What's Happening in San Diego Tech with Brittany Meiling

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border 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 crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing Coronado eating tacos El Gordo the taco stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to coast angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside to Tijuana Estee be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who 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.

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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 Bloom, 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.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the parties.

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Cox Business and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neal Bloom and I am fortunate to be joined by Senior Reporter of the San Diego Union Tribune, Brittany Mailing. Brittany, thanks for being on the pod.

Thanks for having me.

It's fun to finally have you here. We've known each other for a while. We've kind of danced around in the startup world of San Diego for quite a few years. You've been covering some amazing stories of innovation and now we get to chat about it a bit, but also get to know you, which doesn't usually get to happen much in your stories. So thanks.

Yeah, happy to.

Do you want to tell us briefly, like, what's your purview that you cover within the Union Tribune? I know it's not just startups.

Yes. When I first started there, it's been like a year and a half now. I think it was just startups. And because that was my background in San Diego, I had quite a lot to write about and was able to kind of fill up my days doing the kinds of stories that I used to do when I was at the San Diego Business Journal. And that looked like a lot of profile stories, so articles specifically about one startup and what they're doing in the context of maybe their competitors or the greater industry. But I found that this kind of coverage made me on an interesting schedule where I was kind of like a magazine writer, like a features writer, and I was always the one who was writing for the Sunday business cover. And that meant that I wasn't writing daily news. And I just kind of prefer the schedule of a daily reporter rather than always working on longer term stories. So I had asked if I could take on some extra things to cover in my beat. So now I also cover brick and mortar retail along with of course, e commerce retail because that kind of fits in the startup bag too. And to be honest, because I used to cover biotech, I pick up that every now and then. Honestly, I kind of, I kind of dabble in a lot of different business news now.

Oh, interesting. Okay, very cool. So we're going to chat about a few of those areas, especially how they've been impacted by the latest coronavirus, which as we're recording this in early April, we are in the thick of it. I hope by the time whenever this goes live, we're looking back in the history in the past and not still in that. So let's, let's look. I want to learn a little bit about how you came to be a journalist. Like, was that always a lifelong dream or when did that like North Star come to be?

I think that I've always been an avid reader and when I was still in high school, I wanted to do anything that was involved, like involving writing. So I did one of those. I think they actually forced you to do it in my high school, where you had to look up several different careers in, like, the career Handbook and find out, like, you know, what different jobs paid, what a day in the life of those jobs looked like, what kind of education was required of those jobs. All of the ones that I picked had to do with writing because I loved reading. So I assumed I would love writing. And I decided that news reporter was a perfect fit for me because you're constantly learning, doing something new every day, and that fits my personality really well. So that's. I wanted to be a news reporter in high school, and I went to college for that. And it's beside a short stint where while I was in college, I was also a paralegal, and then I worked for a criminal court judge. So I had this weird little stint, like in legal. But for the most part of my professional career, I've only ever done journalism.

Interesting. And at some point, when you came to San Diego and since you've been here, you've really focused on tech and life sciences, which are pretty technical kind of stuff to cover. Was that also an interest or where did that come from?

No, it wasn't an interest. In fact, I was terrible at biology. It was my worst subject in college and years prior. And when I first came to San Diego, I just wanted to find any job as a reporter. For those who don't know, journalism jobs are rare. So actually, when I went to college, my advisor told me, you should probably just expect a career in pr because journalism jobs are disappearing and you'll have to at least move to whatever state you can find a job. And I had specifically wanted to live in San Diego, so I was just like, I'll take whatever job I can find. And when I found a job for a biotech reporter at the San Diego Business Journal, I thought, well, that's a good fit, because I've kind of specialized in business reporting in college, and this is on a business journal. But I didn't know the first thing about biotech. I actually had to Google, what is biotech? When I was getting ready for that interview, I did terribly on that part of my interview. I remember the editor asked me if I was familiar with Illumina, which is the biggest life science company in San Diego. And I said, don't they make a sleeping drug like a sleeping aide? And he's like, no. And I did terribly. But he let me do a freelance article where I had to write about a very technical topic. And I guess that was kind of my test, because after One freelance article. He hired me full time for that job and I did biotech for about maybe a year and a half before I decided to try and take on startups. And that was kind of my avenue to write about tech, which I really wanted to write about. And the tech beat was already taken. Brad Graves covered tech and he'd been covering it for years. So I said, well, what if I write about startups in just early stage tech? That's different. So that's how I got into writing about that.

