On Raising Funds and Building Fun and Interactive Hardware with Pree of Preemadonna

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos? Tacos in 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 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 hashtag SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Talkers and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am thrilled to have you here on the Talkers and Tech podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly. So thanks for tuning in every Tuesday and 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@freshbrewedtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I am thrilled to have Pre Walia on the podcast. CEO and founder of pri Madonna. Hey, Preet, thanks for being on the pod, even if you didn't know you were going to be on the podcast.

Thanks, Neil. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm always up first for spontaneity, so let's see how this goes.

I love it. We love having conversations with people who are newer to town, and I'm having them all the time. I figure, let's let everyone else sit in on a conversation like this as well. Too quickly. You want to give us an overview of what prima donna is?

Sure. Prima donna. We are a technology startup and our big mission is to really power creative expression, especially for, you know, we target kind of a Gen Z audience. And our first product is very fun. It's called Nailbot. It prints fun custom art Directly on nails, about five seconds. And so we view nail. It's really the gateway for the body. And so our vision is to really build fun, interactive hardware and software experiences for kind of our core creative consumers. But yeah, the nailbot is that flagship, awesome DTC at home manicure product.

Oh, super cool. All right, I want to hear the beginnings of this because I'm sure there's been some iterations to get here, I think maybe. But I'm sure your background is crisscrossed as well too, starting in politics. And so take us back. Where are you from and how'd you end up down this road?

Yeah, you know, I like to say I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I never intended to start a business. I. I was actually very good behind the scenes. I was, you know, always chief of staff or kind of on that, you know, on really that operator, but not necessarily that front leader. But I grew up in the south, so I was born in Louisiana and I grew up in Mississippi. And I, I do think my background like, shapes my perspective of the market. You know, I think when I think of the products and the experiences that we build for our consumers in our community, I don't just think of the coasts or major cities. I think of like, what would pre want, you know, living in Mississippi or Louisiana. But I grew up in the south and then I went to college real quick.

Where in the South? Like where. Like on the Gulf or what part.

In Madison is where I went to high school. Yep. And I was actually born in New Orleans, so my dad immigrated. He went to college at Louisiana Tech and grad school at Tulane.

Super cool.

Yeah, we've got like a whole Indian posse down in the south of like, all really interesting.

I spent a lot of time in New Orleans. I haven't for engineering work. I never ran into them, but.

Oh, they're there.

I love it. So how'd you find your way from there, you know?

Well, I went to college in Chicago and I really loved it, actually. Northwestern's really beautiful. It's kind of like big ten school, but, you know, strong in academics. And during college, I. And even in high school I was really, you know, I had this passion for American politics. I just really believe, like, I think policies is very similar to entrepreneurship. You tend to believe in someone's vision for the future. The product tends to actually just be this vision and this person, and eventually they'll institute policies instead of an actual physical, tangible product or service. Uh, and so I joined a number of political campaigns in college. And then after college um, my first job after college I worked at a congressional race in rural Arizona, getting people out to vote. I was 21, didn't know anything. I was like working on the reservations as well. I was like raising capital, getting people out to vote, doing like online and offline grassroots organization. And you kind of learn everything you can when you're, you know, working on these political campaigns. That very much is a meritocracy and you have to be okay with the unknown. The one great thing about working in politics versus working in startups is you kind of have an end date, right? There's a campaign and there's, there's voting day, right, there's election day. And so you tend to kind of have, generally you have some finality. There's um, and oftentimes the lessons from like the primary race are different, the general that are different than when you're actually governing. When you think about the life of a startup and you're going from pre C to C to you know, further down, it's very similar in the type of leadership you need. So, you know, I've been working in politics actually. I then I moved to dc, I worked for Pelosi in ROM at the dccc and I'm someone that likes a lot of things that are fast paced, right. We were raising a lot of capital out of Silicon Valley and I ended up working for governor's race in the Bay Area. I was under 25, super young, the politician didn't win. But I stayed and I managed this political money and you know, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. I don't know if any other entrepreneurs had this moment when they look back, you know, you talk. I think Neil, you had a career switch at some point in your life. I went to business school. This is what happens when people don't know what they want to do. They go back to school, right? So I went to business school. I went to UChicago and totally different than my background. Super strong quant school. I think I was like the anomaly there. I was like this crazy girl that worked in all these political campaigns, community organizer. But between my first and second year I took a risk and I took a job at an early stage startup called Lunara. We did LED lighting and building automation. I was one of the first 10 employees and I basically did. I mean they hired me. I don't know what they hired me to do, but I pretended I knew what I was doing and I have no idea what I was doing. But I like fixed Lights. I sold lights. I eventually managed our control partnerships. I was head of BD and anything that you can imagine, we manufactured in the US and also overseas. I mean, we grew substantially different rounds of funding and I joined them full time when I graduated from business school. And that was really my entrance into connected hardware. So when I talk about Nailabod and how it's this really cool connected device, the foundation for me understanding how to build connected hardware at scale stemmed from the fact that I took a risk, a big risk. You know, when I was 25, 26, working at probably, you know, my parents are like, what are you doing selling lights? You know, working at this very early stage connected hardware startup where you really do get to see. You're almost like a mini founder if you're one of the first 10 employees. And I always like to say, you know, I took a lot of these jobs where I learned. I maybe didn't earn, but I learned. And I think that really set me up for then I, you know, after I joined another startup, we did cloud services, building management. I really understood how, when I had the idea for Nailbot, I understood the pieces it would take generally to build this.

