Welcome to San Diego Tech Ecosystem July 2023 & This Week in SD Tech News

Hello, Hello. Happy Friday everyone. Good to see some people here that are monthly. Welcome to the San Diego tech scene show that we do here on weight room. Thank you weight room team for having us. As always, we love you and I'm excited to get to know some of you or get updates from some of you. So here's how this is going to work. And by the way, I'm going to have a co host here. When we see Fred, I will be pulling Fred up. There's Fred. Let me make him a co host. Fred Greer coming at you live. Startup reporter extraordinaire and at one time an intern for me while he was a UCSD student. All right, so here's how this is going to work. I'm going to intro myself, going to intro Fred, then we'll start the queue. You can all start queuing up where we will give you that three minutes on the clock to intro what you're working on, where you need help and if you get cut off, rejoin the queue. All good, keep coming back, we're happy to have it. So get your questions ready to really take the most of other people being in here at the same time as you. Make sure you got your profile filled out here in weight room. So, so click on your own profile photo there. Click on profile. Be sure to add probably a photo and a link to your LinkedIn probably the easiest things to start with and embellish it as you can. We will get started here shortly. Fred, if you can hear me, come on. There he is. Cool, cool.

Pretty good.

All good. We are doing this on the fly. You heard my intro there?

Yeah, I did hear your intro. I appreciate the shout out, of course.

So we'll go, let's do our quick intros here and then we'll get the queue going. Does it sound good?

Sounds great.

Okay, well I'm Neil Bloom, I am a co managing partner of Interlock Capital. Shout out to my partner here in the queue, Albashera. And I'm also the host of the Tacos Tech podcast and Fresh Brew Tech, a tech newsletter and media company. And my co host Fred here.

Hey everyone, I'm happy to be here. Fred Greer, I'm a former technology reporter for the San Diego Business Journal where I cover the ins and outs of the startup scene here in San Diego and I am excited to be here.

Awesome. Well we are lovers of San Diego tech and want to make sure everyone gets the most out of it. So hopefully community wise here we can make some connections here. So let's get, let's Jump right into it. You ready, Fred?

Let's do it.

All right, let's get Suma.

Welcome to Weight Room. My name is Summer, one of Waitroom's AI onboarders. And if I had feelings, I'd be excited to meet you. But as a bot, I'll stick to being efficient and getting straight to the point. My AI friends and I are here to guide you through the basics of running a successful meeting on Weight Room. First things first, our inbuilt timer. Time is precious and we don't want to waste it on never ending meetings. That's why at Weight Room, we keep it short and sweet with timeboxed conversations. Everyone who joins the queue gets a limited window to speak on camera with the host or hosts. You can see my own timer ticking down on the sidebar to the right of your screen. When you set up a meeting, you get to choose how long each time slot is. The Timer teaches your team to think before speaking and to be brief so they use their time well. Luckily, as an AI, I know how to use my time wisely and I don't tend to waffle, unlike some humans. But what happens when the timer runs out? We're about to find out.

All right, I love it. Local startup, by the way, Weight Room here. So we love supporting them and seeing their innovations each month. Hey, Falon.

Hey, how are you guys doing?

Good, how are you?

Happy Friday to you all. Thanks for.

Give us a quick intro what you're working on and how can we help?

Yeah, so I got multiple things, but yeah. How many of you have joined Thread? Let's all connect with each other on Thread. Let's see here. I think the biggest thing I would like to kind of announce two things we're working on. The San Diego startup map, that is, that's been down for a while for like about six months. But we have Learn Academy interns helping out and have a meeting in a few minutes or 12:30 with interns. We'll have that probably up and running in the next couple of weeks, so just need to get more startups listed on there. And then the other thing I'm working on is I'm a partner at the ANCR cowork here in San Diego and I would love to see some more members here. I'm looking for kind of building it like a tech hub for startup founders and developers so we can just start building stuff. I think it'd be a good extension to go from like kind of tech coffees, you know, like where we talk about ideas to actually Building ideas and just kind of an extension of that. So we're in Kearney Mesa and the website is Ansir. Ansir sd.com Sorry, I got a lot of domains in my mind here so yeah, that's pretty much it. And yeah, just love to connect with everybody.

