Doug Winter - CEO & Founder of Seismic

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast, where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together we're going to uncover what technology San Diegans are creating with our own blend of local lifestyle. This podcast episode is proudly brought to you by our friends at Cox Business. Cox Business provides broadband, Internet and cloud services to the modern tech company. Cox Business, a longtime sponsor of San Diego Startup Week and the San Diego startup community, also puts on the top tech awards. Get started. And most recently, Quick Pitch. Thanks again to Cox Business for their support of our tech community. And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am here at Seismic Software HQ with Doug Winter, CEO of Seismic Software. Thanks for being here.

Happy to be here. Thanks for. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

Absolutely. It's been really fun to watch Seismic grow here in San Diego. I've been here in the tech scene five years, so, you know, Seismic's always been, if you like, one of the big players here. But we want to learn how it came to be, how you got here. So why don't you quickly tell us what Seismic is and then we'll dive back deeper.

Sure. Seismic is an enterprise SaaS company. We sell to large companies. We're in the sales enablement space, which is a fairly new and rapidly evolving space. And what we're really doing is helping sales and marketing teams work together much more efficiently, much more effectively when it comes to how they deal with the problems related to content and sales cycles. So historically in business to business selling situations, there's a lot of content, PowerPoint, white papers, videos, Excel sheets, marketing teams create a lot of it, sellers use it. A lot of times there's not much communication. There's a lot of frustration that happens if you're at a very big company with lots of products and lots of sellers. The problem rapidly gets to be extremely complex. And so we dove into the middle of that with sales enablement and have been at it now for, I guess, eight years and having a lot of fun as the market evolves and we're trying to keep up.

Sounds awesome. Well, yeah. As a person who used to run a sales team, I think we're gonna have some interesting conversations about that.

Yeah, it's one of the areas where almost no one that we talk to says, oh, no, we don't have that problem. We don't need that. We're all drowning in PowerPoint slides and whatever other content might be out there. And how do you make sense of it and make sure that the right teams are using the right stuff at the right time and that you're improving it constantly. That's really what we're all about.

Awesome. Well, really excited to hear how that idea came to fruition and probably pivots along the way, but let's dive back a bit. Where did you grow up? What part of the country?

So I'm an Ohio kid, actually. I grew up in a town called Mansfield, Ohio, which is roughly halfway between Columbus and Cleveland in the middle of pretty much nowhere. Mansfield is not very famous. The things that it's known for. Occasionally you'll be in a men's room somewhere and you'll look down and you'll see Mansfield written on the porcelain. So they make toilet bowls and other porcelain products in Mansfield. If you're a fan of the movie Shawshank Redemption, the prison is actually in Mansfield. So, yes, it's known for a prison. Apparently now it's quite a popular destination for weddings and stuff. I'm not sure who wants to get married in a prison, but.

Interesting.

Yeah, you walk out with two balls and chains, I guess. And once was noted as being in Rand McNally's best places to Live in America. Second to last good claim to fame. That was Mansfield. And then I moved away to Pittsburgh when I was 13 and went to high school in Pittsburgh.

Okay, got it. So Mansfield, maybe not as much a tech town, not much technology around, but Pittsburgh, maybe to get some influence of working in engineering or technology there.

Yeah, there were a lot of people in my neighborhoods that were. That worked at Westinghouse, which is a high tech company that unfortunately no longer exists. You know, Pittsburgh has a great community around Carnegie Mellon. You know, this was a few years back, so it's come a long way even since I was there. But certainly it was a great place for technology.

Yeah. I mean, because of Carnegie Mellon, I think it's like Uber's smart driving.

That's right. Then they hire like the entire program or something and then got sued and decided to do a joint venture or something instead. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Yeah.

So, yeah, apparently when you walk around the streets of Pittsburgh these days, you have to be careful not to get run over by a. Yep. Self driving, self driving. Uber.

Uber. Yeah. So where'd you. Or what was the plan for school? I mean, did you go specifically for engineering or what?

Yeah, I went to Virginia Tech.

Okay.

