Tacos And Tech Podcast

Meet Scot Chisholm, CEO & co-founder of Classy - A social enterprise fundraising software focused on helping non-profits grow their revenue. Classy was named while he and his friends were first brainstorming the concept of Classy while watching Anchor Man - Stay Classy San Diego. Classy is now a 200+ employee SaaS startup that has now processed over $1 billion in funds for non-profits through its platform.    Scot grew up in Massachusetts and went to UMass Amherst where he spent only one semester as a computer science major before switching to engineering. He was drawn to San Diego when his college friends had moved out here while he was finishing college. When he graduated he convinced his dad and brother to drive cross-country with him and he landed in Ocean Beach. The day he got here he saw a pizza shop that advertised ‘Boston-style pizza’. He was curious and stopped in. As it so happens, this was the first day the shop was open and he asked if he could be their first employee. And he was hit by the en

On October 24, Tech Coast Angels San Diego, San Diego Venture Group, and Cox Business came together to put on one huge blockbuster event, The 12 Annual John G. Watson Quick Pitch Competition. With a record number of applications - 280+ submissions - the organizers had a big task of weeding down to 10 finalists to present. In this episode of Tacos & Tech, you get a backstage pass to the exhilarating night. We pick up where Part 1 left off, after four pitches, we'll here from Rae Lietzau at DoWhop and continue on to hear who wins! With a cool $75,000 on the line, let's raise the curtain one more time. After listening, message us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook on who you thought had the best pitch.

On October 24, Tech Coast Angels San Diego, San Diego Venture Group, and Cox Business came together to put on one huge blockbuster event, The 12 Annual John G. Watson Quick Pitch Competition. With a record number of applications - 280+ submissions - the organizers had a big task of weeding down to 10 finalists to present. In this episode of Tacos & Tech, you get a backstage pass to the exhilarating night. From the excitement in the green rooms, judges and the entrepreneurs before and after their pitches. You also get to hear a live performance by The School of Rap. A cool $75,000 is on the line and entrepreneurs are pitching in front of over 700 audience members. The energy is electric and the curtain is ready to raise. After listening, message us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook on who you thought had the best pitch.

Meet Samantha Urban, CEO of Urban Translations and an all around inspiring founder in tech. Urban Translations, which translates paper menus into interactive experiences and languages.   Originally from Ventura County, Samantha grew up in the 80’s when tech was still a new thing, and seeing women in tech was rare. At the age of 10 she bought a computer running on Windows 3.1, the tech bug bit her, and she’s been chasing it ever since. After studying Computer Science, she worked in the U.S. Patent Office and MyYearbook.com, where she saw her first exit, and then with Stuzo before starting her own computer, Urban Translations.   So, how did she get into the hospitality industry? Much of her family works in hospitality so she has a unique perspective. But what really drove her to create her latest software, Urban Translations was a trip to Brazil. Listen in to hear the founding story.   Samantha finds that San Diegans are much more genuine and the culture fits how she wants to build her company and she’s been ab

Meet Jason Pang, serial entrepreneur and most recently co-founder of Whiff, which helps people find their perfect scent.   While Jason originally thought he was going to be an Accenture lifer, he quickly got a taste of the startup life as the first employee of DivX in 2000. He joined Jordan Greenhall, Tay Nguyen, Darrius Thompson, Jerome Rota and rode it through an IPO in 2006 and up to a marketcap of $1.1 billion. Interesting tidbits: DivX was started in a General Atomics building in UTC which was also in the same building as MP3.com and even after two IPOs and being acquired multiple times, there’s still original team members at the company 18 years later. Jason eventually moved on to found multiple companies with both wins and some failures. His latest venture Whiff.com with Paul Tran brings together a few different industries, including consumer packaged goods, online market influencer utilization, and taps into the biotech space in attempting to create customized scent sequencing for each person. Jason i

Meet Sarah Lubeck, Director of Marketing and Communications for the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (SD EDC). Sarah grew up in Philly and is still a lifelong Eagles fan but found herself in San Diego seven years ago after chasing the surf and working as a journalist and freelance writer. Learn about what gift Sarah would give San Diego, what percentage of East Coast Ph.D.s can point to San Diego on the map, and how a Japanese delegation compared San Diego to Los Angeles.   Her faves: Tacos: For street tacos: TJ or Tacos El Gordo in Chula Vista. For seafood tacos, Oscars Coffee: Moniker in Liberty Station and Heartwork Coffee in Mission Hills Beer: Any San Diego IPA by Rough Draft or Mike Hess, and the specially crafted Ballast Point Made In San Diego lager, which donates proceeds to resources to help entrepreneurs in local underrepresented areas. Find Sarah on Twitter @s_lubeck and tell her your favorite taco or coffee spot or a great story about a local tech company. You can also help a

