This Week in San Diego Tech - January 16, 2025

Hello, everyone. Neil Bloom, back at you with this week in San Diego tech news. And we've got a bestie guestie in the house. The OG bestie guesty from the original days of this podcast, the Social Cody the how guy, Mr. Jonah Peak. Welcome to Back to the Pod. What up?

Look who's back. Neil, where are you at these days?

I am at Verity Packaging HQ over here, sampling some of their finest sustainable packaged goods. Seeing some of the fine handiwork that Carrie and team are doing here. It's so cool to hang out with portfolio companies all day and just share our notes. And our network just dives into a question of, hey, you know, I was thinking about this. I'm like, ah, I got the right people to talk to about that. Oh, yeah. Fun to be in person, fun to dive deep with companies. And it's fun to have you here in the flesh on the pod. Man, we started this way back on that little app that everyone was listening into during COVID when there was nothing else going on. And here we are on a weekly podcast. It's good to have you here, man.

Hell yeah. Let's get into it.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech in tacos, tacos in tech. You know we got tacos in tech is on smash for the green guacamole keeper Countins counting beans contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping paella tortillas round holly jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing Coronado eating tacos el gordo, the tacos stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya shores. Entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer. Oceanside to Tijuana SD 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. Hashtag SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on.

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 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 checking tacos, tacos in tech. You know we got it.

Hey.

Hell yeah. And do you want to mention where Fred is or. Or we just give him. Yeah, give. Give him a. Hell no.

We gave him a shout out last week too. Fred. Okay. He was on a. A trip for his master's program overseas. He's currently in Hong Kong, headed to Tokyo with just learning global real estate. So. We miss you, Fred, but it is so good to have the how guy here. And we may may try a few triple guesty bestie shows here in the future as well too. We've been talking about just a little sneak peek there before we begin too deep. We want to send a lot of love to our friends and family in LA. I'm born and raised in LA in the 818. Seen a lot of friends lose their homes. It's terrible. Including some San Diego friends who moved to LA semi recently. The co founder of Sochi unfortunately lost his home, is back in San Diego with family. He actually will be at TechCon SoCal. It's kind of getting reintroduced to the ecosystem. So if you see Tony out there, give him a howl and give him some help. I know the community stepped up big time in offering supplies, but he's one of many who are going through a lot up there, so hopefully one. I just hope the fires are done by now already and now everyone can work on repairing. So sending love to everyone out there.

Absolutely. It's crazy. It's fun. One of those things where you're like, major, major US City. Kind of, you know, hard to picture. It's the type of thing where you're like. If you describe, you're like, nah, it's not possible. But yeah, when you see it, we're so. It's so, you know, and there's so, so much going on. Like, especially with TechCon coming up, we see so many people from LA coming down. You're really thinking about it. You know, we're kind of down here and we seem to have this major military base kind of dividing us, but it's like, man, it's like, it's right there.

Totally. And it's hard to imagine what everyone's going through. I'm, I'm actually throwing an event next week in LA in Burbank and I, you know, it was just like, hey, I want to be sensitive to everyone here.

Should we be doing this?

They're like, no, we're definitely doing it. It's the best for everyone to just not think about the fire for a little bit. So still the ecosystem, heart beats no matter what. Speaking of ecosystem, first of all, congrats, man, on what you've built with Social Coyote. It's such a beating heart of the ecosystem, of letting everyone know what is going on. And so congrats on that and congrats now on the next part that you're about to launch here, which I'd love for you to say.

