CC037: Neal Bloom of Fresh Brewed Tech // uncovering the past and building the future of San Diego

FreshPertech realized, you know, we should have our own original content but focus on other news. The way doing a little bit deeper dives on companies that help and support the entrepreneur and the company themselves. Usually that's showcasing their differentiated culture, showcasing their founding story and kind of their big vision. And that doesn't have to be purely around, you know, they raised $10 million today.

The startup investment landscape is changing and world class companies are being built outside of Silicon Valley. We find them, talk with them and discuss, discuss the upside of investing in them. Welcome to Upside. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Upside podcast. The first podcast finding upside outside of Silicon Valley. I'm Jay Clouse and I'm accompanied by my co host, Mr. Old Old Wooden Ship himself, Eric Hornung.

You know, I've seen that movie no less than 50 times.

What movie?

I don't know what you're talking about.

Of course we are talking about my favorite movie, Anchorman, which we also referenced in the Matt Cordio interview about Milwaukee. I am just talking a lot about Will Ferrell lately. He was on the Conan o' Brien podcast, which is maybe part of it.

What'd you think about that interview on the Conan o' Brien podcast with Will Ferrell?

I thought it was good. Will Ferrell is one of the most interesting people in show business to me, because the myth of Will Ferrell even extends to the people in the industry. Everyone's just like, will Ferrell is the nicest guy who just doesn't seem to have any type of vice. The most interesting aspect of that interview was when he was talking about Sweden. Sweden, right. I think his wife is Swedish. And he was talking about this story of a Swedish king who was just like so brash. He wanted to have this giant sailboat made. And the people who were making the sailboat were like, that's not gonna work. And the king was like, make it anyway. And it like took so long that it went through not even the original maker, but his kid. And then it failed, just like they expected. And now it has like an impact on their culture the way that he tells it. Anyway, yes, I was speaking about Anchorman Eric because today we are talking about San Diego.

Why are we going down this route? I have a fun fact about Sweden.

Okay, hit me.

Did you know that St. Eric of the Catholic Church is from Sweden?

Oh, well, there's the segue we were looking for.

Yeah, but you just jumped. You just went for it.

Well, I was, I was excited, just like I'm excited to talk with Neil Bloom, the founder of Fresh Brewed Tech in San Diego. Fresh Brew Tech is bringing awareness to the San Diego tech community through blogs, podcasts, and all other ways you consume your tech news. He also hosts the Tacos and Tech podcast about the San Diego ecosystem. We got connected to Neil on Twitter, I believe, looking for people doing media in different parts of the country. Is that right, Eric? That's right.

It's amazing how underutilized Twitter still is. I think we're going to rant about it on this podcast a lot over the coming years. But we just were chatting on Twitter about media and all of a sudden someone popped up and they said, you got to check out San Diego. And we said, are you the guy? And he said, yep. And now we're talking to him.

You're very good at making those connections for us on Twitter. You made this bridge to Neil and then promptly decided that you're just not going to join in the interview.

I had a conversation with him on Twitter. I figured you could have a conversation with him in real life. We all have our strengths.

J this will be an interview just between Neil and I. Not because Eric didn't want to join, but because sometimes scheduling between three remote people is difficult.

Well, we're lucky that I am not in Stockholm because then it would be even harder.

Fresh Brewed Tech was founded in 2018, based in San Diego. As you can guess, we're going to talk about all things San Diego startup ecosystem. I'm sure we're going to nerd out a little bit as Neil and I seem to have similar backgrounds. So looking forward to this conversation as we go through it. You can tweet at us Upside FM or email us helloupside FM and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear from you and we'll get to that interview right after this.

Jay this summer we had some fantastic interns, but we were spoiled because we didn't have to do as much work. So if we wanted to hire someone, I don't even know what we would do.

It would be really hard to find the quality of interns who really just came to us this summer. I'm already thinking how are we going to find interns like this again if we ever want to hire a full time employee? Eric, how are we going to find somebody that high quality?

You know, there's probably nothing out there.

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Basically, if you're hiring Integrity Power Search is your go to. They are the plug, Eric. And so here's the plug for them. Go to Upside FM Integrity and learn more about how Integrity Power Search can help you with your hiring needs. Neil, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on Upside.

We like to start with the history of our guest. So can you talk to us about the history of Neil?

Yeah. I'm a Los Angeleno born and raised and went to school in San Diego for mechanical engineering and thought that was the path of my life. Went into aerospace, worked on the space program for a bit, loved it. But also started to realize that within engineers in general, we're not all the same. Obviously some are great engineers, some are better a little bit at marketing themselves. And so when the space business kind of had a bit of a downturn, I started looking at how could I help my fellow engineers market themselves for their next job. And that embarked me on a path of HR technologies. I would say. I really got into the idea of kind of LinkedIn networks, niche networks, and started my first software company helping people brand themselves using visual ways for their skillsets. So kind of a visual resume time wise. It's about 2013 or so, 2012, 2013. And became a startup founder for the first time. Really had no business doing that. But that's the path of an entrepreneur, I guess, right?

Who does.

Yeah, exactly. And started applying for incubators and accelerators to kind of help support and grow what we were doing, me and my co founder. And so we were in Los Angeles at the time. We applied to a few and got into a San Diego incubator and quit our jobs the next day.

And.

And we're all in on that. And so that kind of was how I jumped and dived into the startup world per se.

So that is the bridge between Los Angeles and San Diego. What happened then with this company and what was it called?

