Cruzio Stories: Santa Cruz at Work
Cruzio Stories is a bi-weekly podcast from Cruzio Internet, sharing short conversations with the people who make Santa Cruz tick — entrepreneurs, artists, community leaders, and creatives working out of the Cruzio coworking space. It’s not just tech talk — it’s real stories from the heart of a vibrant local community.
Cruzio Stories: Santa Cruz at Work
Episode 1: Cruzio's James Hackett & Chris Frost
Episode 1: Connecting People, Not Just Cables
Guests: James Hackett (COO) & Chris “Frost” Frost (CTO)
We’re kicking off Cruzio Stories with the people who helped build it — literally.
In this first episode, we sit down with James Hackett and Chris “Frost” Frost, Cruzio’s longtime COO and CTO. Both of them started at the front desk more than 20 years ago and worked their way into leadership, helping shape Cruzio into what it is today: an independent internet company that’s been serving Santa Cruz since 1989 — and still going strong.
But this podcast isn’t just about Cruzio or tech. It’s about Santa Cruz.
Cruzio Stories is a bi-weekly look into the people who make this place go — the creatives, builders, founders, and community voices who share space inside the Cruzio building. The coworking space is our nucleus, but the stories are bigger than that. These are Santa Cruz stories, told one short conversation at a time.
This first episode goes deep — from Cruzio’s early days as a dial-in bulletin board to the wild moment in 2008 when a fiber line got cut and disconnected the entire county from the outside world. James and Frost talk about what it took to build new infrastructure, transform an old newspaper building, and stay fiercely local in an industry dominated by giants.
At the heart of it, it’s a story about connection — not just cables and bandwidth, but people and purpose.
Subscribe now and stay tuned. The next story could be from the business next door, the artist at the hot desk, or the nonprofit building something big — all right here at the Cruzio hub.
it's this easy, guys. James frost cruise io uh welcome to your own business thanks for having us, yeah, for sure this is great.
Speaker 1:I'm excited right now because, um, this is the beginning.
Speaker 1:We're launching a series down here.
Speaker 1:We just created a new partnership with cruise, io and santa cruz, vibes and, uh, brianna down here and I have been kind of pondering outside of the things we're going to do together.
Speaker 1:You know, one thing that we do at Vibes is we try to create like really deep community narratives, and I think one we came up with is there's a lot of people working down here, there's a lot of different tech and businesses, there's attorneys down here, there's people that are journalists, there's it's the whole spectrum, and I think we're going to start with a series that maybe we named today, or maybe Brianna and I come with a smart name for this when we put it out on, you know, apple and Spotify is. Most of what we want to do is just kind of tell the stories right here in this building, but before we get there, I'll just kind of go left to right on my little kind of world right here, james, just kind of give a little introduction and tell us about your journey to Cruzeo, but a little bit of the background, like who you are, where you came from and how you got here.
Speaker 2:Sure, james Hackett, I'm the COO at Cruzeo. I've been working at Cruzeo for 23 years. Came obviously probably obvious. Didn't grow up here in Santa Cruz. Came over from the UK when I was in my early twenties. Uh, started just bumming around California various different jobs, totally unconventional route to where I am today. Customer service background that walked in the front door at Cruzeo one day 20 odd years ago and got a job at the front desk doing customer service and stuck around amazing way up from there, which is what a lot of people here at Cruzeo did. Pretty common story yeah going around here.
Speaker 3:That's pretty common and Frost oh, mine is very, very similar. My name is Chris Frost. I just go by Frost because there's too many Chris's in the world. I have worked here at Cruzeo. I'm CTO. I've worked here at Cruzeo for almost exactly 20 years. I'm coming up on my 20-year anniversary.
Speaker 3:And yes, similar to James, I am not from Santa Cruz, originally Moved here as a teenager and went to high school in the area. But yeah, came over from scotland and settled in santa cruz. My background before cruza was in construction. Okay and uh again I I actually, because of a car accident, couldn't work in construction anymore was looking for a job and walked in the front door of cruza and, like jim, started at the very front desk and worked my way up and learned everything I know about this industry and how long ago was that.
