San Diego Tech News Weekly – August 21, 2023

Foreign welcome to this week in San Diego Tech News. I'm your host, Neil Bloom. Thrilled to be joined again with my co host here, Fred Greer. Hey Fred, how you doing?

Hey Neil, Doing pretty good. I am Fred Greer, journalist and author of SD Founder Substack. I've been covering the tech industry in San Diego for a few years now and excited to be back to talk about what's new and tech.

I love that we've continued to do this series. I've got a long running tech blog called Fresh Brewed Tech and the Tacos in Tech podcast where we highlight builders of companies, technologies and the community. And also run now a investment group called Interlock Capital, investing in the people who are building great technologies and companies. So speaking of your substack, let's dive right into a recent piece you put out here. There's a new. Oh, I'll go out of order for a second. Let's talk about the AI companies to watch list that you did here. Just a new article you just put out on sdfounders.subsack.com highlighting 10 AI companies that were special. Do you want to jump in on that?

Yeah. So I think everyone knows that AI is kind of the banner topic of this year related to tech and startups. And so I was curious what San Diego companies are leaning into AI or have launched AI companies. And so, you know, this list has about 10, 10 companies. It's not a full comprehensive list and I think there's going to be room for part two and part three. But to call out a few that were interesting was the number one was SHIELD AI. They raised over you know, half a billion dollars in funding and they create AI software for drones in the military. A few other ones came to mind was Brain Corp, which creates AI software for floor cleaning and inventory scanning. We have another company called Gretel AI and you know, I think on their LinkedIn it says they're based in SF, but some of the co founders are actually based here in San Diego. And so yeah, if you're interested, check out the whole list. There's another company called Personal AI which is, you know, a competitor to OpenAI or ChatGPT. And so it's, you know, just showing that San Diego has a number of cool AI companies that have launched in the last few years or have been here in the last 10 years. So pretty cool stuff.

Yeah, San Diego, San Diego has a long history of artificial intelligence. I'm sure over the years the names of these industries have changed, right? Over time. We go Back to the 90s time frame, analytics in general. One of the original analytics companies was called HNC and they created the Falcon algorithm which was a financial scoring algorithm. A company bought them in the mid-90s called FICO and that became the FICO Score. And so companies still here, if you drive off the 56, right, you'll see the FICO buildings, you'll see some of the legacy tech in the financial, the fintech world of one of you know, one of our original analytics companies here. So I believe all of that is kind of rooted in a lot of our talent ecosystem. Some of the companies you just mentioned are 10 year plus companies. They've been building tech here for a long time. And they didn't just say oh, we're an AI company now. Like no, from the founding days they were an AI company so not necessarily something new. It is new and fatty right now from who's getting funded. But you know, Shield AI and Brain Corp. BrainCorp, you know, is kind of a little bit of a spin up from Qualcomm. They're putting smart brains on floor scrubbers and other kind of manual intensive machines. You know, some of these like pallet drivers that will drive a stack of groceries to the grocery store floor. Well you don't even necessarily need a person to pull that out. Let the robot do that. So super cool tech that we're building here. I want to highlight actually SHIELD real quick because what, what they have developed recently is a autopilot for F16 and other fighter pilots. So kind of the same as Braincore. You got a machine that takes a human to maneuver right now. Well, why not let AI do it for you? And with the latest news of Ukraine now getting F16s, kind of interesting to to think about what's the future of smart intelligence here and San Diego's at the middle of it, but you highlight a bunch of other also really early stage startups here too. So it's not just legacy. But you also mentioned Sochi, another company that you know later stage but realized that they could build an even new set of or suite of tools into their existing social media content generation for franchise restaurants. Why not allow generative AI to play a role there, which is super smart. And we actually got a chance to hear from Afif Corey, the CEO at Interlock Summit and we just actually released the Interlock Summit website live on Interlock Capital sites. Shameless Plug here and you can actually watch the video now. So I'll link it here and you can watch the conversation we had called Real world applications of AI from three CEOs who are doing that currently right now. But great piece. Look, make sure you check the show notes here for link to Fred's article and we'll also link to the Interlock Summit site where you can watch that conversation as well too.

Love that.