I very scientifically researched by finding the kid that was in the class ahead of me that I thought was the smartest and where he went to school. And I ended up being Virginia Tech. It met my dad's criteria being, you know, inexpensive state school that we could get to in six hours or less. So. So that was basically the guidance I was given, was a great school. Studied electrical engineering, actually studied mechanical engineering as well. Did a co op job. I squeezed an awful lot out of my five years at Virginia Tech. It was a great place.

Yeah, that's great. I was a mechanical undergrad as well, so I can relate.

Excellent.

And so what was the plan to. I mean, how'd you end up out west?

So after school, I took a job with Westinghouse, actually in their Navy nuclear program. They operated training platform where they would teach the Navy personnel how to operate the power plants of the nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers before they went off to sea. And they used civilians to help with the training. So I went through the program side by side with the officers for a year and got trained up and then they went off to sea. And I stayed around, stayed back behind to. To be an instructor. And it was a great program. Tremendous amount of leadership. You're 22 years old or 23 years old. You're basically in charge of a power plant, nuclear power plant, that's a real operating power plant tied up in Charleston, South Carolina. You got 50 people that are reporting to you and you're barking out the orders to do this and do that. So it was a great leadership experience. But at some point I looked down and I realized that the platform, the submarine that I was working on was built in 1963. And I thought, geez, there's really not maybe a lot of innovation and maybe not a super exciting future for me in this field, as much as I'd learned about it. And so I decided I wanted to go back to graduate school. And I thought if I could study business, it would be a good way to kind of make a career jump and do things beyond what I was doing there. And I'd always been a bit of a geek. I was taking my computer apart when I was 12 years old or whatever, my old Radio Shack computer. I stumbled on a program that was run out of MIT that was called the Leaders for Manufacturing program. And the whole vision was it was a joint program between the business school and the engineering school to take technical people and give them a master's in engineering, but also give them a master's in business with an eye towards operations, really helping. I was sponsored by a large manufacturing companies in the US like Intel and automakers and Boeing companies Like that. So I was. Somehow managed to get into the program. I don't know. There's 40 or so people in each class that were in it. And it's. It was a great, great experience for me. So I spent two years there going through that program, built a great network, learned a lot, really opened my eyes and my horizons quite a bit. But the last year I was there, it happened to be until I think maybe it was last winter or the winter before. The worst winter on record in Boston. Snow to beat the band. And I'm traipsing across campus in my suit to do interviews through, you know, puddles of ice water that are up to my knees. And it was like, this really stinks. How far away can I possibly get from this? And I drew a line and it came out to. It came down to San Diego. Nice fucking us. Yeah. That's only half of a joke. No, the truth is, this was in the beginning of the dot com days, and I had all kinds of ideas. And I turned to some of my classmates and I said, guys, when are we ever going to be in a situation where we're surrounded by so many really smart unemployed people at the same time? Let's go start a company. And a bunch of us said, yeah, we're gonna do it. And one by one, they all took jobs. And then I was left kind of as the last man standing. And I didn't have the courage, honestly, to go ahead and do it on my own. And then I saw the opportunity at Qualcomm. I came out and interviewed. First night I ever spent in San Diego was at the Doubletree, right down the hill here where Qualcomm put me up. And I thought, this place is not bad. And Qualcomm certainly had an amazing culture. It was really exciting time there. And so it ended up being a pretty easy decision.

That's great. Well, yeah, Tell us a little bit more about Qualcomm at that time.

What year was this?

Around?

So this was 1996. Qualcomm had just recently won the battle to have CDMA approved as a standard. And, you know, had gone through the phase of, okay, great, now everyone's gonna build CDMA stuff. And then realizing that no one was gonna actually build CDMA stuff, and so they had to do it. So they'd started up a division building phones, and they'd started up a division building the base stations and infrastructure. And they were actually manufacturing everything, really, from the chips to the fans to the racks that they put them in. And so I Joined the infrastructure division and was helping program manage, taking new products that were being released from engineering into manufacturing, kind of building that bridge. And it was really exciting time. I don't know, I think I was employee number 3507 or something like that. It's funny how everyone remembers their Dodge number. And it was before the crazy 1990. I guess it was 1999, the year that the stock went crazy and exploded. And so we were building that stuff out and I had great bosses and mentors there, learned a lot, was continually hearing the siren song of all the dot coms that were going in those days. And so I knew that it probably wasn't going to be too long that I ended up staying at Qualcomm. Got it.

