FI San Diego 2021 Graduation, with keynote speaker Neal Bloom of Interlock Capital

Right.

Happy Tuesday everyone. I hope you're having a wonderful morning. I am really excited to welcome you to Founder Institute San Diego's graduation event. I was just letting our co hosts and panelists know. I'm actually a little bit nervous today because three and a half months in the making, I cannot say how proud I am of the founders that are graduating of the incredible startups that are coming out of this program and what's ahead. So a quick introduction. My name is Mike Shcherbakov and I'm the director, Founder Institute San Diego. I'm joined today with Ben Cote who is my co director here at FI San Diego. Ben, thanks for being here. We have Brian ford, who's our EIR, our entrepreneur in residence at FI San Diego. And we have our Mr. Startup San Diego himself, Neil Blum, who I'll introduce and we'll be doing a keynote. So again, I want to welcome you to San Diego's Fall 21 Fall 2021 official graduation. The agenda for today looks like this. We're going to start with a short introduction. We're going to get into the keynote from Neal Bloom. We're going to get into the sneak peek and some of our startups will be pitching today. So you're going to be able to see their pitch live. And then after the pitches, we're going to get into a little bit of networking. So we're going to go into breakout rooms. Myself, the other leaders will stay and if you have any questions about startups investing f we're happy to answer them or just network with other really great founders and startups. So first let's talk about Founder Institute. Founder Institute is the world's largest pre seed startup accelerator. It's across 90 countries. Over 5,000 portfolio companies have been launched. It's actually the largest mentor network in the world with over 20,000 and an estimated portfolio value of 20 billion. And over a billion dollars has gone into funding these great startups that have come out of the program. Adeo Ressi, who is the co founder of fi, has this quote that we all resonate with saying that there is no shortage of problems facing humanity, but a shortage of ambitious entrepreneurs trying to solve them. And this gets into really what FI is. I like to say that the graduates today, the founders, the startups, this is not the end of their journey. This is truly the beginning. They have finished the core program as you see here on the left side. But now the journey really begins as they go through funding Lab, Venture Lab, Product Market, Fit Lab, as well as a lifetime of support from Founder Institute and an ability to receive funding, support, resources, mentorship all the way through the lifetime of their company. This is not an easy program. 142 founders applied to this particular cohort. 28 of them were accepted and enrolled in the program. And you will meet seven of the graduates today. That speaks to the challenging nature of this program. The Founder Institute is hard because building an enduring business is much, much harder. The founders that you're going to meet today have completed aggressive business sprints to push their business forward every single week for four months. And they've survived weekly ratings and reviews from a network of mentors that have met them every week, given them feedback. So they have been through the ringer and they have made it out the other side. Every graduate is building a fast growing, meaningful and enduring tech company with validation and support from our network's top entrepreneurs, advisors and investors. So understand that the program is rigorous and we are very proud of the founders graduating. So I want to personally congratulate on behalf of myself, Ben and Brian and everyone, the mentors, our partners, I want to congratulate our new graduates. And here they are. We have seven founders and six incredible startups coming out of the fall 2021 cohort. You will meet incredible startups in just a minute after Neil's keynote. But Tramigo, WaveOn, MyVita, AI Spectrum Care alliance, which is now rebranded as Neurolux, Charis Health and New Life Virtual. And I want a big thank you to our partners, specifically Fisher Broyles, Startup San Diego. A lot of the mentors, partners and everyone that was involved in making this program a success. So that's the high level of Founder Institute. I want to introduce our keynote presentation. I like to call him Mr. Startup San Diego. If you're not already following him on LinkedIn, please do search Neil Bloom and you will be bombarded with amazing content daily about everything that's happening not just in San Diego, but just the overall startup investor ecosystem. So Neil is an entrepreneur, investor and community builder at heart. He's the managing partner of Interlock Capital, the CEO of Fresh Brew Tech, and also a lecturer at ucsd. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Neil to go into his keynote. Let me stop sharing my screen. And and Neil, I just want to say again, on behalf of Founder Institute San Diego, thank you not just for keynoting today, but for being such a strong leader in our community. I will say as relaunching this chapter, this is the first cohort graduating from the relaunch I went around and talked to hundreds of these players in our ecosystem and asked them if you could pick one person that defines what the San Diego startup ecosystem is, who would you pick? And 90 plus percent all point to you. So thank you for supporting not just this cohort, this program, but really what you're doing for the entire ecosystem, the great content you continue to put out. Without further ado, I'd love to hand it off to you and get into your keynote. Thanks again, Neil.

Thank you Mike. Thank you all for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here, really, to celebrate you, the entrepreneur that has been building a company, while there's so much other distraction going on. And so we're here to celebrate you today and I'm going to give a big boost about why we should all be excited about what's going on in San Diego. Not just that. Founder Institute is back, which is awesome. We've missed it. And by the way, I presented at Founder Institute, my startup back in 2014. My co founder of Interlock, Al Bashira, met his co founder of his previous startup in Founder institute back in 2011, 2012. So huge supporters of what Founders Institute is doing. So thank you Ben, Mike and Brian for leading this effort here. But a quick background on me. I'm all Southern California raised, born and raised. I went to ucsd, studied engineering, worked in aerospace for a bit, specifically on the space shuttle program. And when they let go of 10,000 people except me, I got this guilt trip where I had to help my fellow engineer find their place in the community. And so my first startup was kind of like LinkedIn for students. We thought we were building it for experienced talent. We had many pivots and eventually found a home at the university. And that was a company called Portfolium. We sold it in 2019 to a larger EdTech company, but we were housed in Evo nexus back in 2013, 14 and 15 and that was my first integration into the San Diego startup community. That was right as Startup San Diego was kind of being born with the first San Diego Startup Week and I was hooked. Not only was I excited about building my own company, I wanted to help everyone build exciting and successful companies too, and jumped on board and volunteering in the community. And so since 2014 pretty much I've been a main volunteer with Startup San Diego, leading to us creating a nonprofit in 2016, chairing the board for the last three, four years, and now I'm officially, I don't know, the retired chair of Startup San Diego, which is a Very nice title to have, meaning I'm not as involved day to day, which is okay because I've got plenty else going on. So in building my own company, I felt that there were a few things that were lacking as an ecosystem and I wanted to help build it. So one was awareness. I felt that a lot of San Diegans didn't know what was going on besides their own company, so started Fresh Brew Tech to be a media company to educate everyone of what's going on. Really a cheerleader, an aggregator. So fresh BrewTech.com, we put out a weekly newsletter, next one's going out tomorrow. We put out infographics on funding, which I'm going to talk you through the 2021 report we put together. And we've got a podcast, the Tacos and Tech Podcast, that we put out twice a week interviewing technologists and founders and community builders. And then on Fridays we host a live chat about what's the latest tech news of the week. So we welcome you to listen in on that. So that was one area was awareness. The next area was capital. I really felt that we were underserved from having local capital where experienced entrepreneurs are funding other entrepreneurs. And so when I was able to started writing my own checks into just my peers, small checks, but tried to do as many as actual feasible and realized that a lot of other people want to join in too. And so just about a year and a half ago, my now partner Al Basheira approached me and said how do we scale community investing in community? And that was the birth of Interlock Capital all during the pandemic. And so I'll talk you through a little bit about that. Shout out to a bunch of venture partners who are here in the audience, including Mark Lambert for joining in as investors with us. We very much appreciate it. Interlock. The whole point is that we want operators, relevant domain experts. Investing doesn't matter dollar amount. It's just put skin in the game and invest in companies. And so we've put 3.6 million into the community over the last 17 deals and 17 months. And we look at pre seed and seed primarily a little bit opportunistic, Series A as well and later too. And we are raising a fund. So while we've been a syndicate today we are raising a $10 million fund for Interlock Capital with have First Capital closed in February, but San Diego, that's what we're all excited about. That's what I'm so excited about. And so I want to share the 2021 tech report. So let me share my screen. I'm also going to drop the link in the chat so you can have it as well too. Let me just drop it in here. Does everyone see my screen?