Speaker 3:That was 20 years ago that I started.
Speaker 1:Wow. So there's some decades behind the two of you at this point. But really organic and that's not a traditional story sometimes is where you kind of work your way from either front desk or just kind of a left-hand turn in a career to this.
Speaker 3:Almost every single person at Cruzeo, with a couple of specialist exceptions, started as a frontline employee, front desk or through our field apprenticeship program. Everyone in the company came up that way. Yeah, and it's great because it means we get to grow people ourselves. We've grown our own talent. We've got people that really understand different parts of a company that they've worked their way through, yeah, and it kind of gives everyone a better sense of the whole.
Speaker 1:I think that's amazing and you know I've only been here a couple months now as far as in the cubicle and been around it. But I did run into one thing I thought was very unique and I think it was just either a normal kind of like company-wide meeting, or you brought some food out there and I think you were on top of the truck talking, possibly, or somebody was up there, and you know I'm 57 and I've been around a lot of different. But I felt like you know there's one thing I noticed I think I told Brianna this is I've seen those before and I was coming in and out carrying TVs in and out for us, and I realized when the when the speeches kind of end and when the party sort of ended, and your team hung around, Cooler beer helps.
Speaker 1:It does, but that says a lot for some. It says it says a lot for that Cause I've been in those and a lot of people will do the FaceTime. They can't wait to get out of there, um, and it was really interesting to me cause I was literally here for like 45 minutes after it kind of ended, um, and they and they were free to go home at that point and a cooler beer does help all the time. But it definitely saw a sense of community around those picnic tables and can you speak to that? A little bit like the ethos here.
Speaker 2:We're a tight group. It's a real family environment. We have a small company 30, 40 employees and, yeah, everyone who works here is just really into it. What we do. You know our job as an independent ISP. You know our primary job is connecting people. People are very passionate about doing that. You know it's a lifeline service. Everybody needs internet for everything. These days it's no longer an auction, you got to have it. Our job as an independent ISP is to make sure everyone in our region has access to world-class, affordable internet and that everyone has an alternative to going with one of the big monolithic corporations who are our competitors. You know everybody doesn't want that around here, especially in a community like Santa Cruz. Our job's to offer an alternative for somebody who wants. When you pick up the phone, you're going to talk to someone in Santa Cruz and they're going to help you with your question.
Speaker 1:That's it.
Speaker 2:We're built on customer service. We're a customer service organization. You pick up the phone, talk to Comcast. They've made the decision. It's much more economically effective for us to be just cancel your account.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:We don't have that luxury even if we want it to be, just cancel your account, right, we don't have that luxury. Even if we want it to be like that, right, we're all about helping people in the community and the folks you know all the way the people building the network, to the CFO, to the marketing team, to the folks answering the phones. We just really take that seriously, but try to have some fun doing it at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you feel it right when you walk in the door. And then let's linger on that one part of it. I'm very interested in that because two parts of it I think when I first started working with you guys. It is nice to land on the website and see some local area codes to call. That's a big difference than the personal accounts I have right now. But that is a small thing you passed over. But a very large hurdle is that competition against the big guys, and I think you mentioned some parts of it. Um, but what about on the backend, like more on the technical end of it, like you know what's kind of coming next or how do you adapt to that from that standpoint? Or to frost? I'm sure if I was pull that mic a little bit closer, just kind of right up towards your mouth a little bit more and point it towards see if we can get that and right there, how's that? That's way better, yeah that's way better.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we talk about you know, our challenges competing with the big guys, and there's an old saying in tech that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Speaker 1:Huh.
Speaker 3:In our industry. Nobody ever got fired for signing up their company with AT&T or Comcast, because everyone knows the experience they're going to have. Right is the experience they're going to have. If it's bad it's like oh well, that's them. But if you're an IT guy and you sign your company up with the independent local company and something goes wrong, then it's your butt. But we have had really good experience building on that local reputation.
