Shifting Toward Purpose

After several legendary decades in Silicon Valley that earned him the nickname “The Godfather of Tech,” Steve Blank settled on a ranch in Pescadero.

Nowadays, Blank often speaks and writes on moral and ethical questions (some might say crises) among founders and CEOs. He served on the California Coastal Commission for seven years. He lobbies for better integration of entrepreneurial education into university programs and is invested in building stronger communities.

This year, delivering the UCSC commencement speech, Blank didn’t give an inspirational talk about entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, and carpe-ing that diem. He told personal stories about “the conflict between money and power versus the common good,” lessons he gleaned after many years spent right at the intersection of money and power. He spoke about his friend Michael Krzys, a tireless public servant, who was killed in a car crash caused by a drunk driver.

“It took me a long time,” Blank said, “but as I got older, I realized that life was more than just about work, technical innovation, and business. Michael and others worked to preserve and protect the values that made life worth living. And while we were making things, they were the ones who were changing our society into a more just place to live.”

He closed by telling graduates,” Your report card is whether you leave the world a better place.”

“Putting up a welcome sign is not enough.”

Nina Simon created OF/FOR/BY ALL based on one question: What are we willing to change about what we do in order to help new people belong?

Simon, former Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (who also created Abbott Square), used this question to radically revamp the MAH’s operations and programming, then to develop OF/FOR/BY ALL to share it with worldwide organizations to enact effective inclusivity.

So what does this have to do with the local tech industry?

Besides the fact that Simon’s strategy of inclusion and transformation pulled the Santa Cruz MAH from a $700,000 budget and 17,000 annual visitors in 2011 to a $3 million budget and 148,000 visitors in 2018 and made the MAH a household-known brand? (148,000 visits who, by the way, match the income, age, and diversity of Santa Cruz County’s real population make-up.)

Besides that, Simon sprung on a major insight at the MAH that should sound very familiar to the tech community. In her keynote at the UK National Trust’s 2019 Convestival, Simon compares the exclusionary attitude she experienced while studying electrical engineer and working at NASA (“‘Maybe girls just aren’t cut out for it.’”) to what she now saw in the museum world (“‘Maybe those people don’t appreciate culture.’”) to explain exclusion.

Simon began to ask what the MAH could change about itself to help new people feel that they were welcome in an art and culture space, both as a good thing to do and also as a good business decision.

“Yes, we felt like it was the right thing to do to involve new people,” Simon said at that keynote, “but it was also the smart thing to do for the business case of how our organization would not just survive, but really be successful.”

Then she refined her vision into a start-up and exported it globally. Within its first year of being independent from the MAH, OF/FOR/BY ALL now serves 47 organizations across nine countries with their SaaS platform-based model. And is growing—fast.

Tech For All

For the first year, robotics is a front-runner in the 2020 Emerging Jobs report, and jobs with “data” in the title, unsurprisingly, dominate the list of fastest-growing roles. AI is a $1.2 trillion industry with hiring at 74% annual growth; the SaaS industry is worth $85 billion. And while these high-tech industries bring to mind jobs like “software developer” and “data analyst” and “mechanical engineers,” the reality is that every company working on AI also comes with its own customer support team, HR (or do we all say “People Ops” now?) department, creative marketing group, financial management, and even interior design consultants.

The United States now has a workforce that is potentially five generations deep. If any of the people in this workforce, particularly young people and people from marginalized communities, are left out of the tech industry loop, it creates a problem for entire regional economies.

Programs driven by the likes of DigitalNEST, Jason Borgen of Santa Cruz County Office of Education, Santa Cruz Economic Development, and the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership are leading the way.

It’s smart to start a business that people love and makes you a lot of money. But helping people learn how to change the world is that “common good” Steve Blank was talking about in his UCSC commencement speech.

When CruzHacks was created in 2013 (Santa Cruz & UCSC’s premier hackathon), it included Tech Cares: a social entrepreneurship category for projects working to solve environmental and social problems. Only 10% of the projects submitted to this category. In 2019, 90% of CruzHacks projects completed and submitted were Tech Cares.

