This Week in San Diego Tech News - 1/5/2026

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Hey. Hello. Hello everyone. Happy New Year. Fred and Neil, back at you. Hey Fred, how you doing?

Hey, Neil, long time no see. It's good. Good to be back.

It is. Happy New Year. Did you have a good holidays? Good New year, Had a good holidays.

And ringing in 2026, you know, ready to get, get going. It's, you know, 2025 was a great, was a great year. We had a lot of tech fundings, IPOs, events and you know, hopefully you had a great holiday with your, with your family as well.

I did, thanks. Yeah. I spent the last few weeks in Vietnam, which was really eye opening and also nice to be on the other side of the world and just kind of take in the year and get ready for the next year. I did actually met up with some founders in Vietnam. I met up with some VCs in Vietnam. I took in kind of the, what's their perspective of the United States from their angle? What's China's perspective tech wise? How are they seeing Vietnam? So that was really interesting. I'll probably do a little write up about that. But yeah, it was really nice to, you know, the last few weeks of the year, slow it down and just ingest, analyze and then focus on what's, what's ready for 2026. So I'm excited about it. I actually launched a kind of a new podcast series called on the Radar related to this where I'm just kind of doing a little conscious thought series. So that was fun as well too. But let's do a little wrap up of 2025. Let's talk through some of the highlights and then we'll, let's talk about some predictions for 2026. Does that sound good?

That sounds good to me. Yeah, we'd love to set the stage. I believe 2025, you know, we start off with just like a very, you know, cautious, optimistic, you know, perspective from local investors that, you know, might have less dollars going to tech companies. And I would say, you know, we did see a surge of activity in both AI and defense tech and 2025 actually wasn't that bad of a year as some of the media would make it, they said this is probably one of the hardest fundraising markets since 2008, since the financial crisis. But if you look at the numbers, thanks to Connect, we're kind of ended around 3.4 billion. And historically we're in that 4 billion to 5 billion range year over year. For a regular year excluding 2021, we had an outlier. I think we had 8 billion or 9 billion to go into both tech and biotech. And that was driven by Covid and interest rates and other, a bunch of other factors. What was your take from kind of the rough numbers for 2025 new?

Well, I mean I looked at, there's a few things of how to synthesize this one. Looking at overall venture dollars, you know, year over year and venture dollars looked, I mean they look pretty much on par. There wasn't like this big drop or big jump up. There's definitely were some big fundings everywhere. Right. AI took a lot of the auction out of the room for, for sure as did defense tech and some biotech deals. Right. But to us that's not totally new. Like we feel like we've been on that for like five, six years now where we see certain hotspots that get big areas of funding. Right? Definitely. As a city we also see certain markets that get a lot like get a bunch of big checks. Right. We always see SF in New York and la. Right. Get these big things. Well, I think the fact that we're still staying in there, still top 10, maybe even top six for funding shows that, you know, we're still playing in there. That's a good sign that we are within the data, the, the global venture capital flow. Well, we're right in there. Any uptrend, we see an uptrend in ours. Any downtrend, we see a downtrend in ours. That's a good thing. Right. So I think the fact that we've normalized into this multi single digit billion yearly, it's a great sign and we're seeing it in our hotspots, our biotech, our hardware and some of our software. Great. That's, that's our bread and butter. So let's dive in through some of that because some of our, some of our deals, I think some of the uniqueness in San Diego that we're going to see this year is, and last year is that there's some new names which isn't as usual because in the past it's been the same company, same late stage companies getting more checks. We've Got a few of those. Right. So we can jump right into like SHIELD AI they have been the net biggest receiver of drone and defense tech companies getting deals. But you're going to recognize there's some new names here that you don't see a lot of late stage funding coming to and there's a lot of big names that you don't see that didn't take any capital last year like the seismics, the teliums, some of these. So let's dive into it. What are some of the tech deals that got some of the largest VC dollar investments last year?

Yeah. So yeah, surely I took, took home. They raised over 240 million. They're I think series F now which is, you know, they should be going public maybe this year. They're a late stage company. Cyber Reason raised 120 million. They are in the military and defense space. They do cyber security. Flock Freight is an OG unicorn logistics tech company ran by Oren, Oren and Solana beach. They raised 60 million. I believe that was a series D, you know, extended financing round. Clear Speed was a new company. They raised 60 million. Also in I believe in the, in the military space. Fabric 8 Labs, they raised 50 million as followed by Equipped Health, which is kind of more of a, I think eating disorders focused tech company called. They raised 446 million funding rounds. So we had about, yeah, a wide ranging from, you know, defense tech, drones to cybersecurity to logistics tech to hardware to eating disorders. It wasn't really concentrated in just one area which I think, you know, bodes healthy for our tech ecosystem. You know, people say San Diego doesn't have a tech scene, but we, we definitely do have a diverse of industries that are, are able to raise capital from, you know, institutional investors from the Bay Area to New York to Boston, et cetera.

