San Diego Tech News Weekly – June 17, 2022

It foreign.

Hello, Hello. Happy Friday or whatever day of the week it is. You are listening to the recording of this later. We are happy to be back. It's been a few weeks and it's nice to be back in the swing of talking this week in San Diego Tech. We have some great stories for you, but first a little intro and I'm excited to have a new co host with me today, which we'll introduce in a second. But first and foremost, my name is Neil Bloom. I'm with Fresh Brew Tech, which is a San Diego tech media outlet. We put on theoretically every Friday at 12:30 Pacific, we jump on Twitter spaces and now we record these for you as well to talk the local tech news in about 30 minutes. So we'll jive on about four to five stories plus a few shout outs and. And then it'll be recorded as well to so you can listen to this later, which you are doing if you're hearing this right now. I'm myself an entrepreneur, an investor. It's got an investment group called Interlock Capital and a community builder where I've been helping build San Diego and now many other cities startup and even not just startup itself, but just the overall tech ecosystem where we are making a good environment to build good companies. That's what it's all about. But I'm thrilled to have a new co host here with Sesha. So Sesha, thanks for joining us. You want to introduce yourself?

Yeah, thanks for having me, Neil. I am so, so excited to be here. Hey everyone, my name is Sesha. I am a former data biotech data person who's currently working in cybersecurity and cloud evangelism over at Microsoft Azure. I am a San Diego transplant by way of Seattle. Have been here for a few years and loving every bit of sunshine, every taco that I've had here. It is a great place to live and grow. I'm fond of all things tech, startups, data and tacos. So yeah, looking forward to it.

And you've fallen right into the San Diego culture, both from the biotech and now cyber world and cloud, which we're going to talk a lot about in some of these stories. And obviously a longtime listener and supporter of a lot of the organizations here in town. From the bitcoin meetup and village up and our past Thursday night's clubhouses, you're a constant. So it's stoked to be doing this with you now and let's dive into it. What do you say?

Absolutely, let's do it.

All right. Well, we've got a great first story out from LinkedIn which put out a, a new study on the top five 15 cities where tech talent is surging. And San Diego topped the list for the biggest increase in tech talent who have moved to the area since 2019. Conveniently, they did. Well, I don't know about conveniently, but they took it from pre Covid times to now. So that encompassed, you know, two plus years, maybe even up to three years. And you know, there's some really cool findings out of this besides us being the only California city on the list. But you want to take us through what you, what you dove into here, Sasha?

Yeah, so this one was a really interesting story and I found that it was kind of fascinating to see what we would expect from, you know, pre2020 to now. And so first and foremost, we saw a 38% increase in tech talent since 2019. And as you mentioned, only California city listed, which I think is wild considering, you know, we've got Palo Alto, we've got, we've got sf, we've got la, and San Diego tops that list. And I think that's super cool. One of those, I think one of the biggest Factors, and the LinkedIn article mentioned this as well, is that San Diego is a cybersecurity leader. And a big reason for that is we benefit from the Navy's big investment into the Naval War Systems Information Command, or navor. And that sort of comes from the fact that not only do we have 800 plus cyber firms, but we also just NAVAR alone employs more than 12,000 people. And I think that that's very interesting. And some of the research that I found really hinted at the fact that it's not just these traditional cyber firms that are hiring people, but it's also, you know, the Qualcomm, the ESAs, the FICO's Teradatas that are looking for talent to harden their services to make sure that we're, we're ready for cyber threats, whether they be, you know, local threats or overseas threats. And so I thought that was a very interesting point that they made in this article.

