Digitizing the Meal Prep Industry with Ted Stearns

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

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

Startups get the party. Startups get the.

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

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Thanks to our friends at Cox Business for being an instrumental resource to our startup and tech community here in San Diego. As a partner in San Diego Startup Week, quick pitch and top tech awards, Cox Business has helped our ecosystem grow into the community it is today.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am your host, Neil Bloom, and I am joined by Ted Sterns, CEO of Mealogix. Ted, thanks for being on the pod.

Neil, thanks for having me. I've been a follower for some time. Really interesting to hear about your relationship with Michael, which we can get into, but love the fact that you brought him into Techcoast Angels. Michael sits on the board with Neologics, as you know. And so I guess I have you to thank you for, Michael. So, yes, hats off to you. Thank you.

Thanks. Yeah, that's Michael Weissman, Ed tech entrepreneur turned angel investor at Techcoast Angels. We'll make sure he gets a shout out here. We can talk all about him. Be great because he's not here to retort.

He would love that.

No, but we're excited to talk tacos with a food tech company. You know? How about that?

I like that. Well, you know, yeah, that's pretty serendipitous. I'm Sicilian, so there's not a food that I don't like. So we can actually talk about tacos for the next 60 minutes if we want.

I'm okay with that. By the time this episode goes out, we will have actually released the taco database, which has every guest we've ever interviewed their favorite taco spot. And hopefully we'll have mapped it, too. So you can kind of see who are the winners. We'll have a little leaderboard. Who are the winners in San Diego, which should be kind of fun.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's start it off. What's your favorite?

You know, that's like asking like your favorite child.

Oh, that's easy.

I've got a taco for every occasion. All right, so if it's late at night, you know, Roberto's. There's always a Roberto's in Stone's Throw, that's for sure. If it's during the day, I like something with a view. And so I've enjoyed bull taco in the past up in Encinitas.

Also.

Roberto's in Del Mar is another good one. And actually the taco stand in downtown over by, I think your office, is.

A fan favorite for sure. Right across the street from me. Yeah, I probably go there once a week.

How about you?

Ooh, for me? Well, I haven't met a taco that I don't like for the most part. I would have to say Mitch's Point Loma. Have you been there?

No, but it's been mentioned a few times. It's on the list.

Yeah. The place, you know, older than dirt, I think. The boats go out, they pick up the seafood, they pick up the fish. They're out fishing all day, they come back, they unload the fish, and bam, you've got fresh caught fish for the tacos right there. It's a staple. It's probably been there for 50, 60 years. I would think so.

Wow. Gotta check it out. Well, I love that we've started the episode backwards. We've asked the last question first, so maybe we should do the whole episode backwards. Right. I'm just kidding. Do you want to give us a quick, like, what is Mealogix? And then we'll dive real deep into kind of its founding story later, the big question.

Mealogix. Yes. Well, not too long ago, we started to see that the Meal prep industry was growing. And you think of meal prep, you think of HelloFresh, freshly blue apron companies like that, companies that will cook food, package the food and deliver those meals to the doorstep of consumers. Those are the big national companies. What a lot of people don't know is that Today there's about 33 million consumers that are currently buying pre made meals. But if you look at those national brands that I mentioned, they only have about 6 million 7 million customers. So the question is, where are the other 25, 26 million consumers getting their meals from if they're not getting it from HelloFresh and the rest of them? And the answer is they're buying their meals from the independently owned and operated meal prep companies. And here in San Diego, we've got about 230 meal prep companies. You've got a whole handful of them that have websites and then you've got a plethora of them that sell their meals just through Instagram. So what meal logics, what we do is that we create software that runs their business, their e commerce and then all of their backend operations. Because without us, they're using scratch sheets of paper and pencils and stone tablets and chisels to manage their business. And that's not an exaggeration. And so our platform, think of it as Shopify for their e commerce and then all of their backend processes like creation of the recipes, the shopping lists, the purchasing of the ingredients, the prep list, everything. So we take what normally would take them about 25 hours to do and we, we digitize everything with our software and narrow it down to, to just 15 minutes, 20 minutes. So yeah, very simplistically what we do is we make the lives of the meal prep owners, we make their lives easier.

