Stanley Kim - Co-Founder & CEO of WinSanTor

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Cox Business and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We are here at Nest Coworking Podcast studio. We have Darian Anderson joining us from Next Robotics but we are excited to get to talk to Stan Kim, Serial Founder, Entrepreneur of Everything.

Hi, thanks for inviting me.

Thanks for being Here.

It's fun.

And thanks, Darren, for joining us, too.

Thanks for having me.

So, Stan.

Yes, sir.

What are you working on right now?

So I'm working on a pharmaceutical company. We think we found. The leading scientist in the field of diabetic peripheral neuropathy, which affects about 50% or more of diabetics, approached me and said they think they found something that may reverse peripheral neuropathy. Diabetic peripheral neuropathy, grow the nerves back. And so when, you know, I worked at Salk, which is probably one of the top research institutes, and when someone says they think they may have found something that reverses a disease, you say, okay, I'm in. Whatever you want me to do, I'll do it.

Okay. How long ago did you start on that?

So they approached me probably in around 2010. 2011. 2011. And they had quite a bit of research at that point, mostly in rats, and showed that they can grow their nerves back. We started the company then, but we really didn't start the company until 2014, 15, when we actually had more data, more research.

Well, we're going to dive deep into that, but I want to get to know the story that's taking you to here, which is many companies.

Many companies. That is true, as you say, all over the map.

In a good way.

In a good way. It's okay.

It's a good thing.

I'm okay with both ways. So it's all good.

Where did you.

Did you study, like, tech and science and engineering? Is that your background?

I studied genetics, so I actually do have a science background. Went to Berkeley and then realized I didn't want to work in a lab, didn't want to go to med school, went to go work for one of the large law firms and decided to become a lawyer. Ended up working as an IP attorney for the second largest law firm, dla, Piper, Shout out to those guys and good law firm. And then realized I hated being a lawyer, so decided to go somewhere else. Wanted to be an entrepreneur. Didn't really know what that meant. I actually have a hard time saying that I'm an entrepreneur. Some people still do. What is an entrepreneur? I don't know what that means. And what. What does that mean to people?

I just, you know, throwing a question back at us.

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, I think that people associate that with folks that are starting something. Right. Entrepreneurs start new ventures and they usually base that on some idea that they have and they're trying to bring that idea to life. And that, to me is kind of describes what entrepreneurs try to do.

But could you be an entrepreneur within a large company though? Because I know people that are very entrepreneurial within very big firms and they're bringing new ideas out.

Yeah, sort of. Intrapreneur idea is a term I've heard that's absolutely. I think somebody can't be an entrepreneur.

I've always felt uncomfortable saying that. But I knew that the Salk Institute was probably the top research institute and has tons of people, lots of Nobel laureates. So I became their IP attorney. Their attorney. And that was a lot of fun because you're working with the top who's who of the world. We had seven Nobel laureates, top three research institutes in the world. And I knew that eventually I would start a company out of there or find someone that I could actually work with to develop a company. Little did I know that actually I thought I'd be in biotech. And these guys approached me and said they think they found some or these guys approached me. They were doing computational neuroscience, AI, neural network, machine learning, whatever you want to call it today. And they were doing some noise canceling technology. It was amazing. We had. It was able to separate different noises from background, from foreground, my voice versus background. And we had military contracts we were working on. This is 2000, about 2000. And we had a lot of military contracts. So we did the tanks and aircraft carriers, the comm systems for those. And we got quite a bit of money from the government to go and do these different contracts for the government. It's all signal processing. So machine learning is literally pattern recognition. So we were separating my voice from whatever is in the background. So if you had music playing the background, we'd be separate all that out. And so you'd only hear the person that's talking right next to the microphone. And that eventually got acquired by qualcomm back in 2006 or 2007. And it's still available. I think I've been told that it's actually on every Qualcomm chip now. So it's called Fluence. We were obviously early on and eventually got acquired by Qualcomm. And that gave me a little bit of money to go ahead and play around, go do other things. I ended up working for the richest healthcare guy as a technology advisor. And that was a lot of fun because you only get to work with so many multi billionaires. I think I don't know what he was worth, but he was quite a bit. And he was one of the richest guys actually. I think he's like number one or number two up in LA with Elon Musk, Patrick Back and forth, Patrick sunshiang. And he was an interesting person. He is an interesting person and it was a lot of fun working for him. He's got a little controversial sometimes, but who isn't? Especially that caliber.

