Saikat Chakrabarti

But he came to this country with literally $8 in his pocket, was able to achieve the American dream, got a job and a single income, got me that middle class life.

So when I came out of San Francisco, as you mentioned, I worked in Silicon Valley.

I was an early engineer at Stripe.

I was the second engineer there.

And just because I was in the right place at the right time, I ended up making a lot of money from that.

and that was a radicalizing experience because i don't come from money and i got this insight into just how inequality works in our society where the rich can keep getting richer without ever lifting a finger while everybody else just struggles to hang on and yeah i mean i worked hard at stripe i'm proud of the stuff i did but i didn't work harder than a teacher or a nurse or the janitors cleaning our offices did every single day i just hit the startup lottery

And in an economy like that, where either you hit the lottery and you can have it all, or you'll never be able to afford a home or a secure retirement, that's fundamentally broken.

That is a broken system.

And I believe it's a threat to our entire way of being.

If we can't get to a country where 40 honest hours of work a week is able to afford you a life, then our country is doomed.

So that's frankly why I quit the tech industry.

I mean, I worked.

with some of the people that are now in this oligarch class, running companies like OpenAI.

I saw their vision of the future and it's not the vision of the future that I want anything to be a part of.

And so I quit and I joined the Bernie campaign in 2016.

And I've spent the past 10 years trying to fix this fundamentally broken economy and to put taxes on people like myself, because I think we need to have way higher taxes on the billionaires and the richest in our society.

Yeah, please go to my website.

It's schoikot.us, S-A-I-K-A-T.us.

We have a massive volunteer grassroots army here that's running the campaign.

We've got over 2000 people volunteering.