This Week in San Diego Tech - January 24, 2025
Neal Bloom and Jonah Peak cover San Diego's startup scene: recent funding in AI, insurtech, and battery tech, TechCon SoCal and UCSD open house recaps, and a new Career Coyote jobs segment. They discuss connecting San Diego and LA tech communities and practical next steps for founders.
Ecosystem is a neural network. And at the center of a neural network should be that everyone is connected. And right now, in an early nascent ecosystem, we're not neural. It's like very like, linear. Like, connections all flow through to, like, one person and they are the point out to a bunch, which. Which means connections happen in series. We need. Connections happen in parallel, right? Like, yeah, we need to. So I've been testing how to, in plain speak, be like, here's the. Here's how we as an ecosystem get better. We all become super connectors and become the better super connectors that we all get better connections.
I like that a lot.
And we'll speed up, we'll go faster. Because we as a startup community need to move as fast as our startups. Like, we can't be running linear yet. The companies have to run at exponential. The community. If it does the community work at exponential speed, theoretically, it should help our startups also. So, yeah.
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 border green guacamole keep accountants counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles founders trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing Coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero gotta shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana estee be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the be tech leaders who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon South Dakota tackles 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 in tacos, tacos in 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.
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A.
Welcome back to San Diego tech news with the OG bestie guesty the social Coyote Jonah Peak, what's up?
Hell yeah.
Welcome back to another week and a little foreshadowing we may have. Because we knew you were going to be here, we we added a new segment to this podcast. So stay tuned to hear the new segment that is live here. But what's up, Jonah? How you doing?
What up, man? Really good. Coming out of a pretty fun weekend event week. Techcom is great, San Diego is great as usual. And it's snowing in New Orleans and it's freezing cold in the east coast, so hey, bet it's true.
And I am here at UCSD in Studio 411, which is the design and innovation buildings podcast studio, hidden away tucked away on the first fourth floor of the dib. So thank you to the Office of Innovation and Commercialization for letting me in and using the space. It's a popular room. There's a few other podcasts that get broadcast here, including Once Upon a Scientist by our friend, our potato friend, Nick, Mr. Nickard. But we got to get you here live in person sometime too with you and Fred.
I'm stoked on that. What are they? Because I've seen them, they've done a bunch of really neat events that are shared in the past, like the Office of Innovation. They host a bunch of stuff. What actually is it?
The Office of Innovation and Commercialization OIC is really. They run the startup community at ucsd. So they help connect all the different incubators on campus. There's like 15 different incubators. There's now venture funds also. They help connect that part, they help resources, you know, whether it's non dilutive funding in that part. And then the biggest piece is they manage the commercialization tech transfer process. So if you are, you know, in a lab, professor, you know, doing some fundamental science or some piece of and there's an IP connection to it, they help you go nail down the patents and then they own a piece of that for commercialization purposes.
Awesome.
And now there's like funds, there's been a long time funds that spin up, that really just look inward at what is a portfolio of tech that a university owns and let's spin it out into companies and so they help with that process as well too.
So cool.
And so I'm actually here today, I just spoke on a panel about just a bunch of VCs investors talking to a group of entrepreneurs. And so they're doing the whole open house today. So there's every place on campus that does startup is doing open house. You can walk around campus and be like, what does the basement do? And what does Qualcomm Institute do? And they're doing. They have, like, pitches and everything. So it's a fun afternoon and I'm glad to see it's almost like Startup Week at UCSD Day.
Wow, Mike. Fomo Ing hard. I missed that one.
Come on up next time with the trolley, because the trolley stops right on campus at ucsd, so.
Perfect.
