Santa Cruz Launchpad 2026 is looking for volunteers to help support its student startup competition and community job fair on May 13 at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It’s a chance to build community, meet local employers and innovators, and play a hands-on role in one of Santa Cruz’s biggest workforce and startup events.

Santa Cruz Works is thanking the local businesses that donated giveaway prizes to support the 2026 Work-Life Survey and help drive community participation. The article highlights each sponsor and prize, gives special thanks to Mission Hill Coffee & Creamery and Woodstock’s Pizza Santa Cruz as recent additions, and notes that it is still not too late for other businesses to join as sponsors.

Santa Cruz fintech, Paystand, just became a premier partner to the network controlling 69% of global corporate Bitcoin — offering the first full-stack financial operating system built natively on Bitcoin.

Santa Cruz Works is now accepting applications from local employers to hire a paid intern at no cost. The AHSC program reimburses up to $5,000 for a 10-week internship — spots are limited.

An AI-powered Steve Jobs answers our burning questions about the afterlife, Apple's 50th, and whether God's UI needs work. Watch it. You won't regret it!

The April 1st Santa Cruz Works New Tech meetup delivered an unforgettable evening. Six remarkable teams tackled some of today's most pressing challenges — from AI-powered crime prevention and conversion optimization to Parkinson's therapy, organoid research automation, a needle-free brain-computer interface, and a fascinating neuroscience talk fresh from UCSC Grad Slam. Local innovation at its finest, and every presentation was worth the wait. Watch all six recordings!

OpenRoad Technologies won a $500,000 CalSEED Prototype Award to build and pilot GridConnect, a product that helps more energy devices connect to California’s clean energy grid. The Santa Cruz company plans to manufacture locally, add jobs, and pilot the technology in 2027.

UC Santa Cruz is among the world’s leading research institutions identified in Clarivate’s latest analysis of the 70 organizations most frequently home to Highly Cited Researchers for 2025.

On Thursday, April 30th from 5-7 p.m. Santa Cruz Hardware Meetup will gather at Idea Fab Labs for a behind the scenes tour with IFL founder Jordan Layman, at their Mission Street location.

Drew Baglino’s article, Power Electronics: The Hero the Grid Needs, is really about one of civilization’s weirdest habits: building dazzling futuristic technology on top of infrastructure that often feels like it was last upgraded when people still trusted fax machines.

Santa Cruz Works is inviting members and partners to complete a short survey to help shape future programs, events, benefits, and community offerings. Everyone who participates will be entered into a free giveaway featuring gifts from sponsors including UpperCrust, Merge4, Laili, Pleasure Pizza, Big Basin Vineyards, Humble Sea, and Chaminade Resort and Spa, with winners announced on May 7.

A Boulder Creek earthquake became an accidental sleep study when Fullpower's Sleeptracker-AI captured the exact moment thousands of sleepers woke simultaneously — revealing that recovery time correlated directly with proximity to the epicenter, a physiological echo that outlasted the tremors themselves.

UCSC’s presence in the world of entrepreneurship expands day by day. Most recently they have been propelled forward by two students, onto the world stage.

Enterprise AI apps rest on a hidden stack of specialized layers — foundation models, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, voice infrastructure, and security tools. Mastering this ecosystem isn't optional; it's the engineering competency that separates teams who win contracts from those who don't.

Join Santa Cruz Works on April 14 at 8 a.m. for breakfast at Spanner’s Santa Cruz headquarters. Tour the studio, see prototypes, hear technical stories, and connect with innovators. Free for Members and Partners, $10 general admission.

Cabrillo’s April 16 job fair brings local talent to 50+ employers, internships, free resume help, and new careers.

Looking to expand your team? Make sure you aren’t making these hiring mistakes.

Santa Cruz Launchpad is an annual event that combines a student startup competition with a community career fair, all under one roof! This year’s event takes place at the Cocoanut Grove at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk on Wednesday, May 13, 2026.

Every cohort, there’s a wave of applications that comes in right before the deadline. It makes sense. Founders are busy, timing is never perfect, and applying to an accelerator rarely feels urgent compared to building the company itself.

But when you look closely at the founders who get the most out of programs like Santa Cruz Accelerates, a pattern shows up. They tend to engage early, well before any deadline pressure kicks in, and that timing changes the experience in ways that are easy to underestimate.

For a long time, founders would come out of accelerators with generous packages from Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, and that support meaningfully extended their runway. Infrastructure was expensive, and anything that reduced that burden gave you more time to figure things out.

That logic still holds, but the center of gravity has shifted.

More and more early-stage companies are building products where the primary cost is not infrastructure in the traditional sense. It is model usage. Every meaningful interaction with your product might call an API, generate tokens, or run inference on a system you do not control. The more successful your product becomes, the more that cost scales with usage.