San Diego Tech News Weekly – January 14, 2022

Sweet. Right? Well, happy Friday, everyone. Happy 2022. It's good to see your icons in our room in person. But you know, the same old story, how it goes two years later. But man, 2021 was. Yeah, it was a wild year for everything, good and bad.

I just trained myself to write 2022. You know, it was like it took me a little bit to catch up there.

I know. Seriously, let's do. So this is the. We're going to get back to doing our weekly Fridays what's Happening in San Diego Tech show. We plan to do it live and also record it and put it on the Talkers and tech podcast network. So just a heads up, we are recording this. We aren't able to have you come up on stage because of our janky recording situation right now, but we will be changing that in the future.

Or clever.

Yeah.

Or clever recording. We'll see.

Yeah, we would love to hear feedback from all of you on, you know, would you like to join a live conversation? And if so, would you like Clubhouse? Would you like call in, Would you like Twitter spaces? So send us a note either by email or LinkedIn or Twitter. We've got a thread going about this week already on Twitter, so if that's a place where you feel comfortable letting us know where you want to join in on conversation, please do. But we do want to engage all of you and have you sharing the news that you're hearing as well, too.

Yeah, yeah. And a point on that. I mean, we like to gravitate towards things that are interesting to us, but if there's stories that come on your radar that maybe we need to be aware of or we didn't see, we'd love to have that feedback too. So making this as big and strong for the San Diego community in general is kind of our goal and our focus.

And it's not just startups. As much as, you know, me and Jonah's startup guys, we're just as interested in big tech, too. We want to know how Qualcomm is influencing the community in the world. We want to know about how the blurring of biotech and tech is, you know, what's that doing from the big tech all the way on down, too. So we're going to be sharing topics that we're hearing all over and you'll hear some of that today. Before we dive in, though, just want to ask all of you listeners, big fans of San Diego, help us grow the show. So leave a review on our podcast, on whatever show, whatever you like to listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Google, and then share it with someone who wants to get more plugged in. Typically I'm getting introduced to a lot of people that's like, hey, this person's moving to San Diego. You could share an episode, podcast episode, and say, here's how to quickly get plugged in, that'd be great. But in general we just appreciate you guys support. So thank you.

Yeah, and one last note on that and I'll just kind of share a bit of a personal anecdote. I mean, I was in tech for a while. I was doing a lot of work at Lime. Was so consumed with kind of just scooters really, let's be honest. And then after kind of found you found Neil in the community, was like, oh gosh, like I missed that this whole thing was going on here and that was kind of like, you know, it was on me. So, you know, someone invited me, I went and kind of found the community and you know, now, now we're here.

So I would say, yeah, if you.

Know someone who's kind of like, hey, tech, I'm not sure, like I'd want to meet some co founders, meet some people, have some ideas to throw around. Yeah, invite them to the, to anything Startup San Diego. Introduce them to either of us. Just bring them to the community. I mean, the more, the more businesses that get built here, the more exciting tech we get, the more jobs there are for everybody. And really, I mean, that's kind of our goal. We want to build San Diego.

Yeah. Well, and on that note, let's do a quick wrap up. So we put out actually a preliminary 2021 tech report in December and then we knew we would update it when the new numbers came out. So you can actually hear, we did a whole episode in a blog post on freshbrewedtech.com, all about the 2021 tech report. But let's cap up some pretty phenomenal numbers. Pretty much we hit the $9 billion raised in VC dollars. Depending upon the stats you see, it's 9 or 9.5 or even a little under 8.94. So everyone classifies certain fundings differently, but pretty much 9 billion compared to our 5.5 billion or so in 2020. So a nice solid jump up. Considering that I think global VC saw a 90% increase from 2020 to 2021, I think we're pretty much on par with that. We drove into some of the other pieces of data as well, like 273 private funding rounds where and there's actually A majority were tech or consumers. More than half of the funding rounds were tech and consumer. And of the $2,600 million plus fundings, and actually seven of the top 10 biggest funding rounds, actually, let's say it that way, seven were tech. So tech actually is starting to power ahead a bit and actually sit there right alongside biotech, if not have more. And we love to talk about biotech versus tech in San Diego. We need to figure out how to talk about it in the same sentence. 9 billion in funding was tech and biotech together. $2,600 million plus fundings, that was biotech and tech together. And so many of our tech companies are tech applied to biotech at this point too. Right. Genomics is a database code set using data science applied to a human code base. IoT in the body is medical device. So I think that's our goal this year and we're going to talk about that in our predictions. Learning to talk about that as one to show kind of the great strength of San Diego.

