Giving Students & Academic Entrepreneurs a Spotlight at San Diego Startup Month

Startups get the party Startups get the party started Startups get the party Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside the Tijuana Estee be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host Neil Bloom. Startups get the party Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host Neal Bloom, San Diego's Tech Ambassador and together we're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle. I want to take a moment to thank our friends at Cochrane Business who have enabled us to tell these amazing stories of local leaders, technologists, founders and funders. Cox is actually a 121 year old family run private company that thinks in terms of decades in connecting communities a lot like we do in building a tech ecosystem. For years now, the local Cox Business team has helped us grow through partnering at San Diego Startup Week, South Dakota Quick pitch and in celebrating our technical leaders at the Top Tech Awards this October, we're very excited to kick off an entire month of virtual networking and learning at San Diego Startup Month with talks on sales, marketing, data, people, design, development and more.

There's something for everyone in the startup and tech community.

Drop in on the pitch competitions, get your LinkedIn reviewed, meet new colleagues and listen in on investor panels on the future of deep tech. Check out the schedule and more@sandagostartupweek.com and thanks again to Cox Business for your partnership.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and I am thrilled to have so many of my friends and colleagues from the startup community Here on the show today, I'm excited to have a big group conversation about something that we're really passionate about and excited for in October, which is Center Startup Month, the Inventor and investors Pitch day, and have so many organizations coming together to make this event happen. So welcome all. Thank you guys for joining. So let's let me briefly talk through like what's happened in October and that'll set the stage for everyone here who's joining on the show. So October's shaping up to be quite a special month. San Diego startup month from October 1st through 30th. And just as we designed it from the beginning, this is supposed to be a platform for organizations to come together and showcase in front of a large community. A great event that brings to everyone resources that are available. So one place, one time, meet a lot of people and meet a lot of resources all at once. And so we're thrilled to have with us members from San Diego Innovation Council, San Diego, Tech Coast Angels and Startup San Diego. So thank you all for joining in today. Do you want to each introduce yourself briefly and your organization? Terry, do you want to start?

Sure. So I'm Tari Suprapcho. I'm the vice president of the board for the San Diego Innovation Council. My day job is as an opportunity scout for Elanco Animal Health, but prior to that I was doing a lot of commercialization of technologies out of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, and that's how I became involved with the council in the first place.

Awesome. Great to have you here, Ruben. You want to give us introduce yourself too?

Sure. Thank you for having us. It's a pleasure to be here with everyone else. I'm Ruben Flores Saeeb and I'm the current president of the San Diego Innovation Council, an organization that along with Terry, I helped start three, four years ago. My day job is to be the Associate Director for Commercialization at the University of Southern California. And the mission of the council, as you know, is to help startups derived from academic and research based backgrounds succeed in collaboration with their colleagues here in the call.

Awesome. Thank you. Ruben, Caitlin, Ashok, great to have you both here. Do you want to introduce yourselves and Techos angels? Sure.

Well, while I don't like going after Ruben on a podcast after hearing his dulcet tones that seem like they're made for this format. I am Ashok from Techcoast Angels, Executive director and recurring guest now on the Tacos and Tech podcast Startups get the Party Started.

And I'm Caitlin Wege. I'm the current president of Techcoast Angels, San Diego. Tech Coast Angels is a group here in San Diego. We're one chapter out of four across Southern California and we have over 200 individual angel investors that work together to vet and invest in companies. And my day job is I manage my family's investment fund, Moodoo's investments, and we invest in early stage startup stage companies across North America. Thank you very much for having me. I guess this would be technically my second time on the podcast since we got together and talked all things space a couple weeks ago.

Yes. Welcome back. Great to have you back again. Thank you. And last but not least, another multiple time guest, Alexa Ray Navarro from Startup San Diego. Welcome.

Thank you. Yep. At Alexa Ray, executive director, Startup San Diego, an official 501c3 nonprofit acting as the gateway to the San Diego startup ecosystem. So we serve to connect, educate and inspire founders and local talent to grow an equitable San Diego startup ecosystem and entrepreneurial community. So I think this is like, is this number three, I think for me, Neil, I don't know, but thank you for having me.