We'll get you here next time. But let's jump into the show. We have a lot to go through. You alluded to this. This past weekend was TechCon SoCal year three with a huge crew of people flying in and driving in to town, as well as a bunch of San Diegans. It happened over a Friday and Saturday at SDSU. I ended up organizing 10 panels and spoke on an additional one and moderated one of those 10. And then I kind of created the deep tech track and the fintech track, which was super fun. And so we had some amazing conversations. I learned a ton about fusion and where we are as a fusion lab, and they invited us to get a group of energy founders, come take a tour of the D3 fusion reactor. So keep an eye out for that if you're an energy. What was your takeaway? I saw you there a few times. Do you have a good time?
Yes, awesome. I did two days. I honestly, I think it's kind of the perfect venue in a weird way, because it's like you are sort of moving around to different spaces, but it's not far. It's not like, you know, you're not moving around, around town or doing anything like that. But it was actually, I. I really love the mix of San Diegans who, you know, are doing really, really awesome things, but other people are coming from out of town. And it was really interesting because, you know, you start to have these really fun conversations where people are like, you know, San Diego is really happening. And we all know this. We're here. But when you start to hear people coming out from out of town saying, recognizing it, it actually, you know, I don't know, it feels. It feels pretty special. I mean, I know we shouldn't necessarily, you know, watermark ourselves on what other people are saying because we know we're. We know we're great, but it's cool to see that, you know, others are thinking that way and feeling that way. Maybe they're going to, you know, open some offices here, spend more attention on our startups and what we're building and spend more time here. I mean, it's It's. It's. I thought it was pretty incredible. And, you know, I think Fasal and the team, they put together a pretty great conference. And, you know, so did you. With all those panels. I don't know how you juggled it, but, yeah, it sounded like it was pretty successful.
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of busy. It was, you know, hurting a lot of cats. But it was all for, like, my favorite people to hear from experts in their own domain. And that is my favorite thing, is to put people on a pedestal so that, you know, a lot more people can hear what's being built and why it's happening here. That's for sure. So it was great. I agree. And I'm sure. I know Fazel and I are going to do a debrief soon. He's. I'm sure he's already working on next year, 2026. Oh, my God.
I was asking. I was asking him. I was like, hey, who sends all your emails? He's like, you're looking at him. I was like, he's. He's hands. He's. He's on it, you know, he's hands on. It's amazing.
He is. He's a hustler and. And he has a team all over the world, so he's, like, up at all times working with his conference team, you know, to build the app and load in headshots. And, you know, he's a cto, so he's like, wants to build processes ever, which is amazing. And he's relying on slowpokes like me to just be like, well, here's a headshot, you know, and he's like, so it was a fun process. I'm also glad. Congrats to him for pulling it off. And his whole family who really dove in, from high school kids, college kids, like, showed up, volunteer, and made the whole thing happen. So thank God, Faisal and team for putting on a great conference. Happy to be part of it. I'm fresh off an event I just put on last night up in LA in Burbank, actually called the Future of Healthcare, a Burbank tech talk that I helped organize. And it was at a hospital where we talked about, you know, where does the rubber meet the road right now in healthcare? I think the original idea was talk about all the areas of advancement in health care. I would say the majority of the conversation was very AI dominated. Very much like, where is AI being used right now? How are you as a hospital setting it up both for internal employees, for patient doctor Communication, like it was very much AI creeping into everything, the good, the bad, the integrity, the policy. So it was a really cool conversation. And in the audience were clinicians, physicians, product managers at tech companies. Like, you had the full ecosystem there to listen about every aspect here. Oh, and the workforce too. You had people looking for jobs where they're transferring from media and how are their applicable skills good in healthcare. That was a really cool conversation to hear play out as well too. So I know that conversation is happening globally, but especially in the us where our healthcare system, you know, needs an upgrade and tech will be one of those areas. Uh, I know that, you know, hearing that happen in la, I know it'll be happening here in San Diego. In fact, I think that is a conversation I hear coming up is a future of healthcare in San Diego conversation coming too. So, and, and San Diego, Ross Young from Clinical Notes. AI made the trek up. So thank you, Ross, for jumping up in the middle of your. Your team off site. He drove all the way up and he showed up and you know, he took the brunt of representing AI to the community, but he's got a lot of interesting customer feedback of who's using it, where it's being helpful and how it's a force multiplier and where it's a crutch as well too. So really fun conversation and I'll be doing more up there as well. Just for connecting the community. We had a lot of LA people come down to San Diego for TechCon and actually San Diego came up for this conversation too. So always good to link the communities there.