Yeah, absolutely. The Caddy career. So kind of like, basically what we've discovered is there's just so many different groups in San Diego. And that kind of came out of just finding events, finding where people like to organize, finding people, you know, kind of expanding in their groups. But, you know, when you go out to as many events as, you know, you and I do, you start to run into people who are saying, hey, I might be looking for my next thing, or, hey, do you know anybody that fits this profile? And so, you know, finding. There's, there's a number of people that could benefit from getting introductions to startups, startups that are hiring and moving in quickly. But I'm also kind of hearing that it's tricky to sort of filter through sort of the LinkedIn side of things. And so, you know, as I started digging through a lot of the sort of big startups or startups that are growing, you see a lot of really cool stuff on their local career pages. You know, it's not on LinkedIn necessarily as much, there's some, but it just feels like there's a huge opportunity to help a lot of people. And, you know, as you know, if, if, if people are finding good opportunities in the city, they stay here. If they stay here, you know, our, our whole ecosystem does better. And what we've noticed, and you've kind of brought this up a whole time, is when someone joins us, a tech company, it gets big enough to exit in some way or another. Guess what? You know, people are going to be kind of pouring their resources back into the city, starting something else or investing in something else. And so, you know, if we can kind of do just a small thing to kind of help people in that part of their career who aren't maybe ready to start something or maybe never will or want to at all, but to in the early and later stages of tech company, you know, that's kind of what I'm hoping to do. So saw another group, a cohort that we could kind of support, and we're curious to see what happens, where it.

Goes well it's super smart. If you follow Jonah on LinkedIn, you know, you're having like conversations with your LinkedIn posts, both text and the video and audio now, which I love. And you start getting into how. What do you do for smart networking? You don't just show up to event, you have a purpose. You, you ask questions, you build a deep relationship, even if it's a few sentences in. And inadvertently everyone's got an ask or a reason. Not just like, I'm just looking to find a best friend. It's usually, you know, like I want to build a community around that helps and I can help. Right. Give and get. And inadvertently there's people who are, you know, I think if you've been to one of the founders hikes, some of the things questions I pull everyone quickly is who's a founder, who's an investor, who's looking for capital, who's raising capital, who's hiring and who's looking for a role. Right. And that like very quickly helps put people into quick little buckets. That's like, okay, great, me go have a 20 minute conversation with someone. It's not going to be as transactional as like, are you hiring? Yes. No. Great, moving on. No, we're going to have a conversation, be like, can I help here? Can I help point you in the direction to get you to the path that you're on? And that's what makes an ecosystem spin faster, is when we all connect quicker to the things that we all need. And if we're all helping each other in that regard, we also faster though too.

So totally. I love that, I love that you do that and I love that you kind of have that sort of pulled back from the heavy. There's not a heavy intention. It's not like everyone pull out your business cards. It's kind of like let's just sort of like, let's do something different. Let's move, let's get the blood flowing. Let's kind of see if we can get, yeah, get some, get, get, get something different going. It's actually built a pretty huge following. People need to, you know, set their coffee pots on auto brew and get out there. It's awesome. When the sun finally comes up, you're like, man, yeah, good spot to be.

Yeah. Well, with the career piece I think also comes just an awareness of the ecosystem. I'm sure when I started doing this, by the way, like finding tech roles back in 2015, 16 when I was bringing hired to San Diego, I also started like my newsletter at that Time. And I was just like, what? This company is hiring five people?

Totally.

All that was just like, discovery. That's like, what. I had no idea that who was the one that blew my mind that we found. Oh, well, Snapchat is the one right now that's still under everyone's radar. Even though we've talked about them, that they have an office in San Diego. I think it'd still be people be like, what. What was the big. What's the elephant app? It was like everyone was using it for. It was like the OG notion.

Oh, Evernote.

Evernote. So like, Evernote had a team here. And everyone's like, what? And Shazam had a team here. Some of that discovery part is kind of cool to find the companies that are hiring in San Diego. So, yeah, for you to discover that. Share it how it. From the rooftops and get people hired so that we can keep building, some good tech people can stay in San Diego, which we know pretty much everyone wants to do. And to do that, you need a good tech job. So.

Totally.

Yeah. All right, well, thank you. There's a link in the. In the show notes. Subscribe to the Kite Career Coyote for that. Let's jump into some of our news stories here. One jumping out for me as a North county resident is Carlsbad getting some more flights. Stoked for this because. Because we had them that took them away and now they're back. So. Palomar Airport Road. Palomar Airport is. Is. This is actually a really busy airport for personal aviation, but commercial has been. It's been touch and go, to use an aircraft term. They've had surfair. Surfair left. It's got JSX Jet Suite X, which is an awesome small little plane company that only goes to three locations, though, from. From Palomar. But American Airlines is coming back. I know it doesn't affect you as much, but for me, I'm stoked to have some connectivity here.

