This video features a conversation between Professor Brian Lowry of Stanford Graduate School of Business and Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, exploring the intersection of public and private leadership. Mayor Mahan shares his journey from economic development work in South America, to teaching with Teach for America in Eastside San Jose, to building civic tech startups like Causes and Brigade, and finally transitioning into local government. Through this diverse background, he developed a unique perspective on organizing for social change, emphasizing the importance of transferable leadership skills and the value of direct community engagement.

The discussion offers an insightful look into the differences and similarities between public and private sector leadership, as well as the unique challenges of municipal governance in a city like San Jose with its ties to Silicon Valley. Mahan outlines how government must prioritize stability, equity, and serving everyone, compared to the private sector’s focus on speed and risk-taking. He highlights that many regional challenges—especially housing affordability and homelessness—are rooted in public policy failures, and stresses the importance of collaborative partnerships among government, private, and nonprofit sectors while ultimately holding the public sector chiefly responsible for systemic change.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. holistic [hoʊˈlɪstɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to or concerned with complete systems rather than analysis or separation into parts; focusing on the whole. - Synonyms: (integrated, comprehensive, unified)

They kind of mesh together into some kind of holistic person.

2. civic engagement [ˈsɪvɪk ɛnˈɡeɪdʒmənt] - (noun phrase) - Active participation in the public life of a community in an informed, committed, and constructive manner. - Synonyms: (public involvement, community participation, social activism)

We were trying to facilitate some somebody's civic engagement, their identity as a voter, a constituent, a resident of a place who has representatives and are representative democracy.

3. consensu [kənˈsɛnsəs] - (noun) - General agreement or harmony within a group. - Synonyms: (agreement, accord, unanimity)

There's more consensus in the community that we need change

4. aspirations [ˌæspəˈreɪʃənz] - (noun) - Strong desires, goals, or ambitions for achieving something important or of high value. - Synonyms: (ambitions, aims, dreams)

First and foremost, I view it as giving voice to the aspirations and concerns of our city and of the very diverse, nearly 1 million people who live in our city.

5. distilling [dɪˈstɪlɪŋ] - (verb) - Extracting the essential meaning or most important aspects of something. - Synonyms: (condensing, extracting, concentrating)

distilling it into goals, breaking that further down into performance metrics and at the program level, and figuring out, okay, programmatically what are we going to do to try to move toward our goals.

6. pragmatic [prægˈmætɪk] - (adjective) - Dealing with situations sensibly and realistically rather than theoretically; practical. - Synonyms: (practical, realistic, down-to-earth)

If anything, I hear regularly the frustration of private sector leaders that want the public sector to be more pragmatic, to move faster, to remove the layers of regulation that have created this housing crisis, to invest in the transportation and transit infrastructure of the future.

7. synthesis [ˈsɪnθəsɪs] - (noun) - A combination of different ideas, influences, or objects into a coherent whole. - Synonyms: (combination, integration, fusion)

The process should help you create a composite, if you will, a synthesis of what the aspiration and concern and kind of the zeitgeist, what it is that the community is looking for, what people want.

8. magnitude [ˈmæɡnɪˌtjud] - (noun) - The size, extent, or importance of something; a great amount or degree. - Synonyms: (extent, scale, enormity)

Government's on an order of magnitude greater level than, than local companies, even the big ones.

9. discreet/discrete [dɪˈskrit] - (adjective) - Separated, distinct, or individually separate and distinct (note: often confused with 'discreet'). - Synonyms: (separate, distinct, individual)

You have to have a clear value proposition, a clear customer base and be able to solve a very discreet problem or offer a very discrete type of value to a customer who really sees that value and is willing ultimately in some way to pay for it.

10. onerous [ˈoʊnərəs] - (adjective) - Burdensome; involving great effort and difficulty. - Synonyms: (burdensome, arduous, taxing)

And we've basically said no to housing and not intentionally, but through zoning, through fees, through building requirements that get more strenuous and onerous and change every year.