Well, and that's a, I mean that's a really good point. And I think there are big companies that are starting to actually blur those lines. I mean, we always talk about Dexcom, we'll talk a little bit about, you know, Roswell, biotechnologies, but I think companies like that starting to really, you know, make a huge name for themselves is really, like you said, blurring the lines because they're doing tech in, you know, the biotech world and so now blur the whole thing. And that really takes two of San Diego straights, which is, which is so cool to see. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. I was actually going to ask you, so for those of you who did catch the show kind of towards the end, we did a year wrap up, but we didn't quite get to the end. We didn't do it on New Year's Eve. So Neil, there's a couple of things that happened actually after the show. A few updates. You said a couple other fundings came in. I don't know if you want to add a couple extra details or notes of things that rolled in right after, at the end of the year.

Yeah, we had our 20, what was it, 22nd IPO. I think when we recorded it was 21, like part based bioscience did it right at the wire. The they went public through a SPAC. So 22 companies went public for close to 6 billion in IPO capital raise, so let alone 9 billion in funding that went through VC and then another 6 billion for IPO funding too. So pretty massive. I think we'd already announced we had already knew that the Tijuana and San Diego won the world Design Capital in 2024. But worth mentioning again, we didn't mention at the time that San Diego won a Nobel Prize in 2021. Pretty amazing. Specifically Artem Patapusian won it. And for his breakthroughs, actually, I mean, it seems trivial, almost a sense. But he discovered how human sense temperature and touch. Yeah, obviously we know we can do that, but he actually figured out how it's done. And I think that research is going directly into Sensor development and IoT right now, all through the Hoya scripts, which is pretty cool.

Amazing.

So that was one that we highlighted and then the public city index that we've started. So working with our friends at Public Finance, a startup, they've helped us track cities as their entire public company as an index. So we compared all the cities, all the big metros in the US to see how our public companies doing. So we have the full year's data. The S and p did about 26% increase for 2021. San Diego pretty much right there. We were right in line with the S and P. Our public companies performed just like the S and P. Not to be outdone by Dallas, which their public companies did 44% stock increase. But for all the hype about Miami startup scene, their public companies did not do well. They had a 30% loss overall and their public companies. But San Diego. In previous years we've actually seen San Diego as a leading market for public companies compared to all the other metros. This year we were right on the target with the S and P, which kind of interesting. I think that was everything. There were some, I think we did update some. We have a whole listing of as many of the VC local capital groups in San Diego that we could find and how many deals they did by publicly available. And a lot of VCs when they saw this data, wrote me, I updated their numbers. So kind of cool to just see all the local capital and how many deals that they're doing. Not to say they're doing a lot of local, but they're doing deals. So to say that San Diego's local capital scene is young. Yes, but it's nice to see a really long listing of all the local capital groups there.

Yeah, and those 22 companies going public really helps. That brings that money back to the funds and hopefully they can keep deploying it here.

Exactly. Yep. We're going to touch on that a bit more as well as towards our predictions to 2022, which I think we should dive right into. But like we said, if you haven't seen the 2021 tech report, you can find it on freshbrewtech.com you can. Also in that same blog post is the infographic, the Deep Dive Report and an audio version of us doing this kind of talk on there as well too. But 2022, because let's live in the future. So a lot of things, a lot of tailwinds behind us that we're going to talk through that we're going to use a prediction. So some of them federal spending, specifically on infrastructure. First of all, the Fed has printed more money in the last two years than it has in its entire existence as a country. There's trillions of brand new dollars out there and a lot of it is finding its way into infrastructure and local government and local spending. And that we believe is going to bode very well for Southern California, let alone San Diego, which leads in a lot of areas like defense spending, like infrastructure spending around clean tech, battery tech, water development. We're one of the first to have desalination plants. Great independence. So a lot of that when the spending comes for those kinds of projects, you also then see the technology companies say, oh, there's grant funding, there's non dilutive funding for these things. I'm going to go build a business that capitalizes on this. And I think you will see more and more San Diego companies relying on kind of civic tech and govtech kind of areas or clean tech, whatever you want to call all the above. I think you will see more and more take advantage of all the cash that is available out there. You want to dive into some of these stories that we.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. So yeah, so the Tribune did a really good story about the federal funding.