Yeah, I mean I think some of these are brand new names to a lot of people. Cyber Reason and clearspeed was not on anyone's radar. Right. People are, you could tell people are asking us who are these people? Right. You get those DMS and emails or can you intro us to it right after we mention them on our podcast? Sometimes we don't know them either. Guys. We try to, we try to get to know them years in advance for sure. But seeing Fabricate Labs raise this Series B is really strong. Remember when they were pitching Tech Coast Angels back in the day? And it's great because they're riding this great wave of the future of, of advanced manufacturing which is quite the rage since manufacturing has to come Back to the industrial base in the United States. So yeah, I think it's a really interesting sign. I think one thing that's, that's glaring missing on the tech side is there's no, there's no AI companies getting some big checks in San Diego. Right. There's definitely, definitely our software companies have rebranded to AI companies. Right. ClickUp. All of them are AI and have AI products. But you do not see these net new big brand, you know, AI deals that are getting 100 million at a billion on their Series A. Right. We do not seem to be playing in that space at all. Okay, that's okay. Maybe, maybe that's a blind spot or it's happening, we don't realize it. Maybe our founders are moving away too soon. We definitely had a few founders move to back to the Bay in the last year who were doing pure AI. Right. Personal AI. There's another one. I know his founder's name, but I don't remember what his company is. Vish moved to the Bay and got I think $40 million thrown at him at his seed round. So some of this we should be keeping our eye on. Right. Is that people who were here getting money elsewhere or moving to where they perceive density is if we don't feel like we have the density here. But biotech, biotech, super dense. Right. We saw a ton of activity in biotech here. There's been this multi year narrative of post Covid of what is happening in biotech. Right. Obviously diagnostics was huge and then it wasn't a lot of companies who went big on anything related to Covid had to suddenly shift and get back to business on therapeutics or oncology. And so you see them being very active all of a sudden. What stood out to you on the biotech funding side?

Yeah, so there was definitely a handful of companies who were able to raise these mega financing rounds. The headline was Crystal Therapeutics ran by Jason McKay. He raised a headline of 205 million. Believe there was a series A funding round and they're focusing on gout creating a drug for that. Timberland therapeutics raised 180 million. Pro ticko biopharma raised 130 million. Aspen neurosciences 115 million. Right there, 110 million. So we saw a handful of biotech 100 million plus deals right here in San Diego. Historically we've ranked number three for biotech funding. I think this year we're kind of bouncing between 3 and 4, but yeah, still pretty healthy. We're seeing, you know, certain selectors, certain sectors get Funded by investors. If you're focusing on Covid or certain flus, I'm not seeing those sectors pick up a lot of dollars, but really depends on the founder as has they been there and done this before or are they kind of like a PhD student trying to spin out, you know, a new drug that hasn't been validated in animal trials and human trials. We're seeing investors, you know, bet, bet big on serial entrepreneur, proven science where risk is mitigated. And so I think that's going to continue to be a Trend going into 2026. But yeah, I think that's going to be a definite topic amongst both founders, investors and even like the bankers and lawyers, they're trying to figure out where is Biotech heading in 2026. And it's also correlated to the IPO market, which we had a few this year, but not, not a ton.

Yeah, let's talk about the M and A and bio and IPO scene because what you're talking about this, the flywheel, spinning the repeat founders, that only comes from building a company, having an exit and then doing it again. Right. And so that takes exits, which is pretty much if you're running a venture back company that's expected, you're expected to return capital through an IPO or an exit. And you know, typically in the past we've seen a handful of big, big M and a and some IPOs generally, mostly on the, the biotech side. Right. And we saw some, I would say some mega billion dollar kind of M and A and we saw definitely some, some ipo. So let's go through that as well and we can talk about what does that mean and what do we think going forward?