Of course. Always, always, always. Thank you all. Well, I think what we're really excited to talk about is really a story, a theme that's been going on in San Diego for a few years now is this. We're better together. The bridging of organizations together, where we share resources and share events, put our heads together and come up with even better ideas to help serve our innovation economy, our entrepreneurs and our tech talent. And I think assembled here is a great story of that. We've got each of you who have had your own individual events and said, you know what, this year a few things happened, like Covid, like some other things, let's join forces. And that's beautiful. I mean, it's such a San Diego story. It's really been a force multiplier for us. So I thank you all for doing that and having that wisdom to say we are better together. Ruben, Tari, do you want to talk through, like, what previous events were like for Innovation Council and what you were looking at this year that kind of led to this bridge to the, to building this inventors and investors event together.

Yeah, we put the inventors first because entrepreneurs come first.

Right.

Don't have a job without them.

Yeah, that's right.

I've got that mixed up too. Investors and inventors. Investors, inventors.

It has happened to all of us.

I think, Ruben, you want to start with the previous event and I can kind of bridge into sort of how we then came into this new one.

Sure, sure. Well, I want to say that one of the main events that the San Diego Innovation Council conducts every year is the San Diego Innovation Showcase which is a the celebration of prior successes of academic startups being launched into the marketplace as well as a demonstration of the pipeline of innovation arising from the academic research institute in San Diego. For the last three years we put together a one day full event showcase where we brought 30 to 32 companies to the table in different stages of development, most of them still on pre commercial stage, but also started the day with one big success. One big example is why we're doing this, why are we here together and why are we investing in these type of companies? The showcase is open to all of the academic or research intensive centers in San Diego and it has been expanded over the last three years to the surrounding communities, including Arizona, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, and of course Irvine as well. So it has been a great one day gathering where we brought the startups, entrepreneurs, the business people, inventors and investors from Boston, from San Francisco, from Japan, from Latin America to look at this pipeline of innovation in San Diego and tell the story of why investing in San Diego is great in terms of people and technologies. I'm going to pass it on to Terry now.

And I should also add that this event that we have become the landmark event for the Innovation Council is very much in harmony with the roots of our organization, which is in the academic institutions. The founding members are from the academic institutions. The board is primarily representatives from academic institutions. It's one of the few public fora where we, you know, where we bring in things this early stage and basically bring them to light. And over the years it's grown, you know, much to our amazement, pleasant surprise and we always endeavor to make it better. But Neil, as you pointed out, this year is a very unique year and a lot of the topics of our board meetings was like what are we going to do? And Neil and Caitlin who were at our quarterly members meeting and that was one of the topics that we brought up as an agenda for discussion and saying like we'd like to pivot but we're not quite sure how. And both of you immediately spoke up and you know, that led on to a number of very efficient and very productive follow on conversations. And that is how we all decided to join hands and work shoulder to shoulder, realizing that in these challenging times, it's much less challenging and much less scary if we do it together. Alexa Ray, you came into the picture in one of those subsequent conversations. And offered Startup San Diego as the framework. And then Caitlin and I and Ruben and Ashok Kathina to talk further. And they too, like us, have their landmark event and we're in a similar situation. So again, thank you guys for coming to that San Diego Innovation Council meeting and speaking up and giving us the space and the forum to be able to do this. We're very, very happy and honored to be doing this with you all.

It's great to see that the event lives on right even within Covid, we still honor each respective group and we bring them together. Another event like that is Techcoast Angels Quick Pitch Event, which over the years has also partnered with other organizations. You know, just a few years ago you partnered with Connect with San Diego Venture Group to create even an Cox business to create kind of an even bigger Quick Pitch event. Like, what were you guys looking at this year coming into Covid? Like, what was Quick Pitch looking like for you? And how did you come to this decision to join hands as well?