Speaker 3:We try to position ourselves as a company, not just to sign people up and make the most money from them, but we try to position ourselves as a trusted advisor. One of the things that I talk about is I would much rather have a happy non-customer than an unhappy customer. So we'll tell people you know we're not going to be your best option. You know we don't want to completely put ourselves out of business, but we're not going to try and get every customer at all costs. We want to be the best option for people. Get every customer at all costs.
Speaker 3:We want to be the best option for people and to that end we've got some really cool new technology we're playing with. We've been working in the wireless industry for 15 plus years now, I think, and the new generation of wireless point-to-point and multi-point technology is letting us deliver speeds at distances that we've just never seen before. We're able to deliver gigabit class speeds so multi-hundred megabits, all the way up to gigabit speeds with this new technology really quickly to deploy it. It's much less complex for our field crews to get it installed and also we're getting high speed connections at distances all the way out to like nine miles, where we used to install only at about two miles.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we're able to do much more, much more swiftly, um, and really kind of keep up with higher speed cable or fiber optic technology where we don't have the option to put those in. And then we're following it in with plans to build fiber and in specific areas where we can see government funding or grant opportunities to to back it up. So we're we're trying to kind of fire on all cylinders.
Speaker 1:It's exciting and I think we we talk about something that vibes all the time in in a.
Speaker 1:It's more of a consulting part we do on the marketing and branding with our clients that we consult for. And my thing is I always say it's like a sports analogy but you got to win your home games, it's my, no matter where your ambitions are, whatever sport you play, you know the rule is kind of try to go 500 on the road and win all your home games. And I think I see Cruiseio, because you know, honestly, cruiseio, I was born and raised here, I was around when it kind of came up and I think one of the things that happens, people are like they're stunned in a way sometimes that you're still here and you're still very successful at what you're doing, because it sure looks like a company that would have been washed over in those late 90sated and you expanded, you grew the company and that's hard to do, especially with a couple. You know two catastrophic economic kind of fails over a 20-year period in my estimation. You know bank bailout and then the one we've kind of been going through recently here. That's not easy.
Speaker 3:It's not. But on top of that, not only have we innovated and kept up, but we've kind of reinvented multiple times over those years. It's not just the two big ones. Cruzeo started in 1989 as a dial-in bulletin board system and then went from there to hosted email and then from there to dial-up service, and then you know there are plenty of companies that made millions selling dial-up internet service completely folded when DSL came Exactly, yeah, cruzeo reinvented and got on DSL and then, when the next technology came out, cruzeo jumped on that and then we started building wireless infrastructure and then, when we had the opportunity, we built fiber in downtown. And we've continued to grow and evolve and we're on our third or fourth generation of wireless technology at this point and every single time it feels like a little bit like oh god, we got to start all right again yeah, um, but with this industry and you can look at it as oh god, we've got to start all over again, or the way that we try to look at it is oh, wow, what an opportunity, what an opportunity.
Speaker 3:That's exact. We can do this new stuff, and I love that. You know there's been a couple of really big shifts, and the one that we're we're in the middle of right now I think is one of the biggest um. As for for me, at least on the technology side is what we can deliver and how exciting it is.
Speaker 2:You talk, brian, about the companies that didn't make it. And yeah, through that dot-com bust, most of the independent ISPs in the country went away.
Speaker 1:Hey same thing, james, and then start that kind of again there, a little bit Just kind of like right up on you, because I think for some reason you're a little far away.
