Tacos And Tech Podcast

Ashok Kamal is back in the studio to discuss recent happenings in the local startup scene. Listen in as he and Neal chat about venture funding, startup news, and more. In case you missed it, School of Rap, which was co-founded by Ashok, helped us come up with a new Tacos & Tech theme song that encompasses all we love about San Diego and the local startup scene. Give it a listen in this episode and let us know what you think! http://theschoolofrap.com/  For a full listing of news, events, and fundings, sign up for our newsletter at https://conta.cc/2TuORun and follow us on Twitter: @FreshBrewedTech.  Thanks to our partners at Cox Business for their support in enabling us to grow the San Diego ecosystem.

Ashok Kamal is the Executive Director of Tech Coast Angels (TCA) San Diego, one of the largest and most active angel investment groups in the country. Originally from the east coast, Ashok grew up in Boston, where he later attended Boston University. At 21 years old, Ashok moved to New York City to pursue entrepreneurship. Hw founded businesses there and immersed himself in the local startup scene. In 2015, after spending 15 years in the big apple, he finally made his way out to the west coast. A visit to his friend in San Diego is what sparked his idea to move to the sunny city, and he’s never looked back. Ashok’s first taste of the San Diego startup scene was at Startup San Diego’s Convergence event, which happens to be where he first met our host, Neal. This is a special episode because School of Rap, which was co-founded by Ashok, helped us come up with a new Tacos & Tech theme song that encompasses all we love about San Diego and the local startup scene. Give it a listen and let us know what you thin

Soon-Aik (SA) Chiew is the Chief Product Officer of Softinn Solutions and a Startup Melaka leader SA is from Melaka, a Malaysian state. He attended the state’s Multimedia University, where he studied international business. He moved to a larger city after graduating to begin his career in tech. SA recently came out to San Diego as part of the YSEALI Professional Fellows Program, which is a professional development exchange program for community leaders from Southeast Asia. Listen in to hear all about his experience working in the Malaysian startup ecosystem, his key takeaways from his recent fellowship in San Diego, and his local favorite experiences. Thanks to our partners at Cox Business for their support in enabling us to grow the San Diego ecosystem. Keep up with SA:  SA’s LinkedIn

Elle Hempen and Ellory Monks are the founders behind The Atlas for Cities, an online community where local government officials and staff share their success stories, learn what’s working in other cities, and build relationships with partners. Elle grew up in a town called Deerfield, Illinois, meanwhile Ellory spent her early childhood in Orange County and later moved to northern New Jersey. Ellory knew since she was a child that she wanted to pursue a career in sustainability. And she discovered through internships and job experiences that she most enjoyed working in the public sector.  Elle, on the other hand, knew she wanted to solve big problems in the most efficient manner, leading her to discover inefficiencies in government. In college, she majored in public policy and interned in and around DC.  Both Elle and Ellory had experiences that introduced them to federal government, including stints working with Barack Obama, both when he served as a senator and as president. The now-founders first met throug

Ana and Octavian Florescu In Diagnostics (InD) is a biotech company that is commercializing a single-use chemistry panel. It uses digital technology to try to miniaturize a blood test to a small, single-use disposable that you can put a drop of blood on and discard after use. Listen in to hear all about their journeys as entrepreneurs, their plans for the future of InD, and their local favorite eats and brews. Thanks to our partners Cox Business for their support in enabling us to grow the San Diego ecosystem. Ana & Octavian’s local favorites Tacos - Fish 101 Leucadia Beer - Latitude 33’s Blood Orange IPA Keep up with InD:  Facebook: @InDiagnostics Twitter: @In_Diagnostics indiagnostics.com

Recently, Startup Grind San Diego interviewed Blink UX CEO and Co-founder Karen Clark Cole at Blink UX’s new office. As you’ll hear in the intro, the office has a storied past, especially related to the startup and tech community.  Fresh Brewed Tech’s Rachel Gauvin hosted and moderated Karen through her history of co-founding and her many learnings along the way. Listen in to how she grew the business, including its expansion to San Diego. Stay tuned until the end for a Q&A with the event’s live audience. This fireside chat is unlike anything you’ve heard on the Tacos & Tech Podcast, so tune in and enjoy!

Kendra Dixon is the program manager at Techstars Anywhere, the one (mostly) virtual accelerator within Techstars. Techstars is a global network that helps entrepreneurs succeed through its many accelerators around the world, startup events, and more. Kendra grew up in San Jose, CA during the tech boom. Both her parents worked for IBM, so Kendra had a tech influence in her upbringing. She attended college at San Jose State University, studying business and interning at nearby companies like Cisco and HP.  Early on in her career, Kendra found a remote marketing gig so that she could travel with her husband, who was a professional baseball player. The young couple traveled to many cities big and small, and even lived in Colorado, before deciding to make a home in San Diego about five years ago. She now resides in Carlsbad, where Techstars Anywhere Managing Director Ryan Kuder is also based. The two of them work together to support entrepreneurs in the accelerator's remote program. Applications for the next Techs