Interesting. So startups were not being written about beforehand or would Brad kind of COVID it? And so they carved that out for you to do.

Brad would cover startups and he did a good job of it too. He would cover accelerators and, and incubators and startups. But because he also had to cover defense, which is a huge part of San Diego's economy, and then big tech, he didn't get to reserve very much time for startups. And so I did some one off assignment where I was writing about co working and I went around to tour all the co working spaces in San Diego. At the time there was only like three or four. Maybe this is like 2014, when that was still kind of new. And I got to know a lot of entrepreneurs that were working out of these coworking spaces. And I thought people aren't really writing about the startup scene like this community of people that are here starting businesses. And they were often a lot younger, which was new to me because as a business reporter doing biotech, I was often working with executives that were about twice my age. It was kind of fun to be around this group of people who were more peers of mine. And so I kind of pitched to my editor, actually pitched at the time, starting a different beat entirely, like maybe one that they hire someone else for. I said, I think we need to be hired. We should be doing a startup reporter job where they just cover this community of early stage tech, early stage companies. And they said, we don't really have the budget for another reporter, so why don't you write a column and you can do it once a week and we'll just kind of test that out. They were really like, they didn't think I could fill a whole page in the business journal with startup news. They were really unsure there was enough news coming out of that area. And it turned out to be the most popular thing I was doing. In fact, the startup page kept getting people who wanted to sponsor the page, so they redesigned the whole business journal to mimic the startup page. Then they had the biotech page and the defense page so they could get sponsors for each page that way. So it turned out pretty well.

That's smart. That's really cool. What time frame was that that you started writing the startup beat?

Oh, gosh, I think that was around 2016. I mean, I had covered it off and on. Technically. My beat at the time was like healthcare and biotech. So I was writing about hospital systems and biotech companies. But with small news teams, you end up getting a lot of one off assignments. So I had kind of been writing about it since 2014 off and on. But 2016 is when the column became official and my coverage started to be more focused on startups.

Got it. Okay. Very cool. I very much remember, like right when you started that startup page, it was a great kind of validation, I would say, for our community, right, to have a publication say, hey, we're solely dedicated on this. But at some point you said, I like biotech. So you know, what was that like that to say I wanted to try something or go back to a little bit of your something you'd already been writing. Like, what was that? What was the reason for doing your biotech?

Do you mean when I went to Endpoint?

Yeah.

Well, biotech had been kind of my, you know, the thing I started at, at the business journal. And I developed what was a very difficult expertise as a reporter who did not know that world at all. In the beginning, I immersed myself into pharma and biotech and trying to learn what that business model is and how to read clinical trial data results and how to really figure out if a product was going to be valuable or not in the marketplace. And I think that that took so much work and immersion to really understand that beat that I felt like to abandon it wouldn't be smart career wise. In fact, there are so few people who can understand and write about biotech. I thought that this will really set me apart in a very competitive, difficult journalism landscape. So I better focus on biotech. So when I went to Endpoints, which is a biotech news, like a global news website, that's what I did for about a year and learned a lot by writing not just about San Diego, but about all different kinds of biotech hubs. And through that experience, I learned how much local communities mean to me because I love the news, but I think more than the news, I love local communities. And I really missed that. It's very strong in the startup beat in particular, and I missed being able to have that connection to the companies that I write about when I decided. And I think I was only at endpoints for about a year before I reached out to the business editor at the San Diego Union Tribune. And I basically did the same thing to her that I did to my publisher at the Business Journal. I said, you guys don't write about startups very much, and I have a pitch for you that you should write about startups. And they were not hiring. So she kind of was like, yeah, we'll have coffee, but just so you know, we're not hiring. And I gave her my pitch about why they should write about startups and why entrepreneurs are so fascinating and why people love to read about entrepreneurs. And Diana, now my editor, asked me to meet with the publisher and give him that same pitch. And he went ahead and, you know, gave a budget to hire and add a new reporter to the business team. And that's why I started the startup beat there at the Union Tribune.

That's awesome. Well, it's great to have you back. I'm curious if, you know, from a Union Tribune perspective. One, it's about time that they were covering that, but two, what has it been like? So since you started writing that beat for the Union Tribune, have they leaned into more of it? Are they saying, oh, one, we didn't know about this, so someone's covering it. What has the transformation been for them to cover startups at that stage?