Yeah, it's, it's a huge deal that Navar employs that many alone. That's honestly almost the footprint of Qualcomm's local presence, which some believe is between 14, 14 and 15,000. So, you know, just cyber engineers specifically working as civilians in the Navy. It's huge all over there, mostly in Point Loma, I think, is where most of them are. But what you mentioned also on the Cyber side which we got to give a shout out to the San Diego Cybersecurity center of Excellence. Ccoe Lisa Easterly and team there who have really built from the ground up a community that helps bring cyber companies together and recruit cyber talent to the area. So hats off to them in terms of that. We mentioned Santa being the only California on the list, but you know, even bigger deal that was that we saw the decoupling of cities that had elite universities in previous days are also cities that had big tech growth and that decoupled over over the last two, three years. Partly obviously Covid is related to that. Right. People just moved to where they wanted to now and so maybe where some elite schools like MIT and Harvard and even Bay Area were not as habitable, you know, for cost of living and just weather wise, you know, I think that'll be really interesting for a lot of cities to talk about their university to keeping talent local. It's actually something we talk about a lot in San Diego. I've seen different studies that show between 70 and 90% of the talent we graduate in Southern California does not stay local. Anyway, that was pre Covid, so I can only imagine what that's like now. And it's probably completely messed up that metric because people now move for quality of life and weather as opposed to just like where the jobs are. So maybe we actually will keep talent local if we can house them first of all and get them good paying jobs. That'll be the biggest thing for San Diego. So really great to see the growth over the last few years and let's keep a close eye on this over the next year or two if we stay in the running for recruiting good talent here. Yeah, we've got some. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Well, I was just going to say that, you know, I think not just in terms of like the like the tech space and people moving to be able to go to remote, be remote at their jobs and so they can really be wherever they want. I think the fact that this list no longer includes just the software companies, but it's also including like the growth in mechanical, civil and chemical engineering fields. I think that's really fascinating because now it's not software engineering that is really the key player in growth, it's really holistic and I think that is a great indication for how we do as a city and is how, how the trends are growing in terms of what makes growth.

It's a great point. Especially San Diego is so diversified in the kinds of products that we do from biotech Life science and medical device, which obviously are not purely software and our hardware like, like all the telecom related and aerospace related, you know, that's a heavy piece of what our talent pool is like and obviously is included as tech talent where I think if you get too ingrained in a startup and tech conversation, people think tech talent is just software. But that is not the case. And, and based on the next story that we're going to talk about, you know, as much this kind of maybe the reverse of that because ResMed, which is known as a medical device maker, is expanding its cloud software footprint by acquiring a company called metafox Dan. A billion dollar acquisition to get deeper into the software space. So here's an interesting side where a life science medical device maker is expanding into software. Now they've already been deep in soft software already. They've got, they've spun out a bunch of sleep tracking apps previous to this but they're really known for making the sleep apnea devices, those big kind of harnesses you or yeah, I guess kind of the air masks that a lot of people wear at night to make sure that they maintain breathing. What do you know about metafox, Dan?

Yeah, so this one was cool. It's actually very similar to what, to what ResMed does and they also hit very similar markets and that they're looking to help nursing homes, home healthcare providers and really in organizing and providing them like a subscription software service to not just, you know, track insurance reimbursements and track analytics, track documentation, things like that, but they're also really just trying to sort of organize everything that you would need if you were a home health care provider or if you were in a nursing home, things like that. And this one was interesting because number one that is a huge deal and number or huge deal in terms of how much money it was and number two, it's, it's interesting because we have, we have a local company that's now trying to go from being a US based SaaS company to be properly global and I think it's an interesting choice. I would not have imagined, you know, to hit, to hit this German company, but I think it's awesome.

Yeah. And actually Resmond has Australian roots so they've been kind of an interesting company to watch straddle both Australia and San Diego as their headquarters but now to make the big jump into an expansion into Europe as well. So very cool to see a medical device company investing big into the software side in this regard. So keep an eye on this. We don't talk a lot about ResMed, but they actually have really cool kind of self incubation and innovation labs that we should be keeping an eye on. Maybe we'll do that in a future story on some ResMed spin outs.

Absolutely. Are they. Do you know where they are in San Diego?