I mean.

The amount is like 1.2 trillion in the infrastructure bill and that gets earmarked out to different pieces of infrastructure. But what's really interesting, and I didn't realize this until diving in a little bit deeper, this isn't necessarily like San Diego. You are the 10th biggest or in top 10. So you get this amount of money, they have to kind of compete for it in a sense. And so local government's going to the federal government saying, hey, we want money for these projects. But some things that actually are really interesting and specific to the San Diego area and I think we'll get a lot of tech kind of built around this. And we saw this with a few companies that actually moved into the area. But sewage recycling systems, that's something that is huge in our infrastructure, is very water specific, something that San Diego alone needs a lot of and, and seems somewhat rudimentary as far as how we were actually tracking this. I mean we don't really, if a system leaks, we weren't really aware of that because it's underground. And now there's sort of technology in the space and satellite realm that's actually able to see this.

Let's not be, I think related to that real quick. Just the ability for San Diego and Southern California in general to be water independent is huge. Right as we're seeing droughts affect and everything else affect that infrastructure that delivers us resources. And so the fact that San Diego is already kind of pulling ahead to be water independent of Northern California in terms of desal and now the giant water reuse projects which is recycling sewage turning into drinking water, there's one up in Oceanside, there's one in east county about to come online. That technology that's going there I think is going to drive further engagement from local companies bringing it to other communities as well too.

I think so too. And actually it's really interesting because there's an accelerator company at the ucsd, I think it's Blue project. I might be getting that name wrong. Start Blue, who's doing water reclaiming rainwater. And so basically it falls, it goes right in the oceans. Well that sucks because that's like clean, not salty water. And so there's a lot of different infrastructure and companies that can kind of come up around that. And maybe like you said, the federal funding can kind of help support that. You know, obviously we've got wildfire prevention and so we were talking about some UCSD collaborations where they had, you know, mapping technology, looking at predicting where the fires will be. And so you're really overlaying some pretty advanced tech on some, some sort of rudimentary systems. In fact I have a friend who's working in Northern California, Nevada City, any area. But really the jobs in that orbit are walk along the power lines that exist and look for things that are of risk. And so that's very human intensive and that's kind of low tech. So you know, building businesses and companies around fire prevention sounds like something that's San Diego can really be a leader.

In actually related to fire prevention. The San Diego Supercomputer center is actually on the front lines of this. So they have helped develop and deploy sensors, all of our at risk areas for fire, which tends to be at the edges of our county oftentimes. And so what they're doing is deploying sensors, but also what they're doing is deploying edge networks using either existing broadband backbone, say by the Coxes and others of the world, or deploying their own together, not just at fire, but also in the ocean too. So what's kind of cool is to start seeing that our data capture systems and our research centers are in a sense instrumenting the world to detect big calamities that could be happening and then work on prevention of it too, once we have that data. So that's all been kind of interesting to watch as well. Related to laying broadband, it's still an issue of having broadband and Internet access in low income areas. And so that is another part of infrastructure build that I know is coming to help bring more Internet to more places, which I think we will be a part of, as well as a bunch of other infrastructure projects, as you mentioned.

Well, so to your point, I mean that 1.2 trillion, if that number is actually locked in stone, it might move around 40% has to be spent in disadvantaged areas. And so that means, you know, we're able to sort of focus on, like you said, broadband Internet in lower income areas or other projects that actually might improve the daily lives of everybody. One that kind of shocked me was the fact that there's a large percentage of San Diego's water pipes infrastructure underground that are lead, which is kind of insane. And I would imagine, you know, I would imagine, I'm not sure, I don't sit in those rooms, but like, you know, do the wealthier areas get their pipes replaced quicker? I'm not sure. But you know, that's something that's pretty old infrastructure and cause some, some problems down the road. So kind of reserving some of that funding and doing, you know, work in that realm and maybe even applying tech to know exactly where they are. I'm sure it's, it's paper and pen maps to this point. Hopefully it's digitized and there's a lot of tech that can be leveraged around there.

