Sergey Sundukovskiy Co-founder, CTO, and CPO of Raken

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, 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'm your host, Neil Blum and I am joined in studio with Sergei Sandikovsky, co founder, CTO and CPO of Raken. Thanks for being here, Neil.

Thank you so much for having me.

Really excited to get to know your story, especially what brought you here to San Diego. But why don't you first tell us a little bit about what Raken is.

All right, well, Raken, I'm going to simplify it a little bit, but Raken is the field management solution for construction industry. And if that sounded a little too esoteric, I'm going to try to unpack that. We help construction companies manage one of several workflows that they do on the construction job site. We started out with daily reporting as one of the key workflows and we diversified. Since then we diversified into time management and we're working on additional workflows.

Okay, great. Really want to learn about how the company got started. But first let's learn a little bit about you. How did you maybe come in tech and where did you grow up?

So I'm gonna start, you know, I'm not gonna give you my full, full history, but hopefully it's a little more than you know. I was born and then started working for Raiken. I'm a typical transplant from, from Ukraine. I, I immigrated when I was 18 and from there I was already too old for high school. So I went to community college and spent a couple of years learning English because I didn't know any English back then. And so a couple of years of that and then eventually community college. I have my, my story is a typical engineering story. I already had a degree from Ukraine, even though I was, I was 18. I, I had a junior engineer degree. It's basically radar engineering, electrical engineering degree, more or less. It kind of back in Russia that, that would set you on the path of becoming of becoming an electrical engineer. And radar engineering is kind of the vestige of the old Soviet strategy of combating stealth aircraft from United States still is. And so they figured they just need a lot of radar engineers. So I started on that path and at the time I immigrated I already had a degree and then I always felt that I was strong and, and I was going to continue with that. And I went to, after a couple of years at community college, I went to ucsd. So that's the continuation of my story. I immigrated directly into San Francisco and then eventually ended up in ucsd.

Got it. And were you doing computer science or you were doing electrical at ucsd?

I was doing, I started doing computer science. So two years while being in a community college, I worked for a small engineering firm working primarily in hydraulics, making pumps, laboratory pumps. And you know, at that time I got to, got to try my hand at programming and I really, really like it, liked it and I wanted to make it my career but I really wasn't sure what engineers do. I had a really funny conversation with an engineer that was working on my pump that I was designing and he told me, hey, you know, you don't need any kind of special license or anything like that. And, and it's kind of funny if the pump malfunctions, then the engineer that designed it goes to jail, but not the software guy. It doesn't happen. So I said hey, less responsibility and you don't get to go to jail when things collapse.

And.

It was definitely a deal for me. Sold again at the time wasn't really sure what computer science is, but since I like to do things fundamentally went to use csd. And it was absolutely phenomenal experience for me because UCSD was just the right school. Just enough of the theoretical and practical. I was all throughout my studying I was working part time jobs and I was working just right before going to college I started working for 3Com Computing Division and it was still. And if you guys remember, palm computing was basically at the root of the entire handheld device industry. And at the time it was part of 3Com. And so I worked for a couple of months there and then transferred down to San Diego within 3Com. So I continued working for 3Com and studying and then eventually working for Encyclopedia Britannica in a supercomputer center.

Oh, interesting. At ucsd.

At ucsd, huh?

I didn't even know Encyclopedia Britannica had a.

Well, actually no, Encyclopedia Britannica was outside of ucsd, but a supercomputer center was inside of so it was, it was sort of several part time jobs at various, at various times. So by the time I graduated, I was arguably a fully baked engineer and I got a. So my trajectory is very, very typical engineering trajectory. You know, senior engineer and then eventually a director, a VP of this and the CTO of that. So again, very typical trajectory.

Got it. So it sounds like at some point you left San Diego.

At certain point I left San Diego because we hit the dot com bubble and there were just not a lot of jobs for the engineers. And I ended up moving to LA and started working for one of the ideal of startups directly in Los Angeles.

Got it. What was that company?

The company was called Wedding Channel. So Wedding Channel was basically a wedding registry that made a deal with federated businesses. Nordstrom, Macy's, Restoration Hardware and these companies basically offered a wedding registry for them. And it was well ahead of its time because nobody at the time have heard of APIs or data transfers or big data, but that's literally what it was for the entire business. It punched well above its weight because it had to work with all of these large companies and transfer the data and ingest the inventory. And it kind of set me on the path of working with e commerce companies for the next 10 years.

