The night The Social Coyote was accidentally created.

It was 2023 and I was bored at home.

Most of us were.

I craved human connection, and listening to Clubhouse rooms wasn't really cutting it.

Around the same time we had just welcomed a little coyote into the family. (Technically a human. The Social Coyote did not exist yet.)

My schedule was suddenly more erratic than ever, which meant if I was going to reconnect with my people, I had to be intentional about it.

The world was also starting to open back up.

So I went looking for the community again.

But first, rewind to 2014.

I had spent the previous decade working inside rapidly scaling tech companies during the on-demand boom after Uber launched. I was basically the "On Demand Guy."

Watching those companies expand from 20 markets to more than 100 was exhilarating. But the pattern was always the same.

The ops teams would build the playbooks. We'd test everything, break things, rebuild them, and eventually form a working operating model.

Then the MBAs and former consultants would arrive.

And our job would shift from creating the playbook to running the playbook.

That's when I realized something about myself.

I like creating things.

I'm less excited about pushing play on a machine that already works.

You could say I'm a creative trapped in an operations body.

Still, the experience taught me a lot.

All three of those companies were based in San Francisco or New York. Culturally, very different from San Diego. There was no shortage of surfboard jokes or comments about whether anyone here actually worked.

Usually delivered right after they complimented our numbers.

It was annoying.

We work hard here.

It's just not our fault we can do it from a patio in the sunshine in February.

Over time I became more interested in the people building companies here at home.

That interest led me to EvoNexus in 2020.

At the time EvoNexus was one of the most important hubs for San Diego startups. A deep tech incubator where founders could pop in, meet each other, compare notes, and solve problems together.

When Evo moved from downtown to UTC, some of the energy didn't make the trip. One of my goals was to help bring some of it back.

Alongside running parts of the program, I started inviting meetup groups to use our space for free. The idea was simple: if founders gathered there, they might eventually decide to build there too.

So I started scouring San Diego for community groups, meetups, and events that might want a home.

Three months later, that mission ended.

We all went home.

March 2020.

Remote work.

The world shut down.

But my curiosity about the ecosystem didn't go away.

If I couldn't plug into the community through EvoNexus, I'd find another way. So I started volunteering my time in exchange for education.

That year I:

It turned out to be one of the most educational years of my career.

I started to see something interesting about San Diego. The ecosystem was vibrant. But it was also intimate. Leaders overlapped boards and organizations. Founders helped each other. And if you asked for a connection, most people were willing to make it.

That openness felt uniquely San Diego.

Eventually the world reopened.

We all crawled out of our dens.

(Still no Social Coyote yet.)

But the event scene was ice cold.

The other thing I noticed was this: every organization had an event calendar. And the only event on it was their own.

If you wanted to figure out what was happening across San Diego, you had to check 10 or 15 different websites. Even then you'd still miss things. More realistically, you'd have to catch the right LinkedIn post at the exact moment it appeared in your feed.

That rarely worked for me.

Especially now that the little coyote meant planning ahead mattered.

My first attempt at solving this problem resulted in an inbox full of about 17 different community newsletters. That wasn't much better. Most had an events section buried somewhere below the fold.

The other option was Eventbrite or Meetup, which felt like wandering through a digital flea market.

So I did what any former operations person would do.

I built a personal spreadsheet of events.

And left it at that.

Then one day a friend texted me.

"Are you going to the thing tonight? It's going to be really cool."

I had no idea what he was talking about.

And by the time I learned about it, I couldn't make it.

That was the moment.

I decided to solve this problem for myself. Using a few of the operational instincts I had picked up during the on-demand years.

But first I had to answer a different question.

What should we call it?

Part one of two  ·  Part two coming soon