Kevin Carroll of Tech San Diego: Supporting the San Diego Tech Community

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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 and coffee 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 esti 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.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly. So thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm really excited to have Kevin Carroll on the Executive Director of Tech San Diego. Kevin, welcome to the pod, Neil, it's.

Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. We've been in the community together for a bit and it is good to finally have you on and tell your story and the Texan Diego story. Do you want to give us a quick high level overview, maybe 30 seconds of what Tech San Diego is?

Yeah. So I've been involved one way or another supporting tech companies for a long time. I'll date myself a little bit. But San Diego, I came here in 2000 with a national trade association that was then called AEA, which had really deep roots in San Diego, that organization changed their name to Tech America and things were doing really, really well. We had a very strong presence in San Diego and unfortunately the National Trade association just went south really quick through reasons that I had no control over. And that organization imploded. And we still had a group of companies kind of looking at what we were doing and wanting to continue those activities. And I was like, well, you know, the organization's gone. I mean, how are we going to do it? And ultimately we ended up going to another organization in town called Connect. And we had a small mid sized company and Connect for a couple years. And while that went fairly well, eventually they got new leadership who was not that interested in, not the, currently not the current leadership, who I know very well and get along with and I think they're doing a great job. But the previous leadership really just wanted to focus on startups. And so we took our party and we formed Tech San Diego. I think that's probably six years ago or so and we've been growing rapidly and things are going good and having a good time and technology's perfect climate.

I love it. Yeah, technology. Long history of technology in San Diego. And like you said, not just startups, but technology companies that are supporting other technology companies too, right? So small, medium and large. There's so much in tech. Can you tell us kind of the broad spectrum of like what do you, when you say small and medium, like what is your, what is a typical focus of a company there?

So the typical companies that we engage with, our memberships are corporate. So you have to be a certain size to think about. I mean it's not a lot of money but you know, the average member pays any, anywhere from I would say 3,000 to you know, 10,000 or so due. So they've got to be pretty substantial. So if you think a company's probably, I would say from $5 million in revenue to probably $200 million revenue is our sweet spot. Now the larger, some of the larger tech companies are qualcomms, they're members too, of course, but really if you look at our activities, the really the focus is on those kind of, I would say 5 million to 150, $200 million companies, which covers most of the space in San Diego. I mean there's just a lot of companies in that space. And our take was, and Tech San Diego was everyone loves the babies, right? Everyone loves the startups and, and I do too. We love those guys. And we wouldn't have have small midsize without startups. So that's certainly something that we need to provide resources. But once they grow and they start maturing and it may not be the next big thing, it may not be a unicorn, but they're just great tech companies. And largely those companies are being ignored from a lot of different places. And we stepped in there and we try to do as much as we can to make sure those companies remain competitive.

So not usually venture backed. These are like bootstrap businesses, or maybe they are venture backed, but they've kind of plateaued on growth.

It's a good question, Neil. I would say it's probably a mix of venture backed and companies that are doing it themselves.

Okay. So they do need, you know, access to capital maybe of a variety of ways. Even if it's not your traditional venture capital, there's many other forms of capital that they need. And then they obviously with capital comes talent. Right. As well. It's a big source of not just growth, but even just from general turnover, there's a lot of access to capital needs. Like. Tell me about that. Just like your journey of understanding talent needs your company.

You know, especially after the pandemic when ironically, the need for talent got actually stronger.

Right.

We have focused a lot of our activities. We have a really good. I'm really proud of the talent portfolio portfolio we have. So on the one side, we help companies build their employee brand and we do that through podcasts and I have a tech directory and I have spaces in our digital platforms for them to promote themselves. We have a. Our newsletter, which goes out once a month to 10,000 subscribers. And what we'll do is we'll meet with, you know, the talent acquisition folks and we say, what are the key messages that you want to get out to the world?

Right.

And so we help them kind of build their employee brand. And it's interesting because we're seeing a lot of kind of traditional marketing elements kind of fall into that now. It's interesting to see them start to tap into marketing for building their employee brand because a lot of them aren't consumer based companies. And so they don't have. They may not have that necessarily have that background. So we do a lot of that. But one of the things which we've done really well and we're spending a lot of resources on is university talent. Now, Neil, I'm gonna. You gotta stay seated for this one because you may want to. We don't have a talent shortage. We have a shortage of people who want to hire new university talent. And so, you know, other regions I belong to a group of national trade associations and they would love to be in my position with all the universities we have that are so close.

Right.

