“What are you working on, Neal?”
By: Neal Bloom
Tags: Investing, Community, Startup, Entrepreneurship

I get this question multiple times a day.

While some of my so-called “titles” have shifted, I’m doing the same thing as always — amplifying communities. How? By telling the stories of, connecting, and investing in my communities through a few different platforms.

Here’s a little bit of my history:

As a mechanical engineering graduate at UC San Diego, my first job was building rocket engines for the Space Shuttle and the upcoming Artemis program. I left that job in 2013 to co-found edtech startup Portfolium, which was originally designed to help graduates share their applicable skills with potential employers and ease the transition from college to full-time work.

I moved back to San Diego from LA as we were accepted into the Evonexus incubator that same year.

I pretty much immediately got involved in Startup San Diego’s grassroots efforts to boost our local startup community and have been a volunteer ever since.

While I exited Portfolium prematurely, we eventually sold the company in 2019, bringing a nice financial win to everyone involved.

When I joined Hired.com in 2015, I wanted to bring experienced tech talent to San Diego through our talent marketplace. We succeeded in opening the faucet and getting San Diego on the minds of tech talent elsewhere. San Diego was a top 5 choice of San Francisco candidates to relocate, even back in 2016.

I left Hired.com in early 2018 to focus on further promoting San Diego as a top tech community. My goal was to educate everyone about what’s going on in our local startup and big tech communities, and then turn you all into fellow cheerleaders.

Enter creating Fresh Brewed Tech and the Tacos and Tech Podcast.

I quickly realized I was building a content marketing engine. At the same time, a friend, Jared Criscuolo, had a content marketing and public outreach agency called Rising Tide Partners (RTP), and I bought into it as a co-owner.

While Jared was writing content for wastewater agencies and city governments, Fresh Brewed Tech was producing content for tech communities. We had a lot in common, so we started to scale as a team. City economic development leaders started recognizing what we were doing for wastewater agencies and the local tech community, so we expanded RTP’s client base deeper into city governments. We have also expanded our tech-focused media and community building to Orange County and Santa Barbara (coming soon), and have plans to add many more regions across California and beyond.

Fast forward three years and I have since bought Jared out of Rising Tide Partners and we’ve interviewed and connected over 700+ businesses and owners through our award-winning client work and our award-winning media sites. I’ve assembled a talented team to help RTP bring more public awareness to communities through outreach/education strategies, materials and message development, brand articles, newsletters, social media campaigns, videos, media relations, and events management.

I’m excited to continue to grow this media and outreach agency. We plan to continue that growth with new tech community media sites in other regions, an upcoming curated networking event series, and by working with more cities and public utility agencies to connect with their communities through our content and outreach strategies.

With new federal stimulus money funding on the way, now is even more important for cities and agencies to spend it on outreach programs that have an immediate impact to get our economies back on track. One of our clients, the City of Vista, is a perfect example of how city economic development departments are being creative with their dollars and community outreach with RTP’s help.

To help further boost our local tech and business communities, another area I’ve focused on is the gap in local early stage capital. While I’ve joined Tech Coast Angels to fund companies at the seed stages, many times the pre-seed capital is hard to find from investors with domain expertise in those fields. With this in mind, I’ve partnered with fellow entrepreneur Al Bsharah to push our angel investing to the next level through Interlock Capital by working with angel investors with domain expertise early in the process. (More on this new investing venture in my next blog post).

While I’m still involved with Startup San Diego as volunteer Chair Emeritus, a new group of leaders are taking the organization and the community to new heights to help entrepreneurs navigate their way through the ecosystem. The hiring of Alexa-Rae Navarro as Executive Director has also helped us scale and grow the early stage startup community, allowing me to work on new gaps in our ecosystem.

So that’s what I am up to! You’ve been a huge part in making this happen. Thank you!

Stay with me on this journey, we’re just beginning.