About · 2026 Edition

The Week, plainly stated.

SoCal Deep Tech Week is an annual, week-long convening that connects deep-tech founders with the investors, industry leaders, and government stakeholders rebuilding America's industrial base. We're three editions in.

Founded 2024 · El Segundo Long Beach · 2026 Independent · partner-supported
§ Thesis

Where breakthrough meets build-out.

Why we keep doing this — and what makes the Week different from the dozens of summits, dinners, and demo days adjacent to it.
001
Operating thesis

Hard tech doesn't move from lab to factory floor on the strength of a deck. It moves through rooms — small, repeated, high-trust rooms where founders, capital, primes, and program offices stop performing and start working.

SDTW is built around those rooms. The cohort is invite-only and small on purpose. The flagship summits are single-track. The dinners are Chatham House. The Week's job is to put the right hundred people in the same building five days in a row, and trust that the partnerships will form.

The bet is that Southern California — the largest dual-use manufacturing cluster in the country, sitting next to the largest port complex on the Pacific — is the right place to host that conversation. The 2026 edition is the third year of that bet.

§ Editions

Three years in.

A short timeline of how the Week has grown — from the first edition in El Segundo to the 2026 edition in Long Beach.
'24
Edition 001 · El Segundo

The First Week

A small founding edition centered on a single founder dinner and two flagship summits. Built to test whether the cohort idea worked at all.

~140 cohort9 partners
'25
Edition 002 · El Segundo

The Working Edition

Four flagship summits, the first program-office roundtable, and the first GP-to-founder forum. The edition where the format settled.

390 cohort74 partners
'26
Edition 003 · Long Beach

Ports & Power

The Week relocates to Long Beach, hosted next to the port complex and the manufacturing corridor. Built around a city-scale concept brief.

500 cohort targetRoster opens Q2
§ The Team

Who builds the Week.

A small core team and a host council of operators, investors, and program leads who shape each edition. Roles are functional — everyone runs ops on-site during the Week.
01 / 05 Jay Velasco
Founder
Jay Velasco

Started the Week in 2024. Sets the editorial line and the host council each edition.

02 / 05 Rahul Singh
President
Rahul Singh

Owns the cohort, the program, and the partner roster. The first call for capital and primes.

03 / 05 Drew Busbee
Director · Ops & Programs
Drew Busbee
"Murph"

Runs the Week itself — venues, run-of-show, summit production, and the post-event memo.

04 / 05 Jesse Nuese
Director · Special Projects
Jesse Nuese

Owns the concept-brief work, the city-scale build-outs, and the off-program rooms each edition.

05 / 05 Daniel Hendrix
Director · Community
Daniel Hendrix

Holds the community line — founders, side-event hosts, and the local operator network across editions.

Host council and 2026 program chairs confirm in early summer. Press & partner inquiries route to partnerships@socaldeeptech.com.

§ How we operate

Four principles.

Not a manifesto — a working contract with the cohort and partners. Each principle is in the operating statement, fully sourced.
§ 01

Small rooms, repeatedly.

The cohort caps at 500 on purpose. Smaller rooms produce more partnerships per square foot than larger ones. We optimize for repeat encounters, not unique ones.

§ 02

Operators in the room.

Every flagship session is moderated or hosted by a working operator — a founder, a fund partner, a program officer. We don't book professional moderators.

§ 03

Chatham House by default.

Default rule for closed-door rooms is Chatham House. On-the-record sessions are clearly marked; embargoed announcements are tracked separately for credentialed press.

§ 04

City-scale over venue-scale.

The Week takes over a city — districts, hotels, hangars, waterfronts — rather than a single conference center. Long Beach is the first city built around the model end-to-end.

§ Get involved

Three ways in.

Apply for the 2026 cohort, request the partner prospectus, or host a side event under the SDTW banner during the Week.
Apply to Attend → Request Sponsor Deck → Host a Side Event → Read Operating Statement →