Artist stories

Local “Queen of Awesome”, educator, entrepreneur, programmer, and connector of people and ideas, Margaret Rosas came into the KZSC Studio to talk about the recent successful Third TechRaising Event.

Margaret is a community builder and collaboration advocate. She also founded the Santa Cruz Geeks, Freelance Camp, and Hope Foundry. She is a community advisor to NextSpace.
Margaret co-founded Techraising with Matthew Swinnerton and Andrew Mueller to create an eco-system of technology businesses in Santa Cruz built upon relationships. Techraising is a weekend startup blitz designed to take ideas for new web-based businesses and bring them to reality. It is a safe space for people to exchange ideas, create new products and get a new perspective on business building and life in general.

It began October 17 at 6pm pitching to get the teams and ended Sunday, October 21, at 6pm with the demonstration of prototypes built over the course of the weekend. There were 27 pitches, 16 teams and 16 proto-types at the end of event. Most teams included a designer, developer and a business developer. Volunteer mentors helped by roaming the event and injecting knowledge and sage advice wherever needed. One of the teams, Studio Holladay – Creative Collective, created an instant magazine chronicling the Techraising weekend and looking at techies that have built things and been successful in Santa Cruz.