Welcome to a special edition of the Tacos & Tech Podcast, where we recorded live during the annual Top Tech Awards on May 16, giving you a backstage pass to the show. Alongside our great ecosystem partners at Cox Business, we set up backstage to briefly interview each of the recipients shortly after receiving their awards. Listen in for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Top Tech Awards 2019!

Brad Chisum is the co-founder & CEO of Launch Factory, an entity that creates startup companies, focusing specifically on business execution. This focus, Chisum says, makes Launch Factory startups better suited to handle the business challenges in front of them. The El Paso, Texas native attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he studied electrical engineering and math. Although he went into college with aspirations to become a theoretical physicist, Brad always secretly...

Hayley Brooks is co-founder & CEO of Whooo's Reading, an EdTech company that provides a machine learning algorithm that automatically assesses students’ responses for elementary and middle school teachers. This tool is a viable replacement for multiple choice and encourages students to think more critically and creatively about what they’ve read. Hayley spent most of her childhood in San Diego, having moved to the area when she was just six years old. She went away to attend college...

Mike Glanz is the co-founder and CEO of HireAHelper, an online marketplace for shopping of moving services. The company has full-service and labor-only movers in 50 states. A San Diego native, Mike grew up in the Mission Bay area and went to school at Clairemont High. He later moved to Riverside to attend college at California Baptist University, where he studied information systems management. After college, Mike landed a “real” job in the area only to start his company a year later. As...

Nicole Carr is the CFO of Measurabl, a software platform that enables owners and operators of real estate to measure, manage, and report non-financial ESG data, such as energy, water, and waste consumption data. Nicole grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a known beer city. She went on to attend University of Colorado Boulder, studying accounting and playing volleyball for the Buffaloes. After spending four years in Boulder, Nicole moved to Denver to begin her career working for KPMG, one of the...

Craig Cecilio is the founder & CEO of DiversyFund, a fintech platform created to build wealth for anybody regardless of their net worth and socioeconomic background. Craig grew up in Connecticut in a middle-class family. He had always wanted to venture out to the west coast and finally did so after attending college in Colorado. In his first couple of years living in sunny San Diego, Craig spent time working odd jobs and building relationships in the local community. He also immersed...

Alessandra Lezama is the CEO of AbacusNext, a San Diego-based TaaS (technology-as-a-service) company. The company provides professionals at large with an ecosystem, where they are able to integrate and have access to all their applications in a private cloud. Alessandra spent most of her upbringing in Spain, but also had the opportunity to experience living in other parts of the world, including Santa Monica and Mexico City. Upon traveling to San Diego to visit family, she fell in love with...

Mike Allman is co-founder & Executive Chairman of Voterfied, an online platform that will revolutionize the way elected officials and government officials interact with their constituents. Mayors or congressional representatives can pose questions and provide information on the platform, allowing voters to take a stance on issues and express their opinions. Mike grew up in rural western Michigan, in a small town called Spring Lake. His father was a salesman and his mother a secretary....

Dawn Barry is President & Co-Founder of LunaDNA, created by co-founders of the $40 billion DNA sequencing leader Illumina, which also hails from San Diego. LunaDNA incentivizes the sharing of health and DNA data for research by rewarding people for sharing the data they already own while contributing to medical research and discovery that saves lives. What really sets LunaDNA apart is that people who share their data are able to get shares of ownership in the company, something that’s...

Sergey Sundukovskiy Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Raken, a field management solution for the construction industry. Tune in to hear all about Sergey's journey from Ukraine to UC San Diego, and his career path to entrepreneurship. Have you ever met someone who has never eaten a taco? Listen to Sergey's story! Thanks to Cox Business for their support of the local startup ecosystem.