Yeah, I would say Q4 we saw probably the highest amount of M and A dollars than any other quarter this year. We had two big ones in Q4. Avidity was acquired by 12 billion by Novartis, hasn't closed yet, expected to close in the next quarter. But it was announced Q4, Sedera Therapeutics also had a banner M and a deal with 9.2 billion by Merck. And there was a handful of other ones. Capsan was acquired. I can't pronounce this one, Arthur. We'll tag it in that one. Kate Therapeutics was 1.1 billion. Regulus was acquired for 1.7. Nalu Medical 500 million by Bolt. There was, you know, just a ton of, you know, capital flowing into privately held companies bought by big Pharma. And I was talking, talking to you, Neil, before we started recording Is historically these big pharma companies would acquire startup and force them to move to the east, the east coast. But now we're seeing big pharma make these acquisitions in San Diego and keep the talent local. They might even spin out companies. I think avidity with their deal. They're spending out a new company and so they keep the talent and they start up new companies, which is pretty healthy for the ecosystem.

It's a great scene, a great sign. You have these big bio, right? We have the big tech companies, the big seven. Well, there are only a few big bio and they're all, it's the Merckx, the Novartis, Pfizers, Avi, Thermo, Fishers and they're all, you know, keep coming back to the water here to buy great talent. And like you said, they're keeping the company here. Well, because we know the talent doesn't want to leave. So even if the talent gets forced to move, the founders are coming right back. So they know that. Well, we might as well keep it here because it will bear fruit. What's interesting is to see also on the real estate side that you're seeing, that's kind of where you see if it's real or not. Right. They can acquire a company but then slowly siphon off IP and talent. Well, these companies are taking huge leases out. I think Novartis was the largest deal in, in 2025. You reported on that. Like huge, like almost 500,000 square feet. Right. Of brand new space for Novartis. And then they're also buying companies who also have their own space already too. So this is a major investment in the local San Diego scene to buy companies and buy and, and take down the space as well. Have you seen that? Is that how you're viewing it as well?

Yeah. So the Novartis, they actually had some previous space in San Diego that I believe they shut it down and then now they did a deal with Alexandria as a second. It was like the largest lease for Alexandria on record. It was a half a million square foot. We're seeing big pharma really just plant a flag here and continue to grow and invest in state of the art facilities. We also had Eli Lilly, they had I think an 80,000 square foot facility that just opened right by Torrey Pines Golf Course, which is a home to about 14 to new startups. One of them is a, is a popular one backed by Jeff Bezos that was started in the Bay Area and now they have a team working in, in Torrey Pines which is Great to see San Diego. I mean for the talent perspective, that's why we're seeing, you know, big pharma make the investment. Because they, they, they, they bet big that the next new discoveries are going to happen right here from Scripps, from Soak, from ucsd. You know we have that flywheel effect for biotech which is really, really strong.

It's really strong.

It's great.

And we just got to keep pounding away at it on the tech side, software side too. In the meantime, we know we have it in the hardware side as well and it's, it's going to keep bearing fruit. Now that finally hardware is getting funded more. I think we're gonna, that's a prediction. We'll see, we'll talk about that in a second. But the ipos is the other piece of exits, right? We traditionally, you know, you see a company go public. Some of these M and A, by the way, they were already public companies and they got acquired. Right. So they're public companies getting acquired, taken private or just completely taken off the market. Well, it's good to see some new companies who are, who have some IPOs. And it's not all therapeutics. Usually in the past it's like 95% therapeutics. We have a little bit of sprinkling. We've got Aardvark Therapeutics but then you got Aptera hardware company trying to bring a consumer three wheel electric vehicle to the market. They filed Once upon a Farm a consumer packaged food filed Carlsmed. This is a med device company spun actually was an evo Nexus company and then Maplite Therapeutics. So bookended by therapeutics. But in the middle you got other little pieces of San Diego specialties. So I think this is a good sign here. Um, what do you have on, on the ipo?

Yeah so Aardvark, they kicked off the year. I believe they're one of the first IPOs of last year. And I would just say like yeah, it's great to see not only like therapeutics companies, ipo. We had a consumer company, we had medical device Aptera which is a kind of a EV focused company. And you know, I think so what I've hear from other sources is that San Diego has a very strong ipo, you know, outcomes for investors. When there's an ipo, there's money that goes back to investors and it's successful. You know not that's always the case sometimes there's back deals that fall apart. But I would say over looking at some of these companies, these are High quality companies that are still around today. And yeah, we'll be tracking them and see how they perform in 2026 and hopefully we see more IPOs going to to this year.

