Tacos and Tech Podcast

Episode Summary Neal sits down with Dr. Adam Link, founder of Fireweed Capital and a recovering engineer who spent a decade in tech — including six years at Coinbase through its IPO — before becoming a financial planner for founders and tech professionals. Adam makes the case that diversification is overrated, that concentration is how wealth actually gets built, and that the real skill is knowing...

Episode Summary Recorded live at the San Diego Angel Conference (SDAC 8) finale at SDSU, where Neal - the SDAC Fund 8 manager - and 40+ investors spent months turning 135 applications into six finalists, then handed out the checks on stage. You’ll hear all six pitches: * Cytodyme’s compliance automation for biotech, * Vium’s sinus device that makes antibiotics 36x more effective, * Polyvascular’s...

Episode Summary Recorded at Natilus HQ in downtown San Diego, Neal sits down with Aleksey Matyushev, CEO and co-founder of Natilus, and Dr. Fabiano Piccinno, Global Head of Sustainability for Air Logistics at Kuehne+Nagel, for a roundtable on the real economics of decarbonizing flight. They get into why ordering a new plane today means a 12-year wait, why sustainable aviation fuel still costs near...

Neal sits down with co-founders John Sjolund (CEO) and Jon Brilliant(CFO) of Luna Diabetes, two serial diabetes tech founders building what they call “sleep only automation” - the world’s smallest patch pump designed to automate insulin delivery while you sleep. With over 1700 nights of real-world wear and a pivotal study on the horizon, Jon and John make the case that nighttime is where the bigge...

Tony Martens, co-founder of Plantible Foods, joins Neal to walk through the company’s eight-year arc - from a free greenhouse in San Marcos to a commercial-scale rubisco protein facility in West Texas. They get into the science of duckweed and why rubisco is both the most abundant and most bioavailable protein on the planet, the modular “crawl, walk, run” scaling philosophy that kept Plantible fro...

Angel Academy Session 5 brings in Brian Dirkmaat, a startup attorney at Rimon, P.C and longtime SDAC sponsor, to walk the room through the legal mechanics of angel investing. Brian covers the full evolution of startup investment instruments - from the original bridge notes of the 1990s to today's post-money SAFEs - and breaks down the real differences between convertible notes, SAFEs, and priced e...

Episode Summary Neal sits down with Will Alaynick, managing partner at Phase Two Ventures, for a fireside chat on what it actually looks like to go from building a company to running a venture fund. Will walks through his journey from operating a life science instrumentation startup - backed by a strategic investor who gave him governance, talent, and manufacturing access - to raising a fund focus...

Angel Academy Session 3 brings together a panel of San Diego operators who crossed over to the investor side - including Katherine Chapin, Dane Chapin, Ken Potashner, and Bardia Moayedi with backgrounds spanning investment banking, corporate law, and consumer products. The conversation gets honest fast: what it means to bet on a founder who introduces herself as "just a mom," why losing money on a...

Listen & subscribe on Apple , Spotify , YouTube . Welcome everyone to the weekly San Diego Tech News! I’m Neal Bloom from Rising Tide Partners . This week, I’m flying solo on the mic to unpack a busy week in San Diego tech. Before we dive in, we wanted to thank you and ask our listeners to help us grow the show, leave a review and share with one other person who should be more plugged in with the...

Angel Academy Session 2 puts two founder-turned-investors on stage: Neal Bloom and Ashok Kamal. Both built companies, stumbled through first exits, and eventually landed on the investor side of the table. The conversation covers what actually changes when you go from pitching to writing checks — how to evaluate founders when there's nothing but a prototype, why saying no fast is a form of respect,...

Neal sits down with Paige Craig, Founder and Managing Partner at Outlander VC, the first-check fund that backs founders as early as humanly possible. Paige shares how growing up homeless, bootstrapping a defense tech company during the Iraq War, and years of studying what makes founders tick led him to build a 38-point framework for picking people - not plans. They cover physical AI, manufacturing...

The 2026 San Diego Angel Conference (SDAC) kicks off with Angel Academy Session 1, hosted at SDSU's ZIP Launchpad. Neal Bloom walks a room of aspiring and returning angel investors through the fundamentals — what angel investing actually looks like, how the SDAC's group diligence process works, and why a portfolio approach matters more than picking one winner. With 135 startup applications on the...

