San Diego Tech News Weekly – February 11, 2022

Happy Friday and whatever day it is. You are listening to this.

Yeah.

Thrilled to have you. We are now testing out this on Twitter. Spaces and zoom according to both. But you're here with us whenever it is you're listening to this.

Yeah.

So very much appreciate that. Shout out to Matt Greathouse. Good to see you here. Thanks for tuning in multiple, multiple weeks in a row. Feel free to jump up on stage sometime if you'd like to. I know you've been a long time listener, first time caller, so love it. Appreciate that. Well, we've got quite some, quite a few wide ranging stories this week to talk through. But first, a quick little intro. I'm Neil Bloom, entrepreneur, community builder, investor, lover of all things tech communities and lucky enough to have been collaborating with my co host here, Jonah Peake for.

A year or two years.

I don't know, a whole pandemic, that's for sure.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I lose track of like the length of this. It's been forever. But yeah. Jonah, I am a former ops guy doing some stuff with Lime when Lime was going wild in the city of San Diego. Super cool. Worked with postmates, so building cohorts there. And the same with handy, so know a thing or two about home cleaning and food delivery. I'm just loving San Diego life now. New dad and going headfirst into crypto. So that's the direction I'm headed, down.

The rabbit hole, which is exactly where we're going to go today. A little bit down the rabbit hole. Starting with platform sciences. New sweet fresh rays of $115 million for its connected truck fleet. Technology, man, we love a good logistics tech story here in San Diego, don't we?

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, you don't realize that we have such a hub until you look into it. And I was actually wondering, is it because we're kind of like the full west side of the country and we have to move things all the way east or do we just. How did, where did that hub come from? I don't know, but it's impressive.

I think it's a mix. I think it's a mix of like the homegrown technologies like Qualcomm where who could literally put chips inside of anything. Right. As well as having amazing use cases like you said. Right. The flow of traffic of goods across the border and then distributing it elsewhere to the world. So yeah, I think there's a mix of that of just good technology and good use cases to test out customer support on. This is another softbank funding man, we need to have like a special Softbank sound because I think this is deal eight or nine maybe, maybe we're in double digits already, which is pretty incredible. There's a reason behind that though. The head of, well, one of the head of Softbank's vision fund, one of their lead investors is based in San Diego and he's a former Qualcomm Ventures gp. So he already knew the town and he's making some deals happen. Every deal I think spends over 100 million plus, if not some 200 million plus. And this one I think comes on the heels. The last Softbank one might have been October, November, so not too long ago as well. This, this puts platform science at almost 200 million raised. And yeah, they 225 employees were close to many of them. Jake CTO, Rob Swisher, head of engineering, super proud of what they've been building. But it was actually founded by a former Omnitrox exec which is Omnitrax is a spin out of Qualcomm actually it was cloud based truck management that Qualcomm was diversifying itself into I think 10 or 15 years ago. And then they got bought up and acquired by Vista Equity, private equity firm out of Texas that loves to buy up San Diego companies. And actually funny enough that, so Omnitrux, Omnitrax, now owned by Vista, bought another San Diego logistics tech company last year. So yeah, it's kind of a big incestuous world here for sure. You want to take us through some of the details about platform science.

Yeah, this is super, super cool. They're basically focusing on like driver safety and so feeling like they're going a slightly different direction than, you know, autonomous and fully taking over the truck. But they're saying, hey, if there's people in, you know, driving and doing these long haul routes, you know, let's see if we can keep them safer. And you might think it's just like let's monitor the driver. And yeah, they do look at driver wakefulness and they can kind of see if someone's sort of maybe drifting lanes or feeling a little bit, you know, tired. There are regulations around that. But what's also cool is they're providing more information. Looks like in cab so you know, we've got road hazards coming up and looks like they're flagging low bridges. So you know, if a truck's coming up and there's maybe something updated that they need to know about, an interesting one's tire pressure, I'm sure that can be A factor some cars have that but maybe being alerted of that changing and then temperature changing as well. So basically providing a significant amount of information so that the driver can make more choices and be more educated as to kind of how they're operating their big rig there. So not fully taking it over but providing humans with a little bit more information which is pretty, pretty cool.