We actually used to track how San Diego as a city of our bucket of public tech and biotech companies did compare to other cities. I haven't done that in a while and it mostly was started by a CNBC on air host who kind of kicked it off. He called it the Power Cities Index. And he actually is from San Diego originally. So we used to have a little good conversation on Twitter when I'd be like, look, San Diego is doing it, we're doing it. He loves seeing that. So maybe we got to bring back the Power Cities index for San Diego there. Especially if this year we do see more IPOs, which I do perceive what the word on the street, I'm hearing one last year was a great year for the public markets and so a solid year. People are going to do more of that. People are feeling that from a US government perspective, the economy is actually benefiting from the things that they are doing, which is going to benefit public markets. Which public markets pretty much just react to the news, right? And if news is mostly up, the markets are mostly up. Now obviously this government is. There's lots of news that comes out all the time, right? And it's distracting the founders, right? The tariff conversation last year was completely distracting to anyone related to that. Maybe in the end it'll be good, right? But for a long time people, it was uncertainty, which is what's really hard for businesses to make decisions by. Right? You end up putting off decisions. So I do view that people looking back a year later, they're going to forget all the crazy ups and downs. They're going to say were things net good for us? They were and therefore going to make more net future looking decisions, including on space like real estate space, on funding and taking risks on spending. And I think that will benefit the IPO market for our community, our companies who actually finally go public, who we've been bounding the tables on. You need to. I also think related to that some of our late stage companies are seeing their revenue leached away by new AI companies and they're gonna have to do something about that, right? So they're gonna either need to go public and not have to rely on keep having a raise and have access to more capital. They're either or they're gonna need to sell themselves, right. While they have hundreds of millions in revenue. Well, they still have Customers, they're gonna need to sell themselves into something that is growing faster. And so I think some of that is going to benefit San Diego in a liquidity sense. The fact that we don't have a bunch of like hot AI companies, all right, like I don't think we'll see a bunch of hot big fundings, but I also think a piece of that is bubbly. Like I think some of that hot deals that happened last year, I don't know, maybe that was just like a one and done. And we're going to see this year where AI pans out or completely wrong and that is only what gets funded. Hot AI deals. Right. I could be totally off on that. It's really hard right now to see where an AI is bubble and what is real. We all know that there are certain aspects that are real. We're definitely our lives are being changed by this. It's just hard to tell what is hype and what's real. And so us having not as many hands in that game in San Diego, it's hard. You just get less signal. Right. I have less founders to talk to being like, well, what's it like out there raising for any company? There's not as many to talk to. So anyway, I just have less signal to determine where the noise is from from that perspective. What are some of your perspectives looking at? Looking forward here, coming up.

Yeah. So you know, being in the real estate game, I've been interested to see where companies moving to and where's the talent going. It seems like north county continues to be a hotbed. UTC in my opinion is a new downtown. There was an interesting article by the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago about how companies are moving out of downtown and it's not really the best place to live, work and play. And I think what I'm seeing is there's definitely talent migration and a lot of executive leadership people are living in La Jolla, Del Mar, North County. So I think that's going to be a trend. I think returning office people are going to be working in the office more. It seems like for both emerging talent, like entry level jobs as well as senior people, they're finding more collaborate. Collaboration whether it's being office twice a week, three times a week, even like startups, there's a need for startup hubs and people to come together and co work together. I think Neil, you've tested this a little bit. We're gonna see more of that going into 2026, just in real life, networking, more events. There's a great event that happens in north county by Hussein. We'll see that kind of expand into other parts of San Diego as well. In terms of like funding, funding activity, I think we're going to see maybe some more dollars get deployed locally. There's been a few emerging managers who are actively trying to raise a new fund. I think on the PE side we have some really strong names. Stepstone Group, JMI Equity, Seaside Equity Partners. They have a strong track record and have been able to raise a lot of private capital to buy small medium businesses. So I think that will continue to be a trend like Tide Rock for example. So yeah, look, look into, you know those, those sectors to bold. Well for 2026 I think you tapped.