Got it. Super interesting. What, what ended up happening with Lenera. Just curious.

Yeah, you know, they stay alive for a while. It's always super interesting because the market opportunity is huge. You know, they ended up holding. And a lot of it had to do with just like some wrong bets on inventory, which is like the very hard lesson to learn in connected hardware. Right. Like you make some inventory bets, you're stuck if you can't sell through. And I think it just, I think it folded because of that. They wouldn't, they weren't going all the way until like 2018, 2019.

Wow.

Yeah. The magical thing about that hardware is once you've got that revenue in, you know, you make that R and D investment, but hopefully you have multiple revenue streams and, you know, you can fund yourself with that revenue. So it's pretty interesting.

For sure. Yeah, interesting. So obviously you got a taste of hardware, which I would imagine you kind of stuck in, stuck with and went, went deep into or where'd you, where'd you want to take it from there, by the way? The, the whole, like first 10 or first 20, like getting paid to learn, by the way, is an incredibly great opportunity. You said not earn as much. Right. But at least you're not. It's not school where you're paying out, right, to maybe learn something. It's like you're thrown in and that's addicting, right?

It is. You know, oftentimes people just want to start companies. To start a company. Right. It's like, great. Or do you really have that risk tolerance or, you know, can you be one of the first 10, 15 employees? And maybe you're not making as much as you would at Google or, you know, Tesla or somewhere else, but you really are going to get, you're almost a surrogate founder without being the founder. Right. And you'll still get paid, you get your benefits, you know, and I think it's that opportunity whenever I have folks that I mentor is to like to really think about that because you're never. Sometimes it'll be very hard for you get that opportunity again later in life. Yeah. But, you know, so trying to remember the other question that you had asked.

Where do you want to go from there? So you got your little taste. You got taste of startup world.

Yeah, I mean, it was a big, it was a big taste. I've been there a while. So I'd actually been on this, I had this idea for Nailbot. So I've been working in LED lighting. Right. Really. But in the building space, you know, two by twos, two by four droppers. And I started to see all these LED dryers hit the market. They're meant to cure your fingernail. They're sold in kits at home. Women were comfortable buying these kits between $99 to $300. But the device is barely dumb. It didn't do anything really, just it dried your nails. Like, I'm going to build nail bot and I'm, you know, I'm going to use a smartphone as a controller. We were bypassing building management systems by using the smartphone as a controller and lighting. And I was like, this is, this is what we're going to do. And we're going to, you know, we're going to use the back or front facing camera, the processing power. This is the controller of the device. This is the, you know, this is the brains of the hardware that we're building. And I always knew, I think in building automation it's really, it was really hard to build like brand loyalty. You have a lot of existing players. I think Nest is an anomaly. But you have ge, you have Phillips, and these brands have been around a very long time in beauty and in fashion and in lifestyle. There's more room for new entrants. And so I was like, Neilbot was like, Neilbot.com I'm gonna get that, you know, because I really thought we were building a product category. And I was like, but the magic is that we're gonna build tattoo bots and CR and henna bots and we're really going to decorate the whole body and it's going to be powered by our community. You know, I think my community background from politics and then even before that really kind of factored in because I was like, what we're really building is this art marketplace where girls or guys or anyone, any maker is going to create, design, say or share or sell their art, starting with Nail and then going onto their arm, etc. And so that I connected like my community building background, my hardware backgrounds all together to kind of build the company. And I kind of like to say the LED light went off in my and I started to see all these LED dryers because it started connecting the dots start.