Yeah, I think that's awesome. What ends up being really, really interesting, not. Not something that you probably know well and maybe from research on this conference or this talk is like, you kind of can't put. Well, it's hard to put like a treatment question into ChatGPT, you know, because now you have to deal with HIPAA in this different sort of form of AI. I was talking to Ross a little bit about that and like, you know, there's protections around, you know, what you can and can't do. But to your point about connecting SD and la, did you get. Did you get a chance to connect with Brandon Hoffman when he came down kind of representing la, LA Texing, you guys actually, you might have had a panel together, but he's saying let's like, try to find ways to merge the two and kind of just like make this region like a super region. I don't know if, if that was something you guys talked about. Bob and chatting with him on the side. Pretty cool.
Oh, I love hearing that. There's, you know, I love when they approach, we approach each other and work on that together and say, how do we fill in each other's gaps? I very much appreciate that. As opposed to LA, just pulling us into venture funding for LA and it includes all of SoCal.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, so I think there absolutely is a lot we can, we can stand to gain from, of saying, you know, the Bay Area versus SoCal and you know, and leaning into our whole total resources. I think we're like 25 million people here in SoCal. Way more capital in LA. Capital that has come from, you know, tech and a lot of areas that we are building that we haven't done the full recycle yet, you know, so I think we can learn a lot. I feel like whenever I go into la, a tech event there, I feel like I'm kind of going into the future, you know, it's like, oh, this is what we could be like five years, eight years from now. And so I feel like, oh, just a few short hour drive, three hour, four hour. I could steal ideas that's working from a community ecosystem perspective and try it out in San Diego and vice versa. I think L A is also looking for like, what are areas that are like not saturated too, right? Like there's a lot in L A where because there's so much capital, there's a lot of like money getting thrown into like the same area. Like right now everyone is suddenly into hard tech and hardware and you know, deep tech and space and it's like, okay, at some point people are going to have to find other areas to fund and I think you can look to other ecosystems for density and be like, oh, this is where there are some other quality founders doing quality things too. So I agree. I think we could all gain from that as well.
Well, we were saying, hey, let's maybe San Clemente, where's that middle ground that we could all, you know, meet up with? You know, it's a good question.
I think like Irvine might be it. To be honest, they said that I.
Was like, where can we go? That's like sexy and beachy and like kind of sexy.
Newport's sexy, maybe. It's pretty much right in line with, with, with Irvine. From where I am in north county, like NCS area, it's actually time wise, if you time it right, it takes me just as long to get to downtown San Diego as, as Irvine. I am equidistant to the both which is funny. 45 ish plus minutes to both of them. So yeah, let's work on it. Let's do a little joint event. One thing we tried pre Covid during Startup week was doing a train from LA of tech people to come down to Startup Week and we would do a bunch of events on the train. We never really nailed it and landed it. We were going to work with Digital LA founder Kevin Winston to do that. But we did end up doing a North County 2 downtown train on Startup weekday. Once we did all got did an event in Carlsbad in the morning then a bunch of us jumped on the train and the 30ish minutes on the train we did like networking and you know that kind of stuff which was kind of that.
I love that because it's like what is the thing you've never done that I want to do that.
