I Made it in San Diego

Back in 2001, the internet was a weird and wonderful place.

It was devoid of the much of the online entertainment and noise of today. It was a place where a couple of Santee kids could do silly but entertaining things like bring the video game Tetris to life by running around San Diego dressed as a Tetris block – that people noticed and enjoyed.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, Voice of San Diego’s podcast about the region’s businesses and the people behind them, VOSD contributor Dallas McLaughlin talks to Rocco Botte, Derrick Acosta and Shawn Chatfield about how they turned their funny internet videos into Mega64, a successful online business with thousands of fans worldwide.

Botte, Acosta and Chatfield never set out to build a business. As theater geeks who grew up in Santee, they started out making free videos for fun. But the right people saw the videos at the right time, and set the trio on an unexpected trajectory that has lasted for more than 15 years. With over 400,000 YouTube subscribers, over 100 million views and over 70,000 subscribers to the Mega64 podcast, the three continue to ride the wave of internet success.

"We're even called the cockroaches of the internet," Chatfield said. "Because we're never like the biggest thing, but we're always around and not really going away, and you can't kill us. We can survive anything."

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Diana Ocampo is a fighter.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, Voice of San Diego’s podcast about the stories behind the region’s businesses and the people who made them what they are, Scott Lewis talks to Ocampo about the battles she's faced and the businesses she's built, then lost, then built again.

When mixed-martial arts first started getting big, matches were illegal in California. Still, Ocampo saw an opportunity, and launched MMA matches at a venue in Tijuana. Her events quickly took off, and she outgrew the space just in time for California to lift the ban on the sport in 2006.

The matches she organized at places like the Del Mar Fairgrounds, Starlight Bowl in Balboa Park and casinos across the San Diego region attracted thousands of fans. She was one of the only female MMA promoters in the nation, and her business became a big financial success.

But then she got cancer — and lost everything.

"Going from having been very comfortable to nothing was very shocking," she told Lewis.

What she didn't lose was her resourcefulness and resolve. She found someone who believed in her entrepreneurial ability, and got an investment that helped her open Total Combat Paintball. Without knowing anything about the game, she quickly built that business into a success, too.

"I'm like OK, let me figure this out," she said. "And I did."

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I had no choice but to try Bitchin' Sauce.

It was years ago, and Ryan Smith was at the farmer's market in Hillcrest. He was so enthusiastic and wildly upbeat about his "bitchin' dips, so I stopped to give them a try.

Yum. The sauces – which are sort of like hummus but made with ground-up almonds instead of garbanzo beans – are good. They're also vegan and fit other restrictive diets. And Smith had a whole charming farmers market schtick that sucked people in.

It didn't take long for Bitchin' Sauce to take off – both because of the flavor and Smith's knack for pitching the product. After making the rounds at local farmers markets, Smith and his sister Starr Edwards enlisted their family for help and started getting stores across the state to sell the product.

Bitchin' Sauce, based in Carlsbad, grew to about $2 million in annual revenue by 2015, Smith said. That's when the trouble hit. A small disagreement among the family morphed into an all-out legal battle that left Edwards with total control of the business. The rest of the family was left scrambling, wondering what to do next.

"Imagine going from a six-figure salary to nothing," Smith said. "Moving out of your house with your wife and baby, moving in with your brother and going, what are we going to do?"

In this week's episode of "I Made it in San Diego," VOSD's podcast about local businesses and the people behind them, I talked to Smith about how he picked himself back up and helped build a successful family business once again.

Edwards is now CEO of Bitchin' Foods. She declined to speak with me.

Rather than wage an all-out battle for the business, Smith and the rest of the family let it go.

A few months after the grueling split, they started building a new business called Good Lovin’ Foods, the cornerstone of which is a trio of healthy vegan sauces the family claims are better than the last.

Smith said the family is now making more than they were when they left Bitchin' Sauce behind. But the new business' growth hasn't come without challenges.

"It definitely was not easy," Smith said. "And it hasn't been without battles – like everything going wrong. ... It has been a battle, but we're growing."

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It's hard to imagine, I know, but there was a time when San Diego wasn't so sure about fish tacos.

When Ralph Rubio opened the inaugural Rubio's on Mission Bay Drive in Pacific Beach, people still expected a taco to have a crunchy shell and contain some sort of beef. It took some time before Rubio's original fish taco, with its soft, yellow corn tortillas and beer-battered fish, caught on.

"There was a lot of resistance. I was surprised when people would say, "What? Fish in a tortilla? What are you thinking?'" Rubio told me on the latest episode of "I Made it in San Diego," VOSD's podcast about the people behind the region's businesses. "That thought never occurred to me. And so I was I was ignorant of that, or that possibility. I didn't realize what a marketing challenge I was in for."

We all know how things turned out, though. San Diego ultimately embraced fish tacos so hard that they're now the thing people seek out when they visit the city.

In fact, Rubio's initial challenge of marketing the fish taco eventually morphed into the opposite problem: The company grew so much, so quickly, that it created a whole new set of problems.