What's the web domain for the San Diego startup map so that people can.

Find it is down right now but I believe it's san diegostartupmap.com it's a long story between acquisitions and heroku going from free to paid.

Okay, cool. That's awesome. Well we will make sure we share that. I'm guessing AI here of weight room is capturing that and putting it in maybe in the AI feed. Falon, question for you. When is is there on the books a co working week happens?

There is and it's. I believe it's in August. There's a co working official co working day and then we usually do the co working week around that we. There's no talks about a week as of yet. Darren at the Nest Nest is the one that's supposed to be leading this and I need to ping him and see but that'd be really cool. I definitely will have the day open for people to join. I don't remember the date exactly, but that's something. I will get over to you as soon as I can.

Awesome. Love it. 10 seconds here. Any chance for doing March mingle more than once a year?

Only if we work together.

Okay, awesome. Well, good to see you Falon. Appreciate it.

Hey there. Now Summer's time is up. It's my turn to speak to everyone. Thanks to our queue system which allows for turn based conversation, Summer can now either sit back and watch the rest of the meeting off camera or join the queue again underneath the rest of our team already in the queue. Anyone who needs to speak can join the queue just as I did during my turn. I'm the only visible person alongside any hosts, so everyone in the meeting can focus on us without distraction. This means others cannot interrupt me over and over again. What a concept. If you're a host, you have full control of the queue. You can pause the queue completely between guests and add further context to the overall conversation. Or skip someone entirely. Test it by skipping me. Now just hit the next button and.

Well butter my bolts. I've got a little something to confess. I spent parts of this meeting engrossed in bot like activities.

Well now they taught us how to do it. I don't get through these.

Thanks team.

All right. Yeah. The early days of a Jacob.

Hey guys, how are we all doing?

Good, how are you? Hey like thank you.

Some tough acts to follow. Am I like the. Oh obviously apart from Falon. I mean the first kind of non AI. Like they seem to be so well centered in the camera and they're just like absolutely perfect in terms of like.

Right there with you man.

I'm waffling.

So hey Jacob, first of all it's great to us I think see you in live video. I feel like I see your headshot liking tons of tweets and LinkedIn posts so thank you for supporting you want to give us a quick overview what you're working on and helpful.

Sounds good. I've been in San Diego a couple years and I've been in software development for like the last six months. So I joined a company which is like a learning management software and then on the side and started a like a sales enablement AI company. It's called Sales Sensei or colloquially just the Sensei and it's the first product. The whole idea is it's meant to use AI technologies as like sales enablement tools for sales organizations and sales teams. Which is sales is kind of my background before software engineering and this the first product that I built. Kind of like a hacky mvp. But the two guys at this company Magnify have also become founders of the company with myself. So we're now with three founders. They're both way more experienced than I am. I'm a first time founder but it's an objection handling tool so it helps sales reps and sales organizations to handle and overcome objections by leveraging AI. So getting advice on how to overcome them and then working through that and tracking some of the data associated to kind of help with like more directed and focused sales training. So pretty early on in that process. So like for me how you can help would be like help as a first time founder, like connecting other founders and just just generally like the entrepreneurial journey because it's kind of like pretty new for me like and then eventually engineering. So I'm a pretty junior engineer and I built this thing over the last six or seven months myself. It definitely needs some work. I'm the only engineer at the moment. The other two guys are definitely more on the business and finance side. So eventually we'll need like an engineering team so engineers. Yeah, that's probably the biggest, biggest thing is right now we're not necessarily looking for to raise funding at the moment. Just happy and lean and early startup.

Yeah, yeah, I see you only have seven seconds left, but thanks for sharing. I think there's a few things that come to mind. Seismic is a sales enable platform. Large company. Al's here. He was sold his company to that company. They're interesting to check out. Personal AI is also building a startup in the AI space so I would connect with the founder there. His name is Suman. They just raised some venture funding but just a cool guy building AI space. Neil. I know you heard his pitch. I don't know if you have anything else you want to add to that but yeah man, just get plugged into the ecosystem. Let's connect on LinkedIn and congrats. So it's a cool company.