Yeah, let's try it. Let's. Let's just throw out ideas. Just start it. We just got to put a date on make it happen Related to I'll do one more quick debrief. We jump in some news. I know an event that just happened was the Post exited founder social. This is a massive group online and in discord of post exited founders. Exactly what it sounds like. And there's a group of San Diegos now enough density where we formed kind of the post exited founder San Diego group. You can imagine there's a lot of overlap with Interlock there because Interlock is a group of kind of serial founders exited founders helping other companies. And so they did their first social this week proud of hussein and Pete DeSalvo of organizing event one because honestly starting is the hardest thing and to start then a little more momentum comes from that. So keep eye out for that. Let us know if you want to get connected to the Post founder San Diego group. But we've got some other news here. You want to dive into some fundings here Jonah?
Yeah, let's do. Seems to be happening quickly. Like you said there's a trend for this in the beginning of the year but looks like top of the list. We'll start ask Turing seed 1 million. What do you know about them?
Ask Turing. Well we happen to know the team pretty well and Neil Santuria, Barbara Brie and Cheryl Goodman coming together to form this cool team of complementary skill sets. Cheryl, longtime corporate communications expert like really like was the face of of Qualcomm and Sony here in town and really now is I feel like has become the face the public face of AI in San Diego. I mean she's curated some amazing thought leadership, put out a book on AI for everyone doing talks around the world I think including somewhere in Asia. Was she in Turkmenistan or something like that?
Yeah. Where is this?
Yeah, talking AI. It makes sense to part to partner in with, with Neil Centuria who is a serial builder and investor. He's built a ton of companies, kind of like been a co founding investor at a bunch of startups here in town in hardware and in software and he's zany and wacky and we love his, his funky personality, great house. He writes every week in the San Tribune. And Barbara, his, his spouse who's got some of the deepest roots of a startup tech ecosystem here in town. It, you know, from the early days of Connect, I think she was also a writer at some point.
Flowers I think came in.
Came in, yeah, like deep roots and serial building as well too. So it's very cool to see them all come together. Tell us about what they're building. Do you know much about astering the product itself?
So it looks like they're building tailored AI solutions for specific industries. They have a few patents and I actually I'm looking a little bit look deeper. So prioritizing things like data privacy and security. It says with cutting edge measures. Not a huge, I don't really know what that means all that much but I like that we're building a lot more AI tools in San Diego. It sounds like it's data security, compliance, integrity, those types of things. I think the things that get really challenging when you know, you kind of talk about just throwing things into ChatGPT and having all this answer, these answers come back. It probably actually is really relevant to the panel you had the other night or last night with MedTech and those types of details. But yeah, it's interesting. I was chatting with you earlier, you know, for A While in 2019, you know, Barbara B. Was, was my nemesis. Not directly, but she was on city council for Pacific beach and so she was fairly anti scooter and I was obviously pro scooter and it was this really interesting kind of back and forth trying to understand how do you let an industry come into a city and, and sort of help you on the one hand by like helping you meet your green targets and not sort of COVID the city in scooters. And so at techcon I flagged down and said hey, hey Barbara, I got to say, what's up? You probably don't remember me, but wanted to say hey, you know, hey, thanks for that fantastic experience. We're friends now. And it was, it was a pretty cool interaction. But she said, you know, she said we're coming at it from a business angle and we just want to understand how can we let something come into our city that's actually, you know, effective and beneficial. It was a really, really amazing conversation. I thought it was such a funny, funny thing. I've been wanting to do that for a long time.
Awesome. Yeah, I love that story. That's so cool. I have just a week or two ago requested a demo. So I'm gonna try it out, we'll report back and I'm sure that's, that's the best that a startup needs right now. Not just funding but feedback for its user base to find its, you know, real footing There another startup. And by the way, you mentioned this a little bit like a lot of fundings this week but also these are announcements. I'm not saying when the fundings came out. Probably sun happened in December during the holidays. I see a lot of of post holiday funding announcements because you know, you close the deal which takes a lot of work and then you have to go tell people you close the deal. Right. And so now people are getting around to doing the PR part of the deal closing. We had a deal last week, we talked about two weeks ago, they closed our funding around last May and they just started talking about it like so anyway, do both raise the capital and then tell people to raise the capital and then get back to work.
