This Week in San Diego Tech News – July 22, 2022

It foreign.

Hello. Hello, Happy Friday. Neil Bloom here from Fresh Fresh Brewed Tech, which is a San Diego tech focused media entity and from Interlock Capital, a investment group. Well, it could be Friday for you or it could be another day, whatever day it is that you're listening to this because we do record this and we put it out on the Tacos and Tech podcast network. So thanks again for joining us. We try to do this every Friday. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but this week we're doing it and we're excited to have you all here. We've got a bunch of stories and I've got a co host, Sesha. Hey Sesha, how you doing?

Doing well, doing well. It's Friday, can't complain.

Yeah, can't complain at all. Especially summer in San Diego.

Absolutely.

Blue skies out my window though I'm inside so I guess it doesn't matter. But we, we've got got some good people listening in here. I want to welcome a longtime listener and brand new San Diegan, Matthew Greathouse. Hey Matthew, welcome to welcome to Carlsbad. Just moved in here. I'm actually pull you up on stage so you can introduce yourself. Let me try to do it because I want to make sure you get connected to others while you're here. How do I do that? Invite to speak. All right, once you get once that's sorted out, we'll connect you in here. I want to make sure you connect with Eric Grossett who's in the audience. Eric, thanks for being here, Matthew. Hey, how's one week in Carlsbad so far?

Hey, how's it going?

Can you hear me?

All right.

We got you.

Cool. Yeah. Just moved to Carlsbad. Born and raised in Santa Barbara. I work in revenue operations. Been doing that for about two years at a company called HG Insights. So feel free to hit me up if you want to learn more about optimizing your go to market strategy. I'm your man.

That's awesome. Well, welcome to town. We'll get you connected in. We've got a little bit of feedback. Sorry, we just identified a night we're gonna do sales slash revenue night, a talent tech networking night in October. I'm probably getting ahead of my event team here, but we already have the date planned for October 18th, so make sure you make your way to that because we're bringing together all the sales and revenue teams hopefully of San Diego to meet you as well. And also you should check in on and this is for everyone. We do once a month we do a Kind of. Welcome to San Diego Virtual Community. Welcome session. We use a platform from a local tech company called Weight Room. And the next one is August 1st at noon. So jump. You'll find links to it if you go to freshbroodtech.com in our newsletter or on our social and you can kind.

Of join the queue.

We'll kind of get you introduced and get you immediately connected to other people in town as well too. So thanks, Matthew. Thanks for being here and hopefully I'll see you in person sometime soon too. Well, let's jump into our stories. So Sesha, what do you think?

Let's do it.

Okay. So what we do is we read a bunch of local tech news stories. We've got. We like to go diverse. We do like to go big tech, startup tech, government tech, like all the above of what's happening. So we go for diversity here. And the first one we're talking about is focused on helping women entrepreneurs get off the ground. So national association of Women Business Owners and Bank of America teamed up to create a local women owned business owner accelerator. This was spearheaded by our very own Felina Hansen, who owns a network of women focused co working spaces called HERA Hub. And she has one in Carlsbad, she has one in Sorrento and I think closer to downtown area. And then she's got them in other states as well too. And so during COVID she, you know, found there wasn't a lot of focused area of people coming into co working as much, which is where they were getting a lot of informal guidance as business owners. And so she got the funding and the national network and mentors to come together and form this incubator. And bank of America is funding it, which is awesome. So they put nine companies through the first cohort. They get paired with a bit of a business buddy, as they're calling it, where they've got accountability, focus on goals and just supporting each other throughout. And they went so well that bank of America not only are they helping fund like the next cohort, but they're also funding a downstream version called the Growth Academy, which is for companies who are kind of like the launch Academy, it's a nine week course for, but they're focused on a little bit later stage. These are companies doing already 200,000 in sales and they need to have at least one full time employee and be.

In business for two years already.

So cool. Great to see this kind of spin up. It's, I know it's going to eventually move national, but to have it here in San Diego as the first spot. Go Felina. I love seeing that. That is so cool. One stat that. Oh, go ahead.

Oh no, she is. She's awesome. So just to see that this is like real inhabiting man. Props to her.

Yeah, yeah.

Just some stats about, you know, women owned businesses. So there's estimated that there's 13 million businesses run by women which employ more than 9 million people and collectively generate 1.9 trillion in annual revenue, which per a per business basis that's actually five times the national average for your average business not run by a woman. So that's pretty incredible stat that they can generate five times the revenue. And proud to have been back some great, great business owners who fall into this category, that's for sure.

