Quick Take
Monday was another landmark moment in the unfolding story of Joby Aviation, as the company welcomed more than 100 local guests, dignitaries, media members and investors to the opening of its new offices at Sylvania Avenue and Encinal Street. The event featured a few speeches, a ribbon cutting, and then a tour of the former Plantronics office now officially the home of Joby which, one staffer estimated, employs about 300 in Santa Cruz.
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On an interior wall in the smartly appointed, newly opened offices of Joby Aviation in the Harvey West area of Santa Cruz is a large image of the moon in its thinnest crescent shape. Superimposed on the moon, writ large, are the words “Tranquility Base.”
For those unfamiliar with NASA-speak, Tranquility Base is the site where Apollo 11 touched down on the surface of the moon in the summer of 1969. It makes sense that Joby, the Santa Cruz startup that is attempting to revolutionize air travel, would evoke such an enormous turning point in aviation history.
But the “Tranquility Base” image is an inherited feature of its new home, put in place by the building’s previous tenant, Plantronics, which designed and built the headsets the Apollo astronauts used to communicate with each other and with the rest of the world. Plantronics was the only company in Santa Cruz County that could credibly stake a claim to that kind of grandiosity — until Joby came along.
Joby is yet to make its mark on history as Plantronics did. But every year, every month, every day, the 14-year-old company is moving steadfastly in that direction, in its design and manufacture of an all-electric aircraft that will not only not require jet fuel, but also because it will be able to take off vertically, it won’t need a runway either.
Monday was another landmark moment in the unfolding story of Joby, as the company welcomed more than 100 local guests, dignitaries, media members and investors to the opening of its new offices at Sylvania Avenue and Encinal Street. The event, presented by the Santa Cruz County Chamber of Commerce, featured a few speeches, a ribbon cutting, and then a tour of the former Plantronics office now officially the home of Joby which, one staffer estimated, employs about 300 in Santa Cruz.
The company’s founder, lead visionary and CEO is Santa Cruz lifer JoeBen Bevirt, who grew up in a place that was not far from Silicon Valley geographically. But in just about every other way, it was as distant as Tranquility Base.
“I grew up on Last Chance Road,” Bevirt told me on the campus of Joby’s new HQ in reference to the tiny, remote mountain community northeast of Davenport. As a boy, Bevirt attended school in Santa Cruz, and getting back and forth each day was an ordeal. He would take a city bus up Highway 1 to Swanton Road. And from there, he’d walk for miles.
Quick Take
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“It gave me a lot of time to think about how to get from Point A to Point B,” he said. Most kids might figure out a way to move into town, or to attend a closer school, maybe carpool with someone else or buy a cheap commuter car. But Bevirt loved where he lived in the redwoods. He just wanted a simple transport by air that was quieter, easier and more efficient than a plane or a helicopter.
“That was my dream as a little boy,” he said. That dream is now a reality as Joby has emerged as an industry leader in what’s known as eVTOL technology — electric vertical takeoff and landing. The company continues to test an all-electric air taxi it hopes to bring to market by 2025.
At the ribbon cutting Monday, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley mentioned Bevirt’s deep roots in Santa Cruz culture, evoking the name of JoeBen’s father, Ron Bevirt. The elder Bevirt was not only a prominent local figure in the notorious 1960s counterculture troublemakers known as the Merry Pranksters — in those days, he was known as “Hassler” — he was also a co-founder of the first counterculture business in Santa Cruz, Hip Pocket Books, which predated even UC Santa Cruz.
Hip Pocket, which existed in roughly the same footprint where Bookshop Santa Cruz stands today, was a modest bookstore. But, with its large bronze statues of a nude man and woman above its front entrance, it brought a new kind of mindset to town. Famously conceived in a hot tub on the cliffs of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Hip Pocket — which came and went long before JoeBen was born — marked a turning point in Santa Cruz culture. Sixty years later, Hassler’s son is ready to make his revolutionary mark on Santa Cruz with a company that has 1,500 employees worldwide, and a market-capitalization worth of more than $3.7 billion.
“Hip Pocket was instrumental in bringing expansive thinking to the community,” said JoeBen Bevirt, reflecting on his legacy as the son of a Merry Prankster. “But this notion that there’s a lot of incredible knowledge out in the world, and to bring that knowledge here to Santa Cruz, to bring more richness to the community, that idea is something I was raised with.”
