Bobby Brannigan - Co-Founder & CEO of Mercato

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Hey and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am here with CEO and Co Founder of Mercado, Bobby Branigan. Thanks for being here.

How's it going? Thanks for having me.

Of course. And with us as well a few other serial entrepreneurs going to join in on the conversation. We got Stan from Winsand Tour. Thanks for being here. And Darren Anderson also hanging out.

Hey, thanks for having me back. I survived the last show and you got me back already.

Absolutely. This is fun. We got a bunch of entrepreneurs who are going to be talking about what's it like to build a company here in San Diego. And no better than Bobby, who's built quite a few as well, right?

Yep.

So tell us what Mercado is real quickly.

So Mercado is an online marketplace for independent grocery stores. We take the stores online, we help them with e commerce and get sales to compete with the big chains.

Okay, so we're going to dive into that in a bit, but we want to hear a bit of your history of what brought you to here because you've done companies all in tech space, but not always marketplaces.

Obviously mostly marketplaces, but yeah.

Oh really?

A few haven't been.

Okay, so let's jump in. What was your very first company you started?

So my first company was Velour Books. It was a college textbook marketplace and I started that in my dorm room.

Where were you when you started?

Upstate New York. SUNY Fredonia.

Okay, interesting. So what time frame was this for building a textbook marketplace?

So it was in 2001. It was the year that Amazon launched their marketplace. So in that year I had a class and we learned about Mary Kay cosmetics and their marketing model. And my idea was to build an online marketplace with a student to student marketing program just like Mary Kay and Amazon had launched. And people weren't buying on Amazon, most of the students that I knew. So I said, why don't we create a platform and then use students to market it?

Are we going to see a trend throughout this history of building products that Amazon has or just started?

Yeah, I guess. I got to know Amazon very well. So I kind of understand what they can do, what they can't do and what they won't do. Okay, so. And they're going after big things. So generally I'm competing with them my whole life.

Okay, so what happened with that with Velour Books?

So it was an interesting business. We learned things the hard way. We bootstrapped that company. We never raised any money. We started off buying and selling textbooks on campus to fuel our own platform. And you know, we spent the first eight or nine years growing it to about 18 million in sales. And then we had a few breakthroughs that grew the company to 100 million in sales within 18 months. So some pretty amazing learnings, you know. Great. A great moment for us, after you're, you know, banging your head against the wall for a long time competing with the big Amazon, you know, some of the special learnings that we had is, you know, we. It's funny, you know, you. One of the things people always say is that you got to talk to the customer. And the time I started in business, and the business I started in was very much the person on campus competing with the campus bookstores, and then us being the adversary and not really talking to the bookstores. Meanwhile, we partner with bookstores. So we were pretty much these renegade students taking bookstores online and not talking to the bookstore customer. So after eight or nine years, we grew the company, and we learned a lot of cool things about SEO and, you know, Google advertising and, you know, how to partner and bring merchants online. But we didn't spend time talking to the customer. And once we started speaking with them, we asked them, we said, you know, how can we help you grow your business? And they said that, first of all, you're a marketplace, and I can sell books on your platform. Have you heard of Amazon, Bobby? And I'm like, yeah, I've heard of them. They're like, we really don't need you to sell books. And I'm like, well, how can I help you? And they said, if you could help me buy used college textbooks, I would buy an unlimited amount of books. So at that moment, we created a reverse marketplace. And in the beginning, we thought when we created this marketplace, that students would enjoy selling on it because they'd get three times more money for their books than if they went to the bookstore. But students are a little bit lazy, and they wanted cash on the spot. And what we found is that when we created a reverse marketplace and we had dozens of wholesalers bidding, basically a student come to the site with their ISBN number, the product over the book, and get the best price. So once we launched that, it was like a rocket. And you start a business and you're on the phone trying to sign up businesses and get them on the platform, early stages, they say no. For us, this was the complete opposite, where people were calling us and they were saying, can I get on, please? And that was the moment. We're like, all right, this is something for real. And we then built it out further. We created a futures market for college textbooks because at the time, textbook rentals were becoming big. Chegg raised $200 million from Kleiner Perkins and some other VCs, and we still had not raised any money. We bootstrapped this thing with Credit cards and home equity lines and borrowing money from people on the streets in Brooklyn. And we had to figure out how to operate the business. And when we had the bid model accrue, and then with rentals coming into the space, we needed a way to figure out how to do them ourselves without putting a lot of capital behind it. So what we did is we took our ask contracts, the contracts that people wanted to sell books for, and our bid contracts, and we went to the bidders and we said, hey, how much would you pay four months from now for the book? And they said, I can do that. So I'm paying a little bit less because I need this book. So we took a S contract and a futures contract to then create a rental contract for the student. And we made 40, 50% margin on the lowest price textbook rentals.

