This Week in San Diego Tech - June 6, 2025

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech, you know we got it. Hey.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it. Hey.

Well, hey everyone. It is been a minute since Fred and I jumped on the mic and so we are excited to be back together. Fred, it is good to see you. How you doing?

Yeah, it's good to see you as well, man. Last time I saw you it was at a San Diego football club game and I think all of San Diego's tech ecosystem like the OGs were, were were there at that event. It was like the GoFundMe crew. We ran into Eric Otterson, Mike Crin from Connect. We ran into Cloud Beds who's also there with some other startup founders. Hope you're doing well since. Since we hung out.

Yeah. Spencer Hutchins visor crew were live on the screen across the field from us. But tech, but taking photos of us in the suite. It was a fun night. Shout out to Christian and Martin from Pillsbury for bringing that suite together. The 1897 club where literally like tech meets sports. Like every time I go to a match it's like that. I barely have time to watch the match because it's just such great community building and friend connecting. So I'm glad you're able to make it. It was fun and we won. That was awesome too. Let's jump into it. We got a lot to talk about. I'm Neil Bloom with Rice and Tide Partners, a community building and investing platform. Longtime investor and serial entrepreneur. Community builder and excited to have Fred Greer here on the mic with me. Hey Fred.

Hey everyone. I'm Fred Greer, community builder in town journalist. Also work for a real estate group, jll and yeah, super excited to be back to talking about the biggest headline news and startups tech in in town. So yeah, super excited to be back. It's been a while since we've done one of these and we have a lot of news to to cover today.

We do.

We.

I'm just coming off a really fun tour I got to put together yesterday of the San Diego General atomic nuclear fusion reactor called D3D and this came actually from a follow up from Techcon SoCal that I put on a talk on the future of energy where I Had some of the leading energy technology experts on a panel there and they followed up and said, hey, would you like to bring some of your community members to come see a tour of one of the preeminent fusion reactor research facilities? So shout out to David Pace who hosted us. It was about 15 of us who came together to see what is a fusion reactor. We learned a ton. Oh my God. So look for posts and there's posts on LinkedIn, on Instagram of people sharing what we learned. We didn't come out glowing green, so that's great. We got to see an actual experiment where they ran. We actually saw a bunch where they were running experiments. This fusion reactor has been running I think for like 30 years consistently as, or maybe even 40. It's like the 80s. It's a national lab. So anyone, it's open access to anyone, data is shared with anyone and funded by the federal Department of Energy. And it's obviously the future of energy is a hot topic right now, specifically related to AI related to data center powering. Right. And so they're hosting a lot of new or recently funded energy fusion companies who are coming and using their reactor as a test bed, which is super cool. They're literally yesterday. Next Monday they're talking about all these VC powered teams that are coming through and using their facility. So it was really cool to get that group together and keep an eye out for more of those, you know, within my community here I'll be sharing more. I think we got one coming up of San Diego State facility out at Lithium Valley out in Imperial county which will be going out and see kind of the opportunities there in the battery and lithium world, which we learned actually there's a lot of lithium potential in the fusion world. So very interesting to see all that right here in San Diego. So thanks to the team for, for hosting us.

But yeah, no, I'll just say congrats on doing that, man. I think right now defense tech and AI are the two hottest sectors in the venture capital startup space. And General Atomics is not a startup. It's one of the largest companies in town, largest employers in town and you know, the average person doesn't get access to tours and behind the scenes opportunities to kind of see, you know, you know, a huge company in, in town and kind of learn more about the business model of it. So I think it's great that you're kind of orchestrating these, these tourism kind of like lunch and learns with these companies. And yeah, I think I saw your picture shared in a SD defense Defense tech chat that's going around and yeah, I'm really excited about, you know, kind of the legacy defense tech companies but also kind of the new startups that are being spun up across defense, energy, et cetera. I know El Segundo gets a lot of credit for it, but I think San Diego, you know, definitely hold some weight on the defense tech front too. So yeah, congrats on a great event, 100%.

