Why Monterey · A 5-minute manifesto
This coast has been a technology story since before California was California. Every chapter looks the same: someone pointed the most advanced tools of their era at a hard, unsexy, physical problem — and the people who lived here got better at what they already did.
We're in the opening pages of another one of those chapters. Maybe the biggest yet.
The arc so far
Monterey was founded in 1770 as the capital of Alta California — a Presidio on a bluff, a port, and a town of people who built things with their hands because that's what the place demanded. Two hundred and fifty-five years later, the geography is the same. The work is still real. And almost every technology wave in American history has swept through here first.
Before Silicon Valley existed as a concept, Monterey Bay was already a technology story. Chapter by chapter, the pattern repeats: a hard physical problem shows up, someone points the most advanced tools of the era directly at it, and the quality of life for the people who live here goes up a notch.
Alta California's first capital. A town founded on the premise that real people doing real work is how you build a place worth living in. Also the beginning of a thread of physical, deliberate work that runs through every chapter after it.
Portuguese whalers from the Azores set up at Point Lobos. Lookouts on Whalers Knoll raised signal flags when spouts appeared. Captain Thomas Welcome Roys' rocket harpoon was the era's bleeding-edge tool, applied directly to one of the hardest physical jobs on the coast. The wave ended when kerosene killed whale oil — Monterey's first technology-displacement event, and a useful lesson about how fast these chapters turn.
Norwegian engineer Knut Hovden invented the Fish Hopper (underwater steel pipes that sucked sardines directly from boats into the cannery), automated cutting machines, the first mechanical dryers on the West Coast, and chain-driven conveyor systems. At peak, 30+ canneries lined Ocean View Avenue. Blue-collar work made 10x more productive by ruthless engineering. A single stretch of shoreline became the "Sardine Capital of the World" because someone decided the machinery was the story.
The Naval Postgraduate School relocated to Monterey and moved into what had been the era's most technologically advanced resort — telephones in every room, indoor plumbing, heated swimming pools across 7,000 acres. Crocker's leisure palace became a defense research campus. Today that same campus trains officers in AI, cybersecurity, and autonomous systems. Same building. Same mission: graduate-level technical education for people who will do real operational work.
Seymour Cray built the CDC 1604 and shipped serial number one to the Naval Postgraduate School. Monterey was the world's first supercomputer customer. A coastal town with a Spanish-era Presidio on a bluff became the loading dock where modern computing began. That's not a metaphor — that's a receipt.
The founding principle I think about constantly: "Send instruments to sea, not people. Return information, not samples." MBARI built the world's first deep-sea research platform that was autonomous and data-driven from the start. The ROV Ventana has now completed 4,500+ dives into Monterey Canyon and discovered 225+ previously unknown species — all driven by the philosophy that the right tool sent to the right place returns more than any crew ever could.
“Send instruments to sea, not people.
Return information, not samples.”— David Packard, MBARI founding principle
Chapter VII · 1995 – 2020
For the first time in the peninsula's 175-year technology story, a wave swept through and the quality of life for the people who actually lived here went down. I think about this one a lot.
Every chapter before this one had the same shape: new tools showed up, local operators figured out how to use them, and the coast got stronger. Whalers got more efficient. Canneries scaled. The Navy educated people who would run real operations. MBARI sent instruments into the canyon.
Then the internet arrived — and for the first time, the wave hit Monterey from the wrong side. The new tools were in San Francisco. The leverage sat with whoever built the platform, not whoever used it. And the operators on this coast — the bakers, the hoteliers, the restaurant owners, the wedding planners — became the product, not the beneficiaries.
Second homes became rentals. Long-term tenants got priced out. The independent shops that depended on residents lost their foot traffic. Cannery Row became a backdrop for tourists instead of a neighborhood for residents.
Every menu, every dining room, every chef got flattened into a 1-to-5 scale. The restaurants that learned to game the reviews won. The restaurants that were actually great — the ones that had earned 30 years of local trust — competed on the same axis as the ones that opened last year.
Booking.com, Expedia, and their cousins inserted themselves between the visitor and the inn. The family-owned places paid 20–30% commission to reach customers who used to come through word of mouth. Some made it. Many didn't.
Note what every one of those platforms has in common. They aren't tools operators own. They're rental agreements with someone else's software, paid for with a percentage of your business. The operator on the ground got less leverage, not more. The owner sitting in San Francisco or Seattle or Amsterdam got all of it.
This is what it looks like when a technology wave happens to a place instead of from it.
Chapter VIII · 2025 – ?
For the first time since 1995, the leverage is pointed back at the operator. The question is whether we use it.
Here's the part nobody in my industry likes to say out loud: the real winners of this wave are going to be the people already close to the work. Not the platform builders. Not the enterprises. Not the venture-funded megaphones. The people who already know how to bake, how to host, how to pour, how to plumb, how to cater, how to run a cinema on a Tuesday night.
Because for the first time in a generation, you can ship enterprise-grade software with a laptop and a folder. The tools that used to belong to companies with a hundred engineers now run on a $20 subscription and a markdown file. The only thing the platforms had that the operators didn't was leverage. AI takes that asymmetry away.
Enterprises are too slow to use it. Too political. Too committed to the old stack. The people who can turn this technology into an unfair advantage this year are the ones close enough to the work to feel what it changes. They can move this week. An enterprise can't move this year.
Platform power, routed through San Francisco and Amsterdam. Operators paid a commission to reach their own customers. Every flat rating system ground the specific reasons people cared about specific places into generic stars. The coast felt it.
Tools that run on the operator's laptop, in the operator's voice, on the operator's rules. A baker can now ship a customer experience that Marriott couldn't have afforded in 2019. The leverage lands with whoever gets closest to the work and moves first.
The thesis, in one line
That's the entire point of Bearing. Not another platform that routes around the operators. Tools the operators own, in a folder they control, in their voice, on their rules — built in Monterey because this coast has been doing exactly this for 255 years, and I don't see any reason to stop now.
Talk to Bearing's live concierge agent — built on the same kind of folder I'd build for your business, in my voice. Or start the free 7 Steps of AI and build your first folder yourself.