Yep. Perfect.

Thank you. Fresh Brew Tech. We have it actually in a few different formats. I'm all about accessibility. We talk through it here so you can listen to it, we write about it and then we also have a graphic here. 2021 was a huge year for VC investment. We're talking from just 2020 which was also a huge leader to 2021, almost 100% increase in venture capital funding just globally and San Diego was a big part of that. We really rode the wave on just the global macro increase investment. So there's a bunch of other things that we want to dive deeper into that says not just is more investment coming to communities, what specifically is happening in San Diego and why is that important? And so a few things like I mentioned nearly 9 I think now it's really over 9 billion was in funded. Was funded venture capital wise. This is so this is not iPodOS, this is everything under private minority investments were invested in 2021 which is massive. Look at where we were at the year before, about 5 billion. The year before that was I think 3 billion. So some pretty big stepwise function increases for venture capital coming to San Diego and 273 individual investments between that. Where if you look at this, this is a really big deal. 157 were tech or consumer meaning a majority of the fundings were actually tech and consumer which is bucking the trend because for so long we've talked about San Diego just as biotech and that's obviously not true. Now there is a lot of tech investing happening in San Diego as well too. Of those financings 26 were 100 million plus. So a lot of late stage deal. That's significant amount of funding going to some mega rounds. These aren't necessarily only your 10 year old companies anymore. In fact my co founders of Portfolium have started a new company called Drata Cybersecurity Company and in 10 months they raised three rounds of funding. Their latest round being 100 million at a billion dollar raise valuation. So funding over last year was crazy. Valuations really went high. I think we're going to see a Little reset in 2022. Some valuations come back to earth which maybe not as good for the entrepreneur. So it feels like your company's not valued as much but it actually is good for you long term because it definitely valuations got inflated a bit I would say in 2021. Some other things really interesting. 96 companies got pre series A funding. This is just friends and family. Pre seed and seed. So a lot of companies in San Diego, $244 million went to pre series A. So that's great because that means there is capital available to there. And I know as a founder it doesn't always feel like that there is capital right there next door, but it is there. And as you're learning in founding institute, you just got to do the work. A few other things. 22 companies went public last year, so pretty banner year for that. I think we were at 16 the year before and under 10 the year before that. Still a large amount of the IPOs were biotech companies. Only three were tech or consumer. Tusimple autonomous trucking company went public. Nuvi, an electric vehicle charging infrastructure company went public and Petco went public. And those are our kind of consumer and tech areas for public companies. Last year I really hope and I think more tech will go public this year just because there's so many who are not just over the unicorn piece, but are doing over 100 to 200, even 300 million a year in revenue from a SaaS business. And that is very much primed for being a public company. There's a few factors. Obviously market dynamics, markets are not great today. But sometime this year the window I believe will open back up and we will see more public tech companies in San Diego. A few other things that are exciting. We won the world Design Capital for 2024. So in a sense, kind of like the Olympics we were named be the beacon of design in 2024. And not just San Diego, San Diego and Tijuana together. So this idea of the mega region, which actually is very relevant to the tech world because you really have tech companies who are sitting on both sides of the border and now we're showcasing off the design side too. So very excited to lead up to 2024 events between now and all the way there. One of our local researchers won the Nobel Prize in 2021. Artem. Pretty, pretty awesome to say that San Diego at La Jolla Scripps Research Institute won the Nobel Prize specifically in discovering how human sense temperature and touch, which seems so basic to us. But as we are an Iot town that does a lot of sensor development, especially in medical device, it seems pretty relevant to the kind of tech that we're building here is around sensing and touching. A lot of companies are moving to town or expanding here. Some of the smaller ones, Tiger, Graph, Groove, Mainstay are moving here. Mainstay is an Irish company opening up an office in Little Italy. But then the faangs are either here already. Google's been here but now expanding. They acquired a company and now are taking over the whole building that they acquired. Amazon's been here and it's continuing to expand. Facebook Meta Word on the street is that they have grabbed face grab space and Apple has become the real big player hiring 8 or 9,000 people in UTC area. Everyone pretty much thinks they're going to try to rival Qualcomm and steal a lot of Qualcomm talent. So talent war is for sure upon us from the chip side. Another thing that we wanted to track as a city is how are our public companies doing. So we built an index. We took the top 12 metros by Venture capital funding and said how are all the companies? How are the public companies doing as an index? And so San Diego's public companies actually ended the year pretty much right as where the S and P did. The S and P I think did somewhere between 26, 27% which is great. Normal stock market year is 7 to 8% in a year. I think that's the historical average over 100 years is like 7 or 8% and our public companies did well. Just want to highlight for all the hype that there is about Miami, their public companies did not do great last year, very under market but San Diego did pretty great. And so our public companies which are largely biotech, obviously rode the biotech wave and other applications of tech. We don't have a lot of SaaS yet so we can't claim that the global whatever happening in SaaS companies is happening in San Diego. But I'm hopeful that this year we have a lot more public SaaS. We also want to showcase who locally is funding writing checks and so we I think I missed like three and they've written me. They definitely let me know that this is largely a lot of the capital that is local. That doesn't mean they're only writing San Diego checks, but that obviously means there's a greater potential for them to invest in San Diego versus another ecosystem for sure. So I tried to do this in early stage to late stage. So in your earlier stage your angel and pre seed and seed tech goes Angels did 25 deals, 13 million interlock 14 deals, 3 million last year and onward and onwards. So a lot of local capital get to know them, don't reach out to them only the day you're raising you want to make sure that you are having a relationship with them so that they can track and follow you for.

As long as possible.