It's been really interesting, actually, because the way that Diana has described it many times, because Diana has been the business editor there for many years now, and she has always said, we've done this, we've written about startups before, and it never took off. People didn't read these stories. They assumed that people weren't interested in startup stories. And the style that I like to do when I write about startups is I like to focus on the people a lot more. I feel like it's fun for me to find the most interesting thing about a startup and lead with that. And I also like to play with headlines a lot. In the analytics that we were looking at. When I started writing about startups, they were doing extraordinarily well in terms of popularity. And so the whole business team became a lot more open to startup coverage. And it was like, well, these are the kinds of stories that people like to read, but it really has to do with how you write the startup story. Startup news in and of itself is sometimes not interesting. And so I think that as long as I keep doing those stories right, and taking my time on them and not rushing them, then Startup news can be really interesting.

Yeah, well, you tell a good story, that's for sure. And I'm curious over the higher level story for San Diego startup community. Since you've been here, you got here, what, 2013 or 14? Is that when you came to town?

Yeah, 2014.

So what's the startup community look like through your eyes since then?

Since then, wow. It's changed tremendously. When I first started writing about startups, it was like such a grassroots community. And like, I always felt like, honestly, Neil, you were a big part of the first introduction that I had to the startup scene here. And I felt like you guys lived in your own little bubble. Like you all knew what was going on in local tech and local startups, but like no one else did, no one in the business community that I was interfacing with at the business journal. And so it felt like a small, really humble seen, and there was a lot of hopes and not a whole lot of results. So I would always write about these little companies that wanted to do things and then like six months later they were, they had disappeared. They weren't doing so hot on the business side. And then over time, we just started to get so much traction in terms of financing, but also in terms of companies that have some staying power. And what I've noticed today, I just look at some numbers that Mike Kren from Connect at the San Diego Venture Group, he sent over their latest venture numbers from 2019. What kind of blew my mind is in 2019, there was $3.4 billion of investment capital invested in San Diego startups. That's a billion dollars more than the year before that. And the year before that saw a billion dollars more than the prior year. So we've seen some pretty significant jump in that investment capital. What was especially interesting to me is that each year we're seeing a pretty interesting amount of that money go towards tech companies rather than just biotech. San Diego used to largely just be like this biotech hub for funding, and now you're seeing that money. I mean, it's still dominated by life sciences, that's for sure, but we're seeing a lot more diversification of where that money is going and even the stage of the rounds that the money's going to. So I see that as an indication that San Diego's startup scene has diversified, that it's maturing, especially in the tech part of that. We're seeing that San Diego tech is starting to have some specialties that I didn't used to see. So you know, we talk a lot about the intersection of health and tech in San Diego because of the history of the life science industry. So we see a lot of like telemedicine and that sort of thing. But we also have like an interesting concentration in things like self driving tech, machine learning, computer vision, stuff that gets spun out of Qualcomm. Then a lot of enterprise cloud systems tech which I think is largely rooted in servicenow spinouts and stuff. So I think a lot of that is all recent.

Yeah, those are great tens to pick up on. It's very cool to see our different industries kind of interlace for sure. The late great Bruce from Xconomy saying big bio meets big data. It's really, it's not just a gimmick or novel anymore. It is very much a thing. Right. Even Illumina like you mentioned before, probably has more software tech in it than more data science than maybe even wet lab scientists at this point. So yeah, I completely agree. It's really cool to see our industries blur the lines and become our superpower.

You know, bringing up Illumina is a really great example. But also a lot of the other large life science like public life science companies are doing the same thing. Like you might have heard of ResMed in the news lately because they are making ventilators right now, but they normally make CPAP machines for people who have, what's that called? Copd, Helps them sleep and they have a huge software department. A lot of people think of them as like this science company because they make these like you know, medical devices. But they have a huge effort towards their software because they make software that pairs with their device. And you're seeing a lot of that in some large life science companies in San Diego.

Yeah, it's incredible especially to see the companies lean in towards the cause of corona right now. Right. I want to talk about the greater what you're seeing in the greater startup community. But what are you picking up from in terms of companies who are seeing like having to out of necessity change their business model right now to really be, you know, lean in to this crisis. What else are you seeing besides ResMed?