Well, you know, something funny, like, I'm pretty sure I'm a friend of mine was relaying a story over where they're picking up a friend from the airport. They're like, yeah, cool. So, like, tell us when you get in. And they sent this kind of like, obscure airline and they had accidentally booked up to Carlsad instead of San Diego International down there. And so I was like, oh, my gosh. It's actually, you know, you can actually get flights in and out. But I mean, honestly, regional airports are the best. I don't know if you've ever kind of hit a couple of them. And it's my favorite.

Oh yeah. I mean, I grew up going to the Burbank airport, which is like so cool. Best regional. But honestly, San Diego airport feels regional. I mean, the fact that you can get in and out quickly except for the security line, you know, even depending, even with TSA pre check. But still, it's such an accessible airport. So Palomar is even next level where you can scoot in 10 minutes before a flight and like hop right in. What I'm looking forward to, honestly, because of the lack of international connectivity at San Diego Airport, is the flights from Palomar to lax. And so that's a quick hop over to LAX and then you're anywhere in the world. So I hope those are the flights that come back soon. We'll see. But they're coming back quick. I mean, I think it's February, there will already be flights, commercial flights from American. I think it's like American Eagle will be flying out to other places. So anyway, we'll keep an eye on that.

Amazing. Go.

There's been some funny news, definitely some life science continues to dominate the funding rounds over the last year and man, there's been some big ones. You can imagine it's JP Morgan Biotech week right now. So this is when a lot of announcements come. Who knows when these actually close? Probably in December. And they just waited to announce during JP Morgan week, some big therapeutic ones. Timberline 180 million Light Horse Series A. Light Horse Therapeutics 62 million Series A and Ribodin, a 4 million dollar pre seed. These are big numbers for the rounds they're at, that's for sure. We got a little bit of details on here, you know, that we aren't life science guys at, at all here, but Jonah bringing the tech in here helped us, you know, describe a little bit of what's going on here. Do you know a little about Timberline?

I. I'm like afraid to pronounce some of these things. No, but I. It looks like they're, they're developing the therapies, therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancers, which sounds, I think, kind of, you know, a little generic in a sense. But, you know, it's like there's so many different roads you can go down in different cancers and different autoimmune diseases. You can actually dissect that. There's, you know, there's a good chance that they're going after something specific. It looks like monoclonal antibody targeting with a promising trial result. So I would imagine. And you Know like you said, you probably know a bit more about biotech than me and we both admit to not being experts is when you start to get these good trial results. I think that's what starts to bring in some really heavy, heavy funding because you can actually get through, get through the rounds. So that that's looking like they're aiming. It says they're aiming to to deliver transformable or transformational durable treatments for unmet medical needs. So it sounds like they're going after things that haven't quite been addressed before. There's that surface level there.

I think the worth hearing for everyone is just like especially over the rapidity is who's funding these companies. Especially even you know if you're a founder and you're just like where's the capital? Even if you're not in this world hearing that, you know Abingworth, Bain Capital and Venrock. You hear Venrock a lot in bio deals. You don't hear a lot of Bain Capital to be honest. So just hearing that is unique and interesting and you should take note. And you know pattern matching works as the more deals you look at getting funded while you're working at how can I get my company funded there as well too.

What about Mountain Field Venture Partners Key Med bioscience Looks like they're strategic too. Is that was that part of this round?

It looks like. It looks like they kind of secured some commercialization rights with them related to China. So it looks like maybe this was originally a Chinese technology that they actually got the rights outside of China to commercialize. So. All right, interesting to see that for sure. Let's move on to Light Horse Therapeutics Series A. This is kind of them I believe coming out of stealth a bit of a launch and to develop new medicines backed by investors like Versen Ventures and some strategics like Bristol Myers Squibb or BMS if you're in the and Abbvie. Also a strategic this is a special function first method to find hidden weak spots in proteins linked to diseases with a focus on cancer.

