Interview: Doug Erickson
In this video, Neil Pearberg (Off The Lip Radio, 831) interviews Doug Erickson (Santa Cruz Works) in one of those places that feels like it shouldn’t matter to the global economy: Cowell’s Beach with waves rolling in the background, the Santa Cruz Wharf off to the side, the sacred sands and birthplace of the first Santa Cruz Surf Club just a few steps away. It’s scenic, yes. But it’s also a kind of a quandary.
Doug explains it is not just that Santa Cruz is beautiful, or quirky, or blessed with great waves. It’s that Santa Cruz is productive in a way that doesn’t map neatly onto its size. It generates innovation at a rate that feels almost unfair, and Doug keeps coming back to a question that’s both simple and surprisingly hard to answer: why here?
He frames it as a per-capita phenomenon, the kind of stat that forces you to stop thinking in terms of raw scale and start thinking in terms of density. Santa Cruz, he argues, is a small town with outsized creative output, and the explanation is some combination of talent, culture, and place. Not “place” in the real estate sense, but in the psychological sense: the kind of environment that attracts innovation and builders, keeps them sane, and gives them reasons to stay.
From there, the conversation opens outward into the clusters that make Santa Cruz feel like an improbable engine. UC Santa Cruz’s genomics legacy is one pillar: big foundational work, yes, but also the frontier edge of biotech, where research starts to sound like science fiction. Then there’s Joby Aviation, the other side of the innovation spectrum: advanced aviation built from the same coastal maker instincts that once obsessed over surfboards and mountain bikes.
Doug rattles off a roster of companies that function like proof points. Jane Technologies becomes an infrastructure story: a veteran founder turning personal need into nationwide scale. Paystand is framed as the next big breakout, solving the unglamorous problem of payment friction. BrandCapsule feels like a bet on the next internet, where visibility depends less on Google’s rankings and more on how AI systems interpret your existence.
And threaded through all of it is the counter-narrative Doug wants to defend: this isn’t just Silicon Valley spillover. It’s not a colony. It’s an ecosystem. Santa Cruz Works exists, in his telling, because the region got tired of exporting its talent over Highway 17. Keep the builders here, keep the jobs here, and the economic impact multiplies outward: restaurants, housing, services, the whole civic machine.
By the end, Santa Cruz becomes less a postcard and more a model. A place that reminds you innovation isn’t only born in office parks and skyscrapers. Sometimes it starts at the edge of the ocean, and then, somehow, it scales.
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