You know, it runs the gamut like I've been because we're all quarantined. My husband and I talk about this kind of stuff like literally every night. And I was just telling him before this recording started that if you think about any facet of life, and that includes every industry that you can think of, they're going through some kind of change right now because of Impacts from the pandemic. And so it's really tough to say specifically. One thing I've been doing a lot of reporting on brick and mortar retail and in that is restaurants. So I've had to see them reinvent their business models, which has been kind of fascinating because they have to implement a lot of technology in a way that you wouldn't expect like a mom and pop restaurant to do. But as far as the local tech companies, I guess what I'm seeing from them is difficulty. Of the ones I've interviewed recently, there's been a couple of e commerce companies that have previously done really well. And Chase Fisher, he did an interview on the record, so I know he wouldn't mind me sharing this. They sell sunglasses. They're an E commerce, so they only sell them online. But right now it's very difficult to sell something like sunglasses because people aren't going out. This is not an essential product and it's not something that's on people's mind. So they have really struggled right now. And he said a lot of e commerce companies like his are probably struggling as well. And he's saying that it's difficult because you even have a hard time branding yourself right now because people find it insensitive if you're trying to sell your product. And your product isn't something that kind of supports what's going on right now. So I think they've been really smart about it. To be honest, Chase did not position it to me as a PR move, but I can recognize one when I see it. And when that company, they paused the production of their sunglasses and they made 10,000 safety goggles for hospital workers, this was brilliant. First of all, it was a big risk financially because they're giving these away. They're not charging for them. And it was good of him to do. He said they wanted to support the San Diego community. They donated all of these to San Diego hospitals. But as a result of that move and the attention that he got from doing that, he ended up getting a deal with a nonprofit organization that bought 20,000 goggles from that company so that they could distribute it to the hospitals in New York City. You know, I see that as a really smart way to rethink how you go about selling. And not that I think that he made very much money on that deal because he was selling it, I think pretty close to cost. However, it's a way to kind of survive during a time when your sales are slowing down. So I thought that was interesting.

Yeah, that is interesting. Some Other companies that come to mind that I think you've covered too are company like Cloudbeds, a software company in the hospitality space that actually, I'm sure they're very fortunate that they feel this way. They raised a significant amount of money, about 82 million just a month or two ago, pretty late stage, series D, I think, funding round. And they, they are like a boutique trap, boutique hotel software company. So they help boutique hotels like do their bookings and they've what I've read, I think you wrote about it, or at least saw directly from the CEO Adam, talk about how they're helping these hotel owners convert their places into like hospitals or at least places where maybe people who are not needing the pure ventilator but, but needing to put people up can utilize their platform for that. So really innovative too. Have you seen other things similar to that within cloud beds? Like that kind of pivot so quickly?

You know, I, I think that Cloudbeds is set up really well right now, doing that big round. I mean, the timing is just kind of perfect because hospitality and all of their customers, to be honest, are just being hit really hard right now by the pandemic and we don't really know how long that's going to last. So thankfully, Cloudbeds is smart in a lot of ways about how it operates. It's largely a virtual company. It's got a remote staff, so that as far as their operations go, it's like not really affected them that much because they can just do business as usual. And I think that that effort that they did, from what I can tell, it really just required them to kind of throw up a webpage that allowed people to volunteer their spaces. And so it was, again, it was a smart PR move. And I think that cloud biz is one of those really lucky hospitality tech companies that's going to weather the storm pretty well.

Yeah, really hope so. We got a bunch of smart people there over in Bankers Hill doing some good things. Another company recently that raised, and what's cool to see now at this point that you've been able to see is companies have success, founders go on to do their next company. And so the team at Gretel was actually the founding team at a company called Harvest AI. They were acquired by Amazon and I think some of them had to move up to Seattle, but came back to San Diego and recently raised kind of a founding round of 3.5 million. Do you remember the Harvest AI team at all from your business journal days?

I don't. In fact, when I Saw the name you put in the show notes Gretel. I was like, I'm not familiar with this company at all. So I'm interested to hear more.

Yeah, it's really cool to see this team work on company number two and raise some money. And I think they raised just in February or so. So I'm sure they're if not growing at least stable. So that's always a good sign for them to see.

Do you know what they do?

What do they do? They're in the data. I know they're in the customer data space. So they are helping companies, I think get more awareness around their customers, specifically in that data space. But that's as much as I know right now.

Interesting. I wonder if it has to do with E commerce customers or what. But yeah, that'll be interesting. I'll look into that one.

