February 7 is Santa Cruz Works Day
February 7 has a funny way of looping back on itself in Santa Cruz.
On February 7, 2018, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors issued a proclamation that did something both ceremonial and surprisingly revealing: it declared that day “Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup Day in Santa Cruz County.” It happened at the Cocoanut Grove, in a formal ceremony that took a grassroots tech community and placed it inside the county’s official memory.
Now it’s February 7, 2026, and it’s worth checking the math, because the numbers tell the story. This is not the 18th anniversary of the proclamation. It’s the 8th. But it is the 18th year of Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup itself, founded in February 2008. That distinction matters because it highlights what the county was really recognizing in 2018: not a single event, but the accumulation of a community that kept showing up.
The proclamation lays out the case with the dry confidence of government language, but the underlying argument is emotional and economic. Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup existed for “those who love Santa Cruz and all things geeky,” and its mission was sharp enough to fit on a single breath: build and connect the regional tech ecosystem, inspire tech professionals and students and business owners, and spark entrepreneurship and startups. That is the kind of thing cities claim they want. What made New Tech unusual is that it operationalized the wish.
By 2018, the meetup had logged more than 80 monthly events, hosted over 480 presentations, and powered through more than 1,600 pizzas. Those numbers sound charming until you translate them into what they represent: repetition, continuity, the slow work of forming trust and shared language in a place where innovation often feels like something that happens “over there.”
The proclamation also points to outcomes that are harder to dismiss as vibes. It highlights New Tech’s role in supporting local companies that offered more than 500 jobs since 2016. It references a June 2017 “Get Hired!” event that brought together 12 local companies offering 500 jobs. And it credits the meetup with spawning new events like HackUCSC (aka CruzHacks) and Blue Tech, linking student experimentation to real-world problem solving in ocean and water technologies.
Ryan Connerty, then a Member of the Board of Supervisors, signed the proclamation on February 7, 2018. But the deeper signature was the county’s acknowledgment that ecosystems are built from meetings that keep happening even when there isn’t a headline.
And then came the next pivot. In 2019, Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup and Santa Cruz Works merged, knitting the meetup’s community energy into a broader regional economic development engine. In retrospect, it reads less like an ending and more like a scale-up: the informal becoming institutional without losing the point.
February 7 marks the 18th anniversary of Santa Cruz’s innovation community, and the day the County formally recognized Santa Cruz Works as a cornerstone of the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.