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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
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S.D. Rated No. 1 By Forbes for Launching Cos.

Move over Silicon Valley, there’s a new champ in town. Forbes magazine ranks San Diego as the best place to launch a new startup out of the 50 largest metro areas nationwide. Forbes staffer Tom Post wrote in a recent blog that San Diego ranks in the top five of nearly every category that was used to determine the rankings. He said San Diego possesses a “heavy concentration in projected high-growth industries, as well as a high likelihood of accepting credit cards and adopting social media.” Post also rated San Diego as the fifth-best business community in the nation, which means we must be doing something right. … Martha Dennis, former venture partner at defunct Windward Ventures, was one of three female venture capitalists to judge the University of California, San Diego’s recent 2014 Entrepreneur Challenge elevator pitch contest. The other two female judges were local VC celebrities Barbara Bry and Allison Long Pettine. The still active Dennis sits on five corporate boards and participates in the local chapter of Tech Coast Angels and the Chairmen’s Roundtable. She’s an adviser to the CommNexus EvoNexus incubator, where she chairs the CommNexus Nextstage program. That San Diego is able to put three female VCs on one panel is an achievement of epic proportions. Fortune magazine recently reported that only 23 of 550 partner-level VCs at 92 venture firms in the U.S. are women. Bry told the Insider, “It was definitely one of the most intelligent judging panels that I’ve ever been on.” … Speaking of new ventures: A new commercial sector is taking off throughout the region, so are you prepared to jump on board and benefit from this emerging opportunity? The MIT Enterprise Forum of San Diego will sponsor a panel April 9 on the “Business of Unmanned Systems and Drones: A New Market Emerging in the Sky.” The scheduled panelists are Charles Bergan, vice president for engineering at Qualcomm Technologies; Linden Blue, vice chairman at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.; and Jill Meyers, senior project manager for 3D Robotics. Katie Rast, co-founder and director of Fab Lab San Diego, is set to moderate the panel, which will be in the law offices of Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear LLP. For details and tickets, visit sdmitforum.org. … And finally this item: La Jolla-based bow tie maker Zach Barnhorst is going to handcraft the world’s largest bow tie — a 7-by-20-foot giant — at the CicloSDias street celebration in downtown San Diego on March 30. Barnhorst hopes to set a new record that will appear in the Guinness Book of World Records. He’ll also give instructions in bow-tying for those of us who haven’t quite perfected that manly art. More details are at zbsavoybowtieco.com. … Till next week.

Contributing Editor Tom York writes the SDBJ Insider. You can reach him via email at tyork@sdbj.com or tom.york@gmail.com.

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