Another big announcement this week was the Inc 5000. This is an annual list that comes out of the 5,000 fastest growing companies. Now this is company wide. It's not just tech and San Diego always makes a good presence on this from dozens if not hundreds of companies. Fred, you dove into the Inc 5000 list. How many did San Diego have this year?

Yeah, so this year we rounded around 89 made the list. Last year I think that number was around 91. And I love the Fortune, you know the Inc 5000 list because it looks at fast growing private companies. So it's companies who are submitting their year over year growth and those numbers aren't normally shared amongst the public. And so you know diving into what companies were mentioned I just try to pull out some of that recognizable some that made top of the list was it wanna which is kind of more of a offshoring group. So they connect companies here in San Diego to talent in Mexico and it was staggering growth. I think they had 7,000% growth and it was Wildfire Systems which another tech company here. I think that guy who founded that company, he was an ex ebay executive and they had similar growth. I think it was like thousands of percentage percentage of growth which was just really incredible to see. And then other companies mentioned were Trust and Will a text tech startup here Sochi ClickUp, Dr. Bowl. These are all you know tech SaaS startups here in San Diego who made the list. So I just. It just really speaks to the quality of companies that we have here and they're growing and hiring locally.

Yeah it's really great to see the growth for sure. Some of these first time like Trust and Will, you know is kind of a beloved company in the community yet first time being named to the list which is a good sign it Juana to have this kind of support company in a sense and actually they're really helping focused on enterprise biotech and life science seems to be where they're helping like Thermo Fisher and Dexcom and Insulet offset with data science and software engineers by just being on the other side of the border and growing. Makes perfect sense that they would be exploding from that regard. Especially when we just discovered we don't need everyone in office every day. Right. So it's great to see the whole startup and tech support system growing together, not just one company outsized versus another. So I'm glad you covered that. Let's jump into another story here around Bay area based company acquire.com moving their headquarter operations to San Diego. We love to see that. In a sense, it's kind of a coming back to home moment for CEO Andrew Bezdecke. Acquire.com which renamed to acquire.com from microacquire.com semi recently also shameless plug that we in our capital invested in them from the beginning, but they are a M and A marketplace for bootstrapped businesses, largely tech businesses, but they actually have added it started as bootstrap software. They've added since podcasts, newsletters and even marketing agencies to the platform. So your business, you've built it up to a certain stage and you're ready to kind of hand it over or just kind of walk away from it. Well, might as well list it to the acquire.com platform and let people bid and reach out and say hey, I'd like more info and maybe I'm interested in buying it. And originally it started as just a way for pre to kind of filter out real buyers versus people who are just pinging you for information. So buyers are the one paying to access you the seller. But they've actually since added a suite of tools that allow you to actually help you a long way from valuation to negotiation to really kind of white glove the service all the way through. So that's a newer feature. And the team itself actually all worked together at a previous startup called Business Apps, which Andrew Gazdecki founded while he was in college, actually grew it, bootstrapped it and sold it. And the company was he moved the company to La jolla back in 2015, I believe. We actually had him speak at an EDC and a Hired.com launch of a report called the San Diego Software Study. I had him speak to just why he moved to San Diego, what he saw in the talent pool here. And he obviously has really stayed with it because he's brought that team back together for company number three with acquire.com and Bill have that office in the downtown La Jolla area. Have you talked to him recently, Fred?

So I saw his tweet. I think over 40,000 people saw his tweet that he was moving to San Diego. He's almost a celebrity in the Silicon Valley tech scene. And when he posts post about San Diego, I was just really excited to see, you know, that everyone just was really excited and welcoming to our community. And welcome back too, because it's not his first time. There was. It was actually a founder who reached out and said, hey, acquire.com helped my wife and I buy our first home here in San Diego. He sold one of his companies using the platform. So I think it's really cool the impact he's making here locally. And I think you might have a story, Neil, to share about another founder who was here in San Diego who sold their company.

