By Jorge Mercado Sunday, April 26th, 2026

Joey Zumaya’s rich family ancestry can be traced back to Lieutenant José Francisco Ortega, the first commander of the Santa Barbara Presidio. 

The year was 1782. The American Revolution was still being fought and the Central Coast was part of Spanish California.

“When you see the name Ortega — like Ortega Street — that’s my family. Those are my ancestors,” he told the Business Times.

Despite having a rich family history that helped transform Santa Barbara into a home for many, Zumaya was without a house himself for a time. At 13, Zumaya recalled staying at Santa Barbara’s Salvation Army homeless shelter for a few months, and that after bouncing around from house to house, staying with relatives because he and his family fell on hard times.

But Zumaya is not embarrassed by the hardships he and his family have endured. In fact, it is what has shaped him into becoming one of the most thoughtful leaders throughout the Central Coast, always willing to give back to others.

“The really cool thing about that experience was the people in the shelter who were part of helping us get back on our feet and treated us with so much dignity and kindness. That is seared into my brain,” Zumaya said. “That has stayed with me as I have found success, is that I want to go back and help people like me and like the people who helped me.”

Zumaya currently serves as the head of nonprofit enterprise sales & strategy at LinkedIn’s Carpinteria headquarters and sits on several nonprofits’ boards — including the one that helped house him and his family for months, The Salvation Army — but his journey to the many leadership roles he holds is different than most.

For one, Zumaya didn’t finish his bachelor’s degree. At 18, he became a father, something he now recognizes as “one of the happiest moments of my life.” But, at the time, Zumaya knew he had to return to Santa Barbara and find a job.

Lucky for him, he got in on the ground floor of a local technology company, Gsolutionz, and, even luckier, the CEO at the time, Allen Pugh, took an interest in him. What started as a blue-collar job turned into Zumaya’s first sales gig.

“I remember my other mentor, Jay, said at the time that he thought I would do well in the job, but if I don’t, no hard feelings and when he said that, it immediately struck a nerve that I had not felt before,” Zumaya said. “It gave me this chip on my shoulder.”

The result of that chip? Zumaya was the first person in the office and the last to leave and within six months, he became the top salesperson at GSolutionz.

“And over the next 10 years, Allen (Pugh) took me under his wing and taught me everything that he knew about leadership and business and strategy, ultimately allowing me to get what I think is 10 times more valuable than some college degree,” Zumaya said. “He was a man of faith, but he was a man of authority too, and learning under him for 10 years allowed me to acquire the skills, to develop myself, to ultimately end up at a company like LinkedIn.”

But by 2014, after 12 years at the company, Zumaya, now 34, wanted to do something new, so much so that he stepped down from his leadership role to become a consultant at Lynda.com.

The first eight months went great, he said, but one morning he saw something shocking on his desktop. It said, “Welcome to LinkedIn.” Turns out, Lynda Weinman, founder of the company, sold Lynda.com for $1.5 billion in 2015.

But instead of shying away or looking for another company, Zumaya embraced the challenge of climbing the LinkedIn ladder, calling it the third “defining moment” of his career.

Over his decade-plus at LinkedIn, Zumaya has been promoted multiple times, starting as a senior account executive, then becoming a team lead for LinkedIn’s LEAD first program. 

LinkedIn’s LEAD program is meant to identify high-performing Black and Latino employees and put them through a leadership development course. Zumaya was one of the first to attend the course, and while going through it, they asked him if he wanted to take it over.

“It was a crazy thing,” Zumaya said with a laugh. “But this global program helps these people from these backgrounds acquire skills they probably wouldn’t have the chance to do otherwise. I could leave LinkedIn today and I know that’s an impact that’s going to transcend my time here.”

After three years in another role, Zumaya eventually settled into the role he holds today.  

“At LinkedIn, we use a quote that says, talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. If you look at someone like me, who never went to college, I probably should be cleaning buildings still, but I had the talent, I had the smarts, and I had the work ethic to become something,” Zumaya said, adding that he is a big proponent of DEI for that reason. 

“There are people like me who can become leaders, who can make a difference; they just need the opportunity.”

Outside of LinkedIn, Zumaya has contributed by being on many national boards. The one he is most proud of is the one that helped him all those years ago, The Salvation Army. Zumaya has been on the board, holding many different titles, including board chair, for the past 11 years.

“It’s a pretty cool story,” he said. “But I feel responsible to help this organization do what it does for so many people, as it did for me, because of the impact that I know it can have on people’s lives, because it had one on mine.”

Zumaya is also proud of his contributions to the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce, which represents 1,100 businesses and 75,000 jobs spanning Carpinteria, Santa Barbara, Goleta, and the surrounding areas.

“The reason I love that one is that I felt like my family’s from Santa Barbara, and we all cannot even afford to live here anymore even though we built the city in a lot of ways so to be able to come back and find a leadership role that was contributing to the health and the development of the community, and it kind of put our family name back in that regard, it was a proud moment,” Zumaya said. 

As a board chair on five different nonprofits, as well as sitting on various others, Zumaya has gotten a knack for knowing what needs to get done to make them as efficient as possible. That is why in 2020, he and his wife founded The Zumaya Group, a full-service nonprofit consulting group.

Last year, the company quadrupled in growth and now helps over 300 nonprofit boards, said Zumaya.

“That’s a perfect example of sending the elevator back down. These nonprofits are serving people and helping them with their lives, so the same way I did that as an individual, I’m trying to do it at scale through the Zumaya Group,” he said.

Asked about how he feels about the way his career has blossomed, Zumaya could not describe it anything other than “blessed.”

“There’s a lyric Jay-Z says that goes ‘I’m having a lot of fun because I’m not even supposed to be here,’ and that’s me,” Zumaya said. “When I think about how unlikely I was to even be here in the first place, or how most people wish they woke up with my problems, that humbles you quickly.”

Zumaya knows better than most the problems the average person living in Santa Barbara faces, but he hopes that by being in the many positions of power he has held over the years, he can continue making a difference.

His advice to the many young people he mentors is to do something you’re passionate about every single day.

“I’ve been doing things for the last 22 years that energize me, and that’s why I’m at where I’m at right now,” Zumaya said.