Well, we were looking at making Quick Pitch bigger and better like we do every single year. You know, it was going to be the 13th year in each of the last three successive years. It kind of reached escape velocity and that was through the collaboration of first techlist Angels and San Diego Venture Group, Now Connect and then Cox business coming in. So we were just able to ramp up everything on the production, on the, on the audience, on the quality of the teams, on the cash prize money, you know, which was getting into the six figure range. But you know, of course, like everything else this year that was turned upside down. So then we were faced with this situation where, you know, it wouldn't be practical or even possible to run a 500 plus person event at Qualcomm hall, you know, like we always do. So, you know, we had to put our heads together and, you know, think about what alternatives could be to kind of keep that same spirit of Quick Pitch alive, but through a different application. So, yes, Quick Pitch is about pitches like the name implies. And we get hundreds of companies that apply and we pick, you know, 10 to be finalists and then we fund some of those 10. But it's also about a lot more than that. You know, the reason it's gotten so big, you know, really the premier pitch event in Southern California, is because of the collaboration. So collaboration is, you know, kind of first and foremost in making an event like that successful. And then, you know, it's also about the connections that are being made. So the TCA coaches to the companies, the judges to the audience, you know, it's the entrepreneurs themselves getting to learn from each other. You know, we wanted to still keep that streak going and of course, find a way to make it fun. And, you know, that's what Startup San Diego is great at doing. So, you know, taking our breathing in the problem and exhaling solutions like entrepreneurs do. We came up with this new idea in collaboration with the Innovation Council and now several others that have joined on to support the effort.

Yeah, it's fantastic to see. Great point about being able to pivot as entrepreneurs ourselves too. And a great showing that. I think that one super pivot is to bring in Alexa Ray, who not only started six months before an event that was originally supposed to happen, Startup Week in May, but obviously Covid and everything else happened during your very first months on the job. So. So take us through a little bit about that impact to Startup Week and Startup Month and then this idea, realizing that it's a platform and you have all these other orgs you can bring in to help, you know, put together an even bigger virtual event.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what a crazy nine months it's been. You know, like you said, I started in December. You know, really when you think about team formation and, you know, getting into sync and workflow and, you know, just, just hitting the ground running essentially was sort of the story of, you know, January through March for myself. And, you know, so I was very much getting my feet wet. And boom, here came Covid. But that's okay because, you know, like, like we said, in true entrepreneurial fashion, you have to pivot. And I think with big challenges come amazing, amazing opportunities. And so, you know, there was so much uncertainty. January, well, once, what, March, March time frame when, you know, we went into initial quarantine. And so, you know, yes, we had Startup Month in the pipeline, but we also had, you know, early stage workshop series that we had plan initially lived. And so we had a lot of other, obviously monthly programs. And so there was this big question of how is Covid going and Pandemic going to play out? What are we going to do? And so I would say we really got our confidence with, you know, the whole virtual format running. Our early stage workshop series that kicked off in April and ended in May. And so at that point, tremendous, tremendous success served over, you know, 500 early stage entrepreneurs, great attendance. We really said, I think we can, we can do this. I think we can take Startup Week virtual. And so we dove in to, you know, planning essentially. And so out of those initial planning discussions, we put Together an internal task force committee with members of the community and the board. And we really arrived at the whole idea of Startup Month. Right. We no longer have the time that we did earlier in the year to sit in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day for a week straight. It's just no longer in the cards. So really thinking about user experience and what was going on in the daily lives of all of our ticket holders and potential participants. And so we really put together and created a much more palatable, really intentional experience over the course of the entire month of October. So really excited and, you know, I think it's absolutely incredible. It really has turned into a platform to really keep the community going and provides an opportunity to get all of our partners involved.

Yeah, I think it's fantastic to see how many community partners have come in, especially some of these organizations. And there's a lot of diverse partners and also events happening. Can you talk through specifically kind of the diversity of how. Kind of how broad we're talking to an audience. Right. There's entrepreneurs who, people who want to start, people want to work at tech companies, there are investors, there's also service providers. How does this event specific kind of fit into everything based on who the audience is and who these organizations are and who they represent?