This year, there is only one category at CruzHacks 2020: Tech Cares. Young people are turning out to be the most eager among us to use tech to make the world a better place.

Cosmic Shift

In 2018, Eric Ressler was running Cosmic Design, a successful design and branding agency in downtown Santa Cruz. He realized it was time for clarity of direction, a speciality on which to hinge all of Cosmic’s work. Cosmic had done work globally, from small local start-ups to Fortune 500s, and had no shortage of clients knocking.

Ressler and his teammates chose to shift Cosmic’s focus exclusively to working with social purpose brands—beyond “mission-driven” or even “cause-driven,” because they saw through the veil of cause-washing that massive corporations have begun to wear. They committed to working only with companies that truly made the world a better place—to help them do that more effectively and with more money.

This was on the heels of the 2016 presidential election; Santa Cruz and the world were confused, to say the least. Everyone yearned for meaning and purpose. A broad, charged conversation about politics, values, and the looming threat of climate change opened up.

“We thought, ‘It’s time for us as a society to figure out how to create a more sustainable future,’” Ressler remembers.

The Cosmic team knew that working with companies striving to make the world a better place fulfilled them personally and professionally, and it was actually profitable. What’s more, they saw a multitude of regionally based foundations and nonprofits that had “set up shop” in the Monterey Bay area but were doing important work globally—just like Cosmic, as a digital company.

“In Santa Cruz County, there are so many organizations that have an impact well beyond our region,” Ressler notes.

Cosmic pinpointed not only a key to their own success, but also a characteristic of this area’s personality and economy: local values generate and attract brilliant change-makers and world-improvers who are eager to export their impact. Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay economic region are home to massive social good organizations like Ecology Action, The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), Gravity Water, and so many more.

Community Tech, Community Identity

“The fundamental difference [between Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley] is cultural,” says Toby Corey. “We are community-first, we think about each other and the place we live above our personal interests.”

Santa Cruz is poised to solidify itself as a particular kind of tech center: one with values around inclusivity, egalitarianism, and environmental stewardship. Santa Cruz Economic Development has long been a major driver of tying this treasured culture to a growing local economy. The importance of having a powerful and plugged-in local economic development office as a vehicle for both progress and cultural preservation can’t be overstated.

“At Novell in the early 1990s,” says Toby Corey, “[CEO Ray] Norda’s mantra was draconian but on-point: you’re either moving forward or backward. I subscribe to that philosophy. If we stagnate, we risk becoming a place left behind, and great talent and ideas will be nurtured and flourish someplace else.”

Corey spent much of his career making enormous trades, raising mind-boggling amounts of capital, getting a company acquired by Tesla, and so on. But his primary focus is doing good, and making sure that good is being done in Santa Cruz. Zentrepreneur Life was born out of this common good.

“I think the great majority of businesses and start-ups inside of ten years will be purpose- and cause-driven,” Corey says. “I think the shining example is a company like Patagonia. Patagonia can walk and chew gum at the same time and is the example of what success looks like for tech companies in the not-too-distant future.”

But the future doesn’t solidify itself—or rather, the future you want doesn’t solidify unless you take action toward it.

In his 2018 Titans of Tech talk, Jeremy Almond reminded the audience that this action is a kind of stewardship—a fitting word for the Santa Cruz spirit of protecting and celebrating what locals love. Stewardship, though, along with being protective, is also generous and creative, expansive and adaptable.

Almond asked a question of the audience that is the essential counterpart to Steve Blank’s “leave the world a better place” advice:

“What are we doing with the skills and the gifts we have, in the place that we have them?”

Part 1: Lifestyle + Business Sense

Part 2: Room to Grow: Office Space and Wages

Part 3: Housing and Homelessness

Part 4: A Unique Tech Ecosystem

Part 5: Where Do We Go from Here

Julia Sinn is a freelance writer and editor, brand messaging consultant, event designer, and project manager. Read more of her work and connect with her at juliarosesinn.com.