Matthew Mahan (born November 18, 1982) is an American politician and tech entrepreneur, now serving his first term on the

San Jose City Council The San Jose City Council, officially San José City Council, is the legislature of the government of the City of San Jose, California. As the Mayor of San Jose, Sam Liccardo casts the 11th vote on matters before the council and acts as chair ...

as the District 10 Councilmember representing the

Almaden Valley , other_name= , native_name= es, Almadén , nickname= , settlement_type= Neighborhood of San Jose , total_type= , motto= , image_skyline = , flag_size= , image_sea= , seal_size= , image_shield= , shield_size= , image_blank_emblem= , ...

Blossom Valley Blossom Valley is a neighborhood of San Jose, California, located in South San Jose. Geography Blossom Valley is located in South San Jose South San Jose is the southern region of San Jose, California. The name "South Side" refers to an area ...

, and Vista Park neighborhoods. Having won the election for Mayor, he is now Mayor-elect for San Jose. Previously, Mahan served as the co-founder and CEO of Brigade Media, a tech company focused on civic engagement.

Early life and education

Mahan was raised in

Watsonville, California Watsonville is a city in Santa Cruz County, California, located in the Monterey Bay Area of the Central Coast of California. The population was 52,590 according to the 2020 census. Predominantly Latino and Democratic, Watsonville is a self ...

. He attended Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose on a low-income scholarship. While in high school, Mahan worked with former State Senator Jim Beall and former Santa Clara Counsel Ann Ravel. Mahan graduated from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in 2005. In college, Mahan served as President of the

Harvard Undergraduate Council The Harvard Undergraduate Council, Inc., colloquially known as "The UC," was the student government of Harvard College between 1982 and 2022, when it was abolished by a student referendum after a series of scandals. The UC had faced widespread ...

Career

After Harvard, Mahan spent the next year building irrigation systems in Bolivia. He then joined Teach for America where he taught at Alum Rock Middle School. In 2008, Mahan joined a tech startup led by

Sean Parker Sean Parker (born December 3, 1979) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and serving as the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also ...

and Joe Green. Together, they formed Causes, an early Facebook application focused on grassroots and public engagement that helped raise money for nonprofit organizations. Mahan became CEO and president of Causes in 2013. In 2014, Mahan launched Brigade with investments from Parker,

Ron Conway Ronald Crawford Conway (born March 9, 1951) is an American venture capitalist and philanthropist. He has been described as one of Silicon Valley's " super angels". Early career Conway graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor's d ...

Marc Benioff Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, an enterprise cloud computing company. In September 2018, Benioff acquired ''Time (mag ...

, and others. Brigade was created as a social medium for civil engagement. In 2019, Brigade was acqui-hired by

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...

and its technology was purchased by

Countable In mathematics, a set is countable if either it is finite or it can be made in one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers. Equivalently, a set is ''countable'' if there exists an injective function from it into the natural numbers ...

. In early 2020, Mahan entered the

District 10 race. He won with 58% of the vote, and in January 2021, was sworn in as the District 10 Council member for the city of San Jose. In September 2021, Mahan became a candidate for Mayor of San Jose, focusing on a platform of accountability in government. He proposed an accountability dashboard which would track progress on issues like crime and homelessness. He also pledged to end the current system of automatic raises for politicians and city department heads unless progress is shown. In November 2022, he was elected mayor of San Jose, defeating

Santa Clara County Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is the sixth-most populous county in the U.S. state of California, with a population of 1,936,259, as of the 2020 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together f ...

supervisor

Cindy Chavez Cindy Chavez (born April 7, 1964) is an American politician who serves as the Santa Clara County supervisor representing district two, which is home to nearly 400,000 residents in Downtown, East, and South San Jose. Her public service career began ...

in a close race. He will serve a two-year term and be up for re-election in 2024.

Personal life

Mahan married Silvia-Wedad Scandar in 2012. The couple met at Harvard in their freshman year at school. They have two children and live in San Jose's

neighborhood. At Harvard, he lived in the same dorm as Mark Zuckerberg.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mahan, Matt 1982 births California Democrats Harvard University alumni Living people Mayors of San Jose, California San Jose City Council members Teach For America alumni