From Tech Entrepreneur to San Jose Mayor: Rebuilding Trust in Government w/ Innovation | Matt Mahan
Watch the full episode: YouTube
Episode Summary
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan shares his journey from founding a civic tech company to leading California's third-largest city, discussing how entrepreneurial approaches can rebuild trust in government through innovation, transparency, and results-driven leadership. From performance management and homelessness solutions to civic engagement and customer service systems, Mayor Mahan demonstrates how bringing private sector best practices to government can deliver measurable outcomes while maintaining the unique responsibilities of public service.
Key Topics: Matt Mahan, San Jose, civic tech, entrepreneurship, government innovation, public trust, homelessness solutions, performance management, civic engagement, customer service, local government, tech entrepreneur mayor
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Government vs Business: Key Differences
- Performance Management in Government
- Tackling Homelessness with Data
- Civic Engagement and Volunteerism
- Grassroots Democracy and Participation
- Back to Basics: Prioritizing Core Services
- Customer Service Innovation
- Closing Thoughts
Introduction
Mayor Matt Mahan: Evan, thanks for having me on.
Evan Meyer: It's a pleasure, sir. Pleasure to see you. It's a pleasure to have this time to talk about your incredible journey and how far you've come from the civic work that you've done for so long and the businesses you've created and Brigade specifically I'm excited to talk about, and capture some of that entrepreneurial mindset as the mayor of San Jose.
Government vs Business: Key Differences
Evan Meyer: So how do you, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO of a civic tech company, think about the government space? Where are the overlaps, the disparities, government culture versus the entrepreneurial mindset?
Mayor Matt Mahan: Yeah. Evan, I think about that a lot and I think there's often a shorthand people use that is not really fair that we, you know, people will sometimes say, I just want government to run like a business. And there are some really fundamental differences between the two that we're not going to be able to avoid. I've been in business. I've built startups that focused on a customer, were incredibly agile and it's a wonderful environment to be in. And there's a lot we can bring over to the government sector.
But just on a couple of the differences: in the private sector, you can offer a very narrow set of goods and services, and you can focus on a very small segment of the total customer base, the total population. In government, we have a responsibility for serving everyone without distinction. We have to serve everyone equally well.
We are in far too many lines of business that are not synergistic. We're doing wastewater treatment facility, running an airport, purchasing power, paving roads, providing police and fire response, running afterschool programs in the libraries. It's a very diverse portfolio. And even when we do a really good job, it's not like revenue just increases and we can plow the profits back into more R&D and better products. There's a real lag over time. Good governance leads to more revenue in the real long run, but it's not a tight feedback loop.
Performance Management in Government
However, what I learned in the private sector that was just eye opening for me going through the process of building a couple of startups was the power of performance management—being able to pick a few key goals, frame up hypotheses, measure performance, and build a continuous learning environment where you're looking at data frequently, you're making adjustments, and you're holding yourself accountable for making steady progress toward a measurable outcome. And I think we would benefit in government from organizing ourselves in a similar fashion. That's what I've been trying to do in San Jose my first two years as mayor.
Evan Meyer: How do you make sure that folks are incentivized, motivated in a way to continue to hit those targets? And I should say, how do you set those targets and how do you make sure people are motivated to continue to hit them?
Mayor Matt Mahan: Well, you know, I actually find that in the public sector motivation is generally not as much of a challenge as people think. We get into the public sector because we want to serve the community. We want to make our community a better place. And in the private sector, if you're doing it right, you're obsessively focused on your customer. So that's an area where there actually is more commonality, whether you're customer centric or constituent centric. It's a service industry. You're focused on how to deliver value to someone.
I think what's challenging in government is that the expectations can be overwhelming. We have come to expect government to solve every problem, to solve it immediately, no matter how entrenched, how complicated it is, or how much it actually requires social change and cultural change. And we often just want to pay our taxes and throw it over the fence and say government, go fix the broken school system, go fix the healthcare system when so much of it is a reflection of our society and our culture.
Tackling Homelessness with Data
What I've tried to do, at least at City Hall, is identify the top handful of goals that the community has told us they expect us to do better on where it's within our purview: crime, reducing homelessness, cleaning up the city, speeding up permits to build more housing, being an easier place to bring jobs and create economic opportunity, and then create some metrics around those things and have a North Star goal.
I'll just take homelessness. It's the most top of mind and maybe easiest to explain. Our community expects us to be on the path to zero people living outside in tents. That's a very worthy goal. It's a goal we all share. We're all motivated to achieve it, but then you have to start breaking it down. You have to start formulating hypotheses and saying, okay, we need to do a certain amount of prevention to stop people from falling into homelessness. We need to intervene earlier and do a better job of mental health care and drug treatment. We need to do a better job of jail reentry because that's a source of people into homelessness. We need to build basic shelter because when you do the math, we can't wait to build a brand new apartment for everybody. It's too slow and too expensive.
So you start to formulate hypotheses, program your budget around that, go execute, and then look at the data and say, are we moving the needle or not? And I'm trying to bring that performance management mindset, that level of transparency to city hall on an issue where I think historically people have generally thrown their hands up and said, I'm just going to blame somebody else. I'm going to blame the federal government, or I'm going to blame the County or whatever. I've tried to take a very rigorous approach to how we actually break it down and make steady progress.
[Full 28-minute transcript continues with detailed discussions on homelessness solutions, shelter vs. housing strategies, civic engagement, volunteerism programs, grassroots democracy, prioritizing core city services, customer service systems, and practical advice for bringing entrepreneurial thinking to government while respecting its unique responsibilities.]
Written by
Evan Meyer
December 28, 2024