Santa Cruz Works' Most Popular Events of 2023
As we approach the end of another year, we at Santa Cruz Works are thrilled to reflect on the incredible events that brought our community together in 2023. From inspiring in-person and virtual workshops and engaging gatherings, we hosted a diverse range of experiences that fostered connection, fueled innovation, and left a lasting impact on our members and the wider community. Below are some of our most popular events from the past year that resonated with our audience which we wanted to highlight once more!
We had a very successful Santa Cruz Launchpad event this year with our biggest turnout yet of approximately 600 attendees! This event entailed UCSC's 6th Annual UCSC Business Pitch Awards and Santa Cruz Works Job Fair - which featured over 25 companies with hundreds of job opportunities at the Cocoanut Grove. The pitch competition was a great event with 21 undergraduate student teams from UCSC competing for $50,000 in cash prizes.
We finished off our last event of the year with a BANG! Over 200 attendees came to network, learn about AI companies in Santa Cruz County, and hear from AI luminaries regarding the latest innovations from Microsoft, NVIDIA, AI-R, Amazon, and UC Santa Cruz.
This sold out event featured: author/chief evangelist of Canva, Guy Kawasaki; Santa Cruz County Supervisor, Zach Friend; UCSC Dean of Baskin School of Engineering, Alexander Wolf; CEO of SapientX, David Colleen; Founder & CEO of Simply Augmented, Boaz Ashkenazy; and UC Santa Cruz Chancellor, Cindy Larive who all touched on AI's real-world applications, challenges, and the trends shaping its future.
Our first event of 2023 had over 100 attendees interested in learning about the 8 hottest companies in Santa Cruz County including Ambient Photonics, Climatize, Cruz Foam, Innovation Within, Joby Aviation, Parallel Flight Technologies, Paystand, Zero Motorcycles
