Using Tech to Equip & Educate Crafters w/ Morgan Spenla of The Crafter’s Box | Tacos & Tech Podcast

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started Startups get the party started get the party started. You want tech and tacos tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash for the green guacamole keep accountants counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us 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 to Tijuana Esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host Neil Bloom.

Come on.

Startups get the party.

Startups get the welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host Neil Blum, San Diego's Tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle. I want to take a moment to thank our friends at Cox Business who have enabled us to tell these amazing stories of local leaders, technologists, founders and funders. Cox is actually a 121-year-old family run private company that thinks in terms of decades in building community a lot like we do in building a startup community. For years the local Cox business team has helped us grow through partnering at San Diego Startup Week, South Dakota. Quick pitch and in celebrating our technical leaders at the Top Tech Awards. The Top Tech Awards are September 17th and you can join this year unique virtual networking event and awards ceremony with a very cool avatar environment built by local tech company Verbella. Buy your tickets and see who the nominees are at toptechawards.com thanks again to Cox Business for your partnership.

Welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and we've brought back co host Al Bashira, serial entrepreneur and VP of Product operations at Seismic. Al, thanks for joining again.

Hey, good to be here.

And we're really excited to bring on our next guest who we've gotten to know over the last few months. Morgan Spenla, the founder and CEO of the Crafters Box. Morgan, thanks for being on.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

We're really excited to get our audience to hear your story. Do you want to give us a quick overview of what the Crafter's box is?

Yeah, absolutely. So the Crafter's Box. And we're actually getting the opportunity really soon to rebrand to craft or crafter.com we're an online source. Thank you. Right. I think it says exactly who we are. Very straightforward. And we want to be the go to online resource for crafters, for hobbyists, specifically in arts. So we collaborate with artists from all over the world to produce high quality digital workshops and content and then we also offer tools and materials and the opportunity for makers to connect. So we're really a service very much for hobbyist crafters.

Very cool. I think we're going to be excited to dive into the different elements of it because it is, is more than meets the eye for sure. But I want to know about your background as a crafter. Like what, what got you into this? Have you always been a crafter all your life?

Yeah, so I've always been, I've always been a crafter. I've always loved the concept of handmade. A hobby crafter, not an artist, but, you know, an avid learner. Very passionate about figuring out how to, how to make something from scratch, how to, you know, create beautiful things by, you know, just with just the raw materials, whether that's molding clay or silk screening or dip dyeing, you know, textiles or fibers. I had this passion to figure out how to kind of get back to the roots and the origin of many traditional crafting methods that have been with us not just generations, but thousands of years. But I couldn't find the resources, the tools and materials easily. I think a lot of people are super familiar with their neighborhood hobby lobby or Michaels and what we, what I affectionately call cheap and cheerful crafting. You know, I've got young daughters and they're super into pom poms and sequins. And that's not really the type of crafting that I, that I grew up wanting to do. But I've never, it's never been, you know, anywhere near a full time job or anything like that. I don't even really show anybody, you know, the pieces that I make or that I work on. It's more of what I would do on a Saturday morning, you know, before everybody else woke up with a cup of coffee and yeah, very, very big hobby of mine.

Didn't didn't you actually do some major work to a very old house of yours or something? I seem to remember from a previous conversation.

DIY across the board, for sure. My husband and I bought a 1930s home, Spanish bungalow in Kensington. And the home is, you know, just under 100 years old. We're the fourth owners of it. It has not received many major updates, and so we tore it down to its studs. My husband has a background in construction and architecture and we redesigned the whole thing from scratch. Took us about 10 years, but we did. I mean, we tiled it, we, we brought in a couple of friends, but all about, you know, figuring out how to do it ourselves. And then, you know, that customization and that labor and that like, you know, that labor of love. And we still live there today.

That's really cool. So how did. I'm curious, because you were not doing this professionally, you're doing it in a lot of parts of your life, but you were working in consulting, right? Is that where you kind of started your career?