You know, we're all about building ecosystem and the way to do that is to know existing talent and technology and connect that right for value added connections. That's what you and I do daily as a service in a sense almost, you know, like we are those routers. We learned some really interesting, interesting things about General Atomics that from the fusion world is where the sensor technology came for the Predator drone. Also from the magnetic, super magnetic aspects of the fusion reactor actually came a whole spin off to power aircraft carriers which are the newest, latest ones are not steam powered, they're actually magnetic maglev as they call it, launched. So really interesting to see just where technology comes from and where it goes and how it's applying to the world ahead and that's what it's all about. So I was actually doing this as an undergrad at UCSD bringing my fellow mechanical engineers on tours. So it feels like I've come all the way back around to 2005 of bringing people to see what tech is being built locally. So along those lines, a lot of tech has been built and been raising funds over the last two months. Really rolling like we're two months into the quarter and you wrote a good post to say, you know, 2/3 way through a quarter, where are we at? So you want to take us through some data that you crunched on your blog?

Yeah, so the headline was here's the San Diego startups that have raised VC funding in Q2 2025. So far I was looking at when does Q2 end actually ends at end of June, I think. Someone commented on one of my posts was hey, how are we tracking compared to last year? And I think we can't, we can't really figure that out until we're at the end of the quarter. But yeah, there has been a lot of funny news in San Diego. We'll say what the article didn't kind of highlight was that it has still been a tough time for early stage startups. I'm seeing car up a lot of reports and you know, we're seeing less deals, you know, less quant quantity, but more Quality deals being done. So higher dollar amounts going to a select few companies. And in San Diego we saw a number of tech deals, biotech deals and also some big pharma news and big tech news which we'll talk about in podcast. Some of the ones that stood out to me the most was Flock Freight. We haven't heard about those guys in a while. Previously they raised 2021, they raised money from SoftBank, it was a 400 million dollar round. Flock Freight was the hottest company in town and then they've kind of, you know, gone through a recession, they've had a tough period and so people were kind of like hey what's up with Block Freight? Are they still around? And I think last week they just announced they raised 60 million Series E funding late. You know they raised some funding from some top investors. We actually have an interview coming out with Orin in the next week or two. Kind of give an update on where they are in the state of the market. They're still the leaders in the logistics trucking industry and yeah they're still trucking along, no pun intended. A few other deals that stood out to me was Revenue Cat which is a subscription management platform for apps. They help apps can they do in you know in, in, in in payment purchases for developers and you know they're not based in San Diego but one of their co founders is here. They raised a 50 million I think Series B and a few other deals on the tech side. We'll link that in the show. Notes for Life Sciences we had some pretty big 100 million dollar plus rounds right there. They're a small molecule drug discovery company. They raise 110 million Series A. Clearpoint Neuro. This is a publicly traded company so that's necessarily a startup. They had 110 million via public offering bio link. They raised 100 million series C which was spun out of UCSD. We talked about that on the last podcast and Higher therapeutics they raised 65 million Series A. So yeah, very very strong deal in Life sciences. And then we also talked about some of the big tech news and pharma news from Novartis to Qualcomm to Illumina. Neil, I'll pause here because I just talked a lot. Any, any, any takeaways on, on this article?