Company is called Portfolium. It ended up as we're doing our customer development really we started to realize that a visual tool to help people find what their marketable skills are is really good for people who don't have a lot of work experience. And so it started going down a path of a early career, new grad kind of population, and we started selling into schools. So first we thought, students are going to love this, they're going to jump on, use this to get their first job, and companies will pay to access that talent pool. That was the original premise, and we had to really sell into schools to get the student population to use the tool. And so quickly became an edtech platform, being a tool that universities would pay to help students organize the work that they're most proud of, almost in a sense, kind of tricking them into building a resume before they really cared about a job or a career. And the company grew on that basis on selling into universities, and it actually sold this year. So the company was sold to a public edtech company called Instructure.

That's awesome. Congrats.

Yeah, thanks. I wasn't with the business all the way through sail, so I was there the first three years, and then me and my co founder had a split on kind of strategy where we wanted to go. And I was really interested still in that HR tech space. And so I went on to do a few other HR tech focused really on filling jobs, filling roles, helping people find that job, that career and passion. And so that's what I did the last three years, helping other companies in that vein.

Why did you decide to stay in San Diego after the split versus return to your native Los Angeles?

That's a good question. And my family's all still in la. But once you experience the magic of San Diego, it is hard to leave. Like, no one really ever leaves here. And so it's a beach town. It's a series of beach towns. There's about 70 miles of coastline with tons of cool little beach towns every five miles or so. And so because of that kind of beach quality of life mixed with being able to do tech, you know, a mile from the beach, or even on the beach in many places. It pulls a special kind of person to that, for sure. It also pulls an interesting kind because of the makeup of San Diego's industries. It also pulls a more technical kind of engineer to town. Interestingly enough, there's a heavy defense build up here as well as telecom and cybersecurity. And so you get this mixture of deep tech alongside the beach. And so you have a really interesting kind of makeup of technical leaders in town. And people who are actually really entrepreneurial in that vein too. And so with that, I was really, really just fascinated with many other entrepreneurs in town, especially ones who welcomed me as a brand new entrepreneur, saying, hey, you know, you come from aerospace, now you're doing software. What's that about? Let me help you. There's a lot of this give before you get mentality that really drew me in here. And I've just fallen in love and continue to be in love with San Diego tech ecosystem ever since we recently.

Interviewed a venture capitalist in Los Angeles talking about the growth of the tech scene there. Since you had a front row seat to that as well. For us who aren't familiar with California or Los Angeles at all, you mentioned San Diego being on the beach and it has a tech background. From my limited perspective, la, it does too. So how would you draw some of the similarities and differences between LA and San Diego?

Yeah, so LA also draws upon its deep roots in its own history, which are a lot of our entertainment, a lot of consumer focused tech, whereas San Diego is a lot of business focused tech. And so I would say pretty much Santa is a B2B town and LA is a B2C town. So that's a big difference as well. The kind of brands, you know, there's more name brands in LA and very much kind of your intel inside kind of brands, things that are powering the things we don't even know about in San Diego. That's a big difference between the two. Now, Louisiana has a great aerospace history as well. I mean, you still have SpaceX, you know, a name brand space company there too. So not to take away from that at all, but you get a lot more of name brand gaming companies and name brand kind of media tech and Snapchat and stuff like that. Whereas you don't know a lot of the brands in San Diego. So that's a big difference. Certain people are drawn to wanting to work for a big brand name and other people, it's not as big to them and they want to work on impactful things. One other piece of San Diego that's a little bit different is biotech. And so there is a mega, mega biotech community in San Diego also kind of behind the radar that you don't really know about. And so that definitely draws in a certain kind of engineer who wants to work on kind of big data, of big bio. And you don't see that as much in la. The difference though in LA is the capital availability. So LA has had exits in their software world that are that are spinning back and refilling the funnel and funding a lot of new startups. I'd say San Diego hasn't had a lot of those big exits yet. And so because of that, companies grow a little slower. I'd say we're kind of four years back in time almost, which is kind of interesting to drive two or three hours and feel like you're in a time machine a little bit. You're like, oh, we could be Santa Monica maybe in four years from now. So that's kind of really interesting to be able to do that from such close cities to each other because you.

Have that proximity to both LA and a little bit to the Valley. How painful is that difference of local capital feeling? You know, on one hand like, I'm sure it's painful because it's not right there, but on the other hand it doesn't seem super far away. What does that feel like when you're on the ground in San Diego?

Yeah, it's, it's at a multitude of steps based on what stage you're at as a company. So first of all, you have to be okay with knowing you're going to have to travel for capital. That's, that's a given. Right. But it's actually more pleasant to fly to San Francisco one hour flight than to drive three hours to la. So that's something worthwhile. But the difference is that capital is really starting to come to San Diego. And so there's a big effort by a group called Connect by San Diego Venture Group that brings venture capitalists to town about four times a year, about 60 to 70 VCs and kind of does a bit of a roadshow for a lot of venture fundable companies. So that's a big part of it is having to bring the capital here, having to do the work to show them hey, it's worthwhile coming down. So that's part of the VC scene now, the angel scene, which usually you want entrepreneurs funding other entrepreneurs. Like I said, we're a little still early in having a lot of those exits. So it's still early days, but that is available to find your first 200 to 500k. You still can find some of it local, but sometimes you have to fill it out with people in other parts of Southern California. So it's still a drive and that still is a drag for entrepreneurs who are the CEOs. There's full time fundraising. You have to travel for that. That definitely is a pain. I think we just have to look to LA and say okay, this will happen in a few years. We just got to keep building good companies. Good companies will have liquidity events and that will come back to us in turn. It's just not today yet.