Absolutely. I could go on for hours about this, but I think first things first, you know, this event specifically really does complement everything else that is currently slated, you know, for the Startup Month experience. And overall, I mean, I talked about our mission in the beginning, but really to connect, educate and inspire founders and local talent to grow an equitable San Diego startup, ecosystem and community. And that's a really, really, really big mission. We cannot do it alone. You know, I'd like to think of us as a full stack ecosystem enhancer and partners are absolutely integral in that. And that's why our core values include community overall, give first, collaborate versus compete. And I could not think of a more perfect example that really embodies what Startup San Diego is all about, Startup Week and now Startup Month. So it's really about bringing people together and community overall. So it's pretty incredible to have four institutional ecosystem organizations, organizations with their own individual missions coming together to really sort of form the bridge for the community to get to the other side. So I think it's the most perfect complement and I'm so excited to see it play out on October 9th officially. But like you mentioned, Neil, there's so much diverse programming in store for Startup Month and I'm happy to kind of go into what one can expect. But I also want to, you know, again, thank you for this opportunity to sort of talk more about Startup mode. So I want to ensure that we throw out a little discount code to all the taco and tech podcast listeners. So I'm throwing out listeners. Taco Pod 30 is your $30 off discount for a ticket to Startup Month. So Neil, make sure I send you that code. But like you mentioned, so there is something for everyone at Startup Month. So whether you're a founder, an investor, someone who works at a tech company, an executive, government representative, all of our conference tracks are split up into eight functions based tracks. So founder, sales, customer, marketing data people, design developer. There's so much content happening and so I would recommend first things first, you check out the schedule. So schedule is now live, which we're very, very excited about. San diegostartupweek.com schedule you'll be able to filter all of the content by track and so highly, highly recommend you build out your experience. Spend some time to get everything on your calendar. So some things not to miss that I really want to point out. Obviously the pitch competition that's happening on October 9th, but also we're doing a really incredible we're literally going October 1st through October 30th. So the kickoff event is happening October 1st from 4 to 6:15. We're going to have some awesome keynote discussions, Fireside chat panel, as well as something I'm really, really excited about. Haven't spoken publicly about this yet, but a party in the Verbella Platform platform, which is a completely immersive virtual world. So we're going to be, you know, chatting together, experiencing content in the first part of the kickoff and then jumping into a virtual world where you'll be able to operate an avatar and engage in some really fun experiences that we have lined up. We're running a Startup Month incubator that's going to be overseen by our brand new six entrepreneurs in residence. So really focused on supporting early stage curious founders. Go from idea to launch. Throughout the month of October, we're going to be doing pitch feedback shows with live investors, Shark Tank style. We have an entire day focused on supporting talent. So Career Incubator Focus Day brought to you by Pet Desk, where we'll be doing live LinkedIn tear downs, live mock interviews, as well as professional mentorship. And we're closing out October with some amazing keynotes as well as another Virbella party. So so much happening. I know I just spoke for about like 10 minutes straight, so I'm gonna turn it back over to you. But remember, tacopod 30 is your discount code.

That's awesome. Thanks for doing that, Alexa. Ray. So much going on. So excited. Everyone cleared calendars for the month of October. We're just all gonna be hanging out virtually like this and really excited. I think something you touched on, the diversity is absolutely the focus and something that we don't always focus on are students, student entrepreneurs and kind of academic and research entrepreneurs, people who kind of are working on technologies while they're working on learning and working on developing new aspects of the day. And Caitlin, you sit on a few different organizations, some related to schools. You mentor a bunch of students I know at the Lavin center and others like, what does this event mean? What does this inventors and investors pitch event mean for students to have access to investors and others like this?

Yeah, well, it really means a lot. And just going back to what Alexa was saying about Bridges, like you said, I do sit on the boards or I'm involved with quite a few organizations around town, whether it's nonprofit and then the university. So Lavin and Zip Launchpad, I sit on their advisory board and I mentor. I'm also somewhat involved with USD and somewhat involved with UCSD and then of course Tech Coast Angels and also Startup San Diego. So just having that overview of the whole community and then going into Covid and focusing on resilience is really being able to have that oversight is how I help to try to connect the dots on getting this, you know, helping form this idea of the pitch fest. And part of the reason why this is so important is, like you said, a lot of the students and the other companies that have technologies that are spinning out of the universities are usually very focused on whether they're at school or just, you know, working on the research and aren't necessarily out in the community applying for pitch events, like the John G. Watson pitch event that we have, I mean, we get over. I know a show can probably correct this, like 200 applications and it's hard to sift through all the noise and a lot of the really cool innovations that are coming out of the academic institutes here in San Diego sometimes don't get seen through the noise for those kinds of pitch or they're not. Like I said, they're not pitching. And so for this, it's partnering with sdic, we're able to focus in directly on the innovations and the technologies coming out of the academic institutions and the students. And so this is very important about shining a light on all that goes on in San Diego and in those institutions. I'm really excited about being able to focus on this and really highlight that and get the public, the community, the economy and all of the funders kind of focusing in on this and shining a light. And then of course being able to partner with Startup San Diego and leverage their platform. Right. Like Ashok said, on a typical year, you know, we're able to market this, we're able to have John G. Watson in person and sell all these tickets. And right now we're in a virtual world and everybody knows there's so much going on in terms of virtual events, it's almost like overload. And so then to be able to partner with Startup San Diego's month, then we get to help leverage the audience and expand hopefully globally the attendees to focus in on all of the wonderful innovations here in San Diego and Southern California. So I'm very, very excited. This opportunity for our students and our academic research institutes.

