This Week in San Diego Tech News - October 2, 2023

Foreign hello. Happy Monday, October 2nd. This is Neil Bloom here with Fred Greer, your favorite tech news aficionados about San Diego. We are coming to you live with this week in San Diego Tech News. I say live because I've been working to try to pump these out as soon as you record them, so. So I'm holding myself to that again. Fred, how you doing?

Doing pretty good. Happy to be back. Happy Q4.

Yeah, Q4 is hot. Which you know what that means. We gotta start working on our Q3VC funding roundup soon in the month, so look for that in a future episode. I'm Neil Bloom. I run Fresh Brewed Tech, a tech news publication that also puts on events in the San Diego region. We also have the Tacos and tech podcast which you're listening to now, and my investment fund with my partner Alba Share Interlock Capital where we invest as a group of operators in other operators. And this is Fred Greer.

And I'm Fred Greer, longtime tech journalist in San Diego. I'm also the author of SD Founders Substack, a free and paid newsletter where I'm covering the top startups and tech companies in San Diego. And happy to be here to talk about the top stories over the past week.

All right, let's jump right into it. We'd say tech loosely sometimes because we like to cover big events that are happening that you know will have seismic waves for all of us here, including the new MLS San Diego Football Club that is coming. They just announced their new trading facility on the Sequan Band of Indians tribal lands. Sequoia being one of the part owners alongside the mansoors. And so they plan to build a training facility that includes an academy for up and coming players as well over in the El Cajon region. Fred, what else do you do, you know from this deal?

Yeah, so I put out a tweet on this. This news broke yesterday. Award winning journalists from the Union Tribune, Jennifer Bruin, she wrote a piece detailing kind of like the development of the project. What you need to know is it's 150 million development, such a huge investment, about 50,000 square foot. It's going to have a hotel for staff. It's going to be five full size training fields and it's going to be a 25 minute drive from the Snapdragon stadium. This build is kind of one of the first professional sports teams to build on a tribal reservation. It's 28 acre site and so it's a huge, huge, huge project and it's great to see, you know, the sports Scene continue to grow here in San Diego.

Yeah, it is good to see. Excited to see more come from that. The team itself has been gaining a lot of talent already from the San Diego loyal who have announced that they are shutting down at the end of the season. Port went out for the loyal, but glad to see that already they're getting some good talent that will be coming over and helping them continue the grow. Continue to grow the sport of soccer and football for San Diego. Let's move over to sunglasses blenders. Have you seen and felt the hype here, Fred, that's going on for our man, Chase Fisher, SDSU alum.

Oh, yeah, I remember covering Blenders, you know, way back when, you know, they were just a small shop in PB and now they're a global sunglasses company now even, you know, even bigger than that now because of the partnership they have with Deion Sanders and the Colorado college football team. I saw when they first got announced that the Deion Sanders coach promoted the Blenders eyewear glasses on national television, it just skyrocketed their sales and they made over $1 million in a single day. I can only imagine what it has come to today. It's been going on for about two weeks now, basically as a partnership where they developed their limited edition glasses for Deion Sanders that also fans can now purchase and pre order. And I'm told that it's backed up until December of this year. So it's a huge demand for the company. And Chase, who is an SDSU alum who started it in college, which is a cool San Diego success story.

Yeah, it's pretty cool to see luxterra, the largest sunglass maker in the world, took put in a big investment in it, which is helping them a lot power up sales in that regard. You know, Lux there owns pretty much every sunglass manufacturer in the world. I believe they own Ray Ban and many others. So, you know, still have the local brand in that is pretty cool. So keep watching, keep watching for blenders because I think, man, this is just kind of just, just beginning to get them to break out here, that's for sure. If you follow, follow Chase on Instagram because seeing the life behind the scenes of what he's going through. He's been at every Colorado game so far, so seeing it from his end is great. Seeing the Rock put him on, right, that kind of stuff. So it's pretty cool to watch. And I feel like this story is still being written even though they've had kind of a big acquisition or not kind of a Big investment from a large group already.

Yeah, I agree. I think he sold to the, to the, to the firm. I think he sold 70% of the company, but he still owns 30%. So as I continue to grow, you know that, that money is still, you know, being localized in San Diego hopefully.

Yeah. And speaking a little bit, pointing back to our soccer story, this next company, Equip, that is that just raised some new money, actually has some soccer stars on their cap table. Famous soccer star Alex Morgan invested in Equip last round and now Equip has raised a new round of funding to expand their platform which specifically helps people with eating disorders to a broader range. And so they raised a. I don't know if they named the round. This is a series the. In a sense, Fred, that general catalyst is, is leading here. The founders Aaron park and Christina. Forgetting Christina's last name, I've taken on now 75. Thank you Christina Saffron. I've now raised up to 75 million here which is pretty great to see a kind of teletherapy software and clinic. So I call it kind of a tech enabled platform or tech enabled service to help people with eating disorders. I'm guessing you've covered equipped in the past.