On something real estate wise that's important. Density, density not just from who's in the building, but who's around each other still matters and matters even more. Right. And you saw Alexandria Real estate's been investing in this for a long time, right? They, they pretty much densified 10x the Torrey Pines Mesa, right. It already was dense and they said let's double down and create these to happen. And that new campus now shows it even more, right. They did the same in Sorrento Valley. Right. So I think that matters a lot. And to watch Irvine company completely just get out of the game in downtown where, where density used to happen, right? Density used to happen along Broadway and B Street and in these buildings and they realized there's no one in these buildings that want to be around each other. Let's get out of this game. And so I see that it's working. I don't see anyone outside real estate investing doubling down on the density in San Diego and therefore it's hard to notice outside of market. And I say that in a lens because Austin continues to explode. You see VC funds are picking up and moving from SF to Austin right. Now. First you had Jason Calcanis from Launch up and move. Now you had David Sachs also from the all in pod up and move his entire craft ventures to Austin. And that is because they perceive something early spark is happening and they want to be a part of it. And when you go to Austin, you feel it in their downtown in San Diego. I don't know if we feel it beyond the events or beyond the Torrey Pines Mesa or Sorrento Valley or Sorrento campus right there. So you don't feel the density and I don't know if we're talking about the density. Right. You see it at Hussein's event. You're like amazing. I can't wait to see you in a month. Well, what about tomorrow? Right. I want to run into five founders like I did tomorrow and I don't want to do it over drinks. I want to do it while working. So that's what I've been experimenting with. Right. And a few others as well. And you mentioned the hubs. Well, we need to see some leadership in that. We need to see the real estate world say yes. We also want to help make this happen and not let anyone in the building because that's often happened. We see that in coworking. Coworking says we want founders here, but yet then they also let anyone who will pay in the building and I get it for their business. But that doesn't densify anything. And you see, you know, university campuses say it too, but it's just like come to us on our campus and be amongst, you know, first time founder students as opposed to let's bring businesses in to actually do that. So I don't see the institutions doing it yet, but that's where we need to get to. Right. We need to see it at almost like the enterprise level of densification happen in San Diego. So I'm not saying it's a prediction. I'm saying that's something that we leaders like us need to kind of step up and force that to happen even more. And so that might be area that happens and helps especially with people wanting to return to office. This is something that is an opportunity here for someone to lead in, curate an office, curate a coworking space, curate it for the people that you know, need to be around each other. So related to that, let's talk about the car to startup rankings. Because these rankings in a sense are part data and part perception. And then when, when Peter walker posted on LinkedIn, you also hear a bit of the perception and reality in the comments.

Right.

You always get the what we're blank number or whoa, we're number. We're higher than we think. You've been tracking this kind of quarterly. I mean Peter talks about it almost daily on his LinkedIn. What are you seeing from kind of the the city rankings numbers there?

Yeah, so we, we'll link it in the show notes. But San Diego is still ranked number top 10 startup ecosystem. They looked at both seed and series A capital invested in 2025 in San Diego, you know, pulled about 3.3% of all capital of last year that went to companies like biotech. We got about ranked 4 for that behind New York, Bay area and Boston. We also had a pretty high ranking in health tech. We were number two. We raised all like 15 of capital for health tech. And yeah, I mean I think it's just the trend that I saw here is, you know, people say San Diego isn't, isn't punching above his weight and hanging with LA or New York and other cities. But I think the numbers don't lie. It looks at early stage deals, capital still flows into San Diego and it's not just one sector. We also have kind of an even split between biotech, health tech as well as some software. But yeah, there's definitely some, some room for improvement. We ranked number 10 in hardware and consumer. I didn't see as many consumer deals this year. And you know, I think that is a challenge for our ecosystem. And so how do we support those, those areas? Opportunity? I think that' that's, that's the conversation that I see from these, from these numbers.

