San Jose’s new mayor, Matt Mahan, isn’t simply interested in managing the city’s status quo. The former tech executive is betting big on bold moves that move Silicon Valley’s heart and soul forward.
Matt Mahan is probably the busiest guy in Silicon Valley right now. He has no choice, as the city’s agenda overflows with issues ranging from new development to affordable housing. When I ask him for an elevator speech about his mayoral priorities, he laughs and says, “We’re on the 18th floor, so, fortunately, it’s a pretty long elevator ride.”
Mahan, who grew up near Watsonville and whose mother was an educator and father was a letter carrier, attended Harvard, where he shared a dorm with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (more on that in a minute). Harvard is also where Mahan met his wife, Sylvia. They now have two young children. Again, these are busy times for the new mayor, who’s a former tech exec and teacher. Mahan, who sat down to chat a few days into his two-year term, certainly seems prepped for the wild ride.
You mentioned your elevator speech. What are those mayoral priorities?
The theme is really about getting back to basics as a city and ensuring that we’re delivering high-quality core services. The three primary areas of focus that I have are public safety, homelessness and blight or beautification. I think the pandemic necessarily drew our attention to a wide range of needs, including many that the city had never been in the business of fulfilling—like food insecurity and vaccinations. And now it’s time to get back to those basic, fundamental issues like safety and cleanliness that really affect everyone and impact our economic competitiveness and quality of life for all residents.
You’ve said you want to run the city like a results-based business. What are some examples of how that can happen?
Let me caveat by saying there are many ways in which the government will not be able to run like a business. It’s important to acknowledge that there are certain elements of the public sector that are just different—we’re responsible for serving everyone. We don’t get to target a specific customer segment. We’re responsible for serving everyone equally. We don’t have the same kind of revenue feedback loop. In other words, we can do a great job and it doesn’t automatically mean that revenue goes up.
But I think the public sector has a lot to learn from the private sector, particularly what we’ve seen from our most innovative companies right here in Silicon Valley. And this is something that I was deeply steeped in as a founder and CEO of a couple of software companies. There’s the idea of performance management and building really strong data-driven feedback loops or learning cycles. You’ve got to set clear outcome-based goals for how you define success and be able to measure the performance of your strategies.
In our case, this includes the programs that we fund and the policies that we implement. We need to measure their efficacy and understand if the things that we’re funding and the policies that we’re implementing are actually producing or moving us closer to the objective, measurable outcome that we want.
Andy Grove at Intel famously built this system of setting objectives and then measuring key results. Some people use KPIs, and there are a lot of different ways to do this. But the bottom line is I want San Jose to be the first big city in the country that passes a budget along with a set of objectives and performance measures and is really rigorous about evaluating the performance of our programs and doubling down on the things that are moving the needle and dropping the things that aren’t.
So, your board of directors is really everybody who lives in San Jose.
That’s correct. Those are our shareholders.
What’s the best piece of life advice you’ve ever gotten?
I’ve been blessed with many great mentors and folks who have supported me through life, but the person I always come back to is actually my dad, who always expressed that he felt like the luckiest guy in the world. And this is kind of funny for a guy who was born in a small coal-mining town in West Virginia, whose family left the coal mining town because the coal mine flooded and who grew up working class. We were always living paycheck to paycheck, and he was a letter carrier who delivered the same route for 25 years.
The point is this: I don’t think he ever said it. He lived it, which is really the value of gratitude. He always appreciated what he had and was grateful for all of the good things he had in life and just brought that kind of relentless optimism and positivity to life every day. He never told me to be grateful. He just modeled it every single day.
What are some misconceptions about San Jose that you’d like to change?
Many people don’t appreciate how exceptional our neighborhoods are. We are a city of neighborhoods, of course. We have these incredibly diverse neighborhoods that are family-friendly. We have a great network of parks, trails, libraries and community centers. And, over the years, we’ve made great investments in neighborhood services.
You and your wife lived in San Francisco for seven years. What drew you back to the South Bay?
We returned to the South Bay for its diversity—culturally and linguistically. We’re also the ethnic food capital of the Bay Area, as KQED pointed out last year. And these are not big, fancy and expensive brands, but little restaurants on the corner that have been in business for 20 years serving, say, Burmese food.
Our diversity is expressed in other ways, such as festivals and cultural and musical events. We don’t always do a good enough job of sharing these strengths. I had a unique opportunity to learn about this cultural richness and see it up close as I campaigned in every neighborhood in the city.
You’ve mentioned your priorities. But how do you maintain the city government’s focus and work with the city council effectively?
It’s really important that we get our 11 council members, city staff, partners and other stakeholders like the county and school boards on board. We all need to come together and agree on priorities. And so I’ve set up transition committees around homelessness, public safety, beautification and downtown vibrancy. And we’ve brought together a very diverse set of stakeholders, including folks from other areas of government.
Those are tall tasks.
I’ve learned that we can’t address issues like public safety and homelessness unless we’re in lockstep with the county and the state—and behavioral health and other agencies. We’ve also invited people from diverse neighborhoods to have a seat at the table, so that the policymakers and the people who are setting and implementing policy inside government are hearing directly from the frustrated residents whose road hasn’t been paved in 20 years or whose small business just had the window broken for the 10th time this year. I’m really optimistic.
What’s the best business advice you ever received, and how can it help you as mayor?
You’ve got to take the boldest bets first. It’s worth prioritizing higher-risk bets if you have the conviction that they’re what’s necessary to move forward.
I learned that from Mark Zuckerberg. I happened to be in the same dorm in college with Mark, and I watched him build Facebook. Nothing about Facebook’s success was inevitable. It wasn’t like they just built a good app when we were in college and the rest was just preordained. People forget they made huge bets.
There was a moment when they were not on mobile—and the world was going to mobile. And Mark basically stopped everything they were doing, even though all of their usage was on a desktop browser. They went all in on building native apps; it was a huge risk at that time, and they were early. People thought they were crazy, and they needed to monetize at the same time.
Seems like a lesson for California.
We need to take bolder swings at the homelessness crisis. What we’ve been doing isn’t scaling. It’s too slow and too expensive. And I firmly believe that we’ve got to create a much lower barrier and cost-effective ways of getting people into safe, managed environments—even if that means a safe camping site somewhere. We have to get people out of unmanaged conditions on the streets; it’s leading to tremendous impacts on our community. I want to see everybody get into stable housing, but we’re going to need different solutions like treatment centers, temporary shelters or interim sites. Above all, we need a strategy, but we’ve got to really push on those lower barrier points to get people off of our streets.
What will San Jose look like by the time your children are heading off to college in 10 to 15 years?
The legacy that I hope that we collectively build is a city that they are both really excited to come back to when they’re looking at their options. They’ll have their whole lives ahead of them, and I’d love for them to have San Jose high on their list of places to live, but also where they can afford to be. I think it’s both sides of that equation.
Matt Mahan helps build a new San Jose for its citizens and the future of his two children.
I want to lead us into a future that attracts investment and growth and truly becomes the capital of Silicon Valley. It’s a city with a sense of having a downtown that is a great urban center and the center of gravity for Silicon Valley. And it’s a fun, dynamic, exciting place where young people want to be. It’s also where people want to start companies and where people want to visit.
I also think it’s really important that our growth is inclusive, and that we build enough housing that young people can still live in Silicon Valley.
Photography by: TRACY EASTON PHOTOGRAPHY; HILTON SAN JOSE; STYLING BY THERESA PALMER