I love that. So pre. So Nail Bot wasn't available, I'm guessing because like a two syllable word, a.

Little tough or was it Nail Bot was available. So you got Nail Bot. Yeah, Nail Bot's available. Privadata was available and it all kind of worked out. Yeah. So yeah, we got it.

So how'd you take. All right, so you have this idea and I'm sure it's brewing for a while. Like what'd you do to take steps to get ready to go full in, all in on it?

And full disclosure, I did not really know I was all in. I was still applying to jobs and had Google or Salesforce hired me way back when. Nailbot may not have existed, but they did not want the crazy that is free Wally us. So thank you Google, I guess for rejecting me many times. Yeah, I mean for a while I was kind of desperate. I was like, I had two paths. I was applying to jobs, I had this idea and I've been working on it and was like working on my provisional patent and was like tinkering around, was trying to get folks to help me with early prototypes and I didn't have any money and I was living with some friends, you know, post business school in San Francisco and I was like, well I kind of have like some savings for a couple of months, so let's see what happens. And lo and behold, I couldn't get a job. But I was able to close my, I will say this, my first check I closed helped me go. And I think everybody, every entrepreneur needs that first check. Whether it's from an accelerator, whether it's from your mom. Yeah. At this point you can't really too proud. You got to take it where it's going to come from mine. Mine happened to be from my freshman year roommate of college from way back when. She and her partner, he's a professional golfer, she looked at this and she said, I had nothing. I had no actually functioning prototype at that point. She's like, I may lose my money, but I will write the check for $50,000. And I think it's for Prima Donna. For the company that we have built. We really have been powered by female investors. And that first one came in a very unpredictable way. And I always like to tell people, you know, you never know if you're, you know, your freshman year roommate is going to be the one that really powers your idea.

Because that happened for me, for sure. It's super cool. I mean, the friends, families and fools are real. They are real and they're buying into you. And what better way than to have so many years under their belt, like literally every day together. That's what angel investing is all about. Investing in the people and knowing, like, no matter what you're going to execute, you're going to figure it out when it's an idea only. Right. You're going to turn that into reality. But even more than reality, you're going to turn into a business. So absolutely. Like those people you want to win.

Over and they've had years of diligence on you as a person. Right. So that's. Yeah, yeah.

Incredible. So take us through learning how to build your own hardware business, because you built hardware and software and a community. All the above. How'd you kind of tackle each piece? Because theoretically you need it all to work. What'd you do first and where'd you ultimately spend a lot of the time?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say we spent a ton of time in the early days and like that early MVP process. So eventually, you know, we'd started off building what I think will be like our second or third generation product. We eliminated the. In our current generation Nailbot, we use one motor and we print one pass over Bluetooth. In an early iteration, we actually use the front facing camera. The cartridge is stationary, and we use the touchscreen of the phone to track your finger. It's very clever. The girls were missing their finger. You know, there were a lot of issues and I had to take a step back and say, what can we get to market with? What will work? What are people comfortable with? And so we spent a lot of time, like, frankly, like hacking printers.

Yeah.

And I applied to a couple of accelerators, got rejected from every place. But the One thing about me that I've. I've always known, I'm someone that hand. And I think every entrepreneur or prospective entrepreneur needs to know this. Everyone has a, has like their super power, right? My superpower is I can get rejected like 50 times and still smile and like not take it too personally or if I do take it personally, it's like for two minutes and then I'm at it again and I. It is, you know, without getting bitter. No one wants to invest in a bitter entrepreneur. So I think you have to like really figure out what that superpower is for you. But my ability to kind of handle rejection I think has helped us go the distance. So, you know, hardware is hard, but if you can keep iterating, if you don't have money to go from, you know, EDT all the way through MP1, I'm throwing out these acronyms. But that's kind of what you talk about in hardware development. Then you have to raise entrances and you have to raised to reach a certain milestone and be very specific about what you're trying to accomplish. Right. Is this going to be soft tool? Is this going to be hard tooled? Is this going to be for market testing or is this really actually going to be the final. This is the design really blocked, right. And so we went. Because it hadn't raised capital for the entire ramp, it was really for each individual tranche. We just had to be really methodical about like what features we're going to build, you know, and what we were going to accomplish. But we did go through a hardware accelerator called Hacks. So I lived in Shenzhen for a bit of time. It was super interesting. It was clearly before Pandemic and it shaped my perspective on how to build hardware, how to build hardware at speed and other places in Asia and you can actually build as well. But I think as a CEO, especially as a female CEO, I feel very comfortable landing in mainland if I ever need to alone visiting a factory, you know, which I think is so powerful if you're a young hardware leader, you know, anytime you can eliminate some amount of the unknown and not be afraid, it's. It like gives you this leg up.