We have not only UCSD but sdsu, Cal State, San Marcos, USD. We have the talent, it's just there is a problem with getting them into the local ecosystem and so we have a university talent initiative. My friend Erwin Jacobs has generously contributed the past year to help us fund this effort. I have a full time person, Christy Kyogi who sits on campuses and does everything she can to direct talent to local companies. We do ton of events. A day in the life of software engineer, Day in the life of a data scientist. We do tech tours, we'll take them out to see the technology companies. We'll bring technology companies on campus, we'll help them with their resumes. We have a ready to work certificate where those companies that are hesitant to hire new talent because of the lack of, they, they mentioned a lack of soft skills working in teams and everything. We run talent all through that and through a number of ways. We really want to try to get more talent to stay here in the region. There is a brain drain in San Diego. We have more talent leaving than coming and it's our intention to put a rapid stop to that.

Absolutely, I would say so you're connected to some other groups. I think it's a, it's not just a San Diego issue where the talent leaves like I hear LA has a very similar issue pretty much like a between 70 and 90% stat of engineering students don't get employed by a local company. And it's interesting the way you describe it of that. It's an awareness issue that they don't even know that companies exist locally for them to work at or maybe the big brand names, consumer brand names that they're not aware of. But that's changing a little bit. We're starting to get some consumer brand names here like Apple and Meta. Is that affecting at all kind of the recruitment of local talent?

I think it's certainly helping us. Right. We're a recognized place. One of the reasons we created Tech Directory a couple years ago is companies were telling us, look, we don't want people to feel like it's an island, right, that they're anchored to San Diego, that once they take a job here they're stuck, there's no place else to go. Well, we know Neil, I mean you and I both know that's not true. There's hundreds of great companies that they could work for but again they're just not aware of them.

Right.

And so one of the tricks is just bringing companies on campus, making them aware. And you know, I predicted that other technology councils would have people on San Diego campuses in the future. And I think that's true. I think at some time you're going to see an Austin Technology Council, perhaps you think about putting a person down here just to scout talent.

Right.

And so we really have the head start on that. We are making a difference. We've looked at, you know, for instance, the ucsd, hdsi, the Data Science Institute. We recently got a list of where those students were going and I was proud to see that list. And a lot of those companies were companies that we had taken up to the campus. So we know that it's having an impact in getting students to stay here in the region. And you're right, most of them just don't know about it. There's all these companies that they've never heard about. We also position to them. Look, do you want to be software engineer number 592 at LinkedIn, nothing against LinkedIn or do you want to be a group of the hard charging, dynamic group of software engineering where you're able to progress your career, you're able to touch upon different areas and you know, there may be a lot more job satisfaction in working for a smaller company, a medium sized company than one of the big ones. Look, Amazon's a great place to work. They work their people very hard. There's a very high burnout factor. Those people to go to work for AWS and Amazon, that's great. It's a great launching pad for a career. They're great organizations. But those, you know, you don't work for Apple or Amazon for 20 years anymore.

Right.

So I think having those companies in town and having them train up some of our people, I think it's nothing but good for the region. I do have members that will argue the other way that they're taking a the good talent, but more importantly they're spiking up salaries. So I do hear that. But I think if you take all those things into account, it's still a good thing that those big companies are recognizing San Diego as a talent outpost.

I hear you for sure. Especially to like you mentioned the training. There's a lot that students need to be kind of trained up to just be a professional. As you mentioned, the soft skills and that our small and medium sized companies do not have the time and resources to do.

Right.

They need people to get to work and build product, not teach you how to be a professional. So I understand what you're saying in that regard and I'm guessing you help a lot. And that kind of offset the areas where small medium companies can't do all of the training, correct?

Well we do. But you know the other thing Neil, is that the small mid sized companies don't have the resources to really know how to do university recruiting. I've been working at these universities for years. I still don't know my way around those bureaucracies sometimes.

Right.

And so having very fortunate. Christy Kyogi is our talent director. She's actually worked at sdsu, she worked at ucsd. She's one of the region's domain experts on really transitioning university talent to the private sector. She knows where all those places are, she knows where all the clubs are, she knows all these things. So we're able to help companies do that. When I first did this I thought we could. I had a manual on how to recruit university talent and it was this beautiful binder that I spent a lot of money on and I spent a lot of resources and it did Nothing because the HR person of 100 person company they, they're not going to have time. You know, we actually take them down and help them figure out how to do university recruiting and we don't need to own it. You know, I'm not a consultant. I don't get paid for every time. You know, I'll teach them how to do it and then they'll do it themselves. So it works out well for people who are looking for new talent. And the university has done a really good job at matching up curriculum. Something that people really haven't thought about especially in the past 10 to 15 years. And they've been very quiet about it because no one knows about it. But the curriculum and the real world skills have really been melded in the, in the past decade or so.

