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

SDVG Beachhead (image used with permission)

The San Diego Venture Group has established a beachhead in San Francisco, and it’s opening for business Tuesday.

After years of trying to persuade Silicon Valley venture capital firms to establish more of a presence in San Diego, or to at least hear more startup pitches here, the venture group has decided to open an outpost in San Francisco. The idea is to provide a home away from home for San Diego startups looking to do deals in the Bay Area.

The group’s satellite office, known officially as “The Beachhead,” is the latest move in what San Diego Venture Group CEO Mike Krenn calls a “cheeky” offensive, which includes a job fair for San Diego companies set for February 1. The job fair, and a related billboard advertising campaign that begins Tuesday, are intended to entice Silicon Valley engineers and programmers to San Diego.

Krenn conceived the broad incursion on the Bay Area’s tech turf, asking in a mountain-and-Mohammed kind of way, “Why should it be that Silicon Valley always recruits from San Diego—and not the other way around?”

The billboard campaign, which uses a big digital billboard along U.S. 101 in Palo Alto, CA, is intended to promote the job fair and tweak the dark side of Silicon Valley by asking such questions as, “Hey Engineers: Enjoying Traffic? SanDiegoIsBetter.com,” and “Hey Engineers: Did You Check the Surf Report This Morning? (Of Course You Didn’t). SanDiegoIsBetter.com”

“The billboard was just a fun idea,” Krenn explained. “It’s a little bit brazen. But we decided we should do it.”

Mock Billboard Prepared by San Diego Venture Group (Image used with permission)
Mock Billboard Prepared by San Diego Venture Group (Image used with permission)

Krenn has drawn financial support for the Beachhead office from a local nonprofit group, the Legler-Benbough Foundation, the City of San Diego, and a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign that has raised over $72,000 of a planned $100,000 target.

“It’s kind of cool to see the community coming together,” Krenn said. “We’re trying to get to $200,000, which would cover our cost [for the Beachhead] for 20 months.”

The venture group has leased space for

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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.