Please describe your profession.: I have the fortune to run a software product development firm… everything from Strategy, Product Management, Development, Operations and Product Marketing.
How does your work depend on internet access and networked collaboration?: Internet access is more important than my landline. I spend over 10 hours each day connected to email, the web, a dozen different internet based applications. The speed with which I am able to work effects not only me, but my team and my clients.
How might your work be changed by having much greater bandwidth capacity in Santa Cruz (i.e. increased revenue, customer base, access to talent, etc.)?: At a business level, video conferencing calls would be more realistic and more aligned with in person meetings. I could imagine real-time collaboration with whiteboarding and prototyping apps.
We have one client that has a serious application for streaming video in a very particularly innovative way – and higher bandwidth would open a fundamentally new market for both commerce and video.
Purely at a personal level, higher bandwidth would increase my productivity significantly. Even with our 6Mb connection, the stuttering delays of page loads or file transfers are disrupting and keep me from being “in the flow.” By the time the page loads, I forgot the reason I went there to begin with… maybe that’s just ADD, but I don’t think so. 
What are the attributes of Santa Cruz that support your work and life choices (i.e. lifestyle, climate, business climate, etc.): The greatest attributes of Santa Cruz are the environment and the people – the most temperate climate that I have ever lived in and some of the most inspiring people to be around. I’m lucky to be surrounded by compulsively entrepreneurial personalities.
Spending time commuting “the hill” to “the valley” for work seems like such a waste of valuable time. Over the course of the last 25 years, I had spent 8 of it commuting from Santa Cruz to Mountain View or Menlo Park. This is a total of over 200,000 miles… almost the distance to the moon… which for me ended up being over 176 days of driving. Just think of getting those days back – 6 months of creating, collaborating, building something great. Being here working with the same connectivity as being in an office in Mountain View has the potential of at least that reward.
What are the most important things that come to mind when you think about the future of Santa Cruz?: Stability of the business climate… creating jobs, creating products, creating fun.