Yeah, but you like oh hey, you're selling, celebrating your holiday in December. Guys listen, I'm raised, we raise this money. It's like now you should wait, wait till June.
Well another seed round from Deep vector raised a 1.5 million seed funding. This is an insurtech company which won't be the only Insurtech that we talk about right now in during these fundings area. They're an AI platform of course they're software so they're AI based platform for analyzing insurance underwriting documents. And so they are co led by Philly based Aperture Venture Capital and as well as InsurTech New York which is kind of cool to see very specific strategic capital investing in this area. So kudos to Scott Knowles and the team there at Deep Vector. I'm sure Fred will have a deeper scoop here as well as he does. And let's dive into another one here. Another Insuretech funding news. Zylo, our friend John Coren who is man has been hustling on this company, love to see it raised a solid 7.2 million Series A. What do you know about, about Zylo and John here?
I mean John, John does hustle. He's one of those people that text you back at 4am if you're ever up, you know, doing, doing, doing the early hours. So you're, you know, that's always impressive. But he's basically building tech for insurance, these carriers and managing general agents, so which is really cool. So he's kind of trying to modernize the sales and marketing process to help these organizations stay competitive. So, you know, you can kind of imagine there's the big insurance companies, but you can actually start, I'm pretty sure you can start your own insurance company, a smaller version. And so, you know, he's, he's building some tools to help them kind of, I guess be competitive. And it sounds like they've done, done some really cool stuff. 300 global clients and they're integrating with, you know, 30 plus platforms to streamline the process. But something's been at this for, for a little while and he's just, yeah, like you said, he's just keep, keep hustling, keep pushing forward and I mean, I guess you could say probably there's some AI in here too, but it doesn't look like they're leading with that necessarily.
No. Yeah. And the team, north county base, Carlsbad, I believe they're in downtown works. Carlsbad I know works there around the clock. I also have gotten the late, late nights, early mornings. I've seen them come to events late and then be like I'm going back to the office, you know, like, not necessarily like extraordinary. It's just like the founder way to just like go and build and to do what you got to do to build a good company. And he's working at it. So yeah, another insurtech here who I believe Plug and Play is involved with at prior rounds, which has a big insurtech focus as well. And Alex Tran, who is a San Diego based plug and play investor I believe is involved here as well too. So good to see some densifying clustering if you will, around InsurTech which is within the FinTech bundle. Another area I've been tracking density is battery tech. I've seen a lot of battery tech in San Diego, some that are spinouts out of ucsd, including this latest round by Sonocharge Energy which just raised a $23.5 million round. I believe they're a UCSD spin out like a few others that I've seen like South8 Sonarcharge is funded by Khosla Ventures as well as a number of other very like battery specific ones. But they also have oh Honda Accelerator Ventures and Temesic which is a Singapore based investment fund and Cycle Capital. So they are building. I think it's a hardware play. It's a piezoacoustic platform technology that makes the world's batteries last two to five times longer, charge two times faster and safer. So better batteries for better futures.
Wow.
Sonar charge. Glad I can be there Pitchman.
I know I'm looking at their site, I'm like I need a little more time. This is awesome. I love the graphics and the way they laid it out. That's pretty cool. Well, congrats to them. That's amazing.
Yeah, no, it's cool to see. Funny story about battery tech. Just before this I said I was on a panel at ucsd. Right after the panel, the first person that come up to me, someone I recognized who was my TA and one of my classes at UCSD in undergrad and she kept like I'm starting a startup, I want your advice. I'm like this is so cool because I used to come to your office hours, man. It was the class that she did that I was in, I was not good at. I told her that. She's like oh no, no one really was good at that class. That was a hard one in engineering. But she's you know, now starting a new battery tech company. So anyway, I'm not going to give away too much but just love the, the stories that happen when you show.
It's amazing. Hey, tell us what natural dying.
