This Week in San Diego Tech News – July 29, 2022

Hello? Hello? Oh, you can't talk yet. One second.

Hey there.

There we go. Happy Friday.

Can you hear me? Neil, you're on mute.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Huh? What's going on with my mic?

It's one of those Fridays. I feel it.

You can't hear me.

I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Oh, yeah, I can hear you. Okay.

Okay.

Cool, cool, cool.

Yeah, no, it's. It feels like it's just a weird Friday. I'm feeling it. It's in the air. I think we're getting into fall. That's what I think.

Yeah, it's true. Already we. But here we are now. We have the newest San Diegan in the audience. Matthew Greathouse. Good to have you here.

Welcome.

Excited to hopefully maybe see you next week on the founder hike. Matthew, if you can make it. But we got some good stories for the week maybe we're all still kind of in the Comic Con haze. The. The cops, you know, like we're still kind of getting over coming back to town after we abandoned it to. But we got some good stories. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Neil Bloom. I am an entrepreneur, an investor and a commuter builder and I do all of that in a few different ways. One, through this media entity of Fresh Brew Tech and the Tacos in Tech podcast where we promote all the great things that are happening in San Diego tech. Also put on our own events and through that I've gotten to know some great people and invested in some and recruited a bunch more to invest alongside me with through Interlock Capital. So very interested in continuing to build a community where we build good companies, invest in good companies and we all win because of it. And so on Fridays we do, we read the tech news of the week. We try to do it every Friday. Already going to shout out, we won't be doing it next Friday, but this week we've got some good stories and here to help me tell those stories is Sesha. Hey, Sesha.

Hey everyone. Nice to be here on this amazing Friday. My name is Sesha, former biotech data person, currently working working in cybersecurity and cloud evangelism over at Microsoft Azure. Check us out on Twitter ZeusSupport. I am a San Diego transplant by way of Seattle. I've been here for a few years and really loving every second of sunshine and every taco that I've had a chance to have. Very happy to be here.

Well, we're happy to have you. We'll have to dive a little bit deeper one day. Into what the cyber evangelism. Because I think people want to know.

But absolutely.

But for now they can, they can read what are the right tweets that they should be following.

Yeah, go to at Azure Support, that's where our main handle is. And I'm actually working on building out some security focused information. So check us out, head over there.

And yeah, we need to talk more about that publicly here since we did a story about a month ago that covered the cyber ecosystem economy of San Diego. There's like more than 400 cyber companies in San Diego and obviously Azure is a part of the cyber story. So anyway, we'll get back to that. For now, everyone, if, for when you're listening to whether it's live or in the future, please go and like and share our freshwater tech content. But also the podcast itself really helps get the word out so that we make sure we are spreading the biggest gospel. But we got to jump into the biggest story of the week. Apple really finally came out and announced, really that they are making a big stake in San Diego. We've been talking about, we've known it, but they finally comment on it. And so they acquired a 67 acre campus in Rancho Bernardo. That $445 million purchase of seven buildings to set some, set some new routes here in San Diego. Just diving into this a little bit. They've, and a little bit of the backstory. They have been buying up and, and building their own buildings from the ground up in UTC area since 2018. And they actually acquired an intel office in Scripps ranch back in 2020. So Apple has had office presence here besides their, their, the Apple stores. They've been, you know, just starting to get engineers in office since about 2018 or so. But this is the first time they're coming out and saying, you know, we're literally going to have close to 2 million in square feet in equal amounts in Rancho Bernardo and in utc. This article by Mike Freeman, who he's been covering it pretty well over the last year, says they say, you know, up to 5,000 employees between the campuses, which is massive. First of all, my calculation on square footage per employee, I think it's more, I think they really are going to squeeze 8 to 9,000 eventually here, but this is what they're admitting now. And either way that's a lot of new high paying tech jobs. So you want to give us a little bit of backstory on this as well, Stacia?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So this one is really interesting. When I started digging into it, you know, not just that it's a huge purchase, but it also, it's starting to highlight some of the contentious relationship and backstory between Qualcomm and Apple. So Apple, you know, that is focusing in, on building a hub for engineering wireless technologies here, here in San Diego, but it's focusing in particularly on designing its own cellular modem processors for its iPhone, which essentially would allow it to ditch Qualcomm as its current supplier. And that, that is a lot. So Qualcomm has said it will only supply to 20% of the 2023 iPhones. This is unsubstantiated, but when you look at how many court battles have ensued and that the contention has intensified when Apple bought Intel's cellular modem business unit for $1 billion, it is suspect for sure. And so I think it'll be interesting to see what happens here and in particular what role Apple is choosing to play. Down in San Diego, some people say that Apple has more ambitions than just wireless tech. I put on my detective hat and started looking through the job boards. And we do see software, we see data science roles, we see business roles. It's really all across the board down here. And so I think that just highlights the point that, hey, we could definitely see more than 5,000 people, 8,000 people. I think it's really just a push to see how many people we could get and really diving into what we can do down here in SoCal.

