Cruzio was proud and happy, once again, to host TechRaising in our coworking space last weekend.

Cruzioworks has lots of desks, ergonomic chairs, and — obviously — great internet. We’re a perfect match for TechRaising, a weekend-long hackathon-type event focusing on cooperation rather than competition (unique to TechRaising, but also a very Santa Cruz concept).

Santa Cruz is a Petri Dish

And Santa Cruz is a great community to hold events like this. We’ve got so many creative people in our area, and so many people with technical, mechanical, and other professional skills. Techraisers brew beer. They produce music. They apply physics to problems like power generation and battery life.

We’re a petri dish for creative tech — look at great Santa Cruz County garage startups like Plantronics, Netflix, or Looker. These successful companies began as local ideas, and they continue to contribute to our local tech ecosystem. Many successful entrepreneurs are on hand at Techraising as mentors and judges, along with venture capitalists from Silicon Valley.

Twenty Projects on the Big Teal Wall

Using Cruzio’s open space and big teal wall to organize, twenty would-be entrepreneurs pitched ideas for startup businesses on Friday June 1st. On Sunday, two days later, nearly all of them exhibited a “proof of concept” showing how they could present their projects to potential investors.

In the days between pitch and demo, people met new friends to collaborate with and our office space buzzed with excited talk and clicking keyboards.

“This is what our space is for,” commented a happy Peggy Dolgenos, Cruzio co-CEO.

No Live Goats Were Involved

One would-be startup (they are farmers) asked if they could bring a live baby goat into our office for their demo. We suggested that a video of the goat would be preferable.

Even without the goat, we saw some awfully creative ideas and had a lot of fun.

One of the best projects was called “Serverless.” You’ve got to see it to appreciate the creativity and technical chops that went into this demo. Tech Beat reports on it here.

Many thanks to Matthew Swinnerton, Margaret Rosas, and Andrew Mueller for setting it up! We love you guys and hope to see more TechRaisings in the the future, it’s a terrific concept and you carry it out so well.

Learn more: TechRaising.com.