One other piece, the big part is mobility, roads, transit. But even bigger is the coming change to electric vehicles. We know that so much has to change to enable that to happen. Electric vehicles, the charging infrastructure, especially charging infrastructure in low income areas, which California put a huge grant out last year specifically to focus on disadvantaged areas to make sure that it's not just Tesla superchargers that are everywhere, but that there are chargers for everywhere. That anyone can charge. I think cinema will play a big part in the EV infrastructure space. We've got a number of startups. We had one tech company that went public last year, Nuvi, that is related to this. We have a new one that just raised funding this last week, chargenet that I participated in a year ago. Yep, big shout out to Tosh. So yeah, that is another huge, the mobility space but really just the road, making sure the roads even are good is I think another place for us to capitalize on as well as cybersecurity which just continues to proliferate more and more and more of bad news. And San Diego has such a cluster in cybersecurity, such a good cluster of tech companies, government agencies and so I believe we will play a big game in changing the cyber game. And lastly more specific climate stuff like actual carbon capture and planting trees technology around that, our ag tech scene. I think we'll also see a lot of money go towards how do we keep the resiliency of our local food and supply chains related to food around that as well. So lots of, lots of interesting things that we think from a federal funding thing will enable San Diego to ride some even higher waves.

Yeah and definitely so there will be a number of businesses and tech companies that are sort of in these, these sort of sectors that now have the opportunity to get non dilutive funding and maybe grow a little bit bigger and then those might hit, you know, that might get on the radar to get some more funding for next year or overall this year maybe that'll add to our funding numbers or hopefully some exit numbers we'll see.

Yeah, so related to, so that was the federal spending, how that's going to trickle down to San Diego. This next prediction is related to some of our leading industries, how San Diego will lead the way in that regard too. So logistics, tech, IoT, digital health and even our legacy industry of chip design. These are some core areas of San Diego that we're seeing continual, not just great company traction but bigger need from the world in a sense. So let's dive into one of our first ones here and we've spoken at length about our logistics tech deep cluster here from all the way from the Walmarts and Amazon's having engineers here to the spin outs from Qualcomms like your platform science to your new unicorns like Flock Freight to one of our few public tech companies last year, too simple which is going the route of automating or making a trucking autonomous. And they have some big news that they finally hit just at the end of the year. You want to dive into it?

Yeah, yeah. This is a big one. I'm kind of like picturing in the back of my mind an autonomous truck pulling itself up to a charging station, setting it refueling its cells and then going back on the road. But yeah, Tusimple has, has done their first solo trip. So we talked about that leading up to this, how they're getting closer and closer but there's always someone, you know, sort of a safety driver sitting either shotgun or behind the wheel, just kind of monitoring. And they just did. It was a, an hour and 20 minute trip, 80 miles from Tucson to Phoenix, which doesn't sound super far, but if you look at kind of where that route falls, it's actually on your shipping trucking sort of road through all the way from Florida to California. So if you start to sort of piece those chunks together, you know you're going to do some serious long haul. Once, once we're up to that point, it's, it's, you know, we talked about this too in the past, but just one last note. Is it, you know, it's, I don't think it's as simple as sort of a remote control truck, a car and you know, maybe a slightly simple, similar or simpler even. But you know, these are 80,000 pound vehicles loaded up and have some serious momentum. So you know, you got to move slowly. I guess you can't just hook a bunch of these on the road and hope for the best. But they're making waves. They're, they're, they've done their first driverless route and I assume they're only going to build from here. This is huge for San Diego's logistics tech. There's a lot of really cool IP being developed here and you know, that might spin out into other tech companies and hopefully they're building them out of San Diego.

Absolutely. Did you end up buying some stock?

I didn't yet.

Okay. I'm still holding and I'm adding to my position. So fan of Tusimple, another, another momentum play or not momentum play, legacy industry applying to other leading industries of San Diego. So obviously chip design has been a long time handset focused thing from Qualcomm who actually I was told last week that actually they started from their original company pre Qualcomm started in the military space communication network for Linkabit, I think was focused on military and they took that technology, applied it to the commercial handset space which was Qualcomm and now finding new industries to Put chips into. So that's what Qualcomm's focus on is diversifying, not just only being handset, but now that idea of a unique chipset into blank industry is very much proliferating. You've seen Illumina buy a genomics focused chip. Man, their names escape me all of a sudden now, but they were an evo Nexus company that got acquired. We've seen it in Omnion. Not Omnion, no, it'll come to me. We've seen it obviously in trucks with like we mentioned, Omnitracks just turned into platform science, but now specifically more like general biotech in terms of researching DNA. Well, now there's a new company, Roswell Bio, that's applying this chipset idea into researching for detection of diseases and developing drugs. Um, so another area, another play of seeing two leading industries in San Diego, biotech and our chipset world coming together and going to lead the way in biotech research with biotech focused chips.

