Hi — I’m Eric.

Inside the machinery, and outside it

During the drought, while I served on the St. Helena City Council, I ran the numbers on our reservoir (the city’s primary water supply). At the rate we were drawing it down, it was obvious we could run dry. I took that forecast to my colleagues, and we declared a water emergency five days later. Most of what I know about public life is in that story. Numbers come first. They define constraints and feasibility, and somebody has to say them out loud.

Before public office I spent more than thirty years building capability. I ran operations for two national real estate investment firms, helped lead large-scale change inside a global financial company, brought troubled properties back to health, and taught corporate finance to college students. I watched a lot of good ideas die somewhere between the spreadsheet and the shovel. Good ideas were rarely the problem. They attract capital and talent. The problem was usually the process.

Some of the perspective in my essays comes from farther afield. As a boy I helped my grandfather haul truckloads of citrus from his Central Valley ranch to orphanages in Mexico. I saw how much need there is, and how little it takes to lift a lot of people. In my twenties I sailed across the Pacific, a year at sea, watching each island solve the basic business of life a little differently from the last. Later I rode a motorcycle from San Francisco to the Arctic Ocean. Twice. Like the islands, every remote town along the way had its own way of building a life that fit the place.

I’d like California to build that way again, around what its people actually need.

Why I bother

My family’s California story reaches back seven 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 healthy, smiling, unstoppable little grandson of mine named Pearce, now one year old. He is the seventh 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 learned 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.