The other so all this first of all venture capital. It's great to come and fund our companies. Obviously what we're all building our companies to have some kind of huge life change for the world. We're building life changing technologies that will change the way we do things whether it's get to work, cure cancer, interact with our kids or our pets. But there is obviously this financial thing out there, right? We want an exit. We want money to trickle back into the community through investment, through hiring people and jobs. And you want this flywheel to continue, want people to reinvest and build good companies, create more jobs. And so we also track exits in that regard too, like acquisitions because we want to see is that happening. And so one of the last areas I wanted to talk about is just where that's happening now. In biotech we've seen massive exits continuously like multibillion dollar exits and $7 billion by Arena Bio Legend acquired for five. These are some pretty big ones. We're not there yet on tech in terms of seeing the exits and then seeing people go on take create the next company but we're starting to and so some names that you definitely will recognize. Suja, a juice maker had a huge exit last year. Tech Lessons Marketplace for Private Lessons was acquired by Microsoft and they've been around since the early 2000s and it's pretty cool to see an exit from a brand like that. We got some space and defense companies that had some exits like Cubic and Space Micro Citadel Defense as well too. Citadel I believe was an Andreessen Horwitz backed company. I believe new Rocket SaaS company that was acquired by private equity that is the private equity company is actually combining five companies and making a larger company still calling it New Rocket. So while they've been acquired they aren't going anywhere. They are San Diego based. Some other SaaS companies MindTouch which maker in the customer acquisition their customer success platform Sensemetrics JLab is an audio maker up in Carlsbad and then a few in the E commerce space. So Eucora was a women's health startup got acquired Equidistant, a E commerce platform kind of like a Shopify but actually more on the back end side. They acquired for $500 million. They're up in Encinitas and expect to see more from them. They're kind of powering the shopping cart through TikTok and Instagram and other social platforms and Echo, a microscope maker. That company actually part of my portfolio through Techos Angels was a part of. And great to see them exit there as well too. So a lot of tech and consumer exits last year that we, you know, exits don't mean that everyone has cash the next day. Sometimes these are for stock, sometimes there's a four year earn out as my partner had at seismic. It takes time for us to trickle back. But we track this because we want to see what everyone, the founders and the team, where do they go on to next? And usually they go on and create a new company. And so that's really interesting from our end. 195 acquisitions in total that happened here. So overall, like pretty, pretty huge year for San Diego. A lot that is going back into the top of the funnel like we talked about from capital and talent is kind of the next thing that's on everyone's mind. With $9 billion of fresh capital in companies, they're all spending that on new hires. I'm sure some of you are feeling that as well. How do I hire people? I will let you in on something. We're gonna announce on Fresh Brew Tech tomorrow. We're launching a job board and we're launching a senior and junior talent matchmaking event series that'll launch through the whole year called how'd you get that job? So keep an eye out for that part that we wanna focus on, helping make sure that talent finds its way to companies so that companies keep growing faster. So you can review this whole. We kind of do a whole deep dive into the report as well. Feel free to check that out in the chat. The next thing I wanted to talk through is another visualization about how to find your way through the San Diego startup ecosystem. So depending upon where you are in your journey, whether you have an idea or you're building a company, it's already venture backed. You need growth capital. I want to share something that startup San Diego created. And so let me bring it on screen. Can you see that? Cool. All right, so we've been updating this every year for about six years. It's gotten massive, it's really noisy. But we just wanted to be as inclusive as possible on this. So we've called the journey through the San Diego startup ecosystem from the mind of an entrepreneur in three phases. Curious, committed and crushing it. In the curious phase, whether it's ideation of thinking through. You have an idea and you want to know how is this idea a business or is it just a Cool idea. You know, is it a always going to be a side hustle or is it something I want to completely go all in on and spend my life on, hire people to and grow it into something. That's the difference of moving from ideation to validation. And so in the ideation world, there's a number of organizations, a lot of universities obviously help in this regard. Most that's kind of where a lot of our incubators sit, in fact, anyway, as well as organizations that will help think through business models like Score Focus into the validation phase, as a lot of you have found through a founder institute, you start thinking about how do you really do your mvp or at least as minimal as possible to see do I have a business here? And so this is this bucket of curious at some point in validation, you realize, yes, this is something I want.

To go and do.

Maybe you got into a startup accelerator like Techstars and you take the leap and you're committed, you're 100% in. And there's more accelerators that obviously open up to you once you're 100% committed, like Evo, Nexus and Founders First Capital, Logic, Boost Labs, San Diego Sports Innovators. And this is also where you probably start taking your first capital outside investment as well too. So a number of groups here from analog capital like ours, Tech Goes Angels once you're kind of a little bit further along. Ad Astra, Bootstrap Ventures, these are some of the groups that will start funding you from a pre seed and seed area. And you're really at this point still testing business models. Right. And maybe you're hiring your first outside team and you're starting to kind of operationalize the things that you as the founder or C suite founding team are doing. Hiring people saying here's the playbook, go and test this. And that's when you start getting into crushing it. When you found a repeatable business model, this is where you want to take. You've already got a bit of a fire growing and you start to pour gas on it. Outside capital largely is institutional or professional money like venture capital. And so there's a lot of venture capital groups here, but there's also groups like cool companies that will help connect you and get you ready for Series A groups like the EDC that will help you connect globally to other communities. If you want to expand outside of the US Downtown San Diego Partnership that will help connect you and find a home for you in San Diego. Lots of coworking spaces. So don't think that this is Only about capital here. It just happens to be that that tends to be what a lot of founders ask for first is where can I find investors based on the stage that I'm at now? If you're here in the validation stage, you may not want to be talking to JMI yet. But it's not necessarily bad to have a connection. Just don't spend a lot of your time here because they're only going to write you a check. Maybe when you're only doing 10 or 20 million in revenue, let's not waste too much of your time. Right? But it's good for an awareness of where you should be headed and who you should be thinking about and building somewhat of relationship. See them at an event or reach out. Say can I put you on my investor updates so that you can track me over the years? But just know that based on where you are, is it important to focus on that group as your priority. So this is something Startup San Diego put together just as an awareness thing. And Startup San Diego also put it in another format. So I'll bring up the startup resources airtable so you also know where to find this in kind of a table listing. So startup and I'll drop this in the chat as well too. Startupsd.org resources so like I said, it's an airtable that tries to organize the same information but instead of like where you are in your journey, more for like the things that you may need. So whether it's events or service stack like say law firm, there's pitch programs, capital and financing incubators, accelerators. So I welcome you to go and look through this to also get connected there as well too. Now there's a number of online communities to get involved in as well. Startup San Diego started a startup slack so startup sd.org slack a good place to get connected to a lot of other entrepreneurs. And the first Monday's program is finally coming back in person on February. I don't know the date, but the first Monday of February is coming back here. It is here. So I welcome you to come out and meet some people there. The big event that Startup San Diego does is Stand up Startup Week, which has been a month over last year. We promise it'll just be a week this year and look for that. I don't know when it's actually being planned for. I think usually it's in the summer, but last during COVID it's been in the fall. That's largely what I wanted to share with you from an ecosystem orientation from what we're super excited about I guess. Lastly, I wanted to tell you about Interlock Capital just so you know that we're available to not just be a capital source but from a mentorship group as well. Interlock capital is about 270 most largely entrepreneurs who are pooling capital together to invest in other entrepreneurs. And so we only want to invest in things that people in our group have expertise in. We want to make sure that we can not only do the right diligence but also appropriately help the company after the fact as well too. We've done now because we've had such diversity in our group, we've done kind of things all over the map now. We invested in our local sports team San Diego Loyal. We invested in a late stage secondary offering of Impossible Foods and then a whole bunch of early stage companies. This company Copia is pre revenue. Microacquire was probably at a 600k ARR when we invested. We are totally fine with pre revenue looking at companies. We just want to make sure we've got the domain expertise to be able to assess it properly. So please reach out if we can be a resource there from looking at your company even if you're not raising so you know, almost more ideal. We'd love to give you feedback on your deck and pay attention before the fact and get to know you a little bit as well too. So yeah, we are San Diego based. We are raising a $10 million fund and we're excited to deploy that and help continue to grow the San Diego ecosystem. Any questions? Anything I can help answer for anyone here?