Yeah, check them out. I know the team previously also was an analytics company, Harvest AI So I imagine it's a pretty similar consumer facing kind of data. But yeah, great to see success beget more success. Hopefully the recycled capital and recycled teams building on new companies here in San Diego, which is great.

Yeah, I'd love to see that.

Another company that is rising to the occasion with Coronavirus is aristamd. They are a telemedicine company which is obviously not just new, but very much the only way you go see a doctor right now unless you have coronavirus, hopefully you don't. They just raised just a fresh new cache of about 18 million in funding. Have you been following them much?

You know, it's funny, I wrote about Arista MD and I cannot tell you one thing about the company because it's been so many years since I covered them and actually Mike Freeman, our tech reporter, so it's kind of confusing. I write about startups, but Mike Freeman writes about tech that's normally more mature. Companies like Qualcomm. He picked this one up because I was working on a different story that day. So he wrote about that financing that they did. But as I understand it, they do a tool that helps primary care physicians speak with specialists which can improve kind of the speed and quality of primary care for the patient. But they do fall in that category of kind of telemedicine that's suddenly like really attractive to people as we're dealing with quarantine and we're dealing with this need to have distance between the patient and the facility. And I was talking to Mike Crin the other day and he said it's so interesting because there are two areas that have historically really struggled to get financing from venture capitalists and that's telemedicine and edtech distance learning. And he's like, now these are two areas that are suddenly like very attractive to investors. So interesting what the pandemic's doing that.

Yeah, yeah, very interesting. I come from the edtech world. It is, it is unfortunate that this is the reason for EdTech to finally go virtual in universities, to adopt some modern day tools. But whatever it takes for an impetus, sometimes that whole industry needs that. Speaking of those kinds of companies, ones that have been working at it for so long, especially in the ed tech space now there's a whole bunch of companies that are faced with potentially no sales, having to lay people off. How are you, like, how are you having that conversation? Are they pretty real with you or they still feel like it's kind of a PR move and saying, yeah, we're doing everything we can. Like, are they being pretty real and saying like things are shit right now?

Yeah, the beauty of it. And I think someone said this on my Twitter the other day and he was so right. People are being very straightforward with me, so much more than in the past. And I think I had said something on Twitter about how it must be because everyone's working from home. And as much as I value PR people because they help me do my job and they're so helpful and connections to the industry, they also often lurk on the line when you're interviewing CEOs, which makes people uncomfortable. It's hard to have a very candid conversation when you know that there's someone listening who's very worried about everything that you're saying. So I had said something on Twitter about, oh, it's so nice to do interviews where I can just have these one on one conversations with a CEO on their cell phone. They're so candid and someone commented and said, well, maybe one reason they're candid is because it's a level playing field right now. It's kind of shit for everyone right now and no one is going to think less of a company if they're having to do layoffs or if they're struggling to sell. And I think that's allowing people to be a lot more honest.

Yeah, that's a good point. Something that you mentioned is that we used to have pretty siloed, but we've seen some organizations kind of come together over just the last few years and that's the edc. I would give them a lot of credit for building a lot of bridges to A lot of other orgs, especially in the startup community between Startup San Diego and Connect and something that's great to see is that they put together an airtable where they want to know what companies are still hiring and how do we help kind of marketplace style get people applying to these jobs. Have you seen this new effort? Who's hiring by sd? Life changing.

No, but I find that incredible. I love the EDC too. I feel like everything they do I'm just so happy to see. So I'm gonna have to check this out because I'm doing a story actually next week on layoffs and so it'll be good to kind of note in there the kind of companies that are continuing to hire.

Yeah, just looking through it, I mean a lot of your bigger name tech companies in San Diego, your Lytics, your Booz Allen, Qualcomm, but then some of your little bit more early stage startups Too in there, Shield, AI and 1986, a biotech company and classy in there too. So great to see that companies are stepping up and saying not only are we not just pausing on growth, we're hiring. So let's go. So that's great to see and we will make sure we put this in the show notes. It is san diegolifechanging.org hiring in San Diego. Great effort as a whole community to do that between the EDC Connect and Startup San Diego. So we're obviously all sitting at home. We're doing a lot of zooms. A lot more than zooms. I personally believe not every call needs to be video. Heads up everyone. It can be a phone call, but that's okay. But are you missing some of your events, some of your go tos, at least getting out in the community at all? Or are you feeling recharged by just being home?

