Luke Erickson

Hudson, Wisconsin

I was born on July 22, 2000, and grew up in Hudson, Wisconsin, a river town just across the border from Minnesota. It is the kind of place where you learn early that work is something you do with your hands and your name on it. By the time most of my friends were looking for their first jobs, I was running one: Stew B's, a small local business I owned and operated for the better part of five years. I did the selling, the marketing, the hiring, and the closing-up-at-night. It was not glamorous, but it taught me the lesson that has shaped everything since — that the hard part of any venture is rarely the idea. It is keeping the thing alive, day after day.

Going west

I headed west for school and studied business management at the University of Utah. Salt Lake City is where I learned to sell for real. I led and coached a sales team at Blerp, then ran high-volume outbound at Artemis Health, where I learned how to research an account, earn a first meeting, and turn a cold conversation into a relationship. I was good at it because I genuinely liked the people on the other end of the call — and because, having run my own shop, I understood what was at stake for them.

Building my own

Then I built something of my own again. One Tap was a digital financial-literacy platform, and I took it from an idea to a working business as founder and CEO — owning the product direction, the partnerships, and the early contracts that gave it credibility. Founding a company teaches you humility fast. You learn that momentum is fragile, that honest feedback is a gift, and that showing up consistently beats almost any clever plan. Those are the things I now look for in the founders I work with.

Around the same time I joined Popl as it scaled, selling into senior, multi-stakeholder accounts and helping roughly double the business-development team through hiring and hands-on coaching. I generated millions in qualified pipeline, closed seven figures, and set a few company records along the way — including a month I am still a little proud of. But the part I cared about most was building the people around me.

Startup Ventura

Which brings me to now. I founded Startup Ventura because I kept meeting talented people in Ventura County who had a real idea and nowhere to take it. I wanted to give early founders what I wish I'd had at the start — a community, a room to think out loud, and people who have done it before. We built it as a nonprofit accelerator in partnership with gener8tor, the national program, and I assembled a board of operators whose companies carry billions of dollars in combined exit value. The goal is simple and stubborn: keep Ventura County a place where it is possible to start something and stay.

Outside the work

Away from the desk, I serve on the board of directors of the New West Symphony, I am active in the Rotary Club of Ventura, I speak whenever I get the chance, and I try to stay close to the local arts and civic community. I ski, I am stubbornly working on my German, I care about sustainability, and I lean on a faith that keeps me grounded. Most of it comes back to the same thing I learned behind the counter at Stew B's: show up, do honest work, and build things that outlast you.