Raising the Tide for All BlueTech Innovation with Gwen Nero

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 countins 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 beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya 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 who you believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS 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 Neil Bloom, San Diego's Tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle. This segment is brought to you by Cox Edge. Our longtime partnership with Cox Business has helped their engineering teams develop new tech products for small businesses and startups. Cox is investing in Edge capabilities and working with developers and engineers across the ecosystem to deliver ultra low latency compute solutions, helping customers to improve application performance and to reduce cloud transport and on premise infrastructure costs. Interested in hearing more about Cox Edge? Please visit coxedge.com and mention Neil Bloom or freshbroodtech.com for our partner discount. And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neal Bloom and I am thrilled to finally have Gwen Nero on. Gwen, we've been following each other on Twitter, the LinkedIn spheres and it's great to have you on. Gwen is the Director of Corporate Affiliates, Business Development, Industry Outreach and Innovation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Gwen, thanks for being on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks Neil. Delighted to be here.

Yeah, we're really excited with this new Start Blue incubator accelerator that you're going to tell us more about. Do you want to give us a quick overview of what maybe one minute of what it is, and then we'll dive into it.

So Start Blue is a partnership between Scripps and Rady School of Management. It's the newest Start R accelerator in their series, if you're familiar with that program. And we're focused on supporting formation of new ocean companies, tackling ocean science challenges and solutions.

Awesome. Super cool. Two powerhouses coming together, you know, got a long history of ocean sciences and Radi obviously incubating a lot of good ideas and good people. This is cool. We're going to talk about it. But how about you? Let's get to know where you got your start, where are you from and how do you find yourself in this path?

Sure. So I'm from Connecticut originally lived in Manhattan for about 10 years. When I was going to school, I went to Barnard College and then went across the street to Columbia University and I studied physics and biomedical engineering. So my background is more in life science and biomechanics and I studied repetitive mild traumatic brain injury, of all things. So really loved that work, but realized while I was in the Midst of my PhD, I liked working on a lot of different types of projects and specifically I liked that intersection where science leaves the lab and starts to move into industry. So be it industry partnerships and licensing opportunities, or supporting our newest innovators and those scientists who are really critical in being those first entrepreneurs for a new technology to translate out of the university into a new startup. While I was at Columbia, I worked with Columbia Technology Ventures, which is their licensing office, on strategies to protect intellectual property to market IP. And then I was also part of NYC TechConnect, which was a nonprofit part of the NYC, the partnership fund for NYC, growing more of an ecosystem for life science startups. In New York, we were seeing a lot of our great university research moved to Boston or to San Francisco where there was more opportunity for them. That was maybe 10, 15 years ago at that point and certainly New York has a really thriving life science innovation ecosystem now. It was fun to be part of that. Just as it was coming together. And was program manager for a new incubator at the time called Harlem Biospace and it was a wet lab incubator and those teams were super small, one to four people at most. Just as they were moving out of the university and needed to have non academic, non university space to further develop their IP within the context of their new business. I took that experience to San Diego. I moved here a little bit over five years ago and started with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, leading their new office for Innovation and industry relations. So that's what I've been doing in that time.

That's really cool. Was it a bit of a jump from going from kind of the biospace to the ocean sciences, or are there a lot of tangentials?

There's a lot of intersection between my experience in the life sciences and what Scripps does. I think there's the name Scripps Oceanography can throw people off. There's a ton of life science innovation and life science research that happens at Scripps, certainly in the natural products space. So identifying unique chemistry that is relevant for pharmaceuticals and more industrial chemical innovation, that's certainly in my wheelhouse from my time at Columbia and in New York. But when it comes to more of the atmospheric, physical oceanography, biological oceanography, that was new to me. So that's been super exciting. Being an academic by training. Just having the opportunity to learn a ton of really compelling, super impactful science at Scripps has been super rewarding. So it's fun.

Can you give us a little bit of the history in terms of innovation at Scripps and maybe just tell us a little bit of Scripps background. It's world renowned. What is it, over 100 years old. And why only five years ago, do you think they decided to create this, this new role in office?

