SD Venture Group Opens Bay Area Office as Part of “Cheeky” Campaign

SDVG Beachhead (image used with permission)

five desks in the WeWork co-working space on California Street in downtown San Francisco. Krenn said local startup leaders can use the space as a temporary office and to host meetings with Bay Area venture firms and industry VIPs.

To use the Beachhead, San Diego companies would apply to the venture group. Krenn said startups would be selected according to their readiness and need, and what they’re trying to accomplish.

As part of the stratagem, which is intended to benefit San Diego’s startup ecosystem as a whole, Krenn says the venture group also would allow San Diego entrepreneurs and CEOs to access a proprietary database on more than 80 Bay Area angel and VC investors. Each investor profile includes such details as deal size, stage of development, and investment preferences—and Krenn said the San Diego Venture Group can make high-level introductions in a targeted way.

Under a related initiative billed as “Tacos + Tech #UltimateLifeHack,” Krenn has helped organize a job fair for more than 40 San Diego technology and life sciences companies on February 1 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The event, which includes a keynote talk by Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob, is aimed at recruiting engineers and software developers, especially those who graduated from UC San Diego and were lured away by job offers in Silicon Valley. They understand that in San Diego, you can make a respectable living, work at an industry-defining company, and embrace the coastal Southern California lifestyle, Krenn said.

Participating companies include San Diego-based heavyweights like Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]), Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]), ResMed (NYSE: [[ticker:RMD]]), and Mitchell International; San Diego area divisions of Teradata (NYSE: [[ticker:TDC]]), Amazon (NASDAQ: ticker:AMZN]]), and ThermoFisher Scientific (NYSE: [[ticker:TMO]]); and local startups like MindTouch, SmartDrive, Seismic, Human Longevity, Portfolium, and GoFormz.

“People want out of Silicon Valley,” Krenn said. “It’s a relatively new phenomenon, and we’re in front of it. Let’s cherry-pick their best and brightest. Cost of living is too high, traffic is ludicrous. We want San Diego to be choice number one.”

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.