Ashok Kamal - Executive Director of Tech Coast Angels San Diego

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos? Tacos in tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on.

Startups get the party. Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom here in the house at Nest, coworking a new recording spot for us with Ashok Kamal, the executive director of Techcoast Angels. Welcome, Ashok.

Startups get the party started. Yeah, it's good to be back in the pod seat with you. New season.

Yeah, we're really excited. We haven't formally had like an actual good long sit down talk. We've interviewed you in the quick pitch podcast, but it's about time.

This is our first one on one.

Yeah.

On air. We have a lot of these irl, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. It's good to be in the official podcast seat with you and we're doing.

It in a big way because as our listeners just heard, we redid our opening and school of rap ashok 1/2 of it Miguel, the other man, knocked it out of the park. Thank you guys for that.

We had a lot of fun startups. Get the party started. I mean it's, you know, entrepreneurship, hip hop, innovation, that's our passion. So this was a real fun song to put together to kind of shout out and salute the SD TechOS community and highlight our favorite podcast, tacos and tech.

Awesome. Thank you guys again. We're going to be hearing it for a while, so I hope everyone loves it. Tell us a little bit real quick. We're going to dive into your background a bit. Tell us about what you're doing now with tech host Angels.

So I spend most of my time thinking about Tech Coast Angels, which, if people are not familiar, is one of the largest and most active angel investor groups in the country. That means It's a large 250ish member group of angel investors that collectively source, process and fund deals in San Diego. Here we're now just wrapped up the year 2019. It was a monumental year for us. We invested more than $12 million in companies. So just from the Tech Coast Angels San Diego chapter, we invested more than $12 million. And this is in innovation, biotech, life science, SaaS, hard tech companies that are really going to become the next big companies in San Diego. And like I said, the membership has grown to almost 250 people. Neil is a member of TCA, so you're a great example. A successful entreprene, has had exits and has focused on giving back to the community in so many ways. You are the embodiment of a TCA member today.

Well, thank you. But it took new leadership, I would say, to recruit a lot of us entrepreneurs to rally and say, yes, entrepreneurs, funding entrepreneurs is the way of our ecosystem. So thank you for leading that effort.

Thanks. And we're certainly, we're riding tailwinds here because part of the reason that we have entrepreneurs funding entrepreneurs is the San Diego ecosystem is at a maturity point where you have companies that have had some success, so entrepreneurs are able to start to pay it forward. That's one of the profiles, one of the Personas for TCA members. Of course, there's a lot of other Personas as well. You have people that are retired from many of the big companies in San Diego. You have people that are currently, you know, VP level executives at many of the big companies like Qualcomm and Illumina and Braincorp, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have other folks that are professional investors, service providers, clinicians, you know, all people that are out there doing work in kind of innovation and advancing technology and are part of tca so they can put their money where oftentimes their. Their. Their practice and experiences. And the idea is to continue building and creating that next generation of San Diego economic development.

Yeah, and. And Angels and capital is a big piece of that. And what's pretty cool for someone like me is to be around others who have been doing it longer than me, who funded my own company, to now write checks alongside them is pretty inspiring.

That's a great story. And, you know, your own company, Portfolium, is a great story that just keeps getting better. It's. It's the deal that keeps on giving. So it was announced earlier this year. I think that was, what, around the summertime when the acquisition.

February.

February. So it was in the early spring when Portfolium, which TCA funded five years ago, and it was acquired. And then the company that acquired Portfolium was acquired. It was announced just about a week ago. So Portfolium actually had two exits in the course of one year, which, since they were both kind of, you know, up rounds, was both satisfying for the founders and also the investors. You don't have too many of those double exits, but it was a double exit.

It's pretty cool.

Very exciting.

As a little asterisk, as of this recording, the second it has not closed. The deal is not closed. So we'll know in early January whenever this goes live. This may be old news already. The deal may have closed, but still.

So founders and investors make note that deals never closed until the ink is dry. You can't always trust what you read on TechCrunch.

It's very true. I want to take it back a little bit to your roots. You're originally an east coast guy. I met you, I think, very quickly after you'd moved to San Diego, because it's hard not to meet someone as soon as they land in town from the East Coast. I think I met you while you were in a wetsuit dressed up in a costume for Convergence. We're doing a tech crawl. Right. Carrying a surfboard. Wetsuit.

I had a wetsuit on.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'd left the surfboard at home in Cardiff. The event was at the old Broadway Evo, Nexus portfolio, et cetera, headquarter building downtown. So I did leave the surfboard at home, but I did put the wetsuit on.