No, I am missing it desperately. The reason that I decided to come to the Union Tribune instead of writing at Endpoints is because I missed the newsroom, like the physical newsroom and the journalists working around you. And I missed the community. So in the way that I do community, I don't do a lot of events, but I do go visit companies in person almost every day. I'm out in the community meeting people or at least grabbing coffee with different people. And it has been such an adjustment to be working and writing from home. You can write stories this way, that's for sure. And I've certainly been taking advantage of more tools than I used to. To be honest, I never did video calls before all of this when people Would send me a Zoom invite. I'd only call on my office phone. I wouldn't ever turn on the video. So I'm getting better about that. But I believe that when I get to meet someone in person and see their workspace and get to know them, I write a lot better stories. And so I've been feeling like I have a lot less inspired to write and it's difficult to constantly be writing about devastation. If anyone reads my stories over the years, I have a bit of a reputation for writing about kind of happy things. I like writing about hopeful things. And that's why I like startups so much, is they're at the beginning when everything is pretty hopeful. And it's been hard to write instead about the difficulties that the pandemic has brought on. But that's part of the job. So I'm kind of just trying to learn my way through it.

Yeah, totally. I think we all are. It's a very new normal and for a while it was a whole new set of rules every day that we had to live by.

Yes.

And especially in the event space. I mean, a lot of events just said not happening. And now it's interesting to see some start to find a virtual way to do their interactions. I hosted today, actually 23 founders and investors. I do a quarterly dinner and I said, let's try doing this like as a virtual lunch. And we use Zoom. We did a kind of intros. Most people knew each other kind of, at least in the community, but we did intros for the first 15 minutes. And then I had already pre assigned groups of four and five to go to these breakout rooms that Zoom has. And so I hit a button, Boom. Everyone was shuffled to six breakout rooms. Gave a prompt. Like it was pretty simple. How's your company doing? Like, are you hiring? Are you firing, Are you raising? Are you on hold? Just kind of company health and you as a person. And then after 15 minutes, the room's erased, everyone's in back in the room together. And then I had round two of the breakout room. So it was kind of fun to try a whole new format. I may do that, you know, going forward just like a real. Everyone said like, can we do this, you know, in a, in a month or sooner and maybe let's do it around happy hour time, do the same thing. So it's kind of fun.

I love that idea. I didn't realize that Zoom had that, that function of the breakout rooms.

Yeah, it's not turned on as a default, so you have to go into settings and find it. But it's very cool. You can actually pre assign everyone ahead of time. So you just hit a button and people are dispersed. But there's a company in town, a very early stage startup called ASAI that was actually they were, they're all volunteers with Startup San Diego and they saw some inadequacies of running Startup Week last year and said we want to build like an event space company that helps people build conferences. And so they actually ran Startup San Diego's speaker process this year. The submits for speakers and the voting whole process and obviously coronavirus was super disruptive to their business and so they very quickly created a virtual networking event company called Meta or a product and they started their very first virtual networking event last week. It was pretty fun to be a part of and they're doing another one next week. So Meta by asai, they're doing a virtual networking event that will allow people in the startup community, at least that's their focus, to meet new people and just check in through a video format. So something cool to check out.

Yeah, how interesting. I was just going to be like, hey, can you like Slack me that later so I can look into it?

Yeah, I will do that. Speaking of Slack, there is a startup Slack in town that's like 2,400 people. It is a great way to stay in contact with people. It's how I communicate with Brittany, even if she doesn't want to be on it because she's at home. But it is a great way to connect with a lot of people in town. So startupsd.org Slack, you can actually find yourself, find your way and add yourself to that Startup Slack community. We'd love to have you. Speaking of EDC that we did before and especially in the job space, I think you did a piece on Advancing San Diego. Do you want to talk through that a little bit?

Advancing San Diego, do you remember that?

That's the. So that is the program that EDC is going to cover a certain amount of hours for. In a sense my free talent, or at least first hundred hours, I think of talent to help technical and marketing talent within the San Diego community.

That's right. You know that was, that was just before the work from home orders and all of that went down. That feels like a lifetime ago when I wrote that story. Yeah, that was one of those programs that again I'm just like talk about a tangible impact to a community that the EDC could provide. They are offering basically free interns for a limited time for. Was it over 100 companies, Neil. I'm going to forget the details now. It's been a while.

Yeah. At least 100 companies. I know applications have just been open, ongoing for a while. So I know it came from a really big grant from, I think, the J.P. morgan foundation and is enabling so many companies to access talent that they may not have been able to afford before. So just being able to stretch the.