You mentioned the industries of defense, telecom, cybersecurity, biotech. Are there large corporations that are focused in those areas and that's why there is that density or where do you think those focuses come from?

Yeah, in telecom, Qualcomm is the kind of the huge, big gravity pull to that, you know, 30,000 people just in that company alone, which has spun out tons of sub industries supporting the chip business, you know, around that. And it's spun out a lot of other sub industries as well in terms of like IoT, you know, devices and many other things. So that's definitely. We can trace our roots back to that. For the telecom side, for the defense, just the military presence here. I think it's the largest naval presence on the West Coast. And so you get a lot of innovation labs from the Navy that spin up around capturing and bottling up a lot of the defense engineering talent around that. And so that's a big part too is that you get. Because we have naval, Marine, and I.

Think it's just Navy and Marine.

You just get a lot of density around people, contractors who are working on that kind of stuff. With that, you also have Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, which are building pretty large scale drones. So you also get a lot of spin out of engineers building their own little sub drone kind of companies too. And then cyber is also the same. The Navy has a huge cyber warfare center here, about 3,000 engineers focused just on that alone. And so that also has spun out engineers who want to go and build a consumer brand, or at least a commercial brand of something that some lab that has started up in the Navy's backyard.

Super interesting. Okay, so we left off your story. You stayed in San Diego, you loved the town, you didn't want to leave, and now you're doing Fresh Brewed Tech. So talk to me about the inception of that business, why it happened and what it is today.

Sure. So right before Fresh Brew Tech, I was with A company called Hired.com and Hired is based in San Francisco and it is a platform for matching tech talent to tech companies. And so I traveled North America helping support our 12 markets from an awareness standpoint. Kind of an evangelist, if you will say. And so I really got to know and compare top 10 to top 15 tech metros in North America. So I say North America because Toronto was Our lone Canadian city alongside the major U.S. cities. And you know, I was spending a lot of time on the road, but living in San Diego. And San Diego is one of the cities I was helping grow. But really comparing, you know, like, what's the difference between Boston to Austin to Denver to Seattle and understanding talent flow, where are they coming from? Are they moving to town? Are they coming straight out of school? Are they coming from local big companies? Where's the VC dollar flowing? Because we all know VC dollars turns into talent, right? We hire people when we raise funds. And so just comparing all that, I said, look like we've got a lot of the ingredients in San Diego locally. But there's not an awareness when I go to any other market that San Diego should be playing at this level. Should it have the same venture flow as Austin and Seattle? And it does. Yet there's not an awareness that the city is on anyone's radar outside of the Southern California area. And so I left, hired and went to work on working on kind of a promotion marketing engine of our community. That started really as just like getting out, meeting more people, blogging about it and podcasting about it. And very quickly that turned into an email newsletter with a following. People realized, hey, I have a bit of a pulse of what's going on. I'm disseminating it in little bite sized chunks and I'm aggregating a lot of other information. I really felt that, hey, there's locally we're writing a lot. People, companies, journalists, they're putting out information like the local business journal, our local newspaper, but it's not really getting eyeballs. And so I was going to kind of help be that hype and promotion engine. And so that was the basis of FreshBrute tech was realizing, hey, there's a lot going on. There's no one who's aggregating and disseminating from one central force. And that was the beginnings of it just in early 2018.

And how has that grown to today? What's changed? What's still the same? What's the current state of Fresh Breed Tech?

A few things have changed. One, we've realized that, you know, there's a lot of news stories around who got, who raised money today. And that tends to be what we all chase. First of all, a lot of entrepreneurs know, like when that news story hits, that's kind of old news, you know, like we've usually raised a few months ago, but we finally just got our PR act together to actually tell a reporter about it. And so for US Fresh Brew Tech realized, you know, we should have our own original content but focus on other news the way doing a little bit deeper dives on companies that help and support the entrepreneur and the company themselves. Usually that's showcasing their differentiated culture, showcasing their founding story and kind of their big vision. And that doesn't have to be purely around, you know, they raised $10 million today. And so we just have learned that we also can be storytellers and not just aggregators of content. And so how we do that is a few ways. We've got some really interesting blog series that we go way back in time, look at successful companies, look at the founders of them and kind of key players and we go back and find them and we say where are you now? And we'll tell a multi part story that says here are some interesting roots of San Diego that people didn't know. And so one vein we've done is the early web analytics roots of San Diego. So Google Analytics was actually started in San Diego by a company called Urchin Analytics. So if anyone uses Google Analytics you usually get a code that is UA and a long string of numbers and that is Urchin analytics and a number.

Whoa. Yeah, I've seen that.