Do we know how often they're running? Is it. Is it a couple times a year or is it multiple times?

How does multiple times a year. It looks like. So yeah, if you. I don't have the link but I'll put it in the notes. But yeah, I don't. We'll put the link in the show notes which will. Will go out on the podcast for how to apply. We should look for that. But yeah, it's called Launch Academy by.

Yeah, I mean it sounds cool. It is. So it is a nine week course. Wow, that's pretty cool though.

Yeah. Jumping into another story. This is a cool story. Gig Town any remember Gigtown, man? I, Andy Altman started this back maybe 2016 or so with his dad, Steve Altman, who was one of like the OGs of Qualcomm and together it was originally about connecting, you know, musicians and their audiences, but obviously Pandemic affected that and so there's a whole new reboot you want to take us through kind of the fresh from the ashes, what Gigtown's up to now.

Yeah, for sure. So this one was really fun. I love that they're calling it the Yelp for local music. I think that's just so fun and like it's clear that, you know, there's definitely a gap that they're filling in. But so what does Gigtown do? So we know that it connects musicians with fans and venues, but what they're trying to do and what they did during the pandemic was really pair down on what features they would want to include in a post post Pandemic version of this app. And so currently they're only on a desktop version and so one of their features that they're looking to add now is to make it through mobile sign in as well and so making it a lot more portable, a lot more easier to access and find more for music and find more artists. Additionally, they're also trying to create a zoom link that would allow for artists who virtually or listeners to virtually tip during performances, which I thought was really cool and quite ingenious because, you know, even during pandemic times, you can't, can't be live performances all the time. And so even having zoom performances, zoom tipping like it's, it's an ingenious way to handle a pandemic. So this is awesome to see. Oh, Neil, you're on.

I am.

I did it.

Yeah.

Got to do it once, right? Per day.

Yeah, it's great to see. And I think it's new owners, right?

It's, it's.

Some of the employees kind of took.

Over the operations of it because they felt so compelled by it. So cool to see gig town up and running again. Look for it for all your favorite local musicians. But great to see a startup here back from the bed, or so it would seem.

So it looks like they're also, they just created a we funder campaign and so they're trying to hit a $50,000 goal and they're already 50% of the way through. And yeah, I think it's going to be very exciting to see what they do next and what the new web app is going to look or, sorry, the new mobile app is going to look like. And yeah, I'm excited.

Yeah.

And to see that during even pandemic.

They generated over 550,000 in revenue for musicians, all from mostly corporate clients. So like hiring them for, for like internal company events virtually, that's pretty great. So a lot of new use cases for even, you know, virtual music playing. I definitely have been on some zooms where it started with someone live playing piano. I was like, oh, wow, all right, we're doing it.

Yeah.

Well, that's good news.

Let's go through a little bit of bad news from one of our big, big biotechs, Illumina. They lost a court bid to halt European antitrust review of the Grail acquisition. So, man, this has been a story for a while. The backstory real quick here. Grail is a spin is a multi billion dollar valued company that is going to, in a sense be able to offer a palette of cancer seeking tests that, you know, it'll be diagnostics where anyone can find 50 different ways to detect cancer in your body. And it spun out of Illumina and now Illumina is buying it back. So they spun out invested in it and now are buying it. And I think that there's been big FTC issues around, you know, if Illumina owns the way that certain things are diagnosed and they use the machines to do the diagnosis itself for some of these tests, like it's a little. That's why antitrust is involved. So I think, I don't know if we have the number here.

Oh yeah.

Eight billion dollar acquisition. So you know, it's kind of, kind of a big one for Illumina, which I think is about a 40 billion dollar market cap company. I gotta check that. I'm gonna pull up Robinhood while we're talking here, but you want to take us through some of the details specifically around Europe.

Yeah, for sure. So this, this is interesting. I've actually been waiting to hear back on this one because I remember hearing it on another podcast about what was happening here. And it's very curious to see what would be the results of this e you discussion. But essentially it's really on the grounds that this acquisition harms competitors. I. E. This is a horizontal merger. And so it's particularly complex in that as you said, we have many Grail competitors who are using Illumina gene sequencing tech. And so it's kind of like, well, if they're part of the same company, like is. Is there, is there, are we making sure that there is like proper grounds on the, on which the competitors can also build their own tech that competes with, with Grail. And so this one will be interesting to see what comes out of it. If regular, if regulators find this Illumina deal anti competitive, they could issue fines, they could require Illumina to sell off assets or they could really, really do some damage here. So I'm curious to see what will happen.

