This Week in San Diego Tech News – August 19, 2022

Hey. Hey, can you hear me?

Hey, I can. Can you hear me?

Yes, I can.

Awesome. Spaces is buggy, but here we are.

Yep.

Everything'S buggy today. I know. San Diego Business Journal website. I think maybe there's some cyber going on in there that we're going to talk about.

Fantastic. Yeah, I can't.

The world's under attack.

I can't see anything on there. It's really weird because I definitely could read it last night, but for whatever reason, not today.

Weird. Well, here we are. Here we are. It's nice to be back. I'm recovering from COVID Still have a little bit of a haze in my throat, but feeling much better.

That's good. That's good.

Yep. I can't believe it's August.

I know.

There is mid August already.

At least it's cooling down. I'll take that.

Oh, well, you haven't been here long because September, October are our warmest months.

Really? Gross. Absolutely not.

That's when fire season really begins.

I've been holding off from putting on my AC until now, but I had finally had to because it was too much. Couldn't take it.

You're lucky you got ac. Most people in cinema do not have.

AC because we shouldn't need it. Right. But I suppose now we really do.

Yeah. Be comfortable, San Diego. Well, we've got some good stories in at the end. We'll kind of talk through a bunch of events coming up through the end of October. So I will apologize. Pull up the Fresh Brew Tech news, this week's newsletter and talk through some of that. But let's get started started on talking through the news. My name is Neil Bloom. I'm a entrepreneur, investor, community builder and I've been helping build San Diego tech ecosystem for close to 10 years while I was also building my own first company that we sold five years ago. And now we're. We're filling in every gap that we can think of from incubators, accelerators, funds, angel investments, events and news. So this show, try to do it weekly if we can not always. And then we put it out on the Tacos and Tech podcast which you can find at tacosandtechpod.com or Fresh BrewTech freshbroodtech.com Join our newsletter subscribe. You'll get the news of what's happening lately and really want to make sure that everyone here is filled in what's going on so they can help brand and bring everyone here to town. My co host today, Sesha. Welcome Sesha.

Hey everyone, it's good to be here. My name is Sesha. I'm a former biotech data person currently working in cybersecurity and cloud evangelism over at Microsoft Azure. Check us out on Twitterzuresupport. I am a San Diego transplant by way of Seattle. I've been here for a few years now and really loving every drop of sunshine, even if it's very hot and humid. But fond of all things tech startups and tacos.

Love it. And we happen to have a special guest here, Mr. Vinny Lingam. Vinnie, thanks for joining. Happy Friday.

Happy Friday. Hey, guys.

Hey.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, no, we, we're happy to have you here. Happy to have a comment on some news if you want, or just listen in. All good. We're just reading some local tech news.

I'll do both. I'm having lunch, so I'll step in when my mouth's not full.

I love it.

I love it.

Well, our news starts off. Sesha, why don't you take off. Take, start us off with the first story here.

Yeah, for sure. This one is awesome and very, I think, relevant to just how things are going in the world. So the FBI is issuing warnings over cyber threats here in San Diego. And there's new evidence of bad actors and nation state state attackers seeking entry into some of our computer systems maintained by San Diego businesses to exfiltrate military trade business secrets. Now, these targets are include defense contractors, of which we have many, biotechs, of which we have a lot, and even agriculture companies, which really surprised me. But when you look at the recent hacks at Colonial Pipeline, JVS Foods, maybe this is not that unusual. These actors include, they are from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. And the most common ways that they are starting to steal victims data is through ransomware, where essentially they're encrypting victims data and infrastructure hostage and demanding ransom payments for the decryption key. And so actually that is exactly what they used in the case of Colonial Pipeline. What really intrigues me about this story in particular is that the sophistication of these bad actors and what they're doing is really growing. Like we see, and I see quite often ransomware as a service now, which is wild to me, the fact that you can literally pay for cryptolocker to go in and steal a company's data. It's wild. But this is not the first warning in July, and I think it was in July the FBI director warned, started warning against Chinese cyber attacks. And so we're really starting to see more of a push for the FBI here starting to push for relationships between our San Diego businesses as well as the FBI to really figure out who are these actors, what are they doing and how can we make sure that we are protecting our system. And so do you want to take us through some of the partnerships that we have with the CCOE and some of the other groups?