Yeah congrats on taking the leap. A number of things come to mind. Won the SDX hackathon coming up July 15th 16th in San Diego will probably be a great place to meet a ton of other builders who are just building right now. So look up SDX Hackathon and you will find info about that coming up. You mentioned first time founder kind of wants us to be around a bunch of other founders whether whether it is so just through osmosis piece you just don't realize one how cathartic it is to hear some people going through the same things that you are. And there is, there's a lot and you're not alone even though it feels lonely as a co founder also. So some of those areas, some of those groups would be Founders Institute. Good one to kind of walk you through a lot of the fundamentals. Another is reading a book called Venture Deals which really describes a lot of the terms and aspects that go into funding and really just building a startup because it is unique world for sure. And actually Venture Deals a few times a year does a live experience where you team up with other members and learn how to be like a VC by education classes. So look for Venture Deals, both the book and the experience if you will or the workshop, I don't know how they call it. You also mentioned meeting maybe some technical expertise or leadership. There's a group called 7CTOs that puts together forms of 7 technical leaders, CTOs if you will. And while maybe it might be too early to find a forum with seven mates or six other leaders, they are having a conference in early November with all their members. They're flying in from all over the world, a bunch of other CTOs. So just good to probably start meeting some other technical leaders and building relationships there and eventually peership and maybe formally having a forum around that too. So those are some of the first few to come, some more casual stuff. I do a monthly founders hike. So you know, come hang out. We do a hike early morning. We just had it this week. Torrey Pines, first Wednesday of each month, 6:30am One month. We'll get Fred out there too. It is early. I get it. And yeah, those are the first the few things that come to mind for helping us get connected here. Anything else from your end, Fred?

Getting off mute here? No, I think you covered it.

Yeah.

You give a lot of good resources the SD founders hike. I'll be out there the next month for sure.

Love it. Awesome. Let's get Roberto up here. Awesome. Hey Roberto, I think you're might be muted. We can't hear you. Say something now. Maybe can you hear him, Fred?

I cannot hear him.

Okay. Not sure if it's on our side of your side. Sorry Roberto, still can't hear you. Bummer. Let's see if we can keep working on that. You obviously can come come back up if we don't make this work out, but yeah, I'm not sure why your sound isn't working, but all good. We'll keep trying. We'll talk. We'll just fill the space for a little bit while you keep working on getting yours. Al says there is an audio test so you can go do an audio test. Where do you find that Al now? Any luck? Yes. Gotcha.

Oh sweet. Thanks so much for bearing with me not skipping which would have been totally cool. Hope everybody's very long week's going well actually from from San Diego originally grew up in La Mesa City Heights but went off to New York for school Bay area for work initially up at Silicon Valley bank doing venture debt for digital health and med tech companies. Ended up in Chicago for a few years but very happy to finally be home. So I'm at Sequential Ventures. We're a pre seed and seed stage healthcare firm. We're investing to build healthier communities by investing primarily in overlooked founders or folks that are operating in healthcare fields that have been historically underserved. The majority of our investments are in digital health, technical healthcare services, social determinant health improvement. We're about to announce our second investment Both a company that's in the social determinant health space but also in the healthcare space and primarily look to write checklist is around 100 to $500,000. I'd love to find more companies from San Diego that are specifically working with payers and providers where our relations with healthcare systems not only here locally with Sharp but thinking about Cleveland Clinic Texas Medical Center, University of Chicago, my alma mater, Columbia, some of the more active innovation arms of healthcare systems and universities where hopefully we can be a bridge to pilots and other resources beyond just dollars. So I know we have a huge emphasis on life sciences and biotech here, which I love to advise companies in the space because I used to do a bunch of that at suv. But for now would love to just meet more folks, more so on the health tech side.