It's a good point, you know, and I think you definitely saw from a consumer angle, VCs pull back from consumer. It's not an area that VCs were funding as much and that money went into another sector like hard tech and defense tech. Right. Again, hard to know if that's just a one year trend or a macro multi year trend. Something I track on this is our biotech and I have to sometimes stop myself because I know we're a top three city from talent, but when you see New York and LA start punching on biotech you're like, oh, these communities can do more than us. We know that. Right. But they have some history in biotech so it's not about per se what ranking we come in at. If we drop to four under New York and la, still pretty good. It's about are we retaining the talent and are we retaining the money that has been coming here. Does it keep coming here looking for more great deals? Right. And that doesn't come out in the rankings as much. Right. Is the money going to net new founders or the same founders who have done well in the past? Because by the way, same as done well in the past. That has to happen. They need to keep getting capital because they obviously approve that they can return capital which is good for our community as well as then that new founders need to find capital as well too. So I look at some of those and I just ask those questions before I get the emotional reaction to myself. It's like, oh no, we dropped. Okay, who we dropped to like to New York, the biggest financial community in the world. Okay. The fact that we were above them for so long is a good sign. So all good. It's just good. It's just another signal to process amongst the many hundreds of signals we should be looking at. Talk about some, just some recent news that's good for, you know, San Diego. We just had a series of the college bowl games that, you know, happen right after New Year's. This is a puts each bowl on the national stage. And one of our local startups, Trust and Will, took down the naming rights for the Holiday bowl, which happened at Snapdragon Stadium, which is awesome to see. And so for the last few weeks it's been the Trust and Bull, Holiday Trust and Will Holiday bowl out promoting it. And the game happened this Friday night. I was fortunate to, to join the Trust and Will team out on the field. But man, seeing Cody, Daniel and Ron and the whole team just like kind of be at the center of the spotlight. Besides, these two football teams was pretty rad. Did you catch the game at all or see their logos all over the community?

Yeah, we're talking a little bit before the podcast about how, you know, I think Trust and Will is a modern case study for how to do marketing. Right. Holiday bowl is a pretty big event here in San Diego. And yeah, we saw a lot of great, you know, brand positioning. They seem like they've done a lot of work with Snapdragon, which is kind of a new stadium. SDSU plays there and the Wave plays there, San Diego fc. So I think timing is just right. I think it's just only the beginning for their partnership. I think they're going to do more sports partnerships and think he wants to do a commercial and, and all these kind of different things. So yeah, it's great. I mean, it kind of reminds me of blenders a little bit with Chase Fiser taking billboards off PB and really just putting Hometown on the map. Trust and Will, San Diego, it's synonymous. I, I love it. See, love to see a local founder bet big on the City 100.

I mean they're a consumer brand. They need to get the entire millennial generation on their platform. So it makes sense. Not a lot of venture backed software companies are going to do that kind of thing, but they're a different kind of company, right? They're a consumer focused financial vehicle. And so yeah, with that they got a lot out of it, I believe from a brand. Their name, their logo was plastered everywhere on and off the field. They got tv, national televised ads. I think it was five or six. So every quarter. And Cody, you know, the CEO got to do the coin toss. He got to give the trophy out. He was in the holiday bull parade also great. And actually walking into the stadium, ran into the guy that runs the pinstripe bowl, which is the Yankees bowl that they do, a college bowl. And he already knew. He's like, trust and well, I love you guys. I was wearing a jacket, right? He's like, I love you guys. Let's talk like, we'd love to have you guys involved in the pinstripe ball. I'm like, okay, here's the intro to Cody make that happen. Right? Like that. So all that from a brand perspective is great. It's something you can only do once. You're later stage and already know how to even measure the effects of brand like this. Right. And which is all they were talking about throughout the game. Right. Is like, how do we, how are we going to know this is a win? Right. And so they're constantly focused on that. The measurement of marketing, if you will, related to a brand coming to San Diego. Ted, which is one of the largest brands from a thought leadership perspective is picked San Diego as their new annual conference site. I think they moved from Vancouver, pick San Diego, be at the convention center, which I think's where most conventions happen, whether Sandigans know it or not. So it's cool to like have them realize and pick San Diego's where their future conventions are at. Will anything come from you hearing from this?

Yeah. Ted had a nice article. Is that Ted finds his next stage of San Diego a bigger. A bigger stage for Boulder ideas. It's going to be anchored in San Diego's waterfront district. The conference will be centered around the San Diego Conference Convention center along other iconic venues across the city. And there was a quote that said San Diego represents where we're headed next. A community built on collaboration. A city tackling the challenges that matter most. And I'm really excited. I think they're going to try to bring in more tech topics, more life science conversations as well. San Diego is known for tourism. There's a ton of conferences already happen here every year across different industries. And so it just makes sense. I love to see, you know, Ted planning, expanding and moving to San Diego. It's going to be great for the city.

Yeah. And I think this is a chance for San Diego to do the prove it work, which is, well, someone picked us. Let's step up as a community and show them what we're made of. We say it a lot we talk a lot about, well look, Comic Con is here and we don't as a community, we're not involved in that conversation. Honestly. There's a lot of conferences that happen here where the San Diegan's tech side of it or don't. I would say Bio.

We do.