So absolutely. How did you balance so first time raising always right. You hadn't ever raised before. You have obviously people who believe in you, who know you for a while. There's the other side of the spectrum which is just like high net worth, but maybe don't have domain expertise and then there's strategic capital somewhere in the middle. How would you balance all that all because you have some great investors like Shrugging and Jesse Draper, who maybe I don't know them as hardware investors. Like, how did you balance finding people who are specific to your industry need versus having good names will make good connections to other capital and partners and talent. How do you make balance that all together?

Yeah, I mean, what I will say is this. You know, we've raised in our overall seed round, we raised about 5.5.6 million. And it sounds like super impressive, but I will say every check was hard fought and it came in tranches, right? And so, you know, you just keep making progress. The great thing is that someone may say no in an earlier tranche of capital, but if you make the progress, they'll come in later on. And so I always just encourage everyone to maintain that relationship because a no can sometimes be turned around very quickly. Sometimes it's just timing also on that investor side to take a step back on raising money. It doesn't matter if you are an engineer, if you are in sales, if you are in marketing, you know, whatever you are. The number one thing that is so beneficial is that like if you actually understand how to sell something. Right. And when I worked in politics, I did a lot of major dollar fundraising. I collected checks. You know, we had deadlines. And I mean, I've been doing that since I was 20 years old. And so for me to go from We've got a Q1 deadline, we have to make it to, okay, we are running out of money this quarter. Like who do I, no, we need to raise some, we need to raise $25,000 checks. You know, it was, I used a lot of the same mentality and understanding and a little bit of the same network to then transfer that skill set to raising from like friends and families. Friends, family and angels. VCs are a little bit different. I can get in that in a second. So I would say my first tranche definitely came from accelerators, friends, family. A lot of my sorority sisters have like five. They put the 5,000, $10,000 checks on our cap table in the early days, but it was great. And then, you know, everyone needs that one bigger check, that first kind of precede person. And you mentioned Jesse Draper with halogen. So I had met Jesse for many years previously and she told me no. Like, I don't know, I can't even count the number of times someone tells me no because I just don't even, I don't even take it as a no. I'm just like, great, we'll talk again. In a nice way. And she emailed me because she's like, you know, we're starting to show Meet the Drapers. I don't know if you were going to like it, but just come on, please, just come on with the nail bot. I don't even know where the nail bot is, but like, have you made progress with it? And I did. And she led my pre seed round and Tim Draper gave me a $50,000 check too from that. And that was like my first, you know, we were off to the races. I needed that one person that was credible. And when you talk about different investors. Well, we have hardware, we have software, we have community. When we span, you know, we span robotics, we span connected hardware, we span mobile network effects, we San cpg, so we have fashion and beauty. So we have a range of investors to pull from based on their interests and very tactically for the other entrepreneurs or, you know, if you have a sort of idea, I create specific decks for kind of each of those areas. Right. Because I think the company appeals to different investors accordingly. You know, we have eight issued utility patents, eight more that are pending. We're working on some very creative printing systems that are mobile and compact at the same time. You know, we have analytics inside of our mobile app so we know what people are printing when they're printing. We've got this web portal where you could customize arts. It's very clever on that side. And then we've done some really clever things with kind of our CPG consumables with the primers, with the press ons. And so when you see kind of that entire spread, it just, you know, you can make the case. It is all of these types of companies, which I think is really incredible. And so I would encourage anyone kind of building a company if you're only in one lane, it's a little bit harder, I actually think, to find investors. Sometimes it's nice to kind of expand a little bit. Yeah. So what I did very carefully was like, I have invested like Helen Griner. She's the inventor of the Roomba. She's an early investor. She is like one of my great manufacturing kind of like experts advisors. But then I have some really great CPG advisors and some really great robotics advisors as well. So I was able to kind of span the range. And that came from getting a lot of different introductions, also finding pockets outside of the Bay Area. We were like, I started to learn from like practice. I was a lot better in LA and New York. The company resonated better there than in the Bay Area, for whatever reason, they liked my kind of crazy. You have to also find people that like you're kind of crazy. Like I have some crazies on my cap table. That's okay. They are crazy like me. They like, like my brand of crazy. Not everyone's going to like your brand of crazy and don't take it personally. And so I think that's how I kind of rounded up. I rounded up my personal band of crazy is that we all love each other.