Well I just appreciate the breadth of it. I mean I think one, you know you and I used to collaborate at this on the back in the day and I just love that you've taken and run with it and it is such a good wrap up so Kudos to you man on not just talking about straight just like this company raised money but you're giving some context and some other news around that I think I saw comments on everyone being like revenue Cat. They're not San Diego, but I love the, you know founders here so count it, you know which is super cool and maybe we do an event or or have them on the pod sometime. So we would be pretty fun because they are probably one of the most talked about companies by Saster by Jason Lemken Loves loves revenue Cat. I think he's invested in them which is great to have some great SaaS talent here powering and building some really SaaS big SaaS platforms and so no great roundup there. I think from a investor hat perspective I'd say the quarter started kind of slow and then all of a sudden the deals have like really picked up and it happens like that. It's like a sine wave of deals are slow and then also I don't know why they all come in all at once. Probably a rush of people get deals funded before the VCs go on vacation for the summer. So I'm open for business all summer so bring your deals to me. And we actually invested in a company last week and we got two more over the next two weeks. I think we'll be deciding on from the last of Interlock Capital Fund 1 so excited about that and man so many good there is a lot of good deals out there. A lot of serial founders starting up new things that I'm seeing. So I think the deal announced a lot of net new companies from founders who have had an exit over the last two to three years. I'm always looking at that kind of data which is always a good sign and that they keep it here. Why don't we jump into related to that funding news. There was also some news of jobs data that I saw in the San Diego Union Tribune. And you know while jobs this is a jobs data report way bigger than the VC and tech world, it's related because what pretty much has been said is that net new job creation comes from net new company creation and so equal amounts of jobs to date. Like I think over a hundred years they've studied this. That says for every company that existing already that is hiring there is an equal amount of jobs that are being companies are firing and so existing companies fire and fire at the same amount. I would pause and say that's probably pre the AI world. Don't know what that means yet. We haven't no One really knows the data yet, but net new company job creation comes from net new company creation, which is why we're so interested in the VC world, because we're not just building the future that we want to live in, we're building brand new jobs that didn't exist before. In this jobs report which we'll link to in the show notes, it's a US macro report that really compared cities that looked at supply and demand of jobs, really that looked at what, what cities have an excess of jobs compared to their workforce and what have a deficit. And so some that pulled out, that was interesting. Top line was that San Jose kind of the Silicon Valley area still has a job deficit, which is really interesting. You think they'd have an abundance of people, but no, they have so many more jobs to fill. And San Diego has just a little imbalance, it looked like. So it has like I think they said 107 workers to 100 jobs. So a little imbalance there. But I don't totally know what that means, to be honest. I don't know over time if that's how it's always been or is that a seasonality thing. San Diego specifically is so high in hospitality jobs, which has been rocked since COVID come back, but is seasonal also in hospitality world. The other big area of jobs for San Diego is military. One in five jobs is military related in San Diego and I would. And federal budgets I would imagine affect that a little bit. So I don't know any kind of thoughts or quick takes when you see this?

Yeah, I mean, I don't have the data to back it, but I think from my experience being involved in the ecosystem, San Diego is number three for life sciences. But behind Boston, San Francisco, we have a strong government sector. Real estate's really huge here. Hospitality is huge here. I think the executive talent tends to be in Carmel Valley and Del Mar and Ranch Santa Fe. When I think about the young professionals, they tend to be headquartered in like PB area, Mission Valley. Obviously we have great talent coming out of ucsd, San Diego State, USD. Some of that talent does go to the Bay Area and New York, but a lot of them are able to find jobs in some of those main sectors that we mentioned. And you know, I'm just really bullish on San Diego long term as it continues to recruit. You know, some of the best talent I see, you know, once a month someone on Twitter tweeting, hey, I'm new to town, I moved to San Diego, I'm coming from New York, come from la come from San Francisco. And the underlying theme is, hey, you know, I want to be living in a place where not only can I work hard, but also want to have a place where I can go to the beach and have a social life and have activities and hobbies. And I think San Diego provides all the opportunities to do so, which bodes well for the region.