Yep. So started in San Diego in the late 90s, acquired by Google in 2004, the team moved all moved up to the bay. And you know, that's an interesting story that we now have gone on to say where are those four founders now we've told part one, part two of that story. Another early web analytics company called Website Story, we've told a four part series how Adobe bought them. And now they've since started two different unicorns in San Diego. The founders called Sertona and Telium. And so we call this our own tech mafia. Kind of borrowed off the PayPal mafia story, you know, like where is San Diego's roots? Where are we from? Where are we going? And it pulls back in those original key players back into the community being like, oh, our story's being told, this is great. Like hey, here's some other people you should interview. They were right alongside us for the ride and they've started these companies and so we're doing a bit of a kind of cool family tree of a lot of San Diego's tech history that we've really enjoyed doing a lot. We've also dove into some other industries like cannabis that has become a bit of a scene in San Diego from our ag tech roots and our biotech. And we've started to tell a Little bit of our impact. Our impact routes as well. When which We've got a GoFundMe was founded here and so was a number of kind of nonprofit tech. And so that's another piece that we're starting to tell stories of as well too. So that's a big part of what we're doing now is original storytelling.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of progress and momentum since you said 2018 is when you started this.

Yes, exactly.

I tuned into my first episode of Tacos and Tech this morning and you settled a debate that I've had since watching Anchorman for the first time. San Diegans is what you refer to people in San Diego, not San Diego ins. Not San Diego San Diegans.

Exactly.

So is Fresh Brew Tech a full time effort for you right now, Neil?

It is. So Fresh Brew Tech has grown some legs in certain ways. So one, we've realized we're storytellers. We're not just content aggregators. And so a few things have come. We've gotten funding through kind of sponsorship of what we do. People want to be around kind of our brand, which we're absolutely honored to have those brands alongside us. And then two other veins have happened alongside it. So other companies and actually city governments have asked us, how can you help tell our stories? And so we've kind of white labeled Fresh Brew Tech in a certain vein, the way that we aggregate and write content and distribute it. So we do that for a lot of city governments to help them talk about their economic development and business communities. So we have a team kind of behind the scenes that are content marketers, that are learning how to tell entrepreneur stories and get them out to a community, whether it's under our own brand and media company or for a city government, which is really interesting to us. And so alongside that, we've also have done some other cities we've added to, not just San Diego. We've been invited to other Southern California communities to help tell their story as well. So we're doing Orange county now and we're looking towards Santa Barbara, Inland Empire, Riverside, which are very under the radar almost, I would say, under LA's shadow, but have robust university communities and talent and tech companies, and they get lumped into many times the greater LA region. And really they want to be their own differentiated communities. So for us, we're learning how to storytell and we're doing it kind of in our backyard, but I could see us expanding beyond Southern California.

Yeah. So what motivates you? What motivates you? To decide whether, you know, we're doubling down. I'm going to, like, double, triple down on being the tech ambassador for San Diego versus I want to help other communities tell their stories.

How.

How do you see your own motivation?

For me, at first, I love meeting other entrepreneurs, right? It's so that feeling that, hey, we're in the trenches, we're doing this. I've been doing it for a while. That's number one. So I'm driven to just meet other people like. Like me, but not just entrepreneurs, community leaders in that regard. So finding an entrepreneur who's not just, hey, I want to build company after company, but I really want to build my ecosystem. I'm really driven to find those other people and then help empower them. Like, what's your community need? I feel like I've read a bit of a playbook on what does San Diego need, and it can be utilized in other communities without having to go five, 10 years again around figuring out how do we pull all the orgs in town, you know, to be on the same page. So for me, I'm constantly looking for an entrepreneur who is a community builder, probably has some altruistic being behind them. And then I ask, how can I empower you?

What can I do to connect you?

What can we help even? You know, do you need to up your brand a little bit? Because that's something I feel like we could be applying our playbook to. It doesn't need to be me in another market. It could be us telling, helping someone else tell their story and tell their community story using the content marketing, content aggregation playbook. So that's for us, definitely what we're looking for is just find that entrepreneur, community leader.

Can you outline a little bit more of that playbook for people who are listening and maybe in a community, you know, on the east coast and saying, you know, San Diego sounds a little bit like my community. We need more here. Where would you recommend they start?

Yeah, first you got to meet. You just got to get down, get boots on the ground and meet some people that are bridge builders. There are a lot of organizations in a community, and many are nonprofits. And so they have to be funded.

In one way or another.

And many times you'll find organizations siloing themselves saying, we are the Oregon town. You have to come to us because they're built on that. You know, their funding dictates that they are the one all and be all. And we've found that for an entrepreneurial community to really grow, you have to be Better together you have people who lean in and say, we're good at certain things, we're not good at all things. We may not be able to take an entrepreneur all the way from start to finish. And so we look for those organizations that really say, hey, we're really good at just helping people get from Seed to Series A. But we need to find how do we inspire entrepreneurs to take the leap, just start the company. And so let's find that organization that's really good at mentorship and inspiring people to be an entrepreneur. So for one, it's that, it's that inclusive bridge building organizations. Those are step one, finding those people. And it takes a while because there's a lot of smoke and mirrors. People want to say they're part of the entrepreneurship game, but you know, they're pulling, they're saying it's just about us and it's not. It's always about the entrepreneur and people.

Who put the entrepreneur on the pedestal. Get that.

Honestly, organizations run by entrepreneurs and our four entrepreneurs are usually a good place to start for sure. So yeah, that's a lot of the.

I would say the early pieces of the playbook to start looking for.

And what is the role of content and storytelling in this? You find these bridge building organizations, you find people that want to lean in and be better together, then how does content layer on to that to help grow the ecosystem?

Sure. So the whole point with this economic development, we need to show that all.

Of our efforts are successful.

Right.

We can all spend a lot of our time and energy, which is, which is our currency, on helping grow the ecosystem, grow companies.

But if we're not moving the needle.

On helping companies grow, get better, have liquidity events, train talent, then it's all for nothing.