This is cool. Did you dig into this at all? I went a little bit under the hood. It's actually really interesting. And if you think about it, you know, you take. Well, for one, you know, we do, we do. You know, with COVID or whatever, you do a test to see if you have a virus, have the virus, or you take a medication because you're feeling unwell. But it's kind of hard to know, aside from the fact that you're feeling better, if it's working. And there is a potential chance if you take a medication or whatever, that you feel better simply because your body has spent time fighting off whatever it needs to fight off. And so what this technology is really interesting, is able to do is actually on a molecular level, see if the medication is helping or see if you're actually infected by said virus, flu, virus, could be, whatever. But those two points are interesting because we kind of assume it's like I took the Tylenol, now I'm better. But there's a really, our minds are strong. There's a strong potential placebo effect that since I have medication, I feel better. Well, did it do anything or not? That's just one very sliver of an example of what they can do by hybridizing legacy chip design in San Diego with the biotech side. There we go. We're starting to build bridges between the two, which is really interesting because traditionally, you know, San Diego has been incredibly strong at finding engineers and finding people to work on the biotech side. But if you're in sort of the tech side you just kind of get absorbed into some of the bigger companies, your Qualcomms or whatever. And maybe you don't get out there and kind of build your own businesses either. So really interesting to see these types of companies coming out that are crossing. Crossing that, that the chasm is the wrong word, but they're crossing the chasm between tech and biotech.

Yeah, no, we love to see it that's industry wide. Let's do a little bit deeper, dive into some trends we think we'll see on the tech startup side. First, we know that just more and more capital is flowing into venture capital. That's just a point a given that it's happened over the last few years, I think. And you can see it in San Diego, new funds, new firms are popping up. But San Diego, honestly we're a bit more pragmatic. We aren't just building a fund to say we got a fundamental. We're very much focused on only raise a fund if we think we can do something unique or special, apply it in a certain way. That is very San Diego, I think. And so that's why we don't see big splashy giant funds. We're not seeing these $500 million seed fund raised by a blank group here on top of the fact that we haven't had the big tech exits yet. But I think something unique that is continuing as a trend in San Diego is focusing on diversity first. Not necessarily first, but making sure that that happens at the same time anything new happens. So as opposed to building a whole legacy tech community and then saying oh, what about diversity? We're kind of growing it together. I think we're luckily able to do that simultaneously. So whether that's Founders First Capital, which is got a unique approach to both investing revenue based finance and now equity based as well too and focus on investing in underserved communities and founders, which is awesome. So see that from a capital side. Then you see Connect coming out with their own diversity program in terms of saying and they're actually coming at it from a talent angle. So making sure that once companies who have raised, when they raise, when they, when they take that capital, which primarily all goes to hiring people, they do it from a. They focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. And so they're a big call for anyone who's in a hiring role to meet with them and talk about strategies that could help and find talent pools that they would be overlooking normally. And then lastly from another diversity angle is Village Up, a new official nonprofit that has grown up to say let's help one measure the potential diversity of founders in San Diego. Let's find a common tool set to enable everyone to say, are we talking about resources for founders in this in an accessible way? So I'm really excited to see them come out and kind of give us a set of guidelines of how to lead a smart, inclusive startup community.

Yeah, yeah. And that's going to only push forward into 22, I think, as the prediction, if you want to round that out.

Yep, exactly. I think what that means is that we are going to measure ourselves and be transparent about it. We're going to hopefully do it in a very holistic and accessible way. And we're going to have capital that comes from domain experts, hopefully as well too, people who know what they're investing in, which is a good shameless plug for Interlock Capital, which really actually only came out in 2021 as an entity to take domain experts to source deals, assess them and invest in them. And our big prediction this year for us is that not a prediction. We're raising a fund. We've got 25% of our commitments in already and actually already deployed one investment. So, you know, we predict we will make a lot of investments from Interlock Capital and that's one prediction I know we will, we will hit.