Oh, I don't. I want to say Sorrento, but I don't think that's true. I know that one of their spin outs is a sleep tracking software based in Carlsbad, but you got me here. I don't remember exactly where they are in town, so if someone wants to jump in, but a little bit of background about them. They're a public company, they're publicly traded, they're on New York Stock Exchange, they do about 3.2 billion in revenue and about 8,000 employees. So they're a fairly large company. They in terms of San Diego size of companies, especially for headquartered companies in San Diego. So we'll make sure we're bringing them up more because sleep tech is an only growing market, that's for sure. And especially so is like maybe this is the wrong word geriatric check which kind of is where sleep apnea and CPAP machines are which you mentioned. This is for the nursing homes expanding their footprint into that being an all in one package there. So interesting to keep an eye on that area of medical device. But speaking of devices, our next story is is a cool one called company called xcom. This is actually a someone called a spin out of Qualcomm. But there is a deeper dramatic story that I'm going to bring up in a second after we. Because I don't think you know about this part.

No, I'm excited for this now.

Yeah, XCOM is they're all the co founders were all execs. They're the literally the sweet C suite of Qualcomm. They left to create their own startup. It's a VR AR wireless headset. And so they presented recently at Augmented World Expo and SF and this is their first products and they've actually been out working on this kind of under the radar really quiet since 2018. Why don't I give the dramatic part part first. So back in 2018 there was a few things that were going on with Qualcomm. They had some massive court cases and battles against Apple, Samsung, the Federal Trade Commission for monopolistic pieces, but also for trademark and patent infringements. So there's a lot going on around that. There also was and maybe related to it there was a potential buyout that was being led Some called it internal coup where certain execs were trying to get the company sold by a rival Broadcom, I believe, if I remember right, which was an Orange County, Irvine based company that got acquired by a Singapore company, kept the name Broadcom and so now Broadcom, a Singapore based company was trying to buy Qualcomm and actually Trump stepped in and blocked it and said this is for, for nationalistic reasons we cannot have our technology in the hands of a foreign country. And so it was really interesting because at the time I think you had the chairman, I'm trying to remember where Paul Jacobs, I think who's the son of the founder, Irwin Jacobs, longtime CEO, he's, I think he was just chairman or he was chairman and CEO and led a movement to, to keep Qualcomm as it was not get acquired. But there are other things going on between the board and other execs. I remember being very dramatic. And so in the end Paul Jacobs, the president of the company, who I'm all sudden forgetting and a cto, Matt Grob, all left the company. No idea if they got pushed out or they left on their own or what, but they left to create xcom. So super cool history around that. Obviously execs of a, of San Diego's largest company, you know, $100 billion plus market cap to go start a startup. That's super interesting. But they went dark actually and kind of didn't know what they're up to. I mean you think about a hundred billion dollar company chairman and CEO and all of a sudden it's him in a garage with two. So take us through what they ended up building like this VRAR wireless headset.

Yeah, so this is super cool. So it's a VR AR wireless headset that says that it's cinematic resolution and reduced latency. Now how does this reduce latency work? Well, they use this like WIGIG technology which basically is WI fi enabled devices but they access at an uncongested 60 GHz frequency band. And so basically that allows you to, to have access points that deliver up to 400Mbps. Now all of that fancy speak for reduced latency and less chances of losing the signal. And so it's really just like a really high powered and high fidelity wireless headset that doesn't have to be wired to anything. And this is super cool and it's supposed to be commercially available this year or next. We'll see what happens. But the first view that the world saw of it was at SF and we'll have to see what happens with this, with this company because there are so many incredible use cases not just for, you know, entertainment, but also just for remote medicine. And we love web3 and we love the Met, the Metaverse, all of those applications you can use this for. And so we'll have to see, we'll have to see what XCOM comes up with.