You put on the San Diego uniform. It's great.

I did, yeah.

But you grew up in Boston, right?

Right.

Tell us about growing up on the East Coast.

Yeah. Well, so now looking back, it's evident that I grew up in one of the real tech hubs, you know, kind of Gen1 tech hubs. When I was growing up, you know, I was more probably proud of the Red Sox, you know, than I was of, you know, the many formative technology companies that have been developed and grown in Boston and created the ecosystem that there is today, where it's still one of the premier tech hubs in the world. You know, for me, I think I loved growing up in Boston because it's intellectually rigorous. No matter where you're from, you're never far away from a world class university. I went to Boston University undergrad. So I think, you know, you have this thriving economy that's now, you know, for decades, you know, kind of been in development. And there's an intellectual curiosity and, you know, I think just strength that the city has along with the other great things, the history, the sports teams, you know, the grittiness, you know, of the people, which I think is, you know, part of the culture too. But when you come from Boston, you definitely are, you know, never too far away from somebody who is a disruptor in the world. And now I see, you know, as I look at Boston from the outside in, my parents still live there, but, you know, I'm kind of, my roots have obviously changed to the West Coast. I have that appreciation for the city. And when I turned 21, I moved from Boston to New York City. So I also have the kind of dual perspective of east coast in Boston and then to Boston, what's really the varsity city and that's New York because I spent the 15 years of my life before I moved to San Diego, primarily in New York City.

Got it. So I guess what drew you to New York from Boston?

Entrepreneurship.

Okay.

Startups get the party started. So the school of rap, you know, kind of DNA was established through my first, you know, real venture, which was a company called Raptivism Records, was rap activism. The idea was to use rap as a vehicle for, for activism and promoting social consciousness and awareness. So we picked different causes. The first one was the prison industrial complex and focused on, you know, that as an area that we want to educate the public about by using rap music. So New York, of course, is other than Los Angeles, the hub for the music industry, among many other hubs, including tech. Today, the tech scene in New York has advanced light years ahead of where it was when I moved to New York City, which was in 2001. So I moved to New York as soon as I graduated to work on my first business. And I ended up staying there until I was in my mid-30s. And over the course of that 15 years, of course, had many experiences professionally, educationally, and personally. But ultimately decided my manifest destiny was to make it out to the West Coast. And as many people are finding, I think, and determining right now, Southern California and San Diego specifically for me really is the greenest pastures out here on the West Coast. And I kind of dropped in on a whim after visiting just to see one of my friends and thinking to myself, you know what? This is a good place to kind of enter the next phase of my career in life. It was shortly thereafter that I met you.

That's pretty awesome. That timeframe, 2015. 2016.

Yeah, 2015.

Okay. So, one, just curious, on your exit of New York, did you feel it was a vibrant tech hub? Had you seen it rise as you were still in it, or is it more, looking back, being from San Diego, looking at it, it was more of a tech hub.

A lot's happened in New York in the last three, four, five years. So certainly New York has exponentially, I think, progressed in terms of its tech community. But there was already the roots of a lot of today, both the current power players as well as the next generation, you know, of stakeholders that have made New York, you know, up there with Los Angeles and, you know, kind of Boulder and Austin, the other, you know, major tech hubs in the world. So when I was there, you had the first, I would say, kind of wave of accelerators like techstars New York and era, that's one of the native New York accelerator programs. And of course, some of the. The early micro and seed VCs, like Union Square Ventures, they were in operation for years before, but now there's so much more activity going on there. It's really grown at a level that probably nobody expected it would.

So you're leaving New York maybe at a bit of an inflection point, or you can see momentum there, coming to a place that, in a sense, you're going back in time a little bit, right? I mean, if you're going to San Diego. We met. We were not at New York's level then or now. What did that feel like? Did it feel like you're going to be kind of a bigger fish in a smaller pond, or like, what was your mentality coming to San Diego?

It felt like an entrepreneurial opportunity. At the end of the day, I'm a. I'm a startup guy, you know, I'm an entrepreneur guy. So New York was certainly at an inflection point in terms of its, you know, acceleration. However, it already was big and just getting bigger. San Diego, it appeared to me when I dropped in here and that convergence conference that you alluded to, which is one of the flagship events of Startup San Diego, that was my first dip into the San Diego waters. But I did get the sense that San Diego was starting from something very formative, organic, but exciting, and going on a similar inflection point trajectory of growth to some of these other growth cities like Denver or New York. My point is that New York was already one of the top tech communities in the country. It just got bigger. As Boston and LA and others have also grown. San Diego seemed like it was more in a fledgling stage. But I like that 0 to 1 or maybe it's like 1 to 3 kind of transformation information more than I'm interested in, like the five to seven or the, you know, seven to nine.