In this weeks episode, I sit down with Grayson LaFrenz and Chad Lohrli, two of the co-founders of Cadre AI, the San Diego-based AI strategy and integration firm helping mid-market companies turn AI hype into P&L impact. They get into why 99 out of 100 business leaders still can’t point to measurable ROI from AI, how Cadre’s pod model mirrors the playbook Grayson used to build Power Digital into a...

Episode Summary Neal Bloom takes the stage at the 2026 San Diego Angel Conference Knowledge & Networking Event at SDSU to walk a room full of aspiring and active angel investors through the four questions he uses to evaluate early-stage companies. Using live audience exercises - pitching Uber, Airbnb, and Palantir in one sentence, debating whether Viori was a pass or a miss - he turns startup eval...

Listen & subscribe on Apple , Spotify , YouTube . Welcome everyone to the weekly San Diego Tech News! I’m Neal Bloom from Rising Tide Partners . My co-host in this episode is Fred Grier , journalist and author of The Business of San Diego substack. He covers the ins-and-outs of the startup world including breaking news, IPOs, fundraising rounds, and M&A through his newsletter. Before we dive in, w...

Blueprint Equity just closed a $333M Fund III - and they’re doubling down on a thesis that feels increasingly contrarian in today’s AI-fueled world. In this episode, Neal sits down with Sheldon Lewis and Bobby Ocampo, co-founders and managing partners of La Jolla-based Blueprint Equity, to unpack their “early growth equity” strategy - investing in bootstrapped SaaS companies doing $1–7M in ARR and...

Matt Holman, founder of Commerce Catalyst and Subscription Prescription, joins Neal to unpack what’s really happening inside modern e-commerce and subscription-driven CPG brands. From Utah’s fast-growing “Silicon Slopes” ecosystem to AI-powered personalization, Matt shares how founders are building durable revenue in a post-hype e-commerce world. They explore the tension between acquisition and re...

Susie Harborth joins the pod to share her journey from refugee immigrant and first-generation college student to biotech operator, ecosystem builder, and now founder-investor behind Inspirafund and Sencie . After building early-stage life science companies, launching BioLabs in San Diego, and working across venture and banking, Susie is now placing focused bets in overlooked but meaningful spaces...

Listen & subscribe on Apple , Spotify , YouTube . Welcome everyone to the weekly San Diego Tech News! I’m Neal Bloom from Rising Tide Partners . My co-host in this episode is Fred Grier , journalist and author of The Business of San Diego substack. He covers the ins-and-outs of the startup world including breaking news, IPOs, fundraising rounds, and M&A through his newsletter. Before we dive in, w...

Episode Summary In this episode of the AI Builders Roundtable, the builders cross a line. Instead of just discussing AI-native companies, they use one - Polsia AI - to start new businesses live on the show. Neal, Craig, and Greg spin up real ventures, fund them, and watch agents begin executing tasks in real time. MVPs get scoped. Outreach campaigns get drafted. Websites get built. Autonomous exec...

In this episode of Tacos & Tech , Neal Bloom sits down with Peter Goldsborough , co-founder and CTO of Rune , to unpack one of the most overlooked but decisive factors in modern warfare: logistics . Peter shares how his background in software and defense tech led him to a simple realization-while billions have been spent on weapons and command systems, military logistics still runs on spreadsheets...

Episode Summary In Episode 3 of the AI Builders Roundtable, the conversation jumps right into deployment. Craig, Greg, and Derrick break down what it actually looks like to run AI agents inside real companies - from shipping production code with Cursor to publishing crowdsourced sports data on-chain, to experimenting with autonomous bots that learn in public. This isn’t a hype conversation. It’s b...

In this episode, Neal sits down with Samantha Pantazopoulos, co-founder of Vizer, to unpack the company’s pivot from a consumer fitness rewards app to a B2B retail demand engine used by brands like Olipop and Health-Ade. What started as a mission-driven app tying workouts to food bank donations evolved - through COVID, retailer shutdowns, and customer pull - into a platform helping brands drive me...

Listen & subscribe on Apple , Spotify , YouTube . Welcome everyone to the weekly San Diego Tech News! I’m Neal Bloom from Rising Tide Partners . My co-host in this episode is Fred Grier , journalist and author of The Business of San Diego substack. He covers the ins-and-outs of the startup world including breaking news, IPOs, fundraising rounds, and M&A through his newsletter. Before we dive in, w...

A short audio reflection on what changes when context stops resetting. And what happens when it starts compounding instead. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit risingtidepartners.substack.com/subscribe