Letter to the Editor
As the new Editor-in-Chief of Arizona Ascent, I’m here to quiet the noise and tell the real story of Arizona. Lately, headlines say our housing markets are “plummeting,” but step into Sierra Vista and homes are gone in weeks; in Douglas, they linger for months.
Every city has its own rhythm. Behind the data are people—families, builders, dreamers. Like Arizona Chimney Cakes in Mesa Riverview, where Janet and her four kids turned a simple coffee shop idea into something magical. That’s Arizona: resilient, creative, and still rising.
–Jennifer N. Conrad, Editor in Chief
Read the Digital Edition
Inside This Issue
Moonshot’s Rural Arizona Pitch Tour Puts Small-Town Innovation on the Statewide Stage
In Superior, Arizona, population just under 2,700, last year’s pitch stop buzzed with anticipation. Entrepreneurs adjusted prototypes, shuffled notes, and glanced at the countdown timer—three…
Jon Relvas: Building Bridges Between Students and Industry in Arizona
In a sunlit lab at Arizona State University, a team of students huddled over laptops, designing solutions for real-world challenges at companies like NASA, Starbucks, and Zoom. Behind the…
Tax Season Starts at Home
Tax season has a way of sneaking up on us. It’s rarely the actual numbers that feel stressful; it’s the digging. Searching for forms. Looking for receipts. Trying to remember where something…
Beyond Comfort: How Mahesh Vinayagam Built qBotica
Before there were bots processing insurance claims, before boardrooms and AI panels, before Phoenix became home to one of Arizona’s fastest-growing automation companies, there was a boy in…
The Backbone of a Successful Business: Why Bookkeeping Matters More Than Ever
It starts with a payment. A weekend invoice. A $200 deposit for a side project. To most people, it’s just money moving from one account to another. To a business owner, it’s the first step in…
The Sweet Leap: How One Woman Turned Donuts Into a Scottsdale Legacy
Before the pink boxes and weekend lines in Old Town, before Scottsdale knew the name, there was a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle and a corporate job that looked, from the outside, like…
A Market That’s Learning to Pause
It’s mid-January in the Valley, and the open house is quiet. In Buckeye, a young family walks through a new subdivision, noticing more “For Sale” signs than they remember from last year.…
What Arizona Residents Need to Know This 2026 Tax Season
For many Americans, tax season is a compliance exercise: gather documents, file, move on. But for Arizona residents in 2026, filing blind versus filing strategically could mean the difference…
