Why I built this

In 2004 I was living in Venice Beach — skating, surfing, editing movie trailers by day. There was graffiti on a wall near the boardwalk that said LOCALS ONLY.

It wasn't friendly. It meant stay off our wave. But it stuck with me for twenty years, because underneath the hostility was something I recognized: a place worth protecting, and people who felt like it was slipping away from them.

I spent two decades in Los Angeles cutting trailers — Spider-Man, Casino Royale, Django Unchained, The Purge — and co-founded a creative agency that made them for the studios. Then I moved my family to Park City.

In 2021 I bought a vacation-rental management company here and ran it until 2025. Owner-operator, which in a town this size means everything: the sales, the client relationships, the vendors, the cleaners, the turnovers nobody else would cover.

And it wasn't just me. It was the restaurant that empties in May. The bike shop that lives on eight weeks. The massage studio, the housekeeper, the line cook — all of us building a life around a season that pays for a third of the year, in a town that charges rent for twelve.

In 2025 I sold the company. Not because it was failing — because four years of watching this town's math up close had left me with a problem I couldn't put down. I could keep managing the symptom, or I could go work on the thing underneath it.

I'm still here. I have three kids growing up in this town, and there is no better place on earth to raise them — the mountains out the back door, teachers who know their names, a community that shows up. I'm not leaving. I'm fighting to stay.

So is everyone else I know.

So I built Locals Only. Businesses offer a real discount to the people who actually live and work here. Employers sponsor their staff onto the pass, because keeping good people is cheaper than replacing them. Locals spend here in the slow months instead of driving down the canyon. Everyone gets a little more stable.

Twenty years later I finally understand that wall in Venice. It was never meant to keep people out. It was meant to say: this place belongs to the people who show up for it.

I'm proof of that. I was born in South Africa, spent twenty years in Los Angeles, and I'm as much a local here as anyone. Because being a local was never about where you're from. You can come from anywhere and be a local. You just have to show up, do the work, and give a damn about the place. That's the whole idea.