All right, last one here. Yes. A series D. Big, big D. Funding for netradine raised a $90 million Series D round led by 0.72 capital which is like a huge hedge fund. Steve Cohen, owner of the the Mets and I think the inspiration for the show Billions made a late stage investment here in Netadyne that they LED and Netradyne is a fleet management logistics tech platform. They have a series of camera for fleet management. I think it's like out of cab in of cabin as well as tracking fleet and how it's doing traffic safety like the whole stack there. So hardware and software play here for Netradyne and they're not the only one in San Diego like working in kind of fleet management in that area as well too.
Yeah, this is cool.
Who else participated in this round was Qualcomm Ventures and Pavilion Capital. So that is pretty cool to see. They've got over 3,000 customers 450,000 active subscribers of their, their management platform here too. So we'll link to the coverage there in the show notes as well.
You know, you got to check out this picture when you, when you, when you check out the link in the show notes. It's really interesting because it looks like it's giving the driver kind of like live updates on how to think about driving your car. You know, it says this one just like, please leave additional space. It's got the car ahead of them marked out, and they're kind of doing some sort of distance to stopping, it looks like, which is kind of interesting because you got to imagine, you know, some of these details are really important when you're doing a lot of driving. I mean, it's just about like the, the, the odds of things happening the more time you're on the road. But, you know, when you add this kind of, this extra little bit of data. So it's funny meme the other day was like, which one of these trucks is not in oil and gas? And it was eight trucks in a line, and seven of the eight were backed into their space so they could leave and one was nose in, you know, and so they're just like, you got to just prepare for, you know, they're preparing to leave the job site after or whatever. But it was about, you know, it's about safety and kind of thinking about, you know, lowering the chances and instances of, of, you know, interaction, a crash or whatever. It seems like that's kind of what we're seeing here. Pretty sweet. And they do have a few jobs in SD that are, that are available, so just kind of wanted to flag that if that's interesting. If this is cool tech, you got some experience here, check them out.
Make sure you check out the Career Coyote newsletter to see the latest jobs like that. Jonah is doing the work for you, the job seeker and the company who's looking to fill. Imagine you raise a $90 million round. There's me a lot more jobs coming in San Diego as well too, because that goes to scaling, which is people. We wanted to highlight two interesting deals of 2024. The biggest individual deal of a company and the fund, local fund that raised the most as well too. So we're going to tap out here. Just kind of look back on 2024 real quick. We got this. You know, Fred's like the de facto of the fundraising here, so, you know, go and do the deeper dive on Fred's newsletter, also linked in the show notes. But what do you think, Jonah I know you know the answer here, but of a, of a community that is deep in life sciences, deep in hardware and tech. Deep tech and deep in tech for VC fundings. Like who do you think got the, the biggest one single check for their fundraise last year?
It's really funny that you say this because if you look at. We got the list so you know, okay, I, I should have, I should close my eyes to guess, but every single other one looks like it's a biotech company. But this one is a company that deals with going outside and getting active.
Yeah. Pretty much sells San Diego worldwide. On our pants, on our shirts. Like the San Diego lifestyle is, is what they have monetized and that is Vori. I'm looking around if I'm wearing any article of Yuri. Not right now, but I've got some. Got some pants at home for sure now.
My brother showed up from San Francisco, or was it Oakland? I forgot. He came in and he's just like, hey, look at these cool shorts. I'm like, those are guys. This thing is wearing Fiori shirts and pants.
So yeah. Yori raised nearly a 900 million dollar round.
Wow.
At a 5.5 billion dollar valuation. These are like tech deal kind of numbers that they're raising and being valued at. And it's because they're doing, you know, amazing things as a company. So shout out to north county base Fiori for winning the, the top largest deal of 2024. What do you think? Who got the largest funding? Like round of a new round of capital or. Sorry, this is a VC fund that raised their new fund of capital and we don't talk a lot about a lot of like VCs raising funds in San Diego. There aren't that many, but in fact two are tied for the capital raise for their new funds.