He had a San Diego company, right.

He has several San Diego companies. He has a company called NandQuest. Yep.

Acquired in the last year or two or went public.

It went public, yes. It was actually the highest ipo, I believe. And he's in another company here in town, does something else, I forget with another person. But he's all over the place also. So he does lots of different things. And he did mobile and for me it was a lot of fun because we had so many resources to go and try and develop his vision. And again, multi billionaires have a vision rather than actually trying to make money, they just want to do something. And that was a lot of fun because that's what I wanted to do and then decided that's not going to work. So kind of hung around and did other things, did the conference circuits, the TED conferences, the TED Med conferences and the demo and a bunch of other stuff. And so that was a lot of fun because you're hanging out with very interesting people. You guys. Ex conomy guys. I mean, there's a lot of really good conferences in town. A little crowded, but there's a lot of conferences in town. Sure. And then a bunch of guys out of the same lab that were doing machine learning, they said, we've got this. They were the guys who did facial expressions, capturing expressions through facial actions. They're called FA Facts or Micro Expressions. And there's a TV show called Lie to Me based off of Paul Ekman, who's out of San Francisco. So what they did is they automated a lot of the capabilities to capture these little micro expressions or facial actions. And that company was called Machine Perception, which eventually became Emotioned. And. And we brought a very influential investor. Actually. He came to us. He came to us. His name is Seth Nyman, probably one of the most prolific investors ever came to us and said, I think this is going to be amazing technology. I'd like to see where this goes. I got to bring my management team on board. So they brought their management team on board and unfortunately didn't do well as a company. But I'm not going to say why, but it didn't do well as a company. And then eventually they decided I'd already left by that point. That they wanted to just give up on the company and so they gave it to Apple. So Apple acquired it. And eventually I believe that technology or the people that developed the technology ended up at Apple and developing face ID most of the sell.

Now it's very successful for Apple on their phone, but not as a company.

Yeah, as a company it was phenomenal because I have two companies that were technology foundations. So that was a lot of fun. You only get to work with so many people that create foundations. They're pioneers in their field. So both these guys were either signal processing guys or they were computer vision guys. So they were the leading computer vision guys and they eventually went on to go create some amazing things at Apple. And they still are. I still see some papers coming out of there and they're doing phenomenal at Apple, which is actually kind of interesting because Apple is very research oriented. So you'd be surprised how much research they do.

What was the business model at Emotient?

Were you going to Emotient?

Yeah. Were you going to provide this facial recognition capabilities to multiple entities that would start to put them in sort of IOT or other kind of devices?

I think that was the conflict. So what ended up happening was we had a CEO who was a marketing guy and then we had a bunch of guys that were technology guys. And there's a little bit of conflict. Marketing is not always technology and technology is not always marketing. Marketing is all about trying to make money and these technology guys who wanted to develop the best technologies and there was conflict. And I think that kind of at one point came to a head and said, look, this is not going to work. And that's when everyone said, I think we should, we should stop. And that's when it became Apple got it.

Okay. Apple is moving to town a bit to actually take on Qualcomm talent.

Interesting.

Two companies that you sell technologies to.

That's not surprising because actually it's interesting because San Diego has some of the top machine learning talent in the world. We have one of the top three schools in the world as far as machine learning. And what we would. What happened is everyone from Bay Area would steal all the technologists from San Diego and then we'd have to go back and fight them to get that same talent. Now we're actually getting better about bringing those directly into keeping San Diego people within San Diego.

We used to call it the second job problem because somebody would get plucked out of San Diego. Then maybe they'd come back for a job, usually with a Qualcomm. But if they left Qualcomm, that's where the dilemma would begin. Because who do you go to from there? And if you've got a six month window or a year window where you're going to go somewhere else, people would end up hopping back to the Bay Area.