It's always this inner entrepreneur kind of beating the drum, right?

It was, you know, when I was in high school, my father was in civil engineering. He was actually in construction. And he had started a company in the 80s that was with a couple of his colleagues that was doing hazardous waste cleanup projects. And it was at a time where, you know, the government was funding a lot of cleanups and there was all these sort of really nasty places that they were finding. And so there was a lot of money being poured into that. And, you know, as business ultimately kind of did a roller coaster, it wasn't very successful long term, but I clearly remember when I was in high school that I never saw him happier in his whole life than, you know, when he was pulling out the hat, you know, for his company and handing out hats and T shirts and like just the pride of, hey, I'm building something here. And you know, we're making something happen. And that really made an impression with me that I never quite shook.

So the swag, you like the giving off the swag? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, that's right.

Little did I know that was the real business I should have got into.

Yeah, seriously. So what happened after Qualcomm and did you stay local and move over to software?

So after Qualcomm, while I was at Qualcomm, a classmate of mine from MIT had started a company that was doing software development, outsourcing. So it was pre Y2K days when a lot of the Indian companies that we now know today as great companies, Infosys, et cetera, were really just getting started, helping with the Y2K conversions. And he had seen this happen. He was at Ford, I think it was. He'd seen this happen and thought, geez, I can do this. And he started A company. And he recruited me to come start the west coast office plan. And I'm like, okay, I don't know anything about outsourcing, but I know a bunch about software. And so I just, I jumped. I left Qualcomm. Looking back at what the stock did over that year was probably the worst possible timing. But you know what, Things happen for a reason.

Yep.

So I jumped and became the west coast operation lead head for the west coast. It was a very typical, I guess, dot com story. I was in the front row. It wasn't my company, but we raised $20 million or something. We grew the business from basically zero to like 25 million in a year and a half. And then it went right back down to zero. As realized that a lot of the companies that were our customers or dot coms themselves and that they actually couldn't pay the bill that we were sending them. So it was pretty exciting to sit in the front row and go through that. You know, building out offices, hiring people, making tons of mistakes, finding customers, selling deals. You know, having to ride the roller coaster back down again was also a good learning experience, albeit a painful one.

Yeah.

And so that company was called one world software. That was my first. My first foray into sort of at least a front row seat if I wasn't steering the bus.

Yeah. And the west coast team was here in San Diego.

Yeah, it started out here in San Diego. We also then opened an office in San Francisco because, you know, it was the thing that you had to do. That office grew really fast. Never went very far. And I still remember the day that I sent the Ryder truck up to go clean out the office and put all the racks of equipment and PCs and office chairs. In fact, I still have one of the chairs that I keep as a reminder. One of those fancy Aaron chairs. Yeah, I keep it as a reminder because we spent a lot of money on stuff like that, which ultimately we sold it for pennies on the dollar as the business crashed. And looking back and thinking how important was it that we had this really fancy chairs, A lesson that I've always tried to take with me. And keep the chair as a reminder.

Yeah, it's a good memento for sure. Yeah. Interesting. So kind of take us forward to where the genesis for seismic came.

Yeah. So the business, you know, as I mentioned, it kind of crashed and burned. Myself and a couple other of the folks from the west coast picked up the pieces and started a new company called Objectiva. Similar business model, helping hired guns, helping other companies build software.

Okay.

And one of our first customers we started, you know, we ended up starting that company. Our first day of business was August 1, 2001. So we had 41 days until the airplanes hit the buildings and the entire economy screeched to a halt. So, you know, really was a terrible time. Ended up being to start the company. But we were fortunate. We got out the gate with a couple customers and were able to sort of weather that storm. One of our first customers was a company called Document Sciences, which people that have been in San Diego for a while might remember.