Yeah. So Scripps was founded in 1903. It is fully part of UC San Diego. So it's an academic department and a research division. But we predate UC San Diego. Obviously. We didn't join UCSD until it was founded in 1960. In terms of our areas of expertise and our priorities, those have grown since our first days in 1903. We started out as a marine biology field station, and now today we have really extensive research in every ocean and every continent as well in ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences. Some of the technologies that you'll see coming out of Scripps, I mentioned natural products and unique marine chemistry relevant for human health. But you'll also see a lot of unique technologies for ocean observations and for marine conservation. You'll also see a lot of innovation around risk avoidance. So climate change impacts and adaptation and resilience to hazards are two of our strategic research priorities. There's a ton of data that's gathered at Scripps, manipulating that data, gleaning insights from that data. There's a ton of opportunity to work with companies around making that meaningful as we are adapting to a changing climate.

Got it. So with all that change, obviously things accelerating, things changing more, is that kind of the impetus for creating this new Start Blue program or where did that all kind of come from?

Yeah. So you spoke with Paul Robin recently as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Commercialization. And Paul really set the stage nicely for some of what's happening at the university and a lot of the momentum and interest to greater communicate the wealth of innovation resources across the campus. And that all was happening around the time that I started at Scripps, led by Paul, but also led by Rady. He mentioned the Institute for the Global Entrepreneur and their partnership with the Jacobs School of Engineering. So Scripps was participating in that campus wide effort to better communicate a lot of what was happening and to also create opportunities for new staff like myself at that time to work cross functionally with these other resources too. So it was timed with that and it was also timed by really seeing that our scientists and our students were positioned well to take advantage of those resources.

Got it. Okay. And so you know, obviously tech transfer has probably been a part of UCSD's DNA since the beginning and maybe even since Scripts even earlier. Has tech transfer around that what's within your purview? You know, what are you seeing with. It feels like the startup world is exploding, like more and more interest in creating startups. That could be wrong from where you're seeing, I don't know. So to create this environment for Scripts staff, like what does that look like? What are they asking for? And you know, is Start Blue the culmination of that or are there a field of things that you're doing to kind of support innovation turning into startups and new businesses?

Yeah, it's really a multi pronged effort. So part of it is education and community building. We rely on our scientists to self identify when there's intellectual property and that's only as good as the education materials and the help that we give those scientists and students as they're becoming part of our community. As to what is IP and how do you report when you have it, how do you start to communicate some of the commercial potential? Because we rely on these domain experts to let us know how their thing works out in the field and who might make use of it. So there's a lot of education and community building and that's me working with some of these other campus partners that I mentioned, but also working with other partners in the region like TMA Blue Tech like Cleantech San Diego. We don't want to reinvent the wheel and have each group doing their own thing. We're all spread way too thin to be doing that in this regard. So we definitely take the mentality of a rising tide lifts all boats. I think both at the university and I've seen that in the region as well. So increasing communications, streamlining and finding opportunities for collaboration is one of those pieces. But then I'll also work with our scientists and students on specific case by case opportunities so they'll flag for me. I'm working on this thing. Fill in the blank of any of those types of technologies I just mentioned and I think it's a fit for this or I think that there's commercial potential here and I'll work with them to say, all right, here, here, here are the resources available to you and help them navigate those and help bring in other people to advise them on a case by case basis too. Then Start Blue is really not a culmination, but it's a next step in certainly how innovation has grown at Scripps in the last five years. So if we were to have started Start Blue five years ago, we would not have seen, I think the adoption and the interest among our internal community. There would have been a lot of question marks around why are we doing this? If we had not laid the groundwork to create the programming and the partnerships that we have today and to work closely with the Office of Innovation and Commercialization too. So now Start Blue. You know, five years into this, we have eight teams that are part of this. Two of those teams are collaborations between Scripps scientists and Jacobs School of Engineering faculty. Two of the teams are non UCSD affiliated, so that wasn't a requirement to participate. We're supporting teams in San Diego county broadly. And then the other four teams have a participant from student, faculty or alumni number. We had a lot of interest from UCSD alumni, which was really exciting to see too.