Interesting.

Yeah yeah. Another big therapeutic top scientist coming out of Harvard, Stanford and Scripps Research tsri the Scripps Research Institute is where you see a ton of cancer research coming out of for sure.

Amazing. Love that.

And they also have a brand new building. I don't know if you've seen that over there. You probably see it if you are leaving the founders hike and headed to Genesee to get on the five you like dead.

Yeah.

Brand new TSRI building which I don't wow. It's beautiful.

Well, you know, it's interesting if you're. If you go actually have Fred speak on this, but they're kind of saying that the tiers of sort of biotech, where you want to be in biotech, it's like if you want to be there, if you can be there, you're like, you know, you're in a palace and then I think you move. I think you're moving a little bit further east there. But that's like the prime spot to be if you're in a biotech, you want to be right there in Torrey Pines area. And, you know, I can completely see.

Why the mesa, if you will. There's a lot of mesas in San Diego, but, you know, depends on which. Which world you're rolling in. If you're rolling an Aztec basketball, you're also talking the mesa as well too. But plenty of mesas here, I guess for the town of Mesas, maybe.

Yeah.

Lastly, here is Ribodin, which is a precede announcement. They're also working on hidden proteins in human cells using a special technology called ribosypher. And they've uncovered 8,000 new protein pieces, including about a thousand that could be key for treating cancer. That's a lot to work through. Hopefully the 4 million goes a long way in that regard. It's a lot of different proteins to go and sco discover here. Yeah.

You'd wonder like, as they start getting through there, are we gonna see another one? Are you gonna see just like a mega round? If they find something within that, you know, thousand or so, it could be huge.

I mean, that's kind of the. This big promise of AI meets bio is that. Yeah. And it's always been the promise of therapeutics. I feel like from what little I know is that you're not just discovering one, you're hopefully building a platform of a way to synthesize and then reapply, you know, some therapy. It seems like though, this is totally the unintelligent world that I view is. But like you, it takes so much just to bring one drug to market, one therapy market. You get taken out billion dollars that you don't even necessarily have time to go back and build the platform. Yeah, maybe why founders sell and then within a year go back and build that next company and come out with 100 million in funding. Because it's like, let's just go rinse and repeat.

Well, wait, check this out though.

It says the.

The they're targeting. This is really interesting. Targeting proteins Only found found only on cancer cells to create better therapies. Which is a really interesting problem with cancer is kind of destroying everything around in including the cancer. But if you're able to sort of target it a little bit more, you know, specialized or specific, that could be really powerful.

It's a fair point. Yeah, really interesting. Well, congrats to these teams for growing and raising. Usually what you do after you raise is you go hire some people and so good spot to go highlight. Next is after you raise go, go publish your, your career postings on the Coyote career page.

So it's a good strategy when you see funding news. Yeah, start keeping, start refreshing their, their pages and especially if you like what a company's up to, I mean that's kind of, that's like huge. I think that's kind of number one. Right. I mean if you can sell why you love it and why you want to be there, I think that's really huge.

Even better than waiting for them to post Jobs is to reach out to them as soon as you see funding news. Ideally they would get. They'd like to not have to take in the masses. They'd like to have hot intros there. So yeah, go go talk to the early stage companies who are taking in capital. Right now we got some big tech news especially last week we reported out on CES and big announcements there. Ces, you know, the biggest consumer electronics. It's become more than consumer. I mean you've got pretty much the biggest tech conference happening year round. You had a lot of San Diego actually representation. I saw Cheryl Goodman out there doing a ton of AI posting. She was there for Nvidia CEO Jensen's keynote on Monday. C Comp had a whole booth the whole week and we're doing showcases of their companies a lot or San Diego and then the big companies of San Diego, Illumina and Qualcomm had some big news announcements. Qualcomm which has been on this big diversification path for a long time, right. They've needed to get outside the handset and to, you know, diversify. So you've seen them in auto and they had a lot more auto announcements. You've seen you actually they had a lot of announcements in around the personal computing space. So beyond mobile, they're actually going back to powering laptops and PCs. Super interesting considering that Apple, which originally started in laptops and PCs, is trying to build their own mobile to replace Qualcomm. So all very interesting to see that for sure. Qualcomm also had announcements around smart home enterprise solutions and a lot of AI ecosystem kind of building, whether it's, hey, we're not just building a platform for drones, we're building a whole ecosystem where there's AI products on top of our AI chassis or our drone chassis or our chip chassis or anything like that. So you could see a lot more of the partnership kind of world coming out with Qualcomm there. Expect more diversification, that's for sure.