So I think a big piece of.

That is helping to say, here's where a company started, here's how people help them, and here's where they are next.

And the journey's not over.

So here's how you can help continue growing this company.

So I think a lot of it is that, which is a lot similar.

To an entrepreneur, how they have to pitch themselves for funding.

Right. You have to say, we started here.

We did some things, we got us to here.

With a little more capital, we can get to here. Right. And so a lot of it is.

Kind of milestone, showing that it's worthwhile to move to town because there's not just one company here, there's hundreds that not just any one company is great for you, but this is the right one for Your company culture. And so, you know, telling the story to attract talent is really big because we haven't had successful exits, we need to import the talent that has done that already.

Right.

It will help our companies grow faster if we bring experts in, not just people who have worked in tech, but haven't actually charted the path that we're trying to chart. So a lot of that is around storytelling, right? Saying, here's our big vision, here's where we want to go, here's why you need to come join us. So talent is one piece, capital is the other. And then on top of that, getting kind of government behind it as well. Because I think everyone's trying for local government's attention from any industry locally. But to get attention more on how to help the tech community, we also need to prove that we're not just here to make a quick buck. We really want to impact our communities.

And we're here for the long haul.

Like, sure, company number one may be 10 years, but then we're going to work on next company. And so I think you have to constantly sell local government around that as well, too.

When you're creating a story about a company in San Diego, how do you think about who the story is written for? Like, do you try to serve all of those audiences you just listed off in every story, or do you target a certain audience with each piece of content you create?

Our audience is varied, for sure. We've got entrepreneurs, we have investors, we have service providers, and we have tech talent. And not everyone is going to want to hear this. The founder of a company, every time, I think for tech talent, they need.

To hear a little bit of that.

Like, hey, there's inspiring people I want to go work for, but they also need to feel like, hey, there's people like me who need to do that too. And so we actually do change it around. We do love to interview kind of that all pieces of our audience. We want to make sure we're talking to that. Just we can't do it all at once. So it is actually really important that we look at that many times. We'll look at, you know, a technical leader, not just the CEO, and we'll say, what's so special about technical talent in San Diego? What have you been able to do here? And then we'll switch it up and interview an investor as well too.

So I think it's really kind of.

That round robin to showcase these are the elements of an ecosystem. It takes entrepreneurs, takes capital, it takes talent, and it takes our service providers. And so I think, yeah, showcasing that and being transparent that hey, this is our whole audience, we are all in this together.

We're all going to run into each.

Other at networking events and I think it's really important to be transparent about who our audience is.

For that fact, your background was in aerospace and engineering and now you're running a media company. How did you quickly come up to speed on how to best run a media company?

Yeah, learning every day.

I think what I have learned is.

That one, it's okay to get a job, to learn, to go get paid, to get an education. And so I've even as I've started a company I then went and worked for a larger tech company and I wasn't ashamed of that at all. I really thought that I want to learn from the experts and the pros and that would short circuit my learnings for sure. Not spending so much time trying to figure it out on my own. So that's one way for sure. I also look towards even while I'm.

Doing it every day I look at.

Social media streams of who I could be a pilot fish copying and just learning from. So Twitter, how we met, by the way, is a great place to see how others are doing it. And being a watcher in that sense, I get to follow along. That's another way.

And then mentorship.

I really look towards people I am not afraid to ask and say, hey, I'm not there yet, you are. Could you help me out? And obviously I got to provide a little bit of value back. So I'm constantly looking for how is a give and take relationship built off of that. But yeah, I think mentorship is a big one and it's easy for entrepreneurs who are already on their way saying I'm just going to figure it out, brute force it. But asking for help is okay. I'm not afraid of that.

Who are some of the individuals or other media organizations that you look to as a model for doing this? Well, in their communities?

You know there's a few for tech aggregation and content, I would say it's not done as much geographically. I look at how the business journals and local newspapers have been doing it and that helps me understand some older models that may have been around it.

But I look at things like the.

Hustle, which is a great content aggregation with a great voice around. How are they disseminating information in a short manner. Also look at the skim and as that as well too who really understood a specific audience.

So yeah, those are areas that I.

Look at but specific to tech news aggregation. Geographically, I think it's still early days. I think it's very easy to look and say TechCrunch is the one. But it's not as geo specific. It's really chasing kind of a hot news and SF and other bigger brand names. So I'd love to meet more people. I'd love to. Hopefully people come out of the woodwork and say we're doing this locally. Let's share our notes. So call to action. Come find me. Neil Bloom.

Love that. And I think that's probably how we actually got connected on Twitter because we were looking for some of the same organizations we were saying who is doing local startup coverage. Well, and yeah, I would agree we've had a hard time finding some of those organizations as well. I want to spend a little bit of time here talking about Startup San Diego, where I believe you serve as chair. Can you talk about that organization and what it seeks to do in San Diego?

Yeah. So Startup San Diego is a now it's a nonprofit. I don't think many of us knew what that meant when we started it, the nonprofit title. So six years ago, a bunch of entrepreneurs were working on their own respective software companies and we said we could use a little community, we could use some cathartic shared love. And so we started just a three day event where we said, hey, meetups that are already happening, plan them on this day. Let's just take a break from our desks and let's get together. And that was startup week in 2013 and that was about 200 people that joined in that just, you know, said, hey, we're founders. Let's let's learn from each other. And Fast forward, we're 3,000 to 3,500 people a year that come together for an entrepreneurship inspired conference.

