More Than Just Surf City

Another much deserved re-post from friend and CEO of NextSpace Jeremy Neuner. If you’ve even heard of Santa Cruz, you should read this… in full.

-Sean

More Than Just Surf City
4th August, 2009
written by jeremy neuner

By now, almost everyone in the entire known universe has seen the Huffington Post’s mashup of “Sarah Palin vs. That Crazy Santa Cruz Lady.” Whatever you may think of the former Veep candidate, the young Santa Cruzan in the video—ranting to the city council about pesticides and slavery in an attempt to, um, participate in our local democracy—doesn’t do much to dispel a popular stereotype of Santa Cruz: that ours is a quirky, un-serious town.

I won’t try to deny that Santa Cruz is a quirky place. In fact, I wouldn’t want it any other way. What the rest of the world may see as quirky, most of us Santa Cruzans see as tolerant, welcoming, creative, and innovative. Still, I’m troubled by the possibility that the viral spread of the Huffington Post video is giving our fair seaside town a bad rap. So in the interest of providing a more complete version of the character of Santa Cruz, please take a spin through the following few items:

–In this short video, Greg Gumble (yep, THE Greg Gumble) from “The Economic Report” shows why Santa Cruz is a unique ecosystem that boasts a balanced lifestyle, a history of innovation, a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and a highly educated workforce. These are the exact ingredients for a strong, vibrant economy and we’ve got more than our fair share of those ingredients in Santa Cruz.

–Santa Cruz is loaded with creative designers, scrappy entrepreneurs, and savvy business people. This video, produced and directed by NextSpace member Dusty Nelson, features a who’s who of local educators, engineers, bankers, designers, government officials, and CEOs, all offering their pitch on why Santa Cruz is a great place to work, live, and play. Take 10 minutes and watch the whole thing. It’s an awfully damn impressive piece of filmmaking and showcases some of the world-class talent in this town.

–Speaking of world-class talent, check out this Business Week article about Santa Cruz-based Plantronics and Altec Lansing. Together, these companies racked up six innovation awards at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Tens of millions of people all over the world use their award-winning products and every one of those products was designed right here in Santa Cruz.

–What about the money? You need a pile of it to build great companies, not an easy task in these cash-strapped times. But local social networking start-up UserVoice recently landed $800,000 in seed stage capital. AlgaeOMEGA, a bio-fuels company spun out of research at NASA and UC Santa Cruz, received another $800,000. NextSpace member Carmen Kubas led her company, Lightfoot Industries, to a third place finish in a regional venture capital competition. And local heroes 12seconds.tv are luring investors with their new iPhone app and their huge community of users. Want to invest in some of the hottest new companies across a range of industries? Look no further than “quirky” Santa Cruz.

Like any city, Santa Cruz has lots of faces. We’re a surfing town, a tourist town, and a university town. Despite our depiction in the Huffington Post, Santa Cruz is a town that’s building an enviable ecosystem of business, lifestyle, and innovation. What’s our secret? We take ourselves seriously, just not too seriously.

Happy Santa Cruz Video #1

Will be finding a creative way to post this and other videos being submitted to www.happysantacruz.com, but until then you’ve got to check this out! All credit goes to Robert Victori, Artem Yermano and Mike Xu (my amazing interns this quarter from UCSC) who put this together last week.

A Slow Process of Revitalizing Santa Cruz

Strongly recommend you take the time to read Tom Honig’s recent opinion piece in the Good Times Santa Cruz entitled A Slow Process of Revitalizing Santa Cruz and check out the document he’s referencing that started out on the back of a napkin… where most great ideas start out IMHO :)

As I said in my introduction to the Envision Santa Cruz event in March, though parts of the existing systems that have been around for generations are failing all around us, I see more opportunity than ever these days. Times of crisis present incredible opportunities for those bold enough to take action and present new paradigms.

Santa Cruz is full of such people in fact and I am so stoked and feel so blessed to be among a community of like minded DOERS who are out there taking bold action, creating new paradigms and at very least TRYING to create a better world for themselves and future generations.

Happy Santa Cruz is Indeed Very Happy :)

After a lot of hard work and help from Todd Schafer, Davy and Ruby at Parachute Creative, Nick Sobrak-Seaton and James Lafferty (HUGE PROPS TO JAMES!) Happy Santa Cruz is now a reality. Check out the site at www.happysantacruz.com, let us know why Santa Cruz makes you happy, and spread the love!

Big thanks too to Genevieve Bookwalter with the Santa Cruz Sentinel for doing a phenomenal write up on the cover of the Sentinel Tuesday as well!

(HSC business partner and homeboy Nick is missing from the picture above)

Santa Cruz – Our Quality of Life is Good for Your Bottom Line

Yet Another Win for Geeks in Santa Cruz

Congratulations to Rich, Marcus, Emily and Scott @UserVoice!

UserVoice Raises Funding, White-Labels User Feedback Facilitator

Expect some more awesome things coming from UserVoice and a few other rock’in statups here in town…

Rack One up for Santa Cruz and 12seconds.tv

I thought it worth throwing out there that bootstrapped www.12seconds.tv, out of Santa Cruz, CA, with 1 full time developer, 1 mostly full time CEO, 1 part time UI Designer and an endless supply of good Karma and Community Capital backing them have managed to surpass the likes www.seesmic.com in unique visitors per month… Seesmic, who has been around for twice as long and landed over $14M in funding.

Yes, Seesmic has “changed their focus” recently by embedding their video player on desktops, but IMHO, I would be freaking pissed if I were an investor in Seesmic and be all over 12seconds.tv right now as this is a simple case study in doing more with less and that the people running your business are far more important than business model.

I simply can’t wait to see what continues to go down in 2009. I strongly feel we’re going to see a dramatic shift in perceptions and in the way business actually gets done from a grassroots level. Specifically, count on those who understand that Business is Personal to start exceeding like never before.

Did You Know?

This is simply remarkable stuff if you stop and think about it.

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