That's awesome.

Last one here is Illumina, which came out the big announcement with Nvidia in using Nvidia products to power next generation genome matching and detecting. Nvidia honestly, kind of stole the show. I feel like for ces, they came out with just like robots for everything. So what everyone knows Nvidia 4 is like, they're kind of like the intel inside. They're the GPU powering compute, or before that they're powering gaming, you know, like video interfaces and then they're powering bitcoin mining. And then obviously they're powering GPT and AI, right. But now they come out and bring out the huge show around, hey, we're also powering hardware like physical robots. We're not just powering software and generative AI. So that was super interesting to see that. And then to see also where they're applying that to the life sciences world, where Illumina is already the leading platform for decoding the genome to now use what seemingly looks like the most modern compute technology powering life science technology as well too.

Interesting. You know what's really kind of fascinating about the Nvidia kind of story of them being in all these different places is their first. I think it was the first and second chip. Just listen to a story on the founder tried to do everything. Like they didn't have a focus of any kind. Right. They couldn't figure out what they were. But the investors believed in the founder. They got through it. And I think chip number three was, you know, their, their mega success. But it was kind of funny because it's like, you know, then they're like, okay, gaming, let's go that way. Now they're kind of like, now we just, we'll power everything. Robots, we got it. Like, you know, your game, PC, we got it. You want to mine some crypto or whatever. I think they're still doing that. So it's got a funny, funny way the thing that they've built themselves into.

Yeah, it is interesting. I listened to a recent interview with Jensen on the BG Squared podcast. I don't know if you listen to Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley really, I mean he's just so down to earth for, you know, being one of the richest companies on earth. And he talks about how like we don't have a long term plan. Right. It's like what interesting. It should be a 3 trillion dollar company 30 years in the making with no long term plan per se. It's like, nope, yeah, aim to build the best compute product that ever was and everything, you know, and just finding its way into everything else in that regard. So cool to see that being tapped into from San Diego technology companies, even, you know, multi billion dollar companies based here.

Let's do it. Well, you want to talk about Taycan?

Yeah. Our event list is always powered by the social Coyote. This being TechCon, SoCal Week, Friday and Saturday. Let's do some previewing here. I've been pretty heavily involved in organizing it this year. I moderated a few panels last year and I took us even bigger step and said I want to own the deep tech track and the fintech track and you know, I'm always big on, on raising my hand and taking on too much. So proud to do it. Being my podcast, I'm happy to promote and that I'm building the deep tech track. I really wanted to focus on some content, some things that are hot, you know, like. And first of all, there's so much AI being talked about at this conference which is great. We've got people from Nvidia there, we have whole panels on the thesis of AI investing. So you'll hear a lot of that. And so I want to say there's going to be a lot of AI. Great. And I want to have the other side, which is, which honestly is what a lot of San Diego is. We've got a lot of hardware and deep and what, what, what the LA ecosystem actually calls hard tech. So I may rename this the hard tech track next year. We've got a panel on the future of energy that will have leaders from General Atomic, UCSD on the fission reactor that's being fusion reactor. It's been worked on for a long time. Nuclear is like top of mind all over again because of AI for powering data centers. We also on the panel have the Navy's head of energy innovation, Captain McKissick. He runs the whole energy portfolio for the Navy which has the longest running nuclear power plants. Right. But also is looking to power Fleet Land and other operations as well too. And missile and defense energy as well and to round out the panel, I just added San Diego State's head of Lithium Valley, which San Jose State has put a physical campus out in Imperial Valley at the Salton Sea where they found one of the largest deposits of lithium. And they're bringing research and academia to there to alongside the miners, the lithium miners, to focus on what is the future of this resource for the battery world. So going to be super interesting conversation. I'm stoked to do that. I think I'm moderating that at this moment. So come see that one Saturday. We've also got the future of food and we happen which is a really cool crossroads in San Diego of life sciences and food innovation. Got four power leaders on kind of the future of food. From both an aquatic fish like growing fish with nip bio to alternative fish, meaning never having to fish again with blue Nalo, to alternative ingredients for things that have previously used like fillers with plantable foods. They've found a natural alternative to a lot of natural ingredients out there. And lastly with the the last company has escaped me Omego Bio, who is also in the alternative egg space building finding a bio life sciences connection to making healthy eggs in another way. Super interesting. I'm gonna quickly go through the rest of these deep ones because man I love them all.