Yeah, definitely pretty cool. And we've got a number of other companies in town who doing adjacent or complimentary things like Lytics like Smart Drive. Smart Drive is the one that Omnitrax recently merged with. And then we've got the autonomous trucks here where we might not ever have to worry about these kinds of things from Too simple too. So you know, gotta imagine there's a lot of tech to put in place right now for fleets and then there's the future of fleets which may be, you know, driverless trucks as well.

So I wanted to like just throw this at you before we move on to the next story. You know, is this feel like a transitional type of company in tech that goes fully autonomous this in the next, I don't know, X number of years or are they able to sort of build this out into something a little bit more. Are there always going to be people in trucks? I don't know, I'm not really sure. What's your prediction there? I'll hold you.

I think there's always going to be people in trucks. It just may shift to more last mile and delivery. Right. The Amazon Rivian trucks kind of thing. I got to imagine there will always be a need. We've always found whenever technologies come into a space they create more jobs actually. So these people may be used in other spaces. Right. So that's my prediction. I don't think it'll fully just go away and be a short term kind of company.

I think it's a fair point. I would actually just wonder does it take away the sort of the stuff that people don't want to do, the really lame long overnight boring like Highway 80 or whatever routes and those get autonomized. Oh boy. Brutal. And then like the really important stuff, the tactical stuff maybe that comes in and that comes later. So really, really interesting. Softbank comes into San Diego. I'm sure there'll be more.

Yeah. And there's another bunch of other companies, startups like Tourmaline Labs is in this space too doing fleet management purely off of legit sensors they get from someone's phone. So keep an eye on all the areas that tech is infiltrating into the truck cap. Super cool. Next story though. This is a big jump and this is actually a shout out to one of our listeners, Seisha, who loves her Maya's cookies. She calls her, her Maya's cookies dealer. Great story on Maya's cookies. Kind of a whole spotlight in the UT about them. This is a non tech business but she's, she is growing like a tech company. San Diego based. Maya, Maya's cookies, which I've had many, they're gluten free, they're delicious. They do different themes for the holidays and for Black History Month this month they are doing a whole series honoring some black icons like Chadwick Boseman and others. But take us through a little bit of this story because this is a great one.

Yeah, this is really cool. So I haven't had the cookies yet, so I gotta get out there and I'll admit I'll come out and say I haven't had them yet, but this is really cool. Maya was saying some really interesting stuff. I mean this kind of business came out of. What she was describing is food insecurity was kind of the politically correct term for that these days. But she says, you know, in a quote, you know, when you're hungry, as a child in a classroom trying to focus, everything looks like food. The teacher looks like a burrito, the kid looks like sandwich. All I could think about was when I was going to eat and how I was going to and how it was going to taste. So she's really like kind of talking about these really these challenges coming up and kind of that fueled her building this business. But also kind of, you know, you can you get a sense of kind of who she is a little bit in that quote. But yeah, she said after George Floyd killing in 2020, she was part of a viral campaign that just literally flooded their business and almost like you had said, turned them into a tech company. She had to figure out how to scale at an unbelievable rate being flooded with orders. So she was working 15 hours a day, seven days a week. She said she did 90 straight days to keep up with demand. But what's really interesting is she said in another quote, I didn't have a college degree, but I had to, but I have is problem solving skills and passion. Super cool that she was able to kind of figure this out and continue to grow. Have you had, have you happened to have some of the new flavors that are popping up like the Black Panther, the Chadwick Boseman or the Michelle Obama yet?

Oh no, I haven't had it yet. I will go look for them for sure. My last batch I got in during the holidays so they're all Christmas themed. But now I'm headed out for more.