Oh, that's awesome to hear. That's a really big deal. Especially at our more research based institutions here where you know, especially from an undergrad you gotta ask like can this person be employable day one? And I gotta imagine certain companies have that question and hopefully are delighted to learn that hey, people can be put to work right out of school. So you've been very focused on the talent side. What else does Tech San Diego focus on currently?

So we do a number of things. One of the things that we're kind of known for is we have a set of pure roundtables. So I have HR roundtable and CEO roundtable And CFO roundtable and data science general counsel. So these are small peer groups, these are not structured. I mean these are anything go roundtables if you want someone to hold your hand and build out your strategic plan. We're not the group for you. I mean, but these are, you know, hard charging executives that have want to benchmark what they're doing against other world class companies and executives. And so most of them get together once a month and it's just them, it's not the rest of the folks that you usually see at networking, but it's just the actual practitioners getting in a small room, writing their problems on a whiteboard and figuring it out. So we do a lot of that. We also do a lot of work around data science. We're trying to create the perception that this is a world class center of excellence for data science. So we work closely with hdsi, ucsd, we have a couple of program series on data science. We're getting ready to announce some other things but we just want people to feel comfortable having their data science career in San Diego. And so you know, they need to know what that looks like. And so we do a lot of work around that. It looks like networking and stuff but the reality is we do it for companies to both retain and recruit data science executives. So that's something we do a little bit of policy work, a little bit of quality of life issues. You know I think that I position to our leaders that small mid sized companies are the economic backbone of this region. I mean and we have the stats to prove it. And yet when big regional decisions are made, they're not really consulted.

Right.

And so looking at things like transit for the tech workforce, middle class housing, we need entry level housing there. We have a big homeless problem, we need to do something about that. But we also have a middle class housing that includes for the tech. I mean not every tech worker is a $200,000 senior engineer.

Right.

And so we need to make sure that we have some type of middle class housing we for tech workers to be able to work in the region. So we do some work on with our electives trying to help them come up with solutions on that.

That's great. That's pretty broad in terms with a small and mighty team that I know you, you've built out. Where do you think Tech San Diego is a year from now?

Hopefully we continue to grow, continue to prosper again. I'm really excited about the talent stuff we're doing it. It's just, you know, two weeks ago I was up at SDSU around all the students. And you just get, you know, such a vibe being around those students. And I just really wish more companies would hire new talent. We have coffee with the dean where I will take a CEO and a lead HR person up to talk to the dean of the college that's been ucsd, although we're going to probably expand, in other words. And what they mentioned is we love to hire these people, but they may lack. We talked about earlier, soft skills.

Right.

So we're doing some things to make sure they have some soft skills. But even without that, they're more ready. They're in a position where they can contribute much more than a lot of companies give them credit for. And so I think making that argument, making sure they have internship programs set up, expanding that program a little bit. We're expanding out to SDSU and Cal State San Marcos. So it's a lot of what we're already doing, but hopefully just growth in membership and what we're doing. And again, we want to see a really vibrant ecosystem in the region that everyone else could look to and point to is that's the place that I want to be.

Absolutely. So when you talk about the kinds of roles in the departments, are you just focused on engineering departments and engineering kind of talent coming out of schools, or is IT across the board?

You know, most of our efforts on our. It's called the Jacobs Talent Initiative. Most of our efforts on the Jacobs Town Initiative revolve around technical jobs. Now, if a company comes to us and say, hey, we need some marketing people, we kind of know where those things are. So we're certainly looking into it, but really focused on, you know, more the technical jobs, whether it's IT or cloud engineering, software engineering, AI, data science, and also working with the university to figure out whether there's any deficits. For instance, one of the deficits I'm seeing is cloud engineering.

Right.

And it, I call them kids. And my talent director scolds me. But I'll say that with the talent, no one wants to be an IT person. They all want to be software engineers or other things. And the reality is, if you look at the pay scales and the growth opportunities for some of these IT positions, in a couple of years, they'll vastly surpass the software engineering.

Right.

And so those type of things kind of concern me too. Are we making sure that we're educating the talent on different types of jobs?

Right.