Yeah. So right out of school, I went to University of Southern California. I was hired on with a consulting job with a consulting company out of out on the east coast, but they had an office in San Diego. And I wanted to stay in California, I always have. But I was actually really passionate about going corporate for a good chunk of time and getting into really big companies and learning the ins and outs of those companies. And I felt consulting was probably the very best way to do that. So I was staffed on a project, actually moved to the east coast for a bit, and then I was staffed on a project, ironically, in San Diego at Bumblebee Seafoods. And we did a huge change management SAP implementation across their 13 offices and canneries. And I was there for two years and it cemented my love for San Diego. I grew up in Northern California, I kind of just kept heading south. Grew up in Northern California, went to school in Los Angeles, and then San Diego, to me was that beautiful compromise between that wonderful beach life of Santa Cruz and the busyness of la. And after that, I actually went back and worked as a director of marketing for an engineering firm up in Silicon Valley. So I lived in San Diego, but I traveled back and forth all the time. And part of the reason that the Crafter's Box was born and the concept was that I just had zero time to dedicate to all of the research associated with that hobby crafting. But I recognized that it was a part of my work life balance and how I would, you know, Tackle really Busy Weeks and 80 Hour Works Week work weeks and so forth. So, yeah, so that's. I was actually doing that and traveling quite a bit when the concept of what I wanted to build really came to fruition. And then I kept that job for my first year of starting the company and just slowly went from full time to a part time capacity. And that company up in the Bay Area was actually acquired by its largest manufacturer. So it was a really nice exit for me to kind of move on and jump, you know, head first.

That's cool.

A brand new endeavor was there.

So one. I think it's very smart that you. You kind of did. It sounds like you started Crafter's Box on your own a little bit on the side while you were still consulting and, and doing things in the other business. Was there like an epiphany moment outside of that exit or. Well, actually it sounds like you started it before that exit. So what was that sort of moment where you thought, okay, this is a real thing. This is a challenge. I have. I want to build this. Like, what was going through your head at the time? What got you there to that point?

Yeah, so, man, Instagram was kind of a new thing and Pinterest was kind of a new thing. That's crazy to think about right now. But they're actually not that old, you know, in terms of platforms for people to share work on. And I followed all of these really niche makers. I did stained glass art in college. Like, I just, I had this passion for like these intense, like, craftsmen and makers who were so loved what they were doing. And I would even try and like replicate some of that work on my own. Not necessarily the stained glass without all the equipment, but, you know, in my backyard, like trying to learn how to naturally dye something using avocado pit, I don't know, or, you know, whatever it was that. Or the origins of a particular kind of tapestry weaving. And so the really kind of the. That moment where I said this doesn't exist is that I saw these influencer accounts on Instagram where these artists could actually bring, you know, bring all of these followers into their studio life. And they didn't rely on that brick and mortar studio space to show their work anymore. And they were gaining so much notoriety and attention for their work and huge communities and so forth, but nobody was catering to the way that these followers wanted to actually learn from these professional artists. So again, your local resources were, you know, Michael's or Hobby Lobby or that local yarn shop on the corner where, you know, all your great aunts, you know, sit around and talk about how to do different kind of stitches and teach each other and so forth. But if you wanted to learn anything outside of that space, good luck. Like poorly lit YouTube video. Maybe that artist was doing like a roadshow where they were going to come through San Diego and then Austin and then Brooklyn and maybe you could get a seat at 10am on such and such date. It was really hard and then to align yourself or to go out there and find some of those really cool resources or tools and materials that those artists were using, like near impossible. So I had one of those moments where I was trying to build something really cool and creative. And I was at like a hobby lobby or some type of store at 9 o' clock at night and had my little kids in a cart and they were about to turn it over and I had was working those 60, 70 hour weeks and I just got so frustrated and I ended up buying like the whole aisle of like metal and leather supplies to build this project. I was so frustrated and hundreds of dollars later, I got home, I tried to do the project that weekend and everything kept breaking and I couldn't google how to fix it online. You know, there's gotta be a better way. I've seen these artists, you know, I've seen these artists teach these kinds of workshops. Why can't we bring that online? And this was the very early days of some other, major, you know, companies trying to do that in that space. But again, they were going after a very crap, you know, very craftsy niche audience and not this incredible audience that was growing gardens in their backyard and making food from scratch and going after slow fashion and slow food and turning, you know, building that movement of getting back to the root of what they were doing. Nobody was catering. It just didn't exist. So that's where it came from.