All right, check these two. They're super different. So the Chadwick Boseman, the Black Panther dark chocolate cookie with extra dark chunks. She gets those from a woman in Ghana at Khanda Chocolates. So that one's super cool. Just chocolate, chocolate. And then the other, the Michelle Obama very different lemon spike sugar cookie, white chocolate chunks and marion berries with red wine from a black owned vegan winery. Very different cookies. But I mean, I don't know, maybe have one of each. That's awesome.

I love it. It's so cool how she's, you know, not just honoring icons but also bringing in other suppliers from diverse backgrounds too. I love seeing that. That is so cool. I absolutely go look for some this weekend.

Let's do it. Go get some cookies anyways.

Yeah, hold on one second. If someone can airdrop maybe by drone some cookies, I'm in. Uh, man, our stories are all over the place, which I love. We started in logistics tech, went to cookies, now we're about to talk genomics. Anyone heard of Element Biosciences? Because you are about to. They are taken on. Maybe someone you heard of Illumina and they just acquired Loop Genomics to add long read DNA tech to their short read platform. This is kind of the holy grail of genomics. Everyone's talk. Illuma has their short read, Omnium has their long read. The race is on in the genomic sequencing space and Element has made some shots across the bows. They only started in 2017. They have already raised over 400 million in total funding since then, including last summer's 276 million in funding. So now they're buying up other startups. So they just bought Loop Genomics in Bay Area, I believe based on company backed by Khosla Ventures Loops software. So remember this is a software company, as are a lot of all genomics. They're using PCR technology which is kind of the same thing we're doing for detecting Covid using PCR technology to amplify individual strands of DNA on a short read sequencing platform. So it actually attaches like a unique barcode to random sections of each copy of the genetic material and then sequences each of these copy segments. So the resulting data is combined back into a single molecule using the overlapping segments to simulate long read sequencing data from lower cost short read systems. So they've really what's cool, they've found A way to bring down the costs for long read, which is kind of the big thing. And now doing read combining with elements already existing long read technology and so they're going after these other spaces. One of our friends of the show, Jason Scharf, he goes element buying loop PacBio buying Omnion Illumina announcing the Infinity project. The race to combine short read and long read technology is on. So this is one to watch. All happening right here in our backyard, right in San Diego Genomics hq.

It's wild. I think I saw an announcement recently. I don't know if you had caught this. Was there any sort of movement for the Luminan Grail? I think there was an announcement but it was a little late and we didn't have a chance to add it to this one. But did you find anything?

I didn't catch it. Mike Freeman sneaked out another article. He was busy this week. Mike at the ut, we love him and he is just pumping out slinging articles this weekend. He, he did a report on Aluminum Illumina's earnings and an update on the antitrust lawsuit where FTC is trying to stop Illumina from acquiring Grail which actually was an Illumina spin out, I think like a $7 or $8 billion kind of acquisition. We will report on that next week. Let's make sure we talk about that. Yeah, because we do love, yeah, we do love a good antitrust story, that's for sure. We also love other medical device meets software tech here. And this is a ResMed story. If anyone's familiar with ResMed they are the owners of sleep technology. They do sleep apnea machines, sleep apps. But they've got a, they've been talking about the supply chain this year which especially most companies are interesting to hear it affecting though the digital health and medical device world. You want to take us through this one?

