This Week in San Diego Tech News – June 24, 2022

It. Hey. Hey.

Hello there. Happy Friday. How are you?

Doing well. And yourself?

Doing all right, thanks.

Yeah, I think this is a nice respite from I think all of the doom scrolling that we're doing. So. Hey, good time.

Yes, yes. If you're listening to this live with us, it's Friday, June 24th. This obviously is recorded and played later on the Talkers in Tech Podcast network. Yeah, obviously a lot of raw reactions to the Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs Wade. While it's not tech news, it certainly affects pretty much everyone in the tech world.

Absolutely.

In one way or another. It definitely immediately affects 50% of the entire population of the United States. So yeah, something that we do here on the podcast is obviously we're trying to move forward our community, San Diego's tech ecosystem and you know, a personal feeling that makes me feel like society is moving backwards.

Absolutely.

That's, that's all we'll do from Politics Talk here. But thanks everyone for joining us. We are excited to have you here. This is the weekly this Week in San Diego Tech News. I'm Neil Bloom. I've got Fresh Brew Tech, which is a San Diego tech focused media group. We are all about promoting about why San Diego is a great place to build a tech company. I happen to do that in a few other cities as well too because I'm just kind of equally as interested in making sure other communities like Orange county and Santa Barbara are where we also build great companies as well too. So while I'm super pro San Diego, that doesn't mean I'm not pro most other tech communities as well too. I'm an angel investor and now I guess a venture capitalist with a fund called Interlock Capital and spend a lot of my free time also volunteering in the community to make sure that we're building good communities here as well too. Joining here. Oh, and Fresh Brew Tech puts out a weekly newsletter about what's going on from both events. New jobs, startup fundraises in general, tech news. So if you haven't heard or seen our newsletter before, feel free to check it out@freshbroodtech.com it's where you can also find episodes of the Tacos and Tech podcast. And with me is co host Sesha. Hey Sesha, thanks for joining us again on another week of this Week in San Diego Tech News.

Absolutely. I am so happy to be here. Hey everyone, my name is Sesha. I am a former biotech data person currently working in cybersecurity and cloud evangelism at Microsoft. I am a San Diego transplant by way of Seattle. It's been a few years now and I am loving every single minute, every drop of sunshine, every taco that I've had here, but fond of all things tech, startups and tacos. So with that, should we get started?

Let's do it. Yeah. And just want to, you know, upfront, thank you all for continuing to listen and continuing to share this. The whole point is to make sure that more people are aware of what's going on here and we can't do that if we're yelling into, you know, at a wall. So please continue to share the content that we do, but also give us feedback so we can continue to make progress on it and, you know, share news that you're seeing and we'll help amplify whether it's about your own company or others that you see, make sure that we're, we're aware of it. Whether it's tagging us on a LinkedIn or LinkedIn post or Twitter or by email, just reply to that newsletter. So thank you all for being a supportive community and vice versa. We got, we got a number of wide ranging articles here from different industries and that's San Diego's thing. We do everything in San Diego, but I think the biggest business news that's on a lot of people's minds this morning is the news about Stone Brewery getting acquired. This is San Diego's largest brewery and in fact it's the ninth largest brewery in the country. They're getting acquired by Sapporo, a Japanese brewery, Big, big brewery in Japan. And they are acquiring stone for about 165,167 million is what I've seen out there. I don't know if it was official, the number out there or not. I think so. I know Eddie's would have something to say about this, but yeah, this is big news. I think from a brewery standpoint in San Diego. There's a lot of opinions around there. You know, Stone has stayed independent while a lot of other breweries got acquired like Ballast Point and have always had their brand and image about being independent and being bold in their marketing and messaging and that our beer is not for everyone. So I'm sure some have some opinions about that. But look, the team's been building it for, I think, 26 years now at this point. And you know, it's a natural course for a company to come to a financial fork in the road. So I don't think it'll change the beer much. We've seen even from Ballast Point being acquired twice now. I don't think it's really changed the actual beer itself, especially its presence in San Diego. But maybe this means, you know, they have more freedom to test and try new things and bring their product to other parts of the world. So, yeah, interesting news. Not tech specific though. I will. And I'll let you have a say in here too, Seisha. But the CEO who's super impressive, Maria Stipp, she comes from the tech world actually, so she helped another local company, Eco atm. She was at the helm after one of their acquisitions, took them private, built up their business again. Then she jumped to be the CEO of Lagonitas, which I think got acquired, and then to Stone as CEO most recently about two, two and a half years ago. We reached out to her two and a half years ago, I remember, to get her to speak at Startup Week and she was like, oh, I'm a week into the job here at Stone. Would love to come in the future. So I know we'll get Maria back engaged. We've also had Greg Koch, one of the previous co founder and CEO, involved in the community as well, too. So, you know, for sure, friends of the community here. And we're excited for Stone, what this means for them going forward.

