By Molly Ressler

Commuting over the hill to Silicon Valley may offer higher wages, but it comes at a price—less time for your family, your friends, and for yourself. MYNT Systems, a turn-key energy efficiency solutions company located in downtown Santa Cruz, understands the sacrifices that come with the commute. They also understand that simply working where you live doesn’t entirely eliminate them either.

In 2013, Margaret Rosas and Sara Isenberg, two local tech insiders, had a conversation about the need for someone to tell the stories of the tech scene in Santa Cruz. The conversation stuck with Isenberg and proved to be the seed idea for Santa Cruz Tech Beat.

Generating excitement around a cloud storage service may sound like a mission impossible, but to Drew Meyer, the lead for Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud storage portfolio global product marketing team, it’s all in a day’s work. Meyer’s job is to break down, in his words, “extraordinarily geeky” concepts like block file and object storage into narratives that resonate with regular people. Unlike the product he sells, one of his most successful marketing strategies is surprisingly simple and applies to any type of business. The secret? Tell customer stories.  

Santa Cruz-based marketing agency Cosmic has always worked with social good organizations, but the company’s client roster has also included a broad array of Silicon Valley B2B companies, startups and tech projects. Recently, founder and creative director Eric Ressler and the Cosmic team made the decision to go all-in on working with brands and companies with a social good angle.

By David Apgar, GoalScreen

“Looker?” asked the sales consultant over the roar of 5,000 entrepreneurs and engineers frantically canvassing the vendor hall at The Indus Entrepreneurs 2018 Inflect conference in Santa Clara. Pivoting in front of his company’s neural-net mandala logo, he shrugged. “It’s a toy.”

In a way, the comment was to be expected. Ever since Gartner included it in the IT consultancy’s Magic Quadrant of 20 top business-analytics providers, Looker has become a target.