Yes.

But there's a more diverse ecosystem here now, so people can jump around a little bit easier if they need to or want to.

But it's good that we're getting Apple and other companies down here to go ahead and compete with to get the talent directly. So it just means there's more jobs and more opportunities. It's going to be a richer environment for people that are graduating.

Definitely. I think what's also interesting, two trends on that is that our biotech space is becoming tech enabled.

Right.

It's a data science and machine learning play now in genomics.

Right.

So we have even more places to put our really smart technologists.

Yeah. Because now those guys can go into biotech where traditionally that was 60% of the market maybe for high tech in town. But that was exclusive only if you're quote unquote in biotech. Right.

Like kind of wet lab scientists. But now you've got just as many if not more data scientists at Illumina, say and then maybe at a tech company.

That's right.

Which is really exciting.

Well, Illumina's neat because they're really not a biotech company. They're really a tech company. Device they just happen to use, they just happen to make data points, DNA use.

Good point.

As the data point.

So you've gone back to Salk a few times.

Has that been so solve for ucsd. And part of the reason is I work really well with scientists and so scientists really like working with me. So they approached me and said look, I'd like to start a company with you. And I launched the companies with them. So I've got my first company, the scientist. There's two scientists I started with. One went over to Qualcomm, I think he's over at Samsung now and the other one is still over at ucsd. And we've started a company with him as well too. I've started a company with him as well too and in brain computer interface. So figuring out how the brain works using machines. And we've got a couple of devices that they're doing really well, measuring how the brain works for brain diseases like glaucoma, Alzheimer's sleep and a couple other things. I'm not that active in that company as much lately. But having that resource, having all those resources, being so close to UCSD and Salk and Scripps and all these other scientists, it's a great resource for me because unlike other VCs, they're always looking for talent. People come to me all the time and say, hey, I've got this great thing. Would you like to start a company?

Got it. So are you. I mean, is there one specific company that's all in on right now, or are you still kind of scouting, looking? Always looking at a few things.

There are several companies that have started. Most of them are research space, so they're early on. But this one company, this is called Winsantor, and the founders are from Winnipeg, San Diego, Toronto. And it's the top researchers in the field of diabetic peripheral neuropathy. And so peripheral neuropathy is degeneration of the nerve caused by diabetes, cancer, HIV, a number of other diseases. So in the US alone, there's probably 50% of all diabetics, a third of all cancer patients, a third of all HIV patients. So we're talking about 30, 40, 50 million people in the US alone that have the disease.

This nerve disconnection is why someone might lose a foot in diabetes.

So eventually it starts off with tingling, numbness, it becomes pain. I was just interviewing some patients yesterday and it's extremely debilitating and very torturous. People are suicidal. They just can't live anymore because it's just so painful. And it's everything, it's pain. They can't sleep at night, they get muscle cramps in the middle of the night. So they can't sleep, they can't walk, they can't work. So it's extremely debilitating. And it's different ranges. Some people just get this numbness and tingling. They can't feel something. Some people get extreme where they can't walk. And other people, they just are so painful, they just want to die. It's a shame. And so we see this, and I get emails all the time from people that are suffering. I used to get an email once a month or something like that. There are people that are suicidal and here are these guys. They've been working their whole lives in this area. And what they saw in the industry was that money was dictating the science. It was always been driven by X, Y or Z. Actually, I just looked at the data the other day. 60% of all money Biopharma deals money is to cancer.

If I can extrapolate, what you mean is, it might be more interesting for the money to follow the drugs than it might be to follow pain management or kind of getting to root cause. Something like, well.