Love it. I love helping especially other entrepreneurs really is what you're doing. You know, you're seeing these entrepreneurs, these coaches, these Instagram influencers. Build a better business, right, Neil, you nailed it.

Yeah. So we view the meal prep owners as entrepreneurs. And you've been an entrepreneur. I've been an entrepreneur. And being an entrepreneur, guess what? It's not easy. Think about the first company that you started or even the second company that you started. I remember back in, it was one of my first companies. I lived downtown, it was 3 o' clock in the morning. I was laying in my bed and I woke up and I could not breathe. I had so much stress, so much anxiety starting this company. And as an entrepreneur you go through those things. You don't lack passion, you don't Lack drive, you don't like any of those things. And sometimes what does happen is that the, the stress of carrying the weight of the company, that can be overwhelming. And so the lens that we look at the world with Mealogic is that we see all of our customers, all the meal prep owners, as entrepreneurs. So if they have drive, if they have passion, if they have purpose, what they don't have are the right tools. So that's why I say our goal at the very core, the mission that we have is to make their lives easier. And we can do that. And we're doing it every single day.

I love that so much. And I think our audience can definitely relate to that. For sure, carrying the weight on your shoulders, just trying to move a boulder uphill, but right there is a resource to grab onto. So sounds like, though you've done this a few times, how did you find your entrepreneurial journey? Like, what actually led you to jump off the cliff the first time?

I had supportive parents when I was a kid. Well, I wanted to buy things. And so when I was 10 years old, 13 years old, my parents weren't giving me money. And so they said, hey, you get a paper route or hey, mow the lawn. And so really, if I look back, I didn't know it at the time. I probably didn't even understand the word entrepreneur, you know, when I was 8 or 9 or 10 years old. But certainly looking back, I was very entrepreneurial at a young age. So I, yes, I was that kid that had multiple paper routes. I was that kid that had a lawnmower and an edger and would go around, drop off flyers at my, my neighbor's house to mow their lawn. You know, with that, Yes, I had parents that supported me as an entrepreneur. So that's kind of where it started. And I found myself just starting little side hustles and side businesses. And then I went to military school. Nothing entrepreneurial about going to military school. It was quite the contrary. Right. You, there's systems and processes in place. And I realized one thing. I realized that I shouldn't go into the military because I broke all the rules. So had I gone into the military after military prep school, I would have been court martialed in about 3Ns. So I did learn that going to military school, that I was not cut out to be in the military. We, as entrepreneurs, we'd like to shatter the status quo. We like to make our own rules. We don't like to be told what to do. And to the contrary, we like to create our own reality in our own world. And so that was the one thing that I learned at military academy. But nonetheless, I got out of school and then the capital markets captured me. Capitalism in general, free enterprise. And so I started working in the capital markets and became a financial advisor. I did my internship at A.G. edwards and then Merrill lynch after that was a financial advisor with them. So that gave me a love for the capital markets. That gave me a love to be able to see that you can take something in the idea, a company that is just starting out and, and then over the course of 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, they can be multibillion dollar companies. And so I realized that I did not want to, I wasn't the type of guy that I wanted to use my muscles to, to make a living. I wanted to use my, you know, the intellect that, that I had to, to do it. So that gave me an appreciation for taking something very small and seeing how if you're on the right side of it, it could become something very big. So my clients at the time were, if you take a look at America, the vast majority of multimillionaires or billionaires, the way that they make most of their money is through starting companies and being able to participate in the equity of that company. So that gave me an appreciation for it. And so it was probably 2006, 2007, I started my first company and I was on the right side of it and it did pretty well. And so very quickly revenue ramped up. I didn't know how to build a company and Neil, I didn't know anything about leadership really. I realized a couple big things and that is if you've got the courage and the guts and the bravery to take an idea and to execute on it that you can be right. So I was really good at that, but I was really poor at leadership at that time and I realized that yes, you can have a great company, you can have a great idea, you can motivate people, but if you lack that leadership quality, then everything can fall apart. And so the company did well, but it didn't do as well as it could could have. I was young at, at that time, you know, 25ish and I, and the leadership qualities is something that I lacked.