I love that. Well, congrats. That's awesome to see. Would love to do a follow up just to share some notes on that where we can share some deal flow together. That'd be great. Spencer Hutchins in town has both a platform concert Health, but also runs a digital health founders and investors like semi quarterly happy hour that we should get you included in. So I'll make the connection there so that you can come out to our next one. And yeah, we'd love to share some deal flow together too just because we agree that bringing tech to the health and life science space is I think a force multiplier in San Diego. So let's do some San Diego deals together. That's great. Thanks Roberto.

Yeah, thanks Roberto. I'll you email by the way. But yeah, two people come to mind is Evo. Evo Nexus. I had it pulled up one second. It's Next Cube, which is like a digital health accelerator program as well as Avalon Ventures which is a health tech focus VC firm. So definitely check those two out and we'll be connecting shortly.

And speaking of Evo, a company, if you don't know already, Carry Health just won the Evo this demo day and demo day happened at Evo Next, I think a week ago, maybe a week and a half. Great to see that coming back in person and if you don't know him already, to meet.

Yeah, no, thanks so much. Actually having lunch with Patrick on Monday. I've been big fan of him for a while now, so, so happy to see the momentum picking up.

There you go. Love it. Perfect. And I love this chime in feature. That was cool. All right, let's get Judy up.

Can you hear me?

Okay, we got you. Oh, yay.

Okay. Never know because tech is, you know, tech is sometimes a tool, sometimes a torture. My name is Judy. I am the business and economics librarian at California States University of San Marcos. And I believe you've attended some of the events on campus. So I'm sort of here more of like a listener and lurker to kind of connect to resources that you have at your hands. And kind of like understand how to kind of like facilitate connecting students maybe into the ecosystem and support them. Because that's really my role. I do teaching and instruction for the College of Business and Economics. And so my research, my. My sort of emphasis is working with those students. Although any student who wants to be or might end up reaching out to me for, you know, research assistance. But also a lot of times our roles aren't really just about research. It's more about connections. So I was looking to kind of listen and learn a little bit about how you've developed connections or what resources that you heavily rely on for referral.

That's great. Love that you're doing that. We need all the resources planted all over the place in San Diego so that people know where to even go.

Yes. Especially kind of being a north. A north San Diego County. I know that we're a little kind of like a disconnect. So I was hoping to maybe you had some favorite resources or things that really emphasize student. Student learning or student support. Although I'm sure everything that you do is kind of across the board.

Yeah, tread. You have. You want to go first. You want to share some.

Yeah, I just think, you know, I'm a recent graduate. I graduated 2019. The biggest thing for me was leveraging all the universities. UC San Diego has their program, their basement, and then the launch pad at sdsu. And each university has their own entrepreneurship program. I think that's a great entry level to understand what's going on at the ecosystem. But some organizations come to mind is Startup San Diego. They do First Mondays, where it's kind of like a happy hour thing. Anyone's welcome? San Diego Tech Hub, which I'm a board member of, they do monthly events. So who are the, like the key organizations in San Diego who are bringing the right folks together? Those are the two that come to mind. But Neil can definitely provide some additional resources.

Yeah. Because I know that there's sort of a mishmash. So those are like, that's your go to and then kind of branch out from there.

