santa-barbara
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Jason Spievak and the Six-Hour Test
The founding CEO of Invoca spent years helping advertisers understand a ringing phone. As an investor and teacher in Santa Barbara, Jason Spievak turned his attention to the people on the other end of the pitch.
Ryan Millner and the Problem of Being Heard
At Amazon Alexa, Ryan Millner helped machines understand people. Building Unwrap meant confronting a more awkward question: why were the people building the machines still struggling to listen?
Ryan Olson and the Things That Click
A garage, a 3D printer, and a persistent interest in how things fit together. The MAAK co-founder’s path runs through field equipment, modular power, and the small frustrations that give a hardware business its purpose.
Richard Nelson sold the house. Then he rebuilt the roofing business.
A third-generation roofer, known as Richy, traded a Toronto roofing career for a software startup. The work that followed has been an extended lesson in what contractors will actually use.
John MacFarlane and the Christmas that Sonos missed
He could see music moving through the internet and into every room. Building Sonos meant learning when to hurry, when to wait, and eventually when to hand over the controls.
Craig Harris and the art of finding the next question
A Peace Corps volunteer became a fundraiser, then a founder. At NOZA, HG Insights and BuyerCaddy, Craig Harris has kept returning to the same problem: how to make scattered information useful to someone who has a decision to make.
Daniel Zarick and the art of changing your mind
He left Twilio with a bootstrapped business in mind. A string of experiments, a disappearing dashboard, and a changing market taught the Arrows co-founder to build the company in front of him.
Tooey Courtemanche and the business of being early
He built construction software before the job site was ready for it. After more than two decades at Procore, Craig "Tooey" Courtemanche, Jr. has handed over the CEO job while keeping the original problem in view.
Ted Guggenheim and the business of getting a reply
Before TextUs, Ted Guggenheim managed bands and recorded cowbells. His next acts brought business texting to recruiters, AI to staffing firms, and a very personal wager to seven pickleball courts in Goleta.
Christian Malek and the business of letting go
A family business without a successor gave Christian Malek a problem to solve. At Novastone, he pairs experienced operators with established companies whose owners are ready for a next chapter.
Boyd Bailey and the Story Before the Headline
A television reporter became an airline marketer, then founded Reputable in Santa Barbara. Boyd Bailey’s career follows a persistent curiosity: how an issue becomes news, and who gets to explain it.
Lifestyledesign Has Put 500 Products on Shelves. Its Trick Is Starting Before the Sketch.
The Santa Barbara studio has spent two decades turning fuzzy business questions into sunglasses, speakers, smart glasses and hard cases. Its advantage is less about drawing a beautiful object than refusing to hand the idea off halfway through.
Reputable Wants to Meet the Story Before It Becomes the Story
The Santa Barbara communications firm has built its pitch around a useful idea: by the time a headline appears, the important work may already be over.
The Agency That Asked Why Mothers Bought the Wrong Formula
Christie & Co has spent three decades selling purpose without pretending purpose sells itself. Its best tool is not a slogan, but a deceptively simple question: what actually made you choose?
The Agency That Put a Potato on the Runway
For forty years, EvansHardy+Young has treated familiar food as a problem of attention. Its best trick is not making the product stranger - it is finding the one place nobody expects to see it.
VADA put a design studio inside a public high school
At Santa Barbara High School, about 225 students combine academic coursework with art and design. VADA’s new studio makes that arrangement tangible - and its funding and admissions reveal what it takes to keep it public.
DesignArt Studios knows what to leave out
A Santa Barbara design firm makes its case through the decisions behind the finished room: where to put the kitchen, when to order the cabinets, and why the pool can wait.
Lisa Horner Makes Marketing Feel Like a Service
From a philosophy degree and a decade in customer care to AppFolio's C-suite, Horner has built a career around one durable idea: good marketing begins by being useful.
Peter Sullivan Put the Lottery in Your Pocket. Then He Took the Long Way Out.
A daily detour for his father’s lottery numbers became a 13-year lesson in product design, patient regulation and knowing when to hand over the ticket.
Noah Dentzel Put a Cable in a Wallet - Then Spent 14 Years Learning What Belongs in Your Pocket
Before the leather cases, charging stands and global retail shelves, there was a dying BlackBerry, a homemade prototype and cheap white wine on a boat. Noah Dentzel's real product is a habit: notice the annoyance, make the tool, then keep listening after it ships.
Sonos Wired the Whole House for Sound - Then Shipped the App That Nearly Unplugged It
The company that made multi-room music feel effortless spent 2024 proving how quickly one software update can undo twenty years of goodwill - and 2025 trying to earn it back.
The Woman Who Sold America a Coffee With No Coffee In It
Caroline MacDougall couldn't drink coffee but loved the taste. So she roasted chicory, carob and figs into a caffeine-free brew - and built the best-selling coffee alternative in America.
MAAK Built Gear for the Front Line. Then 568 Backers Took It Outdoors.
A Santa Barbara hardware team took its frontline power system to Kickstarter, raised 20 times its goal, and learned that the real product was not a battery. It was everything the battery could connect to.
Habit Burger & Grill
It started as a burger stand under the Santa Barbara sun in 1969. Fifty-five years and one ampersand later, Habit Burger & Grill is Yum! Brands' bet that a chargrilled patty can scale without losing the char.
Unwrap
The AI-powered customer intelligence platform that proactively uncovers what matters most - so product teams stop guessing what their users actually want.
Brian Miller
Brian Miller is the CEO of Sovato, the Santa Barbara company building the first platform to let health systems deploy and scale remote robotic surgery. An electrical engineer turned roboticist with a PhD from Northwestern in haptics, he spent his first job at Computer Motion writing software for the AESOP and ZEUS robots and watched the 2001 Operation Lindbergh, the first transatlantic remote surgery. Twenty-three years at Intuitive Surgical followed, where he rose from control-systems analyst to Chief Digital Officer and Head of Digital and AI Strategy. In April 2026 he returned to the frontier he started on, taking Sovato from early market development toward its first patient programs in 2027.
Sovato
Sovato is a Santa Barbara health-tech company building the first comprehensive, system-agnostic platform for remote robotic surgery and procedures - what the industry calls telesurgery. Co-founded by surgical-robotics pioneer Yulun Wang and healthcare strategist Cynthia Perazzo, Sovato lets a skilled surgeon operate a robotic system from hundreds or thousands of miles away, aiming to extend top surgical care to patients regardless of where they live. The company has raised $41M across its rounds and helped enable the longest-distance telesurgery ever completed.
Valentin Ruest
Valentin Ruest is the co-founder and US co-CEO of Classtime, a Zurich-born edtech company building a formative and summative assessment platform used by educators and learners in more than 90 countries. A University of St. Gallen and Harvard-trained economist who once ran mortgages at a Swiss fintech, he traded banking for classrooms, splitting his life between Santa Barbara and Zurich while teaching personal finance in public schools and arguing that software should help teachers decide, not decide for them.