Interesting. Let me challenge you on the military thing where maybe you actually learned a few more things than you're giving yourself credit. As entrepreneurs, while we like to be free spirited and be out and creative, we actually, our goal is to productize and build playbooks for our team. To execute on.

Right.

And our goal is to figure out the most efficient process to meet our customers needs. And so maybe you learned that from military school of how to build a playbook to hand to someone else so that it frees up your time to go think of the next creative thing. Does that resonate at all?

Yeah, exactly. So the operative thing that you had said is that we do like to create our own playbook. We don't like to be handed somebody else's playbook. And especially if you are the personality profile that I am, like an entj, we always look for inefficiencies and we can totally spot inefficiencies with other playbooks. But if we have to follow their playbook, then we're on a path to being very unhappy. And everybody in this world, I think is trying to or seeking to be happy. At least for me, the way that I do that is really creating my own playbook.

Totally. But it actually tees up a really interesting piece around talent, which is people who do do well in the military. Following playbooks make for great executors of our playbooks that we come up with, which luckily we happen to have some great military talent here in San Diego. So shout out for that.

Absolutely. Especially with Memorial Day coming up.

Absolutely. So take us through. I want to find out how you got into the meal prep path. Were you a meal prepper?

It's an interesting story. So, okay, think of it this way. You and I probably think alike in terms of we're open to opportunity, we're not close minded. Right. One of the biggest things about entrepreneurs is that we are optimists. Hopefully we know that we don't know everything out there. We're very open to ideas. And so the way that my mind just operates now is that I'm very open and I look for opportunities. I have that intent. Every morning I wake up really early. I'm up at 3, 45, 4, 15. And I go through my morning ritual. My morning ritual is, yes, I meditate, I go through my breathing exercises, I go through my visualization. And then I go through a period in the morning where I. I ask the universe to give me different opportunities and they just come. And so I've operated like that ever since I saw the movie the Secret. And I know that sounds pretty cliche, right. But the Law of Attraction with the Secret, when it came out 15, 18 years ago, that was a game changer for me. That led me to reading the book by Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. And so the Methods behind the law of attraction are that we've got to have a very open mind. And so the way that I did it is that you had asked if I was into meal prep. And to a certain extent, yes, at that time I did a lot of triathlons. And so as a part of triathlons, yes, you are training all the time. And so having those pre made meals, that's important. So yes, I was a customer of meal prep, but I was dating this girl and her name was Karen. A shout out to Karen in Point Loma and she was a fitness competitor and she was on the circuit, but she also had a meal prep company. And she had had the meal prep company at that time for about three years. Yeah, about three years. And that was about a year and a half, two years ago. And so she was doing really pretty well. And so one day I went over to her house. Neil, check this out. I walk into her house in Point Loma and I'm a clean freak. Like, if you walk into my place, it's pretty clean. I walked into her place, she had paperwork all over the place, no exaggeration, she had paperwork on the ground, on the sofa, on the dining room table, on the mantel, everything. So I walk in and my skin is just creeping. And I'm like, Karen, what is this? What are you doing? She's like, this is my office. This is how I track my clients. I said, okay, you've got a meal prep company. There's got to be software where you can manage your customers and your orders and deliveries. She's like, no, there's not. I've looked. It's like, no way. Like, this is what, 2019, there's gotta be software for it. And so I challenged her on it and she was adamant and she said no. So later on that evening, went home, hopped on Google, did some searches, meal prep software, some derivation of meal prep software. Nothing was out there. And so I was absolutely shocked that nobody had created software for meal prep. So I talked to a couple of the places, Anthony with the Lean machine. I talked to Teresa, who owns a meal prep company, there was one other that I talked to. And I asked them, look, how do you run your business? What kind of software do you use? And it was either I use a sheet of paper and a pencil