Oh Neil, that was wonderful. And as you shared the slide that shows the overall ecosystem. I've noticed that as well as we build Founder Institute that more than an accelerator we want to just be a resource similar to Startup San Diego where you and I talk founders all the time and if we can point them in the right direction depending on the stage that they're in and they get the support they need, at the end of the day that's a win for us. Right? And I've noticed and that's I think why I connect with you so much because at the end of the day, you know it's in your title, you're a community builder and it's showing people here's everything that's out there and the more that they know that's out there, the more they can find themselves aligned with the right resources. So I'll let anyone that has any questions feel free to drop them in the chat. But I Neil, I do have a question for you. The seven founders, the six startups that are graduating today and moving on, they, you know, get this very challenging program. Again, if you're just joining us now, we talked at the very beginning, 142 applied to this cohort, 28 enrolled and started the program where we are now finishing four months later with seven of them. And Neil at this stage, knowing that some of them have just validated and they're about to build and you're going to hear their pitches shortly, some of them are already building and are doing over 500k in revenue. What advice do you give to founders at this stage? I know it's very hard to just give one piece of advice, but given how many founders you talk to and what you've seen across the ecosystem over the years, what would you recommend for founders at this stage?

So I think at this stage is really important to learn how to tell a good story about yourself that makes you look unique. You are graduating with a group of seven. Each of you obviously went through a rigorous program that is now a notch on your belt, right? And that should be part of your story that you made it through. And that's a good reason to check in with people. So I love to use kind of Mark Suster who quote this, turning dots into lines. Give people a reason to track you over time, not just a one time meeting where they're going to make and you kind of force them to make.

A decision about you.

If you can give as many data points to people as possible, they have more information to make a good informed decision about you. And so this is a good reason to say I'm graduating. Reach out and do almost like an investor update or a community update saying, hey everyone, here's where we were three months ago, here's where we are now as graduates and here's where we're going to be. Three months or you get to set the scale of where people should look and check in with you next year. Here's where we're going to be in six months. That's three data points that people can say, wow, they said what they're going to do, they did it, they graduated and now they're going to say they're going to do this next thing. Let's, let's see, you know, and let people watch and get excited about that because momentum really matters. So I think that storytelling is really important. You get to tell the story that you want. It doesn't have to be about revenue if you don't want it to be it can be about other things. So make sure that you pick the right metrics that people can assess and get excited about your momentum.

Wonderful. And in addition to following you on LinkedIn, we dropped your your LinkedIn URL in there, which I recommend everyone does. Do you have a and listening to your podcast, do you have a book or resource single one that you recommend for for founders at all stages who.

One resource to rule them all? Well, if you're after my heart around community building, Brad Feld's Startup Community and Startup Community Way is an incredible book that I read yearly and in fact he put out a new one with Ian Hathaway, who I was supposed to have in town today. I think he's going to come back in a few weeks and we're going to do a little like community building talk session where if you're just as excited about building community as you are, your company love to have you involved in that conversation. So feel free to find me on Slack or LinkedIn or Twitter. You'll, you'll for sure see me publicize it when we do that. In that regard, the venture capital world, as much as we've talked about it and we hype it up, you know, it's actually still like 1% of all businesses, so it is a very small group. I like a book called Venture Deals also by Brad Feld that explains in gritty detail how to understand the angel and kind of the outside investment world puts you also in the mindset of a venture capitalist. Like what are they thinking about when they're on the other side of the table with you in an investment scenario? So, you know, Venture Deals and Startup Community Way are kind of my two favorite go to books to give people in that regard.

Wonderful. Well Neil, we just want to thank you again not only for offering your mentorship through the program, I know our founders have received a ton of value, but also keynoting this presentation. We're excited to have you as a stake in the San Diego ecosystem and pointing founders and investors in the right direction. Thank you again for all the great work you're doing and we're excited to continue to collaborate.

Thank you and congrats companies. We're really excited. This is just the next step on your next adventure, so keep us on the loop, make sure we're aware of what you're doing and keep company and.

Hopefully there are some of the next unicorns and the ones being acquired that you're talking about in the next couple years. So we're going to move into the pitch Portion. I want to clarify, this is not considered a demo day, although we are partnered with Techstars y Combinator 500 startups. This is different than what you would see at a Y Combinator because every company is at a very different stage. You're going to hear a couple pitches from companies that are getting ready to launch their mvp, but they've done a little bit of a validation through customer research. You're going to also hear from a company that has done 500k in revenue last year. And so they're in different stages and so understand that they are here kind of presenting wherever they are in the moment. And we are very proud of how far they've come. So, jd, I've made you a co host. If, if you're ready, feel free to unmute, share your screen and take it away. And each founder is going to be given between three to five minutes. They started the program doing one minute pitches, they moved up to three minute and ended at five. And they have the choice of doing either three or five for this graduation event. So looks like JD took it over. Whenever you're ready.

Can you guys hear me okay? Is it good? Mike, can you hear me?

We can. And again, congratulations on graduating jd. Your hair looks awesome as always.

Thanks everybody for being here. Yeah, I spent a little extra time on that today, so for everyone to enjoy. So let's go ahead and get started. All right, so I am JD Mintz, the co founder or the founder of New Life Virtual. We are a community healthcare platform that changes how we treat addiction. Did you know that 100,000 people died from an overdose in the past 12 months? And that's one every five minutes. This is what we help solve. Outside of the pandemic, it was the number one leading cause of accidental death in America. It's personal because I almost died. The current treatment model didn't work for me, which is why I opened up treatment centers in 2014, realized what worked and what didn't, and set out to solve the problem. It's because the current treatment model doesn't work. People don't know where to turn. Care is fragmented and only 10% get help, leaving 90% to suffer needlessly. New Life is a community health care ecosystem that incorporates telemedicine with the three most important covenants of recovery. Life integration, social support, and community. We enable providers to blend treatment programs with personalized prescriptions to on demand content communities, support groups and peers, keeping people engaged between their sessions, providing better insights to their home and life. We are the new digital front door for treatment centers, allowing them to admit more clients and treat them for life. By enabling providers to make care more accessible, communal and less expensive, they fit the needs of a wider demographic with evidence based personalized care faster. Much like Netflix provided us always on easy access to entertainment, we enable providers to do the same for behavioral health care. We make it easier for care providers to see more patients and stay in constant contact. Recovery is about building trust through positive outcomes and we recognize the real rock stars are frontline coaches and practitioners. From screening to daily check ins and community building, we automate time consuming tasks allowing these rock stars to be center stage, reaching more people and getting better results. But most importantly, New Life is for the patient and their loved ones. 90 days ago Jacob completed his sixth treatment program and for the first time he stayed on track because New Life gave him on demand access to an extended virtual care program, community resources, educational videos and the ability to interact with his peers. We're winning because we help providers grow, we increase health equity and we improve profit margins while reducing payer costs by building a self sustainable community around their services. We have just over 500,000 in revenue last year from a software development contract that helped us build our Go forward version after proving our MVP and we're ready to grow. We have six pain treatment centers across three continents and project 60 treatment centers in 2022 resulting in 2 million ARR and then scaling to just under 100 million in 2026. The substance use disorder market is growing rapidly. There are over 16,000 facilities, 500,000 practitioners and they're tapped out, serving just 10% of this potential $300 billion market. More people need help daily and there's less people there to provide it. Our initial focus will be selling to B2B treatment facilities and independent practitioners through relationships, inbound marketing and strategic sales, then scaling marketing to reach the end consumer. Our early product roadmap focused on building out the critical fundamentals of treatment schedule, automation, care delivery, community and assessments. And over the next 12 months we're going to be focused on New Life Match which will leverage our behavior data, clinical assessment data and outcome surveys to optimize practitioner, provider and treatment pathway recommendations. The addiction market is relatively untapped when compared to the peer mental health market, but there are some competitors going at it in different ways. But our model allows people to connect and engage and empowers existing providers to invite their patients and digitize their services. Our revenue model is a simple base monthly subscription fee which can be scaled based on the number of practitioners and an additional 10% service fee for services booked via New Life Match. Our core leadership team consists of industry professionals, technology experts and clinical expertise. We have deep connections in the substance abuse vertical and our co founder Piyush is the owner of a global development shop. Our advisory boards comprised of industry insiders, policy influencers, technology content marketing and clinical expert and it includes formal health care system, CEOs, insurance billing experts and Obama's national LGBTQ leadership team co chair. We're raising 2 million to scale our sales and marketing team, expedite product market growth and validate our fit. I don't want people to know where to turn or who to talk to. We want to impact millions of lives by making care more accessible and rewarding and invite you to join us on our mission.