Wow.

So it was kind of cool. But, you know, you compete with somebody like Amazon, you got to be pretty clever.

Yeah.

You can't go after them in the same value chain. You have to invent your own value chain. Yeah, Right. So it was a great learning. And, you know, I'm very proud to have built a. Bootstrapped the company to $100 million versus, you know, the 500 pound gorilla, 800 pound gorilla, we want to call them.

What ended up happening to Villa Books?

So we got acquired by a company named Simple Tuition out of Boston, and then we spent about two and a half years handing off the company to them, and then after that, had some more time in my hands.

Okay, did you event. Did you move that company to San Diego Valor at some point?

Yeah. There's a whole. There's a whole timeline there where what happened is that in 2008, they changed a tax law in New York state. They called the Amazon tax. Amazon again, coming at us in every way whatsoever. But we lost half of our suppliers in a minute as soon as they made that tax law. Because book suppliers like Missouri Book Company, which is a big part of Barnes and Noble's business and partially owned by the same owners of Barnes and Noble, they withdrew immediately from the marketplace because by working with us, they had a tax presence in New York. And then because that they had to pay sales tax in New York. So a lot of big suppliers left our platform instantly. We had a great partner in San Diego, Digital telepathy, if you know Chuck, and definitely, yeah, great guys. So big fans of those guys. And they kind of opened our eyes to San Diego. We had come down here on a trip to meet them, and I remember being in Del Mar and like November and it was sunny and sunset. So that was stuck in my mind. So at the time when we had a move, we're like, all right, we don't have a lot of money. We can't necessarily go to San Francisco because we were very mindful. You know, we're running a business thinking in terms of making money. So we didn't have these investors to say, all right, let's live in San Francisco. So San Diego for us was like this perfect opportunity where engineering talent, marketing talent, lower cost, beautiful weather, beaches, amazing. So we said when that happened, we got three cars, there were eight of us, and we just drove from Buffalo, New York to San Diego.

Wow.

Oh, it's Buffalo where you guys were based?

That's where we're based. Yeah. So we started in Fredonia, which was 45 minutes from Buffalo. And then a few years later, we wanted to get out of the college town and go to the big city of Buffalo.

Yeah.

And then we got. Got here to San Diego.

And how'd you know the DT guys? Like, did they help you with some user experience or no?

Yeah. So they were helping us UX and SEO on page optimization.

Okay.

So they had done some really good work that we saw and from other companies that we really appreciated. And then we reached out to them and we started working with them. So they were basically the people that brought us here.

Yeah.

And they were from the early 2000s, like, big San Diego flag wavers, you know, to bring.

Yeah, yeah.

I think Chuck, he may still own it. He owned like a. Like, I think he owned like san diegostartups.com and he may still be holding on to that because we have startup san diego.org and he's like, holding.com.

Nice.

Well, it's great that that brought you here.

Yeah.

So you brought the. What time frame was that you showed up to San Diego?

Oh, eight.

Oh, wow.

On the precipice of a recession.

Yeah.

And you kept the company going through that?

Yeah, we kept it going through that. And at that point when we moved here in 08, we were probably at, I don't know, 7 million in sales at that point.

Okay.

And we grew the company, you know, pretty much from 7 to 18 million in a few years. San Diego bootstrapped.

Wow.

And that's. Is that when you got to know Neil Centauria or is that later?

Yeah, yeah. So I got to know. There are a few key people that I met that really helped us grow. Neil's one of them. Two other guys was a guy named Jeff Smith and Nadav Wilf.

Okay.

Guys from Matrix mt, they had an SEO agency that just crushed it. They. They just tripled our business through SEO.

Okay.

Yeah, they had Matrix mt, they sold to Geary Interactive, they hold, they had Discover sd, a couple different properties.

Okay.

Those guys were big partners.

Yeah.

That's really cool. So what time frame did you sell the company?

We sold it in 2013.

Okay.

And you stayed in San Diego through the sale?

No, no, no, no. So we had to move to Boston.

We lost you.

So, yeah, we jumped on a plane. But we had a plan to get back right away.

Got it. Okay.

And you wanted to start something else as soon as you could?