11. regulatory environment [ˈrɛɡjələˌtɔri ɪnˈvaɪrənmənt] - (noun phrase) - A system of rules, regulations, and policies that span an industry or sector and govern how it operates. - Synonyms: (framework, guidelines, policy landscape)

It's first and foremost incumbent upon us in the public sector to have the right regulatory environment and make the right investments to actually create that thriving and inclusive economy for everyone.

12. transformational [ˌtrænsfərˈmeɪʃənl] - (adjective) - Causing a major change to something or someone, especially in a positive way. - Synonyms: (revolutionary, reformative, radical)

But also go a mile deep in a few areas where the community's been really clear that they expect to see transformational change around things like cost of living, public safety, homelessness, opening up, economic.

From Startup to City Hall - Mayor Matt Mahan on Leading Silicon Valley

Hi, I'm Professor Brian Lowry. I'm at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and this is the interview series for Leadership for Society. And this class we're talking about the intersection of public and private leadership. And I'm really excited to have talking to me today, Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose. Hey Matt, how are you? Hey Professor. I'm doing well, thanks for having me. Fantastic, fantastic. It's so good to have you. You know, before you became mayor you did some really interesting things. So you were at a tech startup for a while. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience in that role? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I've been really blessed in my life to have a diversity of experiences and they've all kind of, I think is will happen for all of your students. They kind of mesh together into some kind of holistic person. But, but I, after college spent a year in South America doing economic development work through the Rockefeller Fellowship and then came back to the US and was a public school teacher here in Eastside San Jose and then later found my way into the tech sector and spent just over a decade actually building two civic tech startups. One of the very first applications on Facebook, it was called Causes on Facebook, it was all about building organizing tools into social media platforms. The idea was that we should go where the people are and if people are connecting online and again this was 15 some years ago, but if people are connecting online and that's where they're getting their information and increasingly having conversations, we had to build tools for people to be civically engaged there. And so we created, grew that company to over 200 million people around the world, raised millions of dollars for local nonprofits, facilitated a lot of volunteerism, and then went on to build a second company called Brigade. That was the vision was for it to be a social network for your civic life. Kind of like LinkedIn which is for your professional life, but for your life as a constituent and a voter. And helping people understand who represents me, what decisions do they make, what votes are they taking, how does that align with my values, how do I tell them what I think? How do I connect what I think about issues and solutions that I want to see in my community to how I vote, how do I connect other like minded people and that ultimately as I left the tech sector, that company was acqui hired, we at least used to call it by by Pinterest in 2019 led me to really be interested in local government. I kind of always followed it and participated and been involved but Ended up then deciding to go run for local office after that. Great. It's really interesting kind of background and I'm happy you, you mentioned the work in the, in Bolivia and Teach for America because I'm curious how those experiences affected your private leadership. So you did those things before you were working in the tech space. I'm curious how your civic interest and that those experiences in the classroom, for example, affect affected your private leadership.

Yeah, I think with every experience I've had, I've taken something away from it. I think the through line, if there is one, it's always easier in retrospect to find the through line than when you're in it and you're just looking forward as a young person. But the through line has been that in each of these roles, whether it was organizing community development projects and economic empowerment work, or teaching in a classroom in a middle school, or building a startup. For me, I've always been interested in civic and social problems or challenges and taking organizing as a methodology for change. And so when I was doing economic development work, we were literally organizing family farmers and giving them new tools and helping them adopt new technologies to make the their farming more sustainable financially and environmentally. In the classroom, you still, you also have to be, it's helpful to be an organizer. I was trying to organize parents and fellow teachers and other resources and partners to provide a higher quality education to young people who were coming into my seventh grade classroom, often one to two years behind grade level. And then in the private sector, some of those softer people skills of being able to motivate people, bring people together, bridge differences, get people excited about a goal that's all part and parcel of building a company. And so in the startup world, I was borrowing a lot of the things I had learned from Teach for America about how to be an effective classroom teacher, classroom manager. There's a lot of people management. If you can manage a middle school classroom, you can manage just about, about any group of people. So I think, I think you, you know, throughout your career have the opportunity to build skills and habits of mind that are transferable. And the relationships you build often pop up again five, ten years later and also can be incredibly valuable. And one of the things you just mentioned were tools for kind of change. And one of the things that I found really interesting in one of the interviews you did after you were finishing up with Brigade is you suggested that it was a mistake that was made was that you pivoted to debates. I'd love to hear you talk about that, especially as someone Who's a civic leader now, like, can you say a little bit about why you thought that was a mistake?

