With Pie Fi, Pleasure Pizza owners seek to build local hub for AI development

Two longtime tech industry employees are launching a new venture aimed at creating a local hub for artificial intelligence development based out of a downtown Santa Cruz pizzeria. The Pie Fi concept is multifold: It’s a physical location for working, learning and meeting, an accompanying digital platform for building AI projects and an accelerator program all in one. And it all started with a pizzeria. 

About two years ago, Sol and Erica Lipman took over Pleasure Pizza on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, driven by the desire to build connections following working remotely during the pandemic. 

Sol Lipman was working for Amazon as a senior product manager when the pandemic began, and in 2022, he helped start DRIVR, an app to help consumers tip the people who deliver their packages. Erica Lipman has long worked as an executive assistant in the tech industry, including for companies like KarmaCheck and Instacart. 

Sol Lipman said he started feeling disconnected from the people he was designing software for, and both of the Lipmans missed more regular in-person interactions and bemoaned the overreliance on screens. They wanted to try something different, something brick-and-mortar that the whole family — the pair has five children between them — could participate in. A food business seemed as though it would fit the bill, providing fun and a learning experience.  

They considered frozen yogurt shops and other quick-serve ideas before finding the downtown  Pleasure Pizza, which was listed for sale by Derek Rupp, the owner of Eastside Eatery and Pleasure Pizza on 41st Avenue. After learning the ropes from Rupp — including everything from recipes to how to mop correctly — the Lipmans officially took over in December 2023. 

Those first few months were “brutally hard,” as the family learned how to run a kitchen from the ground up while also maintaining their full-time jobs in the tech business. While the Lipmans have spent years working for both startups and large companies, running a restaurant business was an entirely different experience. They also had to contend with balancing how to make changes without alienating longtime Pleasure Pizza regulars; “our customers definitely didn’t want us changing the recipes,” Erica Lipman recalled. 

Along the way, they gained a deeper appreciation for customer service and for the experience of just talking with their customers and seeing other people having conversations in person rather than just staring at their phones. 

Having physical spaces where people could congregate, communicate and share ideas felt especially important after the pandemic-related shutdowns, when many traditional networking opportunities such as conferences and trade shows went dark. Many of the students Sol Lipman had mentored through programs like Santa Cruz Launchpad, an annual student business pitch competition, began hanging out at Pleasure Pizza. Some nights they’d have 30 to 40 college students there, some talking about the projects they were working on. 

“Last year, Pleasure Pizza sold about 60,000 slices — every one of those slices is an opportunity to interact,” he said. “We have a belief that physical spaces create amazing opportunity for community and serendipity.”

Simultaneously, Lipman also was observing how AI was transforming the traditional process that most technology startups followed to get their companies off the ground by enabling faster development of apps and other software products. A speed mentoring event he attended last year on the UC Santa Cruz campus featured far more evolved ideas than he’d seen previously. 

“Every pitch was a real potential company,” he said. “These students are growing up in a really tech-forward community.”

Inspired by a vision to bring these young would-be developers and founders together with resources to help nurture their ideas from conception to fruition, the Lipmans started Pie Fi, a startup accelerator and “launchpad” to provide mentorship, training and more. 

This year, Pie Fi launched 10 in 10, a summer program to help guide 10 teams of local college students from idea conception to product design and market launch in just 10 weeks, with support including mentorship, funding and weekly programming. The program culminated in a public demo day in late September, showcasing everything from an app designed to help connect college students with shift work to a Yelp-like review app designed specifically for UCSC students. 

Now, the Lipmans have created a physical component to Pie Fi in a storefront adjacent to Pleasure Pizza where people can come work on AI-related projects, show off their efforts and get advice and feedback from others. They’ve given the 103 Locust St. space a clubhouse feel, complete with couches, whiteboards, fast Wi-Fi and even a giant foosball table that once lived at the LinkedIn corporate campus. 

Starting this Wednesday, the space will host weekly drop-in sessions from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. called “AI Curious for Business,” to help small business owners, startup founders and others gain a deeper understanding of how they can use AI in their own lives and organizations. AI is already starting to affect every kind of industry and business, from bookstores to clothing retailers — “even in the restaurant industry, AI can impact everyone,” said Erica Lipman. 

They also plan to hold a weekly “builder night” on Wednesdays from 6 p.m. to close for anyone who wants to drop in to code and collaborate. Other planned events on the horizon include pitch nights, hackathons, networking mixers, investor question-and-answer sessions, brainstorming boot camps, pizza and prototypes nights and more. 

The Lipmans are also working on forging closer ties with local leaders, nonprofit organizations, colleges and universities as well as potential investors and tech executives as they look to grow Pie Fi.  

“We want to put a flag in the ground and say, ‘Santa Cruz could really be a center for AI development,’” said Sol Lipman. “There’s a lot of talk about how AI is going to change the world and I think it’s time to meet that challenge.” 

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.