Santa Barbara-based serial founder, Craig Harris, is now onto his third company over the past two decades, although his entrepreneurial roots extend much further. FoundedSB had the chance to talk startups with Craig, and what resulted were some fascinating insights and lessons for any entrepreneur. According to him, building a company is not for most people: coming down to a lack of appetite for the necessary risk. He also discusses how the most exciting companies are built by domain experts: building a product around a pain point they felt themselves. But let's start with a little background first.

Craig's Career

Craig joined the peace corps after graduating from UCSB in 1994 and spent 27 months helping with reforestation in remote Paraguay (even becoming fluent Guaraní!). Immediately afterwards, he convinced several of his colleagues to stay an extra 3 months and give $5,400 each (their entire 27-month bonus) to help start an 100-acre demonstration farm. He noticed a gap between the knowledge of American / foreign agroforestry specialists and their ability to share it with the people of Paraguay due to a language gap: so he developed a farmer-to-farmer system for educating farmers on sustainable farming practices. The bet paid off as he was eventually able to secure a $1M grant and turn the demonstration farm into a major success: it's still in operation today!

Afterwards, in 1999, he moved back to Santa Barbara and found a position as a director at a non-profit in the area, and another one just a few years later. For the next seven years of his life, he helped coordinate fundraising efforts for both organizations. But it was during this time that he began formulating the idea for what would eventually become his first company: NOZA, Inc.

Taking some of his frustration with finding prospects for fundraising at the non-profits, in 2006, Craig began working on a tool to make finding fundraising leads easier. Using public records, he started NOZA, Inc. by manually scraping data and entering it into an excel sheet. After hitting the roughly 66,000 row limit (at the time), he realized he should probably recruit some help. So he called up an IT firm, located in San Luis Obispo, called Innovative Concepts, Inc.. Led by Lonny Rollins, the firm got to work developing Craig's idea for a database of donations to non-profits that would be packaged in highly structured and indexed ways. The project became such a success that Lonny became the CTO at NOZA and some of the developers also joined the team. Within just five years, the company was acquired by Blackbaud.

After the Blackbaud deal, Craig took the weekend off.

But on that next Monday, he got to work again and founded his second company: HG Insights (formerly HG Data). HG offers go-to-market intelligence for B2B companies (essentially, they compile what tools & platforms thousands of companies are using and sell that data to the companies selling those tools). Recruiting a great team and getting some early funding via angel investors, Craig scaled HG Insights to a valuation of over $75M during his decade-long tenure.

In January of 2021, Craig left HG Insights after a private exit. This time, he decided to take a real break and announced his retirement. But retirement didn't last long, as in August, he began launching his third (and current) startup: BuyerCaddy. When asked why, Craig stated, "the most honest answer is like, I just had time on my hands and I was bored." BuyerCaddy is similar to HG Insights in terms of the data they collect, but instead package it as a tech-stack management platform and tool for procurement teams at companies.

After all this time building companies, Craig has a lot of wisdom to share. Below, he talks about what it takes to build a company, why he chose Santa Barbara, and traits the best entrepreneurs hold.

Do You Have What It Takes?

When discussing some of the qualifications he believes make a successful entrepreneur, Craig discussed needing a tolerance for risk. Because of this, he doesn't think most people can be successful founders, but instead, could be much better fitted as early employees once the venture has been 'de-risked' enough.

According to Craig, "I think there are a lot of people who want to be founders of companies [but] don't have the risk appetite for it. I've met a lot of folks where I've heard the term 'wantrepreneur', like, they want to be an entrepreneur but they're not willing to take the risk that you need to take. And when I say risk, usually it's something like quitting a perfectly great job to go pursue starting your own company, going from having income to not having income."