I love that we. Some people call it the talent bench. You call it your own personal crazies. Some people it's the circus. But it's what it is though. It's is your talent spotting for. How do you get everyone on board to help in some way or name. Right. And maybe it's purely advisement, maybe it's connections to manufacturers, maybe it's cash and it's all the above. And that's super smart to. To have obviously been working and building that band of crazy stuff.

Hopefully it's cash for the entrepreneur. That's the. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, at, at this point, at certain point, I like to tell people all your advisors should put in some symbolic dollar amount as well too. If it isn't a big check. If they're giving advice and they really like you, they should put. They should write a check as well just to, you know, be a part of that. But totally get that. Okay, so take us through kind of how you ended up in San Diego. Because you're building the bay, you were finding other cities you were connecting with better. How'd you end up down in the fun time down here in SoCal.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So we've been. I was in the Bay Area for a long time. I think it helped me launch the company in a certain way. Right. I was able to get connected to really great talent. I had joined Early Stage Startups. One of our large contract manufacturers for the Mailbot is based down here in San Diego. Their USA facility is. And you know where we are now with the nail bot is like we shipped our drop one and drop one was built in Carlsbad. So shout out to north county here. And so we were at the facility almost every other day. Our 3PL is Shipcom. All right. The shout out to Shipcom there, Shout.

Out to Greg Moser and team there for sure.

Yep, exactly. Helping us ship those early bots out. And so we, you know, it was strategic. I knew that we were going to have to move down here probably for the past, you Know, back in like 2020, I just didn't know if we would stay. And I fell in love with San Diego and we are here now indefinitely. There is for me no better quality of life. I live in Oceanside, I live near the beach. It's wonderful. And yeah, I mean, I think the community here has just been incredibly warm. So I moved about 10 months ago and Ryan from Techstars is one of the first people that I met and got connected to. And I remember this coffee because this, in this, during this coffee, he connected me to like the three most important people that I like ended up meeting later on. And then I ended up being on like a community eir at Startup San Diego too. All from this early breakfast. So it's been very serendipitous. But you know how we got connected in San Diego was I asked a friend of a friend, like, who should I talk to? I moved to San Diego. I'm looking for office space and all these things. And they set me up with Ryan for coffee. And then lo and behold, we are here. And I think he even did an intro for you and I, Neil.

Yep, exactly like. And I knew you were we by the time we actually got an email and stuff calendared, you were already like in place in eir. I'm like, wow, she's in it. Like new to town, already signed up to be an entrepreneur in residence, which most people don't know what they're signing up for when they're doing that. So. Thank you.

I did not. I had no clue. Zero.

Just like this podcast where you thought we were just having a one on one meeting and here we are for broadcasting you to the world. So, you know, that's how we do things. Apparently that's what you sign up for is what it sounds like. You sign up for your own version of crazy too.

Yeah, you know, I think so. I always say this. I think I am someone like I, I enjoy certain amounts of risk in my life and I, you know, I joined all these crazy political campaigns and that's extremely risky. Right. And I even, you know, with Lunara and then, and then Primadonna, I like, I take calculated risks, but I'm not afraid to just kind of jump in because what's the worst that can happen, right? I mean, I'll learn, I'll make a new friend and it doesn't go well. Well, there's tomorrow and we'll try again, right?