Yeah, my inside baseball, I may or may not know an Apple recruiter who said, yes, sure, they're hiring hardware because there's hardware talent here and firmware talent, but this really is going to be another software center of excellence for them. So it's totally separate from the Qualcomm piece. They really do want to build up just a good group that can build good software for their needs. So that is great to hear that also.

Oh, well, I think. And in terms of, hey, if we have Apple down here, what about the other big tech firms? Are we going to start to see more of a push in terms of that. That competition? Because I think that no matter what, there's always going to be some amount of competition between Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. And so I think this will be great to see. Like, does it mean that maybe Amazon is going to do more of a software push down here? Is Microsoft? I don't know. I think it's great for us.

Yeah, it's good in two ways. One, like you said it well, it's brand name. And honestly, brand name brings good talent. And and to be honest, even junior talent chases brand names even more.

Yeah.

And so because we, we graduates one of the largest pools of engineers every year and lose upwards of 60 to 70% of them. That's like a known fact that happens across Southern California. By the way, Louisiana has the same stat in terms of number of engineers they lose of new grads. But having name brands here actually keeps them here. And by the way, these are big enough brands who actually hire new grads. A lot of companies won't and I understand why. It's a lot of effort to train up brand new talent who's fresh out of college, who have no professional working experience. But this is the opportunity for us, I think in San Diego. So here in San Diego we have a number of people working in other industries like say military or biotech or other areas where they have worked as professionals, but they would love to work in tech. I'd love to see us really start to train existing professionals to be ready for tech jobs. Now it could be small steps, right? It could be that you were a technician and now we're going to train you to be maybe a quality assurance manager for software, maybe you were a project scheduler or manager and we're going to train you to be, you know, a product manager for software. I think there are incremental little skill sets that we should be looking into training our existing local talent pool that will behoove us so. Well, people already love the quality of life here, even if you are working non tech jobs and we already know housing is going to be so ridiculously hard. Why not get people who are already living here, give them a new set of skills and get them into better paying jobs to get them into the affordable housing that they deserve. So I'm super bullish on upskilling and reskilling local talent. And so I posted on LinkedIn yesterday about it and if anyone else wants to be working on this, please hit me up because I'm going to pour time and energy into these, these areas. Now real quick back to and man, we're going to talk a lot about this story for a second. Other companies that are here, Amazon has been here and is building out. I know they've got up to 1200 people already here. Google has acquired a company in San Diego like seven, eight years ago and are finally expanding that footprint of the old lubadigm team in Sorrento Valley to just house more Googlers who maybe have been working remotely. But it actually they've been busing Googlers from Encinitas up to Irvine for years now because Irvine's their big campus. So I would love to see them have a bigger footprint. The big thing though, obviously that we're seeing is all of this is north, kind of north of the 52. So yes, UTC Rancho Bernardo, there's a lot of big office space that is hoping and waiting for big tech to come downtown. And that's always been the big question. So that's the what if? What's great about downtown is it also is accessible to, you know, kind of east county, south county south of the border. These are, you know, million plus talent pool that I would love to see get into the tech ecosystem that maybe don't want to drive all the way up to Rancho. So anyway, a lot of opportunity here, a lot of excitement here from everyone all around, as you can tell. Let's just jump into our next story because otherwise we're going to spend the entire half an hour talking about Apple.