Brenton Sullivan is the co-founder & CEO of FieldLevel, a collaborative athletic recruiting tool that helps athletes find the right colleges, and college coaches find the best athletes for their rosters. The company’s mission is to unlock the highest level of athletic achievement for both athletes and coaches. A Berkeley, Calif. native, Brenton spent his teen years at a boarding school in Ojai Valley before beginning his college career at the University of Southern California (USC). Brenton’s teen years were spent playing various sports, including basketball, baseball, football, and soccer, and he went on to join USC’s baseball team as a catcher. It was during his time as a collegiate athlete that the idea for FieldLevel was sparked. Brenton wrote a business plan for what would become FieldLevel, as he was enrolled in the university’s entrepreneurial program.  The aspiring entrepreneur won an award for his business plan, which gave him the opportunity to present his business idea to prospective investors.

Dmitry Shapiro is the co-founder & CEO of GoMeta, which provides users with Koji, a platform that aims to democratize app development. Similarly to how blogs democratized text publishing, and Instagram democratizing photography, the GoMeta team believes that the general public are at a point where they are ready to get familiar with, and create things from, code. The Russia native moved to Atlanta, GA when he was just 10 years old. In 1984, during his teen years, Dmitry watched a movie called WarGames that immediately drew him to computers, and so, he began spending his free time at his high school’s computer lab. Soon enough, Dmitry went from being a rookie to learning how to program. His parents eventually got him a computer so that he could learn skills from the comfort of his own home.  Although his activity during his teen years would suggest a future career in computer science, Dmitry decided to spend his college years studying electrical engineering instead. After graduating with a degree he was bu

Welcome to a special edition of the Tacos & Tech Podcast, where we recorded live during the annual Top Tech Awards on May 16, giving you a backstage pass to the show. Alongside our great ecosystem partners at Cox Business, we set up backstage to briefly interview each of the recipients shortly after receiving their awards.    Winners: Nathan Short - Encinitas Unified School District Keith Fernandez - Sheriff Department Matt Mowry - Point Loma Credit Union Das - CTO Family Health Centers Chris Petersen - Scientist.com Mark Zecca - SD Office of Education Travis Fawcett - AristaMD Mark Sulzen - SmartDraw Ali - Cali Bamboo Geoff Howard - National Funding Brian Nordman - Dudek Frederick - Xiris Pharma Mark Kohlheim - CACI Ken Kraft - Cox Business Jared Ruth - Cox Business

Brad Chisum is the co-founder & CEO of Launch Factory, an entity that creates startup companies, focusing specifically on business execution. This focus, Brad says, makes Launch Factory startups better suited to handle the business challenges in front of them. The El Paso, Texas native attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he studied electrical engineering and math. Although he went into college with aspirations to become a theoretical physicist, Brad always secretly wanted to become an entrepreneur at some point. Challenging himself to live in each of the major US time zones, Brad began searching for a post-college job on both the east and west coasts. He narrowed it down to a job in San Diego and a job in Virginia, but what really sealed the deal was the lunch he had on the east coast. The team at the Virginia-based company told him they’d be taking him out to eat Mexican food and went to Chili’s. At that moment, Brad knew he needed to live in a place where he’d be able to eat authenti

Hayley Brooks is co-founder & CEO of Whooo's Reading, an EdTech company that provides a machine learning algorithm that automatically assesses students’ comprehension for elementary and middle school teachers. This tool is a viable replacement for multiple choice and encourages students to think more critically and creatively about what they’ve read. Hayley spent most of her childhood in San Diego, having moved to the area when she was just six years old. She went away to attend college at Williams College in Massachusetts for a few years before making her way back to the sunny city. Majoring in math, Hayley did not know what she wanted to do after college until she took a class during her senior year, where she learned how to write a business plan. She and her classmate, who is now her co-founder, also conducted market research for their business idea. After graduating from Williams College, Hayley and her co-founder decided to try building the business they had already created a foundation for. The duo

Mike Glanz is the co-founder and CEO of HireAHelper, an online marketplace for shopping of moving services. The company has full-service and labor-only movers in 50 states. A San Diego native, Mike grew up in the Mission Bay area and went to school at Clairemont High. He later moved to Riverside to attend college at California Baptist University, where he studied information systems management. After college, Mike landed a “real” job in the area only to start his company a year later. As soon as he was able to afford it, Mike made his way back down to San Diego, landing in Oceanside. Mike and his co-founder struggled finding investors who believed in their startup, so they raised a family and friends round, totalling $150,000. The duo’s funds allowed them to launch HireAHelper in June 2007. Nearly 12 years later today, the company has a nationwide presence. Listen in to hear all about the challenges Mike had to overcome in the first few years of HireAHelper and his plans for the future of the company. Thanks

