Matt Mahan

Chuck, thanks so much for having me on.

I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, you know, Chuck, my interest in politics goes back to my childhood.

I grew up in a little farming town in California called Watsonville.

For those who don't know it, it's where your strawberries come from.

And like a lot of rural communities, we had big challenges, high unemployment, a lot of crime.

Our local high school had a higher dropout rate than graduation rate.

And it was a work-study scholarship literally on the other side of a mountain range in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley that gave me –

a really big opportunity in my life to branch out and be able to go to a great college.

It really just changed the trajectory of my life.

I was always interested in the differences between my hometown with all of its challenges and Silicon Valley with all of its growth and opportunity.

I started reading the local newspaper, went to a high school that was very into service and civic engagement.

My

Parents were into civic engagement.

My mom was a teacher.

My dad was a mailman.

And just from a young age, I came to this belief that politics and government is the area where we work out the big questions, solve the big problems.

And it's kind of the only game in town for really tackling the big things that create opportunity for people, which is what I'm really interested in.

So I ended up being a public school teacher for a while, worked in tech for a while, but ultimately found myself drawn back to the place where I was living and raising a family, San Jose, where it just felt like we kept asking people to raise their taxes, but the outcomes weren't getting any better.

And I thought, I'm going to jump in and see if I can do this a little differently.