Hi — I’m Eric.

A life inside — and occasionally outside — the machinery

I’ve spent much of my working life inside the institutions that turn ideas into physical and economic reality. For forty years I worked in finance, real estate, construction management, communications and organizational change. I’ve served on boards helping people with mental illness, and on boards resolving regional water issues. I helped lead large-scale change inside a global financial services company, directed operations at two national real estate investment management firms, managed troubled communities back to health, and taught corporate finance and investing to the next generation. I served four years in local government on the St. Helena City Council, including as Vice Mayor, and left public office at the end of 2024.

I’ve watched decisions move from spreadsheets and conference rooms into budgets, buildings, streets and families’ kitchens. All of it taught me that big ideas matter — but capital, execution and trust determine whether anything actually gets built.

I have also spent a fair amount of my life outside the usual lines. As a boy I helped my grandfather haul truckloads of citrus from his Central Valley ranch down to orphanages in Mexico. In my twenties I sailed across the Pacific — a year barefoot at the helm, counting shooting stars and watching how each island community solves the basic business of human life a little differently from the last. Later I rode a motorcycle from San Francisco to the Arctic Ocean. Twice.

My professional experience gave me some tools. The less conventional parts of my life gave me a different pair of glasses.

Together they taught me that anything we can imagine, we can build. They taught me to be wary of institutions that present limitations as permanent laws of nature. And they taught me that some of the ideas dismissed as impractical, audacious or even crazy are simply waiting for the right alignment of technology, capital, talent and nerve.

Why I bother

My family’s California story reaches back eight generations — since before the Americans arrived. We were here through the Mexican period and through statehood, and we helped enable the enormous transformations that followed. Today the story continues through a fat, smiling, frequently slobbering little grandson of mine named Pearce, not yet a year old. He is the eighth generation of our family to call California home.

I love that boy more than I can fit onto a page. I worry about the land he will inherit. Will he grow up in a state capable of audacious undertakings? Will there be room for him to build a life here — whatever life he dreams about?

Those questions make this work personal. I’m not writing to win tonight’s argument or chase the outrage of the day. I’ve spent enough time on this rock to know that good ideas have longer lives than political cycles. They move through conversations, settle into unexpected places, and sometimes wait years for circumstances to catch up with them. I want these ideas in circulation while California decides what kind of future it will build.

The book

This publication is also my public workshop for a forthcoming book, The Nerve to Build: From Scarcity to Abundance in the Age of AI — a blueprint for California’s renewal. Readers can contribute to the arguments in real time by challenging, reframing and expanding the conversation.

So much of our lives comes down to the attitude we decide to carry each morning when we awaken. It is something we choose. California’s future is exactly the same. It is something we choose, finance and build.

Let’s recover the nerve and build again.

Reach me directly at eric@nervetobuild.com.