Yep, definitely.

Document Sciences had spun out of Xerox, had gone public in the early 90s when it was popular to go public with like almost no revenue. And it sort of lost its way. It had grown to be about a $25 million business and sort of stalled out. And being at $25 million public company was no fun with, you know, all the Sarbanes Oxley stuff that was coming. So they had hired us to help them rebuild their product line and at some point, you know, built a really good relationship with the board and with the CEO there. And they said, you know what, we really like your people. Why don't we buy your company and you guys can kind of help us with the turnaround. So they bought Objectiva. I became the CEO, was on the board. He had a chance to get be on a public board, which was pretty interesting. And we proceeded to work really hard to try to turn the business around and get it going in the right direction. Took us a couple years to do that, but we eventually got the business up to, I don't know, 50 million or so, a little bit more. Actually tried to do a management led buyout and buy the business out. The board said, interesting, but we think we want to shop it around a little bit. And so, long story short, very stressful period of time where I was both representing the company to sellers and at the same time trying to buy at the same time. So I had to be very careful about doing right by the shareholders, which we did. And we ended up getting bought by emc. So part of EMC is a software group, it's called Documentum, which was Enterprise Content Management. And so they saw a vision of taking what we did at Document Sciences, which was content customization and creation, and combining it with their stack for Documentum.

Okay, did BMC have an office already in San Diego or a presence here?

They did, although I think it was more on the hardware side. Bmc, actually, the same group had bought Captiva, which was based down Here in Sorrento Valley, maybe a year, two years before they bought us. So there was also some remnants of that business that was still here. Got it.

Interesting.

But we, you know, we kept our office in Carlsbad. We were up in Carlsbad close to the airport. And I was in charge, I was the kind of the general manager of that group and in charge of doing all the integration and part of the leadership team for the Documentum.

Got it. Okay. And while you were there was that kind of where the.

So I.

Sales.

Yeah. So it was probably, probably six months into it when I realized, you know what, the big company is just not for me. And I told my boss that we started thinking about what we might do next and I still had work to do and we had to finish our period with the handcuffs and making sure the integration got done right. So we did all that. But what we observed was that the tools that existed, including our own from Document Sciences and what we saw at Documentum for content management were really clunky, kind of old school on premise. There was nobody who was doing a real SaaS business around real content management. The closest you could get would be a Box or a Dropbox, which is really file sharing.

Yeah. Google Drive.

Right. Google Enterprise level. But the problems that we saw from the documented business and Documentum got to be a billion dollar revenue business or something. And it was pretty big. And from Document Sciences they were real. And we just felt like that if someone you looked at Salesforce and what they did is they took CRM and they consumerized it, made it easy to use and put it on the cloud, sold it as a subscription and you look at workday and they did the same thing for human resource management. And you look at the Netsuites and SAP's and others who've done the same thing for ERP and I thought, well, no one's doing that for content management. And we thought if we could do that, we would have a solution that would be really well suited for the needs of sales and marketing teams. They just need to move faster. It needs to be more business user friendly. You can't have to call it every time you want to change something as part of a marketing campaign. It's just not going to work. That was the vision. Honestly had never heard the term sales enablement. It was probably three years into the business before I actually heard that term.

Maybe it wasn't invented yet.

I think it was in fact what would turn into. One of our competitors, Savo Group had invented that term. We just didn't know about it. We hadn't heard of them yet. And it was not until much later when we started to get some momentum in the market that it felt like, okay, this shoe fits. We're gonna tie it on.

Okay. So you started in 2010 timeframe.

So we started working on the product. I'd say, you know, mid-2010. We didn't actually start selling it until the very end of 2011.

Okay.

That's when we first started selling it.

Got it. Where was first office? Here.

First office was a basement in an apartment building in downtown Encinitas.

Okay.