Thank you JD really well done again. Congratulations. It's been an honor to see the growth of New Life from four months ago until now. And for anyone either watching this live or as it gets shared on YouTube and through founder Institute's marketing channels, if you're interested in what JD is building and creating, please reach out to him. We drop the link for his his LinkedIn URL in the chat, so check out his website, connect with him on LinkedIn and thank you for building something that's very meaningful, impactful, not only to you, but to lots of other people. Well done jd.

Awesome, awesome.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody.

Thank you. Next up we have Jessica Taverniti. Jessica Taverniti is the founder of Neurolux, which was Spectrum Care Alliance. You should have co host privileges, so feel free to unmute yourself and share your screen Jessica, if you're ready and if anyone has questions by the way, for any of the founders pitching, whether it's on their company, their experience, going through the rigorous Founder Institute curriculum, feel free to drop your questions in the chat or connect with them directly. So, looks like you're all set, Jessica. Feel free to take it away.

All right, Good morning everyone. Thanks for being here. I'm Dr. Jessica Tavernitti and I'm the founder of Neurolux. We are restoring hope for families impacted by autism. Our vision is to stand next to every family impacted by autism, providing them with the community strategies and solutions to proactively light their path. NeuralX was created to address the challenges and solutions and ultimately create this community. I've been working in this field for the last 16 years. As a clinical psychologist and board certified behavior analyst, I found I've been inspired and I've also helped advocate for this community and to engage in better clinical practices, education and help These families that have been searching and falling behind for answers. Neurolex is the solution to quarterback their care and plan for a lifetime. Because families are falling short, there's challenges at every inflection point. There's missed developmental milestones. The diagnostic assessment process is often challenging and often the integration into their families or communities can be challenging. We are here to quarterback the plan and help them draft a playbook for a lifetime. Parenting is difficult and there's no manual, especially for a child with difference. Our approaches is that they're falling behind. The rates of autism are expanding. Approximately 89,000 families will be impacted by autism over this next year. People on the spectrum oftentimes have challenges with jobs and we want to also help them be part of that solution. The cost of autism is significant. Families are being impacted financially as well as emotionally and this takes a toll on the whole family unit. Approximately $60,000 will be in addition to the general cost of caring for a child. And we are part of the solution of the cost savings. We help reduce costs, access the care in a more accessible manner and really target the care that's needed for each individual child. Even my co founder talks about the challenge, the fatigue and the exhaustion that it can be as a caregiver. Nothing had prepared him for this, not even being a marine or a litigator. So he has come alongside here as far as Neurolux to help share with other parents and share his story. Our solution is twofold. We have actionable assessments that help distill down the items that families need. As well as an academy that helps families understand what objectionable items they will need next within their journey. We are helping them be brilliant in the basics. We have offered a caregiver to caregiver platform that helps families share what they wish they would have known before. And we've teamed up with thought leaders to share best practices in these actionable strategies for families. We've developed an assessment that families can take quarterly to help them what's around the next corner as well as what they need to do now and prioritize their career. We have an on demand coaching platform that helps break down the road box, empower the families and help them ask exactly what is needed within this community. Our roadmap helps families from start through a lifetime of care. We have helped them understand what autism means. We make meaning of that. We've addressed the wellness for the whole family as well as the siblings and even best practices within financial planning. Our pricing is a subscription based model allowing all families have access to Our E learning platform and caregiving journey as well as our Neuro Navigator assessment which they can access all throughout the year. Our premium model includes the Coaching model which helps with this live on demand coach to break down and answer questions immediately for families. Our go to market strategy is teaming up with those practitioners and diagnosticians that have access directly to families, parent groups as well as autism societies. We've also partnered with Beluga Health to access our medical care reach. Traction over this next year is to access those early diagnosed families. Approximately 5,000 users we are looking to gain within our community. Neurolux sets itself apart by proactively engaging with families at the hardest and most challenging point, the start of their journey. We help with the actionable items, the strategies and the support to create an empowered journey versus other models are very reactive in nature and only specific to the symptoms of their child. We have developed a team of industry leaders in autism healthcare as well as business and we've even partnered with Deepak Chopra to initiate our wellness action. We are looking to raise 1 million to help finalize and launch our MVP product development and expand our tech stack. Tech stack as well as key hires and marketing. We look forward to you coming and impacting this autism community. Thank you.

Jessica. Really, really well done. I wish that everyone in the audience today could see where this was four months ago compared to where it is today. I just want to say a big congratulations to you on what you're building and just a reminder for anyone again watching live or watching this later, if you're passionate and you're seeing there's interest in what you're seeing Jessica build, please reach out to her, find her on their website. It's been an absolute honor to see what you built, how far you've come and what you'll do in the coming years. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Really, really well done. And again, if you have any questions for Jessica for Neurolux or her experience with the program, feel free to either send her a message on LinkedIn. I'm just going to put it out there or drop it in the chat if it's more of a public question. Really well done, Jessica. Next up, we have Adam Halpern with Wave on Health. Adam, I've made you a co host. Feel free to. You're already on it. Yep. Share your screen and take it away.

I'm already on it. I'm kind of the Lone Ranger. I'm actually New Mexico, so what what Neil was showing, I took a picture of that journey that I'm either going to have to Work with all the local stakeholders in the entrepreneurial community to help with that type of progression as a startup founder or I just have to move to San Diego, so I.

Have some big decisions to make in.

The next couple months. I vote for the latter.