Absolutely, I think so. They mentioned in some of these articles that, you know, there's going to be this, this look or this, this push for like the east meets west thing for, for the beer. So. And of course, like how the two companies run. And so I am very curious to see what will happen here. And I think it'll be very interesting for someone like Maria to like, come in and really take the helms of what, you know, was properly just San Diego, but now is going to be part of like this bigger firm. So I'm definitely going to have to check them out and see if, if the beer does end up changing. I hope it doesn't, but we'll see.

Yeah, no, and it's a good point because Stone has actually had to learn how to diversify. If you've noticed, it got into hard sparkling waters. It got into, you know, it's got its Baja Lager. So it's. Or it's not called that, man, but it is for it's the style of beer. What are they. I'm forgetting, I'm forgetting the name of it. But they have had to kind of adapt to not be all only IPAs and find, you know, relevance in a sense in a maturing market where people said, you know, craft isn't only as Hoppy as you can get. It's, it's what it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So I think that'll be interesting to inject some new ideas. Like you said, east me sweats in that regard. You know, their tap rooms all have an interesting look to them as well and feel too. So yeah, I'm really interested to see kind of what, where, where Stone goes from here. But speaking of diversification for a company, Qualcomm, that has been the name of the game for them as well too. And so Qualcomm, we're going to do a quick hits section of Qualcomm because we love talking about them. They're San Diego's largest company by market cap, not by employment. But you know, if I'm pulling up their stock price real quick, more just because I love to compare how companies are doing for the markets. You know, they're a $140 billion company from market cap wise. So I think that's largest by valuation of San Diego company, at least public. And they've been, they've been on a multi year diversification product diversification as well too. So while they stake their claim from the handset world, they've obviously taken their technology into a lot of different products. But that wouldn't have been done without the original co founders including. So apparently there were seven original kind of employees. The two main ones that everyone knows are Andrew Viterbi and Irwin Jacobs, but five others joined who all were at a past company together called Linkabit. So Franklin Antonio, who just passed away was the seventh, seventh co founders and number seven employee at Qualcomm. So sad to hear that that he just passed away and he actually has been from. So computer science is his background. He was chief scientist I believe at one point at Qualcomm, but also big in the philanthropy world as well too. And so he had actually recently given about $30 million donation to UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering and had a building with his name on it, Franklin Antonio hall, which was just getting ready to be opened actually. So I hope he got to see at least some of it. Though not fully occupied. I just actually drove by the building last week. It's if you know ucsd, the building sits on what used to be a parking lot and so it's shocking to see it there. You're like whoa, where did that parking lot go? But that's the name of the game at UCSD is that you know, you blink once and two buildings grow in that time frame. Well, so, yeah, I hope that he.

Was able to see it because. Wow, that is an incredible accomplishment.