That's awesome. So obviously a ton of passion there, which is really great. Do you remember that feeling when you went all in? That kind of like, okay, like I know you transitioned part time, but like at some point, you know, you're like, this is my business, this is my baby. Do you kind of remember that feeling? That memory?

Yeah. So I think I figured out. So for about a year, I would say I was ruminating on the idea for maybe six months or so. And I built myself a really solid business plan, what the company needed to look like in a year, three years and so forth. I figured out how much money I needed to launch the company. I made sure I had that amount in my 401k. And I took those steps to make it happen. And that, I would say, was my all in moment. I hadn't left my job yet, my W2 job, but I pulled all that money out of my 401k. I actually am super passionate about investing in the stock market. And I had done decently well on a couple of really cool senior thesis projects in college. And I felt like I had this. I felt like I had given myself permission to do something really special with that one day. And I decided that this was it. And I, you know, I put my own money in. I decided I was going to bootstrap it. I put my own money in. I reached out to so many artists and said, hey, here's what I'm. Here's what I'm building. Here's what I'll do for you. Like, I will build beautifully produced workshop video and how you do what you do. And you don't have to teach 20 people at a time in 20 different cities and spend four months doing that tour. You can teach thousands of people in one sitting. And I had artists that said yes. And so I booked them plane tickets on the sly. My assistant in my corporate job started to work with me as my assistant on this job, and she helped me manage a lot of the. We brought them all out to San Diego. We did our very first round of filming. And that was like the very all in. Like, I can't look back now. Like, these artists are relying on me. We're launching this. Yeah, that was. That was very pivotal.

Nothing like a forcing function of a bunch of people relying on you. That's great.

Oh, yeah. Showing up on your doorstep like, we're here, we're ready.

So what was so that first piece? I mean, you recorded a few. And was that first business model kind of what it is today? Like, were people buying the video and the kit apart kind of thing in the same vein?

Or what did it look like in.

The beginning compared to now?

It's definitely evolved over time. Other players in this particular market have emerged over time. We've evolved to meet our growing customer demand and what the landscape is looking like in terms of the ways that artists are sharing their work. So in the very beginning, the way to make this business work was to build it on a subscription box model. And we never called it a subscription box. I didn't want to be lumped into the clothing and makeup and food delivery category in people's minds, really. Our motto and our slogan was nourishing the creative Soul on a monthly basis. If you're a crafter, you're a crafter. And there are so many makers, whether they're, they're quilters or they're wood craftsmen or they're, you know, even, you know, weavers or scrapbookers, they're, they're all over the US and they're, they, they actively participate in making and crafting many, many times a month, generally speaking. So I liked this idea of delivering a different kind of workshop and a different concept on a monthly basis. And the subscription model actually worked out really well because in that model and in the day and age of Amazon, where everybody expected to receive a package two days after purchasing it, still gave me the Runway to procure the amount of materials and tools that I needed to fulfill our subscription box orders. With the time of being such a young company, not yet having net 30 or crazy amounts of credit or whatnot for the company. So the concept at the time was on a monthly basis, you would get a digital workshop taught by a very well established maker in that particular craft, whether it was leather working or metalsmithing or whatever it was, plus the shift kit of tools and materials that they curated that was actually from their studio space. They would say, you need this size 4 paintbrush by this brand. So you didn't even have to have the decision paralysis of going to a paint store like Blix or whatnot, staring at a wall of a thousand brushes and saying, how do I learn how to watercolor? I don't even know where to start. And that quickly took off. And so we grew a really solid subscription over the first couple of years. And our customer base was amazing. But there was always this lamenting factor of, well, I just found out about you guys and you launched Silkscreen or block printing or whatever it was four months ago and the workshop's gone. You know, I want to take that workshop. So we, we squirreled away our pennies and little by little, over the course of maybe a year, we acquired all of the inventory for our past workshop launches. And in 2019, we launched an a la carte, what we call a marketplace, an e commerce site where you could buy any of those workshop kits from the past years of business through those artists. Then it became a new revenue stream for those artists. We began to offer materials kits, more patterns, raw materials so you could come back and buy more silk screen ink or whatever it might be. And that today is really where the business is growing. And that's quickly become 50% of our revenue. But our subscribers and Our members are very much at the heart of, you know, supporting us on this mission of growth.