I'm just turning on my clock so I can manage my time appropriately. All right, so thank you everyone. I am Adam Halpern, Founder CEO of Wave on and I'm a former athletic trainer at Stanford University and the US Ski Team. And we are reinventing the way people stay healthy and active. And this is Doug, who's very active and he loves Spartan races and he's one of our beta users because he has a chronic shoulder problem and an ankle problem that is keeping him from training and competing. And Doug is like 229 million other active people that when they're faced with such problems, they ignore it and they hope it goes away or they search Dr. Google to try to self treat or they're pushed into the healthcare system which costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time and they're going to get support from people that really don't understand athletic injuries. This is where Wave on is a 21st century solution. And we are reinventing the way people stay healthy and active by providing a subscription based service to give Doug direct access to sports medicine professionals who provide personalized support that saves Doug time and money to keep training. Unlike the traditional healthcare model that's focused on referrals and co pays and visits, we leverage technology and human experts to create a high touch point system that allows us to monitor and respond to common active health problems. So what that means for Doug is he's able to receive and respond information on his own schedule that helps him understand what to do next to continue on his active goals. And our early data is very encouraging. Doug, along with our additional beta users saw improved function on average by 13%, symptom improvement by 50% and felt empowered because now they're taking control of their active health. And they really enjoyed the opportunity to speak with experts who understand their athletic needs. This combination of technology and human experts improves the care delivery model to make it 10 times easier, 10 times cheaper and 10 times faster than traditional healthcare.

There we go.

So working with Doug and having conversations and customer discoveries with our other beta users and thousands of other people, we've really honed in on who our target market is. They are people that have performance goals and they play sports and they exercise every day and they spend money on memberships, equipment and travel. So our go to Market strategy is, well, let's work with organizations that have a lot of these people and we will focus on a local market and then we will scale accordingly with national organizations and companies. Doug and our beta users really helped us understand that we are prepped to help millions of other people just like that. And we're working with these organizations under a freemium model which highlights which qualified users through data need additional support like Doug or need a quick direct referral within the healthcare system to a specialist. Working with these organizations, focusing on this annual subscription allows us to have a very healthy financial model. Our product, product roadmap is we've already secured solid strategic technology partners that allow us to deploy our MVP and then ultimately create our seamless wave on end user experience. With each stage of growth, we plan to capture more users and progress the product to support new uses and needs. Based on our prototype, we were focusing on our rehab of musculoskeletal and muscle and joint problems and with the eventual goal to create a SAS model that we are the go to product for the active community. We separate ourselves from our competition because we lower the barrier entry. By focusing on service before the healthcare system, we're leveraging an underutilized skill set in orthopedics and we're focusing on prevention and early intervention, unlike the healthcare system and this model is not very new. Virta, Calibrate, Cerebral are already reinventing access models and underserved populations such as type 2 diabetes and mental health. And we just see activehealth falling further behind and we want to change it and we have the team to do so. With expertise in sports and healthcare and technology and startups and with an advisor panel that loves the service and they have important connections and resources. We're raising 1.5 to finalize this wave on end user experience allows us to go back to these organizations we've already talked to to secure some enterprise accounts and really improve the team around the product. If you're passionate about wellness, if you're passionate about improving the current healthcare system, let's talk, let's reinvent the way people stay healthy and active and let's create the next wave of active health.

Thank you.

Amazing. Really, really well done, Adam. And I do want to point out to everyone listening, the founders here are doing all of this live, which is very nerve wracking. Traditionally when there are graduations for other chapters, they have all of the founders record their pitches before so that they can get them perfectly right. So we kind of dropped the news on them two weeks ago that they're going to be doing this live and I just have to say I'm so proud. You guys are absolutely crushing it. Adam, really, really well done and again, passionate about what Adam is building. Please reach out to him. Hopefully we do get him to move out to San Diego soon, but connect with him on LinkedIn. If you have any questions for what he's building or what he's doing, drop it in the chat. Really well done, Adam. Congratulations. All right, next up we have Mark Capper with Charis Health. Mark, I've made you a co host. If you'd like to share your screen and unmute yourself, feel free to take it away. After Mark Capper, we will have our last but not least presentation. Austin Schneider, Kaner with Tramigo so.

Well hello everyone. I'm Mark Capper. I am the CEO of Charis Health. I live in Los Angeles, but my co founder lives in Carlsbad. So we consider ourselves as part of the San Diego community and I'm eager to move down there as soon as we're up and running in Charis Health. So let me introduce you to Charis Health. So infectious diseases including COVID 19 cost the world economy trillions of dollars every year. In the U.S. COVID 19 continues to cause grave impact on U.S. businesses, with many experiencing significant losses. We talk to HR managers on a regular basis. They're experiencing a crisis because employees and customers are resistant to return to facilities due to safety concerns. The World Health Organization and the CDC are urging businesses to prepare for a future of increased risk of infectious diseases. We need a solution. We need a solution that will allow workers and customers to feel confident to return to workplaces. That's why we created Karis Health. Charis Health makes the risk of infectious disease visible and manageable. It provides a CHARIS number for each individual employer guest that indicates the risk of active infection. This allows employers to manage the return of customers and workers to the workplace. The KARIS number is like a credit score. It allows individuals to not only visualize but also to manage risk. The KARIS number is a dynamic estimate of the current relative risk of an individual having a COVID 19 infection. But it also provides location and time specific behavioral recommendations to reduce risk. And for the organization, the system will recommend specific risk management strategies as necessary, such as work from home or platooning. If an employee tests positive, track and trace data is immediately available to human resources. We provide a third party HIPAA compliant management of employee vaccination and diagnostic testing data and customers are free to enroll in the karis system. On OpenTable or other reservation management systems. Our technology is a cloud based SAS solution. We rely on daily geo specific active infection rates from county health agencies. We gather WI fi and GPS data for mobile devices to track frequency, duration and location of context with others and users, provide symptom vaccination and test data through daily questionnaires. Our risk calculation model is based on existing proven third party models, but we'll continuously update our model as our proprietary data is collected and this tool can be adopted for many viral infectious diseases. So far my partner and I have defined the mvp, we've identified developers and we've conducted marketing research with over 25 human resource leaders and large organizations. The majority of the human resource leaders say their employees would be eager to participate in the system in order to feel confident coming back to the workplace. We validated our pricing and we have two commitments for early pilot launch including a major cruise line. Our business model is a rapidly scalable SaaS enterprise solution. It relies on a low cost monthly subscription per employee as well as a single location fee. Customer Research supports a $3 per employee per month fee for large employers and a $10 per employee per month fee for smaller employees, employers and of course it's free to restaurant and hospitality guests. We are targeting large Organizations of 250 or more employees and according to the IDC the total available market is 4.3 billion annually. We conservatively assume our serviceable obtainable market would be around 43 million annually once launched will be the only competitor with a dynamic risk rating, dynamic risk management and HIPAA compliant vaccination and test data storage. My co founder Thomas and I met in the USC MBA program and have done several collaborations in the past. We are currently partners in a COVID 19 testing business. I have over 25 years experience in product development in medical devices, digital health in the pharmaceutical industry. Thomas is a cfa with over 20 years in corporate risk management experience and has held leadership roles in two fintech startups that have attracted investments from large organizations like Goldman Sachs. We are seeking a $750,000 safe node investment for the development of the application and algorithm through pre launch in three Alpha sites. We have two investors committed one to the first round pending diligence and another has committed to a later round once we've identified or landed our first customer. Thank you for joining us and listening to this presentation. We'll hope you'll join us in our commitment to reduce the impact of infectious disease on businesses and individuals.

