SANTA CRUZ >> With competitors nipping at his heels, inventor JoeBen Bevirt needs to hire 100 more engineers to join his team of 120 in Bonny Doon designing and building an air taxi, which he calls “the next generation of transportation.”

Bevirt, 44, who started Joby Aviationin Bonny Doon in 2009, put out a call for talent last week, speaking to 250 people at the second Titans of Tech night presented by Santa Cruz Works at the Dream Inn.

Growing up in the towering redwoods and next to the Pacific Ocean “gave me the audacity as a little kid to dream big,” he said. “This place is near and dear to many of us.”

Born and raised in Santa Cruz, he is one of four bidders seeking county approval to use part of the 104-acre shuttered Cemex cement plant property on the coast in Davenport.

The air taxi is not his first venture.

He invented the top-selling GorillaPod camera tripod while a student at Stanford, sold a robotics startup to Agilent in Silicon Valley, then put his energy into airborne wind turbines, a project acquired by Google X before focusing his attention on solving traffic.

His team is currently based at a 100-acre limestone quarry, but recently Bevirt has kept many of the details under wraps.

A writer for Ubergizmo in 2015 said Joby’s concept for a two-seater aircraft with a dozen tilting electric propellers was “a sight to behold.”

That concept graces the home page of Joby Aviation along with the goal to liberate humankind from the automobile with electric personal aircraft.

Bevirt was among 2,000 innovators presenting at the 2016 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics exposition, according to the Joby Aviation website, but little news has been posted since then.

A 42-second video illustrates how the craft is supposed to work, but there are no photos or videos of an actual aircraft in flight.

NINE MINUTES

More details emerged in December when Bevirt spoke to 200 people in Davenport at a county-organized meeting to share his vision for the property.

He showed a map of the San Francisco Bay Area, contending his air taxis would fly people — 28 miles as the crow flies — from 450 Bryant St. in Palo Alto to Pier 50B in San Francisco in nine minutes and beat the price of an uberX private car, currently $59.

Last week, Bevirt said he needs software engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers and people good at building component parts.

“With electric propulsion, aircraft can take off and land like helicopters but be much more quiet and much faster,” he said. “They take off and land vertically and fly like an airplane on a wing. Our goal is to save a billion people an hour a day.”

Only two days earlier, German startup Lilium, which flew a two-seat vertical-takeoff-and-landing prototype in Munich, won the 2018 “early stage company of the year” award from the Global CleanTech group.

“I am excited the rest of the tech community has woken up to the vision that was born here in Santa Cruz and now is racing to catch up with us,” Bevirt said.

He didn’t mention that the Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base near the Mojave Desert is testing five cruise motors for an all-electric plane, designed and built by Joby Aviation. NASA made the announcement a week ago.

Afterward, Bevirt was surrounded by attendees with questions about his aircraft and the jobs available.

County supervisor Ryan Coonerty, who represents Bonny Doon and Davenport, was not in the audience, but later he said, “It is exciting to have a growing cutting-edge green technology company like Joby Aviation in our county providing good jobs.”

He added, “I’m committed to doing what we can to keep those jobs in the community in a way that works for the company and works for the community.”

SUPERHEROES

“You are our superheroes,” Bonnie Lipscomb, the city’s economic development director, told the tech workers, explaining that each tech job creates five professional and service jobs.

She has three goals: Fill vacant downtown office space, build places for tech workers to live and make City Hall business-friendly.

“Santa Cruz is really turning the corner,” said LeBaron Meyers, who moved to Santa Cruz from San Francisco and has been attending tech meetups for the past year, impressed by the collaboration she sees. “People want each other to succeed.”

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• Santa Cruz New Tech MeetUp: Meetup founded by Doug Erickson will celebrate its 10th anniversary at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Cocoanut Grove.

•Studio Holladay: Ted Holladay will produce a coffee-table book for the 150th anniversary of Watsonville’s Martinelli & Co.