and a day planner, or I think Anthony had said that he uses a spreadsheet. And he was like, the, the, he was a sophisticated one. And I was shocked by it. And so I started to think through, okay, if these are the Pain points of a meal prep owner. How can we solve this? Obviously, software can solve those things. So I came in with a very open mind and said, look, just a blank sheet of paper. If we were to create a solution, what would it look like? So I started to build the architecture for it. And. And at that point, you know, it was just an idea. It was. It was so fragile at that point that I started talking to the meal prep owners and said, look, I understand. This is what I understand your problems to be. These five major problems that you have. If we were to build a solution that did this, this, this and this, would it be something that you would buy and would you pay for it? And so the resounding answer was yes. And so at that point, I think I went out, raised some capital, just a small little round, and built the prototype. And Neil, the prototype was. It was a pig with lipstick at that point. And I went out to the meal prep companies and said, look, this is how it would work. If we made this, would you buy it? And I think I called in total 122 meal prep owners and I pitched them. It was a cold call. I'd get them on the phone, hey, this is Ted. I don't even think I had a name for the company at that time. This is Ted in San Diego building software for the meal prep industry. You got 60 seconds, I'd love to tell you more. Time and time again, they were saying, yes, that gave me market validation. We proved out our assumption at that point, or my assumption at that point. So went back to the investors and said, look, These are the KPIs. This is the interest that we have. Let's go ahead, let's build this thing. It was a seed round raised. I think it was 1.1 million, oversubscribed, on a convertible note. And then we started building the software and we built it. We launched it in August of last year. Was version one of the software. We only had room for 30 customers on the platform. We thought it was going to take about 90 days to acquire the 30 customers. And I think we acquired the 30 customers in 27 days, sold out. We only had room for 30. We built a wait list of more than 400 customers on the platform. And the version 1.0, Neil, was buggy. It was buggy. It was so not user friendly. It looked like it was built back in the 1990s, but they liked it a lot. And so we went back to the investors after that and said, look, this is what we've built. This is the reaction that we're getting, this is our revenue, this is our customer base. And that's when I opened up the pre Series A round and then raised some capital on that note. And it was definitely not a straight line from A to B. We have sorted stories just like every other founder.

Oh I'm sure, I'm sure. Lots of pivots even just in two times in a day. Right. The roller coaster ride.

Oh yeah, yeah. So many setbacks. Unbelievable.

Well, lucky enough, I'm happy to be involved as an investor through Teco's Angels. As we mentioned. Michael Weissman, so thrilled to be along for the ride with you.

Thank you very much. We appreciate your support.

Yeah, no, we're absolutely thrilled. And take us through a little bit of. Not necessarily the pivots, but what have you heard from original customers, the ones you know, the Teresa's and others to now, like what's the difference that they're seeing and feeling? I'm guessing they didn't even picture some of the features and some of that, that, that you were building out and helping them and really more like where are their businesses gone because of your software. I'd love to hear some of the success stories around that.

Yeah. If we take a step back, what's really interesting about the meal prep space is that when you think of a meal prep owner, meal prep founder, these are individuals that chances are it is their very first company that they've started and they didn't, most of them certainly did not go to MIT Sloan to get their mba. These are individuals that kind of fell into the industry. And so then all of a sudden what's happening is that they start their company with three customers or five customers. And it's a beautiful story because they start with five customers and then three months later they've got 15 and then six months later, oh my gosh, they've got 50 customers and before you know it, they're making $100,000 and then 200,000 then 300,000. So it is, it is. The average meal prep company generates about $270,000 a year in rev. And they, it may just be them or maybe they have three employees, part time employees. And so they're doing really well. And they're doing really well using processes again that you and I would have used back in the 80s or 90s. I'm not sure how old you are.