Speaker 2:Just pull the whole thing toward there, you go, yeah you're totally right, brian, that a lot of independent ISPs over the last 20 years have gone away, either went out of business or got bought up. Cruzeo's always. We've always been looking ahead at what's the next technological breakthrough, but we've already also always managed ourselves pretty conservatively. You know, we haven't overstepped, we haven't looked for massive expansion and we never really looked at opportunities which were there. But we didn't take opportunities to get bought up by a bigger ISP because our mission was always to serve this region. So there was nothing in it for us to say let's sell out and go with the big corporation deal, because what we wanted to do was just stay grounded in Santa Cruz County. We now serve San Mateo County and Monterey County too, but this Central Coast area, that's what we're interested in making sure that the folks here have got access to independent options.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think one of the big moves is the building we're sitting in. I grew up here and you know my dad was a cop right across the street in the old police department and I was at the library and I'd run around here when it was the Sentinel, you know, looking for photos of sports games and things like that that we played in. This is a big move. This was a big move, and so can we talk about this workspace that we're in right now in this building? Absolutely, what year and what was the thought? Or do you have one more follow-up? Well, let me back up a little bit. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:Before we even moved into the building and kind of the. The root cause of it was in 08, uh, we had a fiber cut in Santa Cruz and it took the whole city offline for like two and a half days.
Speaker 2:You remember?
Speaker 3:that no, I was. I was out of town at that point, so it was yeah, the someone went into four manholes in Sunnyvale and with a still saw and cut through fiber.
Speaker 2:Uh, completely took Santa Cruz offline.
Speaker 3:No, completely took Santa Cruz offline. No 911 services, nothing. The whole county. That was a fun day.
Speaker 3:I was on call that night, yeah, and our on-call system was just. It used text message paging, and so my phone started going around 1.30 and just I kept getting the text message. It was for like 15 minutes solid. Everything went dark and we had to. We put someone in a car and had them drive South until we could find wifi to get online. Unreal Armageddon stuff. A little bit. It was a little bit, it was. It was crazy stuff.
Speaker 3:No one knew what was going on, yeah, couldn't call outside of the county, nothing, um, and so in the aftermath of that we realized well, nobody else is going to build redundant service into Santa Cruz, just out of the goodness of their heart. At&t Santa Cruz at the time was a backwater market. Comcast was not investing in the community and we were a third tier market at best. And so we went out and started looking at grant funding opportunities and UCSC were doing the same at the same time for connectivity, and we worked with a company and UCSC to build fiber into Santa Cruz and part of that at the same time. We needed somewhere to land it. We needed a building for the fiber to land.
Speaker 1:Tracking.
Speaker 3:We had all our data center equipment was over the hill and so we wanted to try and bring that more in-house and we were looking for a bigger office. So all these things kind of came together and we started looking around for a new home and we looked at a bunch of buildings and finally settled in a partnership with Ecology Action and a developer on this building. And it was old and tired. The building had been empty for some years. It was really cool inside. It was creepy, but it was really cool and it was perfect building.
Speaker 2:We just had to gut it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe for a movie set, not necessarily a tech company.
Speaker 3:But it had because of the printing press. It had a direct PG&E feed, which was important, right, and it was a big, solid building, which is the kind of thing you want to put a data center, yeah. And so we gutted it to the concrete shell and built it out to our own specs and, because we had brought massive bandwidth capacity into it and we put in the data center, we thought, okay, what else do we do with the space and how do we get this bandwidth to people? And it turns out that when you've got a lot of bandwidth and a lot of space, the best option is bring the people to the bandwidth.
Speaker 1:I love it, I love it. And that's the micro. What's the macro, James? As far as you have all that Is that about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it. I mean, then, that gave us our opportunity. We were already, you know, we used to be up at 903 Pacific at the other end of the mall for years. We had, uh, we were you know what we used to call them cyber cafe yeah, we had that was it stopped.
Speaker 2:Set out, it was a nice little part of our business. We'd have people come in and use those computers all the time. Yeah, um, so we were. We had a model in mind and, as russ said, yeah, if you can't get the internet to people, then bring them to the internet. Um, we had this great building. It's just a couldn't have been. Couldn't be a better story for us of you know, the old home of the old media yeah here comes the new media company coming in with the new connectivity, everything about it just just great.
Speaker 2:This the building was sitting empty. I'm sure you you remember this little block of town was kind of dead to the world. We really brought some new life in here and, yeah, as soon as we opened the doors, started bringing people in, selling offices and selling co-working, we were blown away by the demand that we saw it was immediately successful. We took over a bigger portion of the building pretty much immediately and built out the other offices and, yes, since then it's been all about.
