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 a...
Apr 15, 2019•23 min
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 “bi...
Apr 02, 2019•21 min
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 syndi...
Mar 19, 2019•24 min
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 ...
Mar 05, 2019•16 min
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 w...
Feb 18, 2019•21 min
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 bee...
Feb 04, 2019•27 min
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.
Jan 08, 2019•21 min
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...
Dec 19, 2018•12 min
Meet Doug Winter, founder and CEO of Seismic , an enterprise SaaS tool for sales enablement that’s been around for 8 years. It helps sales and marketing teams work together more effectively and efficiently as it relates to sales cycles. Thanks to our friends at Cox Business for their support of this episode. While Doug grew up in Ohio, he went to Virginia Tech and studied electrical and mechanical engineering. After college, he took a job with Westinghouse in their Navy Nuclear program training ...
Dec 07, 2018•36 min
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 semest...
Nov 27, 2018•34 min
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...
Nov 15, 2018•57 min
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 afte...
Nov 08, 2018•59 min
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 ...
Oct 25, 2018•47 min
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 wa...
Sep 19, 2018•24 min
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...
Sep 07, 2018•31 min
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 mov...
Aug 31, 2018•13 min
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 su...
Aug 21, 2018•18 min
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 compan...
Jun 08, 2018•23 min
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 Di...
May 24, 2018•35 min
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 ...
May 07, 2018•22 min
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 ...
Apr 11, 2018•19 min