I appreciate that. Yeah. There's a few websites that have tried to, you know, be a source of truth, if you will, but everything feels stale within a day. But if you go to startupsd.org and you hover over the community tab, you look for ecosystem resources list. They have both a airtable with listings of different groupings like legal help, capital incubators. So that's one way that like there's a listing and then there's a visual aid that goes along with it called the Startup Journey, which is all the logos of organizations in town that help companies at the specific stage they're at. So if it's ideation or validation, here's all the different university incubators and non university stuff. If it's more on the capital side during the Angel Seed phase, there's logos for that too. So I'd recommend checking out that startup. SD.org resources page is one of them. And SD Tech Hub you mentioned has kind of a North county focus to it, so I think they've got a resources page as well too. Fred, correct me if I'm wrong. And so SD Tech Hub, what is the website for that? Just probably Google SD Tech Hub. You will probably get the link there. Those are probably places I would start. We freshbrewtech.com we do an email newsletter every other week of events that are happening over the next month. So it might be one of the freshest spots to find up and coming events to point people to. And then there's a new newsletter by Jonah Peaker called I gotta find it. The Hungry Coyote. Is that what it is? The Social Coyote. The Social Coyote by Jonah Peake where he puts out on a weekly basis. Here are the events happening in the tech scene that week. So from an event standpoint that's a good place to go as well too. I would start there. Connect website has a number of resources as well too, including an airtable of what companies just got funded. Like pretty much they're up to date within a day or two and you can see you know who funded them. So it's good to know and see a listing of what other investors are investing in San Diego companies. So the SD fundings Airtable by Connect is a good one. There's two and I think they also have an event calendar that showcases a number of events that are coming up as well too. So those will be probably some of the first few ones. But I think Judy, I owe you an email to follow up after I saw you at San Marcos's Calcio San Marcos Pitch Festival a few weeks ago. So let's see how else we can help each other out there too. Well, while the queue's empty, you want to talk a little bit of news real quick, Fred, and welcome. Anyone come jump up if you'd like. We will keep this going for maybe another 10 minutes or so unless bunch of people jump back up. Connor Dave, if you feel, feel Al, if you're feeling like you want to come say hi, all good. And if not you can just hang out and watch. Oh, here's Connor. Let's let Connor up and then we'll continue on. Hey Connor.

What's going on everybody? How do you all good?

I'm doing all right. What are you working on? Where can we help?

Yeah, I'm a little bit more on the investor side of things but have been working in impact and more specifically climate investing for the past handful of years. So I am also a San Diego native, born and raised, went to school on the east coast for a little bit and then came back. So shout out Roberto. But have been trying to drum up more resources and connections and startups and investors here in San Diego with a specific climate focus and trying to build the ecosystem at the same time. So I know the Cleantech San Diego group or and connected with some people there last week actually as a matter of fact, but trying to continue to build that.

Awesome. Love that. I know you've just recently been looking at some interlock deals and there's a number of us other we've got some investments that interlock sustainability focused and I think there's a few investors in town where we've talked about maybe doing like a sustainability or clean tech founders dinner of some sort. So keep in the loop there. But there's a few other investors to meet here in town. Cleantech's a good starting spot because they've been good at sharing deal flow with other people and they're a good partner with Laci as well. Are you familiar with Laci in la?

Super familiar with Laci, yeah.

Awesome. I would love to get Lacy to do a day in San Diego sometime because I know a lot of our companies go up to the Laci program, which is the LA Cleantech incubator. And it'd be cool to do a little Lacy showcase day for San Diego and Cleantech.

So I'm pushing that towards your one.

Helps setting that up for sure. There's a guy my age who works at Laci who's also from San Diego. His name's Abe Baca. So he would push that internally at Lacy for sure.

That would be cool. Maybe we can do it during San Diego Startup Week, which we should give a shout out to is the end of October, so the Monday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of the last week of October. And it's going to be a little more like LA Tech Week where there'll be a set of programs and then other organizations can add their events that are happening during that week as well too. So maybe that's a cool way to get the LA crew to come down during San Diego Startup Week. So let's follow up on that after this.

Right on. Sounds like a deal.

Awesome. I'm curious on your end. We only got a few time here, like where do you see blue tech versus clean tech?

I see it as a subset of cleantech and I'm going to even more broadly top of the funnel call clean tech a subset of climate tech. I think those things are used kind of synonymously these days. But bluetech having.

I think we lost them. Just give us one second.

I don't know about Neoba.

I'm here. I'm frozen for it.

Okay.

Cool, cool.

Yeah, we just lost Connor for a second, but I can hear you just fine now.

Okay, Connor, feel free to come back up and finish that thought. Sorry about that. Here we go. Testing. Yep, gotcha. Cool.

So yeah, in cases didn't. In cases this one didn't get through. You asked about bluetech within cleantech. I said bluetech within a subsector of. Is a subsector within clean tech, in my opinion, which is even more broadly a subsector within climate tech. I think climate tech and clean tech are kind of used synonymously. I think that there's a little bit of a fear associated with clean tech because of the infamous Clean Tech 1.0 bubble and burst. So people like calling it something different.