100% related to that. And I think you tagged me or we got both tagged in a recent one, someone new, someone new moving here. But what I see is a lot of people moving. It's like a return back. So people already knew San Diego, either they grew up here or their spouse, partner grew up here and has family here. And so to me that I have a lot of data on, like the awareness of the opportunity of San Diego. When I was running Hired's platform, San Diego was a top five city where tech talent would list the cities they are interested in moving to for a job, but they had no idea of the companies there. And I think that continues to be an awareness issue. And so if you've already seen San Diego like the genie's out of the bottle, you know, it is heaven on earth. If you've never seen it, you don't, you can't picture the lifestyle and, and, and obviously no one really still knows the tech opportunities, even the people who live here or have lived here before. So that's on us. It's on us, the community to continue to talk about that, all the tech that's happening, all the jobs potential here and all the talent because you know, it's not a hard sell. It's an easy win and close rate on lifestyle. So that's why we're doing this. That's our life, that's why we're bringing this to you. We hope that all of you amplify that. So if we just talk to me and Fred, talk to ourselves, it's an echo chamber. If we just talk to our friends Jonah and Hussein, also an echo chamber. We need everyone to turn out and amplify out. So thank you for participating in this experiment which is community unifying to bring more community in. Related to that, I just saw a community member take a new job here that I thought was worth talking about. Mark Fields just announced today he's taken on the chief information and Innovation officer at Illumina, which is huge. It's like top three public by market cap company in San Diego. Mark is a super experienced tech leader in the biotech world. He led Thermo Fisher as the CTO for San Diego in the Carlsbad region, which included, I think he was part of Life Technologies and that acquisition by Thermo and then had thousands of engineers under his management that he opened shops in Mexico to kind of expand the region's worth of technical talent. He then got tapped by Insulin, which is one of the leading insulin pump companies competing with Tandem Diabetes to to open an engineering office here in San Diego. And up until a few months ago, that's where he was. He had like 3,000 engineers, I think under and product managers, he said, under his role. As soon as he told me he was leaving, I was like, oh, like let's make sure you get plugged into other companies here. And honestly, within days he was gobbled up by Illumina, which is great. That's awesome. We love to see him staying here and to see him powering more medical device companies on the software side, which is what he'll be doing with Illumina, which is another huge hardware meets software meets life sciences company, which is a specialty here in San Diego. Any takeaway?

Yeah, I'll chime in on Alumina in general. They've had a tough past two years. If you look at their stock, you know, it's definitely gone down a lot from their peak in 2021 during COVID times and yeah, they had a acquisition of Grail fall through and they were kind of being under the scope of the FT dc. Jared Whitlock used to be a former co worker at the Center Business Journal. He's now at Endpoints News. He's documented aluminum stuff. So if you want to know what's been going on the last six months, year plus he has a scoop. Also, Jonathan Wilson from Stat News is also a great reporter too on the life sciences scene. Illumina has made a lawsuit of a local San Diego company called Element Biosciences for patent infringement. They're saying that, you know, Illumina, not Illumina, Element had a do a statement that, you know, Illumina has a great patent portfolio, but they believe that they did not, you know, take on, you know, take any patents from, from them for their genealogical genomic sequencing. So yeah, there's a lot going on, man. They have a lot of leadership changes, a new CEO, some lawsuits. The growth deal kind of got pushed back. So the FTC is not no longer going after them anymore. I think they'll be fine. They have a long history in San Diego. A lot of startups have left Illumina and have started companies. Elements one of them. There's Like Aluma, it's like almost like a Alumina Illumina mafia similar to Qualcomm. And yeah, it's exciting time. I'm interested to see how they, you know, continue to be the leader not only in the genomic space but also kind of lean into the AI. AI stuff. I know you're very involved that Neil, just the bio and AI scene and I wouldn't be surprised if Illumina, you know, kind of maintains his leadership by leaning in AI type products. So that's definitely something I'm looking forward to over the next few years.

I am as well. Well remember the. There was a lot of Illumina alum starting aluminum mafia, starting new startups. I invested in a few actually and I feel like they were too early almost to a certain regard and I'm hoping with the rise of kind of the new application of AI, AI has been there, but the new world of it, I hope that this is kind of a new wave of it as well too. The also interesting piece was the bankruptcy of 23andMe and everyone going crazy over who's going to control the data because actually like I think China or a Chinese entity had some stakeholder aspect to it. You know, Luma plays a big role in this and Luma could come out as maybe a consumer brand around this, whereas right now they're really just a B2B brand. Be really interesting to see what they do from kind of the genomics data hub because they literally might control or at least might see through their pipes some of the largest genomic data in existence, Maybe more than 23andMe, I don't know. So anyway all that's super interesting and now that you have a chief innovation and Information officer, Mark Fields local who has played in this world before, I'm super interested to watch that. So congrats Mark. I texted him, told him I would give him a shout out here and looking forward to seeing what you do next. Let's jump into some other news around AI, specifically personal AI which is a seasoned team of AI builders. Had some news with a partnership with Nvidia and then some news that they're moving to sf. So this was interesting. This team is super experienced having I think done vision, I think vision impairment technology. AIRA was some of the team here. Suman was co founder of Aira and I think they've had a few rebrands and really kind of come. I feel like they were pre generative AI and then now have like led the personal AI data movement right at the right time, right place. But I know you're talking to them right now as well too. You got some updates here, Fred?