And so how we've grown that over.

The years is a few things. One we've always looked at we are by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, that we are providing content education and promotion of founding companies and startups, specifically hyper growth mentality companies. We also have added content for tech employees as well too. So we realize that when you're starting a company, you may be a one or two person show, but very quickly you're gonna hire people and they need to be growing at you at the same company at the same time. Right. You all need to be rowing together. And so now we bring conversations around design, development, sales and marketing throughout the week that help enrich anyone who works at a startup. So that we're all kind of enriching ourselves.

And so that that's really what Startup.

San Diego does year round is work on that conference. We incorporated as a nonprofit in 2016 and didn't have any employees until just a year ago. And really it's volunteer driven. So the volunteers work year round to curate the conference in terms of planning about 300 panels and events over a five day period. And this year we did something interesting where we went kind of on the road within our own region. And so we did a kickoff night in tijuana, which is 20 minutes from our downtown. And actually the TJ Tech scene is own differentiated tech scene, but also really linked to us. There's a really strong engineering dev community in TJ that amasses right at the border so that they can quickly come over the border and work at companies in Southern California, both from an outsourced perspective. And companies have TJ offices of engineers and data scientists, so we feel very much linked to them. And so we do a whole talk throughout the week on what's it like to work as a, as a binational company. And so we start, we kicked off the year in ntj, did a few days downtown and then moved up to our north county area, about 45 minutes north to the Carlsbad area, which is another little density of tech and biotech, and did a day there. And so we realized that we really want to come to where the people are. It's tough for you to take days off work, especially if you're an tech employee. And so Startup San Diego's is that inclusive model of, hey, let's celebrate entrepreneurship in startups throughout the week, but let's also do it in a way that's easy for as many people to come to. We really want to be accessible. We have low ticket prices for students, for veterans, things like that. And we have talks around diversity, inclusion and accessibility as well too. So it's a big celebration of entrepreneurship and tech throughout the week.

I think Columbus here had a similar timeline of doing our first Startup Week and we have not kept pace with the amount of growth that you just described there. So what has enabled you in the Startup San Diego team to empower a group of motivated volunteers to work year round to do this? Can you talk a little bit more about the team structure or the size of the team?

Yeah, and I will say, like our team, in the beginning it was, it was have a team, burn them out for six months, lose the team, recruit a whole new team who would work on it next year. So that definitely was not planned but that's how we ran the first few years, and the original kind of founders stuck around, so at least there was some tribal knowledge we passed on. But no, it was very hard to keep the same people working on it next year, which means you had to learn a lot of things from scratch.

And that was tough for us.

And I think our growth really came once we realized one, there's other industries we should be pulling in. Our craft beer industry is one that is growing so fast that it does resemble a startup at many times because of the kind of growth capital and growth in general that they need to go through. And so we actually pulled them in and said, let's have conversations about how to grow a craft beverage company. And now we still have that. And it's not just beer, it's actually craft juice, craft kombucha, wine, distilling. It's all become a really strong industry in San Diego. And so we've kept that as part of a vein, and that pulls in a whole new audience as well. And we've also pulled in more of the biotech community too. Even though that's a bit more mature industry in San Diego for us, there still is the aspect of how do you start a biotech company if you've never done it before? And that's the same education around entrepreneurship that doesn't need to be in a box separate from tech. It can be biotech, it can be anything too.

So for us, it's just like leaning.

In and saying, what are San Diego's industries? Who else should be here at the table learning while we're putting out this content? And then, like I mentioned, the employee pool adding in kind of skill set. Enrichment as well has helped out a lot. But honestly, our biggest driver that helped us grow was hiring our very first executive director a year ago. Just having the funds to do that was a big deal because the volunteers could finally look and say, here's someone to answer to. Here's someone who's documenting our processes and will hold on to these processes for next year. And so I would say we're still in the early stages of seeing what that did. But so far we've seen so many of our organizers from the 2019 conference last May, say, next day, say, let's start working on 2020, which we've never had before. Usually it's like, I'll see you in six months, but really never see you again.

Yeah, super familiar with that cycle.

Yeah, it's a consistency piece.

Right.

That people need to feel familiar with for sure.

How was that executive director funded?

So we are entirely funded through the.

Sponsorship of our conference, to be honest. And so we make some money off of the conference itself from ticket sales. We raise money by sponsors, which are inevitably. Most of our sponsors are local tech companies who want to differentiate their brand at the conference and hire talent, as well as say, here's our founding story and really tell their own story too. So what's really cool is how much it's tech company funded. So our it was funded through extra funds we had. At the end of the conference in 2018, we did start applying for grants. And so we got city and county grants in 2018, which was a big deal for us. We were a nonprofit, so we were.

Able to do that, but we didn't.

Took us two years to even realize how to. How to apply for grants. And even one thing we really learned is because we're conference driven, the grants are usually around demographics of your attendees and your audience. And we realized, oh, we weren't collecting a lot of that data. We need to. So we learned that aspect, you know, survey people before and after. Well, who attended and who didn't attend, who came last year and why didn't they come this year? Those are really interesting data points for us. And that's enabled us to put that data back into grants that, you know, city governments are proud to say, hey, we're supporting entrepreneurship and innovation in our city. And so, yeah, I think we're 30% funded now through local grants on top of our conference revenues. And so for us, we're actually hiring a new executive director now. We may have burned out our first one. And that's a good learning point for us as well. He's still around helping us out. But yeah, we are looking for a new executive director. Right now we've got 700 plus applications that came in, which is awesome. In a month.