Yeah. To have been part of two monumental companies. For sure. We're going to move through these quick because we've got a bunch of Qualcomm quick hits here. Qualcomm recently bought an Israeli startup called Cellwise Wireless Tech. They're really focused on 5G network deployment and automation, which is obviously Qualcomm is making huge investments into because that is the next iteration of the handset market. The network's still being deployed. Really. Even though we all claim to have 5G on our phones, we're still. It's a mix of 4G and 5G, it seems. So, yeah. New Israeli Internet acquisition that they made, which is not new for Qualcomm. They've been in industry a long time, but good to see them pulling in sur 5G talent. Anything on there or should I move forward through this?

We can go to the next one. Although this next one is sort of in a similar vein in that Qualcomm is now partnering to work on road safety. Road safety through the new cellular vehicle to everything tech called C V2X. And so this one will be interesting to see. Really what they're trying to do is improve the amount of or to improve traffic safety by reducing the number of road accidents that you see by prompting the driver of any impediments or anything that is in the way while they're driving. And this is particularly interesting when we look at the amount of automation that we're going to start seeing with driverless cars, things like that. And so it's interesting to see that Qualcomm is. Is across the board and where it's looking to start developing.

Yeah, I think what's cool to see. So yes, they're diversifying in all different sectors, but to see the depth that they go say in transportation, they've. And we're going to talk and might as well bring this up now. They've already been partnering with OEM automakers and so specifically they just announced a new partnership with Volkswagen, but they're already in BMW and a bunch of other carmakers where they're providing like in car, whether that's kind of navigation dash entertainment. But now that Qualcomm's got their hardware in their communications company and so boom, you've got their chips in the car to provide in car communication. Why not have car to car or car to cloud communication as well too? And so this is a great thing for them. To be able to expand upon from vehicle to everything like they're talking about. And why not have our cars be able to talk to each other? You know, Lord knows humans are not good at communicating car to car unless it's using like the middle finger, you know, so if our cars could talk and tell each other and say, you know, get out of the way and let's avoid accidents, I'm all for it. So that's obviously an area where they're investing in and the other area is robotics. And they're doing this in a variety of ways. We have talked previously about their drone investment, which is a form of robotics. They built their own platform to not just say, let's make sure our chips are in drones, let's build an entire platform so that if someone wants to build a drone, they plug and play our technology slap on, you know, a battery and electric motors. And theoretically you might be able to actually already have a drone just off of the Qualcomm chassis. And so they're doing the same thing in robotics. They're creating their own and iterating the Robotics RB6 platform, which includes not just the hardware, but a whole kind of ecosystem and design structure supporting for pretty much making like smart robots, you know, whether that's in sectors like government service, applications, logistics, healthcare, retail, warehousing. So we all know that automation is coming to a lot of these sectors. Qualcomm obviously wants to be at the form of putting their, their hardware in to automate. There's an interesting spin out of Qualcomm called Brain Corporation that have I think are a unicorn here in town in San Diego where they are taking they call dumb hardware. Let's use an example as like a floor sweeper that you put in the BrainCorp OS operating system. And now the floor sweeper can sweep floors without a human in the loop. Wow. Qualcomm is thinking to do the same thing right? Is that, hey, don't just plug in a brain, design us from the ground up. So think of us from there as well too. So great to continue to see that diversification which is important for Qualcomm to continue to stay relevant in these big changing times for tech.

Absolutely. It's super cool to see this. I think that Qualcomm not just being in Iot, but all across the board. It's awesome to see. And we'll have to see what Qualcomm gets up to next.

Exactly. So that's our quick hits on Qualcomm. We'd love to make sure we're talking just as much big tech as startup tech. But tech is everywhere, as we're about to see in San Diego, including even in the biotech world, where they're literally taking concepts from. So Scripts is developing an open source RNA sequencing app called Pythis and kind of using the coding environments of software development, plugging them into using rna, which is also its own code base.

