Neal Bloom (born/raised in Los Angeles) describes his education at UC San Diego (mechanical engineering), five years in space propulsion building rocket engines for NASA and the Air Force, and his pivot into tech startups. He co‑founded Portfolium (a LinkedIn‑style platform for students), joined EvoNexus in 2013, worked as a city launcher for Hired.com, and helped create the nonprofit Startup San Diego to broaden support for entire companies (not just founders). He now focuses on promoting San Diego’s tech ecosystem via FreshBrewedTech (newsletter and original reporting), runs a communications/PR firm (Rising Tide Partners, acquired in January), and produces local-history journalism (Tech Mafia series) to raise the region’s profile. He mentions program growth (mentorship revival, Startup Week/Tech Week expansion), regional outreach across San Diego, and partnerships with civic organizations like the City of San Diego and Comic-Con.
Questions this video answers
UC San Diego, mechanical engineering.
Five years.
NASA and the U.S. Air Force.
Portfolium.
EvoNexus (applied and got in in 2013).
You.
Hey Neal, excited to chat with you today and learn about your background and your role with Startup San Diego. So before we get to all the amazing things you're doing now, tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up, where did you go to school, and just a little bit about your career path.
Sure, yeah. Thanks Felina, for having me. I'm excited to do this with you. So I grew up in Los Angeles, not too far from here. I've actually moved to San Diego three times. This time pretty permanent. And I went to UC San Diego for my undergrad in mechanical engineering. When I graduated, I immediately moved back up to LA like a lot of people do, unfortunately, and worked in the aerospace business. So I actually worked in space propulsion for five years building rocket engines for NASA and the Air Force. So super interesting, interesting. Very passionate group of people who really want to do anything possible to keep America in space. But I really fell in love with kind of the talent pool actually, so the engineering talent, the recruitment of engineering talent. And so I started to help the company out a little bit more with that kind of planting seeds in the STEM world. And with a co founder and fellow rocket scientist colleague, we started a software company called Portolium that was kind of like LinkedIn for college students or is LinkedIn for college students. And that was my first touch into software and technology startups. So applied to Evo nexus incubator in 2013. We got in immediately, moved back to San Diego, lived on my co founder's couch while we were quickly after Portfolium, joined a company called Hired.com early on and became kind of a city launcher for them. So helped them expand from a few cities to a few dozen. And with that I got to learn how to kind of size up a tech ecosystem. So we would make a ranking of cities by a number of things. Universities, their venture capital flowing in, things like that. And built a playbook on how to connect software and technical talent with technical companies. And once I really learned how to do that for a dozen cities, I said, great, I really want to focus on San Diego because I live here already. And during that time I helped create this nonprofit called Startup San Diego. And while the nonprofit only existed about, we only created about two years ago. Between 2013 to now, we were experimenting with education and conference based learning for entrepreneurs. And I made the big push to not just speak to entrepreneurs, but the employees of companies that entrepreneurs are founding. And we said, we have so many resources for founders, we should make sure that everyone in the company is accelerating at the same rate, whether it's skills, skill set based, managerial kind of learning or, you know, fundraising and running a company as an executive. So been really engaged as that part is how do we help an entire company? That really helped us expand the reach of Startup Week. Right? Because now we can speak to so many more people. It almost should be called Tech Week. I feel like at this point because we have just as many people from Intuit and Viasat and Qualcomm coming to both speak and attend as startups. And so I'm really proud of that part that we've really done is expand and help the whole company grow. But something else that I also started to notice was that while everyone's heads down building their own company, we don't necessarily talk about what we're building to the rest of the world. So earlier this year I really embarked on kind of the evangelist piece of the tech community or just the business community of San Diego. Talking about from a blog, an email newsletter, podcast, kind of a multimedia focus of how do we shout to the rest of the world of what's going on here in San Diego so that entrepreneurs can keep being heads down building the companies. Because really in the end, that's the best thing founders can do, is build good companies and let a lot of other people kind of help them champion what's going on. So things I'm working on are kind of this marketing, communications, PR for tech, actually acquired and bought. I bought a company in January that was already doing this. And so I bought a company called Rising Tide Partners, which helps primarily government agencies and public utilities with PR and communications. And I've added in kind of the tech clientele as well to help with just strategies for expanding communications about what they're doing and how they're connecting to the community. So that's my day to day. I have a team of writers, project managers, some students who kind of are showing us what's the entrepreneurship community like through their eyes while a student on campus. And we're trying in any shape or form, tell stories about the great San Diego community. FreshBrewedTech.com Right now we put out a twice a month newsletter, talks about fundings, job openings and events that are happening around town. And then we also have our own original content team of three or four writers that track down interesting stories around town. And one that's really cool is this series called the Tech Mafia series where we track down kind of the successful companies of the 90s and early 2000s and we get in touch with the founders and say, where are they now? What have they started since? And one interesting story we found was Urchin Software, which was acquired by Google in 2004 and is now known as Google Analytics, started here in San Diego. Not many people would know that. Even more interesting on top of that is that they used to work in what is now Desk hub Little Italy. So that was their office and it continues on as another tech hub here in town, which is pretty cool to tell. We told Another story about mp3.com, kind of the early, early company to really take the digital music industry by storm. They went public, they were acquired by Universal, pretty much the entire talent pool stayed in San Diego. And so they've gone on to create dozens of companies locally. And so when we put out our first story, we had so many people reach out and say, hey, here's what I'm up to now that we actually did a four part series on mp3.com to talk about. Here's kind of the family tree that's come about since. So we're always looking for interesting stories around that. So I welcome anyone to send us new and good stories to talk about. You can email us at any techos T E C H O S like tacos but techoshbrewedtech.com if you'd like to send us even events, jobs, things like that we are happy to aggregate and share to our 10,000 plus reader group. A few things around that that we're looking forward to is expanding programs at the top of the funnel for entrepreneurship. So helping people go from ideation to full blown execution mode. Some of that is building confidence through meeting other entrepreneurs. So I know we're expanding programs around that and then meeting other serial entrepreneurs through mentorship. So excited to see the mentorship program come back because that was really one of our core things when we started our first year and it went away for a bit. So I'm excited about that. But there's a few other things I'm excited about are these partnerships. We've started to work with larger, like larger partnerships through the city. So the city of San Diego has become a great friend to us. And then there's a few organizations in town like Comic Con that really see the value in us blending our communities. That may not on the surface seem like, you know, like a startup and comics maybe not there, but our communities really have a lot of similar interests and we can help amplify what we're both trying to do. So things like that are really exciting as well as I guess planting a bit more roots throughout the entire region, having a chance for all of us to work, not just in downtown, but throughout San Diego, wherever there's little pockets of entrepreneurship. And so we're seeing a lot more interest in North County. There's even some new events that meet up there pretty regularly now. Little bit more also in Sorrento and UTC, too, with WeWork expanding there. So I think regionally, the growth is pretty fun to see, not having to have everyone come downtown, but, you know, taking this playbook that we did to downtown and saying, great, now let's go do it all over town, too. So a lot of good things coming in 2019, that's for sure.