Well, after I sold it, it was an interesting time. I wanted to figure out what to do in my life. And at that point, then having a lot of money, I was like, all right, I probably should hire some advisors. So I hired two advisors, a guy named Jerry Colonna, who's a well known CEO coach. He just wrote the book called Reboot. And then also Angelo Santinelli from Babson Business School. So I had two coaches simultaneously helping me think through what to do next in my life. And it was funny, you know, I went through all the different routes of thinking, you know, how can I? What do I do next? I laid out all the different opportunities. I'm like, all right, do I open a coffee shop in pb? Do I go work at Amazon? Do I become an EIR at a vc? Do I start another company? So I spent about six months thinking through all those things. And in thinking about it, I realized that building startups is my favorite thing to do. I'm going to keep building them, and I have a much bigger one in me, and I want to have that, I want to achieve that. And at the same time, while I was doing that, I got an opportunity to meet some really interesting people. Like Richard Branson. Went to the island and, you know, with other advisors I had and everything, and what they were big advocates of is you got to do something that you really believe in. And that really resonated with me because, you know, the less business it ended up being, like 13 years of my life, these things take a long time to do great things. So you might as well do something where every day you wake up in the morning and you're really excited about not just the business you're building, but who you're building it for. And it also allows you to bring much greater people into the company that are very passionate about that same mission. So I enjoy being On a mission. So that's kind of, at that time I was, I was, you know, I had a little more time on my hands, obviously. So I started, you know, investing in companies and I needed to get my hands back, my hands wet again in terms of looking at other companies. So I ended up investing about 20 startups, more than I probably should have because I got a little aggressive, especially out of the gates, writing pretty high big checks, like 100, 200k checks to early stage companies. And then I learned after a little while to slow down a little bit. So that went pretty good. And as I was doing that, I had more time on my hands and I went to my dad's store and I saw that a lot of things he was doing were still very much in the stone age. He had no point of sale system, he had no social media, he had no website. This is a grocery store, his grocery store in New York City, which he's still operating successfully and my brother's managing the store with him. So that was a moment when I went in there and I said, all right, I want to build this for my dad. It wasn't even around wanting to build a business or making money or anything. I was just simply, my dad needs this and my dad has stood behind me and all this stuff through thick and thin. I'm just gonna build it. So I went back to the people that I built my last company with, because there were only seven of us at that point that had built that hundred million dollar company. We're a small team that built a pretty big business for that size with that amount of people. So I went back and I said, hey, can you guys help me build this company? And they said, of course. And we started diving in and as we looked at it being Marketplace people, we said, wow, there's like 30,000 independent grocery stores out there and they have to compete with the big chains. Amazon's coming at them, Walmart's coming at them, Target's coming at them. I want to fight that fight and I am confident we can win that fight because we know the turf, where we know the merchants. I mean, when I grew up, I was eat, sleeping and breathing that grocery business. The DNA of it is my DNA. So I look at the business, I look at the opportunity and I said, let's do this. And the team was in. And that's when Mercado was created.

What was that? When did you start? What do you call the start point for this?

2015. Basically when we said we're moving on and we Went to the CEO of Simple Tuition and said, hey, time to move on. But it's kind of crazy. The day I left is the day I started Mercado.

Okay.

I didn't breathe for a minute, really. So in retrospect, I might have taken six months off because it's, you know, one hole to the next hole. But I very much enjoy this. But yeah, we started it right away and there were. There were six of us.

Bobby, you mentioned that you had sort of a mission and vision to take on Amazon. That's no small feat. So whatever you learning about that so far as you've started to go toe.

To toe with them, well, obviously Amazon has a very big vision. Right. They're thinking about. They're not thinking about five years from now, thinking about 50 years from now, 100 years from now. And we're thinking about it similarly in a way. And food is a very different thing. Food is not a book. And there's something very special about an independent grocer and what's special about them. I really, really appreciate myself. And a big part of it is, you know, independent grocers, the customers are like family. And I always think about the way my father thinks and he operates. He would never give any customer in a store anything. He wouldn't give his own family, his own babies, his own kids. And I think that's extreme value. And Amazon can come in and automate CPG products and try to give, I don't know, C B fresh products. But an independent grocer has that connection with their community. And my mission, our mission is to enable the independence with tech to fill that gap, because there's a massive gap. So I think that if they fill the gap, they compete with Amazon. And at this point right now, independent grocery stores are 55% of the grocery stores in America.

Yeah.