Yeah, so this one, this one, this story is close to my heart because back in the day as I was working in a lab, I remember having to do mass spec and how painful and how cumbersome it is. And so this app, like if I had it back in those days, would have made my life so much easier and probably my processing and the amount of stress I got from trying to just analyze all of my data. But this is a super, super cool. What it does is it processes mass spec data through essentially by and so that you can identify and quantify modified RNA molecules. Now this is particularly useful for now since we see that the COVID vaccine actually was made from modified RNAs. And so Scripps is hoping that companies can use this app, that companies that manufacture these RNA vaccines can use this app, not just to speed up the process that it takes to do mass spec and to quantify and understand the types of RNAs that you see in vaccines, but also to ensure quality. So human error is oftentimes very much an issue for a lot of these things. And so having this app will make it a lot easier for companies to just be able to check, check and see. And it's actually, since it's open source, it is available on GitHub, so you could, we'll put it in our show notes, but you can go ahead and check out the link. It's super cool.

And this is from Scripps Research, which is a research institution. You know, this is another form of place that tech is coming from, but they're doing world class research to the point of literally last year's physics Nobel Prize was or Physiology and medicine Nobel Prize. In 2021, he was at Scripps Research. So not only are they literally putting out code in GitHub doing world class research, they're taking home the Nobel Prize in it too. And it's right here in our backyard, right in La Jolla UTC area, like around UC San Diego. So it's pretty cool to see not just our big tech and our startup tech companies, but our research institutions doing tech advancement as well too. So it's important that we highlight that.

And I think making it available for everyone, right, because that's, that's sort of the bigger piece of it where it's like, not only can they create all this amazing tech, but anyone can use it to further their own research and their own science. Like, I think that is, that's the goal of science, right? Like you want to further it for everyone else to be able to do the same and build upon your discovery. So I think this is great.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think another area that San Diego probably is on the map because of petco. You've heard of Petco Park? That's because Petco is headquartered in San Diego. Well, so is Pet Tech. Pet Tech is actually, we've got some pet tech built in San Diego, Fluent Pet, which is a new tech company. And I like these guys because they have done pet tech in the past. So they're, they're repeat pet tech founders doing. Letting you have a conversation with your dogs. Little furry friend conversation. I bet this is close to your.

Yes, this one is also very fun. I'll preface this by saying if you have seen Bunny the dog on TikTok or just on YouTube, it is so delightful, you should absolutely check it out. Um, essentially this Fluent Pet is this new product where you can record your voice into special buttons that dogs, cats, your furry friends can press down on with their paws in order to air quotes like talk with their humans. Uh, and this is so fun because, you know, imagine just like if you see the videos, it's basically like little words that are like walk or poop or treat or things like that where your dog can, because they recognize the sound of your voice, they can hit the button and therefore ask for things or have a conversation with you. And I find it delightful. I think if I were to ask my dog to use this, she would just say to stop hugging her and. Or give me more treats. But this is absolutely delightful and this is cool because it's also part of this bigger study at UCSD called they can talk.org, which focuses on animal cognition and communication. And so really what we're trying to do and what they're trying to do is understand and develop. Develop more data on animal cognition and how animals can communicate non verbally and verbally. So this is very cool to see.

Yeah, it's interesting. So the founder, the CEO Leo Trottier, who I go back with, man all the way since 2013 or 14, they were an Evo Nexus company. I'm looking at the LinkedIn and it's, I guess the same company, Fluent Pet. I knew him as something different then, and I'm trying to remember what it was, but they went through at the time. In 2015, Qualcomm spun up a robotics accelerator by Techstars and they were. Oh, Clever Pet. That was the name of the company. And remember Clever Pet, it was a. It was a device that your, your dog would interact with, hit a button, and be given a treat for hitting a certain button. And then it would get harder, so there'd be like a sequence of buttons and lights and it would keep the. The dog engaged. So I think it looks like Clever Pet may have just kind of morphed into Fluent Pet, which is not just engagement from buttons and lights, but now it sounds like audible as well too. And it's so cool to see them continue to advance this. I remember them being a UCSD spin out and it's great to see them still alive and developing this. So really cool to get a spotlight and an update on Leo and Fluent Pent here.