It was a brand new construction and the landlord was very gracious and sort of looked the other way because we were clearly not supposed to operate a business. But you know, he got a good deal. And it was one of those mixed use things where upstairs was an apartment, ground level was a retail shop. Turned into be an iPad, iPhone repair, fix it place. Great guys are still there, I think. And then there was a basement. And so we took the basement and we took the upstairs and. And we ended up, I think by the time we left, we probably had 12 or 14 people crammed into that place. It was cozy, to say the least. We would have, you know, some of our out of town employees would come into town, it could stay and we had a bed in one of the bedrooms and so save money on hotels.

It works.

It worked. Yeah, it worked.

You guys have always, whenever you've grown, you've always stayed kind of north county, coastal North County. Has that always been on purpose?

We have, you know, it's. It's tricky. San Diego had a lot of great things about it, but one challenge is it's geographically spread out. And you know, I love downtown. I lived downtown. I lived in Mission beach for a long time. But you know, you find a lot of people that move as they get older and have kids, they move further north. And so we started out where we were. Now I live up in Leucadia. So we started out there and then, you know, over time we've moved slowly, moved a little further south to where we ended up here in Del Mar Heights, which I think is probably the ideal spot just because it's right here. The 56 is here. All the major intersect roads kind of end up here.

Yeah.

So unfortunately everyone else knows it's the right spot. So it's also one of the pricier spots. But. But yeah, that's kind of how we ended up here.

That's awesome. Well, take us through a little bit of that early growth. I mean, I know you expanded pretty quickly to have an east coast presence, right?

We did. So one of the founders was Ed Callanan. He's our CRO. And one of the founders of the company is a Boston guy, Boston born and raised. And if you know a lot of Boston people, they don't leave Boston as long as they're still alive. So Ed fits in that mold. And so he started up our sales operations. You know, he leads the sales team. And we started up, you know, for him in his attic before we got an office in Boston. So we had the attic in the basement. And we've kind of grown up as a two location company, you know, pretty much from the beginning, which is, you know, it has its challenges at times for sure, but as you hit a certain scale, it becomes an advantage. You know, the fact that we're very comfortable working that way, we know how to do that requires a lot of trust. And so, you know, Ed and I having worked together for a long time, that's, you know, that, that kind of enables that to happen. Yeah, but we have, yeah, we have a very similar size. I think it's a little bit smaller at this point in time. Office in Boston, but very similar size to what we have here.

Got it. Are you traveling a lot back between the cities or.

I travel quite a bit as, as do a lot of the other leaders in the the company now mostly it's to customers and we do have a lot of customers in the Northeast. There's a lot of businesses in Boston and New York and D.C. et cetera, travel. San Francisco a lot. Chicago. We acquired a company, sizable company based in Chicago earlier this year. So we have a pretty good footprint in Chicago now as well, which is great. It's a great city and lots of business there, lots of great people. So it's a good location for us.

So we can touch a little bit.

On the acquisition that was your competitor.

Right, that you acquired?

It was, yeah, that was Sava Group, who was our competitor from so long ago. So yeah, they went from the big fish that we were trying to attack to a peer and a competitor to a little bit of a smaller company as we grew, kind of grew past them. And then we had the opportunity earlier this year to basically grab a bunch of great people that knew this space that we were, were in really, really well and a bunch of great customers. And then, you know, basically we were in the process of moving their customers off of their platform onto our platform.

Got it and got to own the sales enablement term. Now it's under the brand.

That's right, yeah. Unfortunately, I don't think they didn't trademark it. So it's still out there for everyone to share and we love to share it, but yeah, I think deserve a lot of credit for having created the ideas around it.

You've also brought in some other local teams, right? I think there's a lot to be said about bringing in other local San Diego teams under the fold too.

Yeah, we did. Geez. Almost two years ago now. Is it really cool that we brought the. Yeah, that we acquired Email Copilot and they've done some really interesting things and had some smart people. A lot of work around data. Data is really important to us as it is for a lot of companies and it was an area that they really knew well, as well as some artificial intelligence kind of and machine learning capabilities that complement really well what we were doing. So as much as anything, it was about the people and a good way to help jumpstart our efforts in that area as well as grow the team.