Because again, there's been such a focus on software engineering, but there's other technical jobs Right. So making sure cloud engineering is a good example of that. I don't think we could produce enough cloud engineers.

Right.

And so what are we doing to do that? And so I think we need to keep an eye on that in the region as well.

You make a great point. And even when you say cloud engineer, that's so many roles between DevOps and the whole stack around that. And then when you even say data science, that's data analyst and data engineer. Like there's many, many roles even in these kind of buckets that you talk about here. So it's a good point.

Yeah. And the hiring folks, you know, for instance, one of the deficits, one of the problems in data science was, and this is getting better, but they would copy and paste job descriptions on data science for entry level positions. And these job descriptions, they sounded PhD level.

Right.

And you go into a company go no, we don't need that, we just need someone working on these SQL databases. It was an entry level database data science position, but they were asking for things that someone would have to be in the seven to 10 years experience. And so making sure that our companies understand kind of that and job descriptions and that. And again, we want to make it easier to transition university talent to the private sector. So whatever we could do to make that easier and part of that is working, it seems like the HR people and the talent acquisition, they kind of get it. I think one of the barriers are the hiring managers.

Right.

They came in under a different time where the skills I don't think were as matched as they are now. And so you know, if you have a software engineer has been doing this for 15 years and you ask him to hire new university talent, he's kind of shaking his head saying geez, I, I don't have time to train someone. Especially as you pointed out, for a small mid sized companies, I don't have time to train someone. I need coding now and I think they're more ready than a lot of people think they are.

That's great to hear. So a company is looking for talent right now. What do they do when they come to you? What's the ask and where should they start? With Tech San Diego, we have more.

Students looking for jobs than we have companies.

Right.

And so we do. You don't have to be a member. I love everyone to be a member of Tech San Diego, but you don't have to be a member of Tech San Diego. So if you think you want university talent, maybe we'll put in liner notes, I'll give you the email for our talent director, who's Christy Kyogi, and she can help you. Now, obviously she's going to spend much more time and vetting on members of Tech San Diego, but if you give her a job description for university talent, she'll get you a handful, hopefully of resumes of folks that can handle the job. And you don't need to be a member to do that again because we have more students looking for jobs than we have positions.

Awesome. All right. Well, absolutely. We'll add links in the show notes here. Kevin, you've been San Diego a long time now. You definitely have got to know your way around the taco scene. You got a favorite?

I do. And I'm going to tell you, I don't think I've listened to your podcast. I haven't heard this one. So this is a new one. Okay. Love it. So there's a. There's a swap meet in Escondido and it's a largely Hispanic swap meet and there's a number of taco places in there, but as you go in, just walk straight in and there's a little piece. There's a place that advertise Berea tacos and it's just the sauce they use in that and the meat and the cheese is melted just right and it's really, really good. I don't know the hours. I've only been there on the weekend, so I don't know if they're open during the week. But you know, every month or so I'll go there just to go to those taco stands and get a Berea taco.

I love it. Especially love taco places that don't have a name but just a location where you go look for the taco stand itself.

I couldn't tell you the name of this taco place.

I love it. Well, we will find a way to put that into our taco database as we have one for sure just alongside the truck that shows up in the Target parking lot of south park, you know, on Sundays kind of thing. So, Kevin, it's so good to finally have you on the podcast here. Thank you for the work you're doing in helping our companies build even better companies. That's good for all of us and for the talent as well. We appreciate it as well too. So thank you. Keep doing up the good work.

I also appreciate. I want to throw that back at you. We also appreciate the work you do, both within the startup community, but beyond that.

Right.

We understand it's not just one little community. It's all these communities that are working together, right? It's the startup community, the small midsize, it's the large company. It's making sure that we have a complete picture of the ecosystem and how that ecosystem works together.

Right?

And not being competitive with each other, but being cooperative with each other. And so making sure that we're cooperating and we're talking and working with each other helps all of us. So I want to applaud your efforts in that area. We love the work you're doing. Continue to work and we'll continue to work together. I used to see you out and about networking a lot, but since those networking has gone down, I haven't seen you as much. So hopefully as we expand that networking, I'll be able to see you in person more.

Yeah, I would love to see you in person as well too. So Kevin, thanks so much. Cut from the same cloth. Keep doing the good work and thanks again. Cheers.

Thanks Neil.

Thanks for tuning in. Tacos and Tech Podcasts. You can find all of our episodes on freshbroodtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also follow Fresh Food tech on all of our social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

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