I'm going to go with 90s. We'll leave it.

Okay, 90s. So it's really, it's great to see that in their first company or their second company, they could do so well. Now what our platform does is that it allows them to scale even faster and they're working long hours and so don't think that this is part time for them. When they've got even as little as 50 customers, they're putting in a full, full week and they may be working six days or even seven days. And so what our software allows them to do is truly, and I, I think I mentioned this early on, but what would normally take them about 30 hours to do in a week, we've condensed that to 30 minutes or even, sometimes even less than that. So what does that allow them to do? That if they've got an extra 25 hours out of their week, which is extremely realistic, then they can start to market themselves. They can go out to the, they can put partnerships together, they can go out to the CrossFit gyms, they can go out to the hospitals and start to provide meals to the, to, to the workers out there. So it really does free up their time so they can actually grow their business and scale their business more better and we reduce their cost quite a bit as well. With all the partnerships that we've put.

Together, that's pretty incredible. Are you physically tracking like time given back to them and, or just increase in revenue and that kind of, Are you able to see those kinds of stats on your own internal dashboard?

Yeah, we are now. So what we did is that when we launched our beta, our version 1.0 back in August, we essentially we opened it, we thought it was going to be open for about three months, but we got all the customers for the most part that we needed. So we closed it and then we serviced those customers. But version 1.0 of the platform was not designed to scale. And so what we did is when we raised the additional round of capital, close to the $2 million that we just raised, we started building version 2.0, 2.0 of the platform. So think of the version 2.0, that's the platform that allows us to scale, that allows us to go international as well, that allows us to move into different verticals. So right around the corner we are actually launching version 2.0 of the platform. So we've been building it ever since about February. We've got about 15 developers, full time developers working on it stateside. And now given that the launch is right around the corner in July, I've built out all the leadership team, sales team, success management team, everything that's necessary for us to grow. So July is actually going to be a big month for us because we've got a lot of customers that we're onboarding. We're going to be launching version 2.0 to the masses and I think we're going to knock it out of the park with it. We're pretty excited about it. It's neat to have brand new salesmen that just get on the phone and they start to make the outbound calls to the meal prep companies. And the meal prep companies love it. And so it's great. On the, you know, the very first day that your salesmen jump on the phone, they start to make sales and they know that they're providing a product to the meal prep owners that is, that, that is of high value. Yep.

I can only imagine. And because you've got a, an audience that you say maybe first time entrepreneurs, there's a lot of other pieces that you can provide them with help as well too. I've got to imagine add ons other features like what's kind of on the horizon for that.