So what made me laugh is their next product that they're trying to hit or create. Create is and they're gonna get it in prod by Q3. But it's essentially Fluent Pet Connect, which is like a mobile app that will let your pets send texts to their humans, which I love. Like, I think that would be amazing. I don't know how that would work, but, man, I would just love to see that.

Yeah, well, we'll keep an eye on them. They recently did a public crowd crowdfund on Republic, raising like over 700,000 in equity crowdfunding. So not surprising, people love their pets. And there's a lot. Like we mentioned, there is a lot of pet tech in San Diego. Some people who have built and sold companies sold to Petco and went and started the next one the next day. So if you are a pet tech founder, you're in a good place here in San Diego. But another industry that is big in San Diego is our blue tech scene. So this is anything ocean and water related. San Diego's got a massive blue economy, as it's called. In fact, Santa county is home to 4,320 maritime, water and Bluetech businesses, which is actually 5% of the region. Super interesting. 114,000 people are employed in this industry. That's actually 9% of our workforce back from 2020. And this may be actually a low number because, you know, hard to tell these days what employment really looks like for companies post Covid. But between 2020 and 2022. So just during COVID the bluetech revenue for the industry grew 18% and jobs increased 163%. Not necessarily surprising here because obviously water related businesses are part of that. So it's not just maritime. And we are obviously finding that during drought we need to find new technologies to become water independent and resource independent. So really cool overview here. What else did you do, you know about the blue tech scene, Sasha?

Yeah, so this one is cool also because I think following this report we started to see more government support than you know, there already was this growing, this growing area of support. And so the Biden administration, they created the PROTECT program which is $2.6 billion in grant funding for coastal ecosystem restoration, port infrastructure programs. Really just adding to and really filling the community in the area with money to do more of these projects. And so this article is cool because it called San Diego the Silicon Valley of bluetech, which is awesome. Like, I think that's sort of our next step and that's, that's where we're heading.

Really cool. Especially considering we just did an overview last week on our cyber community which had 800 businesses in it. We're talking 4,000 businesses on the bluetech world. These are starting to become some really big slices of our ecosystem. Specifically to give an example of the bluetech environment and maybe one people aren't thinking about algae. Algae is an area that actually San Diego excels in both from research and productization. You may be using algae in places like eating it, spirulina, it's being used in many other. And so there was a recent X Prize competition that a San Diego bluetech company actually won. So Global Algae Innovations competed to sequester carbon in an X Prize competition. And actually the XPRIZE foundation is founded by Peter Diamandis, who has a San Diego presence. He lives or has a presence in La Jolla and is the co founder of a company called Human Longevity which just in the last week merged with a SPAC to go public for a billion dollars. So xprize, you know, while it's changed in obviously not just the world, actually I think there's some space things are related too. It's got roots here in San Diego. So Elon Musk actually created $100 million X Prize specifically for carbon removal. There's competitions for companies working on carbon removal tech at scale and you can imagine why Elon is involved in that and why he's interested there. Take us through more about this XPRIZE competition and Global Algae Innovations.

Yeah, sure. So one of the winners was our very own Global Algae Innovations founder Dave Hasselbeck and his works on algae form algae farming at scale to offset the palm oil palm oil production in favor of low impact proteins and oil products. So as we know, palm oil production is a huge driver of deforestation and algae. For algae farms can produce nine times as much oil and 23 times as much protein per acre compared to palm or soy. And so this is a great number and this is what Dave is really pushing for. And so he wants to promote rainforest regrowth and promote CO2 sequestering. And so Global Algae is hoping to capture 11 million tons of CO2 in rainforest regrowth every year by algae farming. And so in the process of putting together his company and in the, in the competition that he's in now, he is creating an R and D development facility in SLO to see how else to hone down on his software and hone down on his farming to make sure that we're sequestering carbon. So I'm very excited to see what he'll get up to.

