Steve Beck is a managing partner at Serra Ventures, an early-stage venture fund focused on IT and agtech. The Illinois-founded fund has about 85 portfolio companies. Steve grew up in the Bay Area, where he lived an adventurous childhood. After high school, he moved out to San Luis Obispo to pursue his bachelor’s degree at Cal Poly SLO. During his 13-year stint there, Steve became serious about entrepreneurship. At 23 years old, he was managing a surf shop and convinced his employer to help...

Amy Chang is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and healthcare analyst.  Amy grew up in West Covina and attended college at UC Berkeley. After residing in the Bay Area for nearly a decade, she made her way out to sunny San Diego, a place in which Amy and her husband saw themselves having careers. When Amy first moved to San Diego, she worked at AMN Healthcare and spent the next 14 years building a career there, eventually becoming the company’s VP of strategy and investor relations. Amy...

Mike Krenn is the President & CEO of Connect w/ SDVG, which elevates innovators and entrepreneurs throughout their growth journey by providing educational programming, mentorship, networking events, and access to capital. Mike grew up in Mountain View, at the heart of Silicon Valley. After high school, he moved out to San Diego despite his parents’ wishes for him to attend Humboldt State. Soon after making his way to sunny SD, Mike enrolled in classes at San Diego State (Go...

Pulkit Agrawal is the CEO and Co-Founder of The 5th Ingredient, a software startup that has developed a platform that breweries can use to track their data from grain to glass. During his senior year at Harvard University, Pulkit was recruited to join Ballast Point as a process engineer. He started his role after graduating in 2015 and was able to take on several projects that gave him a solid foundational knowledge of beer, a beverage he enjoyed drinking but knew little about...

Maritza Diaz is the CEO of ITJuana, a startup that enables companies to create software centers of excellence in Tijuana. Originally from Ecuador, Maritza was working her first job out of college when her company offered to move her to the US for one year. The young software engineer took the opportunity and moved to Chicago, never turning back. During her time working at Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Chicago office, Maritza was offered the opportunity to relocate to its San Diego office, and...

Al Bsharah is VP of Product Operations at Seismic, a sales enablement platform. The show is also joined by Amy Chang, CEO of Delta Nutrassentials. Neal, Al, and Amy are all members of Tech Coast Angels, which will give you an investor perspective of the San Diego tech scene in this episode. Al moved out to San Diego in 1998 after working as an engineer in the Detroit auto industry. He always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur and spent his time in San Diego trying to build businesses and...

Cody Barbo is Co-Founder & CEO of Trust & Will, an online service making it easy, fast and secure to set up your estate plan. Originally from Huntington Beach, Cody moved down to sunny San Diego to study at San Diego State University. The diehard Aztec broke out of his shell by pursuing leadership roles on campus, the most significant one being student body president. During college, Cody had the entrepreneurial bug, hustling to get an app idea off the ground. After college, he...

Alexa-Rae Navarro is the new Executive Director of Startup San Diego, a non-profit that supports entrepreneurs and startups in the local ecosystem. Alexa-Rae was born and raised in Riverside and went to college at UC San Diego, where she studied urban planning. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles to work at the mayor’s office but knew she wanted to learn more and went on to earn a master’s degree in urban planning at UCLA. Her studies coincided with a graduate internship at the LA...

Rob Rast is Co-Founder & CEO of both FLX Bike and Miles Board, which make electric bikes and skateboards that make commutes kinder to the air that we breathe. Originally from Sacramento, Rob spent his childhood there but says he did most of his growing up in China. In 2009, at the age of 19, Rob dropped out of college and purchased a one-way ticket to China and lived there until just a couple years ago. While in China, Rob learned the language and decided to start his first business...

Kim Walpole is the Co-Founder & CEO of Trials.ai, a startup that’s developing frontier technology that helps research teams develop their clinical trial protocols. Originally from Bronx, New York, Kim did a lot of traveling with her family growing up. She worked for the American Management Association and later began consulting a couple of pharma companies. After meeting her now-husband, she moved out to San Diego in 2010, where she currently resides. A few years after moving out to...