Matt Mahan
speaker
2,299 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 22 May
Matt Mahan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 3.
Appearances
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.
I decided to run for city council, and I went out and knocked on 10,000 doors, got yelled at for a lot of things that
I wasn't necessarily responsible for it, but I got a real feel for the common sense of the residents of California who would ask questions like, if I'm paying $20,000 a year in property taxes, why haven't my local roads been paved in the last 15 years?
And I thought that made a lot of sense.
So I went to City Hall to try to find out.
Pretty bad.
I'm really worried, which is why I jumped in.
I think the state is heading toward an inflection point past which there may be no return.
We have increased spending in state government by 75%.
Put that in perspective, that's $150 billion more this year than six years ago.
And as far as I can tell, none of the outcomes have gotten better.
Nevermind 75% better, many of them are flat or down over the same time period.
So there is a...
real lack of accountability in government.
We don't have a money problem in Sacramento.
Showing 961–980 of 2,299 · page 49 of 115
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