Okay, so you came here though, pre tca, right? You, you came, what were you, what, you came to town and you were, you were consulting, right, for a green tech company. Is that what you're doing when you first.

I was doing, yeah. So I was still doing some projects with different people I'd worked with in New York. I had a tech company that I sold, which was a recycling software company. So I still, you know, had those roots. And actually some of my friends from all over the country had moved to San Diego, which is really, like I said, the driver of me coming originally to, to visit and spend some time here. And then some of the first people that I started, you know, kind of networking, you know, around. But it was. San Diego was largely a new city to me and I didn't have a specific agenda in mind other than, you know, you go into an interesting place where it seems like there's, you know, activity and energy and try to, you know, help and be helpful. And I got connected with Brant Cooper, a mutual friend of ours who had a little tech meetup in North County. I moved to Cardiff. I was at the time in Cardiff. And that's, I think, where I first met you, actually. And then it was a convergence shortly thereafter in between. The reason I had a wetsuit on is I made my first angel investment. So I came here without a very explicit agenda. I knew that, again, I wanted to, you know, meet good people. So I pounded the pavement at, you know, some of these events that were going on in the community and I ended up in investing in a company that had just expanded from Santa Cruz to Encinitas. I'm kind of in my backyard. It's a company called Outside. At the time it was Encinitas, location was the 1.5, let's say property, meaning it was halfway done. And there was one other property in Santa Cruz. Now there's, you know, 30 outside somewhere around. There's five in Venice alone. They're all over the world. They're co living, it's a co living company. So Neil, you've been there. It's basically the, these villas are fitted out with office space and people both live and work, usually short term, you know, in this network of, of outside properties around the world. It's a really, you know, cool company. So I got involved with that, made my first angel investment and I was looking for ways to help Outside and their founding team. The company was founded and today the CEO is a guy named Emmanuel. Awesome guy who was kind of getting it off the ground here in SoCal. And one of the ways I tried to help was by bringing Outside to other investors that I knew. I had met somebody from a different TCA chapter in one of my past startup lives and I learned that there was a chapter here in San Diego. So I, I actually presented Outside to TCA much the same way that nowadays I get presented with companies, 3, 4, 5 a day on the other side of the table at tca. And that's how I actually got introduced to techos angels was my investment in Outside and my efforts to introduce Outside to other investors.

Interesting. Okay, so what was that experience like first meeting tca? Looking back now, could you see your path to leading it even then?

So TCA was going through a transformation at the time as well. Right. So that's the cool thing about these kind of changing and growing communities is there's a lot of change and upheaval in the air. And much like San Diego was going through and still is going through changes, TCA was formalizing sort of its organization and the then board decided they wanted to hire their first executive director to kind of keep the trains on track for, for tca. So in that process of me introducing Outside, I got to know a few of the TCA members who happened to also be on the board of directors. And one of their messages to me was, you know, regardless of how this outside financing plays out, I wasn't the founder of Outside. Again, I was an angel on Outside. I was just sort of doing my like value add, you know, part. Regardless how this, this particular deal plays out, there's a Bigger deal that we think would be a perfect fit for you. And that's coming in as the first executive director at TechCoast Angels. So I met with five or six members of the board and really enjoyed those conversations. And from my perspective, I looked at it like, hey, I'm in this new city. There's this legacy organization, Tech Cost Angels, that has done a lot of good work over the years, funded, you know, company Neil that you were a founder of and many others, you know, we're talking, has funded hundreds of companies and, you know, tens of billions of dollars. But the times are changing as well in the angel investing landscape. AngelList is here. There's a lot more micro VC super angels. You know, SoCal is growing. There's a lot of, you know, forces that could be threats to, you know, groups like TCA that had been around in this case for 20 years. So it seemed to me like TCA was an entrepreneurial opportunity within an entrepreneurial environment. And for me, that's exactly what gets me excited. And on top of that, I felt like there was a. Although it was a sort of startup, it was a startup on the legacy, the foundation of a nationally renowned angel investing group. So there was a foundation there for us to leverage largely the members, the capital, the brand of tca, where it's not like we were starting from scratch. It was just sort of a refresh of the organization. And that's what attracted me so much to the opportunity.