I'm not from the industry, so I see now the flaws of the industry. And there's so much focus towards certain diseases, cancer being most of it. 60% of all cancer monies go towards cancer. So anyway, so when the scientists, what they discovered was that there's no incentive to advance what they were doing. So they were the leading research. And so the US government, Kenyan government, brought them together and said, look, you guys are all doing this and this for different companies, advising this company that stop, we're going to give you a ton of money, just go look for something, give you each 30, 40 years of experience. Let's see what you guys can do collectively and see where you can advance this. And so they discovered these class of drugs, not just one drug, actually a whole class of drugs, this whole brand new science that show that they can grow their nerves back. And as they advance further and further along, this is why it took it so long for us to get from 2011 to on, is that they saw that they can not just grow the nerves back, but also reverse the functions. And so recently, about two years ago, they tested some of these compounds in humans just to see if it would work. And they saw these patients and actually interviewed them yesterday. It was so inspiring just being with the patients. I mean, these are patients who couldn't walk and they're walking again and they said that they had no pain or they had the numbness so they could run two miles where they couldn't walk before. And that for me was pretty neat. And so the other part, and I interviewed three of them and you'll be able to see them on our website in a couple weeks whenever this goes live. And what they. And the common theme was they loved having their independence again, having their lives again. And so that was really interesting for me. It's like, wow, that's actually what we're doing. We're actually providing, giving their lives back to them. So it's actually kind of neat for us, for me to be part of this company.

I have a bit of a personal connection here. My Dad's been type 1 diabetics for 40 years and has experienced this, specifically multiple kidney transplants because of diabetes. And takes so many different drugs to, in a sense, numb his own nerve firings to stop it from saying you're in pain, right?

So right now the only treatment that's available are pain drugs. And so there's a Drug called Lyrica and Gabapentin, which really just mask the pain. And there's Fentanyl and some of the more addictive drugs, or Tylenol, Advil.

But it's interesting. That's what I was saying. I think the money does tend to follow that sort of in the way that we do medicine here. Right. It's all about pain management, keeping people comfortable. But this whole concept of bringing their life back, that's a big advancement. But maybe the money is just starting to drift there, right?

Well, hopefully in the future it will. But today there's so much money going towards these certain areas that some of the. And I saw this when I was at the universities, right. There was a lot of signs that being abandoned, they weren't one of the hot areas. And so you'll see these hot areas, what everyone invest in. And there's thousands of them, thousands of companies actually focusing on these certain hot areas. And some of them are rare diseases. Maybe you have a couple hundred or a couple thousand patients and you kind of go, you don't need 20 companies in the space, you need maybe two. They don't lower the prices, they're not out there to benefit the patients. And so there's 30,000 diseases or more and we need to treat a lot of them. And we need new science, we need new innovation. And the current model is not really towards innovation. It's. And I understand why, because it's so expensive to develop a drug, it's hundreds of millions of dollars. So do you really want to bet on brand new science or do you want to do what everyone else is doing? It's easier to do what everyone else is doing. But if the system was really towards innovation, we would get rid of a lot of subsidies, insurance, and have people more aware of what works and what doesn't work and make things more cost effective.

Do you want to describe your specific technology and the solution that you're building?

Let's get a little technical for a second. Sure. What they discovered when they first saw the science, they just saw nerves growing back. And what they subsequently found was that they were reactivating what's called the mitochondria. And the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the body. And so the nerves themselves, the end terminals, the peripheral nerves, they grow about 2 millimeters per day using the most amount of energy. So they require a lot of energy. So for a lot of these diseases, diabetes or otherwise, the mitochondria shut down. And so what we do is we found this mechanism that seems to reactivate them, just turn them back on. And by turning them back on, it actually grows the nerves back through what.

Kind of application is it? Like a drug?

A drug.