And even though the fish taco is now a San Diego icon, Rubio said he's also had to pull items off the menu on occasion when they proved unsuccessful, including a calamari burrito and a cheeseburger taco.

The company has pivoted to recent years to focus on fresh seafood and healthier fare.

"People were looking for delicious grilled seafood options and it's hard to get delicious grilled seafood in a fast-casual setting anywhere in the United States. That was our market opportunity. And so that's what we went after," Rubio said.

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New Village Arts started as an idea Kristianne Kurner had for a theater company back in the late 1990s. At the time, Kurner was a member of the first graduating class of The Actor’s Studio in New York – an intense program led by James Lipton.

When Kurner graduated, she left New York for Los Angeles and started a family. But the theater scene in L.A. wasn’t doing so well at that time, so Kurner instead decided to make New Village Arts a reality.

In the latest episode of “I Made it in San Diego,” VOSD’s podcast about the region’s businesses and the people behind them, I talk to Kurner about how, with just a couple thousand dollars, she moved her family to Carlsbad and started a scrappy little theater company that eventually grew into one of the region's most respected (Disclosure: I've done some acting for New Village Arts).

The company's first production was inside an old chicken coop.

"It only had 25 seats, so we sold out every show," she said. "It was really a great way to start because it got us a lot of attention." 

With more fans than it could pack into a chicken coop, New Village Arts had to upgrade.

Kurner struck up a friendship with Judi Sheppard Missett, the founder of Jazzercise, who offered the group a space to rehearse, hold classes and produce shows in the back of the Jazzercise warehouse. The shows filled up, classes kept getting added, and New Village Arts quickly outgrew that space, too.

It finally found a new home in the heart of what would become the thriving area known as Carlsbad Village. The company's shows attracted new people to the neighborhood and played a role in its transformation.

"What we always believed was that if we did really good, quality work then the people would help to support it,” Kurner said.

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There aren't any slick commercials or campaigns advertising Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps. And yet, you've probably heard of the product.

The soap is different – some might say a little weird. The most memorable feature isn't the soap itself; it's the labels, which are packed with over 3,000 words about “God’s Spaceship Earth,” Mohammed, Jesus, the Marxist welfare state, arctic timberwolves and more.

The quasi-religious rants on the labels were written by the company's founder, Emanuel "Emil" Bronner, an eccentric man who started by selling his liquid peppermint soap to people who would first listen to his soapbox lectures about uniting humanity. When he realized that more people were showing up to buy the soap than listen to what he had to say, he started printing the main tenets of his philosophy right on the labels.

In our latest episode of “I Made it in San Diego,” VOSD’s podcast about the region’s businesses and the people behind them, Emil's grandson David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner's, talks about how the family's company has grown from a quirky sideshow soap with a cult following to a multimillion-dollar brand that folks can find at places like Target.

David Bronner said the first big boom happened in the '60s, when the rising hippie counterculture embraced the soap, both for its messages of love and unity and for its sustainable, organic ingredients.

"My granddad's message just caught fire and became the soap of a generation," he said.

Tax problems caused some setbacks – Emil saw Dr. Bronner's as a religious, tax-exempt organization, the IRS did not – but the company, which has its factory in Vista, has continued to grow at a rapid pace.

David Bronner attributes the success to putting the company's progressive ethos and messages it champions at the forefront. Issues like fair trade, progressive employment practices and legal marijuana have become central to the business, garnering the company a lot of press.

"It's kind of the way my grandpa did it," David Bronner said. "We fight hard for the causes we believe in. And you know we're kind of like cause marketing 101, but way beyond it. People respect that we're not just doing it for the marketing bang, we're actually in our fights to win them."

David Bronner, for instance, once locked himself in cage filled with hemp plants in front of the White House in an effort to make the case for the legalization of hemp harvesting in the United States. Hemp is an ingredient in the soap.

David Bronner was hesitant about joining the family business, but the activism that's become a big part of his job has made running the company about a lot more than just soap.

"It turns out you can write soap into all kinds of interesting, fun, adventurous things," David Bronner said. "And so I'm never bored."

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I take three separate fitness classes a week to supplement my running workouts, including one at Barry's Bootcamp in Hillcrest, a franchise with locations across the country. San Diego has lots of similar options for the fitness-inclined: CorePower Yoga, OrangeTheory Fitness, CrossFit.

One fitness franchise helped pave the way for all of them, and it started with one woman teaching classes out of rec centers in Oceanside.

Judi Sheppard Missett, who is still Jazzercise's CEO and continues to teach classes, didn't set out to build a fitness empire. When she moved to Oceanside after college, she was trying to make it as a theater actress and singer, and just wanted to teach classes — a modified jazz dance workout she invented — on the side.

"But as luck would have it, or karma, or whatever — the universe had something else in store for me," Sheppard Missett tells me in our latest episode of "I Made it in San Diego," VOSD's podcast about the region’s businesses -and the people who made them what they are.