Meet James Martin, founder and CEO of Rally Corp., a messaging platform that engages customers by shortening the feedback loop. James, a former Texas police officer, entered the tech world after he drew the short stick to reset computers in his department. His sergeant suggested he get a degree in technology, which eventually led him to business analysis in the public safety industry. James eventually joined Tyler Technologies and helped take it from 30 employees to a public company. James moved to San Diego to start Monk Development in 2007 and built it with Etienne de Bruin for eight years until selling it in 2015. He then took a year off, only to start Rally Corp. shortly after. In the episode, you’ll learn how Brant Cooper and Jeremiah Gardner, authors of The Lean Brand, inspired him to name his new company.   Some of James’ favorite San Diego haunts:   Favorite tacos: The Taco Stand and Taco Surf Favorite brewery: Council Brewery in Kearny Mesa Favorite coffees: James Coffee Favorite Business book How To

Meet April Wensel, founder of Compassionate Coding, which provides training curriculum for technical teams to build supportive, diverse, and inclusive cultures, implement better code review practices, and foster better communication between engineers and other employees.   Wensel’s love of computer games during her youth led her to software engineering in college and her career. After attending Pomona College, she moved to Silicon Valley to work in the software development world for companies such as Sony, edtech startup Zoodles, AI startup Cognoa, and others.   After witnessing a multitude of company cultures, she discovered how companies were ignoring empathy and only speaking to a specific type of engineer. With this in mind, she founded Compassionate Coding to effect positive change in a company’s culture.   At the Tacos and Tech event in Mountain View in 2017, Wensel met a lot of San Diego companies who were very open to speaking about their culture and diversity. She also loved the promise of nearly yea

Meet Maksim Pecherskiy, Chief Data Officer for the City of San Diego!   Maksim has been Chief Data Officer for over 3 years in accordance with the SD Open Data Policy in which he and his team are tasked with pushing city data out to the public to be built on top of. Maksim was born in the Ukraine and has been programming since he was 7 years old. His dad got him into computers and he continued playing in the cybersecurity space and web development arena for both startups and enterprise-size companies. At some point, he had a feeling that he could help the world in a better way and so he joined Code For America. This took him to Puerto Rico, which he loved and got to help build a search engine to help Puerto Rican citizens find the help they needed from specific government agencies. While back in SF afterwards, randomly he found the Chief Data Officer on a job posting and applied! The rest is history. The data team of the City automatically releases and uploads to https://data.sandiego.gov/. They also work wit

Meet Kristin Slink, co-founder & Chief Product Officer of LoanHero which was just acquired by LendingPoint. In this episode we get to go into the trenches with an operator on the consumer finance tech industry.   Kristin came to San Diego on accident. She thought she was visiting San Francisco and ended up touring San Diego and fell in love while going to school on the East Coast. Immediately after college she moved straight to San Diego with no job but landed one very quickly after. In San Diego, she met her future co-founder Derek Barclay when they tried working with a multilevel marketing company but immediately fell in love with the entrepreneurial path. Six years ago made the leap of starting her first company with Derek called FirstLookApproval. “Turning browsers into buyers!” Along the way of learning the fintech space, she and Derek created LoanHero to empower merchants to bring personal financing to the point of sale. While this was Kristin’s first software business, she quickly became the produc

Meet America’s newest citizen, Etienne de Bruin, Founder of 7CTOs, the organization that helps CTOs grow as world class leaders!   Etienne and his wife, both South Africans, moved to San Diego from Germany in 2000. He was weighing Boston vs. San Diego and cnn.com/weather told him to make the move to sunshine. Luckily he choose the San Diego biotech scene which survived the 2000 dot com bombs whereas the Boston opportunity died immediately. Etienne takes us through the difference of doing business and working in tech in South Africa vs the U.S. South Africa does have a strong software developer culture and South African business leaders have a strong presence in building big American companies, like Elon Musk. In 2005, he co-founded Monk Development in San Diego and grew the software company all the way up until 2014 when they successfully sold the business. In 2009, he started to lift his head and say, “what’s everyone else working on?” and put energy into creating a community for software developers which ha

The Tacos and Tech Podcast highlights the builders of companies, technologies, and the ecosystem of San Diego with a local flair for our lifestyle as well.   Meet Ashley Van Zeeland, who came to San Diego in 2008 as a postdoc scientist at Scripps Translational Science Institute and within 10 years never left a 2.5 radius mile of La Jolla/Torrey Pines. From finishing her postdoc, getting her MBA at UCSD Rady School, being the first female-led and genomics company in startup incubator EvoNexus, and acquired by cloud-first genomics unicorn Human Longevity, she has had quite the San Diego journey. She’s now advising multiple startups as she works on her next endeavor. Ashley co-founded Cypher Genomics in 2010 with Eric Topol, Ali Torkamani, and Nik Schork while in the lab at Scripps which developed software to dramatically reduce the time required to interpret raw data produced by genome sequencing. Cypher Genomics was acquired by Human Longevity in 2015 and she became the CTO of the company in 2016. Ashley speak