That's awesome. I think having Sergio and Dean entrepreneurs in their own right leading that effort, saying we want new blood, new brand, not necessarily new identity. Right. Because it's still techcos Angels. But some of that, you've kind of had to be the face of changing that brand because a lot of entrepreneurs have gone through Tecos Angels and had whatever experience they did from a legacy. What's it, what's it like going through now? And obviously, look, impact you impact like does everything right, like writing checks, funding companies, speaks for themselves. But what other areas have you had to focus on to kind of lead the. The new brand of tca.

Yeah. So hashtag TCA today, as we call it. I mean, I think you're right that at the end of the day, the KPI for any investor is, you know, at least at the outset, it's how much money are you investing? Of course, on the back end, and what the investors care about is how much money are you returning? You won't necessarily know the answer to that question for three, five, seven, ten years down the road. So we Focus more on what did we invest at a given point in time.

But to the entrepreneur, they're maybe looking more at just dollars written as opposed to the return.

Also right now, if the entrepreneurs want to keep raising money in the future, then the investors that they work with need to be successful for those follow on rounds. So it's something worth paying attention to if you're an entrepreneur. But certainly bottom line is, are you open for business?

Yep.

Now, the reality is TCA was always open for business. I don't think there was ever a year in 20 years going back where the group didn't invest four or five million dollars a year. And four or five million dollars we're talking about from San Diego investors into largely San Diego companies. That's not chump change.

Right.

You know, there's not a lot of funds, you know, but four or five million dollars a year is equivalent to 40, $50 million venture firm, because venture firms are spread over say a 10 year kind of horizon. Right. So TCA was always writing checks. The question was the process to get to those checks. And there's sort of two outcomes. You know, with any investor, you know, experience. It's a yes or a no. So what I think we focused on largely is the path to both yes and no for entrepreneurs, making it a more entrepreneur responsive organization. So if the answer is no, and most of the time it is because like any competitive early stage venture investor, we're funding maybe 3% of the deals ultimately that we see. And we're seeing three to five deals every single day.

Wow.

So how we say no is really important because that's the majority of the responses that we or anybody. Andreessen Horowitz, Techstars, Y Combinator, etc. That's the majority of the responses that you're going to be giving, you want to say no in a way that's respectful, timely, and hopefully constructive. Meaning maybe there's a referral to a more appropriate accelerator program or a mentorship program so the company can continue to work on the milestones that it might need to hit in order to possibly come back to TCA or other investors. And there's many cases where we have said not right now to a company, but they've gone and did XYZ and then they've come back and then they've gotten funded. But how you say no is really important. Then at the same time, how you say yes, I mean, the companies you fund, those are your immediate customers. You want that process to be as frictionless as possible. So it Needs to be fast, it needs to be clear, and it needs to be efficient. And that's what we've worked on a lot. Having a clear 30 day or less, for example, due diligence roadmap, where if we go into due diligence with the company, we're going to get to an answer within 30 days. Having the right people looking at your deal at the outset. If somebody's a, let's say, drug development executive, they shouldn't necessarily be looking at a chip company and vice versa. Right. So we've worked really hard to be able to segment our membership and to do what I call precision screening. Having the right member on the right deal at the right time. The right time is when the company comes in and engages with us, not, you know, waiting six weeks for a dinner meeting that just happens to fit the schedule of, you know, the group. That's not how entrepreneurship works. The best deals move fast and not on a schedule.

Yeah.

So making sure that we have sort of real time processing of deals and that process is efficient and accurate, you know, that's one of the things that we've worked really hard on doing. And then finally, when you get to the. Yes, how the fund, the financing mechanically takes place is also really important. So of course, in any angel group, it's a group, a network of individuals. There are people that write checks and they write the checks directly. That's how classically an angel group works. What we've innovated and this was the vision of our now just concluded his presidency. Dean Rosenberg, you mentioned Sergio Guerrieri was the president before Dean and set up a lot of these programs for then Dean to develop on. And one of Dean's legacies was creating this ACE Annual Fund, which is so far there's been two of them. Neil, you're an investor in both. The first one was a little over $2 million. The most recent one, which is now investing in the year 220, so it's called ACE20 is almost $4 million. And the fund is even better way or another way, let's say for entrepreneurs to raise money from TCA because it's a single cap table entry. So the fund is the entity instead of say having 10 different people that are writing checks. And the amounts are both predictable and significant. So it's 100, 200, 300, $500,000 checks from one entity based on the voting of the members of the fund. And for an entrepreneur, that gives you a really clear sense of what's possible when you raise money from TCA, it's predictable, it's in the range of what VCs kind of in our universe are investing and I think that's done a lot too to attract the best companies.

Yeah, it's pretty incredible what we've been able to do in the last man like 12 months really since the first fund came to be. Can you look back at any trends that you're seeing differently? We're getting different deal flow, are different members bringing deals in now because of the accessibility of capital through that fund.

So we're seeing more deals from everybody.

Okay.

Certainly, you know, members are our number one source of referrals, are, you know, close second or maybe even one A is other, you know, active investors in the community. So it's everybody from say Okapi in Orange county, which is an OC venture fund that I met Jeff, who's one of the partners over there at one of Neil's investor networking events. So we're able to do business with groups like that that maybe before weren't really engaging with tca. Now we have these other top shelf investors that are doing deals with us. We just did a deal. One of our most recent investments in a company called Mercado, it was a $4 million round and it was led by a VC in New York called called Greycroft. So that's a tier 1 VC. And in the past, you know, without the fund mechanism to be able to write that big check and you know, kind of quickly, even though a lot of individuals also participated, the total round was a million dollars, but the fund wrote a quick $300,000 check. So that, you know, that institution of the fundamental has allowed us to work with a lot of other of the best investors in the country. So I think it's definitely improved the quality and the diversity of our deal flow.

That's awesome.

And that's the name of the game. I mean in this business, it's a power law driven business. Sadly, most of the companies that we invest in will not make it for one of many different reasons. So you have to be able to pick, you know, the winners in your portfolio. And getting access to the best deals is really the most important function for any investor that's doing early stage investing.

Yeah, what I love about that syndicate method in a sense that one it makes me, when I want to bring a company kind of makes checks, me says like look, you're about to show this to 200 of your peers, even 400 of your peers, right? You're going to be judged on this a bit they're also going to look up to you because you're an entrepreneur and you theoretically should know a thing or two about where this company's at. But I love that kind of social capital in a sense that we have as a group. And I get pretty proud when I am ready to introduce a company and bring them through due diligence. So that's been pretty cool experience for me.

I think the fund, and generally a group like tca, you have both the wealth of the crowd and the wisdom of the crowd phenomena. The fund has had a secondary effect. Besides attracting the best and more startups, it's also attracted many great new members. A lot of our members, especially we talked about, for example, entrepreneurs, some of whom are still running companies. They're running companies that have raised money and that have been funded, but they are running companies to this day, or they've recently exited companies and this might be their first foray into angel investing. So the fund is a good way where you're not necessarily tasked with picking the winners by yourself. You can invest in the fund and then if you really want to be passive, you can let the rest of the fund membership and the deal. Teams vary deal by deal. Obviously, with the nature of the deal and the experts, we have to work on that domain. But it's a way for you to kind of get onboarded into angel investing if it's not something you're experienced in. If you don't want to have to pick those winning stocks, you can invest in the fund and it sort of democratizes the process and it creates an easy way to kind of get started. So the fund is definitely been one of the amplifiers of our membership as a whole and the diversity of our membership.

Got it. Okay. Well, I look forward to continuing to bring great companies through. Thanks for your leadership there. A little on your personal side, hopefully I'm allowed to say this, you tell me, not got married and have a.

Yes, whatever it is. Yes.

Got married and had a baby in the last year.

Yeah, 2019 was a big year for me.

Big year for you. And, you know, continuing to lead this great organization. What's daddy life like now?

So I think there's a lot of great aspects of parenthood and husbandhood. You're also a, you know, not quite a newlywed, but recent husband, fairly recently, you know, married man. And, you know, it's the best gift you can have in life. It's a great partner. And then a child comes along, which is now, you know, equally great gift. Being a parent makes your life Ten times harder, but a thousand times better. And that's what I found. And so my son, his name is Akito, he's three and a half months old right now. Of course, he's a consummate startup experience and that he's literally learning everything and new milestones. Kind of the cycle of growth is much more rapid than even the most innovative of technology startups. But certainly having that learning experience and just the fulfillment, both chemically as well as just sort of intellectually and socially of a child. For anyone here who is not a parent yet, it's really a gift. When you find the right partner and you have the right time in your life, it makes your life very complete.

Well, he has two great co founders, that's for sure.