At one point, Sheppard Missett was teaching so many classes, she developed nodules on her vocal cords, and lost her voice. That seeming setback ended up being a game-changer for Jazzercise: Sheppard Missett decided to enlist other instructors whom she could teach her routines to, and they ended up fanning out around the county, expanding the reach of the classes.

When instructors moved away, they brought the classes with them, which opened the door to franchising the business.

After that boom, though, came challenges, including a lawsuit over how instructors were required to look, and eventually, stigma about Jazzercise as being old-fashioned.

"Sometimes when you're a pioneer, you develop a little stigma because people say to themselves, 'Gosh they were a big hit. We remember when back in the '80s, and they still around, what's going on?' And of course we we are still around," Sheppard Missett said.

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Finding shoes that fit perfectly can be hard.

After a particularly frustrating day of shoe shopping at a mall,  Lucy Beard had a big aha moment while drinking her Starbucks latte. Beard happened to pick up an article about 3D printing technology and she thought, if these machines can create one-of-a-kind objects, couldn't they be used to make customized shoes?

"I could have any kind of coffee I want from two little machines, and yet I couldn't get a pair of shoes that fit," she said. "And that was where that light bulb moment came off."

Beard decided right then and there to get into the shoe business.

In the latest episode of I Made it in San Diego, a podcast illuminating the stories behind the region’s businesses and entrepreneurs, I sat down with Beard to talk about Feetz, the company she launched last year that uses a smartphone app and a warehouse filled with 3D printers to create one-of-a-kind shoes for its customers.

Beard knew nothing about 3D printers when she decided to build a business around them, but she found local resources like Fab Lab, a nonprofit that teaches people how to build things using new technology, and quickly got herself up to speed.

Once she understood the technology, which essentially melts down strings of plastic and turns it into shoes or any other object you program it to, she taught herself the business side of things by signing up for programs and classes for entrepreneurs.

Beard struggled early on to get funding. She said it's harder for women to get male investors to believe in them, but she eventually found her way. The company's gotten investment money from big-time players in the shoe industry and is garnering national attention for its sustainability efforts – the shoes are made with recycled and recyclable material, and 3D printing is a lot more environmentally friendly than traditional shoe manufacturing.

And recently, the shoes, which Beard admits were a bit ugly in the early stages, started getting folks from the fashion industry's attention.

Beard said she's still figuring out the next big innovation for Feetz. She's thinking about how to build a shoe-subscription service sort of like Netlfix.

"That's the future where footwear's going to go," she said. "It's going to be very different than how we think about it today."

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The first time Daniel Sullivan was introduced to solar, he was hooked. He said he knew right away that it would take off, even though it was an expensive and somewhat obscure technology at the time. He was an electrician, so he brought the business opportunity to his employer.

"I went to my boss and I said, look, this is something that I think is going to be a big deal," Sullivan said.

His boss shut him down. And that was just the first time someone told Sullivan that his big solar bet was a loser.

In the latest episode of I Made it in San Diego, a podcast illuminating the stories behind the region’s businesses and entrepreneurs, Voice of San Diego’s Lisa Halverstadt sits down with Sullivan to talk about how and why he went all in on solar despite the naysayers' warnings.

Sullivan got a slow start, but his persistence eventually led to the creation of a solar company that now pulls in $50 million a year and operates in San Diego, Orange County and the Inland Empire. He says his main motivation to build the business was the California energy crisis, the oil and gas industry and his newborn son.

"So it all came together for me that this is what I need to do," he said. "This is what makes sense and we can't continue to be beholden to an industry that wreaks havoc all over the world."

Sullivan's road to success wasn't smooth. He explains how he went from sleeping in a garage and living paycheck-to-paycheck to running a multimillion-dollar business.

"It was really a sink-or-swim situation," he said. "You know when you don't have a backstop, when you don't have a safety net, when you don't have a means to provide for yourself unless you succeed at every stop, you're very mindful of every decision you make. ... There's no room for error."

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James Slatic is a marijuana business pioneer.

One of his past business ventures set the standard for packaging medical marijuana. Another innovated vape cartridges and other products.

The successful businesses he's built and his highly publicized ongoing legal battles with the district attorney’s office have made Slatic one of the most recognizable faces of the green rush that's sweeping the state as entrepreneurs jostle one another to find their place in the newly legal industry.

But before all that, Slatic was a serial entrepreneur who made lots of money, and lost lots of money, time and again.

In the latest episode of I Made it in San Diego, a podcast illuminating the stories behind the region’s businesses and entrepreneurs, Voice of San Diego's Scott Lewis sits down with Slatic to talk about the ups and downs of building his many businesses.

Slatic's helped build restaurant software, started an internet business that helped unsigned bands get record deals, ran an organic spice company and started a company that made and installed official signs for the California Lottery.

He says he can't help but spot business opportunities and go after them with everything he's got.

"In an entrepreneurial business we say, 'In niches there are riches,'" he tells Lewis. "The entrepreneurial bug doesn't really go away."

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