World, I feel like right now when people are just trying to tighten the purse strings a little bit, this is an incredible resource to be looking into. There's actually a lot of local resources that sometimes when I hear about how many applications come in for these programs, these are like free programs. For example, the Connect all incubator. You know, you get free office space there, you get mentorship, and, you know, they get. They get like less than 100 applicants for each cohort, which I think is pretty small for an incubator. So I think last time I checked in with them, they had like 60 applicants for their. For their latest cohort. So especially right now, when we should be taking advantage of every resource we can get. There's a lot going on in San Diego and if you follow just my coverage, you'll hear about them.

Yeah, totally. It's all about that awareness. It's just why we started this podcast. Right. We just felt that everyone was in heads down building companies, and we weren't talking about all the great things happening. So I think you're ramping up with the startup page and everything else has at least gotten a bigger awareness. But our job's never done, that's for sure.

Yes.

Do you remember when you're at the Business Journal, when we had. When. I think the Business Journal was pretty involved, or if it was their own event, the Top Tech Awards. You remember that?

Yes. Yeah, that was like Cox. I think it was Cox Business and. And the Business Journal, but largely Cox Business. I remember right.

For sure. Yeah. So I think they're in their, like, 11th or 12th year. It's coming back. It's later in the year this year, which probably is super lucky for them that they did that. It's usually like April, May, and they already had made the decision to do it like September, October. But applications are open right now, I know, to submit recognition for your favorite technical leader. So like a CT cio, VP of Engineer, and it's kind of a fun night. They've got like, I think it's usually at the Del Mar race track, pretty snazzy, swanky event. And they give out awards to technical leaders like, pretty San Diego thing to do. I think not many places celebrate your cto.

Yeah, I love that.

Yeah. So awards are open now. We'll put the link in the show notes for this. But, you know, it's fun to see that things are still happening. We're not completely shut down. You're obviously writing stories and keeping us up to date. Really hope the community comes out of this bigger and better than where we were. What's the first thing you're going to go do right when we're out of lockdown?

My husband and I just talked about this. You know, he had all these, like, great things he wanted to do that had to do with, like, exercise and community and recreation. And what I said was super lame. I want to go get a burrito at a Mexican restaurant and, like, be able to sit down, you know, which restaurant, which.

What's. What. What logo comes to mind when you think that.

You know, it's embarrassing because I think it's a chain, but I used to live in Grantville, which is a little neighborhood kind of east of Mission Valley. And there's a Tio Leo's there that has, like, the best dining room. It's so cozy. And they have fireplaces, and I always thought that the service was great there. They have awesome fajitas, and so that's where I'd like to go back to. But I also, I love Don Carlos up in La Jolla by the Wind and Sea beach. And I have this tradition of going and getting a burrito from Don Carlos, taking it down to Wind and Sea and watching the sunset. And lately, even though you can take, you can get, like, takeout and you can sit in your car, but I've been feeling like I shouldn't be in these public spaces and I shouldn't be at the beach. So I really look forward to doing that again when all this is over.

Yeah, me too. I really wish we could find a way to get tacos and burritos delivered for every one of our little taco shops because, well, maybe it's good for our waistbands, but I miss it. Brittany, it's been awesome having you on. We need to have you back again so we can talk through the news, especially once we're in recovery mode and we're feeling all these good stories, continue to see these companies continue to prosper. Thanks so much for being on. Where can people find you if they want to follow you and see your stories social wise? Twitter. LinkedIn.

Yeah, Twitter is the best platform because I'm pretty much always on Twitter sharing stuff and the handle is BritneyMiling. And I'm also on Facebook. I share very regularly to the Facebook group San Diego Tech Founders. I think that's what it's called. Neil, you probably know better than me and I am also on LinkedIn, so if you are in connection with me on LinkedIn, I share my stories there really regularly as well. And just a reminder, you can read the Union Tribune without a subscription. You can read like I think it's like three or five articles a month. So I think something that's fun to kind of keep up with San Diego Tech news that we're writing is sign up for the newsletter that we put out and it'll come to your inbox. And then if you find yourself reading it all the time, then you can subscribe. I think it's only a few bucks a month right now.

Yeah, it's a great resource, especially for how many stories you're putting out there. I'm a proud subscriber, so thank you for putting out those stories. Continue to shine a bright light on what we're up to here. Thanks Brittany.

Happy to 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. Well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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