I didn't see this. This is cool. No, tell us what are these two? Because I'm surprised by that.
Yeah, Fred got the scoop on one of these. Neos partners raised a $1.2 billion fund. This is fund two, I believe for them. I'm pulling up the notes here. This is an article from Fred's stack And yeah, a $1.37 billion clean energy and data center investment fund. So Neo's partners like quiet. I would say they're quiet. I don't run into them here in town. But they raise a new clear new group of funding from US Endowments, including University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and Yale University. These are like some of the largest pension endowment funds in the University Space they have funded as well as a bunch of family offices, foundations and other investment managers. So big fund and a lot of new capital. So if you are building tech around this clean energy, data centers and infrastructure, go get the capital here from a company. The fund that's in town and in fact the one that tied it is also in infrastructure and focus on data center energy infrastructure as well. And that is Stepstone. They raised a new fund also about 1.4 billion that is focused on infrastructure and it has a very much like a tech focus to the infrastructure fund. Stepstone has a bunch of funds by the way and they, they invest about $15 billion a year. Also San Diego fund that no one knows about, that they're La Jolla base. They're also known as a fund of funds. So they fund other funds. So anyway, good to know that there's nearly 2, what is this 2.8 billion of fresh new capital to invest in San Diego based funds. And they're all energy, clean energy, infrastructure related.
I mean it's got to be massive. It's so funny because you, you know, it's like looking at some of the at least Neo's, every single one of these top three I'm looking at, you know, empowering the future. And it's a picture of power lines and it's like these are the things we don't, definitely don't think about but are massively important to this energy grid. And then you know, AI comes online and just starts sucking power into data centers like you were mentioning these things. These deals are important. Wow. Safe, quality, productive construction services for the electric utility industry. That was one of their major investments too. I mean, gosh, you can't be small, right? I mean you got, you're not, you're not putting a small check into a company that's doing construction for utility. Utility companies. Anyways, that's pretty fantastic.
It is. I'm going to nix out our last story here just for time because I want to get to our newest segment of the program which is Howling Jobs by Career Coyote, Social Coyote himself. I force this on you because you put a second newsletter out there. Tell us about the genesis of Career Coyote and how's it going so far?
Sweet. So I was seeing similarly with the, the event space. I was just seeing lots of things everywhere. So all of these companies, a lot of these San Diego tech companies are posting their events. I think they get lost in LinkedIn or their, their jobs lost in LinkedIn. And so I was kind of saying, well, if I start to go to their career pages, wouldn't they have, you know, wouldn't that be a natural place to find some of these? And so I just wanted to make sure that they could elevate. I wanted to start putting this stuff out here so people start sending me jobs. I want startups to be able to kind of compete for good, good talent because, you know, it's expensive to promote jobs. And it's also, you know, I want people to be able to find work. So basically went through as many career pages as I could find. There's plenty more to go through. But I found 33 companies that had at least one job located here in San Diego. And I thought it was just interesting. Let's just throw this out there and kind of see what happens. And, and it went, it went pretty crazy on LinkedIn actually. But there's some fun data points if you look at what people are clicking on, at least from the newsletter side because the LinkedIn side's a little harder to see. A couple of the job career pages, you'd imagine. SHIELD has the most jobs, they've are hiring a ton. But what's interesting about them is almost all of them are in San Diego, which is incredibly cool. ClickUp has jobs all over. They do have one in San Diego, so people are checking them out. Went directly to their career page. Snap actually has a few, which is cool, but they're listing it in San Diego, Diego and la, which is, which is interesting. And then, you know, as you kind of continue down, actually Zylo, Zylo got a couple eyeballs. But the thing that actually was really, really fun. There's two things, but one, epic gardening people, people knew that. They were like, I know what that is because I linked it twice. I said, what's the company? So if you want to learn more about the company and let me go straight to the jobs page, people are