But you've got to catch the young, passionate people to invest and double down in that business. Right. So that they will get excited about being passionate, going head to head in Amazon in their neighborhood. Right. Because it's going to be a neighborhood play and bringing that passion and that neighborhood feel. And that's probably like your, you know, the, your kids. Right. Imbuing them with that or someone in your spot like your, Your father obviously has his lineage. And the folks that he's worked with coming next, though, it seems like you've got to own that neighborhood store and go toe to toe with Amazon with those young folks that have passion, which is something about this generation that is there to work with.

Yeah, I agree And I think that now more than ever, people care about quality and where the food has come from.

Absolutely.

And I think that that's an extreme edge the stores could have. And they have a massive gap right now. And there's. There's still 55% of America they're operating with. It's insane. No data, no technology. Their vertical integration is D minus. Right. So our vision is that we're going to give them the tech they need that's straightforward. I wouldn't say in my mind it's easy, but I'll call it straightforward. Not easy for everyone. The data, they don't even use data. We're going to leverage the technology to give them data, to ultimately give them buying power. And I think in a spot where they have data and buying power, their care with the community is hard for Amazon to replace with computers and machines because you have the people that are, that want to serve, and they have. They're on a mission to create this value in their own community. Right. So, and my dream with this is that, you know, five, six years from now, we can have, you know, build your own grocery store in a box. Somebody has a vision, they want to create a grocery store. We can literally tell them on what corner to put it, what the products should be based on Google's data and our data, what it tells us, what the customers are asking for. Create an Omni Channel experience. But basically, grocery store in a box, that's pretty powerful.

Super powerful, yeah. Great. That's being built here in San Diego. You started the company, though, in New York, Right. At some point it was or always planned to be back here the day we left.

We planned on coming back as soon as we possibly could. New York made a lot of sense for us to start Mercado for a lot of reasons. Some of our early investors were ex Fresh Direct people, which in my mind was one of the best grocery delivery companies. So the former CEO of FreshDirect, Rick Braddock, invested. Monica Wu, the chief revenue officer, she invested. My dad's store is in New York City, you know, and the day we decided to do Mercado, I walked down the street and I signed up five merchants that I knew for my whole life. So it was a natural place to start it. And New York City is a special city in terms of it's a. It's a city of independence. You don't have grocery chains in Manhattan in Brooklyn and Queens. So it was a natural for a lot of reasons.

Got it.

So how long have you been back?

I've been back a year.

Okay.

Downtown Works, right. Is where headquartered right now.

I live down the block.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. There's a good little nexus of startup companies there.

Yeah, yeah, those guys.

Yeah, that's. You know, when we started NEST Cowork, we had this kind of vision of what I call the Dark star, which is not pejorative. You have sort of wework coming into town. You know, It's a big 900 pound gorilla, the Amazon of coworking. And we work collaboratively with folks like Downtown Works and Hera Hub to kind of come up with an answer. So we felt like those independent grocers with the Walmartization crew coming in. And I tell you, it was all about values. I think we all went right back to that, like how do we build communities that are cohesive, that are unique so that we have uniqueness amongst ourselves so that we don't compete. But then that really opens up the collaboration and it's been interesting to watch that whole process unwind with. We work trying to find themselves stumbling a little bit. I suspect that they'll recover and do better. But I think this vision you have, you know, is like really awesome and just really. And Dark Star for me is more like people that have lived in corporate life and they've worked amongst people, which we all want to do. So you come back to work with people, but you're doing in the context like where you're comfortable and not necessarily like they're in a corporate environment.

Yeah, that's a good point. So something around the San Diego space, not just being surrounded by other good tech companies and investors that you've had. Speaking of, you had local investors in this last round, correct?

Right, lots of them.

Yep.

Techos Angels was lucky to be a part of it as well. To put some money in.

Yep.

But also the talent here too.

Right.

You've got people who you're hiring local, right?

Yeah.

Which is fantastic as well. What other aspects are you seeing that are kind of leaning in for you to build this company here versus in New York?