Yeah, I mean if they really are promoting latency as their thing, you know, you really do think about the areas that you wouldn't want to trust wireless and VR ar, but now you think you can. Right? Like remote surgery is kind of interesting where you're in a VR environment, it really can feel like you're there as opposed to a static screen which is kind of how they're remotely manipulating robotic surgery robots now. So super cool to see. Makes me want to make sure they are connected to some local edge companies as well from a latency and data transfer perspective. But cool to see XCOM coming out with their first product. So we'll keep an eye on them and report more on where they're at. Obviously they have some pretty big chip and telecom routes now mixing in with hardware. So speaking of hardware that San Diego does really well, we've got a whole little mini section on robots and drones because San Diego does it pretty well from the big, big giant drones which are Air Force and Navy related. General Atomic and Northrop actually make some of the largest drones on Earth. These are drones that can fly for 30 plus hours at 50 to 60,000ft and they're between 5 and 15 tons. So these are massive compared to, you know, the hobby DJI drones that people use for videography. Well these drones obviously have been deployed to war zones and so now there's talk of deploying them to Ukraine both directly from an excess hardware maybe being sold or given. So a lot of talk around San Diego designed, developed and somewhat manufactured aerospace hardware making its way to the war in Ukraine to support its fight against Russia. What's interesting, and there's a good Business Journal article by Brad Graves about this, he's, he's one of the defense writers for the Business Journal dives kind of deep into what's the current status of US's drone footprint right now and do we actually have excess drones really that we can give away like this or not. They talk about how the Ukrainian war really exposed how much we need real time visuals above a battlefield. I mean you literally have like they're literally aiming artillery pieces and tanks purely off of $100 drone and, and destroying Tanks. So, you know, if that's the new way of battle, at least against certain, certain superpowers like Russia, you know, should the US be giving them out? Or is it, is it super important that the US does give them out to kind of win that war and stop that style of battle? So super interesting that Sandy was involved in that, that's for sure.

I think what will, what is the really interesting question that comes out of that is how do we make them? How do we, how do we make them entirely AI powered and how do we make them, you know, entirely autonomous? And Speaking of that, Shield AI just landed $165 million Series E rounds where they have all more money to go deeper into their software stack, hive Mind and build out their software hardware to power drones and autonomously power aircrafts for the use by the military and the government. So I think that'll be sort of the next step of what can we offer not just for Ukraine, but for future, for future wars and for future military excursions in terms of the AI and the software we can build to power our drones.

Yeah, it's a great example Shield AI which both builds hardware and builds AI software to actually do autonomous fighter jets. Like their AI has been applied to, I think F18s and F15s and they're talking about 22s and 35s. So one side, they do just software that can fly a plane, literally. And then they've got hardware and they've actually have acquired a few other drone makers. And so this new funding of 165, they were already actually a unicorn as of last September. I remember they raised to put them at the billion dollar mark. I think this puts them over the $2 billion mark now in terms of valuation. So interesting to see a drone tech, defense tech startup, which actually didn't. This always surprised me, doesn't have roots in the big drone makers. Like not a Northrop or General Atomic founder. Actually one's a Navy seal, the CEO, I think Ryan, and I'm forgetting the co founder's name. But anyway, take us through a little bit about what else they can do with this AI piece of their defense drone.

Yeah, so super, super cool. So I just watched Top Gun. So this is all very, very, I just, I love it. So first of all, this, this, this AI software stack, it's called Hive Minds or otherwise known as an AI pilot, it powers unmanned UAVs for use in high threat areas. So areas where either you can't have comms or you're inside buildings where there's low, low visibility or there's just, it's somehow it's difficult for, you know, a real pilot to go in. So these UAVs can perform missions such as room clearances, they can do penetrating air defense systems, they can even dog fight in F16, which I think is wild to even think about. But essentially how does hive mind work? It. The aircraft uses sensors to map out the landscape and then the software hive mind tells the aircraft where to go and what to do to accomplish the mission. And so that basically means that you don't need a gps, you don't need waypoints to tell you where things are and you also don't need comms. And so this is really sort of the perfect trifecta of missions where there isn't a lot to go on and you're really going into it blind. And so I was reading over the website and they called it the Defense Metaverse and I think that's just super cool and it's like a great application and I think it's the future of how we encounter and how we work through missions that are very intense and very terrifying. So yeah, we will have to see what SHIELD AI does because I think as you mentioned, they're an evaluation of $2.3 billion now and they're. That means that they're joining a group of big hitters which includes Space, SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril. And I think that we'll have to see what they, what they come up with because they're onto something really, really cool here.