We do great bio's coming in June. People are already talking about all the different events that they're doing. The side events to bring local to big bio, right? You see some of that. I think there's another chance for us to say let's do something different than we usually do, which is, you know, just stay home or just buy a ticket and just go organize a little 30 person of your tribe and connect in. We did that. I think I did that four times this year. We did it with a fintech conference. We did it with a Med Device conference. We actually did it with, with Comic Con. This year we're going to do a bigger presence with our local gaming community. I would. And, and on the defense tech side, right, we did it with, with Navy Gold. We put on our own Navy. We would put on our own autonomous event simultaneously. So I would say if any of you run your own events, think about and look at the national conference scene of what's happened in San Diego and do it during then and do it downtown and invite get the cross communities. I will say one thing to learn. Don't reach out to the conference organizer. They're not going to care, to be honest. They're incentivized on who writes them a check. So go find your own sponsor, do your own thing, invite people and then do it every year. Right? And people will start to come to the conference every year. They'll look for, oh, that San Diego event, I loved it last year. I want to come back, right. So I would kind of task anyone to do that. Connect the global community that's already coming here with our local community. They're in our backyard. It's an opportunity here to do yourself. Related to that, we got some big events. January is always a big event scene, right? We kick off the year CES is pretty much already happening in Vegas. This is the consumer electronic show. We have all of our big companies go out. I know Qualcomm always has a huge presence there. Uh, and even trust will I know they're gonna be out there because AARP does a whole show around that as well too. Um, I will actually be there Thursday and Friday. I'm putting on like a founder and funder dinner with a few other investors. In Vegas. So if you're around, you're a founder, let me know. Love to have you Thursday night in Vegas. Uh, other events obviously that are happening this week. We're doing our kickoff to the year with, with the Carlsbad Industry Exchange. This is a monthly event series. Normally we do a different theme each month like tech, biotech, sports and active lifestyle. We decided for January let's bring all the audiences together. We're gonna have different color name tags, but let's see when we actually cross over some industries. Right. What happens when you get a sports and active lifestyle brand talking to a tech guy? Hmm. I don't know, but let's find out. Right, so we're going to do a little bit of blurring just for month one. So look for the link there. If, if you're in north county and you're in those three fields and want to connect more with the north county community, the big biotech event obviously is JP Morgan. That happens next week. And JPM is what everyone calls it. They don't even call it like the Biotech conference, it's just called jpm and it is, I think it's even bigger than CES at this point. It is huge, huge. And there's so many side events. There's side events to the side events. Right. What's on your radar for J.P. morgan, Fred?

Yeah, so a few people have been asking me, hey, are you going to J.P. morgan? I'm planning to be there. It's in the Bay Area. So that I think there's going to be a debrief event in San Diego at some point. Like hey, what the top themes, what we're discussed, Stay tuned for that. And then me and you are actually working on a pretty cool event that we've done two years in a row now. So we're working on a third, third time, which is what's the VC outlook for San Diego in 2026 where we bring a panel, maybe three to four investors and invite some venture backed startup founders and invest local investors to kind of exchange notes. So yeah, stay tuned for that debrief as well. And you know, myself and you, Neil, are planning several events for the year. So stay tuned and listen to the podcast and we will continue to try to build community whether it's tech, life, science, consumer, even the investor community here. I'm really excited about what 2026 is going to entail and we couldn't do it without the support of our readership and people who just want to see San Diego win and help push the ecosystem forward. It's an exciting time to be here and there's definitely some challenges, but I think that's the fun part is like there's always room to improve and do things better. So yeah, it's always a pleasure to do this with you.

Likewise. And thanks for continuing to to write share on the business of San Diego on your substack. So make sure you're following Fred but also sharing his articles so that we get make sure that the people who should know do know. Also mine as well too. Rising Tide Partners on stubstack. Follow those. You can hear both these podcasts and the writings that go behind it as well too and appreciate all of you. You know, you've all written notes, you've all sent us dms, you've all come up to us and told us at events that you appreciate we're doing. We feel the love and that powers us honestly more than anything is knowing that we are helping others makes us want to help more. So thank you all. Looking for a huge 2026. We'll see you out there, Fred. I know. I'll see you soon. Thanks man.

Always a pleasure, Neil.

Bye guys.

Keep accountants counting Be founders trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping Paella 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 standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero got a shout out Taco Los Angeles 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 to Tijuana St. Be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach we interviewing founders who be shooting for the moon Hashtag SD Tacos with your host, Neil Bloom.

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