Yeah, I've covered it since exception. You know these two women founders, they came together, one of the co founders used to work at UC San Diego, specifically in the eating disorder center. The other co founder, Christina, she experienced this issue with eating disorders earlier in her life. And so they, they really have experience working in this space. I remember talking to a Boston based investor who said that they were one of the, you know, the top companies to look out for and that was in 2019. They have since raised over 70 million in funding. They're one of the top woman back woman tech startups in the US and so it's great to see them that they continue to grow and they created a platform that they're serving specifically eating disorder patients and so they're doing some good in the world and great to see that they're continuing to find success.

Yeah, it's great to see. I got introduced them by Spencer Hutchinson who's got kind of a complimentary platform, telehealth but on the therapy and mental health side. And we actually had Aaron Parks co founder on the podcast within the last year. So it's, it's awesome to see them continue going forward here, that's for sure. Congrats Equip team. Another late stage company of ours here in town is Vuori, kind of owning the Athleisure space with a very kind of San Diego Encinitas vibe and taking it kind of to the world. Well, an article came out that I think actually Cody Barbo texted me to as soon as it was out to show. Hey, Vuori is claiming they're going to IPO next year, which is pretty exciting, especially for a CPG apparel brand. What's your take on this?

I was excited to see this. I just heard Joe Kutla, who was a University of San Diego alum, speak on stage about the early days of Yori when he was just, you know, trying to figure it out. And so now to see that they are announced to go public after taking a 400 million investment two years ago from SoftBank is a big deal. I think it's going to help generate, you know, wealth for the early employees and it's a big success story. They're. They're competing with Lululemon and Nike and they're just going continue to, you know, become a household name in the Athleisure space.

Yeah, I'm pretty excited for the S1 to go out and us to digest this. We'll be able to, you know, show who's on the cap table, if there's any to San Diegans would be awesome. Besides employees, we want to start to see. What I continue to say to a lot of people is what's hurting, what's stopping San Diego's, you know, meteoric growth that we know it can lead up to is the lack of exits. And an IPO is one. Is one path of an exit. And what I mean by that is the, you know, the. The recycle of capital, meaning, you know, generally investors, when they get a big success, they put more in, they invest more into more companies. We already are seeing that from the DTx Pharma deal, which had a big exit. You're already seeing recycle because of people's perception that we had a huge win. We're missing that on the tech side and the CPG brand side. And so I think there's a lot of enthusiasm and excitement here. I don't want to get too far ahead of our skis because many tech companies have said they're going public and never do when the market itself obviously can dictate that who knows what next quarter holds. But still, you know, you can tell there's some enthusiasm here because we would hope that this would lead to former more success by more people going public, but also the people who go through an ipo. I mean, when you Learn that you bring that to your next thing. You, you build your next company with the plan to do it better, faster. And so that would be the hope here as well too. But we will wait and see how that comes to be and we'll keep you updated as we hear more about them going public. There's been a number of events that have happened recently. We should give a quick recap too. You and I have held one or two of them together and then we were at some other events. Let's go back to Fashion File that you helped coordinate with the, the founders of Fashionphile. Sarah Davis. Take us through that real quick.

Yeah, so it's funny, it's a full circle story. I've written about Fashion File at the Business Journal and for my substack and Sarah took the idea that we should bring together founders and early stage consumer entrepreneurs in Carlsbad to see the Fashionphile, you know, headquarters and we got a full tour, got to see the operations from behind the scenes, kind of hear bootstrapping for 18 plus years to a 400 million dollar operation. Sarah and Ben both, you know, kind of gave a Q and A and shared, you know, their insights of building this company and raising money from Neiman Marcus 100 million partnership. So it was really a cool experience and want to do more of these events down the line. I heard the feedback from founders that this was one of the best events that they've been to this year.

Yeah. And I want to give, you know, kudos here. The fact that we really curated specific CEOs that could really benefit from this industry. Right. People who've been in fashion or apparel or high end products, you know, kind of the CPG piece. So you know, I think it was, it's really important the curation piece that we do for this. And I agree, I'm looking forward to doing more as well. Which speaks to another event that you came to that I held last week. We did industrial SAS and Whiskey Class, me and a venture firm out of LA B Capital, which is a huge fund by the way. But I specifically work with the Seed Stage fund. Anu and Patrick came down, they've been coming down a good amount now a few times a year. Actually met them through Connect. Exactly a year ago they came down to Venture Summit which kind of turned into Innovation Day this year. And you know we've been saying, hey, we, we don't just, we want to even just Even just saying SaaS is almost too big now. We wanted to go industrial kind of working on selling software into industries they had a really good description of it, of industries that make things, which is one way of looking at it. Some people call it like blue collar industries, people from agriculture to, you know, waste management, all of these areas. So we gathered 20 people together who specifically support this from investing and CEOs of companies in the space and did it at a cool but also casual place called the Leucadia Club, which is a private club, mostly people in the tech scene who've put together their own little club in Leucadia. And we did some whiskey tasting with two local whiskey distillers. And a VC out of Seattle came down and brought his own wine line as well too. So it was kind of a cool thing. What, what, what was the vibe that you were getting when you were talking to people walking through?