Yeah. So San Diego, as we reported a few weeks ago, there was a great report on the cyber security cluster of San Diego. There's close to 400 cyber related tech companies in San Diego making up for what was it like 50,000 employees at least, if not more. And the Navy's Cyber center of Excellence is actually headquartered here. And I think they've got close to 3,000 engineers focused solely on cryptographic and other kind of cyber security engineering work. So this is a hub for it. And in fact, FBI's headquarter for corporate espionage and corporate cyber attacking is based in San Diego. So that is what the FBI's local office is focused on, which is a great reason to build community around that and make sure everyone's talking about, which is a very San Diego thing. Bridge building. The organization called Cybersecurity center of Excellence is run by Lisa Easterly. Shout out to Lisa, who will be on our podcast next week. Actually, she leads a industry cluster group that makes sure that government, big tech, small tech are all sharing latest news, warnings and talent. That is the big thing. And so a big attack that happened, what was it, May 2021, was on Scripps Health, our largest health care system, I believe, in San Diego, which, you know, had a huge data leak. And so having a pre existing relationship already between FBI and Scripps helped close that leak quicker than usual. So, you know, it's good that we're working on things. We'd rather just not have this attack in general, but I don't think we'll be able to stop that. You know, I'm kind of proud that we got the, the big, the big four, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, you know, we got the big ones looking at San Diego. It means we made it. Yeah, you know, let's, let's make sure that they don't get anything from us, but keep trying, keep, you know, being the enemies at the gates. We also recently had the cybersecurity team from Cox Communications on to really. Or Cox Business to really talk about what a cyber attack does to small businesses, which really could be detrimental. A Scripps Health could pay the ransom. They could throw a ton of resources at it. A small business Might not be able to. I mean, it really could be that a ransom has to be paid and you're, you're out of business or loss of data means client loss of client trust, customer trust, and you're out of business. So I think we can't ignore the fact that small businesses are very vulnerable, and I think hackers know that. So go back and listen to an episode we did on Fresh Brew tech podcast or talking tech podcast on tips to help small businesses. We'll make sure we link it in the show notes here as well, too. Obviously there's some, some, you know, quick tips that really we could share. I mean, it really comes down to human nature or humans being the front line of defense, updating software, enabling firewalls, and just being generally suspicious of all emails. I'm sure everyone's got an email from someone they thought from like their best friend or their mom and wasn't really from them. Right? So enable multi factor authentication. Enable those malware scanners, which suck, obviously, because it's barriers to us doing what we want. Do the backups and do your vulnerability scanning. But in general, you know, we got to make sure that we're protecting ourselves and our companies here first.

And it's really, you know, like the sort of like the bare minimum you can do. It's really simple things in terms of just protecting your systems. And even if it seems like it's redundant or something, that doesn't seem like it's all that important, it's just, it's protecting you against a lot of these bad actors that know that it's easy enough with some of these legacy systems that they can just go in and easily hack in into the mainframe. So it's just like the little things that really go a long way. And I think that, you know, the FBI pushing this partnership and also calling and saying that, you know, they're not here as a regulatory body, they're really here just to make sure that our San Diego businesses are protected and they can start tracking who these, these bad actors are.

Couldn't, couldn't Civic be helping out a little bit in this space too? Vinnie.

I would, I would. One thing I would recommend is not having your phone number linked to any, any important service because if your SIM gets hacked or swapped, they can access it. So move for other forms of authentication. And if you do have to use your phone number somewhere, make sure you have number lock set up with Verizon or AT&T or whoever else, because SIM swapping is a very, very strong attack. Vector for hackers.

Interesting. Is there like a VPN version of phone numbers? Like a Google Voice number instead of your own line that people should be doing?

You can use Google Voice. That's actually pretty secure.

Okay, that's a good one. Well, awesome. Let's jump into our next story here, which is a little bit different. It's a biotech focused at home test company called Veritech. It was awarded a Walmart open call deal where Walmart's looking to award local companies the opportunity to be sold in Walmart Sam's Club, direct to consumer, which is a huge leg up for our startups. You want to take us through a little bit about this one, Sesha?

Yeah, sure. So Veritech, they make narcotics field tests really originally made and used by the police, but during the pandemic actually transitioned over to be used mostly in terms of PPE for first line of defenses as well as law enforcement. But this is really cool. So they have a line of at home test kits for cannabis and fentanyl and they're using the brand name Verifique. And So they were one of 49 companies to be awarded this award of being able to sell their product on the shelves. Basically meaning that you can go ahead and buy a cannabis test or a fentanyl test at Walmart or Sam's Club. And this is supposed to come into the stores I believe in the next year or so or in 2023. So that will be a very interesting change and really bringing, bringing a lot of these test tests back into like the consumers directly to the consumers. So this will be cool to see.

Yeah, fentanyl is scary. I mean it is creeping into more and more of our lives. Not just the drug habits of heroin and other illicit drugs, but it's other opioids. Man, it's so much cheaper and it's completely undetectable until now from the average consumer. And it is deadly. And fentanyl death is scary. So to see a company being able to bring it into our homes one is a little scary. I mean it's a little anxiety driven. The fact that what are we, we're have to start testing products at home. Like what are we going to like start literally everything, run it through fentanyl test, that's kind of crazy to me. But man, it's a scary world we live in.