We have wait real quick do are there where's the quick. Where are people going to get because there's a lot of there's a lot of panels where people are going to get the, the kind of the schedule and like how do you make sure that you're hitting these ones?

Yeah, techcon, socal.com where you can find the schedule. And then there's now the app is now live and so you can download the app in both the Apple and Google Play store to register and see what all these panels are about. All the speakers, there's a bunch of VCs flying in town talking both from early stage, late stage, where they're spending their money this year have a lot of enterprise tech leaders, you know, from say like an Nvidia and others, where they're looking at innovation, where they're looking for partnership and where they're exploring new, you know, industries to kind of go into as well too. So you'll see a lot of that. All right, so I will, I'll highlight I won't go too much more into the deep tech one. There's a lot of good deep tech, the fintech one. We've got some baking tech tech, we've got crypto, we've Got prop tech, which I think are three key areas that San Diego has got some great talent in. And so you'll hear some, I don't know, the kind of state of the market in those areas. Prop tech, by the way, is property tech or real estate tech. Could be mortgage, it could be lending, all the above. So you've got companies like Bluma, who's raising a Series B. You've got the newest pre seed deal that's interlock, just participated in retro rates and that's on the proptech one as well, so should be great.

Proptech lives under fintech. Is that kind of what you were?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the fintech track includes property tech and bank tech payments. You know, kind of. This is kind of a big cluster. There's wealth tech, which, by the way, speaking of wealth tech, Cody Barbo will be in the house speaking, I think more on a scaling software panel. We've also got the original founders of the cell phone, Marty and Arlene Marty. I think the famous video you've probably the ad you saw of him making the first cell phone call in New York. He's. He's one of the keynote speakers. Also one of the keynotes is Carta's head of insights and data, Peter Walker. Puts out amazing reports all year round on Twitter about here's what ecosystem funding looks like. We actually, him, me and Fred often have conversations on Twitter about, you know, data we're seeing in San Diego versus what he's seeing. And so I'm excited to see him in person here in San Diego as well, too. Anything jumping out on you on the schedule for TechCon? Man.

I'm trying to decide how to think about if I want to think about it by track or by people or by letting the universe decide what I see. I don't know, I'm in one of those three buckets. But no, it sounds awesome. I'm impressed by all the names coming into town and it kind of like. I'm not sure. I think we could have probably done something like this five, ten years ago, but it seems like it's getting much more though. It's getting easier to be like, hey, come to San Diego and check out this conference here. And it seems like people are much easier. Yes. I'm not sure if that's true, but that's kind of what it feels like a little bit. I don't know if you're noticing anything different.