Yeah, well, we got to go back in the way back machine. But yeah, we, I think we always struggled with that platform. We were trying to facilitate some somebody's civic engagement, their identity as a voter, a constituent, a resident of a place who has representatives and are representative democracy. And there was always a tension that I think is unresolved in our democracy between how do you empower people to organize and fight for what they believe in and also create space for dialogue and learning and debate. And I believe in both. But I think our platform struggled. When building a tool, there's actually a difference between government and the private sector. But when you're building a startup, I think you have to be very focused. You have to have a clear value proposition, a clear customer base and be able to solve a very discreet problem or offer a very discrete type of value to a customer who really sees that value and is willing ultimately in some way to pay for it. And I think we struggled between building an open platform that was primarily about helping people who disagree discuss and debate issues. And we saw a lot of engagement around that, but then it kind of died there because if we were focused there, we weren't doing as much to help facilitate action taking and the execution of an agenda. Electing candidates, passing legislation, volunteering in the community, getting things done. And I don't know that in one tool, at least as a startup you can, you can have both seamlessly integrated. But that was the tension we were facing and we kind of went down the rabbit hole of debate for a long time and it became really hard to manage. I mean, we all know this on social media today, another unsolved problem of how do we keep our conversations online, respectful, constructive, ideally finding some common fact basis where we can agree on a certain shared reality. These are unsolved problems and we certainly did not solve them at brigade, though we did build a lot of great tools and facilitate a lot of important conversations. Yeah, it's really interesting what you learned there because I want to now kind of shift to your experience as mayor of San Jose. How do, how do you understand the role of being mayor of a city like San Jose?

It's a great question. First and foremost, I view it as giving voice to the aspirations and concerns of our city and of the very diverse, nearly 1 million people who live in our city. And you never perfectly can represent everyone and capture every voice. But the process of campaigning, if you do it right in My opinion, and you're not just focused on raising money and getting interest group endorsements, but you're actually out knocking on doors. And I personally knocked in my first race on over 10,000 doors. The process should help you create a composite, if you will, a synthesis of what the aspiration and concern and kind of the zeitgeist, what it is that the community is looking for, what people want. And my goal has been to internalize that and give voice to it, both give voice to it in the rooms that many of our residents don't get to participate in. And they send us here as representatives to City hall to work with our professional staff, work with colleagues from other levels of government, but to try to articulate and advocate for and represent the views of the thousands and thousands of people who I had one on one or small group conversations with on doorsteps in their backyards. In addition to knocking on over 10,000 doors, we had about 400 community based events, forums, basically town halls, house parties in people's living rooms and backyards, and then in this kind of executive role as mayor to figure out how to translate that into action. And one of the things that's been, I'm sure you'll want to get deeper into this, but really valuable to me personally, it's having a background as a founder and CEO of a company, also having been a classroom teacher and being fairly well versed in taking a vision, distilling it into goals, breaking that further down into performance metrics and at the program level, and figuring out, okay, programmatically what are we going to do to try to move toward our goals. Measurement, creating a feedback loop. And so I view my role as being a change agent on behalf of a community that has aspirations, has concerns, wants to see certain changes in the community. And my job every day is to come into City hall and figure out how do we marshal the resources of our local government here at City hall, but through partnership with other entities in the public and private sector to drive forward the kind of change and outcomes that people elected me to produce. And so that's kind of how I think of it. It's representative, but there's a unique role as a representative of, to do a lot of the work that the public never gets to directly participate in. And that's, that's why we have that representative style. It's not just a direct democracy where we put everything out to a vote every single day. There's a lot of work that has to happen behind the scenes.

