as employers, they're trying to figure out, how can I make certain that I am just as engaged with my workforce as I was when we were all together. The other thing is, as I'm hearing from a lot of different companies, they're not going to go back to, you know, 100% of the people are going to be, you know, under a commercial roof. There's going to be a lot of hybrid, either 50% of people are going to work from home or something of that sort, you know, because one, all of the people who have the different immunity risks and it's just too risky for employers to force people to come back and all of that stuff. The other side of it is the cost. It's much cheaper for people to work from home than it is to bring them all, you know, into one specific facility. So you're going to see a lot of those different, you know, changes associated with, with that. But, you know, with all of those things, you know, companies are looking for ways that that's this, you know, making their teams more productive is critical. Reducing their risk associated with a more, you know, distributed team is an area to help people. So that, so that's where I see is the, a significant opportunity for small businesses. The other thing that happens with recessions, every single time when people go back to work, it's a smaller footprint. Excuse me, for the bigger employers. If you look back to like in 1988 what were the employee base of the top five companies to actually the employee base of the top five Companies? Even as far as like 2019, Fortune 100 top five companies, bigger companies are able to do more with less workforce because of innovation. And there's things that are going to drive that innovation much more. So with a stay at home, remote work, 5G telehealth, all of that stuff. And then you had some other big barriers system wide that prevented some adoption like insurance and banking. Banking was never going to allow you to do as much of this virtual stuff that it is today. And the same with insurance. Now insurance is allowing telehealth to happen and there's going to be so many opportunities associated with that because there's so many teeny little urban, you know, you name it type of places that need things and they need a way for people to go in and service them. And those are huge, huge opportunities to take advantage of.

Kim, can you talk a little bit about the fund itself? So I think I remember it was a hundred million dollar fund or have, is that right?

Yes, it's a $100 million fund that we were raising to help our companies with growth. Specifically when you look at these diverse led, largely service based businesses, getting access to six figures of capital is a challenge. They're not attractive to VCs and they're not attractive to traditional banks, but they could be. We, you know, some of the companies that we are in diligence to will be our first batch of funding. These companies are servicing, you know, some of the top companies in, be it in health care or pharmaceutical areas, you know, defense and what have you. So this capital is to allow them to, you know, augment their staff, invest in marketing, you know, build extensions onto their products. And that's what we're looking to do. Our model still is it starts with a accelerator experience. You know, the thing that you have with, you know, first time founders is none of them have run a P and L before for somebody else, which happens with more majority led companies. And so as part of our accelerator, especially with our fast pathfinding program, we actually have them go through simulations where they run a company for like three years and see the dozens of decisions that they need to make and funding those companies before they start using our money to start like figuring out what they need to do. So that's part of our experience. But we look to use that hundred million to fund 500 companies, average of 250,000 and you know, some of them will go up to a million. So we, our model is a revenue based model. So it's a hybrid between traditional debt in equity. We make an investment in the company based on the business. It's not based on the credit of the individual because, you know, just because of the whole institutional situation, they may not have great personal credit and they may not have, you know, the personal collateral house to pledge in order to get access to six figures. They pay back to a cap. So it's a 1x cap based on a royalty stream and it fluctuates based on their revenues going up and down because that's what happens largely with businesses until they get an amount of momentum. But we are low dilutive capital and patient as well. So we look to partner with them to help them grow.

That's incredible. So you have a physical space that they're going through accelerator or it's all virtual for that part.

Especially with COVID 19, it's all virtual. We do have as part of the experience Pitch Day experience, which we have invited you to be one of our emcees for coming up, Alex will have to twist your arm to get you to be one of our MCs as well for one of our upcoming events. And you know, it's, you know, so it's the, the actual structured growth curriculum experience is virtual. So it's online and, and they also get a dedicated coach to work with them. And then the pitch day today it's online but we have, you know, allocated two days so they can go through pitch practice and pick. They're presenting their newly transformed growth plan and they get support with building their growth playbook. And then we work with them afterward anywhere from six months to 24 months with actually implementing the program. And a small portion of the companies we work with we fund, but we also work to partner them with our other network of funders because their businesses are much stronger and helping them attract funding.

That's pretty great. That's awesome to have. Especially related to the ecosystem. Also the Alex that you're involved in from Connect all where you are helping at the ideation stage of helping people go from ideation to committed to building their company and then the next, once they get a company going, they're all in on it and start making revenue. The next great handoff is having someone who can help them scale, which is founder first.

Yeah, I mean our challenge program is targeted to companies generating as little as 50,000 in revenue. We've got programs going in the South Bay and North County. Our North County Challenge Pitch day is actually on Tuesday and You know, it's just a really exciting experience.

That's great.

I was going to ask how many companies go through and are they sort of in the cohort batches or how many kind of come go through each cycle?

So they're in cohort batches. And in our challenge program we can have anywhere from, you know, 10 to 20 companies that go through that together.

That's awesome.

And then we've got two other kind of levels beyond that. You know, the challenge is 50 to 250. Then we've got our boot camp which is the 250 to a million. And then our Fast Path program is for companies over a million in revenues.

Got it. So where do you see this heading over the next few years?

World domination. When I launched Founders first it was to fund and grow 1000 businesses and help them grow to be mid market companies so they can add anywhere from 20 to 50 premium wage jobs which will have a billion dollar impact. And so we've worked with over 300 companies so far. So we've got another 700 to go. I'm very much a metrics driven person. And so you know, every quarter we, you know, the way our model works today we're working with another, you know, 30 to 45 companies each quarter this year. And then you know, next year we look at, you know, growing that by a factor of 50% to the point where by 2022 we'll probably have a number about 300 net new companies coming through our program, each net new and then having the membership of the follow on support. And we have a pretty robust tech platform that we use to help them with their performance and it gives them some gamification to help them with learning new skills and recognizing positive economic behaviors. So it's been a lot of work, but a lot of fun.

That's incredible. Such an impact on just this community, San Diego, let alone if you can scale this too and when you will. It's incredible what you're building. So congrats to that Kim.

Thank you. Thank you.

Do you find other investors come along? Do you get other investors who will come in alongside you for any of these companies?

Yeah, I mean we have partnered with other organizations, you know, many times. We look to be the first institutional money in the business and we are, you know, a big promoter and cheerleader for the company. And so you know, that gives them an opportunity to attract other capital. We have had people come out of our program and go to, you know, other accelerators, be it tech stars or 500 startups. Or you know, one of those Tory Burch program go on to raise, you know, institutional money, you know, so, you know, that's where we want to give them an on ramp and stay with them. Just like if they were a tech company and they got into, you know, some of the, and they, you know, day one got into some of the accelerators, like you know, the evil nexuses, if you will. You know, it's, it's where they may not take as many companies, especially if they're not tech enabled and they don't have capital. We get a chance to be that for them so that they can, you know, you know, go into that, that route if that's what they choose to do. It could be that they go from here and be and esop, you know, that route or they go to traditional debt. But you know, we're there to help them with building that, leveraging our social capital so they can build those relationships and grow.

Have you found that any of the companies have had any challenges or issues that are transitioning into. Because the accelerator and the program that you run sounds like there's a ton of wraparound support and then maybe going into other programs, XRS500 startups or anything like that. There have been any challenges or, you.

Know, we share with them that, you know, it's not what it's, you know, it's a, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And that you've got to be prepared for. You know, these particular, you know, if you have a focus of where you're taking the business, there's lots of different options. There's not just a, you know, one way of getting there. There's many ways of getting there and we're here to help you keep going as you go through that journey.

Kim, it's great to get such a big eye perception and under the hood of how Founders first is just making such a big impact. So thank you for that. We will put a number of resources in the show notes to help lead people to find your company. What about online, like on social media? Are you out there for people to follow along? Twitter, LinkedIn, what's the best way?

Always can connect with me via LinkedIn. We're pretty actively on Twitter, Facebook, we've got a Facebook group as well. So yeah, we're accessible through most social media channels.

Okay. And I'd be remiss to ask someone who's been in San Diego for so long their favorite taco spot. So I must know, where do you go for tacos?

I go to Santana's that's in Scripps Ranch, which is down the hill. Love their carne Asada nachos. That's a guilty pleasure of mine. I make a point of walking around the mile and a half loop near my house and then go and get a half order of Santana's carne Asada nachos and a Corona.

It's a good balance. Walk to it. Yeah, that's smart.

Sounds like a quality meal.

Yeah.

What about when coronavirus allows us to open back up? Where's the first place you're either gonna go or go to eat?

Oh, gosh. So I want to go Ventanas. That's the right above the Lexus dealership in. I think it's in Escondido. They have wicked lobster Mac and cheese. So, so good. Got to check that out.

Okay, good one. All right, Kim, well, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Alex. Thanks for joining us too.

Yeah, thank you. This is fantastic to learn so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you for this opportunity and thank you to the service you guys are both doing to help San Diego businesses. It's so, so important. So I appreciate the opportunity.

Thanks, Kim.

Thanks.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter Eelbeom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos in tech Pod on Twitter too.

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