Why CVIA. Why Now.

The Coachella Valley has always had builders. What it has never had is a room big enough for all of them.

I've now lived in this Valley long enough to see the pattern. A brilliant entrepreneur launches something remarkable in Palm Springs. A civic leader in Indio reimagines how their city serves its residents. A young founder in Cathedral City builds a company that should be getting attention from investors across the state — but nobody outside a few miles knows it exists.

The Valley spans 40 miles from Palm Springs to Coachella. Forty miles of talent, ingenuity, and ambition — and for too long, the people doing the most interesting things in it have been largely invisible to each other.

That's why we built CVIA.

A lesson from CV Link

Think about what CV Link set out to do. A 40-mile transportation corridor connecting cities, neighborhoods, parks, and people — trail by trail, city by city. One of the most significant infrastructure projects in the Valley’s history.

Seven cities said yes. Two opted out. And those gaps — the breaks in what should have been a seamless connection — have been felt. I've heard it from residents across the Valley: the missing links changed where they ride, where they spend their time, and yes, where they spend their money. Short-term decisions with long-term consequences.

CVIA draws the same lesson — not as a warning, but as a blueprint. The cities that choose to participate in a unified regional vision don’t just benefit themselves. They strengthen the entire ecosystem. And the ones that don’t — they feel that absence too.

We’re asking all nine cities to say yes. Not to a trail — but to a conversation.

What happens when you put the right people in a room

I’ve spent thirty years building things — startups, programs, partnerships — across industries and coasts. The one constant I keep coming back to: the best ideas don’t come from presentations. They come from the conversation that happens after.

When a 28-year-old founder hears how a 55-year-old operator reinvented their business model, something shifts. When a civic leader from one city sits next to an entrepreneur from another and discovers they’re solving the same problem from different angles — that’s where the Valley’s next chapter gets written.

CVIA is deliberately ageless, raceless, and borderless. There is no prototype for who belongs in this room. Not a specific industry, not a specific zip code, not a specific stage of life or career. The 22-year-old and the 65-year-old. The founder and the funder. The artist and the engineer. The civic servant and the serial entrepreneur. All nine cities. Every background. One room.

Inclusion isn’t a tagline here. It’s the architecture.

If You Can See It Here, You Can Be It Here

This is the belief at the center of everything we’re building. The young person in Coachella who watches someone who looks like them take a stage and tell their story — that person goes home changed. Maybe not that night. Maybe not that year. But the seed is planted. And from that seed, a business gets built. A community gets stronger. A region becomes something it wasn’t before.

That’s the long game. And it starts on May 26.

May 26 only works if you’re in the room

May 26 only works if the right people are in the room. Not just because of what they bring — but because of what they need. What this Valley needs. Come tell us.

The feedback, the conversations, the connections made that night are what turn a Pilot into a platform. Every person who walks through that door is a co-author of what CVIA becomes. The room shapes the vision. The vision shapes the next event. The next event shapes a city. And nine cities, connected, shape a region.

We’re not looking for an audience. We’re looking for builders.

The future is a question

The Pilot is not a proclamation. It’s a question: what is this Valley ready for?

City by city, we’ll take this platform across all nine. Each event anchored by local voices, local venues, local stories. Each one building on the last. Over time, CVIA becomes the place where the Valley’s next generation of builders first sees what’s possible here — where new ideas are born not from imported inspiration but from the local hero on stage two cities over who did something remarkable and made it look possible.

We’re not the first people to believe in this Valley. But we intend to build the infrastructure that makes that belief visible, repeatable, and impossible to ignore.

The answer shapes everything that follows. Come help us find it.