So I love it. Just say yes. There's a lot of that with entrepreneurship that you have to just Be willing to say, all right, we're in for it. So take us through where, where nailbot is now. And, and really it sounds like it's only product number one. You got some ideas for other future products like where are you headed? Where are you going to be maybe in a just like short term year from now, you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean so drop two is in pre order for Nail Bot right now. Drop one already shipped and we got some really exciting customer feedback. So if you want a nailbot pre ordered hers on nail. But yeah, and so we're really gearing up for like a, a really exciting holiday season for this first generation Nail Bot product with some really exciting consumables. But yeah, we've got a, a pretty extensive roadmap already in development right now. And yeah, I mean we are, we're kind of off to the races. So yeah, I, I mean I would say supply chain as you know, is kind of a mess right now with the pandemic. We got a huge chip shortage in the world. But I am very proud of our team. We shipped a connected hardware device in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of a chip shortage and we are, we are going right. So I think was just a testament to our team and in our board. And so yeah, we're working on our next generation products behind the scenes. Our apps are released to the App Store and we're really trying to aim for like a heavy holiday 2022. And then in terms of other things that I'm part of, I'm actually on the board of a nonprofit called Maker Girl. We teach girls 3D printing and stem through really fun interactive modules. It's led by college age women and we've got with a big bus tour going on this summer and there'll be some nailbots on that bus tour too.

Oh, super cool. Love that. Awesome. Well, you've gotten to know obviously the SoCal lifestyle and specifically San Diego lifestyle, part of that lifestyle is tacos. So we have got to know, have you found, in 10 months you've been here, have you found a favorite taco spot yet?

So this is a hard question to answer and I'll say that because it's like saying there's one place and San Diego is so different. So in Oceanside, Sunset Market, Thursday nights, right. There are many taco stands, right? And there so many of them are good. I do like city tacos generally, which I think a lot of people do. This has nothing to do with tacos, but there is a place that Opened up in Oceanside and it's called, like, Jorge's Mexatessen. It has the best chicken soup, like Mexican chicken soup I have ever had. They also have really good tacos, but I think the Mexican chicken soup, like, takes away.

Yeah, it's deli and Mexican together.

It's not a deli. It's just the name.

Okay. But chicken soup, I think deli chicken soup, you know, matzo ball soup.

It's. It's actually really. Their tacos are really good too. Like, it's. Yeah, it's this hole in the wall and it's on, like, Coast Highway. It's in South Oak. It's next to sk's donuts.

Okay.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's actually very good. I like tacos there as well. The city tacos, generally. Otherwise, Sunset Market on Thursday, any of the stands or. Or Borgs.

Oh, these are great, great ones. We'll have to go. We'll definitely be adding some of these to the list for sure. But South O in general, the food scene in south though is awesome. Which I know you lived there for a bit. Any other. Just favorite restaurants in general on Oceanside, since you're.

I mean, actually best. If you really. The best tacos in South O are from Buccaneer Cafe.

Oh, really?

Oh, my gosh. The breakfast tacos are like the best. And then on Friday nights, actually tonight they're going to have. They have sunset tacos as well.

Okay.

Yeah. And they're super cheap. And the salsa is incredible. Like, I get that salsa. I just get extra of it and I eat it with everything for sure.

Well, non taco related. My favorite restaurant in south though is Dijimara, which is just so good Indonesian food. I'm guessing you've been there.

Okay, so I have. I'm going there in the 22nd. Getting a reservation there that isn't at 5 o' clock is near impossible. It's so hard. I've tried to go there like three or four times.

Oh, so you're about to have your own experience. All right, enjoy. Because it is so good.

Okay. Fingers crossed. We're able to actually get a reservation.

Oh, true. Yeah, I know. No, the owners are incredible. They're usually behind the bar and it's just a great spot. We've held some founder dinners there as well, too, so hopefully we'll do another one there in the future.

Yeah, I can't wait.

Well, Preet, this was great getting to know you live in a podcast format like this. We're so excited to have your energy and your own version of craziness here in north county building some really cool hardware. The hardware scene is strong actually in north county, so that's kind of cool to see that coming together. And thanks for being on the pod, but also thanks for being an EIR and helping another nonprofit organization here in San Diego.

So thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And if anyone's like listening and, you know, want some more info or wants mentorship and wants to understand how we built this thing, just connect. Happy hour.

Absolutely. We'll put everyone in touch and everything will be in the show notes as well too. So check out primadonna.com and nailbot.com they.

All go the same place exactly.

Thanks, Pre.

All right, thanks.

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

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