Okay, fair enough. Yeah. I feel like specifically to San Diego because we've got such a, you know, water based economy, if you will, from Navy Shipbuilding, Scripps Oceanography. I just, I hear all the terms and it would, would be nice to have one overarching because you hear bluetech and some people think climate and other people think anything. You know, could even be like water technology or stuff for defense related warship building, like. Yeah. So interesting to hear the different conversations. I like hearing the different definitions in general. Clean tech, blue tech, and even a little bit of defense tech have a great home in San Diego. So it'd be good to get those clusterings. I'll make sure everyone's on the same page about how we're talking about it. All areas I like to invest in. All right, Fred, they want to talk a little bit of news.

Yeah, it's been a bit of a slow news week, but I was looking at the funding tractor to see what's. What's that, what's out there, what's top of mind for you?

Some bigger tech companies doing some in San Diego, which is unfortunate to see between Illumina, obviously Luma's been in the news a lot from a CEO change from maybe not getting the Grail investment or M and A that they thought. So Lumina is shaving some people as is potentially too simple which may actually even completely either sell or divest or shut down its US operations. So a lot of shakeups happening at recent our Most recent tech IPO company TuSimple here in town. So unfortunate to see. But both of those I feel like are a little bit. I don't know if they're not the bellwether of the economy as much like they each have their own unique things going on. Tusimple got caught up with having Chinese leadership and executives that were supposed to be divested and so that part is affecting its stock price and aluminum. Same with this M and A deal that isn't going through. So I don't know if we're seeing the same kind of tech layoffs that are happening macro San Diego wise as much. Have you heard anything as much local related to that?

Yeah, I mean it's the biggest, the big players like Illumina, Qualcomm, those ones that you mentioned, there's been a lot of smaller layoffs Startup I'm seeing just like across the board. It's not just San Diego ecosystem. Everyone's kind of dealing with this difficult time. But I'll be interested to see what companies are doing as far as like the talent they like go. Are they going to go join other startups or they're going to start their own startups. So I think there's a positive side to it as well. Yeah, Another, another news, positive news was the Mosaic ML company that got acquired which was based in San Francisco but the founders is here in San Diego which was acquired for over a billion dollars and they only had under 100 employees. I think we talked about this last week but I just think it's really interesting to see that was kind of a San Diego based company but it's not talked about from that lens. But there's a lot of, you know, good news and good companies still here despite the downturn. So.

Totally. Yeah. Mosaic founder and CEO Naveen Rao was co founder and CEO of Nirvana Systems which got acquired by intel five years ago. They got acquired by databricks Databricks recently and I think they had an NC's office. I think Naveen I know is local and I'm pretty sure they had an Encinitas hub even though I think the co founder was in sf. So yes, great to see that kind of AI traction happening. Let's get out here. Hey, Al.

Hey guys. On this topic, one of the things that I've been most excited about long term for the San Diego ecosystem is the concept that we've we in something we haven't had. And that's kind of like the flywheel of, hey, you have these really big unicorn companies that grow. They're like the trees and all the employees are these little seeds that drop off. And when those companies go public or they sell or something happens, you're kind of minting little mini millionaires that come down and they go do their next thing right. Whether it's start a company or invest in companies or whatever the case may be. And I feel like one, there are a, you know that it used to be like Qualcomm back in the day, right. And that was it, right. Like that was the company, maybe Intuit or whatever. But you didn't really have that constant flywheel. I think some of it began with seismic starting to grow on the tech side and a bunch of other companies that came along and all of a sudden we had these, you know, quote unquote unicorn companies that were growing and starting to go public and things like that. I'm curious what you guys think about. I mean, the economy feels like it's kind of slowing that flywheel down. And I'm kind of curious, one, who you think those big companies are today and two, how you think the economy has sort of impacted and impacted this flywheel that we had started to build over the past couple years.