Well, you know, they say if you have the data, it's a little bit easier to make the prediction. So, you know, congrats on that and obviously reach out to Neil if you're interested. It's been a hell of a lot of fun for me.

But they also a ton of deals you've sent us, which is awesome. So we love that you're a part of it as well too.

Appreciate that.

Sent deals and you've invested in deals the other end of the spectrum, which is we have been, I feel like exits. We've been talking about this for years. We want to see them, we need to see them and we're starting to see them. So we actually saw a lot in 2021. The problem with exits, especially from M and A and IPOs, is that it's never usually like boom, got acquired for a billion. A billion immediately is released in the community. Wow, look at this amazingness. It's never that way.

One never.

It's talked about like if it's an M and A, it's usually not said how much was it acquired for. So was it good or bad. And usually there's like multi year earnouts that are in mixes of cash and stock. And so it takes a while for that trickle to trickle out. But if we at least see an increase in M and A, we know it will eventually trickle out back into the community in positive ways. So yeah, I believe we'll see. We had three tech and consumer IPOs last year or yeah, IPOs. I guess I believe we'll see five plus this year. And I know that's totally dependent on the stock market but I just believe that there are so many companies that have this pent up that we gotta not just give a secondary buyout offering of our stock but really finally get public to the community, public to the stock markets.

Let's go slightly deeper there because we saw a couple of acquisitions from major companies that are leaving their company standing. I mean people love San Diego so much that you don't want to come in by a company and just kind of absorb it so much into your business. Do you think of those five, any of those will be kind of left to be a subsidiary and operate independently? You know, Bayer came in and bought one of our biotech companies and was just like oh, you know, you just, you just keep doing, you, you guys just will have you sort of independently operate. And I think that I kind of feel like we're going to. That's more of that's going to happen in San Diego because, because we have such a unique mix of sort of culture and place to be that you know, it's been built around that. Which is super interesting.

Yeah, no, no, no, I, those five, I'm talking companies going public. So they are very much going to stay put and be public companies. There are many CEOs of unicorns or sunicorns who have said I am building a public company, Fox Freight being one. And I think they'll do it. I think they will, they will, they will build longstanding multi, I don't know, let's say 10 plus year public companies. And I think that will change the game here. I think they go public in 2022. I don't know what the markets, how they treat that this year, but I think, I think they push into going public on the exit side. Oh, go ahead.

I was just saying I loved the term Sunicorn. I haven't heard it before. Maybe it's out there, but let's make that one a thing.

I love that we have to look at what that looks like on paper. What does a Sunicorn look like? Like what is the graphic of a suit? Of course. Like, like the porn's just starting to bud. Maybe it's coming. Yeah, exactly. Now There's. I mean so many of the hundred million dollar raises actually weren't. Didn't push them over a billion dollar company. I think next round they will. Yeah.

So it's probably somewhere in the 800 plus valuations where like the next round's clearly going to kick them over.

They're not quite there yet.

Or yeah, maybe they, they were able to grow their value on their own. But it's within reach.

Right. I'll even call a few out like Soshi. So she's right there. Their next round pushes them over. I don't know. Cloud beds ended up. They might be right on that edge to cloud beds or not. They took softbank money so it's a good chance they did get pushed over that line. But on the exit side I think we'll see more M and A for sure. One that we saw that we love that just happened is Classy and gofundme join club.

This one's so sick.

Two San Diego companies and actually people don't know. There's actually a third Santa company that got wrapped up in this too. Crowdrise was acquired by GoFundMe within the last five years. They're another San Diego nonprofit tech company co founded by Ed Norton, Mr. Ed Norton, the actor and the Wolf Brothers. They've been wrapped up inside GoFundMe this whole time. And now Class is in there too. And I think it was all equity for everyone. So everyone now has GoFundMe stock and everyone's riding the GoFundMe wave. And there's a lot of excitement around this. Two kind of legendary nonprofit tech companies, a B2B and a B2C joining forces. Pretty cool in that regard. Classy's raised a ton of capital to date. 183 million. Most recently last summer. I think they raised 118 million a Series D. GoFundMe I think has only actually raised one round which changed its leadership and brought the company's headquarters to the Bay Area, but still maintains an office in San Diego. So we're pretty excited to see these two forces come together. I think we need to get the founders of both companies together on a podcast and just talk about. Because I know they've known each other for years. It'd be cool to actually have them sit around a table and talk about the early days of everything.