Wow.

And we're in the interview process. What's really cool this time around though, is that a lot of the volunteers, the leading volunteers who organize this year's conference are around and they're playing a bigger part in interviewing and saying, hey, maybe, maybe I want to lead, take this role too. Which we didn't have before. We kind of just threw out a job wreck and just let random jobs applications come in. This time we are obviously we're showing there's a lot more interest because we showed one. Here's what the role is. Someone did it, they did it successfully. Here's what you could do differently and take us to the next level. Too.

So I think I heard 3000 to 3500 attendees. 300 events?

Yep. Panels.

Mostly panels and like individual speakers.

How big would you estimate the volunteer pool to be for an event?

So leading up to it, probably 25.

To 50 really key core volunteers that are working on different veins of this, whether they're working on the content curation, so planning the tracks of the conference and organizing that application series. Then there's a whole operations team that are working on venues, food, ticketing, pricing, a sponsorship team and a marketing team too. So that's a core 25 to 50 that are now, I used to say six months a year, but year round and then week of, and kind of leading up a few weeks before it elevates to a few hundred kind of day of volunteers that help us start printing name badges, checking people in orienting people where to go, things like that. What about Columbus? Is it similar in volunteer size to put on an event like that?

Definitely. In terms of like key organizers, I think the team has. We went through a little bit of a wave of expand and contract a little bit lately because we had a similar six month burnout cycle of the organizing team. We've never had. We never had an executive director. We started out of. We are. Columbus is one of the pilot cities for Startup Week globally, where we had Chase as a national sponsor. Chase no longer is a sponsor of Startup Week at the national level. And so this year we also lost quite a bit of funding that we didn't compensate for. So a little bit of a down year in terms of attendees and momentum. And so I've personally been trying to get a little bit more involved for the coming year of saying, okay, let's lift this back up because it is such an important part of the community and what's happening here.

Yeah, yeah, I can totally relate to that.

We had a. I would say actually.

2018 was a bigger year in terms of total attendance size for us. And so after this year we looked at, you know, okay, we were down a little bit on attendance, but actually ticket revenue was up. We went a little higher on price tickets.

This is the first year we had tickets priced. We had the Chase funding. Did you guys have Chase funding? Initially I thought you did, but maybe, maybe I'm thinking of Tampa Bay. That allowed us to make the event free, which was great for getting the community to come out and having a lot of people in the seats. This year we had to do ticket sales to make the conference work. I don't think there's a problem with that it's just the first year we had to do it and with a lag in marketing, plus now the added barrier of ticket sales. I did a talk and it was just not very well attended. And I thought, man, this is, this is a bummer, you know, to the point where now I'm trying to get back off the sidelines and say, okay, I took a couple years off because I was in that group of people that got burned out after six months. Let's, let's try to pick this back up. We're going a little bit long here. So I want to ask one more question about San Diego. What is one of the most misunderstood or just not known aspects of the San Diego tech community?

It's hard to ask a San Diego that, right. We're in it every day. But as I've traveled around, I think there's two veins of that. So a lot of people know San Diego as like a vacation hub. People come to play and then they leave or they came for a conference at our conference center, maybe Comic Con, and they left. So one is that there is a vibrant tech community here. There are people who move here for life, who work on technology and not just service the tourists and vacation industry, people who dive a little bit deeper than that, usually know, who maybe know like the industries. Think of San Diego as just a defense and biotech town. And so I would say, I would push back and say we are just as much software and hardware driven. A lot of the biotech talent has come over to your consumer or at least your commercial hardware world as well too. And capital now is spilling into both worlds where you can say big bio, you're using these kind of genomic interpretations, but you're using data science behind it, which is the same data science that's powering any of your apps. So I think those are some misnomers that I hope we get the word out that there is a vibrant technology, tech and software community in San Diego too.

If listeners after the show want to learn more about you or fresh brewed tech or check out your podcast, Tacos and Tech, where should they go?

Start on Twitter. That's where we're most active. Eelbloom eshbrewedtech is where you can really find a lot of that info. Artupsd another place to find out about more of the events that are happening, networking events and the conference itself. And we would love to host you in our city as well. Come out next May. Late May 26th through the 30th is Startup Week 2020 and we would absolutely love to have anyone from anywhere in the world come join us, including you.

Hey, listener, have you ever wanted to get a message in front of the Upside audience but weren't sure how to sponsor this show or weren't able to do a long term sponsorship? Well, now you can just go to Upside FM Classifieds and let our audience know anything that's going on in your world, whether it's an event, an application, a special coupon or deal, or just letting them know who you are, what your company does. All you have to do is go to Upside FM Classifieds and you can place an ad on this show. That's Upside FM Classifieds.

All right, Jay, we just spoke with Neil from San Diego and this deal memo, or this outro, this debrief, if you will, is going to be a little bit different because it's going to be the Jay Clouse Show. You're going to run this one for us and let me know what you guys talked about. I didn't get a chance to sit down the interview and I have not had a chance to listen yet.

Isn't it always the J. Claus Show?

I think it's called Upside, Jay, you egomaniac.

Unique New York. The arsonist has oddly shaped feet. The human torch was denied a bank load. How now, brown cow Enjoyed this conversation with Neil and my hottest of takes is that he laid to rest the ancient question. It is San Diegans, according to Neil in the way that he introduces the podcast. San Diegans, not San Diegons, not San Diego, ins San Diegans. And now we know.