Yeah, it's a great point. Something else that TCA and Connect have done in bringing Quick Pitch together is the idea that it's not just a one time event, but there is coaching that goes and happens. Leading all the way up. Ashok, do you want to talk a little bit about kind of what that coaching that you're bringing to this event with like, what's that like for applicants over the last month and leading up to October's event?

Sure. Well, while we did have to re engineer some aspects of Quick Pitch, like the live Qualcomm hall showcase element, there are other aspects that we didn't want to throw out in the process of that remix. So the coaching which happens between the finalists and usually it's TCA investor members, in the case of Quick Pitch, it's often a month leading up to the event is one way for not only the entrepreneurs to refine their pitches, and I see from point zero to five in that, say 30 days, there's an exponential improvement in the final pitches. It's just the iteration process of doing any kind of pitch. So that's a big part of it is we help them polish up their two minute presentation and deck and we're continuing that same playbook here since at the end of the day inventors and investors is still going to be a cohort of finalists pitching on a virtual stage. But the other benefit is the relationship building that happens between the coaches and the entrepreneurs. So we have a number of cases where the TCA investor coach has gone on to then lead the deal for that company within TCA and A subsequent financing. You know, Quick Pitch is a large cash prize. You know, it's in the $100,000, you know, range, you know, now every year. But TCA has invested in the $5 million range in quick Pitch companies over the past few years. So the real prize is the introduction and the relationship that you're building with, you know, real investors. And that's both the TCA members as well as some of the judges who, you know, let's say, you know, are also getting exposed to startups. And that's part of the reason that they're choosing to judge is to get that first look and then to start connecting those dots in the line to fundraising.

Yeah, you bring up a great point. It's more than just this event. It's really opening up to a community. And another piece of that is the picking of the judges, picking the right people that come together, which I know both STIC and TCA came together to do. Do you want to touch on that, Tara Rubin, a little bit about kind of how you selected judges to put in front of this, this group of finalists?

Well, we.

Go ahead.

Just got it real quick and. Go ahead. Feel free to jump in, Tarek. You know, we really, in this case, we really felt we could rely on the expertise that Tech Essentials has in driving the pitch event, the Quick Pitch competition. The traditional format of the San Diego Innovation Showcase hasn't been much of a judge and pitch. It's been more of creating awareness and bringing all the elements of the ecosystem together without judging and letting the community choose who they want to work with. In this case, we banded with TCA and we all thought about who are the experts, who are the people who have seen companies, invested in companies, selected companies in the past. And at least from the San Diego Innovation Showcase, San Diego Council perspective, we stayed away from selecting any individual organization with that actual real experience in investing. Terry. Sorry. If you want to go ahead, Sure.

I mean, in terms of the actual judge selection, it was very much a brainstorming in terms of thinking who, you know, who would be the best people to come to an event like this. Keeping in mind that the pool of finalists were going to be drawn from a larger pool that was. That started out being initially curated by the San Diego Innovation Council. So going back into the academic, research institutions, you know, past showcase, you know, presenters that, you know, left positive impressions.

Right.

So. So I. So it. So in terms of how we, you know, came up with the. The judges that we will have at Inventors and Investors, is. Is very much A joint effort.