Yeah, and this is just one story in a series of antitrust for Illumina. Unfortunately, they've been hampered in multiple times to acquire other companies. Not to get too deep into this, but you know, there's two main areas of dissecting genetic material. They're short chain and long chain, which you would know this best. Seisha. But they were trying to buy their rival who was pretty much like the Illumina of the opposite chain that they do, which I think was Pacific Bio. No, so I'm forgetting the name. Well, the Illumina of the other chain, it got shut down from that. Then there's a local startup called Omnium that got acquired for 800 million by that other competitor that they were trying to buy, which is now right in Illumina's backyard. And now Illumina is trying to, you know, buy another suite of diagnostics. And again, they're getting stopped there as well, too, so tough going for them. Um, you know, it's, I guess it's, it's good and bad to be the name of the industry. They literally set the stage and just came out of what genetic sequencing is at a commercial level. But there's some smart people there. I think they'll get, they'll, they'll, they'll figure it out. I've gotten.

Yeah.

So, by the way, $31 billion market cap company now, which still, you know, puts it in the top 10 for market cap size in San Diego, easily, maybe even top five. So. But still at an $8 billion acquisition of Grail, that's, that's massive for them. So we'll see what happens. Mike Freeman loves, he's a great antitrust journalist, just great tech journalists in general. So we'll keep watching for Mike's articles from the interview and to see what happens next.

Absolutely. And I think going on to another fun biotech one. This is a little bit more, more good news, maybe. San Diego biotech Biocyte is acquired by its rival vertex Pharmaceuticals for $320 million in cash. This one is a very cool story. Do you want to take us through?

Yeah. And what's even cooler is diabetes tech in San Diego. So while we talk about genetics being a big cluster area, Diabetes tech is absolutely another super superstar of talent in San Diego. From Dexcom being a glucose sensor to Tandem being a glucose delivery vehicle, and then everything that is spun out in between. And we even interlock have a, have an investment in the diabetes tech space. So excited to see this because when you see acquisitions, you see talent usually moving. Now sometimes it means a loss of jobs, so let's not downplay that part, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here. What does Viacy do? Viacy is developing a therapy to help type 1 diabetics which, which is called juvenile diabetes, where they have complete loss of the pancreas, cannot produce insulin. Well, they're developing a procedure to, for people to the type 1 to produce their own insulin, which is awesome. Pretty. There's so many different ways of creating the fake pancreas, and this is doing it biologically more so than a straight up machine delivering it inside. So they're going to acquire for 320 million by Vertex Pharmacy, all cash. As of 2019, 1.6 million people over the age of 20 had type 1 diabetes. And needed to take insulin. And this affects my family, actually. My dad came down with type one at 21 years old. So kind of grown up around diabetes, which is why it's such a passion area for me. And at the time, actually, funny quick story, so he used to, he got it in the 70s. At the time there was no glucose meters. You literally had to go to a doctor's office and hours later they would tell you what your blood sugar was. Oh, gosh, hours ago. But in fact, even then, there was no doctor in LA that actually even had the capability. So he drove from LA to San Diego three times a week to Scripps to get his blood drawn. By the time he got home that night, they'd be like, hey, you know, this morning you were a little low. He's like, yeah, no, I wonder why. I felt a little lightheaded driving six hours today. So that was that. We've come a long way since that. And obviously now being able to take stem cell derived islet cells, which is what this therapy is trying to do. And they're currently in clinical trials to take kind of a credit card size implant of the stem cells, the pancreatic cells, insert it back under the skin. And early studies in this trial are showing that these, these cells are actually successfully triggering enough to secrete insulin, which is crazy. Who needs a pancreas? Just take the cells and put it in the body and just, you know, tell them to do their job. So vertex, though, competing entity here, they've got an injectable therapy which is kind of similar. So, you know, obviously one side sees that the power of them combined is better. And so, you know, another straight horizontal merger happening in the low 300 millions, which is great to see what happens next for hopefully solve getting closer to a solution for type one. Because just injecting yourself multiple times a day with just jabbing a needle into you, man, that is not a solution for the rest of your life, that's for sure.

And having to monitor it, what? And always. And always having to be careful, but it's, it's a lot.

Yeah.

And with like the price of insulin, like, it's crazy.

Oh, it is. It's is insane though. Speaking of prices of drugs, you've been hearing about Mark Cuban's new prescription drug service.

No, I have not.

Oh.