Yeah, I think the headline news, they just announced this week that they were moving their headquarters to San Francisco Bay Area. And they also had some news with Nvidia that, you know, personal AI is bringing AI receptionist to small business owners. I met with their team actually pretty, pretty recently and they were telling me that they have some big partnerships and big telecom folks and they're going to be rolling out, you know, their, their, their new tool which is AI receptionist to small businesses tens of thousands. And they're seeing some great momentum in the AI space. Someone tweeted to me that, you know, hey, what are the top three AI companies in San Diego? I think personal AI is definitely like my number one, number two, IPOP AI and there's a few other ones like hello sky just raised some funding from UCSD and you know, personal AI. You know, I'm seeing a lot more companies recruit talent in the Bay Area. Personal AI has made some executive hires that are largely in the Bay Area so that makes sense for them to make it their home base. But they said they're still going to have a satellite office in San Diego because a lot of their team members still work here and they're currently at UCSD and they've been around for about four or five years, raised a little bit of capital and they're almost at profitability and so they don't even know they need to raise anymore. Which is to me is a good sign and represents what San Diego is. We built real technologies that have impact and you know, it's just great to see them recognized by Nvidia and finding success not only in San Diego but also now in Silicon Valley, which is great.

Totally. Yeah, I think the leakage is really strong. You can't deny that, you know, the best, some of the best and brightest are in Silicon Valley. So why wouldn't you want to be around that? Especially if that's your customers or access to top talent. I was, it was really fun to run into the personal AI office. Like headquarters is on the fourth floor of the Design and Innovation building at ucsd which is super cool. I kind of thought it was, you know, recent grad spin outs there. But no, we've got venture backed companies in the dib. So shout out to Paul and Greg for, for housing some good startups there and wishing the personal AI team well. And I know I keep saying this, I've had them on panels. I need to get my personal AI going. Because who doesn't want to just like chat with a bot of me better than chatting with me probably, you know, so go, go chat with my bot. And that's how we'll scale some of these connection points here, which is pretty much what personalized pretty much doing. We had some other big news related to Qualcomm and Nvidia who are making, who continue to be some of the biggest names in AI in general. AI is just taking billions if not trillions of capital in terms of investment from infrastructure, which is down to the chips, which is actually then down to the energy flowing through the chips. So it's interesting to see how that all plays out. Qualcomm has been on a multi decade diversification play going obviously from powering not just handsets to trying to power everything from drones to data centers to and, and then having a whole entire AI ecosystem. They've even, you know, built some local partnerships include within their AI ecosystem with ipop AI which is a serial team of founders doing vision technology as a service. And so Qualcomm has kind of built this huge partner network of AI software to power through their devices, as has Nvidia as well too. So we'll continue to keep reporting on that. Do you have any specific news around Qualcomm or Nvidia or you got some articles coming out.

So this is the first time hearing about this news. I'm not surprised to see Qualcomm all in on AI. They actually were early investor in Anthropic and I mean being a semiconductor leader, they have to, they have to be all in AI and Nvidia seems to be everywhere. So it just makes sense for this partnership to happen. But yeah, I think you have another story scoop here on some gaming news.