And I just want to add to that that, you know, one of the, one of the assets that the people in the San Diego Innovation Council Board bring to the table is the relationship with early stage venture capital investors who we typically look and talk to to invest, you know, in a Series A or sit, you know, around even for the type of deep, deep tech innovations that arise from the academic institutions. So I think that was, you know, something that both TCA and us could, it was a common language to speak that we could combine our efforts.

Yeah. Is there anything specific? I know you can't release names of finalists yet, you're probably still weeding it down, but can you give us some hints on either some industries represented or any little sneak peek?

Sure. I think what, you know, what we can comment on at, at this stage is that one of the things that we as, you know, as a collective group were striving for was to get a pretty balanced mix, but driven first and foremost by quality.

Right.

But the balance of the various industry fields. So you'll see a mix of biotech, clean tech, high tech devices, and also diversity of the entrepreneurs, which is very much resonant of the times that we live in. So there was a great deal of thought that went into the selection process from the pool of applicants and we were very pleasantly surprised to see the enthusiasm that we got from the community. I think we opened up applications and we didn't have a huge window of time and we got a pretty high number, so it made our job a little bit more difficult. But again, for something that is the first of its kind like this event, it's nice to see it get momentum this quickly.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's great to have so many orgs, organizations, you know, like Connect, tca, others who can promote it as well and pull in their audience too. Alongside yours. Alongside what Ashok mentioned around the follow on potential investment from the relationships that are getting built. Like, what else have you seen come out of the showcase and that you hope happens for these entrepreneurs and the community in general from an event like this?

Well, what we've seen is partnerships. We've seen seasoned business people kind of engaging with some of these early stage big tech startups and becoming part of their teams and helping them succeed. We've seen investments happen. Last year at the San Diego Innovation Showcase, we had two in the spot, $2 million investment offers to a couple of companies that were presenting. So that was really a crescendo that came after three years of doing this event. But really the connections within the community, the service providers, the investors, the entrepreneurs that it's hard to predict where they're going to go. Right. But we're seeing that the community has an appetite and continues to ask us to have it. Especially again, our focus is academic based startups and academic based startups often have a team of folks who are doing it for the first time. They don't have the experience that serial entrepreneurs have. And we're aiming to make that bridge that connection with folks like TCA and others who've done it a number of times who can come in and mentor our early stage deep tech startups coming from academic centers.

Yeah, it's quite the platform to put them on. So again, thank you all for coming together and doing that. I want to ask Alexa Ray a little bit about just the month in general. You gave us a little bit of sneak peek on some events. What else can you give us from a tips for all of us sitting at home watching, you know, what's the way that we can make the most of the month, Give us a little, you know, little tips on how to do Startup Month, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So like I kind of laid out before, I think, you know, it's a month long of a lot of different experiences and events happening. So I would say dig in, start with the schedule first and really build out the entire month to ensure that, you know, you are calendaring out the sessions and regardless of track that you're most interested in getting it on your calendar so you're not missing, you know, sessions throughout the week. We will be on Startup San Diego's end sending out updates on a weekly basis to just another reminder to not to miss some of the great content that's happening that specific week but really focus on some time spend, you know, 30 minutes or so just building out your experience to make sure you get the most out of the month. Like I said, I mean there's Monday through Friday starting October 1st through the 30th, there's something happening. So you know, we're really excited about, you know, what's in store and yeah, have fun and also be bold. I think people, because there's a lot of unique experiences that we're that we're able to bring to the community based off of the platforms that we have that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do. And so you know there's going to be a lot of show styled content and so where we're really leveraging bringing people up from the crowd onto the stage. So I would say be bold Be brave, right? Like if you're participating in the pitch feedback session, volunteer, you know, to do your pitch in front of the investors live and just welcome the feedback. Right. So I think it's going to be a really fun experience experience. So I hope everybody really enjoys and I think one last thing I'd like to say is, is just an extend really is major, major gratitude to all of our partners and sponsors because without them this would not be possible at all. Specifically City of San Diego, you know, one of our largest supporters behind Startup Week and now Startup Month. And so just embracing us pivoting into this virtual Startup Month has been absolutely incredible. And there's countless other partners including all of the local universities this year. So USD, sdsu, ucsd, super proud of that and I think tying in perfectly to the pitch event with the strong academic tie. But others innovate 78 Logic Boost Labs, Silicon Valley Bank, AWS could not be possible without all of those partners as well as our community partners. So we're just really grateful and excited to hear what everybody thinks about the experience.