So Mark Cuban's got a whole whole new business called, I think it's called Cost plus Drugs, I think is what it's called.

Oh, this sounds familiar.

He's going directly to drug manufacturers, negotiating his Own price, pretty much getting it for cost and purely putting a. Oh, it's called cost plus 15.

They're all they're doing is doing a.

15% markup on the exact cost of making drugs. They've got examples of people who, you know a cancer drug, they're selling it for 54 bucks. It's 3700 for them to get it delivered by their doctor at the hospital.

Yeah, absolutely. It's insane.

So insulin is on that list as well of just looking for that. So I haven't tried it yet. But cost plus 15, a whole new startup just trying to deliver prescription drugs at a bare minimum price. Shout out to our last story is.

Another big tech story.

But it's tech. It's, it's Qualcomm. Qualcomm is joining forces with both Swedish and French firms to build this new satellite driven 5G which is a big deal for 5G to become a satellite because 5G is really known to be short wave, high intensity. And I just went to an awesome conversation on 5G this week by Evo Nexus. So I'm trying to get a little educated here, but take us through, like what does this really mean for Qualcomm's partnership here?

Yeah, for sure. So this one, what they're trying to do and what Qualcomm and Ericsson, who's a Swedish firm, and Tails, which is the French firm, they're working there to develop satellite driven 5G network and their goal here is to really improve terrestrial connectivity. And so this is, so we're making communication possible even in the remotest corners of the globe. And in the case of natural disasters, major outages as a failover. And so this, they're still in the testing phase. There are many difficult problems that have to be overcome here. But it's really exciting to see firstly, you know, that satellites move at really high speeds. And so, meaning that that link would have to be, would be successful, susceptible to a lot of changes. And so the tech here would have to counteract all of those changes and make sure that it would still work, you know, despite all of that happening. And so they're in the testing phase. They're expected to continue well into 2023 and eventually tests will have to happen on the ISS. So that will be very, very cool to see. I'm really curious to see what Elon has to say, you know, in regards to Starlink. Um, but let's see what happens.

We know what you will say. Well, Elon will say whatever's, you know, first Good for Elon and then. Yeah, but yeah, no, I think it's just good for having more applications and using for space. That's for sure. It's for the longest time, you know, people were unsure what why we're investing in space. Even just 10 years ago, why did we need the space station. And here we are using as a testing bed for connecting people at 10x speeds. So it's good for that area because space is so much harder than anything we build here on the ground, which means we're building smarter technologies. And deep space, deep tech gets applications too.

So all good things.

And great that it benefits us here in our backyard as well too. With Qualcomm. Well that's our show for the week. We like plowed through that. So hopefully now it's time for everyone to go out and experience Comic Con which just kicked off this week. Wednesday night through the weekend. You gonna go out there and put some cosplay on Seisha so.

Well, I would be. I'm actually up in Orange county this weekend, so I'm missing all the fun, but I've been seeing all the pictures and it looks so much fun. So maybe I'll have to head back a little early just to check it out, get on my pirate costume.

Oh no. Yeah, exactly. That's pretty typical of San Diego to leave town for Comic Con. I know I did when I lived downtown for sure as well too and used to be able to actually like rent out your place even that's like become harder to do during Comic Con.

But yeah, I mean I hear that like What Hotels are $1200 a night just because of the Comic Con. I'm like, wow, that is, that is different.

Yeah, no, it's great to see. And this is also, I think the first year that the full Comic Con museum is fully opened with actual content inside as well too. So that's all year round In B Park we did previously, we did Santa Startup week from that with the shell of the space. So I'm anxious to get out and actually see the museum on a different weekend. That's for sure.

Yeah.

Well everyone have a great weekend and week. Thanks for tuning in again. Remember to check out fresh brewtech.com for up to date news on fundings, jobs, events, what are events else that we have coming up? Founder hikes coming up on August 3rd. So I hope to see you there. Marketing night coming up late August, which is going to have maybe a little bit more of a consumer focus.

Should be interesting.

And then Devin Data night end of September not one of our events, but big fans of the Data Science Alliance Night with Bill Nye is coming up.

Yes.

Bill Nye is going to be in town, which is awesome. So go out and go see Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill.

Yeah, I think there's also the summer bash at the end of August, August 31st, I think.

Yes. San Diego, life changing. It's got theirs as well as Connect has the summer social in mid August as well, too. So lots of opportunities to see all in person, which we're looking forward to. So have a good weekend and we'll see you over the summer. Thanks, everyone.

You too. Have a great weekend. Bye.