Speaker 2:We were always wanted to be a hub for the community, whether that be online or in real life. You know we had the homepage of the Cruzeo has always had the news headlines and the surfing and the weather. Now we've really had a place we could bring people and do events, bring people together. But also, as all of our members are experiencing now, there's a place you can come as a freelancer, a couple of hundred bucks a month, you can set up and you've got access to world-class internet meeting rooms. You can hook up with the lawyer next door to do your ip work or you need a graphic designer or website. It's all here in-house. Bring your clients in the front door, our guys will meet them.
Speaker 1:They don't need to know you don't own the whole building it doesn't feel like that, it's just and you got the, you got all these rooms. I'll tell you even an outside perspective, as we hired our first intern of a series of like three or four we're going to hire as part of this partnership, given, you know, you know giving them some space down here. So there's a little bit extra and he was psyched on this space. He was the ability he's up at UCSC right now, he's a senior the ability to come down here on this partnership and kind of work in this sort of like energy down here. You know, that's a 21-year-old's perspective of this place. You know, kind of feeling super excited and then to kind of tie this around a little bit I want to make sure I get back to it because I think you touched on it.
Speaker 1:There is that one of the things that we, two and a half years ago, we started with Vibes is you know, there's a million different things we kind of like talk about it conscious capitalism, there's a bunch of different names for that sort of ethos where you kind of have community in mind at the same time you're building a practical business model. You kind of have community in mind at the same time you're building a practical business model, and I think Cruiseio is a master of that, you know, even from sort of like the branding to the continued kind of like stake in the community. And I'll give you both a couple of minutes here to talk about not so much the Cruiseio, the business hat, just like maybe flip it around like you're just a human that lives in this city that like on the outside, look in at, want a local option, an independent option.
Speaker 2:And you know me as a resident looking in. That's what I want too. I'm happy that this service exists in the area that I live and we have access to an internet service provider of cruise AO size who can connect businesses, enterprises, homes, everything up to the Warriors Arena the county building we can do whatever's needed for the community.
Speaker 2:So having that as an option in the community, I think people in Santa Cruz County especially just really value that and in another area it would have easily that we wouldn't have made it, because people just don't see that same value Goes back again to you talked about the energy when we have a staff meeting, the same thing that I think our staff all have bought into the fact that, yes, we're a business. Yes, of course you know I work in the Russ does all of the cool stuff. I work, you know, building the spreadsheets and making sure we pay the bills. I know we need to pay the bills. We're a business. We got to make money.
Speaker 2:But that's not the be all and end all of what we do. We're here as a part of the community and we've been here so long now. We know everybody. Things can click into place very quickly. Our equal access program that we started in the pandemic, that came together with a couple of phone calls. You know we've been here so long. The head of the county office of education, he knows he can just pick up the phone and call us. We need more help. Frost knows the ED at the community foundation, we pick up the phone, next thing you know we're hooking up hundreds and hundreds of families and kids with low-cost internet. Really not even by doing anything special, just by being a part of the community and knowing people and knowing that we're a part of it and we can just make those connections and things come in together.
Speaker 1:It's a huge thing. The access to information like that is an absolute gift. And it's very hard because that's the type of work you do, where you know we call it like humblebrag or whatever. It is very hard to talk about yourself in that context because you're doing it for that genuine reason. But that's you know. Even talking to Brianna back when we first started, that's one of the narratives we want to kind of it's easier for somebody else to either write or talk about a narrative like that, because that is a story that needs to be told, not just to kind of elevate a brand. It has its purpose, but mostly for people that are underserved to know that's out there, because it's you know. The problem with being underserved, especially with access to information, is you don't know that it's available to you. It's Twitch 22. So Frost, back at you. As far as the emotional kind of side of it, the human side of it, yeah, there's two things I'd want to touch on.
Speaker 3:Number one for me. James and I are both immigrants and you know I have been so lucky to land in Santa Cruz. I've lived in multiple countries, I've been all over the place. My parents kind of dragged us around a lot as kids, but Santa Cruz, for me, is the first place that I've ever felt like oh, this, this is home, this is where I want to be, and for all that I've gotten from this community, I've been incredibly lucky to live in this incredibly beautiful place. The weather here is better than pretty much anywhere Like it's just heaven.