Yeah, I like the, the, the distinction. You Drew between a representative democracy and that's, you know, straight direct democracy. Because it makes me think about the tension between being a public servant, which I think you assume you see yourself as, and being a public leader. So how do you, how do you resolve that tension? Like, when do you lead versus simply respond to the desires of your community? Great. It's a great question. I mean, I do, I do. You used a great term there in public service. It is, it is service. It is. It does feel like a calling. It is about others. It's about using, I mean, to me, public service. About using your skills, your abilities, your knowledge, your relationships to do as much good for others as possible. I don't try to lead on every issue. I don't think that's feasible. I try to focus on areas where I think I have something unique to offer or where the community. There's more consensus in the community that we need change. An obvious one being our crisis of homelessness. I don't think there was a door I knocked on where homelessness didn't come up. So I try to prioritize. That doesn't mean I am not responsible for making decisions or being well versed in policy across a wide range of things. I often make the point. Your city provides a lot of services that you might not even think of. From treating the wastewater and having the sewer system to maintaining the roads, the streetlights, the bridges, the parks. There's a lot that we do. And so it's sort of this approach of needing to be able to be at least, you know, an inch deep or a foot deep, whatever you want to say on, on a wide spectrum of things, and be conversant enough and knowledgeable enough to sort of listen to the community, understand the trade offs and decisions and, and kind of be a thoughtful policymaker on behalf of the public, but also go a mile deep in a few areas where the community's been really clear that they expect to see transformational change around things like cost of living, public safety, homelessness, opening up, economic. You know, those are the places where I try to spend my time and position myself to actually be a change agent on behalf of the community.

And you mentioned a number of very complex issues. And you. The range of issues too, the complexity of any of the issues and the wide range of issues you have to deal with. And earlier on you talked about, as a leader of a private organization, you have to be very clear, here's the mission here, we can't do everything. Here's what we need to focus on and be the best at this. Well, wondering what translates from private leadership to public leadership and what is a harder. What kind of skills don't translate as well as you think about the intersections between private and public leadership? It's a great question. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that one of the most important things, maybe the most important thing, whether you're in the public or private sector, is the team that you build and the sense of mission or purpose that you have, that has to be shared and can't just be words on a wall. It has to be something you live, you breathe, you discuss, you debate. That evolves over time. That is, this is our why, this is why we're here, this is our mission. And if you have a strong sense of mission and a team of people who are empowered to work together to go achieve that mission, then there's plenty more under that in terms of methods and means. But that to me is at the heart of what allows any entity, public or private, to be effective. So that's a big. That to me is a common thread. And I think on the methods there are many commonalities. I talked about goal setting, measurement, having feedback loops. There are a lot of core principles that we had in the startups I was involved with, that I brought into the mayor's office that are very transferable around being highly communicative, being very transparent, accountability by actually telling people what you're trying to do and measuring and reporting out publicly. The collaborative nature of our team, a mindset of always learning, continuous learning. There are a lot of things like that. I think the methods of good management, good teamwork, highly effective organizations can be. Are kind of shared, can be shared largely across different sectors because they're really about how you get groups of people to work effectively together and have impact together. The company versus government versus nonprofit versus foundation are all just different vehicles. Some of the big differences though, and there are big structural differences. I mean, one is just that government is more consensus based. In a company, we prioritize speed and risk taking and outsized impact and gain. In government, we tend to prioritize stability, predictability and a sort of ability to serve everyone and try to serve everyone equally well. And so in government we do tend to be slower. We don't have a CEO. I'm not actually the CEO. The policy that we pass take a certain amount of consensus. I have to get a majority of the city council to agree to move forward on something. And then even if we move forward, government is further decentralized in the sense that so many of our systems around public health, public safety and so forth are shared responsibilities between cities and counties. So even if the city wants to do something, if it's not talking to the other hand, count the county, doesn't really work. So I don't, I'm not someone, even though I spent over a decade in the private sector, I'm actually not someone who goes around saying government should just be like a business because in many fundamental ways it can't. We, we have to serve everyone. We have to serve everyone equally and, and think a lot about equity. We, we, we don't, when we, when we're successful, we don't have all this new revenue and profit that we can plow into R and D. There are just these fundamental differences. And yet many of the mindsets of highly effective organizations, many of the core principles, I think are very transferable.