Yeah, my wife, Marlene, she's phenomenal too, and she's much more experienced in child development than I am. She did her master's in childhood development and she's, you know, been around a lot of children throughout her life. So she taught me a lot of things from domain expertise, doing diapers to, you know, tummy time, and, you know, kind of all of the important, you know, aspects of being a parent of a young child.

Well, you also, beyond that, you also relocated within San Diego. You're a longtime Cardiff guy, North county, coastal, even wearing your Cardiff hat. And you moved down to Little Italy.

Yeah, it was Cardiff Kemal. Now I'm living in Little Italy, so I still love Cardiff, as you can tell. Still can't get rid of my Cardiff hat. And I drove down the coast the other day and just kind of drove slow down the PCH on my way to a meeting in Encinitas, reminiscing on the four years that I spent there. Because being a parent and a family man is the number one priority in my life right now. Marlon and I moved downtown. We're in Little Italy. Because her family is all from and around Chula Vista in the South Bay. So having that, you know, access to family is obviously paramount. You know, that's why I decided to move down. But I always liked Little Italy anyway. When I would come down to, you know, downtown, let's call it, when I was living in North County, I would often spend my time in Little Italy. I liked both the sort of, you know, bohemian culture of it as well as the kind of energy that's here, you know, from a restaurant, from a, you know, kind of bar, from shopping. And from a business standpoint, there's great co working spaces in Little. There's several of them. So it was always A place that I spent my time when I was down here, and therefore, it didn't really feel that. That foreign to me. When it was time to move south, Little Italy felt like the appropriate, you know, kind of and welcome backstop. So I'm enjoying it. It's just I never coming from New York City, and my first office was in soho. My first raptivism. First office was in soho back in the day on Houston street, before the Whole Foods was there. And, you know, it was a different, you know, era in New York. But Little Italy kind of reminds me of that, you know, kind of that West Village or, you know, area like that in New York, Lower east side that I, you know, really liked. So I did feel some, you know, I guess, nostalgia for, you know, my New York days when I, you know, when I planted myself back into, you know, an urban environment that I was never expecting to do. But, you know, you always do what's best for your family.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And part of that is feeding them. Do you have a favorite taco spot, both from north county and have you found something new in Little Italy?

So I think spanning north county to Little Italy, my favorite place is actually in Little Italy, and it's. It's Blue Water Tacos.

Ah, okay.

Down here, if you've been there before, it's a. Specializes in fish tacos, certainly. And actually the first taco shop I ever went to in San Diego, when I came to visit a friend of mine back, you know, we're going now rewinding, you know, five years, and he picked me up from the airport, and it's near the airport, so it's sort of on that first, you know, I guess, exit around Sassafras out on your way out. And we went there, and he introduced me to fish tacos, which, you know, I came to learn are a San Diego staple. And still to this day, and now the good news about moving to Little Italy is I'm now walking or scooting distance from. From the taco shop. That's my favorite. There's a lot of good ones in north county, too, but I think Blue Water is my favorite one.

That's pretty great. That's awesome. Shoak, you're prolific on Twitter, like me. I appreciate that we can connect there just as much as in person. We connect probably there more than in person.

Right.

Where can people. What's your Twitter name that they can find you on?

So it's AKLaunchleader. That's my Twitter handle, and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn as well. It's just my name. Fortunately now, although it was not always fortunate when I was a little kid having a name like Ashok Kamal. I'm pretty easy to find on Google, LinkedIn, et cetera. So anybody wants to reach out the tca websites tcasandiego.com youm can also check out the School of rap website, that's schoolorapofficial.com I'm always in a handful of different places in cyberspace and in the community too. So, you know, I love going to events like Startup Week. I'm excited about now living downtown. I can be at Startup Week every day now where I used to have to make an admission to come downtown for the main event. But yeah, I try to hit up the meetups and the conferences and the universities and just be out there in the streets because that's what I did when I first got here and it got me to this point. So I'm not changing the strategy anytime soon.

Absolutely no. Thanks for everything you've been doing and continue to do for the community and uh, it's great that how accessible you are and we're going to have you back on pretty soon now that you're so close to our studio. So thanks, Ashok.

Appreciate it. Thanks Neil and congrats and best wishes on a big new season ahead.

Thanks. Startups get the party started.

Startups, get the party started.

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 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 Coworking in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eealbloom as well as Fresh Brewedtech and Tacos in Tech Pod on Twitter too.

Get the party started, you want tech and tacos.

Tacos in tech, you know we got it. Air.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos. Tacos in tech, you know we got it.

Hey.