I think so. What's interesting is there's so many conferences that happen in San Diego that are not on our. We are not like probably our friends are going to them, but it's not a San Diego conference. Right. It happens to be in San Diego, but maybe you know, global AI for the automotive industry. Right? Sure, Qualcomm's probably there, but it's not like San Diego. So this feels like one of those ones where it's a San Diego conference but talking globally as opposed to Startup San Diego Startup Week, which tends to have a lot of like ecosystem conversations that seem very specific to San Diego, which is important that we have that. This one is kind of a flip on that it's San Diegan's talking to Silicon Valley, Louisiana, New York tech leaders from other communities and sharing our notes more on the technology side or in the investment side. So I think it's a, it's perfect fit for what is missing from our year round thought leadership here. Friday night will be fun. We interlock sponsoring the social and we've got coming back a VC from Climatic Ventures is DJing the social. So DJ Araj who will be fun to see him on the ones and twos there. So come on out come Friday afternoon and Saturday all day it's at sdsu which is super cool that they're hosting this and come find me. I'm just be. I'll be busy standing in the middle of a quad pointing people to each other saying you, you should meet you, you should meet you. Just routing people. That's just. Now I just stand and just kind of like, you know, keep the lights going.

Road counts.

Yeah. Bunch of other events. What's on your radar for other events here?

That's a ton. I mean we have, we, we kind of already hit the, the founder's hike, but I love that type of thing. And, and there's two others that, that are kind of interesting. I like the Product Roundtable lunch. I like sort of hitting the lunch hour on a Friday. It's kind of hard to do Friday evening or it can be but kind of getting a whole bunch of product people together is, is always a really cool one. So check out that one. And then Indie AI and Indie Hackers is coming back. I'm kind of a, I'm just like a fan of indie hacking. I'm a fan of kind of putting, you know, building things and putting out there. Maybe, maybe you've seen that or my, my enjoyment of that yet. But it's. I just like that there's other ways to build businesses and. What's the last indie hacker event? The AI Indie Hacker event was really a Whole bunch of people talking about really cool ways they're using tech to build their businesses. And so it ended up being more sort of supportive of each other and giving people ideas for how to solve problems and sort of it was not so much of hey, it'd be cool if we work together on A, B and C. Which is kind of a. Just a different perspective on a gathering or what. What sometimes can happen at a gathering. There's a lot of that type of stuff in San Diego. But that's partly why I like these very specific sort of like product or indie hacking groups or groups that are very heavily sort of around a very sort of small subset. Do. Do you want to talk about Den AI or we. We good?

Okay, yeah, let's talk about it. Den Dent AI is a group that I met during Comic Con last summer. I got invited. They just happened to be putting on an event in San Diego because of Comic Con. They aren't San Diegans actually. And they caught my eye because they had some former astronauts talking about space tech and I launched a bunch of astronauts. Got to meet actually one of the astronauts that I launched on, I think it was STS124 or 5. So I just nerded out there. And naturally we got in contact with the organizers. They stayed in touch like, hey, we're bringing an event to San Diego. So I threw it on your radar. And now we've got a bunch of AI companies who will be showcased there. So they asked for, hey, we, we're coming to town. We're doing an event about AI. We want to make sure we're showcasing our host city. So we've got companies there like IPOP I know will be there. I think Cheryl Goodman will also be there. Andy from Kesha Ventures will also be there. So there'll be some local. And then they're bringing outside in as well too. So come on out the. The Dent the AI Startup Showcase which is going to be downtown at the UCSD the Market Building on January 27th.

And one thing to keep in mind, don't wait on this one. If this is interesting, I mean read through it. But they said over 850 sign people signed up for the last two showcases. I don't know how many, how many people can go to the few hundred can fit.

So yeah, they're gonna cut it off for sure. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This will be cool to see for sure. And check out the rest of the events we've got in the show notes. We've got some cool ones coming up. Startup San Diego is actually doing a hackathon coming up around Valentine's Day, so we'll feature that one next week on this pod. I want to give a big thank you to the how guy, the best Ms. Jonah. Thanks for joining and I think expect to hear Jonah again next week. So no in the comments on replies on LinkedIn or other socials. What else you want to hear from us and make sure you subscribe to all of our newsletters. Me, Fred and Jonah do this out of love, really. And also, you know, building a little business on it at least to pay for itself for putting forth this effort in so that we build great ecosystem because people are building great companies. We wouldn't do it any other way. So thanks everyone for tuning in. Thanks, Jonah.

Thanks for having me. We'll catch you later.

Of course. Cheers.

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