Yeah, there's a fintech founder here, Tara Falcon, who actually was a entrepreneur in residence with Startup San Diego while she was working on her startup. She actually had two startups, both in the fintech, one was on financial literacy and one was in kind of this cool model that allowed you to put in to buy, in a sense, buy a certain amount of stock that when you get to a goal, let's say I'd like to buy a surfboard. When you reach that, that dollar amount, it auto sells the stock. So you made your $600 return to buy the new surfboard. It was called Rise up. And she went through Techstars with that. Well, she used to acquire.com to sell her financial literacy platform, which was really cool to see. I think what they did acquire, what's cool about them is that they put you on the pedestal as well and they actually took out billboards in Times Square of her tweet saying just sold on acquire.com which was pretty cool. You know, make the entrepreneur the champion, the superhero. Which is pretty cool to see. So I'm excited to partner with them once they come into town because within Interlock we have a number of exited founders who are now looking at the next thing which for them is buying a business. You know, the 0 to 1 start is, is tough for everyone. Why not buy into something and streamline it in a way that you already know and spend more of the latter part of your time building a company on the growth stage, not the starting stage. So I'm looking forward to doing some stuff with them around building community around the buyer side of businesses. So welcome back guys. Andrew and the Acquire team. There's been some events recently that have come up. I know you just were at the EDC Summer Bash. How was that?

So the Summer bash is their annual event that brings together folks from the startup community, the business community, real estate community and yeah, the EDC is a really popular organization here. They do so much to promote, you know, how San Diego is life changing, welcoming, you know, employer small businesses, startups and So I was really excited to attend because a keynote speaker was Vuori CEO and founder Joe Kutla. And so he got to share, you know, the early days of building Vuori, turning it into a small, you know, garage startup here in Encinitas to, you know, a global retail brand that is continuing to expand and compete with, you know, giants like Lululemon. And so that was really cool. I think some, some, some cool stories that came out of that was they are expanding, you know, here locally. They're going to be hiring, I think over 100 more, more folks here creating more jobs, but then they're also redesigning their office. There's a local company called Burger Construction. They do a lot of, you know, buildings for biotech companies and help them design, you know, best in class offices. And so I think Vuori is working with this company to redesign their office. So I think they have a lot of, you know, cool things happening here in San Diego and they're a company to watch that are will continue to make impact globally.

Yeah. And north counties where they've always been based and Cindy's where they started, I believe. Headquarters is now Carlsbad, not too far from the original spot. So great to see a highlight of San Diego's kind of sports and active lifestyle world which, you know, based on our lifestyle, you would, it would make sense that we have a lot there, but we should we. Absolutely. It's great to be highlighting the growth that we've seen there from companies doing well and growing. In fact, the city of Carlsbad is doing a little gathering at the end of the month of sports and active lifestyle companies at a local brewery that we can share some more info out for those who want to as well. I'm glad you're able to attend that. We held our quarterly ag Tech gathering event in Escondido last week. It was another 40, 50 participants from farmers, growers, food production founders and technologists and scientists. So really cool, diverse gathering. I had Lou Cooperhouse, the CEO and founder of Blue Nalu, join me in fireside chats. Lou has got 40 years of food tech innovation. Worked from, worked at ConAgra designing kind of a whole innovation focus within a company. Then he actually built a startup ecosystem at Rutgers University in New Jersey to really pretty much do the same thing that we're talking about. Bring in the growers, the food production and food supply chain and technologists. And so we're kind of excited to tap into his brain power and do the same here in north county as well. So awesome, awesome. Chat by Lou Lou Nolu, by the way, is designing cell cell cultured fish. So they are growing the highest quality bluefin tuna in giant brewers vats. And right now they're partnered with mostly North American and Asian food production firms. So they'll be coming out, I hear end by end of 2024 there will be full scale bluefin tuna that will have never grown up in the ocean coming out and will be eating it at scale, which is pretty exciting. So we'll be putting out a video of that conversation shortly, hopefully within the next few weeks. So keep an eye on that. And then we announced our year two of the Ag Tech Hackathon which will be happening November 2nd, 3rd and 4th. This is a chance for people with ideas or want to work on people, work with people who have ideas to come together over two and a half days. And we will through a, you know, kind of a, we'll help you through the process of taking the idea, learning how to unpack it, storyteller around what the real problem is that you're trying to solve. Why should push you out of the room to go talk to people and learn about is this a real problem and is a widespread problem or is it hyperlocal just to me. And then do the analysis on what you hear. Should you iterate your, your, your idea into a specific kind of solution and then present that to an audience. And we'll be giving out some cash. We've got about 10,000 in cash we'll be awarding to the top three ideas. So we'll put a link in the show notes here for the next Escondido AgTech hackathon that we'd love to see any of you at if you have an interest there. A few other events coming up. Innovation Day by Connect, also part of Innovation Week, which Connect has kind of brought kind of the community around. Do you know about Innovation Day, Fred? You want to describe it a little bit?