This is all drugs, by the way. This is all brand new science. These are all drugs. So we discovered drugs. It's not stem cells and it could be. And so this is new science that no one's ever discovered that they can actually reactivate these mitochondria. And the target itself had pretty well characterized, but no one had ever understood this pathway. So what we discovered is this new pathway that no one had ever known. We as a group had been pretty well funded by the government. And so rather than other people where they would go develop brand new drugs because you actually can patent them and protect them better if you actually have brand new drugs. We as a group have said, look, actually my co founders, they're all scientists. The only thing they cared about was making sure it's not like they're making tons of money. They're scientists, they're researchers at the university. They chose this life of academia. So for them, they decided to go ahead and repurpose, recycle an existing drug. So again, there's thousands of these drugs that are associated with this one target. Not thousands, there's tens. And so we as a group said, look, why don't we actually go take the safest of these drugs? So we chose one of those drugs. It's a drug that proved 40 years ago it was a pill for stomach ulcers. And we said, well, the nerve endings are at the skin, so why don't we actually go ahead and repurpose it, recycle it into a topical, and then make that our lead drug? Because there's nothing in the market right now. So whoever creates the first drug is going to win. So we said, let's go ahead and make this topical drug and we'll go advance that through the clinical trials and it'll go faster, it'll be safer, something that patients would like better. We've been told that's not the model. The model is go develop brand new drugs, stronger patents, stronger ip, charge, more money. And we've said, man, we're okay. We've been so well supported by the government and the government really liked the idea. So we were given over $25 million in. We as a group have been given over $25 million from the government, Canadian, UN's, government, and we can kind of do what we wanted to do up to this point. So we're now in phase what's called phase two, which is out of three studies because Phase one, phase two, phase three. So we're in phase two now, which is animal studies. No, actually it's humans. Humans, so it's human studies. We've got seven sites in Canada starting patients and we've already tested these class of drugs in humans and we saw, like I said, nerve growth. We actually did biopsies of patients.

So these are the folks that you.

Just interviewed where they said they can walk. That was one of the drugs, I gotta be clear, it's one of the drugs in this class. So that drug, it was approved here in the US but it was not the safest drug. So we chose what we thought would be the safest drug for long term use. And so of this whole class of drugs, there was a drug that was approved in Japan, in Germany, it was never approved here in the us it was abandoned for marketing purposes. It was a pill for stomach ulcers. And we decided to go and make that into our lead drug at topical and now we're in clinical studies. So we finished phase one in Australia, we're now in phase two and it's showing great promise.

And so, and so safe, as you define it the way you described it, you're talking about side effects that might occur because of it. Less side effects equals more safe.

Yes. So I got to be really careful here. The FDA is very strict about what means safety. It's not been approved here in the US but it was approved in Germany, Austria, Japan, a number of other countries, sold in several other countries. Millions of people have used it. It was tested here in the US in Eyedrop.

That was a stomach drug that you're.

Talking about, but it was also tested in children, daily, is an eye drop, and then shelved for marketing purposes. So again, if you're a tech guy, you don't want to, you don't want to go and develop your brand new science, you don't want to go direct your own language. You just use whatever resources are out.

There, which is like efficacy. Right? Like what works.

So application, Think about tech guy. Application is new, but do you really want to create a brand new language in the pharma world, everyone develops their own language because you get more IP that way you get copyright laws. So in the pharma world that's what you normally do. So having a guy that's from the tech world go into the pharma world and saying, look, we're going to go ahead and with the blessings of the scientist, we're going to Go ahead and reutilize as many resources as possible to try and get this not just approved faster, but also commercialized faster or adopted faster. So if you're a patient and you see something that's brand new and it's going to be a modified hiv, actually that's what they use. They use modified HIV for some of these different therapies. You go, this is brand new and this is what we're going to do and we're going to inject you with this or here's a drug from 30, 40 years ago that people were ingesting daily. And we're going to make this into a topical something you rub on your skin. Which one are you going to use more? And I think we can actually make it more affordable and something over long term, 30, 40 years, not going to cause complications. Which one would you rather take? I know as a person that takes drugs every now and then that Advil or whatever else is, I'd much rather take something that I think is going to be safe. So what's interesting is the other part then and I just gave a talk up in la and pharma companies only think of pharma other drugs as their competition. These people approached me and said, well, is this something similar to an herb? Or have you ever tried using yoga or something else like that? And I realized that neuropathy, there's no treatment for neuropathy. My competition is yoga or some other natural supplement or some other pain management or some device. It really is everything. There's electrical stimulation people use. So for the common user, my competition is all the above. Whereas I think in the pharma industry everyone goes, no, no, your competition is just drugs.