Was this the first startup you worked at?

It was, it was the first. At the time that I joined, it was, it was already past initial startup stage, but it was the first startup that I started working with.

Got it. Okay, so what was LA like at that time? When.

At the time it was, it was pretty nascent and it's kind of interesting where Silicon Valley was, was already Silicon Valley and in early 2000, but LA was not and it would take another 10 years for LA to tip. I found that out in a pretty interesting way because I was away building my startup in Texas, even though my base was always in California, but I built startups all throughout out of state. When I came back in 2011, I saw that things have substantially changed and the entire industry had moved on. And instead of 10 guys talking about exactly the same things, you saw quite a bit of ferment. And I became very curious, how does that actually happen? And so started looking at what is that entrepreneurial engine is? And so it turns out investors moved in a couple of years prior and then you had a couple of people that did well in LA and they reinvested into the community and you also had universities. And this is how the whole thing got jump started. And you see what you see now, which is close to between 5 to $10 billion investment a year in startups and startup ecosystem.

Got it. So that ecosystem being more mature, is that what brought you back to LA to start the next company?

I came back, I came back to again, I was never fully gone. I would come back, I would work in Texas and then come back over the weekend.

But then.

My startup, specifically in California and in San Francisco to be more precise, was my first foray literally at my own startup in California. So that we're talking about pushpoint.

Okay.

That's the company that got acquired by Capital One. And I spent a couple of years at Capital One, still living in San Francisco, but traveling, still living in Los Angeles but then traveling to San Francisco. By that time I already moved to Irvine, much closer. And I've been inching closer and closer to San Diego and always wanting to, to be close to San Diego. And you know, that was, that was my opportunity to kind of live in Irvine but travel to San Francisco. And I knew that based on my earnout, I need to be in San Francisco for a couple of years. And that's what happened.

Got it. But something was pulling you to San Diego, it sounds like, I mean, you'd already had a taste in school.

Absolutely. I always felt that San Diego had so much potential, but the startups were not as developed, not as mature in San Diego. And this was specifically due to the fact that you still have natural sciences, which is exactly bread and butter for San Diego. And it's just expensive area for VCs to invest and wait for the return. So I felt that at the time the entire industry would change, the startup industry would change in San Diego when we're going to have merge between the life sciences and things that take longer time to do and the quick turnarounds for the startups which has started happening and we see this happening with invent of big data and cloud and artificial intelligence, which San Diego has been, or UCSD in particular has been number one school in the country for artificial intelligence.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. We're seeing a lot of the big bio meets big data, which is pretty exciting to see those worlds merge for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. Which basically shortens the cycle for the startup and makes investors a lot more interested. So we in San Diego now, we pretty much have exactly what we need in order to make the entire area as successful as Los Angeles or Silicon Valley. I don't see any reason with all the schools and the amount of money that's in the area and also the expertise why we can't be next Silicon Valley Absolutely.

So take us back to is Raken what brought you here or what actually brought you to start the company here?

Raiken brought me here as to actually build a startup in San Diego or close to San Diego. The break in got started at Cardiff by the Same which is 10 miles from San Diego, North County, San Diego. Yeah, exactly. For all intents and purposes you can consider that San Diego Reagan got started by Kyle Slager. I was late stage co founder. I joined the company later on in the life cycle of the company when the company already been making money and had quite a few customers. But it was at the point where it needed to scale, scale and to start scaling now. Prior to joining the company I met with a lot of investors that were looking at Drake and were told that we have to move to Silicon Valley, otherwise we would not be able to get the investment. And we will listen to the investors and respectfully push back because ultimately the money that you get in Silicon Valley doesn't go nearly as far as you can. You can make them go in San Diego.

Absolutely.

And we eventually raised a seed round and I joined full time as a late stage co founder covering technology, product and marketing.

Oh wow. It's a big purview.

That's right. Just wear a lot of hats.

Yeah, that's what we do in startups.

That's right. You just have to do. And this is, this is kind of the senior operator role. You have to join the startup and you've been there and you've done that and you just, you know, you apply everything you have learned in other places.

Definitely you mentioned something about the money goes further here, which you know, usually investors would like. What else is kind of unique to San Diego? Are you seeing anything even specific to the north county area that you are in? What else kind of strikes you as something beneficial to Raken?