I do. Just on the last part, you said all in on AI, but the all in podcast had a really interesting conversation about Anthropic this last week. So all in on Anthropic, go listen to that podcast. Because they're one of the major players at the forefront of generative AI consumer platforms. But yeah, let's talk about some global news that's hitting us locally here. The Micro Microsoft has been trying to acquire Activision Blizzard for a number of years. It had been blocked by the FTC under the past administration and it was one of the largest acquisitions around. I think it was like a 60, $70 billion acquisition. We're talking about a gaming unit that already is grown through acquisition. So Activision and Blizzard, two mega players in gaming came together over the last 10 years I believe and how that affects us locally? Well they have just in the last few years acquired a gaming studio named High Moon Studios which is now known as Activision Blizzard High Moon Studios and I guess now it'll be known as Microsoft Activision Blizzard High Moon Studios right there in Carlsbad. We did a gaming gathering in March right outside High Moon Studios there to bring the gaming community together. And we're actually bringing them together again late June up in Carlsbad because one, we keep meeting so many people who are like legacy games and people who build in games, stay in games, I've noticed. And so there's a huge talent density, there's a huge company density and there's now even interest from some of the spinouts who want to create a gaming incubator co working hub up in Carlsbad as well too. So all super interesting and interesting to see how all of that will impact us here. Microsoft actually had big news about around the layoffs recently. I think they laid off like 3% of workforce in the last week. You know, I hope that doesn't affect us locally but it also one brings Microsoft the brand to town in another way. And Gaming Studios is a very specific, very, very specific role compared to what Microsoft does overall. I would imagine it's a very small part of their workforce. So, so yeah, so interesting to see and we'll keep the gaming news here. Do you have a little input on this as well?

A tidbit that I would would say under the headline is that, you know, I talked to a few bankers and lawyers in town and early, early this year they said, you know, we're going to see a lot of IPO activity. And now I'm seeing, you know, maybe I feel it might pick up again but M and A activity certainly has been picking up a lot more and I think now with the new administration they're less red tape for these acquisitions to happen. And I think what happened with this acquisition, it was 68 billion, which is a really large acquisition and it was blocked I believe or it was just something was holding it up. And I think now going forward this new administration, there's going to be a lot more just let's hands off approach allowing companies to buy our smaller startups. I wouldn't be surprised if you see a flurry of M and A deals and gaming doesn't get enough credit in San Diego. But we have studios like Amazon, Daybreak, there's a few other ones and it's great to just Showcase that there's a San Diego story in this broader news. Microsoft has a growing presence in town. So yeah, it's definitely important to highlight.

Amazon Daybreak, Zynga, Rockstar, Star High Moon, which does Call of Duty. Warner Brothers Games just shut down their studio, but that space is interesting in what we're looking at maybe for the gaming hub. And then Sony has got a ton here as well. Sony PlayStation and Sony Studios. And then the Psionic team is still here, which is owned by Epic, which has spun out a ton of talent as well too. So yeah, so much gaming and so much talent that obviously wants to stay here. So. Oh, and Playable Worlds, Series B based company that just went live doing amazing on their Kickstarter as well too. So anyway, let's keep moving on here because we got still more to go. And speaking of gaming, which is kind of like the one few areas of our technology world that actually touches consumer, we have some great consumer brands here as well too. I mean, we like to talk about Vuori a lot, but there's actually a lot of food companies that you might know, whether it's, you know, Petco on Pet side or Jack in the Box, all headquartered here. And Jack in the Box was in the news recently when I didn't even remember this, that it had recently bought Taco Bell. Del Taco, Del Taco, which I remember looking up specifically because of the tacos and tech podcast, because I wondered had anyone ever mentioned either Jack in the Box or Del Taco as their go to taco spot in LA for Laker games. It's a famous chant. We want tacos because they give away two free tacos when the Lakers win by double digit numbers over a hundred. And so I was like, yeah, has anyone, I don't think anyone's ever mentioned Jack in the Box on the Tacos and Ted podcast. But you know, Del Taco, I guess they closed 200 stores. There's a little bit of news that maybe they'll spin that out. This isn't actually the first time that Jack in the Box has like bought a company and then spun it out. In fact, they, I think funded or founded Qdoba, which was a competitor to Chipotle and they spun that out. And Cordoba is still based in San Diego, but now a separate owned company. And so interesting to see, you know, they keep playing and toying in the Mexican food space. You have some takes here.

I think it's just tough to try to be a leader in the taco space in San Diego. At least there's so many great companies copy taco shops in town. Yeah, it sucks to see that they're closing 200 stores worldwide. Del Taco as well. But yeah, I think consumers Gen Z are looking to healthier options. I think Cava, I mean Chipotle used to be up there. Their quality is kind of going down. Sweet Green has one in Del Mar. I'm seeing a lot of great options so it's kind of hard to compete in that space. But yeah, Jack in the Box was started in San Diego or headquartered here. And yeah, it's up to see the news, but I think you have some other news about another local chain expanding which I believe you know the founder of. You want if you want to talk about that news.

