Ryan Sebastian had been a transportation planner for about four years before he and his wife started to venture into the street food scene.
The couple was expecting their first child and naively, Sebastian notes, thought starting a food truck would give them more flexibility in their schedules. Since then, the San Jose-based entrepreneur has made a name for himself as a placemaker in Silicon Valley’s capital city.
His creative food-based ventures range from karaoke ice cream truck Treatbot to the Taco Festival of Innovation to Moveable Feast, which is a network of local food trucks.
Q: What’s been your journey since starting your first food truck?
A: We started Treatbot, the karaoke ice cream truck, back in 2010. We started doing events and that’s where Moveable Feast came from. You can either choose to do something really focused or you can try to do something wide scale. I think in any regard you have to aim high and think of what are your ultimate goals. One of the things we’ve really thought through is how do you create a sense of community in a place that sometimes doesn’t have a strong sense of one. We just thought it was really important to create new opportunities for connection. You’re running a food truck, how much can you do with that? But as we looked, there’s a huge need for opportunities for people to connect. So we’ve approached it as if you believe people are better together than they are apart, how do you create those opportunities? We just think there’s a huge demand for it so we just kept looking for ways to do that.
We eventually acquired San Jose Made from a friend of mine and we’ve grown it significantly since. We’ve been able to connect people who make their own things to people who want to purchase local and purchase things made by someone they actually know. Now we provide a lot of services to much larger entities to provide a connection. We’ve been a fairly longtime provider of programming events and marketing for the San Jose Flea Market. We’re working on the county fair with the fairgrounds amongst other events that they’re doing on-site. This has been rewarding doing this type of work.
Q: What does the term placemaking mean to you?
A: There’s this term called creative placemaking and it’s an idea that you can use creative low-cost ways that create a sense of place. It is not a generic space but actually reflects the value and culture of the people there. If you work for a typical city you say, ‘we need places for people to hang out, let’s spend $100 million on a new park.’ That’s fine, we need those investments, beautiful parks like Central Park are an example of that, but there are ways to do that with what you already have without spending a fortune. My frustration with the planning world is that you’re ultimately making recommendations. You write a lot of reports that no one reads and it rarely leads to an outcome that people really care and love. Most places that people loved were built before modern planning even existed.
Q: How would you classify your business?
A: We work with what is called microenterprise. Microenterprises are businesses between one to nine employees and we realize that’s a hugely underserved market. We found out there’s a huge demand for regular people to support those things, to be in places where microentrepreneurs are around and it’s not being served. One of the reasons why there are huge retail vacancies everywhere is because they are only looking for your AAA-rated national tenants, they’re not looking for the next wave of people trying to create a business.
Q: Out of all your different ventures, what’s been your favorite?
A: I still love events. I still love when people show up and that’s maybe not so specific, but I just think we spend way too much time on screens. To see people being together in places enjoying themselves is just one of the best feelings I could have in this line of work.
RYAN SEBASTIAN PROFILE
Company: Moveable Inc.
Role: Principal and Founder
Age: 44
Birthplace: San Jose
Current City: San Jose
Education: William C. Overfelt High School, Bachelor of Science in Planning & Real Estate Development, University of Southern California
FIVE THINGS ABOUT RYAN SEBASTIAN
- He cuts his own hair.
- He’s a Sunday School teacher.
- He plays doubles pickleball with his 13-year-old son Thomas at Evergreen Valley College.
- He’s been happily married for 16 years to his wife, Christine Sebastian.
- He enjoys mentoring entrepreneurs.
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