clicking straight on the jobs. They know what epic gardening is probably because of Fred and because it's, it's epic and cool and yeah, so people are trying to get, trying to get work there. So I don't know, I think elevating companies, tech companies and, and startups or companies that have tech jobs are really interesting because I still threw in the wave. Had a couple of analytics jobs for, for, you know, health of their athletes. And I think that kind of fits as a tech job. But I think the last thing I was going to call out is just, I love karma AI. I don't know, I just love them. You know, the, the second largest autonomous Driving vehicle fleet, seconded Tesla and I think you know, they're growing at such a rate that they, I don't know if they might pass. Might pass them. Not, not, not a predicting person here but I did like that every one of their jobs comes with a bit of a challenge where it's not just sort of submit a resume. It's come in on here and yeah, put, put do some homework a little bit. You can do something. It's kind of awesome. I'm a huge fan. So anyways, that's kind of what we're seeing. I'll keep throwing these out there but send me, send me jobs if you're, if your company's hiring. If you're looking for to fill roles. Ross actually from the panel last night has a couple full stack jobs open. So if you're full stack go go hit him up and yeah, just let's, let's keep, let's keep helping San Diego companies. That's kind of the real genesis here for sure.
We are trying to better connect all the aspects here so that we build continue to help our companies be great which will in turn make the community great. And, and so it all, you know, all helps each other there. The links are in the show notes. You can go to subscribe to Career Coyote and the Social Coyote which we're going to highlight a few events coming up over the next few weeks. Carlsbad Life in Action Tech and sports and active lifestyle. Kind of doing a joint gathering usually curate for a few different groups but Fashionphile is offering to host and really hits the mark on kind of sports and active lifestyle luxury brands. Anyone building that space as well as the tech side. So together with the City of Carlsbad's Life in Action Group February 4th we're putting together a kind of, kind of a private group of people. So hit me up if you want to come in the north county area to go see the fashion file space. Also a North county startup. North County SD Startup Mixer. This is Hussein's bread and butter event. Finally went to my first one in December and it's so good. It's. I mean it really is like a really great event. It's held the same spot every month in Leucadia at the Leucadian and honestly it's so compelling of an event that Hussein built a whole event platform to compete with Luma around it. So go find on startupbeach.com, you can go find this event and other events that are coming up as well too. We always put them in the Social cloudy as well. You got one last one you want to highlight here?
Yeah, I just want to call out the cyber group, San Diego Cyber Group. Actually been chatting with David Spark at Hussein's meetup, but he's cool. They're getting really deep into the cybersecurity world. There's obviously really kind of a lot going on in cybersecurity in San Diego, but, you know, this is getting hugely popular. It's like 123 people have. Have said that they're going to attend. And one thing that's kind of cool, I like, I like. He kind of does. You know, what you guys do at the, at the founders hike is kind of saying, hey, who's hiring? You know, go find, go find them. And who's looking for work, go find them. But it's a very specific group to, you know, cybersecurity experts. And I just wanted to call them out because he's, he's always been. Been friend, been a good friend. And the CISO series podcast is kind of what. What was one of the things that was the antithesis of this. And he moved out here to San Diego somewhere recently. So kind of getting ingrained in our wonderful city.
Oh, I love to hear that cool backstory. And we'll make sure we send more people that way as well as make sure that the San Diego Cybersecurity center of Excellence, Lisa Easterly and crew come make sure they are aware of each other and helping each other out there as well too.
Love that.
So, like we said, follow both me, Jonah and Fred's newsletters. They're linked in the show notes so that we can continue to learn what you are looking for as a listener and continue to share and we all can continue to share with each all of our own little ecosystems and bubbles because then we will speed up this ecosystem which we know we all will stand to benefit from. So thank you all for tuning in. Jonah, it's great to have you here. We're looking forward to Fred coming back and maybe you all will be hearing the three of us next week, which should be fun as well too.
Hell yeah.
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