I said Columbusians, I think on a trip to Louisville with the Create Columbus Commission and people snapped back saying that's not what it is. And then no one settled on what it actually is. So I think a lot of cities have this problem.

Yeah, Columbus, Onions. It's not Colombians. That would be conflicting. Anyway, I really enjoyed this conversation because other than the fact of Neil is running an interesting company here that in a lot of ways has parallels to what we're doing at Upside, just with a very geographic focus, it's encouraging to see somebody create a modern media company that seems to be working and not only working financially in a self sustaining way, but one that serves a community and doesn't just thrive off of anger and intense reactions. You know, most. And I'm talking about just like most media, most media is incentivized to evoke negative reactions and fear in a lot of ways and get you to click and learn because of that. But Everything that Neil's doing is for the benefit of the San Diego ecosystem and it's working, which I think is just very encouraging for a future of journalism.

Yeah, I think making people all happy and excited and optimistic is just a better long term play. Maybe not as good short term, but in the long term I think that's what you want.

I. I still question and maybe having a media company is the answer. I question how communities can keep guys like Neil happy and committed and doing that work over the long term. You know, like having somebody like Neil who's documenting this and who has such historical context and will have so much historical context to the ecosystem. A lot of times those people finally get burned out and move on to other places. Maybe being in charge of a media company that sustains and compensates you for that effort is one of the solutions for getting those community builders to stick around and continue building the community. I'm not sure, but he mentioned that he has a playbook to help move this model into other cities, which is great. The question is, does he build his company into all those cities himself for him or kind of open source it?

Are you seeing this as an extension of your idea for community based platform?

Maybe. I think he has a good ethos for it. But for the listener who may not be familiar with the article I wrote in the update issue one, we spoke with Stephanie Manning of Lair Hippo who informed me anyway of what a platform role inside of a venture firm looks like. And that immediately started connecting dots for me of why can't the community builders be running a quote unquote platform role in their communities and connect to each other and something like this seems to have infrastructure that might lend to that. I don't know, but it's a really inspiring starting point. It's great to hear. He and I geeked out on Startup San Diego and their San Diego Startup Week that they've been running for several years now. That was at the end of the interview and that was really fascinating for me to hear how much growth they've seen because these Startup Startup Week events are amazing resources, awesome things to run for your community and have such a high rate of burnout for the volunteers running it, which he addressed and they've also experienced but have gotten beyond it was. It was very much like therapy for me, listening through like the problems that they faced and how they addressed it, how they overcame it and really found a model to staff and executive director who can be in charge of it, which seems to be a turning point for so many Nonprofits is just getting the funding to staff and executive director paying somebody to make it their full time focus to make this thing awesome. Because the risk you run, like he said, you often have these events that are coordinated by volunteers. They're huge. Those volunteers are just like pouring everything they have into it for a matter of a couple of months. They get burned out. They don't want to start over for the next year for another like three to six months after it ends. And by that time you're behind the ball again already. So I hope the community builders listening to this, who may volunteer and run events in their local communities, got the sense that, okay, let's start the cycle early. Even if it is painful in year one because we just finished, or year two because we just finished year one. It can really make a difference for succession, planning and the success of those events.

So leaving this interview Jay, are you more or less bullish on the San Diego ecosystem than when you came in?

Of course I'm more bullish just because I have more information. I knew almost nothing about San Diego other than some of the beach towns that are along the coast there. A geographical interest to me was that it's a one hour flight to San Francisco from San diego, but a 3 hour drive to LA. Really interesting how logistics and travel times like that and seemingly close cities actually play out and what that means for those cities. He also talked about the industries of note in San Diego, which are defense, telecommunications and cybersecurity. Unique industries that we haven't crossed a lot of on the podcast, growing out of the Naval Innovation Labs there. So I think that's a really big benefit for the San Diego community because a lot of communities we talk to are like, yeah, we do enterprise really well. We do financial services, healthcare. There's a handful of those now. So how do you stand out as the community for that? And maybe you don't have to, but I at least have not heard as much in the realm of defense, telecommunications or cybersecurity.

Sounds very similar to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. If you're familiar with the Silicon Valley startup story, which happens in the 60s, it was almost all out of the military industrial complex, defense and need for information transfer and the silicon chips that were being produced there. So very similar kind of startup industry in San Diego as the Bay Area.

Well, dear listener, I'd love to hear what you think about this interview or what you thought during the interview. And so as always you can tweet at us Upside FM or email us helloupside fm. We'd love to hear from you. Until then, we'll talk to you next week. That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's guest.

Thanks for watching.

So shoot us an emailupside FM or find us on Twitter psidefm. We'll be back here next week at the same time talking to another founder in our quest to find Upside outside of Silicon Valley. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please email us or find us on Twitter and let us know. And if you love our show, please leave us a review on itunes. That goes a long way in helping us spread the word and continue to help bring high quality guests yes to the show. Eric and I decided there are a couple things we wanted to share with you at the end of the podcast and so here we go. Eric Hornung and Jake Lasse are the founding parties of the Upside Podcast at the time of this recording. We do not own equity or other financial interest in the companies which appear on this show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinions of Duff and Phelps LLC and its affiliates on your collective LLC and its affiliates or any entity which employ us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. We have not considered your specific financial situation nor provided any investment advice on this show. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you next week. Keep on Find a way get in on.