One last thing about that is that you really thought about the networking piece a lot. Do you want to talk about just like how Run this World is going to work and what that environment's like? Because it's not just a conference on Zoom, right? You don't just log into Zoom and then drop off. Like what's that experience can be like for everyone throughout the month.

Absolutely. I'm so glad you pointed that out because that's actually something that it was. One of the biggest factors in deciding sort of our platform for the conference for Startup Month is ensuring that we have something that provides the opportunity for engagement in a creative way. Right. Not just thrown into a giant zoom session with 50 other people. So Run the World has the capacity to do one to one individual networking sessions. So we're going to be doing lots of, lots of networking throughout the entire of the. Excuse me, throughout the entire month. And so essentially depending on, you know, which cocktail session you decide to join, you'll be thrown into, you'll be matched and paired on a five minute basis with somebody from the community who's also participating in that event. So you'll have time within the platform, five minutes to connect, chat, discuss, and then within the platform directly, you have the ability to directly connect with their profile so that you can follow up after the networking session directly to engage one to one, continue the conversation or even set up actual meetings within the Run the World platform. So after those sessions it will actually the Platform will send you a wrap up of, you know, say the seven or eight people that you connected with, you know, during the 45 minute networking session to provide you really clear next steps to how to continue those conversations. So that's one way we're doing networking. In addition, I mentioned the Verbella Virtual World platform. So we will be having sort of social event on both opening day and kickoff day with a lot of great opportunities to actually connect one to one in an avatar format of course, but where we've got some really unique activities planned out and attendees will also have have access to. Within the virtual Verbella world, we will have a startup San Diego team suite. So essentially looks like a giant co working space complete with a boardroom and meeting rooms. And we're going to be doing some really exciting engagement experiences, office hours, one to one mentorship within that Verbella team suite. So definitely networking opportunities there as well.

Awesome. We're really excited about that. San diegostartupweek.com is the domain. It's San Diego Startup Month. The inventors and investors pitch events is October 9th and if we're going to have this group put on a pitch event, then we're going to have a taco rapid fire pitch event right here. I'm going to put you on the spot for the tacos and tech podcast to quickly lay it on me. What's your favorite taco starting with Terry.

All right, Miranchito and Rancho Penasquitos. Highly recommend the salmon tacos.

Ooh, good one, Alexa Ray.

Okay, plead the fifth. Just like on the first tacos and tech pod interview. Grandma. Grandma would kill me if I didn't say tacos at Pete's Camp in San Felipe, Baja California.

Okay, all right, we'll do it for Grandma a shok.

I feel like if grandma heard my answer, she would also probably slap me for not saying somewhere in Baja California where a lot of my family's grandma's is at, but I like blue water seafood in good old fashioned Little Italy.

Awesome. Caitlin.

Yeah, so I'm a vegan and Tacostan actually has a delicious grilled cactus taco and I think haven't been in a while Puesto does or they used to do a fried avocado taco and those are both fabulous. So it's hard to choose between the.

Two good ones and Reuben.

Well, if I could I would go down to Ensenada, the home of the original fish taco. But in the absence of that, I'm happy to go to Cotijan here in Encinitas and have the carne the adubada taco. It's amazing.

Good ones. We're missing all of them. We'll have to do some postmates and get do a little taco tasting from all of them to our houses.

It's getting me really hungry right now.

I know.

And like it's that time of day too.

I know it is. Well, thank you all so much. Thanks for jumping on to talk more about your passion of putting this all together. It's going to be fantastic. I can't wait for everyone to join in and we'll make sure in the show notes we add the discount code as well. Thank you Alexa Ray for that. But thank you all for not just this event but what you're doing year round for the community. So I really appreciate it and we will see you at San Diego Startup Month shortly.

See you then.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the same tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest coworking in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos in Tech Pod on Twitter too.

You know we got it get the party startups get the party started. Startups get the party startups get the party started. Startups get the party startups get the party started. You want decking tacos tacos in tech. You know we got it.

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