It's just, it's just there's so much here to unpack, so I get it. But yes, let's, let's move on to the perfect smile, maybe.

All right, take us through it.

Sure. Okay, so Brius Technology wants to give you the perfect smile. It has invented a new technology that it is calling the Independent Mover, which is a term for Brava tech, which. That's what it's called. That's what it's called. That uses AI and advanced alloy hardware to guide each tooth to a desired position independently. And so it's really just like the next gen of, of braces or Invisalign, which I'm feeling a certain amount of FOMO because I've def, I definitely remember the pain of braces. And so reading about, I'm just like, wow, this is way nicer than what I ever got. But this, it's cool because it really, what it does is it uses nickel titanium, which is a memory alloy and it's fashioned into a device that is attached to the back of your teeth. The software then scans the teeth and uses AI to build a person a patient's perfect smile. And then your orthodontist will look at that, that AI derived smile, it'll make sure that it, you know, that it's perfect. And then the, the appliance will then set to the final destination. And so as it sets, your teeth will move according to how it is set. And so it's essentially slowly but surely moving your teeth to the right alignment. It's supposed to be a lot gentler and A lot less painful than traditional braces or Invisalign is. And so I think it's, it's really cool to see. It's also covered by insurance and it's comparable to the price of like Invisalign or braces. And so I think this is really exciting to see.

Interesting. That's really cool. I mean I feel like what it feels like is that technology has really lagged for the Dauntless spot compared to like have you been a dentist? It feels like they've really teched up for the dentist side of just like these cameras in your mouth and even the cleaning stuff. But yeah, maybe just because we're not getting braces these days, but it's due time to try something new. This is pretty cool. I think they're. Are they Carlsbad based? I don't know if we have that. They are, they are cool and. Well, this is great to see. Congrats to Brius. Let's see if we all need to update our teeth later in life.

I mean, I know that I never put my retainer in, so probably and.

I feel like I've known so many people who've done Invisalign who had braces previously as well too. Another life science focused company, Persephone Biosciences, they are focused on the microbiome area of therapeutics and they raised a $15 million seed round. So this is in the cancer therapeutic space and they're doing precision probiotics, so gut kind of therapy for cancer detection. You worked in this area before, didn't you?

Yes, I did. And actually I was reading through this and I, you know, back in the day of researching I was focused mainly on the therapeutic side so building, creating cancer therapeutics that would really just focus on hitting the cancer cells themselves. But this is, this is properly more on how do you use the microbiome to boost that therapeutic response. And I think it's really cool to see. It's. I'm curious to see, to know and understand how the microbiome therapeutic will interact with the actual cancer therapeutic. But it sounds like they're currently doing a research study that would exactly look into that and understand how does the microbiome affect oncology patients and how do they interact if you were to take an anti cancer drug and the drug that they're trying to invent. So this is, this is a cool story. I think we'll have to see how that works, how the interaction looks like. But I mean I feel like microbiome therapeutics is really the Next step, how do we use our own immune system to boost response?

Yeah. And San Diego, we don't talk about this on this podcast enough, but San Diego actually is a microbiome brain trust. We've got one of the biggest research divisions on it at UCSD that I think either started or at least is the main partner of the. What is it called? The big Gut, the American gut something gut challenge. And a lot of spinoff companies doing microbiome for blank. In fact, Sun Genomics we recently had on the podcast does a custom vitamin blend once you send them a stool sample. And there's other microbiome for like facial, for what's it called for like skin formulas to where you give them samples and they'll create a custom blend for you. So this precision probiotic is very much becoming a mainstream thing, a consumer thing, but now adding in the cancer therapeutic piece where we're fighting it ourselves. That's awesome. That is two superpowers of San Diego coming together. Speaking of the precision, maybe this is less precision, but I came across a site that you can get paid up to $500 per stool sample. Yep. So if you're looking for a little side hustle, I'm happy to share the link with anyone who's interested in this. Not a San Diego company, so. So I don't really know where it.