Yeah. Related to the healthy options Ever bowl is this Acai bowl, frozen Acai bowl, which is kind of the healthy version of frozen yogurt or ice cream to be honest, with a superfood focus. Lower sugar. So Everbowl was founded here in town, Jeff Fenster and originally he it was just all company owned places and up until about two years ago they were only company owned and were at about 30 stores and then made a big change and decided to go franchise and have grown rapidly. And so he reached out to me recently to say hey, we're about to open our 100th store. Can you help share the news? And a whole group of us community builders jumped on video and shared and congratulated them on their hundredth store. So I think they took them six years, six or seven years to go from 0 to 30 and then under 2 to go from 30 to 100. And I've seen his map on his wallet HQ. I think they've got a plan to like 500 so going fast and some of the names of these franchisees you would, you'd know Drew Brees, I think former quarterback might be the largest franchisee within Everbowl. So he's owning and funding a number of these. And then what's also super cool is to see the local business community in each community take ownership and leadership and what Everbowl does to empower new business owners. Typically it's like a family focus that they do. I've seen them open in Hawaii and Idaho and Kansas and all over. So you know, congrats to the Everbowl team. Jeff Fenster, friend of the pod. Congrats on your growth and keep leading your empire of building healthy food spots.

Yeah, I was chime in here to say shout out to Jeff. I heard him speak actually at one of Your LP Summits, Interlac Capital Summit. And he talked about how, yeah, he works with Shaq o', Neal, Drew Brees, and I believe he actually. He's a very small operator. I think he actually has a construction company as well to help build these retail spaces. And, yeah, if you haven't heard of Everboy, you can go Del Mar. It's a great location. Have a few other locations in town. It's great to see them continue to expand and grow way beyond, you know, what they started as. And it's. They've made a household name in the Acai space, which is cool to see the construction one.

I'll give a quick shout out to that. That's called We Build. And so, you know, once they got on this expansion path, they realized time to open store matters a lot. And if they could prepackage a kit apart or do all the work up front, especially because it's the same look and feel they want, you know, all of them. So they actually built their own wood shop and warehouse right there in, like, Carlsbad Vista area. It's like right on the border. And then they started bringing this to, you know, people of friends who wanted a franchise. And they said, wait, I like Shaq said, I got 200 chicken shacks that I gotta launch. That someone, some general contractor says each one's gonna take three months to build. And you're telling me you can launch it in three days. And so I think that's almost their bigger business now is the we build, like, franchise in a box, where they're just launching every. Every celebrity that's opening their own physical retail is using them, which is pretty cool to see. And that was not by design. I think. I think it started as personal need for Everbowl. Let's round this out. We got one last one to talk about. One of our robotics companies, Psionic. You've probably all seen the team here because they bring them everywhere. The little robotic hand, he brings them to the founders hike and every panel he's on. And now he's on the largest stage on YouTube getting reviewed here. You want to break this down, which. It's kind of cool to see a local tech company on the large stage.

Yeah, I mean, they're actually a client with us at jll. We're helping them find a new space in town. They've really just found a lot of success after being featured on I Believe It's Shark Tank. And, yeah, they created, like, a robotic arm. And, yeah, they just made a name for this up in the industry and actually just found out about this news when you, when you show this to me. But I did see them post on Twitter. This YouTuber, he's like, he's huge. You, you do. He does an article. He does. And it's like millions of views, you know, the day it's released. So it's cool to see that they're being showcased by a very popular YouTuber.