Yeah, interesting.

That's almost to me like describes a eastern value system versus a western value system. Like we're kind of closed for business when it comes to drugs in the western world because it's all drug based. Right. And then the alternatives come as outside of the industry or outside of the establishment. But I think if you go for example, further east, you'll find that so much of that started as homeopathic or herb based began because the cultures are so old. Right. That didn't have a pharma industry yet. So acupuncture, these things that we consider alternative, which were just mainstream, but you.

Have to all these things if you're a business person. So the common theme for me is how do I develop technologies to be adopted. The first two companies I developed, they were adopted fairly widely. Most of the cell phones have one of our technologies on them, which is really nice. And so for this, how do I get the broadest, widest adoption? It's not about the most amount of money that I can develop out of this thing. You can milk it and charge. And the latest drugs are several million dollars a person. Right. It's subsidized, so it's who cares? But in my world, it's all about adoption usage and the impact. And actually, this is also the scientist view, which has been really nice because they've been so proactive and their whole life is all about what they can do. Science for them, it's not about how much. They're not defined by how much dollar you made. They're defined by what science they created.

That's how they keep scoring.

Yes. It's interesting. I have friends who are very competitive and they say, well, if someone offered you a lot of money, would you several hundred million dollars or several billion dollars, would you take it? I'm very competitive. I'm the most competitive person in the world or one of the most competitive people in the world. I think I am. People that win the Oscars or they win whatever in their field, they win the championships. It's not about the money. It's about that, whatever that is. And for me, that's about trying to get the most impactful drug. And so I'm in the pharma world, I want impact.

So what does that look like to get this to market and get it out there? What time frame are we talking about?

Three more years, hopefully. Knock on wood. So I'm going to knock on the table for a second. Three more years, we hope. We're in phase two and we're going to phase three, hopefully later this year, early next year. The drug was approved in many different countries. Japan, Germany. So we've been told that we can actually go to those different countries and probably even get faster than the U.S. you may or may not know this. 50% of all revenues for drugs are here in the U.S. u.S. Worldwide. So that means everyone focuses on the U.S. market. Only the U.S. market for us, we still own a good chunk of the company. We can charge a very little bit of money and go into these different countries and still make a lot of money. So we can partner with a Japanese company and keep the price low, or China or India and still make a lot of money and go faster. In India, there's 50 to 100 million people with neuropathy. So, you know, you charge. You charged $100. So, okay, yeah, I don't have to I don't have to get 80% margins, I can get 2% margins and still do well by doing well.

That's incredible. It's, it's. I mean that's why we build life changing and mission driven companies here in San Diego because we have that kind of value system.

Yeah.

I was curious, how did you. What's your sort of attraction to San Diego? What, what sort of drives you to be here? You could probably live and work anywhere.

I sort of do. I mean I travel quite a bit all over family. I mean it's a great place for family. It's a great place for. It's a great culture for technology. If you actually look at all the different cities, where's the most innovation? San Diego is probably one of the top three globally.

Especially for hard problems. What I call hard problems. Right. Like discovering the genome, like launching unmanned vehicles. These are tough problems that we go after. I always like to say that here in San Diego we go after those hard problems. You don't see that everywhere.

Yeah, that's true.

One thing that I will say that we don't do very well is we don't commercialize technologies very well. So we have a few, we have Illumina, we have Qualcomm, there's Fortune 500s, we have Sempra. But as far as technologies that we're good at developing technologies, getting to a certain point and then flipping them. And that's a shame.

And we're kind of always the intel inside. We're in a lot of other things.

Right.

I'm not even sure if we're intel for. Because intel is still an Intel. Right. I think we're the guys who sold to Intel. And actually I heard this the other day from someone from Asia, came over and said Sandy, he had been traveling to Boston and San Francisco. He goes san Diego, everyone's really good at getting rid of the company. Why is that? And I said it's the sun. Everyone wants to go out and go surf afterwards.

So you're willing to monetize in a sense that you can assure your place here.