"For me, when I started my first company, we owned a small home in Goleta. Me and my wife were both just kind of grinding to make those mortgage payments. We had a little equity in the house, so we pulled the equity. We went from having equity in the house to very little, but we took that cash and that paid the bills while we built the business from the ground up, starting very small. But anyways, there's always some kind of risk story there: quitting a job, mortgaging the house, moving to a new city, putting debt on your credit card, borrowing money, whatever it might be. And it's not for everyone. It's not for most people."

However, Craig has met some incredible co-founders out there that didn't have it in them to take that financial risk, but were "more than incredible" very early employees willing to come in once it was de-risked (meaning they could be paid a salary).

It's an interesting perspective to hear from Craig, where one could be very entrepreneurial, but yet not be suited to be an entrepreneur because of their lack of risk tolerance. Maybe being an entrepreneur isn't about having all the right skills, but instead taking a leap of faith and having self-belief.

Importance of Domain Expertise

Craig remarks, "I'm not a big fan of someone or a group of people just getting together [and saying] "let's come up with an idea. Let's start a company." I know a lot of companies are probably started that way. And I'm sure many of them are successful, but for me, the more interesting stories about company formations are when someone or a group of people are actually domain experts in something."

Instead of thinking "I want to start a company", Craig argues the entrepreneurial mindset should stem from "you already have a job in a certain industry and are doing the same thing all day, every day. And, and you're sitting there going: "God, this is so stupid." How come nobody's done it this way? That would be so much more efficient for our team. And that's the moment, right? Like when you think about it … you're making something and there's millions of people like you that also probably think that the process is stupid or broken or could be improved."

Craig has put this perspective into action with several of his companies. When he founded NOZA, it was built for professional fundraisers which is exactly what he had been before. It was while working for the non-profits that Craig "was that person who was like, oh my God, this process of trying to find the next donors that are going to care about our mission and give us money to support it. That process is just kind of broken and archaic." And so, he built NOZA to solve that problem.

Location Matters

Has Santa Barbara made a difference to Craig when building companies? His response is "heck yeah."

"I can't imagine having not built these businesses here in Santa Barbara. It has made a huge difference in my quality of life and in the quality of life of my family, given our lifestyle."

Craig moved here in 1990 for college, and over 35 years later, he's still here. The only trouble Craig mentioned he experienced when building a company in SB was, "in 2008 or 2009, I was trying to raise a venture capital round (a little series A for NOZA). And most of the investors I spoke to were in the Bay area and they were uninterested in funding a company in Santa Barbara. They thought that if we wanted to be relevant, we needed to be in Palo Alto or San Francisco … But anyways, since that time we've had a super incredible ecosystem of companies be built here in Santa Barbara area."

Craig went on to discuss many of the great companies built here in Santa Barbara over the years, including Software.com, Expertcity, Procore, and many others. Venture capital firms seem to be a lot more willing to invest in Santa Barbara nowadays as well, with nearly $300M of VC money flowing into the area in 2025 (up 16% from the year before). So, this funding difficulty likely would not happen to Craig if he were building in SB today.

Takeaways

Craig's story contains some lessons for aspiring or current entrepreneurs. First, be honest about risk. How much are you willing to take? Whether it's putting up equity from your house, quitting a great job, or taking on debt, nearly every founder's story involves this type of risk. If it's not for you, that's perfectly okay. There are so many places in startups beyond just being a founder. Secondly, If you’re deep in an industry and thinking “there has to be a better way,” you could be in a really great spot to start a company. The strongest ideas tend to come from lived experience.

Finally, location matters. Craig’s early struggle to raise venture capital in Santa Barbara looks very different today, with venture capital actively investing hundreds of millions into startups here. For founders who want to build something meaningful without giving up the beach-and-outdoors lifestyle, Santa Barbara could be the spot (read more about why).

We want to thank Craig for his time meeting with FoundedSB. If you are interested what he is doing, you can check out his LinkedIn here. And if you found this article helpful, consider joining FoundedSB's free mailing list to get exclusive access to weekly founder interviews, just like this one. Our mission is to provide high quality coverage of startups and founders in Santa Barbara.