Yep. So originally this company, they, their initial product was a line of color chemistry, color chemistry kits which they've called Swabtech, which basically changes color based on the presence of certain substances. So for narcotics, explosives, firearms. This pivot was actually kind of an interesting one in that they are focusing mainly now in cannabis and fentanyl, which I think is. As to your point, it's driving because of some of this anxiety that we're starting to see where we have fentanyl. We have more of this creeping into society now and this is how we've responded. And you're right, it is a little anxiety inducing, it's a little scary. But I think it's good that at least now we have ways to test.

Yeah. Well, congrats to local startup Vertique. Getting the tap by Walmart, huge distribution deal for that new company. Alert moving to town. I don't have a good sound queued up, but welcome Psionic new Bionic limb company moving from Champaign, Illinois to San Diego. And not only are they just moving the company here, CEO Adil is claiming to want to make San Diego the bionics capital of the world, which is awesome. You love when not just a company moves here and says we're going to build a great company, but we're. But when you want to build a great community around it as well too, that's when you got Neil Bloom's attention and I'm all on board. They started the company out of Adeel's MD PhD program while he was at Urbana Champaign. And you know, he originally was just going to get a doctor as md, but he talked to a professor who said, look, as an MD, you'll make a great impact on localized lives. Right. The impact will be very local. Everyone you come in contact with into your clinic, you will touch them and heal them. But with Psyonic the impact can be global. And it sounds like from that he made his big pivot career wise. He launched his first product Ability Hand, which is obviously a robotic hand in 2021. It's only a year ago and it's already being used and tested at Facebook, Meta and NASA for a variety of applications. Do you have, do you know some of those applications that they're testing it on?

Yes. So this is number one super cool. So it has the Ability Hand has sensors in its fingertips that you, that can detect pressure when you're gripping an object, just like you know, an ordinary hand would and send a vibration to your arm to communicate that sensation. And it basically allowing you to feel what you're doing, which is just so cool. And I think the really cool part is that there are 32 grip patterns that they have currently. So essentially you can, you know, you can do the thumbs up sign. You can do the high five thing. You could do like the little waves, wave, cowabunga thing. You can even do the middle finger. So it's just lots of applications here and it's super cool to see and actually intriguing because I'm curious to know why they came here to San Diego other than, you know, it's amazing.

But I think they got a big partnership with Naval Medical Center San Diego, which is one of the premier hospitals for the military who obviously have one of the biggest impacts of, you know, robotic limbs. Right. We've got veterans coming back from the warfront with injuries and the military is obviously making an investment to get them back to operating in life as much as they can. And so pretty cool to see that that inked partnership makes him want to move the entire company out here. His quote here is, my ambition is to turn San Diego into the bionics capital of the world. Our new space in San Diego will be burgeoning with new bionic developments. It'll be bionic paradise. We were so excited for you all to see our space, what we'll be creating. So it sounds like we'll be doing a robotics Bionics San Diego event from Psyonix space pretty soon. We've got two Psyonix in San Diego now. We've got this company and then Psyonic, the game developer that makes Rocket League, was acquired by Epic Games a few years ago. So spelled a little different, but two Psyonics in town, both doing well. Love to hear it, Vinnie. For someone who's new to San Diego and you're a newer San Diego, you're kind of a veteran now after a few years. What's some tips that you would give a deal how to get plugged in and what to do while he's in town.

You know what, as much as I've only been here for a few years, I'm. I'm still pretty. I don't know, I mean, co. Half my time I've been here, I've been in covet, so I don't know, I like going out, eating in restaurants and whatnot. San Diego is kind of a cool place for that. Okay, so what else?

I don't know. Under the radar as well.

The other half of the time I've been here, I've been traveling.

Well, I look to.

I love San Diego. I think it's. I. I like the beach. The beach is pretty cool. So this coastline is incredible, as you know. True. Yeah.

All right. Good, good. Yeah. Nothing particular.

Sorry.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you next week. It's been so long since I think so. We did see each other a year ago when we did that rooftop 2100.

Oh, that's right. But that was still Covid. That was still Covid era. That was like one of the only events I went to.

It was like a two week break between, you know, the variants and then a lockdown again. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing you next week and mixing it up a little bit and hopefully seeing a little bit more often. But we'll make sure you get a chance to welcome a deal to town too because that's how we do it in San Diego. Once you hear a few months you're. You're a local.

Sounds good.