That's interesting. You think of some of the technologies that's been built and bought early, like Google Analytics developed here but sold out early. Urchin in a sense, not early, but the team went and joined and built it within Google or HNC Websense. Websense Active, TurboTax. TurboTax, an Intuit product.

Right.

So we're really good at that. And it's a shame because we don't have enough people to Say, I want to be Facebook. We have too many people that says, I want to sell to Facebook or I want to sell to Novartis, I want to do this. And it's kind of a shame. We need more people that want to be Elon Musk and say, look, I want to be the largest, largest car company. We don't have that.

I think it's this generation, though. Like, I think guys of your ilk and the folks that follow, I think that's the opportunity you're interested in reinvesting in tech. If you look at another San Diego trend, the early disruptors who invented and sold, they didn't necessarily put back directly into tech. You know, they might have done another company. You do see sort of serial entrepreneurs, but a lot of those folks invest in real estate. Right. Because it's San Diego and alternatives. You don't have that same culture like you do in San Francisco where it's like, push it right back into tech. All back in the middle, you hear.

All these guys like Goodrx, the guys from Facebook, they make 10, 20, $30 million and they go, not enough. We need to go build something bigger and better. And they're going all in. In San Diego, you make 10, $20 million. You're holding a lot of that.

It's like, let me buy my place in Rancho Santa Fe and Coronado.

I'll invest and maybe I'll invest and I'll play. You have $20 million and you'll invest $50,000 and you kind of go, really? That's not going all in. I mean, that's like small investments. Buying a couple shares here and there, that's it.

Maybe. Again, I think it's interesting, the generation that you represent and those that follow value based interests may drive, you know, those, those passion projects may drive versus, like, play the game safe, get out. You know why? You can get your, get your place in the sun here in San Diego and play it safe.

I think we're changing that. I think that, I think that's different now. I think I want to be here and I want to work on the next thing.

No, there's some great companies now. I mean, if you look at the. I mean, we have four great. We have club beds, we have seismic helium.

Kariba.

Yeah, they're. They're doing really well. And they're, they're, they're breaking the ceiling.

Yeah. And what's interesting is that they're maybe even incubating in the Bay Area and then pulling the team down here. That's, that's definitely a new trend, you know, because it used to be like the folks in Bay Area where a lot of that money was coming from is like, well, yeah, we'll fund you, but got to come up here.

Yes.

And now actually I didn't necessarily see that trend where Google would. Google Amazon. They're realizing we can't just be in the Bay Area. Right. So we're going to go plant a flag in Seattle, we're going to go plant a flag in San Diego and Austin. All these tier, kind of tier two places that have a lot of strong technology that provide them with cost, value and kind of diversification.

Well, the constant though that has been all along here is our food, our taco scene. You've seen a lot of tacos since you've been here. Do you have a favorite?

Do I have a favorite taco? What's a place down in Washington Street?

Lucha Lima.

That's really good. Then La Jolla, there's the taco stand. That's really good. And then you can't go wrong with Tijuana. So there's a bunch of places in Tijuana. There's one. We were just talking about this at the top of the hill. I have no clue what the name of that place is. I do go to LA quite a bit. And there's all this. The trucks, they got the funky tacos, right? Yes, yes.

Korean Kimberly, cool new tacos, you know.

But. But the. The. There's a lot of truck stands as well too. So they're really pretty famous.

Well, Stan, this has been awesome. We're excited to. To build some big companies with some big passion and mission behind it.

Well, I hope we are one of those. The one thing that I will say is that we're a little different because we haven't had the desire to go flip our company. We've had the desire of trying to make sure that we develop a drug for patients. And so the one message that goes out, I hope I relay that we're all about patients and trying to make sure that we get drugs to patients. And so that is our priority one, phase one, phase two, phase three, get done.

All right, well, win Centaur by Stan and team and we're excited to continue to watch you have huge impact. Thanks for being on.

Thank you.

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. Big shout out to school of recognition for our rad intro music and thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter Eelbloom as well as Fresh brewed tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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