Well, they were started just about the same time, I think almost the same year. And didn't we. I don't know how public Classy live was. Is that something that got rolled into another SD company.

Yeah, that's true. Lend a company I invested in sold a virtual virtual event company platform that they created called. It was called Fondi. Then it was re sold to Classy and we ran startup month on it for the last two years A few.

Months ago it was recent.

Yeah, yeah, they just, so they just sold that as an asset to Classy to now have, you know, an events platform too. Virtual events platform. So yeah, a lot of cool San Diego things to this that's for sure. Also interesting, the founders are pretty much out of both of all of these companies, which is interesting because they've been building it for so long. They all still have equity. I think they all got cashed out at some point, not completely. So they're still incentivized for the long term too. But new leadership has come in and I think we might see more of that as well in some of our companies that have been building for 10 plus years.

So it may be fairly obvious, but I thought it was really interesting why these two seem to go so well together. And they're both like you said, giants in the philanthropy market. Combined, 20 billion looks like raised by them. Together, the philanthropy market's 500 billion annually in the U.S. but what's really, really interesting, and this is kind of why this marriage seems to work really well, is, you know, let's say you're on GoFundMe and someone needs help because the recent rainstorm or the recent national disaster has impacted their home or whatever, they're raising some funding to kind of help support that issue. Well, you can give money to your friend to help them get back on their feet, but you can also then be sort of, you know, initiate support for a nonprofit that's actually working on the greater cause, this sort of climate change issue in this particular example. And so there's actually a way that you can kind of marry these two together and say, hey, hey, I'm helping my friend, but wait, there's more I can do. And so that's why, you know, they're starting to think that these two, you know, among other things, would actually work incredibly well together. And there's a really a pretty cool blog written by the founder of, or sorry, the current CEO of GoFundMe right now, Mr. Cordigan. You can Google that it's on, it's on medium of kind of why he thinks that that marriage is so great. And you know, I think that it all makes sense. But again, it's so cool because think about the stats that are staying in the city right It's a company buying a San Diego company who had just acquired a San Diego company. And there we go. We just made, we just created the show Inception for San Diego startup tech.

We love it. So yeah, one example that already happened this year. We'll see more of I think more M and A this year and we hope to bring you those news as we hear about them. We will share them in blog, podcast and social format. So keep an eye on us. Freshprotect.com if you haven't subscribed to the newsletter yet, go sign up@freshbrewtech.com and give us, give us some feedback on how you want to join these conversations. Like we said in the future is Clubhouse the right spot? Call in Twitter spaces. Do we not want to do a live and just you just listen to the podcast reach out to us. Like we said, probably Twitter. Let's have a public conversation about that and we want to hear from you what other content you want to hear this year.

Yeah, and I think that's a fair point because you know we get, we love having folks join us live but you know, the majority of people are listening come from going about their daily lives walking the dog. I don't know if people are driving to work, but they're definitely going for walks listen at some point.

So those are Data says over 100 listening within the week to this episode. So obviously not 100 are here right now but we know you're listening later. So thanks for listening in.

Yeah, and share feedback with us too. Find us on Twitter, share the stories you're finding, ones you'd like us to dig a little bit deeper on and bring a friend to the San Diego tech community. Bring them here, bring them to an event, a meetup, an event and anything that really gets people more active in the tech community I think is better for everybody. So you know, let's, let's see if we can do that together. Build the San Diego tech ecosystem. And whether that's biotech tech or if you're bootstrapping your business solve good. We just want, we want more building.

Here if we can. Yeah, I'll give a quick shout out to some new event series I'm going to launch come March, April at the new UCSD downtown campus. Focus on talent but focus on bringing specific skill set based groups together. So we'll do a marketing night focusing on bringing, you know, top marketers together for peer mentorship, but then also junior marketers to make sure they're connecting as well too. Do the same in, in cloud and tech kind of roles. Sales roles. Finance and business analysts too. So keep an eye out for fresh food tech Live events coming out early spring at the new UCSD campus at park and Market.

Hell, yeah. That's all I got.

That's what we got. That's our show. Thank you, everyone, for listening in and make it a great day and great year.

See you out there. Love, San Diego 22.

All right, guys, take care. Bye, everyone.

See ya.