Amazing. Really well done. Mark. Thank you for the great pitch and what I will add is, you'll notice every founder that has pitched so far is building something that's meaningful to them. They're building something that they care about and something that impacts a lot of other people. And that, at the core, is our ethos at Founder Institute, you'll notice that if you apply as a founder and you want your startup to go through the accelerator, you'll have to pick which one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that you're aligned with. We don't just talk about impact. It's not something we just say we do. We are building meaningful, impactful, enduring technology companies. So I just want to again congratulate the founders on taking something that they care about, something that they that's meaningful to them, and building something around it. So really well done, Mark. And last but not least, we have Austin Schneider, Kaner, who is going to be telling us about Tramigo after Austin goes. We do have two other founders that are graduating in this program with us. One of them is Kelsey Nolan, who's Austin's co founder. So after he pitches, we'll just have her hop on to say hello. Hello. Sammy Chora, if he's here, will introduce himself, not do a pitch, but just tell us a little bit about what he's building with MyBida AI. And then we're gonna go into our breakout session in just the next few minutes. So, Austin, feel free to take it away and bring us home.

All right, thanks, Mike. All right, here we go. And you can see my screen changing.

Yep.

All right, if it lags, just let.

Me know because my Internet's been cutting in and out a little bit today, so just feel free to cut me off if it. If it lags for a few seconds.

All right?

Young adult loneliness is at its highest levels in human history, despite us being more connected than ever through social media. So how is this possible? Because current social media is too surface and superficial. It leaves us feeling empty inside. We asked, how could we make people feel more fulfilled, more connected? That's why we created Tramigo, the first ever social experience platform. I'm Austin, the CEO, and I'm pioneering a new industry, the social experience industry. Young people don't know what to do or who to do it with when it comes to taking their relationships offline. We alleviate the pressure of figuring out what to do when you first meet someone. By enabling users to join and create activities on the go, we've created an authentic platform where you can develop genuine connections from around the world by maximizing your experiences. I'VE traveled around the world and fell in love because of how resilient it made me become. Travel defined my life because of all the incredible connections I had made. So we started this community that wherever you are in the world, you would feel local. I traveled.

Wait.

Okay, I. I lost my. My train of thought. So Tramigos can get out of their comfort zone wherever they are. We're gamifying our platform by adding badges and levels for achieving real life goals, which is how we incentivize our community to get out there. Tramigo changes the standard for social connection. Our research shows that this new and largely untapped social experience industry will be worth more than $100 billion and is expected to be worth at least 12 billion by 2023. With 78% of millennials choosing to spend money on an experience, we're pioneering not only the social experience industry, but the gig economy. For the experience industry, we need initiators on our platform to be hosting events and setting an example for other Tramigos. That's why we're building an ambassador network. No longer the gig workers have to drive people around or deliver food. They can create fun events, meet new people, and get paid to do so. We knew we were on to something big. The next Uber, the next Instacart. But instead you could go get a beer, meet someone new, and get paid for it. Who doesn't want to do that? We generate revenue from hospitality businesses. Businesses pay a monthly flat subscription fee in order to sponsor events on our platform and provide promotions for Tramigos who create activities at their establishment. This monthly recurring fee eliminates the manual labor involved in getting businesses to continually advertise appealing to the needs of busy business owners. Then we customize the package based on their needs. We pair our gig workers with these businesses to put on successful activities. The more friends and trumigos they bring to the activity, the more they make. We knew this business model would work, so we went out to prove it. Here's a case study for the AC Lounge in North park. We partnered with Andrew, AKA DJ Omega, who wanted to get his name out there and play his music. He promoted the event to his friends, his family, and a bunch of new Tramigos. And this is Gary, the owner of the AC Lounge, who told us it was the busiest Wednesday he's had since before coronavirus. He was so thankful and can't wait to keep working with us. We generated around $500 from that event. While it's not much now, it will be. We've replicated These success stories again and again. Now we have our first engaged cohort of 10 local businesses that have committed to advertising with us. As we lock these businesses down, we'll be charging each of them $300 in recurring monthly revenue to be a Tramigo company. This cohort iteration model ensures we generate hype as we ensure success stories for the businesses we onboard. We plan to scale that number of businesses to 36,000 in the next five years, with the average business paying $500 in monthly recurring revenue. That's 18 million in revenue per month, more than 200 million per year. So why is this a home run? Why are your dollars better with us? Because not only is it innovative, not only do we have the strong narrative, but we have the competence, the culture, the resilience, the drive and the traction in place to make this happen. We're creating a perennial shift within workplace culture. I'm an innovator for the future of work and the bold, visionary leader to make this happen. And I'm also humble and coachable. I love learning how to be a better CEO every day. And you can bet your ass that my team will accomplish what we've set out to. What have we done so far to improve? To prove it well, I built a team of nine people who believe what we believe and have turned down many others simply because they didn't have the values that aligned with our own. We've worked together over the last year to turn our whiteboard vision into something that's changing lives today. We recently deployed our app, which is available for you to download now on both the App Store and Play Store. We've grown a strong foundational community here in San Diego by hosting events where people can authentically connect. Our guiding light metric is Tramigos made. That's success to us, connecting people authentically. And thousands of Tramigos have been made thus far. We're looking to replicate our community in other cities and build out must needed technical components such as our advertiser portal and our ambassador portal. But we need your help to do it. There's no doubt in my mind that the world needs what we've created, that people will become better human beings as a result. I know we're going to move humanity forward and that I'm going to bust my ass every day to make that happen. And as a result, we're going to make a lot of money. We're going to need it to change a lot of lives. But if you're looking to truly improve the way we connect and create more love in the world. I need you to stand behind us. Thank you.

All right, Austin, well done. And congratulations on everything that you're building with Trivigo. Kelsey, if you're available, feel free to unmute and maybe just tell us, you know, in 30 seconds what the experience has been going through Founder Institute with Austin and for Trabigo, if you're not available.

I'm here. I'm here.

Hi, guys.

I'm Kelsey.

I'm the CSO of tramigo.

I have had a great time with Founder Institute.

I've come a long way with my.

Pitching and public speaking, and I credit.

That a lot to Mike, Ben and Brian.

I've been excited to be on this journey with them. It's hard to follow up Austin's passion here, but I'm so excited to be.

Part of Tramigo and bring it super far in the future. Wonderful. And congratulations on graduating as again. 142 applied, 28 started the program that got in and we're finishing today with seven. So congratulations on being one of the seven. Kelsey and Sami, if you're here and able to unmute, feel free to unmute and tell us a little bit about myvita AI. And if not, let's see. Sami, can you hear us?

Can you hear me?

We can, Yep. Yeah. If you can tell us just a little bit high level of Myvita AI and maybe, you know, quick 30 seconds version of your experience going through Founder Institute.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Mike. First, I want to congratulate every other.

Founder in the program for all their progress today. I'm so excited for you guys.

My name is Sami Shora and I'm the founder of MyVita AI. Basically, it's a supplements app. It's the world's first AI powered supplements recommendation and management app.

The product was designed and invented by.

Myself as a biohacker and supplement consumer. And I cannot wait to bring it to everybody, including supplement consumers. So that's pretty much what we do. And thank you all for being here. Wonderful. Thank you, Sami and I see that in the audience. We have a lot of other founders. We have some founders that have been accepted into the program that starts in March. And also see we have some of our great mentors and I'm going to put them on the spot. But, Steve Morley, are you available to come off of mute for just a minute?