And you know, and obviously you need all these entities for a community to function well, right? You need the private organizations, you need well functioning government, nonprofit organizations. And I wonder about the relationships among those different entities from your perspective. So what responsibilities do you think private leaders have to the communities in which they operate? Especially, I will say for some, a place like San Jose, this is a, a big one, right? Because San Jose is strongly associated with Silicon Valley. Some people think of it as the capital of Silicon Valley. And so it's in people's mind almost indistinguishable in some ways from the, the large organizations that run a lot of the things that we engage with every day. So we have to think about the interactions between the civic society people in the community and private leadership of big organizations. What are the responsibilities that private leaders have?

Yeah, well, that's a great question. I mean, there's, gosh, there's so many angles on that that we could get into that I'm interested in. I mean, I think our companies and San Jose, by the way, is largely a bedroom community. We're a residential big city. We're the most residential big city in the country. Many of our big tech companies are actually headquartered in neighboring cities, but their workers live in San Jose. And so I think a lot about that dynamic between the community, the workforce, the housing we need, the schools we run, and so much of what San Jose offers vis a vis the private employers that are incredible engines of innovation and wealth creation, but are literally physically, in many cases, located outside of our city limits. And what does that mean? I mean, one thing it means we have to think regionally and these are big global companies that don't necessarily see themselves as a San Jose company or even really as a Bay Area company. They're global companies. You know, I have. I have some mixed feelings really, on the role of these companies in our community. One is certainly my hope is that they think about being community centric and being good corporate citizens in our community. Things like hiring, hiring young people, creating apprenticeship and internship opportunities for young people in their own backyard, in their community here. So I think there's on the one hand, a responsibility, an affirmative kind of a responsibility they have to give back in their community. You know, hire locally, invest in the local workforce, not pollute, not, you know, be good corporate citizens, fund great nonprofits doing good work in the community, partner with government to get better outcomes. On the other hand, I think that can be taken too far, frankly. I think that ultimately we have to respect that the public sector has a unique responsibility, and we cannot shift that to the private sector. As much as tech's growth here has had impacts that we're not always happy about. Higher housing costs, more traffic, those are fundamentally public sector problems. And I would say that part of the responsibility of companies is not to try to block public policy evolution that would address those impacts, but the fact that we're not building the housing we need, we haven't upgraded the infrastructure we need, that's a public sector problem. And that onus and responsibility, first and foremost needs to be on us now. If corporate titans in the area, we're trying to block the housing or block the infrastructure, we're opposed to our climate goals or other priorities we've set, we'd be having a very different conversation right now. And I would say that that would, that would not be okay. But if anything, I hear regularly the frustration of private sector leaders that want the public sector to be more pragmatic, to move faster, to remove the layers of regulation that have created this housing crisis, to invest in the transportation and transit infrastructure of the future. And, and really, those companies being here is a great thing. Most other regions in the world would kill to have the kind of innovation economy and job base and tax base that we have. Our county has one of the highest tax bases per capita of any county in the country. We have a lot of wealth, including public sector wealth here because of these companies. I think it's first and foremost incumbent upon us in the public sector to have the right regulatory environment and make the right investments to actually create that thriving and inclusive economy for everyone. Doesn't mean companies don't have a role to play, but we have to Recognize their first job is to serve their customers, serve their shareholders, generate revenue. It's our tax policy that determines how much of those resources we claim for public goods and then to deploy them effectively. And so that's why I say I'm of two minds. I want our companies to do more, to be more invested. We've got some great corporate partners here. Adobe Downtown invests a ton. We want them hiring. My wife actually runs a high school, Cristo Rey in Eastside San Jose, where the students all have jobs at local employers. I want to see more of that model. And yet at the end of the day, the big problem is let's not just blame tech. I think that's a lazy answer. I think most of our challenges locally are public policy failures, fundamentally. And those are, those were human made. Those are, those are decisions that we have made over the years as policymakers.