Yeah, no, it's great to see. I mean, I ran into Brian and Al today. It's great just seeing them wander around here. When I used to do startup poker with them, Startup week with them.

Yeah, we don't let them out to do that stuff anymore. They have to just work, work, work.

Yeah, no, of course.

Just kidding.

So tell us, where's seismic headed? Where are you seeing ahead of you?

Well, it's not often that you kind of find yourself at the right place at the right time. And sales enablement as a market has really taken off in the last year and a half. Two years, definitely. You know, it used to be that when we would go into a meeting, we would spend half the meeting explaining what it was, what we did. You know, they didn't have a budget, it was a junior person in the room. Now we're going in and we're having conversations with large companies who have budget and senior people assigned and they know what we do and they're just trying to make sure we're the right fit for them. And so, you know, the rising tide is lifting our boat, but it's. It's something that we're trying to capitalize on. So we've been growing quite rapidly. We're going to be over 100% sort of organic growth this year, you know, which at scale that we are, is really challenging and something I'm very proud of. But we're also, we also grew through the acquisition of Savo. So we're going to end up the year, probably about $115 million business. That's great. So we've come a long, long way and we're starting to think about what's next and do we have our eyes set on ipo. We're starting to seriously consider that as an opportunity to continue to establish our leadership position in the space and try to get there and kind of help the rest of the market understand this is what sales enablement looks like. Yes. The best in breed platform. And, you know, it's in new, evolving spaces. Things change a lot. So, you know, we have been growing our R D team tremendously to try to make sure we stay ahead of anyone else in the space in terms of the innovation, keep pushing it.

So, yeah, that's great.

We're hiring.

All right.

Heard that yet?

Yep. We learned it recently in our newsletter.

That's. Well, I love it. Thank you very much. Yeah, we've got a great. A great spot here. We got a great engineering culture, I think that's growing fast and some pretty fun problems that we're trying to solve.

Yeah, I mean, just SaaS B2B SaaS specifically has just completely exploded. Maybe Salesforce is the leader in that. I mean, Dreamforce conference alone is just technical. And Saster. You guys participate in sastr?

We haven't. We haven't so far, but there's a lot of them. It's hard to keep up.

It is. It's true. And you guys do your own too, right? You guys put on.

We do. We just had our user conference call it Seismic Shift.

Okay.

One of the things, if you have a name like Seismic, you can have a little bit of fun with it. So our annual user conference is Seismic Shift. Our annual get the whole company together conference they call Seismic Activity.

Okay.

So, you know, we were warned by our marketing team early on not to overdo it. We do have a little bit fun. So Seismic Shift was last week. We had 550 or so of our customers and partners in town. We took over the Pendry Hotel downtown, which was a lot of fun and it was great. We had three days. We had a lot of speakers. I think we had 14 or 15 customers that told their story, as well as a lot of other kind of product roadmap sessions and things like that.

That's great. And especially the IPO route. I mean, we have not had much of a tech IPO here in quite a while. So it could be exciting. If that's where you guys head.

It could be exciting. Yeah, we. Yeah, we're lacking unicorns. We're lacking IPOs, and we're lacking big software companies in San Diego. And I would love to be a small part of helping move the town in that direction. I think there's a lot of talent here. I think that there's a lot of people in the Bay Area that are getting sick and tired of living up there. It's funny, when I went and did fundraising, the Series A fundraising, you go up. Mostly I had to go up to San Francisco because there aren't a lot of Series A investors here in San Diego, going up and down San Hill Road, knocking on doors with my hat in my hand, trying to see what we could do. And they all asked me two questions. Same two questions. This was 2013. They said, you're going to do a freemium model. Right. And that was not our model at all. So I tap dance around that a little bit. And the second question was, you're gonna move your team up to San Francisco. Right. And, you know, hey, I'm trying to raise money here, so I'm tap dancing around that one, too. Whatever makes sense. Blah, blah, blah. The thing that I think is interesting is, you know, fast forward about a year and a half when we went back and did our Series B round, and now we had people kind of calling us. We'd gotten on the radar a little bit, and back up to Sand Hill Road and talking to companies up there, firms up there, and they all asked me two questions. They said, you're not going to do a freemium model. Right. Because that had totally fallen out of favor. And you're not going to move your company up to San Francisco. Right.

