A skateboarder turned founder, Gabriel Garcia-Solis racked up 50 million views, one dead pickleball brand, and a viral AI food app called BadHealth—all before he graduated. His real product was never the app. It was nerve.

He was a teenager when the first videos took off. Skateboarding. A board, a rail, a phone propped against a curb. By the time he was eighteen he had fifty million views, brand deals, and the strange weightless feeling of winning a game before you understand the rules.

Then the body sent its invoice. Every skater knows the math—you ride until your knees come due. Gabriel paid early and walked away. Santa Cruzian Adam Bender, a professional inline skater now a top engineer at Google, made the same trade. You learn to read the warning before it becomes a cast.

So he tried to monetize his mind instead of his ankles. A data science TikTok caught fire—half a million views in two weeks. And nothing. No deals, no checks. Turns out the world will pay you to fall off a rail but not to explain a regression. He filed that lesson away.

Next came pickleball. He built a brand at the top of the wave, pulled in twenty thousand dollars, watched it move. Then the tariffs, the overseas factories, the margins that made no sense. He killed it. That part matters—he killed it himself, on purpose, before it killed him slowly. Knowing when to quit is its own kind of courage, and most founders never learn it.

He went quiet. Bagged groceries at Trader Joe's. Worked a desk at a wealth management firm. Watched money up close. And in the background, over three months, he built something on the early AI models that were just then coming alive—an app that looks at your food and tells you what you're eating. He called it BadHealth.

A video hit seventeen million views. Then ten thousand downloads, fifteen countries, women between thirty-five and fifty-five who don't just use the thing—they write him, asking for more. They want features. They want it to be better. There is no sweeter signal in business than a customer who refuses to leave you alone.

He won at Slug Tank. Then first place in biotech at Launchpad 2026, after grinding on the pitch like it was the only thing that mattered, because for those weeks it was.

He grew up in San Diego and chose Santa Cruz for the obvious reasons—the water, the light, family within reach. This summer he'll pour time and money back into BadHealth while still clocking shifts at Trader Joe's, trying to make the thing stand on its own by graduation.

Here's what I keep coming back to. He's done all of this before earning a degree. Three ventures, two graveyards, one live wire. He's young enough that failure costs him almost nothing and teaches him almost everything. That's the whole secret. Take the risk while the fall is short.

He will fail again. He's counting on it.

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Santa Cruz Launchpad 2026 — The student startup competition and job fair where Gabriel took first place in biotech, held this year at the Cocoanut Grove.
When Code Gets Cheap, Everything Else Gets Harder — Adam Bender's "Software Engineering at the Tipping Point" argues that AI-driven code abundance stresses every other node in the system, and building fast may cost more than you think.
Santa Cruz Launchpad Returns: Bigger and Better! — How the region's premier student pitch competition expanded to spotlight the next generation of founders like Gabriel.
Calling All Employers: Santa Cruz Launchpad 2026 — A look at the Launchpad ecosystem connecting Santa Cruz County's young talent with the companies eager to hire them.