Yeah, and there aren't a lot like you mentioned just now, those SpaceX, Palantir and Neural. There's not a lot of unicorn defense tech companies so they are paving the way. I will say there is an interesting grouping of defense tech tech in San Diego from a startup perspective, including Citadel, which is defense drone defense. They actually got acquired last year and I know the team is onto some other defense tech which we should we'll be hearing about soon. So cool to see that San Diego, you know, whether you like defense tech or not, is definitely making a name for itself and growing its community. But on the other side of robots and drones come the educational purpose and inspiring people. From a STEM perspective. We all know we do need so much more STEM related talent and the earlier we get people inspired to see it as an application and a career path, the better. And so a company that maybe a lot of you have heard of, Robolink, which makes an education focused robotics kit, they've actually been around since 2012. But they've been making some really, really good progress over the last year or so with these robotics kits, which by the way range from $90 to $2,000. Pretty wide range in terms of the kinds of kits you can buy to teach anywhere from 4th graders to 10th graders through high school, how to learn and build robots. They're at 2,000 schools now, so pretty cool to see their impact over the last few years. Hansel Hong, I've met him many times and it's great to see him doing well. He's kind of got an education background and applying that to the robotics and STEM world. Totally makes sense to be here in San Diego. What else do you know about Robo?

Yeah, so this was cool. I definitely wish when I was a kid I had access to these kinds of things because there is like one of the kids is a self driving car kit that teaches AI And I mean that is so great to hear that kids now are, are learning about self driving cars at like fourth grade level. And I think that's, that's incredible. But found it interesting because you know, they have, they're doing almost $3 million in revenue and there's 12 employees. It's really. RoboLink is made up of 12 people and I think that's amazing and it's great work on the part of the founder and I think we'll have to see what they come up with next and what they keep, keep doing over the years because I, you know, there's so many different use cases for stem and I think the question is how do we just reach more, more kids and how do we make these kits more accessible to all kids?

Yeah, well, a great application of it is Greater Than Tech, which is a new nonprofit only around about 2, 3 years that just ran an 11 week STEM and business inspiration program for elementary and middle schoolers. I was lucky enough to be a judge for their final demo day last Saturday. So Greater Than Tech focuses on using robotics and drones to inspire students in low income and underserved communities to find that as a career path. It was super cool. And the other part that's also great is they also teach entrepreneurship and business. And so all the demos and presentations for the 12, 12, I think it was 12 teams that presented all how to show off like pricing, manufacturing expenses, what they'd sell for. And it's great that they're actually thinking about that and profit and margin. So it wasn't just a tech play, but it was also an experience in learning business as well too. So super Cool. And big shout out to Jasmine lafleur who co founded that nonprofit. Her and her partner Brittany are both like full time aerospace engineers and started this nonprofit on the side just to inspire kids to get into science, math and business. So big shout out there and a good collaboration with robolink but a few other shout outs. There's been some big fundings recently. Have you heard of National Resilience or actually they're kind of known as Resilience. You hear them as a biotech manufacturer at all? Oh, you muted. Oh, all good.

I was muted. Sorry, I have not heard of them. But yeah, tell me more about them, Neil.

Okay, real quick. Resilience which was which start founded came out of stealth in 2020 with an 800 million dollar funding round. Talk about that coming out of stealth. They have some deep pockets. They come from all biotech and saw that there is this huge lack of local biotech manufacturing and I mean local more like in the US we can't actually produce a lot of our own drugs and devices and all the things and so this is kind of a way to put money into spinning up biotech and life science factories all over the US specifically. So they now raised a fresh 625 million in funding now. So since they've started they've raised close to 2 billion in funding. They've got 1600 employees in 12 factories or at least plants where they're spinning up to test and be a contract manufacturer. But in the United States, maybe in Canada as well too I think. So they raise a huge massive round. We often speak on the show about our logistics tech stack which which I think drones fit into that in a certain regard. But a Carlsbad based company called Airspace or Airspace technologies raised a $70 million Series C round. This is kind of doubles their funding. They actually got their start in logistic tech routing for critical deliveries. We're talking organ transplants and other kind of medical related critical shipping and and logistics. I at one point thought they were like literally sending or like kidneys by drones but I think they're more on the software side of mapping and planning than actually sending drones. But excited for Ryan and Nick to the co founders of that in north county to to continue doing really well. 100% growth year over year so far I saw.