That's great. I love the broadness of it, allowing for the county. So that's super cool to hear. And that the teams have already been selected, which is great too. I stumbled upon this from seeing your post of Call for Mentors. What else do you need from the community? Where else can the greater kind of startup community of San Diego be helpful and lean in here?

Yeah. So the mentor program is arguably one of the greatest assets that we're offering those teams. We have eight teams that are tackling a variety of different challenges from ocean tech kind of autonomy type technologies to aquaculture seaweed farming and treatment of seaweed and stormwater filtration. Just to give you a sense of what those teams are doing and they're all at different stages and have set milestones and need different types of expertise. So that's why we're pushing the call for mentors very broadly. And we'll be doing that not only in the fall, but also in the winter and spring. So I would say stay tuned to the Start Blue website, which is startglue, ucsd.edu, and then also the newsletter that you can sign up for there, because there'll be ways that you can apply to mentor twice each year to work with these cohorts. And so the more diverse voices and expertise that we get in there, the greater visibility these teams will have and an opportunity to grow towards their milestones. We've got almost 50% of our startups are female founders. And so it's really important to me that the mentors, that the teachers are reflecting the diversity that we have in our current cohort and where we want to go as a community too.

That's fantastic. Are you looking just from mentors for knowing in the future, what else? Like some backgrounds, I'm guessing obviously existing entrepreneurs who've done it before in this space?

Yeah, certainly in that space in San Diego. If you've got an understanding of the San Diego innovation ecosystem, understanding of blue tech and what is ocean innovation, that helps. But I want to emphasize that that's not a requirement or prerequisite because some of these teams have been working in ocean tech for a while and they're looking for somebody that really knows how to contract with local municipalities or someone who really knows how to navigate FDA regulation and compliance. We have teams that are looking for a variety of different expertise. And on the website and in that mentor document, we've got those explicitly listed, but mechanical engineering expertise in IoT. Those things are all heavily sought out by our teams.

That's great. Okay. And so we'll make sure we put links in the show notes as well for this. How often are you going to be picking and selecting new teams going forward?

So we're running one cohort a year. It's an eight month program, which is unique, it's longer than our other Start our accelerators. The fall is the more kind of traditional Start R type lean launch curriculum, if you know what Lean Launch is. So what's different there is that all of our speakers are coming to that content with the lens of ocean science and innovation. So that content typically has things like customer discovery, developing your go to market strategy, market sizing and competitive landscape analysis. So we'll have entrepreneurs, we'll have leaders from Scripps, from the Port of San Diego for example, who are presenting on those topics but bringing to those topics case studies and examples of how their organizations or their ocean companies handle those. So that's really unique. Then we'll take a little bit of time off over the winter holidays and come back in January and run through May and that will be more getting our teams out of the classroom, out into the local San Diego blue economy. So we're doing things like site visits and more workshop style classes bi weekly. So we're doing one cohort that overall runs October through May. But we're going to change it up and it's going to have a different flavor in those two different terms.

Really cool. I love seeing just the community collaboration which you said and many of us see is kind of the DNA of San Diego. Right. This kind of better together. Rising Tide lifts all boats which is perfect for scripts to say that and his name, my company actually Rising Tide Partners llc. I think it sounds like a great call to get people who can be complimentary to what these seasoned scientists already know, which is ocean sciences. Well now let's fill in the gaps of the other pieces for them. So it's a great call to action. Where do you see, you know, one cohort a year. I get that for now. Where do you see this going? Like what's the kind of big goal and what would you look back on and say this was success a few years from now?

Yeah, so this is our first year so I get that question a lot. What does success look like? Where are these teams going? Part of the motivation for starting Start Blue was that San Diego is incredibly unique in its blue economy and the resources it offers not only to startups but but to ocean specific later stage startups, small businesses and existing large businesses. But there's still really that gap when it comes to formation and those newest teams. So I say all of that to set the stage that our metrics will be getting these really new teams up to speed quickly and graduated into those other fantastic resources in our region like the Port of San Diego's Blue Economy incubator, Bio Labs, evo, Nexus, tma, bluetech, other more industry associations depending on the flavor of the of the company and their technology. So that's what we're working towards. We're also working towards getting these teams to be competitive for non dilutive funding opportunities through the federal government, things like sbir, STTR Awards. So these teams are so early that they're probably not pitching for equity investment right out of the gate come May when they graduate. But they would be incredible candidates for a Phase 1 SBIR or STTR award or to start to grow relationships for really early seed stage funding.