Nicole Carr is the CFO of Measurabl, a software platform that enables owners and operators of real estate to measure, manage, and report non-financial ESG data, such as energy, water, and waste consumption data. Nicole grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a known beer city. She went on to attend University of Colorado Boulder, studying accounting and playing volleyball for the Buffaloes. After spending four years in Boulder, Nicole moved to Denver to begin her career working for KPMG, one of the “big four” accounting firms. A few years passed and Nicole felt burnt out in her public accounting role, so she began working for one of her best clients, Realty Income, a San Diego public company. There, she spent about six years with that company, working in financial roles.     During her time at Realty Income, Nicole became more familiar with ESG (Environmental Social Governance) and realized she wanted to make it a bigger part of her career. She stumbled upon Measurabl while flipping through a long list of San Diego

Craig Cecilio is the founder & CEO of DiversyFund, a fintech platform created to build wealth for anybody regardless of their net worth and socioeconomic background. Craig grew up in Connecticut. He had always wanted to venture out to the west coast and finally did so after attending college in Colorado. In his first couple of years living in sunny San Diego, Craig spent time working odd jobs and building relationships in the local community. He also immersed himself in the real estate syndication industry, soaking up as much information as he could. After the recession hit, a colleague of Craig’s came up with the idea to take advantage of the low real estate pricing, so he banded together with some investors and began to purchase real estate. In 2015, he dissolved that company to focus on DiversyFund, which he formed in August 2016. In November 2018, DiversyFund became qualified by the SEC to offer investment to anyone regardless of socioeconomic background. The fully-online platform is open to anyone in

Alessandra Lezama is the CEO of AbacusNext, a San Diego-based TaaS (technology-as-a-service) company. The company provides professionals at large with an ecosystem, where they are able to integrate and have access to all their applications in a private cloud. Alessandra spent most of her upbringing in Spain, but also had the opportunity to experience living in other parts of the world, including Santa Monica and Mexico City. Upon traveling to San Diego to visit family, she fell in love with the palm trees and decided to stay. Alessandra got her first gig in the tech world after meeting some people who had given her the opportunity to work on a project for a telecom company,. After doing well, she continued landing tech-centric opportunities and was later presented with the challenge of reinventing the way AbacusLaw operated. With a team, Alessandra was able to build Abacus Private Cloud, which acts as a “CIO-as-a-service,” as she calls it. Five years ago, Alessandra joined the AbacusNext team as their 29th em

Mike Allman is co-founder & Executive Chairman of Voterfied, an online platform that will revolutionize the way elected officials and government officials interact with their constituents. Mayors or congressional representatives can pose questions and provide information on the platform, allowing voters to take a stance on issues and express their opinions.   Mike grew up in rural western Michigan, in a small town called Spring Lake. His father was a salesman and his mother a secretary. Mike went to Michigan State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering. He then went on to work in Chicago for eight years and later joined a management consultancy that moved him around the world to Johannesburg, London, and Los Angeles.   It was in Mike’s time in Los Angeles that one of Mike’s clients ended up hiring him, which led him to move down to sunny San Diego in 1998 to work at Sempra Energy. He wore many different hats in his time at Sempra Energy and eventually became president of Sempra Gen

Dawn Barry is President & Co-founder of LunaDNA and former executive of the $40 billion DNA sequencing leader Illumina, which also hails from San Diego. LunaDNA incentivizes the sharing of health and DNA data for research by rewarding people for sharing the data they already own while contributing to medical research and discovery that saves lives. What really sets LunaDNA apart is that people who share their data are able to get shares of ownership in the company, something that’s never been done before. What really sets LunaDNA apart is that people who share their data are able to get shares of ownership in the company, something that’s never been done before. In the last year, Dawn co-founded LunaDNA, which is backed by Illumina Ventures, among other investors. Before cofounding LunaDNA, Dawn - who was was named San Diego Business Journal’s 2017 Business Woman of the Year - rose through the ranks at Illumina, from sales specialists to Vice President of Applied Genomics. There, she integrated market dev

Meet Sergey Sundukovskiy Co-founder, CTO, and CPO of Raken - a field management solution for the construction industry. Tune in to hear all about Sergey's journey from Ukraine to UCSD and his career path to entrepreneurship. Have you ever met someone who has never eaten a taco? Listen to Sergey's story! Thanks to Cox Business for their support of the local startup ecosystem.

Meet Dan Hendricks, North County resident since 2002, a retired Navy Captain who specialized in nuclear engineering, and is the Founder of Open Source Maker Labs (OSML). OSML is an innovation lab for makers and developers of new products. Once retired, he began working with his kids and their high school’s robotics clubs where he quickly realized there are a lot of energetic people out there who didn’t have a way to connect or build. And so OSML was born. The favorite phrase and criteria for new projects at OSML is “we’ve never done this before”, which demonstrates the lab’s vision for innovation. Listen in as he describes all the capabilities of OSML to help build new inventions and technologies in North County. Thanks to our partners Cox Business for their support of the local startup ecosystem through their support of this episode.