That's really super cool. It's amazing to see how you've evolved, you know, as a solo entrepreneur and bootstrapping and everything. You know, when we first met a few months back, you had 13 ladies and one dude on your team, you know, which is amazing to see, especially, you know, in this day and age. You know, how's that ratio looking now, out of curiosity? And what's the size of the team?

We're at 18. Still only two dudes, but they don't mind, we don't mind. It's all good.

I think it's great. So that's fantastic. And the thing that's really admirable about what you've done is you have bootstrapped this company to sizable revenue in 2019. And I don't know if I want to give you the opportunity to sort of brag a little bit, but I don't want to share numbers if you're not comfortable. You did spectacularly well in 2019, and you're doing really well in 2020. Obviously, you raised a little bit of money this year, and Neil and I were very honored and lucky to be a part of that first investment. How has that transitioned from being an organically grown bootstrapped company to one with a little bit of powder in the cannon post fundraise? How has that changed you or your business at all?

Yeah, that journey of deciding mentally that I was ready to take on money that I felt that I had not just built my mvp, but had grown a company that I felt could keep going just great on its own, you know, and become this cool niche company that, you know, that the hip and trendy crafters and home decorists and like, DIYers and so forth, call it slow crafting after the slow food and slow fashion movement, but that they could latch onto and continue to support was awesome. And then when I realized that or decided really to kind of turn towards a much broader crafter audience and that we could serve that industry so much better than those in the industry, we're serving it today with really cheap product and without the soul and without the, you know, the meditative aspects that wellness that so many people were looking for and why they go out to their garage and have a wood carving studio and why they have a sewing room, and there's reasons behind that hobby making. I knew that to get to that next level, we were going to need to bring on, like you said, some powder in the can. And that was really important. So that was exciting, you know, so what we are today is not going to be who we are in two years. You know, it's going to look so drastically different. And as we get to expand and as we get to grow in that space and really kind of lean into the different areas that our community is taking us, it's exciting because we get to do that. And, you know, on the numbers side, we've had the opportunity to double our revenue every single year. And we hope that by investing a little capital into, you know, who we are today and becoming a little bit more of a, you know, a digital plus inventory business out there, we're just going to get the opportunity to grow like crazy and speed that up, speed that, you know, that ability for people to find us and to. And to, you know, connect with us and join our community even faster.

So alongside the same time that you decide to raise some capital to accelerate growth, Covid comes along and happens too, which does some pretty divergent things for some people, some accelerates and some the opposite. What's been happening to your business during.

COVID Yeah, so it's been really unusual. Super unusual. Right. So the first month of COVID we were in this incredible conundrum because we were keeping our staff super safe. People weren't working in our office or in our. Our warehouse space. In our warehouse space, if we were keeping staff in there, we were running these really odd shifts so people didn't have to work together. We saw a huge influx in orders people wanted to craft and make from home. To this day, you still can't find a sewing machine anywhere in the U.S. i mean, there are certain crafting materials that are just inaccessible because people are stuck at home. And that's one of the ways that they exercise their brain, is they learn how to make things and they keep making. So we've done exceptionally well on that end. On the flip side of that, you know, figuring out how to navigate a logistics and distribution and logistics center, which we have two warehouse spaces here in San Diego in Covid times is so tough. Appreciating, you know, and sharing that message with your consumer base and so forth, so that they're equally understanding on, you know, how tough it is to. To ship. And it's the postal right now. What's happening on the. With post offices and just with all couriers, private or not, it's Christmas in July, but like times 10, like, they're all there. There's so much pressure. And so it's great to be in E Commerce in some ways, in this really unusual way, especially in this industry. It's also really tough. Do you manage those expectations correctly? Hoard inventory? You know, we don't know what's going to happen in three months. Lots of weird things going on right now.