Got it. I love seeing going earlier in the funnel to help people get ready to then have success later in the funnel. Right. That's the big thing, that it's often easy to focus on people who are already doing really well. Oh, you've already got funding, great. We'd love to help you, but we need to keep filling the top of that funnel. And that's what it sounds like you guys are doing is prepping people to have a good experience starting their business from ideation.

That's right. And if I can build on that a little bit more. We've been working with a local organization called we the Plot Plug that supports Pan African and Latinx entrepreneurs both to share the word about what Start Blue is to recruit teams, to recruit mentors, all to getting to what I just spoke about, which was increasing diversity among not only the teams, but also the mentors and the speakers in the program. But we've been working on a couple opportunities that we've been pitching to federal grants to increase more voices in ocean innovation and creating even earlier stage pipeline programs to bring new entrepreneurs, new engineers and scientists from communities that otherwise are not engaging in the ocean science space into programs like Stork Blue or like others in San Diego.

That's awesome to hear. Love seeing that. Is this a big part of starting a company is from an investment point of view? You're looking at, they asked the question around investing in the jockey of the horse. And oftentimes you're investing in the person more than the idea. And so in a sense, what you're doing is you're building a talent funnel that you hope recruits new talent, more talent, widens the funnel. And not everyone will go and start a company. Many will just have entrepreneurial genes that then say, yes, I'm open to a little bit more risk than I would have. Any thoughts on that kind of around the. Kind of the talent funnel piece, especially just what it brings to San Diego. What it brings to Scripps.

Yeah. So we had kind of the three big criteria when we reviewed applicants for Start Blue were product and service, market, opportunity and team. And that last piece really gets to your point. So especially with these early, early stage teams and I take this approach when I work with our scientists too, when we're educating them on what is, you know, innovation, what are opportunities to work with companies and creating those sorts of resources for them. It's all about kind of being entrepreneurial. And this particular thing that they came to start Blue with might not be what they finished with or they might finish with it. And then a year from now they realize, you know, I'm going to take what I learned and turn into a totally new company. And all of those things are wins for us. And we take that same approach with our, with our students and scientists. It's all about kind of educating, creating more of this fluency in entrepreneurship and innovation. Not necessarily focusing so much on the tech, although we certainly needed to see some concept there that was really compelling in order to take some of these teams on.

Awesome. Love hearing that. Well, congrats on this. This is really exciting. StartBlue UCSD Edu, the place to learn more. Obviously, you know, scripts having a foothold on our coast should theoretically have the best look on the best fish to turn into best tacos. So we gotta know where's the best tacos to have from your perspective.

I'm a big fan of Guesto. I really love those blue corn fresh tortillas. But I'm working from home right now. I'm in south park, so. So my local go to would be tacos stand. If you've been in this area long enough, you knew Tacos Perilla before that, that was one of my favorites too. But I'm a big fan of any sort of pulled pork taco. So the carnitas at Hoesto is pretty great.

Yeah, they have a great wide selection of unique tacos there. Good call for sure. Well, Gwen, thanks so much for sharing your bit of your history and for this new whole torch that you're kind of leading the charge on. This is going to be a super great new area for San Diego to be known for. It's already been known for its blue tech, but now for blue tech incubation of talent, of ideas. I'm really excited for it. So congrats. Thanks for leading this.

Of course. Thanks for the opportunity to share more about it with your audience.

Absolutely. And we will share links like we said in the show notes and get in touch with us if you think you may be a good connection to help start Blue as well too. So thanks, Gwen. Appreciate it.

Great. Thank you. Neil.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And this podcast is edited and mixed by Patrick Norton at Citizen. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter at Neil Bloom and on LinkedIn as well as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and tech pod on Twitter too.

Intact. You know we got it.