Tech Week Season Has Arrived To Promote Innovation, Entrepreneurs 

Welcome back to the Sunstone Way. 

We’re right in the middle of Glendale Tech Week, the first of three tech weeks Sunstone is proud to be a part of this year – four if you count the New York Climate Tech Week. I’ll talk more about those in the coming weeks, but I wanted to shine a spotlight on Glendale this week. 

Glendale is one of the larger cities in Southern California with a population of 200,000 or so. The city has chased technology for quite a while, and this will be the Ninth Annual Glendale Tech Week. 

P3 Strategy 

Sunstone presented a two-hour session yesterday, Sept. 3, talking all about public-private partnerships. We thought it was so important, we tagged the event as a part of the P3 Strategy Series, the rapidly growing recurring event talking about many different aspects of the P3 approach to taking innovation and infrastructure to the next level. 

I was particularly proud of Dr. Yi Chao, the founder and CEO of Seatrec, one of Sunstone’s longtime partners. Dr. Chao has advanced the science of clean energy through ocean temperature differentials, bringing his ground-breaking concept to reality through P3 financing that has included a number of different government contracts and grants. 

Eric Eide, managing director of the Alliance for SoCal Innovation, was part of the panel, talking about the innovation community. Glendale’s own director of Community Development, Bradley Calvert, sat in to talk about the advances already made at the city. 

Bragging Rights 

Eric had a particularly strong case as a P3 advocate. Glendale launched a Glendale Tech Strategy in 2017, and received a $1 million government grant in 2019 to set up two accelerators – one at KidsX from the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and the other at Hero House. 

Even more exciting, Glendale was awarded another $1 million grant last October from the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development – our friends at GO-Biz. State Senator Anthony Portantino helped secure the grant. 

This public investment will go directly to private programs led by FoundersBoost and SmartGateVC LLC. The FoundersBoost Foundation has collaborated with Hacker Fund and the Alliance for SoCal Innovation to support innovation through several stages of development – from idea creation through startup scaling and growth. 

The collaborators, Hacker Fund and the Alliance for Southern California Innovation, will build and run the “Glendale Growth Alliance.”  That alliance will host public hackathons, run more accelerator programs and seek additional pathways to grow and receive funding – promote more public-private partnerships, in other words. 

The second organization chosen to put the $1 million grant to use is SmartGateVC LLC, which will run the Venture Building Program. Researchers from top universities will be brought together with industry experts to develop and build products and companies. The idea is to reduce the gap between the research and business communities. 

Reasons for Tech Weeks 

I love it that Sunstone can play such a strong role in so many Tech Weeks. The very name is a celebration of what we believe in – investment, entrepreneurship, community. Each of these cities is investing in their future through partnerships designed to promote entrepreneurship, all to improve their community. 

In the next month, we will be at the New York Climate Tech Week (Climate Week NYC), the Long Beach Tech Week and the Los Angeles Tech Week. We are there to facilitate partnerships, smooth connections and promote innovation. We are there to make our communities better places to live and do business. 

Because that’s The Sunstone Way. 

And remember, always be a Sunstone!