So I mean, building companies, you know, it's hard work and it takes time and you have enough adversity, you know, when you're building a company. And you know, I think for me, San Diego is the best city to live in in America. If you look at it all around and the weather, the beaches, the cost of living, like even the culture and community. I live in Little Italy and it's like restaurants all over the place, coffee shops, I really enjoy it and I Think it's great to build a company in that environment. And I've never met anyone that I wanted to hire that said, no way I'm not living in San Diego. So in my last company we hired people from Amazon, backcountry, Newegg, Zappos. Right. And they moved from Seattle, from Vegas, all these places. So I like the attractiveness of it. I also like that we're not in the Bay Area battling for employees and somebody's jumping from, you know, Google to Facebook to Uber, like, like you don't have to fight that. So your retention stronger. So I think all around, like holistically this is the spot for me. I think it may be harder for a first time founder because if you don't have necessarily the larger network and there's not as many investors, they're in other areas. But having done this multiple times, we have a following and we can make it happen here. And people love San Diego.

So you just raised kind of semi recently?

Yeah, last year.

Yeah, 2019.

Yeah.

What's 2020's big plan? Is it just grow market share or is it build product? I guess it's probably both. But what's the big win?

Yeah, so it's basically to 5x successive merchants on the platform through marketing.

Okay.

And we actually rolled out an Amazon prime like product called Mercado Green where you can get unlimited free delivery for $96 a year. And it's really optimizing the whole business towards a membership model, scaling membership with strong unit economics. And then we're going to go out and raise a $20 million round. And we have investors lined up, we just have to get to the unit economics. So for us it's relatively straightforward what we need to do to get there and then we're going to scale further up from there. But it's really bringing even stronger success to our merchants that we have now. Our merchants are more successful on our platform than any platform out there that exists. If you know, for example, there's some companies that will build a grocery website and stuff like that and will totally 5x their sales. But we have another 5x in us and I think it happens in 12 months. And then on that traction we raise 20 million and really rock it.

And you're using your own delivery force right now or what's that force like?

No, no, we work with a lot of restaurant delivery companies. So we're partnering with companies like Doordash and Postmates and they're powering all the deliveries for us.

So AB5 right now is or is not a problem for you guys? Because it's. It's on their end.

It's more on their end at this point. Yeah. And we're. And we're in California. We're not as big as we are on the East Coast.

Okay.

You know, we started in New York City. That's a big market for us, you know, biggest market in the country. So that's very strong. So we're not. We're not like some companies. We're not. Some are solely focused in California. It's a little more problematic.

Got it.

Want to talk a little bit about some of your investing side. Have you kind of put new investments on hold while you focus on your own company? Are you still looking to invest?

Still looking to invest. I've learned a lot from my own mistakes and a lot of the great mentors, like Nielsen Turia being one of them. Michael Loeb in New York, Jason Calacanis in San Francisco. I've had some great advice from them, and I invested in deals with all of them. Many deals with all of them. So some good learnings. But, yeah, I'm still investing now, but my strategy is a little bit different than before, I hear.

Yeah, I started 12 months ago, going a little heavy, and 2019 was a little good, silly, but now slowing down, too.

Yeah, it's like anything else. Right. When you start off, you know, you get excited. You haven't seen as much, and then once you see more, you start to see what worked and what didn't. But I guess the good thing for me is that the companies I invested way more in are doing way better. And my learning around that was that when my gut was there, when I really believed in the person, they've done really well. So I guess that worked out, but I had a bunch of smaller investments that fizzled.

Yeah.

I think the part I'm coming to grips with now is realizing you want to keep backing the ones who are doing really well. And that actually takes up just as much time as finding new deals. And so it's the time frame of plant new seeds versus, you know, put more into the ones that are doing really well.

Yep.

That's definitely kind of where I'm at 12 to 18 months after getting started into it.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of interesting things that people have their own tactics to the way they do it in terms of, you know, their level of support, what kind of service they provide, what kind of connections they provide. And one of the things I aim to provide is that, you know, I don't come in with, you know, just my own money. I'll come in with three people. I can come in with several million dollars in funding because I have other people that I've done deals with. And it's similar to what other people do. Like, you know, Jason Calacanis, when he comes in, he, he's got an arsenal of people behind him. He literally has an army. Right. He's got his syndicate, but he also has Sequoia and all these other, these other organizations. So if you can invest with more confidence in terms of what's upstream, I think that is, you know, kind of the, one of the learnings that I had.

Sure. What do you think of the San Diego funding environment in general?

Right.

You have to go get later money elsewhere. Are we building more angels though now? Are there people who back other people? Are you feeling that more than when you were here back, you know, in the early 2000s?

Oh, it's another world now.

Okay.