Yeah, this is interesting. So it's, it's a good example of the fact that literally chips are in everything and we don't really think about it. We're kind of like oh my phone or. And a lot, there's a lot of talk about cars, electric cars. But yeah, so they, the last time we talked about them they were making ventilators to support hospital congestion. So super cool, really important and you'd think they should be, you know, prioritized. Sounds like it's, you know, they're not necessarily getting able to skip the line ahead of you know, some iPhones and some other sort of, you know, other chip for the demand for chips. But they make sleep apnea machines. You know, you might know someone who has one. They do need chips, but they have to obviously compete with phones, cars, other electronics. There's chips in literally everything these days. Apparel is coming online as well, so I'm sure they're competing with that. And what's crazy is in order to get what they need to kind of keep matching their growth, they're chartering jets to avoid the clogged supply chain. We were talking about ships and containers off the coast, right. And so the wild part is they have to try to keep up with growth. This can cost 5 to 10x the amount to fly one over. I remember at one point we were thinking about a supply chain issue where we needed spare parts to repair scooters. And we always thought about it was just throw them on a plane. It's easy, but the cost is almost prohibitive. To get like a brake handle or whatever over the ocean, you're kind of just like, roll your eyes. They're like, no, just park them in the corner. Anyways, these are a little bit more important. But what's crazy is because of this increase in cost, they say the revenue has grown by about 300 million. Um, but it could have been closer to about 700 million due to the supply chain. And with all of this rolled together and all of this growth, profits shrunk because of, you know, freight costs. So they, they, they're growing like crazy. They're seeing a lot of demand. They just can't quite meet it because of the supply chain, which is pretty wild. So, you know, hopefully that frees up soon and we're able to kind of get those machines back, back online. Obviously, sleep's important, and we gotta, we got to make sure that we can all get the electronics we need. But really, really interesting story on supply chain.

Yeah, seeing an effect everywhere. And we just obviously at the top of the show, talked about how we're a logistics tech hub. There is not. There's enough sources of problems to go solve through all of this, but maybe the only solution is charter your own plane.

Oh, my gosh. Not everyone has a luxury, right? But I know being publicly traded, maybe they can justify it a little bit.

Yeah, well, thanks for that one. The last, last major story we want to talk about is an interesting report on how a 2018 California state law mandating at least one woman on every publicly traded board is really reshaping not just boards, but the way that companies are run. So this is a good report out from Karen Perlman, new writer at The San Diego Business Journal and she talked about California Legislative Law 826 back in 2018 mandated every public company need to have at least one woman on the board. Now you can imagine immediately a bunch of lawsuits came about discrimination. And those are still ongoing. But in the meantime, enforcement's already started where they're actually giving fines already to 100 to 300,000 a year to companies that are not complying. So some data that's been interesting, at the time there were 1275 companies that needed to change up their board. Back in 2018, now there's, it's not, it's not a hundred percent, but now we're down to 300 companies still who need to do that in California. In San Diego though, honestly, we're lagging a little bit in terms of the average. 12% of public companies back in 2018 had women on the board. Now 31%, we're still only a third the way there. A little disheartening to be honest. Um, and especially there's data that's been shown. Credit Suisse put out a report, they did like a six year study that showed women on boards actually improve business performance and especially stock performance. So actually it could calculate that and determine that women that had companies that had women directors outperform the stock outperformed all mailboards by 26%. Pretty huge. It's like three times the average of the stock market. So now you've got a performance that shows that. It also has shown. Yeah, there's another study I saw that said 45% stock performance. When there's inclusion on the board, you can imagine it trickles down a number of other areas as well too, like hiring practices, company policies, all those things as well. So super interesting to just hear both the kind of the mandate, but also the performance reason of why to do this as well too.

So a question for you. I think you probably have a little bit more background on this than I would, but more from a mechanic standpoint. So if you have to change your board typically, does that mean that someone has to exit the board then? Or can you create a new spot or kind of like is it so simple as just throw, you know, bringing someone on and it feels like it isn't. But I'm not super, I don't know a ton about this.

Yeah, it totally depends on governance of each board. Some are maxed out, some can make a resolution to increase board size. I don't know if every state, because many states did this besides California and actually in fact NASDAQ is, has not mandated it, but is now making it a compliance check of saying, tell us why you haven't done this. You have to report why you haven't put a woman on the board and someone from an underserved community. But I imagine in other states it's not going to be just like a one person. It'll be a percentage makeup of the board, which might mean adding won't help. You might have to switch someone out to change those percentages on the board itself.

True. That's true. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Gosh. It's not so simple as to just like open up a seat and hire a person any. I guess it's, it may take a little time, but, you know, you'll improve fines if you don't move. And maybe. But it sounds like, you know, the fine is kind of not really what the movement is here. I think the 26% increases what sounds like it's really valuable to me. So. Man, yeah, let's go.