Something I think Al and I kind of heard from you talking previous and previous few months around. You've been shopping remotely for quite a while, I think something about avoiding grocery stores for a long time. Is that true?

What's that anecdote? So I haven't. Well, it's not entirely true anymore. This summer my family took a road trip and I went into a couple grocery stores. But prior to that, I haven't been into a grocery store in years. Like, I just. To me, that's such a waste of time. This idea of going up and down aisles and figuring, you know, and that you can have amazing food delivered to your doorstep through CSA boxes and supporting local farmers. And same with every, every major, you know, consumer goods type of product that you could want. It can be delivered to your doorstep. And if you seek out really economical and efficient, environmentally friendly ways to do it, there's solutions out there. So it was funny. I had a lot of family who was like, what do you mean you haven't been to a grocery store? Both my husband and I are entrepreneurs. He's got his own business that's growing and thriving and we don't have time to. The idea of spending two hours a week at a grocery store is such wasted time. Like, how much is my time worth to be in a grocery store? And away. So we have like a. We've got like nine different online outlets. Everything from like online alcohol delivery through BevMo to those supporting that awesome neighborhood market that delivers. And so I'm passing out lists of like, we'll try this one and go, you know, and I think that we're just changing consumer behavior so rapidly right now. Right. Like my mom, who would have never had grocery delivery before now, can't imagine life without grocery delivery. And that's happening in households all over the US and it's going to happen in other, you know, it's going to happen in other sectors too. And crafting when people think of, well, how do I get more, you know, whatever is the material of their choice. We want to be that resource that they say, oh, fast, convenient, easy, really on trend, incredible artists. I'll keep buying my supplies through them. And the convenience is a big one of our, you know, we hope our customers take out of our service and Product.

That's amazing. I can only imagine when Covid hit and the entire planet is freaking out and attacking each other over toilet paper and trying to figure out how to get anything, and you're just like, what? What's the problem? I don't understand. Real good here. It's cool. So kind of curious, what's next for Crafter? We talked a little bit about it. I did see something recently about a tools exchange. I don't know if that's. Or something you've had for a while, but it was the first time that I had seen it. Yeah, just talk about that. Or what's next or kind of what's under your immediate play for Crafter.

Totally. So today we're known as the Crafter's box. This idea that convenience, everything shows up on your doorstep to learn how to do something very artisanal, something very special. If you visited our website today, you'd find workshops and how to weave tapestries or build stained glass art or even carved wooden spoons and how to recreate that in your own personal studio crafting space in your home. You can also come back and you can find raw materials, like curated yarns. We might have a partnership with a really amazing alpaca yarn mill in, you know, Idaho, or something like that that we're featuring and talking about maybe custom carving tools. We build a lot of our own tools and materials in house, so we work with and commission beautiful looms, hardwood, maple looms, and all kinds of really cool tools to be ours. And they are becoming the industry favorites, which is super cool. You can find fabric on our website, all kinds of great stuff. So we're looking to just expand and grow that. If it's a breadth and depth kind of thing, we have a very large breadth of crafting, different types of artistic making, and we now want to go after the depth. So in 2020, as we look at what that means, that means launching a bigger and better online shopping experience, perhaps bringing in live workshops, an opportunity for makers to list their workshops and people to attend via Zoom and so forth. It means building out that raw material arm, building some really cool collaborations. This coming fall, we've got a lot of really cool collaborations in the works. Covid is weird, but right now, if all goes well, you'll find us in your local anthropology and your Nordstrom and other areas. So that means a whole new arm of our company that's going after where shoppers are going to be buying for their holidays. We think the gifting market could be huge for us and yeah, just a lot of really, you know, with having raised money, I feel like it's opened up that roadmap from us being very, very focused on doing what we do best or core competency, and now being able to really expand that to figure out what other areas we can build an awesome core competency, what other areas we can have more direct relationships with consumers and kind of continue to expand. On the tool exchange side, it's very much that we're recognizing that we, you know, we have, for example, printmakers who come back to us again and again and again, and they're slowly amassing all of the cool tools that we offer. We have a whole custom linocut carving tool line. So now our logistics center loves me for this. But you can, in that concept of having a very minimalist crafting toolbox, only the best and only the needed supplies to keep making. You can, you can swap tools that you already have for other tools in the line so that we're continuing to expand our offering and we're not duplicating. You don't need five of the same tool in your tool set, if you think about it that way. So, yeah, lots of cool stuff coming up.