Right. I mean, in a short period of time. I mean, I remember even when I was in college in 2001, I didn't even know. I didn't even like I was totally into, you know, the stock market and trading and all these things and finance. I didn't even know what a VC was, a venture capital, what is that like? It's an adventure. I don't know what it is. So I didn't even know anything about it. And then, you know, even, you know, coming here in 08, it was, there was only a few people. It was like Mission Ventures, it was a few investors. Right now there's a lot of people, there's a lot of angels. And I think largely because people have made money. The people that invested in a lot of these companies, Ubers of the world, and they had some exits and there's cash, right. You got ex Facebook people, ex Google people in San Diego and they're investing. And also I think the investment world is different. I remember going to venture capital, the first one I ever went to a show where I heard the investors talking at a table and they're like, how many investments did you made that were outside of a 10 mile radius of your office? People used to invest super local so they can stay in close touch with the founders. And now people are investing everywhere.

Well, you know, we had that era. It was a specific era, right. And I think of Dave Titus, right, who's was a phenomenal investor here. When I came to town in 2000, like you talked about, there was Mission Ventures and trying to remember What? Dave's Winward? Yeah, Winward Ventures. And that was kind of like that's who you go to and talk to and you know, talk to them. They're like, Yep, we're raising $100 million fund. And we raised $100 million fund. He had like five or six of those guys in San Diego and that was kind of like it.

Yeah.

And, and I think what's interesting is those guys got sort of transplanted by a vision that was like, we're going for billion dollar companies. Right. So you didn't really need those regional investors. So that kind of whole crew closed out their 10 year deals and there wasn't, there was kind of a gap. And I think that's what you and I felt, you know, in 2005, 2010, like in that era is those guys were gone. You had that money transferred to the Bay Area, to Boston, to New York, a couple central hubs, and that's where we were all going to get our cash. And of course there's exceptions to all that. Now it's like in this next generation, you know, with like a Stanley Kim who's sitting next to me, he's now bringing money back into the community because we've had multiple serial entrepreneurs and they see that they want to get back into tech, not just by real estate, which is kind of what that middle group did, I think in the mid 2000s we were talking about in the previous show. So I think like you said, it's like night and day compared to what it was just five, ten years ago.

Yeah, we're all getting kind of hooked. Right. Like we may have a win and we're like, we're not done. Like now we have even more power to do better and bigger, everything like that. And we can invest and build companies at the same time too. I think that's great to be having that in San Diego. And that's like almost like a flywheel. It hopefully should spin itself faster and faster or at least complete itself so that capital gets recycled and more people have access and more people win.

Love that flywheel. It's a cool idea.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well you've, you're in the grocery business, you see a lot of food, but San Diego is a taco town. Do you have some favorite taco places?

Yeah, I'm actually a really a big fan of not. Not taco.

Uh huh.

Sam, the cooking guy's place.

Yeah.

Over in the Little Italy. Little Food hall, right?

Food hall, yeah.

Yeah.

They've got some unique tacos. That's for sure.

Right?

Yeah, yeah.

They always get the eggplant parmesan taco.

Okay.

And they have a tofu taco, so. Yeah, it's very good.

That's a good one.

Yeah.

Cool. Well, that's. Do you guys have a favorite taco spot? We'll put you on.

I was thinking Blue Water Grill, you know, around India. Not sort of classic, sort of Mexican base, but just great fish tacos. Like real fish, like caught off the boat that day. They just serve it up so nice there. You got to stand in line usually, but you know, call ahead. You can call ahead 15 minutes and cut the line and just have a great meal there. Smells good too. Nice people.

Something cool about San Diego in the food space. We just previously interviewed bluenalu founder Lou Cooperhouse who's doing cell based fish and seafood. We're going to be growing cultured fish the same way we propagate yeast. And so we will have tacos that are grown in labs that will be sold potentially through the Mercado marketplace. We'll have this whole little food tech nexus, which is pretty cool to see.

Well, if you think about our craft beer industry, Right. It kind of centers arguably around white labs. Right. Who's like concocting all these great recipes for beer. And that was kind of the impetus, you know, for kind of building a tech brew market here. And we've thrived on that. You had like that combined with a supportive mayor, you know, for a couple terms and boom. We like really built the craft brew.

Yeah, clusters. It's really cool. Bobby, thanks for being on the show. We're excited to help and watch you guys continue to grow. Where can people find you and Mercado online?

So they could find me on LinkedIn and also@mercado.com.

All right.

Yeah.

And they could also download the app.

Cool.

Thanks everyone for being on. Thanks, Bobby.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for having us again.

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, you can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and tech Pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want Tekken tacos, tacos and tacos. You know, we got it.