Yeah. And you've only been in office about two, two and a half years now. A little less than, less than that. But I wonder what we should make of a city that's as rich in some ways as San Jose and still has, as I think you kind of mentioned in passing, a serious inequality. Inequality problem. There's the house, for example. The number of unhoused people is relatively high, especially in a place as well off as San Jose. How do you make sense of that? Because on one hand, there's a huge tax base. This is what you're referring to, and a lot of resources. How are we in the situation and how do we think about solving that? Is it a, is it a partnership? Private, private, public. But it seems like what you're suggesting, it's, it's fully a public responsibility that it's been somehow that we've dropped the ball on. Is that how you see it? I think it's largely a public policy failure. I'm not saying the corporate sector shouldn't do more, can't do more. Philanthropic sector. I have been critical of our philanthropic sector in the sense that they do a lot of good work, but the vast majority of the money that they raise locally goes out of the region, if not out of the country. And I would like to see them spend a little more, I'd like to see them rebalance their portfolios to do a little more locally. I talked about workforce and opportunities for young people and investments, you know, corporate social responsibility. I'm not saying those things aren't important. And I always thank the companies that do it. I, you know, try to put pressure on the ones who don't to do More. But I think we have to acknowledge that government's on an order of magnitude greater level than, than local companies, even the big ones. We operate on a totally different order of magnitude in terms of the impact of our regulations and laws, the resources at our disposal. You can take all of the education nonprofits, foundations and corporate education related programs in the country, add them up and they spend less on education than the state of California does through our nearly $100 billion a year that we put into public education in the state. So I guess what do we make of this? Well, first of all, let's put things in perspective. First of all, homelessness, which I'm very focused on, tends to correlate with economic growth and wealth, largely because coastal cities that have had the most wealth creation and growth have had incredibly unbalanced growth because. And they've been led by very progressive leaders, those of us who are left of center politically, we have created these incredibly attractive creative cities that generate all this innovation and job growth. And we've basically said no to housing and not intentionally, but through zoning, through fees, through building requirements that get more strenuous and onerous and change every year. And we keep adding new layers through incredibly idealistic, but also costly environmental review processes and regulations, labor regulations and processes. We've added layer after layer after layer. Now there is inequity. And you're right, and that was what drew me to Eastside San Jose. The reason I became a public school teacher in Eastside San Jose was I wanted to close the education gap. And on the one hand, I'm proud that San Jose is the Raj Chetty at Harvard did this research a while back. We have been the number one city in the country for economic opportunity and upward mobility. A child born into the bottom quintile of income by household in San Jose has a greater chance of making it to the top than any other city. So in many ways San Jose represent the American dream better than any other city. But it's a low bar. As a country. We've got large inequities, large wealth disparity, and we have to do more to create greater equality of opportunity. It's why we've been investing in early childhood literacy and high dosage tutoring to address learning loss and more internships and youth jobs. And we have a lot more we need to do there. But when you look at the big structural macro issues where cost of living and high cost of housing is the number one issue, that is an entirely human made, policy driven outcome that has led us to only Build one new home in our region for every six new jobs that the private sector created. That is a failing of public policy. We have caved to those who don't want the housing. We have added layer after layer of regulation in response to various interest groups that have interests other than building housing in mind. And we have yielded the outcome that we have to collectively take responsibility for in the public sector. Only we can solve it. No amount of corporate philanthropy is going to address the housing imbalance that we have unintended, unintendedly created in the Bay Area.

