I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sam Dettmann, a friend of mine since college. Sam is currently running for a Village Trustee position in his town of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. While many of my previous blog posts had a tangential relationship to the greater San Diego area, this one takes a peek behind the curtain of a close-knit southeastern Wisconsin community, and the high-level resilience insights we can glean from someone involved in the local political sphere there. It’s a slightly different angle than normal, but one that I found interesting – and still highly relevant. We covered ..read more

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Khai Minh Pham, a visionary at the intersection of life science and artificial intelligence. While AI has only recently entered the public conscious, Khai has been a trailblazer in the AI space, starting with growing and exiting a groundbreaking AI company, DataMind/RightPoint, in 2000s. His latest company, ThinkingNode Life Science, is both truly innovative and terribly interesting – he’s working on revolutionizing the way we approach healthcare and drug development by running both through the lens of AI-generated digital cell clones. We we ..read more

I recently had the chance to sit down with Jonah Peake to talk about the go-to source he created for all of San Diego’s tech and entrepreneurship events, (and perhaps what could be called his alter ego), The Social Coyote.  More than just a mere event newsletter, The Social Coyote is one man’s mission to get 1000 San Diegans out of their dens and into the tech and entrepreneurship community. Sprinkled throughout the weekly calendar are a healthy doses of coyotes wearing sunglasses and a fur-rocious amount of puns. It’s great fun, sure, but The Social Coyote is also a case study on buildin ..read more

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Patrick Firlik, the founder of Well Traveled, a healthier and more effective alternative to other immunity boosters like Airborne and Emergen-C. Resilience is all over this company – Patrick is a first time entrepreneur, learning the supplement space, bringing a new product to market, and using that product to build resilience in his customer base! A resilient mind is critical to entrepreneurship, and I enjoyed talking to Patrick about his journey. In this interview, you’ll learn about the mindset you’ll need to just pull the trigger and start a company ..read more

This latest interview is a special one with a special guest – my father, Steve Hammock! An accomplished business professional, he was president of Watkins Wellness, the leader in the worldwide hot tub and swim spa industry, for over 25 years. While growing that company into the hundreds of millions in revenue, he was also highly accomplished on the personal side as well – raising 5 kids and maintaining his marriage of nearly 35 years. As a newly minted parent of a six-month old, I find myself constantly thinking about the lessons I learned in my own childhood from my own father. And as someone ..read more

Consistently ranked as one of the top biotech cities in the United States, San Diego is home to giants like Illumina, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Genentech, Bristol Meyers Squibb, and seemingly countless more – many of which are fed from a rich pipeline of science graduates from UCSD, SDSU, and USD.   However, not everyone interested in biotech wants to go to the giants. Some think that they’re the ones who can create the next big thing.   And that’s where Aquillius comes in.   A biotech and MedTech incubator, Aquillius is a biotech startup founder’s dream – they pr ..read more

I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Yi Chao, Founder and CEO of Seatrec, a startup that designs and manufactures products that generate electricity from the temperature fluctuations in the ocean. When I first heard about this technology, it almost sounded like magic! A way to generate energy just from the naturally occurring ocean changing temperature? Wow! It turns out that it’s actually not that new of an idea – the research has been around since the 1970s, but generating enough energy from these fluctuations to, say, power the energy grid, is remarkably expensive. This ..read more

When you think of city management and design, do trees come to mind? The good folks at Tree San Diego think so, and think that you should too! Tree San Diego is an urban forestry nonprofit who works to increase the quality and density of San Diego’s urban forest — and they have some thoughts about the importance of urban trees and how they contribute to a resilient community. Trees, and by extension, the “urban canopy” (the layer of leaves, branches, and stems of trees that cover the ground in an urban environment when viewed from above), have an important role in city design. They make cities ..read more

How can you get rid of a wine bottle? Lowell Jooste, of LJ Crafted Wines, is searching for that answer. Using his patented technology to serve his wines in refillable growlers, Lowell Jooste has saved over 154,000 single-use glass wine bottles from the landfill — and is changing the way San Diegans drink wine. In the interview below, we explore topics such as the importance of team culture, building sustainability and environmental resilience into the wine industry, and the challenges of opening and operating a business. I’m chiefly interested in the concept of resilience — personal, comm ..read more

Recently, I got the opportunity to speak with the San Diego County Farm Bureau — a non-profit organization tasked with fostering San Diego agriculture through education, public relations, and public policy advocacy. As someone who’s primarily lived in the urban parts of San Diego, I was shocked to learn that San Diego is ranked #1 in the United States in part time farmers, nursery crops, and avocados — and is home to more small farmers (less than 10 acres) than any other county! In this interview, you’ll learn how farmers, large and small, contribute to San Diego’s local economy, com ..read more