San Diego companies, like, wake up. You know, like. So the report's coming out for 2021 data in March. We're going to come back and share that data because. And we're going to call out some companies who haven't done it yet because one, we're shareholders of many public companies. So we want to see, we want to see a stock performance, but it's also the right thing to do. And so we will keep reporting this out as we do it. So thanks, Karen, for writing that story. Hey, good, good. Oh, go. You have a transition, because I have one. I was going to say, at least in one place where gender parody really rings true, the Olympics. You know, there is, there is men and women in every sport competing in the Olympics. And luckily San Diego is representing not nearly as much in the summer, where I think we had close to 70 San Diegans. But there's a number of people who are competing from, from San Diego in the Winter Olympics, which you wouldn't expect from such a sunny, beachy town.

That's what I was going to say. I was wondering about that because, like, literally we have, well, at least one article that I found. So there's about five represented. And I was wondering, it's like, why how come we have so many snowboarders? So it's like, really, it's like, it's bizarre to me. It's like, I don't really. I was trying to figure it out, but you obviously get Shaun White, big one, but he's kind of crossover from skateboarding kind of makes sense. Did you see the final run?

Yeah, I know fourth place is sad. Really sad. He thought I could have capped off his, what was it, his fifth Olympics that he was in. Right? Yeah.

And they were saying last year was like the, the like or last time he competed, like the run to run. It was like so good. He should have. It's so hard because, you know, it's like to use like a tired sports analogy, it's like your mind and your brain's just like, I want to keep doing this. And your body's like, yeah, I don't know. I remember he was talking about his, his back leg and all. Man, that's gotta be tough. Cause you want to keep just shredding it. But he was up against I think a 16 year old, you know, who is there saying it was like I think eight months old when Shaun White won his first medal. And you're just like, dude, this kid. How do you, you know, I don't know. So he grew up idolizing, you know, in many ways. Shot White.

Yeah. Well, shout out Carlsbad based Sean White, a few others. Also north county representing on this. Do you want to read through?

Yeah, sorry, I got sidetracked because I was wondering if you had seen Hirano doing that big air. If you haven't Google that. Google that video. This guy got so high. Anyways, look at, look up the video. I was trying to go to bed early last night and then half I came on and I just got sucked in. I stayed up crazy late. So Tessa Mod snowboarding. Seamus o' Connor from Ramona, also snowboarding. Lizzie Lindsay was my second. The Jacob Bellis snowboarding gold medal legend. I know. I looked up her, her background. Okay, let's see how they did. Gold medal snowboard cross is kind of insane. I don't know if you ever watched that sport.

It is. It's super fun.

Cruise down the hill and then Kylie Humphreys bobsledding. So we got bobsledding out of San Diego.

Yes, from Oceanside.

Cool. That's just an insane sport. She's super decorated in her past, but wasn't pulling any medals so far yet. But maybe it's not over yet. We'll see. Fingers crossed. I'm sure there's other San Diego too, but those are, you know, a couple that, that stand out. But you know, what's up, Sean? You know, you represented San Diego for so many years. It's cool. At least, you know, you at least kind of almost rounded out the top three. But anyways, we're, we're still fan.

Yeah. And let's not forget why maybe they'd be here. Down in Chula Vista is one of the largest Olympic training centers around. So many sports are represented there with with training a whole facility that also supports athletes. So we know that could be a reason as well too.

Hey, let's hit some fundings.

Yeah. January was actually kind of quiet month but man, first week in February it's roaring back. So Endeavor Biomed raised a cool 101 million.

Nice.

Yeah. 1859, we Devin and team, we've known these guys for a few years. They've been kind of in stealth mode building this really cool platform in the biotech space and they come out roaring on a 40 million Series A. So check look, keep an eye out for 1859. I think they were a JLabs company that came out of that.

It's kind of cool. A funny anecdote on that. Have you ever looked up how many people are employed by stealth Mode startup on LinkedIn? Thousands.

The largest startup around.

It's cool they came up with with 40 million. That's a huge, huge way to come out of stealth.

