Startup Ventura

Luke Erickson is the Founder and Executive Director of Startup Ventura, a 501(c)(3) startup accelerator in Ventura County. He is an entrepreneur who built and exited his own company before focusing on building institutions at home.

He founded it to fix a problem he watched for years: the county raises and educates ambitious people, then loses them to San Francisco and Los Angeles, while companies that stay, like Curri, struggle to hire locally. After his first exit, Luke made a conscious decision to have an outsized impact on his city and county, and turn it into a place ambitious, innovative people want to call home. https://startupventura.com