There are a couple of things which make San Diego in general and north county in particular and make it unique. One of the things is proximity to the warm ocean, which basically just all by itself. Startups are not very startups in general and startup founders are not good at keeping the life work balance and startups are what they are and then sometimes they require more time and many times they require more time than you otherwise would devote to a corporate job. At the same time, being close to the ocean just gives it completely, you know, allows for you to stay healthy both mentally and physically. So it has proximity to the warm ocean has a great, leaves a great imprint on the companies that are based here.

That's great. I Mean that keeps obviously employees engaged more as well too. Right. They have a little place to let off some steam when they're working 24 7.

Absolutely. And that cannot be overestimated. The importance of it cannot be overestimated from a company success perspective.

What else do you find talent wise? Anything that you've noticed unique talent in North County?

We also, we have top rate schools and as such people are just, we see that there is, you know, across in San Diego altogether and we see people, people coming out of colleges are more or less fully baked into, you know, being able. Schools themselves are encouraging entrepreneurship and rely on a lot of the hands on work as part of the curriculum. And you see that in contrast with some of the other schools in the area such as Berkeley, Moore Theoretical School such, such as Berkeley or even UCLA and UCSD and other schools like USD or San Diego State University, you see a lot more emphasis on practical and as such you have a lot more practically minded individuals that are graduating and will find great employees that are just graduated college or been working for a couple of years. Right out, right out of college and again, not a ton of training that's required.

Yeah, that's great. I mean me being a UCSD grad as well, I definitely appreciate the hands on learning that's for sure coming out of there too. So you know, being that this is a lifestyle play as well with San Diego, that helps with that work life, balance your own lifestyle. I'm interested in getting to know a little bit and so curious. Do you have a favorite taco, favorite taco place?

I do not. I actually never tried a taco in my life, which is probably unique.

This is shocking for sure. This gives us great opportunity to introduce tacos to you and we would welcome that maybe on a future episode. But shocking even as an undergrad to have never had a taco.

Never, never had a taco. You know how things are when you're undergrad and money's tight and you're just surviving on eggs and oranges. Just keeps you in good shape though. I probably was in the best shape of my life when I was studying at UCSD because I couldn't really afford the car so I had to, I couldn't afford the parking so I had to park at the glider port and then just, you know, do a lot of chicken and take my bike and just bike to ucsd.

Okay. All right. Mexican food in general. You have favorite Mexican food at places or.

No, I spend quite a bit of time in Texas, so a lot of, a lot of Tex Mex. So there is, you know, I certainly have my fajitas are probably are my favorites but you know, it's difficult to get better than Texas and doing Tex Mex. So I certainly have my favorites there. But I'm eager to try tacos. All right.

All right. We're going to do another outing soon together. The other scenes of San Diego, the craft brew scene here. Something you partake in or you have a.

In general I like beer and one of my favorites is Karl Strauss bread trolley. It's certainly up there with the best of them.

Yeah, it's a good one for sure. A long time favorite. What about coffee? Are you a coffee drinker? Do you have a favorite coffee spot in San Diego?

I certainly am and I don't have any quixotic spots. I really like Peet's. It's just the best for my palate and there is, you know, any peet's would do but I go more often since now I'm in Carlsbad. There's a spot that I go by the airport in Palomar Airport Road in an innovation way. There's my favorite pizza.

Ah, got it. Okay. We didn't get to talk about the space you guys are in. The make space here is pretty cool, pretty unique. What's it like being in this kind of innovative environment?

It is fairly unique because it's a crossbreed between office space and the co working space. It's not purely co working and it's not purely office. We have garage door type doors. All the office spaces are right by the main hallway and when you leave these garage doors come down. But otherwise it's an open environment and there are a couple of make spaces. It's pretty unique because it has a couple of anchor tenants such as GoDaddy and GoPro which, you know, we're very happy with the proximity. But lots of smaller startups and life science startups and startups like Reagan.

That's really cool. And we've got coffee here too. Copa Vita.

That's right.

Well, Sergey, I really appreciate getting to know you a bit more. If people want to follow you or find you. Is there a social channel that best place to find you on?

There is. I'm always on Twitter and Sduko is my Twitter handle. You can always get a hold of me this way.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Really appreciate it and really excited to watch raking continue to take off.

Neil, thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for joining us on the tacos and tech podcast with Neil Bloom. 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.