Sure.

Hi there.

Hey, buddy.

Yeah, I'm here.

It is happy to be here too. It's wonderful to see you. This wasn't planned at all, but I'd love to just put you on the spot. Because we have incredible mentors in our program and our mentors mentor based on their availability, based on the bandwidth they have available. And all of them, in addition to the founders being rated, all of the mentors are rated as well. And Steve Morley consistently comes in as our top rated mentor in providing incredible value. But Steve, I'd love to just ask you again, kind of putting you on the spot. This wasn't planned, but if you don't mind, can you share a quick background on you personally and what you've built and kind of the claim to fame and also what you find why you mentor in this program? Because I think your mindset speaks to a lot of why the other mentors are involved as well.

Okay, sure. Yeah. And wow. I get to lead. Well, real quick because like you said, this is completely unexpected. But yeah, my background, I've been a serial entrepreneur for longer than most people here have been born. Started my first tech company in 1978. Yeah. But my best startup was Qualcomm. I was honored to be Employee 10, the first non founder of Qualcomm and spent 21 years as an entrepreneur within that company. But for the last 15 years I've been helping folks like these to build companies, turn ideas into great idea in great successful businesses or in some cases to give up on the idea because it wasn't going to work. And you might as well learn that early on, save you a lot of grief. I'm here to help anybody. It's my passion. I feel totally blessed in my life with my career and I want to give back. So find me. It's easy to do. Stevexecs.com and happy to help out. I don't know what else. Mike, did you ask? I'd lost all the credit.

That's perfect. And I just want to say we're grateful to have you. I know that this is a congratulations to the graduates, but also it is really a thank you to the mentors, the partners, the sponsors that have made this program possible. With that said, actually we have Justin Nahama. Justin, are you available to come off of mute and turn on your video for just a second?

Sure.

Okay. Wonderful. Justin, I have to say is one of our. He was actually the first sponsor of the Founder Institute San Diego program, believing in something that was being relaunched and I just want to thank him personally. Justin, thank you for what you're doing and the mentorship capacity. Thank you for your sponsorship in the program through Fisher Boyles, your law firm. Can you tell us just a little bit More about maybe your background and why you chose to support and be a mentor with fi.

Sure.

Thank you, Mike.

I just popped it in the comments as well. But it's been really cool to watch you bring Founder Institute to San Diego and and really provide the platform to help people lean more into the community. And what struck me about you and Founder Institute is really the differentiator commitment to impacted community. You know, I built my life around that as a Marine and then the last 15 years working with various companies in the nonprofit and for profit space. And as all the companies know, the past that I've been lucky enough to mentor, the past year or so, I've been working with Deepak Chopra as his COO for his foundation. And it's been extraordinary to watch how things have shifted with COVID And what I know with 100% certainty is all of the companies that are going through and graduated that made it have the right formula, values, alignment and support to do good in the world and be wildly successful. And so my role is very simple behind the scenes, my love language is courage, and everyone on this call has it. And it's been extraordinary to watch all of your growth. And so I'm just excited to see what everyone does in the world moving forward and here to support you on all fronts. So thank you for including me and your trust and look forward to seeing all the magic unfold. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Justin. And now I'd love to hand it off to Ben. Ben has been an integral part of this program, doing a lot behind the scenes with the curriculum, supporting the founders in an incredible way. And again, as my co director at San Diego, Ben, do you have any words for the founders?

Yeah. Just so proud of you guys and all the work that you've done, seeing everyone come through this program. Having gone through an accelerator myself, I know it's a ton of work. Having built a number of startups myself, it's a ton of work. But it's so amazing to see how far you guys have come in just a few short months. Like the. The contrast is just amazing. So proud to have been able to serve you work with Mike. Mike's done an amazing job. I just want to also give a shout out to Mike, who's done an amazing job leading these sessions, helping bring Fi back to San Diego. And I'm super happy and proud to work with him and do this again within next semester. So if anyone out there on this call is interested in joining us, working with us, we're really excited. We'd love to have you here. I think I'm about to build my next startup company as well. So I'm just. It's.

It's.

Once you start, you cannot stop. This is an addicting process. I encourage everyone to get started because I just, I love the process so much.

Excuse me.

And I'm just. And I love San Diego so much. Again, just to echo what Mike said, we have some, just the most amazing mentors that I've been able to work with and fortunate enough to bring into this program as well. So I'm excited to bring those resources, those connections, those mentors into this program to share those resources with you guys and just to share that knowledge and wisdom and just to bring about more amazing companies in this beautiful area that we get to all live in. So thank you, Mike. Thank you guys all for being a part of this and for joining us on this call. And I hope to see some of you that are on this call into our next semester.

Mike, did you do this without telling.

Everyone that it's your birthday today?

I just saw that. Fun fact. That is ridiculous for you not sharing that with everybody. So happy, happy birthday. Thank you. Talk about the best birthday gift ever. Everyone who knows me personally knows how passionate I am about startups and community, and here we are at the intersection of it and getting to, you know, with everyone's help, bring Fi to San Diego. It's an honor and it's truly an incredible birthday gift. So I just want to say one last congratulations. I've said this at the beginning. This is not the end. This is truly the beginning. You have a lifetime of support from myself, Ben, Brian, the other mentors, the partners in the program you have, Fi is there as your partner all the way through the lifetime of your company and any future company that you build, if you want them in your corner, and they are someone great to have in your corner. My commitment is I will continue to add as much value to you and this ecosystem as possible to connect you with the best mentors like Steve, Justin, Neal, Bloom, and we'll continue to grow this ecosystem so we can have impactful, meaningful, enduring companies built. So thank you again for joining us for this graduation event. Congratulations to the founders. We're going to move into the networking piece and so Brian has set up breakout rooms. We'll have five to six people in each room and these are really just simple ways for you to connect. Some of you will have the founders that are graduating in your room. Some of you will have a couple of the mentors. But the goal and this is the, you know, for the next 10, 20 minutes, if you'd like to just share, you know, your name, what you're working on, what you're passionate about so you can meet other people that are in a similar space to you. And maybe if you want to share, just as a talking point, you know, one thing that either Neil mentioned in his keynote or a founder that did their pitch, something that stood out to you from this last session over the last hour and 20 minutes as just a nice conversation starter. We'll have the breakout rooms going for the next maybe 30 minutes or so if you'd like to stay on. Otherwise, feel free to introduce yourself to your group and then, you know, excuse yourself and leave at any time. Last thing I'll say again is FI is it's the largest early stage startup accelerator in the world. We also host the most startup events of any organization in the world. So FI has a number of events. We're hosting a pitch competition with Misty Rusk, who actually runs sdac, the San Diego Angel Conference, and is also the director and I believe the founder of the Brink USD. We'll have a number of active investors on that panel. We're also hosting, I'm hosting a Fireside Chat with Gaurav Bhattacharya, who's the CEO and founder Involve AI. He came through Founder Institute years ago and last year his company raised 15 million in a, I believe a seed, possibly a Series A. So again, we're going to keep hosting great events with great founders, investors and mentors that hopefully you find value from. And if you're interested in joining the program, you can go to FI CO San Diego or just FI Co if you're already in the area. So again, congratulations to the founders. We'll jump into our networking session and we look forward to doing great things together. Thanks so much and Brian.