TechRaisers Kick Off 2012 Season

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TechRaising 2012 is off to a fabulous start. Thanks to everyone who attended, and to productOps for hosting, the first meetup leading up to April’s TechRaising was incredibly inspiring. The room was filled with passionate and energized TechRaising alumni and new faces – everyone excited to brainstorm and collaborate around building tech in Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz tech ecosystem.

As a reality check, we wanted to find out what is was that attracted people to TechRaising; why they would take a weekend from their busy lives to attend April’s TechRaising and gather with people they may never have met and proceed to work together to build something they could demo at the end of the weekend … the answers were truly inspiring. Nearly every answer resonating around the same values that drove the founding of TechRaising. It became crystal clear that there is a vibrant community of people here in Santa Cruz that want to reinvigorate the tech ecosystem with the creativity and “can do” mindset that is so often is hidden within or exported to the valley.

We took a little inventory of the expertise in the room, and snap, wow, what diverse and amazing talent we have … Santa Cruz is truly a creative, collaborative, and innovative hub bursting with enthusiasm and promise.

This group is ready to DO, ready to BE in action, and ready to BUILD the future. These qualities are fundamental to being a successful TechRaiser.

Looking forward, an immediate goal of TechRaising is to provide a blank canvas and all the components needed for the members of the community to come together, expand their networks, align around ideas, iterate those ideas, and have something to show for it. Who knows, some teams may even get funded … 2 of 8 ideas from TechRaising 2011 did.

We will meet again next month to continue building towards the April’s TechRaising and hope you can bring your enthusiasm and join us. We have a lot of ground to cover between now and April. We want you to be involved and help build the excitement and momentum for your ideas and the event.

What we learned:

Why do we want to be involved in TechRaising?

  • Meet people in the community
  • Tech community to flourish
  • I want to start a business and this is the right place to do that
  • Learn about new ideas
  • Support innovation & ideas
  • Want to be involved
  • Change the way people interact with books
  • Building stuff
  • Done it, got funding and now want to give back
  • Want to be part of this
  • Be around interesting people
  • Create value in the community

We had over 20 people in the room and the expertise was overflowing. We have the talent and the experience to build projects, to build products, and to build businesses.

Expertise in the house:

  • Development
  • Sales
  • Sys Admin
  • programming
  • Interaction design
  • Java
  • node.js
  • PHP
  • Google App Engine
  • Amazon EC2
  • Python
  • Drupal
  • Javascript
  • Staffing
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Design
  • Electrical engineering
  • Scalable high performance websites
  • Making stuff up / Innovation / Ideation
  • Project management
  • QR codes
  • Spray paint
  • the Generalist
  • the Facilitator
  • the Marketer
  • the Futurist
  • Operations/Logistics
  • Social Media
  • Strategy
  • Business Models
  • Enterprise 2.0/Social business transformation