Big question. You know, I think a lot of the ways we look at viable pieces, usually around exits, you see a big exit happen and it recycles capital and talent in a variety of ways. And we've always talked about how we compared to many other cities haven't had the big exits, we haven't had the billion dollar IPOs, the billion dollar acquisitions. And what we started saw during COVID was either the majority buyout where PE comes in and then comes in again to some of these companies and or secondaries being a bigger thing. And so it's actually a relief valve where founders are getting liquidity sooner than planned. So I think that is a little bit starting to happen in San Diego. But I think most of our exec teams still don't even know to ask about secondary offerings at the series B, C or D level. And that would be a great relief valve to get some capital flowing into the community sooner than the big exit happens. So I'm big on making sure people are educated around that. I don't know about M and A, but it feels like it's coming back up. It feels like the stock market's coming a little back up and therefore companies are getting ready to exit again. And so I think it behooves all of us to also make sure that people know how to get ready for the exit ahead of time from a personal wealth management perspective because sometimes it's usually too late anyway. Those are some of the pieces I think that we lack as a community and hope that's what you're asking about. C.L. fred, anything on your end?

Let me just add some. I have some names to throw out. I mean I put a tweet today about San Diego unicorn startups and I think still think it's a little bit early before these companies go public, but they've been talking about it for some time. ClickUp, which started in San Francisco where they moved to San Diego. I think there are, you know, a target for IPO within the next decade, five years hopefully. Drata hq they are a compliance startup here in San Diego, started in 2021 or 2020. They've been growing like crazy. I can see them having a potential to, to be this big company. Flock Freight, they've raised money from Softbank and they're notoriously known. Those investors are notoriously known for pushing their companies to go to public markets whether they want to or not. That's an interesting company to look out to. Not a tech company but Vuori Clothing. I think Joe Kula, he's a really good CEO and it's been awesome to see their brand become a global brand. And I think these companies have potential to be the next not so Qualcomm companies but well known companies that are household names like WD40, we have Intuit here, we have Dexcom, like all these big name hostile name companies that are known outside of San Diego. I think these are some of the companies that come to mind. But yeah, I think it still has some time and these companies are still maturing.

Yeah, I didn't realize your Twitter was blowing up from your tweet just before this. Got some of those brands, brand names joining on the chat on Twitter. Make sure you get that on threads too. Fred A few other that come to mind that I know are very focused on, you know, having a long lasting San Diego brand which probably means, you know, manifesting your own destiny through an IPO or something like that like Sochi or Cloud Beds. Also probably in the unicorn club as well. It's interesting because some of the other bigger you know, multi billion dollar brands like Lytics are pretty under the radar yet are valued pretty high because they've had these PE buyouts but they keep the brands here so that, that's all that is super interesting. What's the most interesting probably is the level of that has come to San Diego over the last three to four years just before COVID and through now. One, you've got the Apples opening campuses here which is bringing, you know, enterprise grade kind of executives to town which I think San Diego has lacked for a long time to not have the manager, director, vp, kind of really experienced talent there. And so I hope that drives the growth if they come to our companies here because they eventually will. No one leaves San Diego. They come for Apple, stay for the startup scene and I think having an executive class that knows how to build big brands that will have some great staying power for San Diego as well too. So I'm excited about that. Well, anything else come to mind?

No, that's all so, so top of mind for me. I think this is, this is great. I love welcoming people to San Diego. There's a lot of people I'm hearing that have moved here in the last two years, three years and I think it's not going to stop. And so let's continue to have these. Welcome to San Diego because it's the next tech, huh?

Absolutely. Did I freeze again? Can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you now.

Okay. Well we try to put out a weekly tech news, you know, podcast Fred and I so check out, keep a track, keep track of both of his and eyes. LinkedIn and Twitter's freshbrewtech.com is where we post them online and Fred's got his own stub stack that is absolutely worth subscribing to sdfounders.subsack.com right Fred? Yep. And events that are coming up worth checking out. I don't know a ton in July and I, I froze while trying to pull up freshproof tech website but I know in September will be Innovation Day at Petco park by connect and end of October will be the San Diego Startup Week. So we hope to see all of you out there and thanks again for joining us. We'll see you again soon.

Thanks everyone.

Have a good weekend.

Cheers.

Cheers.