So I almost feel like we should have a new a new title to what San Diego does. It does San Diego does AI and machine learning because it's so many of our companies, logistics tech, defense tech, all AI based and I think that's so so cool.

It's true. Yeah. Maybe by just calling it logistics tech we're not highlighting the real tech that is in there which you're right is very smart tech from routing and otherwise. And even the self driving truck style is way more than just mapping software that's for sure. But in the other world of software galley which is building a a kitchen digitization Software raised a $14.2 million Series A. So cool to see them doing well. They actually have a few different like kitchen tech software companies in San Diego. So good to see that doing well. Obviously we saw during COVID that our restaurant industry was needing of you know, modernizing and from food delivery to everything else order and and route mapping. So it's great to see that San Diego's got a piece of that. A few other shout outs from non related to raises. There's a brand new product management certification program at USD that just got rolled out. So that's kind of cool. I have seen a lack of product managers in San Diego compared to other tech hubs. So the fact that we're going to be able to train our own is awesome. And then there's some events coming up that are worth checking out. Dev and Data Night by Fresh Brew Tech coming up on June 28th. I think we'll see you there, right Sesha?

Oh yes, I will be there.

Awesome. These are a little out of order but that's in two weeks and we'll be talking both from senior talent and junior talent, connecting people through talent, networking a few different ways. And we'll have a great panel of CTOs and data scientists talking both career mapping. But what's the kind of latest trends and what should technical leaders be looking for both from tools and running teams. And then next week entrepreneur organizations running their their first ever young female founder summit inspiring 12 to 20 year olds to who have ideas for starting a business. This is a summit for both talking all aspects of entrepreneurship. So so I'll actually be speaking at that about marketing and branding and that is at SDSU on June 23rd. And then on July 14th we've got Innovate 78 startup recruiting event which funny enough we have one of the speakers in the audience shout out to Sean Ring, entrepreneur himself in the talent tech world will be speaking on that panel up in North county on July 14th in the evening. So lots of things to come over the next few weeks that we hope to see you at. What are you, what events are you looking at? Sasha, you're going to go to any of these?

Oh well, definitely June 28th, Devin day to night, I wow. There's a lot of cool stuff coming up. I'll have to just do everything that I possibly can because this summer. So firstly, I'm so glad that things are back in person and I can, I can finally meet all the people that I've heard on Clubhouse through Twitter spaces. It's just a great time to be.

In San Diego for sure. And speaking of that, I'm just going to throw this out there an idea I've had in my brain that I kind of stole from another entrepreneur in Canada. Dan Martel started a weekly founders hike. People just show up at 6:30 in the morning. I think he does on a Wednesday. I want to start one here. So if anyone's interested, let's do it. Let's meet up for a hike. Weekly hike. Just sweat it out and talk it out, what we're working on, how we can help each other. So look for information to get that going. I think we'll start at Torrey Pines because it'll be central to a lot of people north and South County.

But now are we doing, are we doing tacos afterward?

Because probably yes, Roberto's is is right there. So yes. And so is, and so is a good coffee shop as well too. So yes, we can do Founders hike tacos and coffee which is perfect.

Love it.

Well Sasha, thanks so much for joining us. We're looking forward all of you as well to continue joining us to share this with others who want to get in the know on all things going on in tech in San Diego. Join us every Friday at 12:30. We will try to stick stick to that schedule and also you can find this recording later on fresh brewtech.com and feel free to sign up for our newsletter to get this sent to your inbox. But without further ado, take care. Have a good weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

Have a great weekend everyone. Thanks.

Thanks.

Bye bye.