So if we think of meal logics, let me take one step back. The meal prep sector employs about 300, 350,000 people in the U.S. however, there's no governing body, there's no association, there's no industry events. There's nothing like that. Like if I'm a plumber, Neil, if I'm a plumber, there's probably three or four or five different national associations that I can join. However, if I'm a meal prep owner or work for a meal prep company, there's no association out there. There's no online go to entity for data or for best practices or a knowledge base. So if we think that yes, obviously meal logics can create incredible technology that makes the lives of the meal prep owner much easier. But we know that's a given, we can do that. Now what we're going to create is the overarching umbrella for the industry which is the one go to place for all things meal prep, for data, for best practices, for the academy. Oh, this is interesting. So what we're going to launch also in July is what's called the Meal Prep Academy. And so what's awesome about meal prep, starting a meal prep business is that it is completely different than starting a restaurant. What I mean by that is that I think here in the US the average cost to start a restaurant is about $280,000 and it takes about eight to ten months to start a restaurant. And then once you launch that restaurant, it's brick and Mortar, you've got employees, you've got obviously high cost. And then unfortunately, survival rate for restaurants isn't too high. That is completely different than a meal prep business. Most meal prep owners that we talk to, and this is after talking to more than a thousand, most meal prep companies start out of their kitchen and out of their apartment kitchen or their home kitchen, or if they're living at home with their parents, their parents kitchen. And so most meal prep companies start with just a couple hundred dollars. And it doesn't take eight months to start a meal prep business like a restaurant. They can start it in a week. So what we found is that what if we developed a blueprint that showed an individual how to start, launch and grow their meal prep business? So what if we created an online elearning platform that showed an entrepreneur how to go from absolutely nothing and show them pretty much a foolproof way how to start, launch and grow their meal prep business? And so after talking to many, many meal prep businesses, what we started to do was build the curriculum and understand what worked for them were the best practices. Because no one in the industry is better positioned than to understand what are the best practices of a meal prep owner than meal logics. We know what works and we know what doesn't work. And so we started to get real serious about it and started to talk to different entrepreneurs and to do the market analysis to determine if we created a e learning platform that showed individuals how to do those things, would it be something that could be marketed? And the answer was yes. And so what we're launching in July as well is the Meal Prep Academy. And it's a beautiful online course that shows that individual that is an entrepreneur. And the thing about where we are in America today is that what do we have? We've got 8 million, 9 million, 10 million consumers that are currently unemployed. We've got a lot of consumers that work for restaurants, that no longer work for restaurants. We've got 27 million Americans that call themselves entrepreneurs. That's incredible. That's the largest number of entrepreneurs that we've ever had, 27 million. So we believe that if we made it really easy for an entrepreneur to start and launch and grow their meal prep business, they'll do it. So that's one of the ways actually that we're expanding the market because in America right Now there's about 30,000 independently owned and operated meal prep businesses, but again, there's 27 million entrepreneurs. So we believe that there's going to be, albeit it could be a small percentage of the 27 million. But there's going to be some that raise their hand that say, you know what, Yes, I can start my own meal prep business. And with Neologix and with their online guided courses, that shows me everything that we need or everything I need to do it, that they'll do it and we can make them successful. So you started off the conversation about talking about entrepreneurs, right? You're an entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur, we love entrepreneurs and so how can we position them for success? And we feel that this is one of the ways that we can do that.

Love that. So inspiring, empowering. Congrats on that, on that long term vision. We got to now find who, we got to make our list with you. Who of all the meal preppers makes the best tacos for meal prep so that we can highlight them and maybe have them back on the show of the best taco meal prep entrepreneurs.

Oh, you know what? I know exactly because I've had them. Mikayla. And she's here in San Diego and she's a hustler and she's an entrepreneur. She started her business five years ago, probably five or six years ago. And I would imagine that some of your listeners actually buy from Mikayla. She creates some pretty incredible recipes. And so maybe six months ago she was making tacos and we were gobbling those up.

That's awesome. I'd love to ask you a little about the industry. Not just meal prep, but the rise of ghost kitchens. Right. Obviously we saw the rise of Blue Apron and all those too. What has Covid done done during all this? Because I've got to also imagine cleanliness all of a sudden takes into factor at a different level too. If you're making this in your kitchen. What has the last year been like for meal preppers and just the food delivery kind of industry in general?

