Wes Moore

Where if I ask a founder, what is it that you do?

No founder worth a salt is going to tell me, oh, I do everything.

Because then what it's telling me is you're not focused.

What does your company do?

And why are you best in class?

And I think part of the problem is that for a lot of states, that's kind of been the answer.

Where if you look at Maryland, Maryland has said that we have been focusing on the eds, the feds, and the meds.

That's kind of been Maryland's economic base.

And it's been like that for a very long time.

One of the things that I've been focusing on is saying, what are we doing to diversify our economy?

Because we cannot simply rely on who's sitting in the Oval Office.

Or if you look at the fact that, you know, in the past year, I've had over 31,000 people fired.

Federal workers.

You know, and so that's more than any state in this country.

There's been no state that's been under a greater level of assault than what we've seen from this federal administration than Maryland.

So we've got to find a way to diversify our economy and quickly.

And so I decided that I said, here are the things that we are going to target.

We're going to target I.T., we're going to target life sciences, we're going to target aerospace and defense.

It's very clear.

Why?