Yeah, Marcus Brownlee, he pretty much does reviews of tech and so he gets the first of everything from electric vehicles to bionic hands. He's got 20 million subscribers on YouTube. And I just pulled up, this video's got 2.4 million views and 5,300 comments. So well done to the Psionic team on getting the exposure here, which is awesome. So hope that leads to, you know, growing the business, which I think they've got. Always have had a good public fundraise crowdfunding campaign going as well as scaling and growing their impact to help people who have limited abilities. Let's jump into some events. There's a lot going on. June 6th, tomorrow morning or whenever you watch this, the first Friday of every month. San Diego Founders Hike. 6:30am and we've officially, we've been asked for so long, we officially launched the afternoon version as well. So whenever we do our hike the following week, Wednesday, we'll do an afternoon sunset hike. I cannot claim I'll be at every single one of the afternoons because I gotta scale myself. And so I've got a partner, Rachel Louie, who is going to be leading the afternoon sessions. This actually is like 30 minutes before yours and I's AI gathering that we're doing. So I'm going to show up at the hike, it's down the street, and then not do the hike. Just say hi, let them off, let them go hike, and then come to our event. Someone even asked me, they're like, how are you going to be at two places at once? I'm like, I'm a magician.

So you have a twin brother out there. They see you everywhere.

That's the job here, is figure out how to scale ourselves. June 9, a new I just got asked to be on a panel. It's at ucsd. It's a whole day summit for family offices on kind of the future of investing and technology for family offices. So I'll be speaking on a panel actually alongside Adam Jacobs from the Djegos family, who is the CEO of Exome, a cancer diagnostics company. So we'll be talking at the Qualcomm Institute. Funny enough, about, you know, where is the future of investment in technology. I'll put a link to that in the show notes because I think you can still buy tickets to that. It's like a multi day conference that is coming to town using the Qualcomm Institute there. I think it's called Fyre F Y R E. Anyway, the next day, June 10th, we are gathering the Sports, Active Lifestyle and natural consumer brands community up in Carlsbad. We're partnering with sdsi, NACHO San Diego and City of Carlsbad to gather people up in Carlsbad there. It looks really large attendance actually on that one, but a very good curated community. And then Matt Hayden's famed Best Ideas dinner which happens usually in Orange county county, he's bringing it to San Diego. This is a group of family offices or fund of funds who kind of hear what are the latest funds and investments that are within his wheelhouse. Matt Hayden is kind of a legendary family office management leader who's helped a lot on the investment relations world. And there I'm speaking on kind of what my focus is of what I've been doing and what I'm investing in. Next weather event on your radar, Fred, I know you've been doing a bunch recently. You got. Yeah, more coming up.

Yeah, there was a Summer Social Connect Summer Social earlier this week that happened on Tuesday. Great turnout of folks I saw posted online launch Factory, which is accelerator in town. They had a small little happy hour with Daily Piper and New Fund Venture Group yesterday. Great group of great companies. We're excited about what they're doing in the the technology space and in town. And then I would just give a plug to Social Coyote. Jonah Peak gives a great newsletter. He curates kind of the public facing events. There's also a lot of private events and so definitely I would say connect with community builders. There's like groups like Connect, Evo, Nexus, Neil Bloom, myself, Usain from north county mixers and startupbeach.com and you know, talk to people, ask them what events are going to. There's definitely micro communities happening in north county, to Del Mar, La Jolla, to Downtown. There's really a lot of ways to get involved and you're probably only one person away to get connected, to understand what's going on. And we try to, you know, showcase some of the best events that are happening in the region. So yeah, thanks for listening and it's always a pleasure to do, Neil. It's great to just talk about all the stuff happening in town, not only to be in person to hear about it and meet people in person, but also share with others because I think people are just excited about what's happening in San Diego. It's just the beginning. It's a great ecosystem that we got.

It totally is. I. I always want to see you more in person, but this is the. This is the best we can do right now because we are out, you know, doing our thing in different areas and we barely run into each other until. Unless we're doing our own event. So always appreciate the time, Fred. And again, appreciate all of you for not just tuning in, but amplifying this so one give us feedback. Do you like this format? What else do you want to hear? And then share this with others that you think could believe in getting the value from this. We get tagged on on X and LinkedIn a lot and we appreciate that that's our best amplification in that regard. So keep doing that and we'll keep sharing and we'll keep building. So thanks, Fred. Thanks for all of you for tuning in. Yeah, man.

Always a pleasure, man. See you next time.

You know we got tacos in tech is on smash for the green guacamole keeper Counting, counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping Fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coating yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside the Tijuana estee be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on.

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