It's interesting how some industries flourish during a pandemic like this. It just so happened that meal prep is definitely one of those sectors that, that saw an incredible growth during this time. Because when you think about back in March, April, May of last year, we were scared to go to the grocery store, we couldn't go to the restaurants anymore. And so those consumers that were buying pre made meals actually started to buy more pre made meals. And then you had companies like the Hellofresh and Freshly that started a market increase their marketing spend, advertising spend and so that made more consumers more aware of meal prep. And so by and large the vast majority of the industry, our customers saw at least 100% growth in their business and it was great for them. And yes, there were some that had a difficult time that didn't know how to market and grow during this time. But there were upwards of probably 85% of our customers that saw substantial growth in the industry. Prior to Covid, There was about 23 million consumers. There were about 23 million consumers that were buying pre made meals. Latest report that just came out from Nielsen puts it at about 33 million. So we saw close to what is that? Not too good in math, but maybe an 80% increase in the amount of consumers. So the question is, will the habits of these consumers continue and will these meal prep companies keep them as clients? And certainly some of the habits of the consumer have been cemented in their mind that yes, meal prep is convenient, it's healthy, it's even cost effective. And so I think by and large the industry believes that this growth that we saw, certainly we will, we won't see the 300% or 200% growth that we saw in the past year or two years, but the market is expected to grow from the 33 million consumers to about 50 million consumers just over, not the next 15 years or the next 10 years, but just over the next five years. It's supposed to go from about 33 million to about 50 million. So that's still substantial growth. But here's the thing. The open, this growth that we're seeing here in the US is also being seen international. So when we see this market growing at 100% or 200% per year, guess what, what's happening in South America? They're experiencing the same growth in the uk, in the Ukraine, in Russia, in Eastern Europe. And so for us, our path and our trajectory and what we see for growth is not only are we looking at capturing the US markets, but in some of the overseas markets as well. And later on this year when we open up the Series A, a large portion of that capital that we're going to be raising is going to be for international growth.

Got it. That's fantastic. Take us home with a little local perspective. You know, you've built a few different companies and a few different industries in San Diego. You know, you've been in the finance space, insurance space. What's the tech community like here from your perspective for hiring talent and finding the right people to plug in, you know, after you raise these, these rounds.

We've actually find it challenging to, to find the right talent in, in California. And that's, I think for a couple different reasons we've Got a lot of good talent in Cal, in San Diego. And then we've got a lot, a lot of much larger companies than Neologics, where these, these engineers, developers, designers hang their hats. And so how do we make, how do we make it attractive for a developer, a good, smart developer, to come on over to miologics? And it comes down to partly my job is that I need to be able to articulate the vision to them. I need to get them excited, motivated, inspire them. And so what they may lack at nothing against some of the larger corporations out there, but what they may lack is that feeling that they can make an impact in the company. Right. They may not even understand the overall vision of that large corporation that they're with. However, a smaller company like Miologics, they can be impactful. Right. The developers that we have, they're instrumental, integral into building our platform. And so can they make an impact on the company? Absolutely. Can I, Can I sell them on the vision, what my vision is? Yeah. And so part of the job is on the founder, the CEO, to paint that vision. So we do that. What we also do at Meal Logics is that every single one of our employees has stock options. And that's something that I'm fervent about. I want them to be owners in the company. I want them to profit when Meal Logic gets acquired down the road. Why? Because they probably, if they spend five years with me, six years with me, three years, 10 years with me, I want to make sure that it can make a material impact on their life. Right. You've been through an acquisition and you can see what it can do to somebody. So can they make a good amount of money working for a large corporation? Yeah. But can they still have a very good salary and participate in stock options and walk away from their time with Mealogix having a good amount of capital, that can really change the direction of their life. Yeah, they can. And so we have that at our disposal. So in answer to your question, it's more of a challenge for us to hire that top talent. We've been able to do it, and I think we've been able to do it because of some of those things that I mentioned.

Yeah, it's all part of the startup game that you got to work that much harder to catch up to the incumbents. Right. But you have a different story to tell. You're moving faster, more nimbly, and you're making an impact. And obviously you've inspired me and our audience in the entrepreneurs that you want to empower and everyone. So congrats on that, Ted, and it's a real pleasure to have you on the podcast to tell the story. Thank you.

Hey, well, thank you. This whatever time we had, it went by pretty fast. Neil, thanks so much. I love what you're doing for San Diego. We don't have that in San Diego. Right. And you're a strong advocate for us. So from one entrepreneur to another, love what you're doing. And so next, steak dinner and bourbon is on me, my friend.

I love it. Likewise. Looking forward to that. Well, thanks, Ted. Appreciate it. Thanks for being on the pod.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tex podcast with Neil Bloom. 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 coworking in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eobloom as well as Fresh brewed tech and tacos in Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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