In this scenario. Slow is I think, is it San Luis Obispo?

Yes.

Is that where the farm is? Yes, it is. Got it. Okay. All right. So good connection between throughout California but obviously San Diego based they actually worked on, they started working on this with General Atomics. It sounded like with funding from the DOD for alternative fuels. And I actually have an algae investment funny enough in the fertilizer space company called Upcycle local to San Diego CEO Jared. Might as well give him a shout out. He's taking three waste stream products. Algae waste from anything that's used in algae production. Spent beer grains. Actually he gets it from ballast and stone sometimes and biosolids which is human waste actually that is after way at the end of the line of the sewage treatment plant. Usually it is dumped in a field, the hard stuff, the solids and he's putting it back into the ground through fertilizer through these waste stream products. And so it's really cool to see all the different places that algae is showing up as a new resource here in San Diego, but and specifically also winning X prizes because that includes capital and money which is really what, what makes companies move forward besides just an idea. Those are our big headlines in this area. But we got a few shout outs that we wanted to give. Any of you guys seen maybe Stacia, obviously you've seen these custom branded Monopoly like you've seen like, like the Simpsons, Monopoly and others.

Yep.

So yeah, Monopoly for blank. Did you know that those were all designed, developed and made here in Carlsbad.

Oh wow.

USA Opoly is like a 40 year old business started by I think a brother and sister team. And this one, the brother is coming. He's been kind of out of the company. He's coming back in for two reasons. One, he is kind of reinvigorated by board games and they have developed their own board games on top of getting the licenses from Monopoly and they're finally going digital. So they're actually building digital versions of Monopoly for every brand as well too. So I didn't know that didn't exist yet. But a pretty cool, cool thing to see. No, I had no idea that all those Monopoly boards were designed in San Diego, especially Carlsbad.

It looks like that the actual, the digital versions are being created by a company right out of Spokane and Washington. So that's another nice little connection there.

Yeah, you love your Washington connection for sure. Well, we'll leave you with a bit of good news. Have you been to Birch Aquarium yet?

I have not yet.

Great. Nice little aquarium right at UCSD and they are bringing little blue penguins to the aquarium. These are the smallest penguins apparently in the world. Little blues. So I leave you with that on a nice warm weekend, go check out the little blue penguins bouncing around at Birch Aquarium.

They're adorable. That is perfect.

Well. Oh no. We got one last quick shout out to our friends at Housecall Pro just in the nick of time. They sent us today that they raised a cool 125 million in funding today. Man, I've known these guys almost since their start in 2013 when they were in Evo, Nexus. They, they were got into the program but physically didn't want to be there because they had plumbers coming in to try their software and they're like, you know what we need like our own space where plumbers feel like they can just, you know, walk in. So Housecall Pro, nine years later, I think an over a unicorn. Now they might be our latest unicorn. We need. We didn't, we don't have our sound effects queued up but congrats to Reza Ian Roland. I'm missing more of the team there with the original six founders still at it, still building great software to help the service providers like your plumbers and technicians for your house. But they are doing it at huge scale, like I believe, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, kind of a year of revenue kind of company. So congrats to the team and I don't have a tie in for them in blue penguins. So Good job housecall pro and go see your penguins everyone. It is another beautiful weekend in San Diego. I hope everyone is out enjoying it already by the time you're listening to this. I'm doing this from outside so I am right here. I hope you do as well too. Sesha.

Always.

And everyone, thanks for joining us. Join us every Friday on Twitter Spaces or listen to this as you are recorded later on the Tacos in Tech podcast. But we'll see you soon and thanks everyone again. Have a good weekend.

Thanks everyone. See you later.