Goes, but anyway, I'm kind of intrigued. Wow.

All right, I'll share it with you. All right, we're moving off of this subject. We're moving to the clean tech side of San Diego. So company called nuvi, which we, I think we broadcast about a year ago when they went public, they're a interesting EV charging company. They actually work on technology that helps you bring power back to the grid. So let's say you've got, you know, your car is already full of battery, you plug it into your house and you can actually use it as a backup battery source. So it allows what is called V2G vehicle to grid technology. And so they've just partnered with San Diego Gas and Electric and Cajon Valley schools to the three of them together have kind of built out a backup system where Cajon Valley schools is buying electric buses. So eight 60 kilowatt fast chargers and eight buses. And they're going to charge the buses at the off peak times to make sure that they're not paying super high electricity pieces. But then these batteries on the buses are so big that they're using newbies technology to use the batteries to power back during high peak time. So to not use as much on grid power, but to use school bus power because the school bus is only used at certain times of the day. Right. In the morning, maybe the afternoon. So super cool to see this coming together. And in fact, Cajon Valley schools, they actually got 95% of the costs of the electric buses, which cost $400,000 a piece. They got almost, nearly all of it paid for by grants between state, federal, San Diego Gas and Electric and other opportunities. So this is pretty cool to see local technology, local utility actually doing this as well, benefiting, you know, one of our public schools.

Yeah, no, this was really cool to see. I saw that these batteries actually have a capacity of up to 210 kilowatt hours, which is five times more than the typical electric car, which is just by itself. Great to hear. And they can also charge these buses in two to three hours from being fully drained, which again is like a great, a great way to what, like use buses. And then it only takes a few hours to get them back to full capacity. So great to see.

Yeah. And most schools nowadays have pretty much installed solar everywhere, so I would imagine they're also utilizing solar energy for, for generating electricity too. So hopefully that is part of this as well. So more to see from Nuvia. I remember when they went public, it was a very tiny IPO and it was one, you know, almost like a micro cap ipo but you know, thought, hey, they gotta get their way to liquidity. Just like a lot of biotechs, you know, you need access to more capital to bring it to market. So it's cool to see them finding applications of this and makes me want to go pico with that newbie stocks doing these days as well too, which shout out to. We have a public spreadsheet that we built that tracks every San Diego public stock and it updates price in real time. It's got some good historical data on when they went public at what market cap and what market cap they are at now. So I think it's linked in. Where can you find that Easily if you look up the 2021 Venture Report we put out, it's right at the top of that leak. So just type in freshbrewtech.com search 2021 report and you will find a link to our our public spreadsheets. But we'll link it in the show notes of this one as well too. For our last story, Carrie Health. Do you know, are you familiar with Carrie Stacia?

I have not. So I wasn't familiar until I started getting into this story a little bit deeper and it's super cool. So it's battling the opioid crisis through a wearable device that essentially detects if patients have taken their methadone, which is a treatment for opioid and for being addicted to opioids. And so this helps people who may not have to have to go in every single day to their doctor's office to get treated or to get tested to see how they're doing in terms of their regimen. And so the device will detect if a dose is taken that day or not. And it also allows doctors to remotely adjust the dosage depending on how patients are reacting. And so I think this is great. This is just the next step in helping us find a way to. To beat out the opioid. Opioid epidemic. Yeah, no, this is, this is a great one.