Really? Even in 2014. There.

Even in 2014. And they were. All the early investors, were early stage investors, were really struggling with the turnover culture, you know, and as a CEO, I can't imagine hiring, you know, building a company on a bunch of people that I knew were, you know, we're just going to be there for two years until they hit their second vesting, and then they were gone, which seems to happen quite often. So they can go, you know, place bets on the next one. And I can't imagine, you know, having to deal with, you know. You know, the most important thing is we have a water slide in our lobby, you know.

Yeah.

You know, it just isn't. It didn't work with my Midwest roots. It didn't work with the way I thought we need to build a business. And San Diego, I think, has a much better culture that way. And, you know, yeah, there aren't as many Engineers here. There aren't as many big software companies that you can find talent from, but when you get people here, they tend to be, you know, more grounded, they tend to stick around, they tend to buy into what we're doing. And so, you know, I would love to continue to grow here and continue to help try to put San Diego. There's a lot of other great companies that are doing it as well. I'm pretty excited about it.

Yeah. A lot of irons in the fire, for sure.

Yeah. Try to keep in touch with those guys. And I think we encourage each other quite a bit to try to be successful, so. Yeah, that's great.

Well, we appreciate you planting a flag here. Tell us a little bit about life in San Diego. Do you have a favorite taco spot that you go to?

Sarah is in Mission Beach. I lived down there for a long time, and it is a beautiful little place right next to the. The Beachcomber.

Oh, yeah.

If you know it. If you know that area. I don't know how many burritos I've had, carnitas, burritos, etcetera, that I've consumed there, but it's a. It's a great spot.

It's a good find. Usually people mention taco surf in that area, but Sarah's is another good one.

Yep, yep. Yeah. I was a South. I lived in South Mission.

Okay.

And that was pretty much the only place within stumbling distance, but fortunately it was also a fantastic spot.

Yeah. What about favorite coffee place?

I like coffee. I know I live up north, so coffee. Coffee in Leucadia is, you know, Panicin is great too, but coffee. Coffee is a little closer to my house and you can find me there fairly often on a Saturday or Sunday morning.

Yeah.

Stumble across the street.

The beer scene here, obviously is huge. Are you into local craft beer?

You know, I am good. My good buddy of mine, my old boss actually was, ended up working at Green Flash, so I kind of became a fan of their stuff. And I don't think I do probably a great job of keeping up with all the new ones.

Oh, there's so many. Like one a day.

It's exciting. Yeah, it is exciting, but I kind of. Maybe I'm too much a creature of habit in that regard.

Yeah, no, I get it. For sure. Maybe our tech scene will follow the craft beer scene. That's where we've had our unicorns.

That's true. Good point. Good point.

Good point.

Drunken unicorns.

Yeah. Well, are you active on social media? Can anyone follow you? Twitter, LinkedIn?

Yeah, I'm on Twitter and on LinkedIn. More so LinkedIn probably in terms of my own activity, my Twitter account, I kind of turn over to our PR team, to be honest. Got it. It's more them than me. One thing I've observed in the world in the last few years is Twitter in the hands of the wrong users can be a really bad thing. So try to, try to cool my jets on that one.

New Elon Musk moments.

Exactly. Exactly. But I do pay a lot of attention to LinkedIn and kind of try to build my network with people that I actually legitimately know. And I think that's a pretty powerful, pretty powerful vehicle.

It is awesome. Well, Doug, thanks so much for your time. Really excited for what you've built and where you guys are headed and we will help keep promoting you guys.

Great. Thanks a lot. Lot appreciate you coming in and we'll talk again soon.

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the Tacos in Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. This has been a partnership with the San Diego Venture Group and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation's SD Life Changing Campaign. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eealbloom and on LinkedIn.