I loved it. I got to see, you know, some founders that, you know, you don't really hear about that. You know, I think San Diego is known for being a biotech hub, but you know, we do have industrial SaaS and you guys did a great job bringing together like minded individuals from investors to founders and even the consumer brands that were serving the whiskey and the, and the wine. But that was, that was a really cool touch. And you know, San Diego is really unique. We have everything. And so bringing these curated groups together really lifts everyone up. You get to meet people who are a little bit farther than you or who might be a potential partner down the line, who might be an investor on the line. It's really a great way to cross pollinate, you know, similar people working on different problems.

Yeah. And, and honestly, under this bucket of industrial, I would consider logistics tech. And honestly, you and I have now chatted. We want to do dedicated logistic tech night. So look for that coming up. Just because there's so much logistics tech in San Diego, not just in startups, all the way to big tech. I mean from Amazon analytics and Qualcomm all being involved in this. So keep an eye out on something. Fred and I'll be putting together soon. All right. One other event that just happened last week, Women's Venture Summit. I know you were at it last week.

Yes. So quick recap of that. That was a three day event. They had it at the Cooley headquarters in La Jolla. Sylvia Ma is kind of the brainchild of her. She's a longtime investor for women founders. She champions women innovators, entrepreneurs and investors. And you know, I got to meet a lot of different people. There's probably around 700 folks. It was a sold out event. They had different talks, they had dinners, they had mixers, all the above. And people flew in. Not only San Diego base, but there's people from the Midwest, people from New York. I think it really just signaled that there's a changing tide in woman investing. Crescent Ridge Ventures was there, there was Misty Kane from techstars, there was Life Science investment, investors from Connect. There's really everything across the board. And I'll also be doing a story recap in the event so. Well, job to the the seller team who puts on the Women's Venture Summit. It was its 10th anniversary that year, so it was extraordinary. Extraordinarily special.

That's awesome. Yeah. So supportive. And we've now done investing together. Sylvia's in some of my syndicates, I'm invested in some of her companies. Interlock actually is 52, 52 of our portfolio are women led companies and 25 are women founded companies in our portfolio. So I think there's something special in San Diego around the, the ecosystem we have helped foster to raise the raise the floor for women led companies. I think it's unique and I think it is worth noting. Not just noting, but like what is it, what's been special here that we've done it. And I point to Sylvia in fostering a community that she is plugged in with Felina. From a female focused coworking space to other experienced operator investors here in town that, you know, really feel that parity is what we need here in terms of giving everyone an opportunity to be invested in or invested by. So thanks for highlighting that Fred and I'm looking forward to your story. It is a busy month for AI events, let me tell you. Sdx, which has become known as kind of a cool AI focused group, put on a hackathon. They did a hacker house. Well, they've got events every week throughout the month, 8th, 13th, 14th and 20th around building in in the AI space. So we link to it here in the show notes. And then a specific AI company, IPOP AI which is kind of a spin out from the launch factory team. Also putting on a bunch of hackathon events throughout the month on starting tomorrow, October 3rd, 5th, 14th, 17th, 19th, 21st, 24th, 26th. So a ton of events all in the let's build AI specific areas. The end of the month, San Jose Startup Week, October 23rd to 27th and really excited for that. A whole week's worth. It'll be in Carlsbad, it'll be in Tijuana, it'll be at sdsu, it's Going to be all over town. So a new day each, a new location each month and then already into November, which is crazy, less than a month away. Now the 0111 conference specifically focused on technical leaders November 2nd and 3rd. And the AgTech Startup Hackathon November 2nd, 3rd, 4th. Bringing together growers, scientists and technologists up in Escondido. Man, there's a lot. It's gonna be a busy month. What do you say, Fred?

Yeah, it's going to be a busy month. No slowing, no slowing down. I thought September was busy, but I think October is, is even better. And you know, if you are looking to get plugged into the tech scene or the startup scene, there's just a lot of events you can choose from. And it's, you know, I'm hearing from people that they're, they're looking for to get plugged in. So right now there's an opportunity to, to find out what's happening in the space from tech to, you know, also meeting investors. This is how you build your company and how you get plugged in by, by attending these, some of, some of these events. And so we look forward to bringing, bringing highlight and awareness to all of them.

Yeah, and speaking of which, I gotta run because I'm about to head to Innovation Night at the La Jolla Playhouse, which is an annual event and tonight they're honoring Irwin Jacobs, the visionary, founder and original CEO of Qualcomm. He'll be there tonight. So I've got a run to go to that and we will give a recap of that at our next recording here. So Fred, thank you and thank you all for listening. We will catch you next recording here, but keep an eye out for Fred. Substack sdfounders.substack.com and fresh brewed Tech for the latest in the San Diego tech ecosystem. Thanks everyone.

Thanks. See you next time.

Cheers.