San Diego’s Young & Restless: A Cross-Section of Tech Entrepreneurs

After working over the past two years to help tech startups get started in San Diego, Brant Cooper tells me he’s sensing “a global renaissance in entrepreneurship.” It sure seems that way, if the attendance at a recent San Diego Tech Founders “demo night” is any guide.

San Diego Tech Founders is a virtual grassroots organization that Cooper created a couple of years ago for local tech entrepreneurs on Meetup Group, the social networking platform that makes it easy for people with common interests or issues to get together. It’s only loosely organized, and not well-funded. If there was no Meetup Group, Tech Founders probably wouldn’t exist. Nevertheless, it has become a magnet for a restless demographic in San Diego, young and tech-savvy adults who live online and who want to figure out a way to also earn a living on the Web. More than 900 people are registered members.

Cooper’s optimism about a renaissance in entrepreneurship reflects his perspective as a lean startup evangelist and business development consultant. He’s given presentations and met with clients throughout the United States, and in places like Vancouver, London, Barcelona, Santiago, and Kuala Lumpur.

He says he began to step up his activity on behalf of San Diego’s tech startups roughly two years ago, after publishing The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development with co-author Patrick Vlaskovits. Cooper acknowledges that his business as an author, speaker, and consultant benefit from his work on behalf of San Diego Tech Founders. But, he tells me, “I’m not really doing this to build up my business. I’m doing it because I’m passionate about building up the startup ecosystem here.”

Before moving to San Diego, Cooper spent 16 years in Silicon Valley with software and telecommunications startups. He says he developed enough contacts to bring some Bay Area entrepreneurs to San Diego to speak at Tech Founder meetups, including customer development guru Steve Blank (who inspired and

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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.