Matt Mahan

UCLA.

Listen, Chuck, I got to focus and prioritize.

I can't solve every problem.

I'll leave that one to you.

Thanks, Chuck.

Well, David, like everybody, I'm frustrated with a state that keeps spending more and seemingly getting less, which is why I jumped in.

But to back up, I grew up in a little farming town here in California, a town called Watsonville, where your strawberries come from.

I do work in Watsonville.

Driscoll berries, you know it well.

Yeah, exactly.

Working class family, mom was a teacher, dad was a letter carrier.

My lucky break in life was getting into a great college prep high school on a work study scholarship.

I took buses about two hours each way, worked my way through high school and college, and came back as a public school teacher through the Teach for America program.

Always was very community oriented, was interested in politics, wanted to know how to make

our city, our world a better place, ended up in the tech sector and spent about a decade building civic tech tools to help people navigate their democracy.

What did you build?

I was involved with an early Facebook application called Causes and then went on to start a platform called Brigade that was sort of like LinkedIn for voters.

And the whole premise

was to build grassroots bottom-up power by connecting voters around issues they're passionate about, outcomes they want to see, and help them organize to hold their elected officials accountable.

After about a decade in the civic tech space, our company was acquired.