Speaker 3:For me, this is exactly where I want to be. It's got one. It's definitely better than stone, um, but for me my attitude is to live here and enjoy Santa Cruz and be able to take advantage of everything that is here, and not be.
Speaker 3:at least try to give back and contribute back to that community would just be a jerk move, you know yeah like yeah, it doesn't take a lot of logic for me to think obviously I want a nice job, I want to be able to live comfortably, but I want to do something that lets me build back into this community, build back into this region.
Speaker 3:Um, and you know james touched on the equal access stuff and that's a that's a huge part of that being able to move quickly and get things done that can contribute back to the community and serve low-income households and the farmworker communities, but also be able to serve everyone else.
Speaker 3:And you know James talked about knowing everyone in the community, and for me it comes down to this expression that you make your own luck. Right, and the way I try to approach this is maybe we're not going to build something with this one person next week or we're not going to build on this building, but I want to know them, I want to be in the conversation and when ideas and opportunities come up, I I want us as a company and me as an individual to be in a position to take advantage of those opportunities. You make your own luck, you get ready so that when something comes up, you can jump on it and you can be effective with it. And so from the emotional side. For me it's about building a company, that is, a staff that are ready to take advantage of opportunities.
Speaker 3:You know, we don't rest on our laurels, we don't sit back and go, hey, we've done this thing and now we're, we're set and we're just going to do this for the next 10 years, Like, cause, the next 10 years we don't know what they're going to have. We want to be in a position where, when something new lands on the scene or some new opportunity happens, or you know, heaven forbid, the next pandemic or whatever we're ready to react to it. We're ready to go out and do good, awesome technology and bring great connectivity here. So that's holistically. That's kind of the way that I approach pretty much everything we do and it informs even now, at least for me, subconsciously it informs the way that I approach almost everything is how are we creating capacity and how are we building the next opportunity?
Speaker 1:That's really good stuff and I think that's why we align on ethos. Even the first few meetings with Bjorn, it's like, oh, there's something here. It's more than just a workspace and, um, you know, internet and things like that. And then we'll wrap this up on this uh podcast to be named later by Brianna. Um, you know, hopefully you're getting some ideas over there. We're going, zach thing, I talked to you at least I talked to James about it.
Speaker 1:Frost, the idea of this is to basically probably shorter than this, but this is a good introduction to the series. But really talk to you know, whoever's willing in this entire building to have this kind of a sit down and conversation, because I think this thing's it's easy on my part that red light goes on and then people are people and there's going to be a story and a conversation in every. You know we do, but from your perspectives individually. We'll start with you, frost, and go back to James One, I guess. Do you like this concept? And what can we do with this little kind of like this little 10, 15 minute conversations in here?
Speaker 3:I love it because I think you get 30 people through here. You're going to get 30 different background stories. One of the things I love so much about santa cruz is that you can you have people that were born and grew up here. You've got people that landed here from other countries, from other states, from all over the place. It's a university town, it's a beach town. We're now, you know, so adjacent to silicon valley that you've got tech migrants. Yeah, um, that variety of stories is so rich, um and so interesting and I think you you going to get some really cool stuff out of it, just from the people that I know around the space.
Speaker 1:Right on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I can vouch for the fact. We have some very interesting folks working out of here who'd be more than happy to tell their story. Now we sit down and talk to them, whether it be about a specific thing that's happening or just about their business, and we learn all about what they're doing. It's fantastic that you can. More people can hear their stories and more people can hear hey, what sounds like a pretty cool place. Maybe I could come down there and join that community, set my business. So, yeah, whatever my venture is down there, it seems like that's a cool group of people. Maybe I'd be a good fit. You know, we've got plenty of room. Come one, come all. We'd love to expand the community, yeah, and so, yeah, I think it's a great idea, great concept, and happy to be kicking it off with you.