Yeah. So Innovation Day is an annual event held by Connect San Diego Venture Group, which is an organization that supports early stage startups, small businesses and they're bringing together, you know, I think 3,000 folks to Petco Park. This is an opportunity to understand who, who are the companies, the cool companies in San Diego that are hiring, solving, you know, cool problems. They're also bringing investors not only from San Diego, but outside. I'm told that they're going to be Bay Area investors, LA investors. So it's a great way to network and raise, you know, maybe raise capital down the line, but then also connect with other folks. Maybe you'll meet peers and meet your co founder. It's a really cool event. I will be there. I think one other thing that I'm looking forward to is they're going to have a section highlighting different companies. You can buy their products. One of the companies I've written about is called Sunday Golf. They're going to be there selling some of their products. So I think this is a cool opportunity to also give back and support the community by buying their products. So looking forward to it.

Oh, that's awesome. Really cool to hear. The week itself they determined. So that's September 14th. They've kind of invited other organizations to have events throughout the week as well. So I know the top tech awards are the same week too. So you can find. And that's a, that's an event in its own regard. 6, 700 ctos coming together and having a good time and getting awards for that year's top CTO and cio, which are pretty cool. It'll be at the Del Mar Fairgrounds I think on September 15th. So that's a fun event worth going to as well. And so drop. There's a link here in our show notes here of other events that are going on. If you are putting on a community event that week, get in touch with Connect or I think it'd be cool to get, you know, that week full impact of just other events happening throughout the week. In fact, that is the week that Techstars begins on the 11th, that Monday. So Fred and I will actually do that week probably Monday. We will release a of couple podcast with the 12 newest companies that have been chosen and are starting a three month incubation acceleration here in San Diego as well. So a lot going on that week, which is pretty great. We'll see out there. They also just announced San Diego Startup Week the week of October 23rd through the 27th. Each day will be another day, another place in the community of what's going on. I think day one is in Carlsbad. Day two, I hear is in Tijuana. I think there'll be a day at SDSU and another day around at Qualcomm. So it'll be a really good cross section from geography and industries of what's happening in the startup ecosystem. So make sure you go and check out info about San Jose Startup Week. I don't think they've announced the full schedule, but they're kind of slowly starting to drip out everything that's happening throughout the week.

Yeah, I just want to give A shout out to startup San Diego. They've done a really great job of hosting some really great conversations around AI and, you know, bring, bring the community together. I think their last three events was near, you know, full capacity, 300 attendees and from all walks of life. So I'm looking forward to Startup Week this, you know, this time around. And it just speaks to the community that we built. It's strong, it's healthy. I think LA Tech Week was one of the biggest they had. So I think San Diego is going to be, you know, very similar, if not tracking, tracking on par.

Yeah, I'm going to give a quick shout out in general right now. Like, there is a lot of new community organizers stepping up and really working on community, which meant for someone who's been at it for a while, I'm really appreciative of it from people like Fred who have got a substack and you're dedicating time to covering the scene from Jonah putting out the San Diego social. Social Coyote saying, here's the events you should go on this week from the SDX team who did a hackathon and now are doing a hacker house, which is pretty cool. You've got a group you're working with that are doing San Diego Sands or Silicon Sands founder event with Kaelyn and others. I just really, really appreciative of people who are stepping up and doing community building right now at a time where, know, it feels like you should focus on what you're focused on, but people are doing stuff for the community. So thank you, Fred and others for, for stepping up here in the community.

No, thank you, Neil. I think you, you, you, you kind of showed the blueprint of, you know, how to community build the right way. There's a lot of positivity in our community and we got to keep it up.

Awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone out at Stuff, but also online. People are engaging heavily on Twitter these days, which is great. Maybe, you know, LinkedIn and threads will, will catch up in terms of where stuff is happening too. But stay involved digitally and physically here and we'll see y' all out there. Thanks so much. Cool.

See you next time.

Thanks. Cheers.