There's some events coming up that are worth talking through that the community should know about. And if you are ready to come out of your Covid bubble, we'd love to see you at. Let's see if you go to freshbroodtech.com and look at the latest newsletter, we've got a whole event calendar there for you. So some events coming up. We've got the Aerospace and Technology Career Fair happened up at Kent Pendleton on oh it was yesterday. Nevermind, you missed it. Hope you all enjoyed that one and found some jobs. But next big event that we're throwing fresh brew Tech is throwing is marketing night on August 30th. And actually Vinnie, your David Saxton loves to come out to that one, meeting other marketers to see who could be using weight room. So I'm looking forward to seeing David there. We'll also have speakers from the San Diego Loyal soccer team from Trust and Will, a estate planning software and a local marketing agency, RocketDog. So make sure you come out if you're a senior or junior marketer. We're making sure we're connecting both experienced talent and new talent. Get them in the flow for marketing roles. That's August 30th happening downtown at UCSD's park and Market. San Diego. Life Changing is an organization that helps tech companies recruit great talent to San Diego. They're putting on their summer bash August 31st, so come out to that if you want to meet other Sandigans, especially talk about recruiting and talent tactics. The Cause conference, which is the first of the first year that it's happening focused on on impact driven leaders in the community. September 15th happening at University of San Diego and literally the next day is the Women's Venture Summit. This is year man, year seven or eight focused on women in venture and women entrepreneurs, making sure that we are helping them move forward and progress. Be some great talks, pitch competitions with cash prizes. I will be there. Excited to be a part of it. Man, we've got a lot coming up. September, October are always busy. The Green Summit September 17th and I will actually be there as well too because Steve Wozniak is the keynote and Steve's actually recently invested in a San Diego company so he's getting a little connected to the San Diego scene. So it'll be cool to see the Green Summit talking all things green technology. Top Tech Awards Night this is an annual event awarding really our CTO, CTOs, CIOs, all the technical leaders. It's a fun night. September 22nd and this year it will be, I think the one of the first events to ever happen at the brand new Snapdragon Stadium over in Mission Valley. That stadium is looking super cool. I will be going to a Wave soccer game there the week before and then coming back for the Top Tech Awards Dev and Data Night, also by our company Fresh Brew Tech, connecting the developer, software developer and Data community on September 27th. And last but not least, the San Diego Startup Week. We are back in person end of October. It kicks off actually with an ag Tech hackathon happening in Escondido October 21st, 22nd and 23rd and then in person all week 25th through the 28th. Each day is a different part of town. Carlsbad, Downtown, UTC Sorrento. It's going to be pretty fun to have a Startup Week back. Helping people either take their ideas and turn them into reality or if you've never worked at a startup, giving you kind of the confidence to know what's it like to take the risk, take the leap and join a rocket ship. So a lot going on over the next two months or so. I hope to see a lot of you at that. Stacia, what events are you looking forward to or anything else we missed here?

Oh gosh, there are so many. I think all of these are going to be awesome. Marketing night for sure. Summer Bash, that's going to be good. And then Devin Day to Night and then San Diego Startup Week was actually my first event that I did here in San Diego and it was awesome and really introduced me to this amazing warm community here. So definitely go to the San Diego Startup Week. That will be amazing. I think there is also an Edge meetup next week either. I think it might be on Tuesday, but that one will be great. If you're interested in Crypto and just hearing from the wider Web3 community, check out that one. It's usually down here in Little Italy.

The bitcoin meetup at Edge. Absolutely one of the longest running bitcoin meetups around. I Think man Paul Pui started his first Bitcoin meetup, I think 2014 or 15, and it's been going pretty consistently monthly. So yeah, we got to add that to the calendar. Good call. I see my partner Al Bashar in the audience here. A partner here with me at Interlock Capital, who was the winner of last year's Investor of the Year award at Santa Startup Week. Shout out Al. Let's see what this year holds for the awards ceremony. I think you can start submitting nominees for Startup Week's awards. You can also still apply for the Startup Week incubator. It's actually a whole month long incubator built on a techstars curriculum to help companies in one month only get ahead and get some help from very experienced tech people. Well, that's our show. We did it in all in under 30 minutes whilst Vinny is probably still scarfing down some food.

I'm done, I'm done, I'm done.

All right, well, we appreciate you, Vinnie joining us and everyone else. Make it a great weekend. Not hard to do here in sunny San Diego. If you want to check us out, look up freshbrewtech.com to find the latest news and events in our weekly newsletter. So please subscribe to that and our podcast, the Tacos in Tech Podcast where we interview great builders of tech here in San Diego. So for me, Sasha, thank you all very much. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

Thanks everyone. Happy Friday.

Bye.