That's amazing. And I just want to throw something out there about these. The kits, which are super amazing. They're like, they come in, you unbox. And my wife ordered one. She ordered a really cool cutting board because she's in love with cutting boards. But she's not super, you know, artistic or crafty. She would. She would say that herself. And it had everything, all the.

You ordered it for her, didn't you? Wasn't this a Mother's Day?

Yeah, yeah. Did I. Did I say she ordered it?

Yeah. Let's give the right.

Oh, okay. Sorry. And so it's. It's got all the wood and the glue and the clamps and everything you need to put this really cool cutting board. But, you know, that's like one example. The others, some of your kits, they have, like, sewing machines, electronic programmable sewing machines that come with the kit. Like, so there's all kinds of varied different levels of these. These kits that are available. So that. That, to me was something that was really interesting. I just wanted to share that.

And the idea that people are gifting the kit, like, that's something. And you told me that two years ago. And I said, oh, we're really going after, like, the maker who, you know, like, they're going to take this kit and they're going to take it into their studio space. And really explore it. And there's this whole market of not just gifting, but inviting other people to. So Crafters Night, pre Covid was a space that we had just launched. And it means that you can have four or five kids or eight kids or 10 kids your doorstep, and you can have your friends over and you can all make together. And that concept, that idea that you could bring people together, you know, communal making, was something I was so excited about. So I'm looking forward to getting back to that place. And we're seeing people zoom. Crafters Night, which is also equally cool. We just hosted, helped a. I think she was in New Jersey, a customer get 20 kits to all of her friends, and they all zoomed and they all did the project together for her birthday. But I think that the communal side of crafting or doing that cutting board project with your wife, Al, knock it out. Yeah, Right.

Fun. I've got to imagine that you one, you know, spending a lot more time indoors with family, maybe doing some new crafting projects of your own. Have you found any new hobbies during COVID or is it just dive deeper into the business?

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's a little bit of both. So I. I've got, like, being a crafter myself. I have access to the coolest, you know, treasure trove of materials and tools, like in our warehouse spaces. And we. We actually just recently spent some. Some family, really awesome family time in Sedona. And I brought out some basket weaving kits because I don't actually get to sit down and craft a whole lot. I am moving a mile, you know, 500 miles a minute, all the time, growing this company. So when it comes to actually making sure I make time for creativity and art, that's important. So I brought up basket weaving kits. So here I am, you know, Red Rock desert, gorgeous, sitting by the creek. Kids are playing in the creek, and I'm coiling baskets. And it was like the most idyllic moment ever.

That's awesome.

But, yeah, I love to explore the kids for sure.

That's cool. I grew up in a family where my aunt is a huge quilter and actually did lithography on quilts. So she would get photos and put, you know, kind of screen print photos on the quilts and give us gifts, which were pretty cool. So I'm excited. She's one of the biggest listeners of this podcast. She writes me after every episode and tells me how it does. So I'm excited for Aunt sue to hear about Crafter and hear this episode. This one's for her. But Morgan, you've been living in California most of your life, so you can respect a good taco. San Diego, it holds it down for its tacos. But LA and Santa Cruz, they've got their unseen too. Do you have a favorite taco spot?

Oh, for sure. So we live in Kensington. We love the walkability. We live within three blocks of Ponce's. He's also a neighbor and a very good friend and a store of some seriously amazing street tacos. So, yeah, favorite with a Cadillac margarita, which is during COVID they serve in these mason jars and it's like a, I don't know, a quart of margarita and it's. You take that home with your mason jar, Cadillac margaritas and your tacos. When they have their. Their taco night and it's a good.

Night, that's pretty great. Well, Morgan, it's been great to have you on here. We're really excited for everything you've built and everything you're building going forward. So thanks so much and all the best.

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and tech pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want taking tacos, tacos, you know we got it.