Yeah. Carlsbad company mpower, they are building space photovoltaics. So these are super cool new ways to generate electricity in space that they hope to have applications here on earth as well. They raised 10 million and travel app seeker, we used to know them as the Van Life app. They raised 2.25 million with a lot of local investors involved in it. So really cool to see they're bringing kind of bringing the campsite community together. So helping both camp sites fill inventory but also just campers meet each other and we know that has blown up during the pandemic.

Fan lifers, techstars anywhere as well.

Yes, techstars anywhere company so super proud of Bri and Jess and team which.

Is kind of funny. It is techstars anywhere but we claim a little bit of loyalty to San Diego because we got that because Ryan.

Cooter's here, that's for sure. But yeah, some shout outs. This is the super bowl weekend. We've been talking about super bowl for a few weeks because some of our startups are representing at the Super Bowl. ClickUp finally picked their ad. I know they're doing like testing the audience and see who liked what they got a funny one. So we linked it in the show notes here. Go look at ClickUp. Also Cloud beds also has an ad out there. Got to imagine Dexcom is probably going to show up. Last year they had a big blowout one with Nick Jonas wearing during the patch. Gotta imagine that they'll show up. So keep an eye out on some San Diego representation at the big game this weekend.

I love that. What's, what's the connects 5, 10, 30 coming up in the innovation day.

Yeah. April 28th, innovation day at Petco Park. It's being announced Innovation Day by Mayor Todd Gloria that day. Hopefully it'll be that day every year. And it's about thousand of us, thousands of us coming together to celebrate innovation. So the name is called 5, 1030, penned by Mike Kren. Kind of a cool idea that the decisions we make now will affect five, 10 and 30 years from now.

I like it. I was like, damn, you're at the date wrong.

No, it's a cool concept or it's.

Not for another eight years.

Yeah. So maybe it'll be like a beer named 5, 10, 30. Be kind of cool to see, but let's do it. Come on out on the afternoon of the April 28, there'll be literally there'll be hundreds of companies tabling so you can meet tons of companies. There'll be a ton of investors there as well. I know capital is going to represent and I know TCA is doing its own thing too. And then a whole bunch of companies do. So keep an eye on that one.

Sorry, the ticket link is here as well for 5, 10, 30. Super cool. April 28th.

Yep. And you want to give a shout out to sdsu.

Yeah, this is cool. So the new Virtual Extended Reality Research Center. It's cool. They're calling it Vital V I T A L. It was launched in 2017, but really just one of those initiatives that got kicked into gear during COVID which is super cool. And they've actually brought this to literally all eight colleges at sdsu. This is something cool to look into. And there's a really interesting quote from the deputy cio, but anyways, he says, you know, the tools will just become more and more reliable, affordable and easy to use as we look ahead. Referring to VR and alternate reality. Essentially, if you're going to take off your glasses, you'll feel dumber, just like we have without our phone. So it's going to be kind of nuts if you think about it. Having access to the future of technology is going to be so massive for the future. And it's cool that SDSU is pushing forward with that.

Super cool, Vital. Looking forward to it as well as their big technology push into SDSU west over by Aztec Stadium in Mission Valley. So that's our show for the week. Very eclectic. Enjoy your weekends, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. Jonah, who do you got on the super bowl, man?

I don't know. I kind of. I. I like la, but I like the underground story. I just. Matthew Stafford, going through all those years in Detroit, I was just like, man, give this guy. Give this guy a win.

Yeah.

Brutal, brutal teams. But yeah. Let. So let us know if you like this mix of stories. This a good variety. Share it, Share it around. Help us out. We love San Diego. We're specific to San Diego Tech here. We just love to see it grow, and it's a hell of a lot of fun for us. Hope you. Hope you enjoy too.

Yeah. Please share. Please give us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or Google, wherever you listen to these and give us a review. Or even just. Just a rating, either one. We saw a few this week. Really appreciate the comments from you guys, and we love you as well. We'll see you next week.

All right. Happy Friday. See you, Neil.

Cheers. See you, Jon.