Yeah. We've gotten to know the company a little bit over the years and they. Well, first, the opioid epidemic has just exploded, unfortunately. 68, 630 overdose deaths in 2020 alone. You know, without Covid around, that would have been a pretty big number for, you know, one deaths from one space specifically. And Kerry, is what they've discovered one is that there's just these, these barriers for people to continue to get their methadone that they need, which keeps them away from, you know, going back to the old habits of heroin and other things, you know, and having to every day go and drive. And sometimes it's a long distance, you know, people don't live. There's not a clinic everywhere that can readily available service every, you know, methadone patient. So just being able to give the flexibility to do this at home or at least self medicate under the guidance of a doctor from remotely would be a big change of quality of life for many people. So super cool to see. Obviously they did. They attracted a lot of capital from the San Diego angel conference this year that just happened in April. I think they gained a $350,000 investment from SCAC and now they're on their way of designing the medical device part itself, which I think is the first big hurdle. Making sure they can actually detect, you know, different chemicals right below the skin and then actually build the business case around it as well too. But they're on their way. So excited to see Carrie continue to do well. Last shout out here. For a company that we've known for a long time, Cordial. So Jeremy and Adam and team have been building Cordial for I think at least eight, seven, eight years. They actually were the they're in the email marketing space so I think Shout out to Al knows them I'm guessing knows them pretty well. Cordial just raised a series C of $50 million and we're excited to see them continue to do well. They're actually deep domain experts in the email space. I believe they previously came from Blue Hornet, which also was an email technology company and then started Cordial. So congrats to Jeremy and team on continuing to grow well and they're they're a downtown company so it's good to see another company who is still downtown. And that's our show for the week. Now that does not mean there isn't a lot else going on. Next week alone there's some big events that we're doing ourselves. So Monday August 1st we are hosting our welcome to San Diego. So if you know someone who is new to town, includes you Matthew. Come join us at 12 o'. Clock. Get in kind of you'll jump in the queue on weight room and introduce yourself and see how the community can help you. It is video and we do record it so you can go and watch it later. But the goal is to really have a bunch of people listening but also then joining and introducing yourself so we can plug you in all at once. So send someone each everyone listening to this. Send someone new that you know who either is in San Diego or is moving here soon. Send them to that Monday at 12 o' clock. You I'm sure you can find a Link on my LinkedIn third was it Wednesday? We've got the 6:30am Founders hike which should be really fun. We had like 30 people last at our first one last month so we're doing it again. Torrey Pines Beach 6:30. Try to park just on the free beach parking area so you don't have to pay the 20 bucks for the day in Torrey Pines parking lot and meet us at the the bathrooms. We'll take off by 6:35 6:40 and be done at 7:30. We'll be done an hour or less so should be good to get that going. There's a bunch of other stuff happening. There's the Connect Social on August 11, the SD Life Changing Summer Bash on August 31 and San Diego Marketing Night. Or that we call it. We're calling it yeah just Marketing Night by Fresh Brew Tech connecting senior and junior marketing talent on August 30th. So a lot going on in August. It's a busy month. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you out there in person. What are you looking forward to going to? Oh, you. I know what event you're going to.

The Data Science alliance is hosting a really. I'm so excited for this. It's hosting Bill Nye, this is Science Guy on Thursday. Somewhere up in, I think it's by like Torrey Pines, but it's definitely going to be a good evening. It's Thursday. I think it's at 6:30. That's when it is. But it's going to be a good time for sure.

Oh, you got Bill Nye. You got Mayor Todd, Gloria. Oh yes, and some other data heavyweights like Ilka from the San Diego Supercomputer Center. This is really like a new kind of coming out, relaunching the Data Science alliance, which is awesome. They've got a new executive director, Patricia, who we're really excited to to meet and see. So this is a great coming out party for them. I'm unfortunately going to miss it and so I'm going to miss meeting Bill Nye. So you go and shake his hand for me. Yes, I'll fangirl my favorite gift which is, you know, him saying science and lightning behind him because that's of course one of my most used gifts for sure. Well, thanks everyone for joining in tuning in here. Make sure you share this with others. This will be live on Twitter pretty much immediately to reshare and it will be live on our podcast probably by the end of the weekend. Hopefully if we can get to it and keep sending us your news for us to share. Share Fresh Brew tech newsletter and podcast as well too. And we'll see you next time. Thanks everyone.

Thanks everyone. Have a great weekend.

Cheers.

Bye.