You know, I, I can't, I can't let this one go. So I have to ask this question. What does it require? Do you think housing prices to come down? I mean, the constituents who have the most power, often the people who have the most money and resources to have voice. And I think part of the problem in a representative democracy is sometimes you have a louder voice from a certain segment of the population than you do from other segments of the population. And what you're describing now about housing, please meet up. Ask the question, do we want to build more housing? Are we willing to deal with the costs associated with building that housing? Yeah, I think, I think that's a great question. I mean, I am on the side of, of building more housing, allowing private investment to flow back into the housing market, creating workforce housing. I don't think it is likely. Even if we dramatically improve the rate at which we build housing in the Bay Area to better balance supply and demand, better balance housing and jobs, I don't think it's likely that property values will go down significantly. I think they will grow at a less fast pace, they will grow at a slower rate. It will not be. It has not been healthy. It's not a healthy sign for our society that the value of housing in the Bay Area has been going up 10% year over year. Even if that's great for those of us who own our homes, in the long run, that's not sustainable. What we need is for incomes to begin growing, growing faster than the cost of housing. That's the shift. Because these are not static systems, these are dynamic systems. And you have to look at rates of change. We need incomes to start growing at least a percent or two faster each year than housing costs. And that is doable if we keep investing in our kids, we invest in high quality education, we create mentorship and internship and apprenticeship opportunities, we support small business and entrepreneurs and continue to have startups built here. There are a lot of ways we can ensure that incomes Keep growing quickly here, but we have to add housing supplies so that the cost of housing slows and we get to a place again where as a ratio of one's income, the cost of housing starts coming down. It's close to 50% for a lot of people in our community, sometimes higher. It's over 30% for way too many people. That's that affordability threshold. We want the cost of housing as a percentage of your income to be at 30% or less. That's affordable. And that takes rebalancing, supply and demand.

Great. So one last question for you. Sure. Again, the theme is the intersection between public and private leadership. And we have a people who are going to watch who are leaders now, will be leaders in the future. What would you want to leave them with as on that theme? Let's be problem solvers. I got into education because I wanted to close the achievement gap and make sure all of our kids had access to a high quality education. I got into tech because I saw an opportunity to build better tools for civic engagement and improve civic discourse and outcomes in government. I got involved in local government because I'm passionate about building a city that is safer, cleaner, more economically vibrant and inclusive. And I think that we can get past a lot of the partisanship, a lot of the division in our society if we stay focused on outcomes and we have an honest, open, rational, collaborative dialogue about what's working and what isn't. Silicon Valley has a unique opportunity to offer a different kind of politics. A politics rooted in openness, experimentation, learning, measurement and learning. And we don't have to be red team, blue team. We don't have to be public versus private sector. We can try to get everybody together around shared values and shared goals. I think we actually often when we focus on the outcomes, most of us agree. And so the means to getting there should be less ideological, less about a party orthodoxy, less about who gets credit. It should be how do we collectively all understand the nature of these problems, accelerate solutions, learn from what's working and what isn't, and just keep moving things forward for our society. And I just, I think we live in a special place because we have a lot of resources and we have that mindset that's a little more focused on outcomes and less focused on ideology. And I think that's a special thing about Silicon Valley. Well, thank you so much, Mayor Mahan, for talking to us. I really enjoyed the conversation. Likewise, I appreciate the opportunity, Professor. Look forward to being in touch. Thanks. Thank you. Sa.

LEADERSHIP, INNOVATION, ECONOMICS, SAN JOSE, CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, HOUSING POLICY, STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS