Scot Chisholm - CEO & Co-founder of Classy

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador and together we're going to uncover what technology San Diegans are creating with our own blend of local lifestyle. This podcast episode is proudly brought to you by our friends at Cox Business. Cox Business provides broadband, Internet and cloud services to the modern tech company Cox Business, a longtime sponsor of San Diego Startup Week and the San Diego startup community, also puts on the top tech awards. Get started. And most recently, quick Pitch. Thanks again to Cox Business for their support of our tech community. Welcome back to another episode of the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am here at Classy headquarters with Scott Chisholm, CEO of Classy. Thanks for being here, Scott.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Excited to spend some time with you. Thanks for it.

Of course.

So tell us just real quick, what is Classy?

Classy is a social enterprise fundraising software company that is focused specifically on working with nonprofit organizations to grow their online revenue. We work with about 4,000 customers at this point, all nonprofits of every size, from the volunteer run small organization to big marquee customers and organizations like the Salvation army or Shriners Children's Hospital. We've got about 200 plus folks here now at headquarters in San Diego, our only office. And we've been doing this in one way or another since 2006, but we launched as a tech company in 2011.

That's awesome. I'm really excited to hear the path to getting here, but take us through a little bit about your own path. Where did you start? Where did you grow up?

So I grew up in a town called Hingham, Massachusetts, which is about 15 minutes south of Boston on the way to Cape Cod.

So. Red Sox fan, obviously.

Yeah, Red Sox Patriots fan. I now have kids, so I've had to adopt the Padres a little bit since, you know, my seven year old's not that into watching baseball on tv, so we gotta go to the games.

Got it.

But yeah, full Boston sports fan. Congrats.

Good. Sucks. Thank you.

Yeah, it was a good series. Exciting. I was able to catch a New York Boston game when we were in New York traveling for business. Yeah, it was awesome. So grew up there, ended up going to University of Massachusetts Amherst. Started as computer science and then after one semester switched over to mechanical and industrial engineering and focused on sort of operations research and lean, Six Sigma and things like that. And I had two friends. I was a super senior, so. So my two friends had Already graduated. And they were out here in San Diego surfing and living in Ocean beach in a really crappy apartment. And they said, hey, you know, surf's great and weather's amazing. Why don't you come out? I'm like, all right, mix it up a little bit. Why not? Didn't have a job. So I convinced my dad and my brother to drive cross country with me. So we took our car and just went across country, and it was a very memorable trip. And we landed in Ocean Beach, California, and they dropped me off, and they went right up to San Francisco and flew home.

Oh, wow.

And. And my two buddies were out, you know, doing something, and I was starving. So I walked down the street and there was this pizza shop open, open that had just opened up that day. And they were advertising Boston pizza. I'm like, what is Boston pizza? You know. You know, Chicago pizza, New York pizza. Where's Boston pizza? So I was like, I gotta try this. So I go in there. My first meal in San Diego was a piece of Boston pizza, which is really just a marketing jargon.

Yeah. Thin crust. With thin crust.

Thin. It's basically New York.

Okay.

And basically, I was thinking to myself, I was eating the pizza. I kind of need a job. So I went back on my resume and handed it to the guy. Went back. I'm like, hey, can I be your first employee? And he's like, you look a little overqualified, but yeah, if you want to, like, sure. And he literally opened that day. So my first job was learning how to sling pizzas in Ocean Beach. And that pizza shop used to be called Castanova's, is now called Surfrider Pizza, and it's still in existence. So I was the first employee there. And actually, it's where I kind of learned. Caught the entrepreneurial bug because he had literally just opened there, and he didn't really have a business background, but he made an amazing pizza. So he taught me that. And I kind of just got him going on marketing and other things. And we used to go door to door to the neighbors. We would hand out slices at the bars at night. And that was sort of the first foray into it.

That's awesome.

And I eventually picked up an interview with Booz Allen Hamilton because they came in for a slice of pizza. This guy, really? Yeah. We struck up a conversation. He's like, what's your major? Blah, blah. I'm like, I'm mechanical industrial engineer. He's like, you know, would you want to come in and interview? We hire a lot of engineers at.

Pizza shops, of course.

Yeah, yeah. And that's how I ended up getting that job. And I was there for about three or four years. And we started classy during that time period.

Okay, awesome, Interesting. So what was that? So what was going on for the impetus of classy? Was it something impacting kind of your daily day at booze, or is it a personal thing?

It was a personal thing for myself and all my roommates. We had moved from Ocean beach down to Mission beach and other. We had attracted other people from the east coast to come live with us. We had a house of like seven people squeezed in, and my mom had had cancer growing up, and everyone in the house had been affected by the disease in pretty profound ways. My best friend Pete's dad had passed away from brain cancer when we were in college. And so we were honestly just trying to figure out how to get involved with the local chapter of the American Cancer Society. We were like playing around with our laptop, went on their website, and it was super hard to figure out how we could get involved with them. And the only thing we saw was this event called the Relay for Life, which is. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but it's their largest event and you basically walk around a track for 24 hours. And that wasn't necessarily our idea of a good time at 24, 25 years old. So we were kind of like, all right, I guess we'll do nothing. And then someone came up with the idea to just do a bar crawl down Garnett Ave. In Pacific beach and collect cash at the door and just donate the money afterwards to them and have some fun and meet people because we're new in San Diego and the movie anchorman happened to be on in our apartment when we were coming up with the name for the pub crawl. And my buddy Pete said, well, why don't we name the pub crawl the Stay Class Pub Crawl? Never thinking in a million years it would turn into anything but that. And he has that, you know, the signature phrase, of course, stay classy. And so we did the pub crawl. We were 75 people showed up, we raised $1,000. And I was in my Booz Allen apartment and I called up the ACs and I was all excited. I'm like, hey, you know, we raised this money, blah, blah, blah. We did this pub crawl. We plastered town, you know, plastered the town with posters and your logo. You know, more people know about you. And she actually got kind of mad for us fundraising outside of a non sanctioned event. I was like, well, do you want the $1,000? And she's like, of course I want the $1,000, but you've got to come to this sanctioned event called the Relay for Life in Point Loma in two weeks. And I was like, that's the same event we were trying to avoid. Oh, and by the way, you need to bring a money order. So we basically went to the bank on a money order and then went to the event and we did three laps around the track and handed the check to her like a baton and got out of there and the whole thing kind of left. We weren't like super philanthropist or anything at a young age. This was sort of our first attempt to get involved in something. And we just found that there was just so many hurdles and so much friction in the process. And they did such a poor job of sort of relating to us in a relevant, personable way. And by the way, a caveat. I do love the American Cancer Society and I have a full circle story for you in a bit about them and working with Classy later on. But that day they weren't winning any awards, so we, you know, and they inspired us to basically go on and to. At first it had nothing to do with technology. It was really just about bringing young people into the fold and making it easy and fun for them to give. And so we did that through events that's kind of what we knew at the time. More pub crawls, of course, but anything from races and runs to big tailgate parties and partnerships with the Padres to big music concerts. And there's lots of people around San Diego now that have been to a state classy event. And what we would do is we would partner with a different local nonprofit. We would pick a project in the community that was very tangible, whether that was surf ride or cleaning beaches that people could actually get involved with. Or it was partnering with someone like San Diego Youth Services and helping them restore a wing of their homeless shelter. We would always come up with something that was tangible that people could wrap their arms around and understand what they were fundraising for. And then we would fundraise through the event and we cobbled together like a jury rigged system of PayPal, Evite, MySpace, Facebook, you name it, to sort of do the ticketing and then allow people to make a donation and track everything. And we had this big concert coming up. It was a 5,000 person music festival with modest Yahoo as the headliner. Bass Nectar, Mason, Jennings Pinback. We booked all those bands ourselves, by the way. That's A totally different story about us faking it on calls with William Morris and caa. But anyways, so we had this concert in Mission Bay and we realized what we were using just wouldn't work for this thing. And we wanted to build a personal fundraising element to it. And so we partner with Pete Nystrom, who would become a co founder of the concert company later. And we found him through an agency essentially. And he built what would be like the beginnings of what would become classy, the technology platform later. And it allowed you to buy a ticket to that modest Yahoo show and then very simply create a personal fundraising page and share it on the early versions of social media, which were at the time MySpace and Facebook. Facebook had literally just opened up beyond colleges. That's where I'm dating myself here.

2009, 2010.

Exactly, exactly 2009, 2010. And the charities that were benefit, we raised a lot of money. And the charities we were benefiting were like, hey, what you guys have built is pretty amazing. Can we use this for our own campaigns and events throughout the years, outside of your stay classy events. And that's when sort of the light bulb moment went on for us. We were like, okay, interesting. This isn't even really that good. And they're interested in using it. And that's when we sort of started to learn about the market. We realized that there was a multi billion dollar public company called blackbaud that was sitting on the throne of the nonprofit tech space for decades, since 1981 really, and had more or less gobbled up any competitor that came. And there was a lot of frustration in the space from folks running nonprofits that they just didn't have options and they were sort of pigeonholed into using one vendor's solutions. And in any marketplace, competition is. No, competition is not necessarily good for innovation. So we found a really ripe market that was almost begging us to enter. And so I like to say we naively and ambitiously at the same time threw our hat in the ring. We quit our jobs. We went through the UCSD springboard program Connect. We were like in early, that program's been around for a while. But from a software standpoint, it was before Evo, Nexus, before all these other incubators. And we went through there and at first they didn't even know what to do with us. They're like, you're a pub crawl company. I don't really understand why you're here. And so we cycled through a few advisors. They're like, I can't help you. And we made the biggest startup pivot of all time from a charity pub crawl to a SaaS company. And we made it. And we relaunched in January 2011 with about a dozen charities on the platform. And what it was at first was a very. It was a point solution for peer to peer fundraising, more or less. We didn't even really have the events registration at the time. It was really just specifically peer to peer. It was very narrow. But that's where we found the early interest and the demand. And so we launched as that and, you know, we'll kind of get into the meat of things. But fast forward seven, seven and a half years from that moment and we're yesterday we crossed the billion dollar mark. So a billion dollars raised on the platform in total.

Yeah.

Congratulations. And 500 million of that came in the last 14 months. So it's been a wild ride from a pub crawl to a billion. I've wanted to say that for a while, so now I can.

I feel like you need a celebratory pub crawl we do to root it all home.

So I'll let you ask a couple more questions, but I'm just going to skip to that full circle story. So American Cancer is one of the latest classy clients. And when we were pitching them, it was their full executive team, their cfo, everyone down in Atlanta. And I'm telling this pub crawl story and like how we ran into all these issues with their website. I'm like, this is either the best moment of my career or the worst moment of my career. And the CFO puts her head in her hands like this and she's like, oh my God, crap, this is not going well. And then she just puts her head up and she's like, Scott, nothing's changed around here. We really need your help. So we're actually able to win the account and we're sort of going through the process of launching with them. So coming to your pub crawl story, when that goes live, I promise you we'll be doing another pub crawl to support the American Cancer Society. We'll do a live using. Classy. Yes.

That's awesome. I love hearing that. And along the way, I think of you guys growing up. I think the tech ecosystem really kind of grew up around you guys too. Right? You were very early to be downtown. Not a lot of other companies downtown here, but you guys picked it early on. It seemed like, what time? When did you guys move?

2011. Right. When we launched, we were as an events quote unquote company. We were above the planned Parent next to Tsushiyoda. And it was Steven and Latany, the founders of vavi, who rented me my first hundred square foot office and that's where I started. And then it expanded from there. They moved into a new office. We took over all their office space and then we moved to downtown when we were transitioning as a tech company.

Got it. Yeah. The first startup week wasn't until 2013 we had a tech crawl. I know we came through you guys space, we do every year. So it's been really great to see you guys kind of at the center of your guys growth. You're kind of seeing everything else grow around it too. What's your perception of the tech growing around here while you guys have been growing?

Yeah, I mean I'd like to think that we're a leader in sort of the 2.0 wave, the 1.0 wave. And there's waves before this of course, but who we looked up to was like the active network specifically and they were reaching sort of the, I don't know, 500 to a billion dollar sort of valuation. And there were a lot of great leaders there doing some awesome things that helped us out in the early days. And a lot, a lot of the folks there that were up and comers now work at Classy, but we looked at them as they were sort of in our space in some ways as a leader in this community. And we looked at sort of the 1.0 SaaS, companies that were a couple years ahead of us, like the Hubspots, the Mailchimps, the 37signals, the folks that weren't necessarily in Silicon Valley but had made something out of their opportunity in their respective cities and made the city itself part of the culture. And I think that was. Those were like our role models. So you had sort of active as like the, in my opinion, our sort of model company around here. And then I would look outside of San Diego to companies that weren't necessarily in Silicon Valley doing it their own way and I was able to find a lot of inspiration in that as well. But yeah, no, I really appreciate your comment. In terms of, you know, us being a leader in the 2.0, I think there were many others outside of Classy. But you know, I'm glad we are here to talk about it.

Yeah, for sure, we are too. Some other piece that's unique to San Diego is the nonprofit space itself. So you made a mention then the 1.0 days there was a company based here, Kontera.

Kontera. Yep.

Tell us a little About.

Yeah, Kantera was. They were even before Active and some others, and they were really ahead of their time. They were building mostly Internet, Internet based solutions for nonprofit fundraising. And it was sort of like event based, peer to peer. It was really early to do that and they showed a ton of promise. And eventually they were sold to blackbaud, our main competitor now. And so I'm not sure if the product still exists within. I think they've sort of over the years upgraded or done whatever. But that was an early sort of story in this space of consolidation. And I respect a lot of what they were, you know, what they set out to do. And I feel like in some ways we sort of picked it up where they left and, you know, want to do our own independent story and not get acquired and go from there. And Blackbaud, we want to disrupt the space and bring something new to the table.

Have you seen the talent from Kinterra around? Are they still in town working on things?

Not as much, but I think that we do have at least one that I can think of that was an engineer working for Kinterra. Then a lot of the Kinterra folks went over to Active and then were then. Now they're, you know, everywhere. Yeah. So interesting.

Another piece here is GoFundMe being started here too. I mean, and that whole crowd space is kind of interesting. Yeah. Them also buying Crowdrise and bringing, I think, bringing the team to San Diego.

They're still in it. They're still in LA. The GoFundMe team, the consumer side, at least half of it, ish, is in San Diego still, The rest in Redwood City. Yeah. But Brad And Andy started GoFundMe a few years before us. I think it was in 2006. So when we did the pub crawl, they were starting as a tech company and they're both from the east coast, they're both from Boston.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. At least Brad is. I'm pretty sure Andy is too. And so you had two, four Boston guys. Basically, myself, Pat, Brad and Andy, starting in separate companies, did not know each other in this general space.

Yeah.

And then sort of breaking through the noise. I mean, they did an incredible job, but it was not obvious that they were going to emerge as the winner for a long time. I mean, they were behind Kickstarter, Indiegogo, at least in terms of notoriety and press. I think in numbers, they were probably right there. But people didn't even know who GoFundMe was. And then all of a sudden everyone.

Knew who they were.

So it's an amazing story. And in some ways, there's a lot of similarities with our space. Like, we ran into. There were some key competitors in the early days who unfortunately are no longer here in the space, but got all the notoriety, all the press, and they were Silicon Valley companies, and we were just always playing third or fourth fiddle and had to make do. And it was very difficult for us to raise money at first. No one would touch us. We did the Sandhill Road thing early on. I swear, we had to be one of the first meetings that Andreessen Horowitz ever took. For some unbeknownst reason, they had just opened. And then we were like, we should not have been there. Like, I mean, we. Our pitch to everything was just absolute crap. And we were like, where are we? This is like, super legit. It was like our pre Series A and, you know, the show Silicon Valley, when he goes down and he just gets a bunch of no's, that was essentially us minus the gesture where he, you know, does, you know, what on the table. We did not respond that way. Yeah, exactly. So we. Yeah, no, but. So we had to, like, basically claw our way to 5 million in angel funding. We brought in no institutional money, and it was all families and friends. I mean, like, I got so grateful for a lot of my family members investing in the early days and keeping us going. And then one of our advisors, Steve Smith from Connect Program, was like our second angel investor, really. And he made a very significant angel investment in Classy. And the first investor in Classy was actually my buddy Pete, who named us Stay Classy that when he went to business school and he invested essentially the savings he had in Classy.

That's Pete Nystrom.

No, Pete Sternberg, my high school buddy who was the one who gave us the state Classy name. He was living with me at the time, and then he went to business school.

Wow, that's really cool.

Yeah. So a lot of friends and early connections. Even my wife. My wife's actually the smallest shareholder on the cap table. She invested $7,500 back in the day.

That's great. Did you have a good time?

No, we were just dating. So it was a big leap of faith. I think one day or one month. It was Carrie plus my other friend from high school, Chris, who invested $10,000. And that got us through payroll to give you a sense of the ups and downs. But we raised $5 million from all angel investors. It ended up being about three super angels who invested 100,000 or 250,000 and then kept seeing our progress and kept investing. And they upped their stake all the way to about a million dollars each. So each of those invested 3 million of the five. And they were really just like successful businessmen who one had a private foundation and one of his charities that he was granting money to was using Classy. His name's Bob Graham, he was the chairman of Invesco and he cold called us from Texas and asked us if we wanted angel investment. Talk about, I mean that's crazy. And the other two, similar story where they just, they had a philanthropic tie but we're just very successful businessmen and got what we were doing. And where, you know, institutional money and VCs just, you know, they're like, how do you, how do you build a business in this space? I don't get it. Do charities pay money? You know, do they invest in their technology? I don't understand. Yeah, you know, are you a charity? Like, I mean literally we used to get that all the time. So it's just a lot of, a lot of hurdles, early hurdles. And I like to say traction was our best friend because once you have traction you go in and it's like these numbers speak for themselves to a large degree. And then you can kind of, you get better at your pitch and you refine your story and then you know, what traps to not fall into. But it just took us a long time, years to get to that point.

Yeah. And something that's at least we're hearing uniquely about a lot of the people we're interviewing on this is San Diego has a lot of mission driven kind of companies and founders, which is probably why we're not as much in the consumer space. Potentially we're more mission driven on other things, on changing big life changing things. And I think that plays to your guys narrative the entire time too. Did that help eventually get the VCs on board or really became just a traction in numbers for like a SaaS business?

I think that our genuine social enterprise mission from day one, our mission is to mobilize and empower the world for good. But doing things like becoming an early member of pledge 1%. Now there's 5,000. I think we were the 20th starting the classy awards, which investors literally, like prospective investors told us was idiotic to do at our stage to distract ourselves by doing something like that. We just kept doing it because we believed it. And what I think investors latched onto was not the social enterprise mission. It was the fact that our social enterprise mission became the marketing for our brand. And so once that started to get going, the people saw us practicing what we preach and that became. We went from being a up and coming software vendor to becoming a partner. And that's a big difference from a marketing perspective and from a brand perspective. And that became a big asset. And if a nonprofit, they're obviously super impact driven. They see another who cares about your tax designation, but they see you out there in their space trying to benefit the community and benefit the sector as a whole, having nothing to do with the fundraising software. That's a pretty big deal. So it ended up working to our advantage on both sides. It was a. It was something that was huge culturally and we just believe it. And it's how we started. It wasn't some marketing mechanism that we added like last year. This was from day one. In fact, the Class C awards were started before we were a tech company. And then two, it did have a tremendous lift on the brand. It helped us break through the noise because people saw us tackling things, doing different than like classy awards. What in the heck is that? For the first couple years, the Classy awards were more well known than Classy. The technology company we actually went through during our rebrand from stay classy to classy in early 2014, we had a whole exercise internally of how do we talk about ourselves as a tech company and not an award show company? Interesting. Yes.

First, you're an events company. In your awards.

People didn't know what we were. We had an identity crisis.

Yeah.

But it eventually all came together and we're fortunate that we were able to attract the investors that allow that to happen. Right. I think it would have been an easy. The other possibility, where it didn't all come together would have was probably more probable than it all coming together, if you know what I mean.

Totally. Well, take us through a bit to kind of today. I mean, you've hit a pretty big number milestone. What is. What does tomorrow look like for Classy?

So a billion dollars is. It was our bhag when we first started, I'll never forget, we were in an off site and literally we were doing like the big, hairy, audacious gold Jim Collins exercise. And a billion dollars raised on the platform was our bhag. So I mean, that's just kind of cool, you know, to think that we accomplished that together with all the nonprofits on the platform. But it is just a milestone. It's not an ending. I mean, it's. We're really in, really in the first chapter of this thing. A billion dollars. There's 410 billion given every year to 501C3 charities alone in the United States. And 280 billion of that is from individuals like you and I. Not Warren Buffett, not corporations, not the government, but smaller gifts. And I was just reading some stats. I don't know, it was a month ago or so, but more people give than vote. So 60% of Americans give every year, and 58% voted in the last election.

Wow.

So it's really, really ingrained in our culture. And you see that around the world. Some countries not so much, but a lot of countries have very deep giving culture, and that's not going anywhere. People give through recessions, and that 410 number is growing, like, substantially. So my point is that we have a given culture. The market's massive, but people need new ways and better ways to contribute. And out of that $280 billion number, only 9% is online.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Wow.

So that's in cash and checks, believe it or not.

Still the same way. Handing it off as a baton.

Yes. When we started, it was about 3 to 4% of the individual contribution number was online. Now. So it's growing double digits every year from a market size perspective, like E commerce. But it's probably five to ten years behind that curve, partly because nonprofits didn't feel comfortable focusing online or moving their offline online because it was a lot less personal. So in offline, you have an event, you sit with someone, or you have a major donor, or events are very experiential, or even in direct mail, you've got beautiful packages, you show the impact. What's happening there was not the equivalent online. The 1.0 giving was a PayPal form, essentially, and that just wasn't satisfactory. And so I believe that that was a huge. The technology ramp and progression was a huge reason why that's been lagging. E Commerce, where you had tons of E commerce companies, you have people like Shopify way out in front. That wasn't the same in our space. And I believe that classy is at the forefront of making that change happen. And then you have sort of these wins behind us. Generationally, you have baby boomers that are figuring out sort of where to put their wealth and their planning. And then you have these millennials coming into their own. They're in the. I think I'm at the tip of the spear in millennials. I was born in 1981. Depending on where you research, that's like the first year of the millennial. The millennials are getting into their 30s and whatnot, and 20s. And they're giving. And they were born with a mobile phone in their hand, practically. At least the younger ones, but certainly the Internet and everything is a huge piece of their life. And so the trend is being is catalyzed by the millennials. But now you're seeing online giving happening across all generations, and we see that on the classic platform as well. Baby boomers are actually the highest rate. They raise the most from a peer to peer fundraising perspective, actually, which makes sense because their networks may be a little bit more tapped in. But before, we barely. I think it was almost solely millennials driven by organizations like Invisible Children. If you remember them in San Diego with their Kony 2012 video and everything else, they were one of our first customers.

Really?

Yeah.

That's great.

And then Team Rubicon in la. I was on the board, the board of directors for them for four years. Met them at Summit Series together, myself and Jake, and just loved what they were doing. And they were one of the earliest customers. And now they're on the World Series T mobile commercial. Pretty much because I was on their board. Right. Nothing to do with Jake. No. They're an incredible story. But the point is that you have those types of organizations who are doing 75% online, 25% offline, and grants, whereas one of our larger, newer customers is the salvation army. There's 8,000 of them, and we are working with all of them now, but they're less than 5% online.

Yeah.

And so you just a new type. It's not only the millennial donor, it's the folks running the organizations and what they're prioritizing. So this is just a matter of time where this whole thing shifts.

Got it.

And so we really do feel like we're at like the first inning just based on the numbers.

You have to educate people to give digitally now, which they're not used to. So you've been in downtown for quite a bit. What's that been like for the company to grow around the downtown space?

It's great. We started off in like fifth or sixth and F, and then we sort of outgrew that space. And then we added another office that was just down the street. So we had like a little campus thing going on. It was pretty fun. There was artistic buildings, very creative space. Digitario is actually the one. Dan, the CEO of Digitaria, handed us our office. Yeah, we met him somehow, and he's like, I like these guys. And he gave us an early in on the office that was pretty Cool. And then we ended up following him here in Diamond View. Miriam's right below us.

Yeah, that's right.

He's like, what, are you following me around? But, yeah, no, I mean, we've really appreciated it. It's awesome to have things for our employees to do and tap into, whether that's just a restaurant or nightlife or whatnot. And then there's more and more companies that are here, which is. Which is really cool to see. And I love North County. But you do see more and more companies moving down here or into Liberty Station or just areas around. And as it gets. Culture. As the culture starts to build and has. It was. Even when I moved to San Diego 14 years ago, it was rather dry. And now it's much, much, much better from food and drink and everything. And that vibrant sort of feel is attracting companies and employees. And so we saw that kind of early on and just happy that that trend continued and we weren't, like, out on an island.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Definitely. Now this building has definitely turned into a bit of a tech building, for sure.

Yeah.

Get Houzz here in the building, too. They've been here for a while. Yeah, that's great.

Well, they beat us out on our first attempt to get into this building.

Got it.

Yeah. But then we got the 13th floor. They're down fourth or fifth. So. Yeah. Better view.

Yeah, totally. Well, speaking of just the food scene, from Boston pizza days to today, what are some of your favorites? Do you have a favorite taco place around town?

I would say Ortiz's in Point Loma.

Okay.

I lived in north park for a long time, and Colmina's is really great there. But then I moved to Point Loma and started going to Ortiz's, and I've gotta say, that's pretty awesome taco.

Okay. What about a favorite coffee spot from.

My days in Little Italy? Papaleko. And then I kind of, like, was a Starbucks convert for a while, but more recently, I go to Pete's in Point Loma, and I've got to say, they do a really good job, like, for being a big chain. They've got the best espresso out of anyone, really? I really think so.

That's a big claim.

Yeah. I'm sticking by it.

Yeah. What about.

I mean, I drink, like, two of them a day, so.

Yeah. Is there one nearby? Is there a walking distance pizza?

No, not down here, but there's one right near my house.

Okay. Copa Vita right here, which is nice and convenient.

Copa Vita's solid. They need to strengthen their espresso.

Ah, it's okay.

You can tell them if they're listening.

Okay, we'll let them know. Feature sponsor.

All right.

What about beer? You have a favorite brewery or favorite specific beer in town?

Yeah, I mean, like Sculpin. Might as well have a, you know, a sign in our office somewhere. And that was sort of the beer we grew up with. Classy. But I'd say more recently Alpine. I really like Duet.

Awesome.

And they have a new specialty beer out. It's called like the Hanson or something. It's very good.

Seen it. Check it out. Scott, really appreciate the time to know the story. Where can people find or follow you to keep following along the class?

Well, all the classy stuff is@classy.org on our blog. We're very, very, very active. So that's a great place for company. And then I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter and on Quora actually. So any of those places are great.

Awesome. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate the time.

Thank you. It's great.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. This has been a partnership with the San Diego Venture Group and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation's SD Life Changing Campaign. You can find Neal bloom on Twitter eelbloom and on LinkedIn. It.