Maria Davidson isn’t the first name that comes to mind when you think of Silicon Valley power players. But for some of tech’s most outspoken figures, she’s the first person they trust with their political aims.

The 34-year-old founder of Kojo, a construction startup, is heading up a new political group called California Renewal, which aims to build a lasting presence to promote moderate policies in the state. It isn’t the first group of its kind — the California Business Roundtable and David Crane’s Govern for California espouse similar, pro-business ideals — but it’s getting some serious support. According to Bloomberg (opens in new tab), Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, Greenoaks Capital founder Neil Mehta, and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan have all chipped in, with the goal of raising up to $1 billion in the coming years.

Born in Russia and raised in Israel, Davidson moved to San Francisco 11 years ago after meeting Lonsdale and agreeing to be his chief of staff. (Though she later left Lonsdale’s VC firm to start her own company, Kojo, Davidson has nothing but positive things to say about the controversial Twitter fixture.) On a walk down Marina Boulevard on a recent Friday, she was occasionally distracted by the sheer volume of notifications on her phone: Elon Musk had just retweeted a post of hers about the rate of government spending in California. (“Wow,” the X owner wrote.)

Despite never working in politics before, Davidson has tapped into a powerful feeling among many tech elites: that California has become too liberal, is spending too much, and is far too beholden to organized labor. Strolling down the waterfront, Davidson gamely explained how she first got involved in these discussions, and how they led to the formation of California Renewal. A former president of the Oxford Union debate society, she happily delved into the thornier topics surrounding her group — including whether it’s self-serving for all these tech titans to get involved in politics now, when a powerful California union is proposing a 5% wealth tax on billionaires.

Agree with her or not, what Davidson is proposing is something many in Silicon Valley are talking about behind the scenes. Here, she explains it in her own words.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Let’s start by talking about you. Tell me about where you’re from and how you wound up in San Francisco.

I was born in the Soviet Union, when it was still the Soviet Union, to academic parents, and we escaped communism to move to Israel. So most of my childhood I spent in Israel, and then I moved to the U.K. when I was 13, not speaking any English, and stayed in the U.K. till I was 23. I went to college at Oxford. I ran this debating society called the Oxford Union, and I ended up meeting Joe Lonsdale, who’s one of the cofounders of Palantir, and he convinced me to move to the U.S. to become his chief of staff, and I’ve been here ever since. 

And you just decided immediately, “Yeah, sure, I’ll move to San Francisco”? Had you been here before?

I had actually never been here before. I think when you’re 23, you don’t have that much to lose. I remember I called my mother, and I said, so my vacation to America is actually going to be forever. And she was like, “What?” But I was really inspired by Joe’s vision of fixing these broken industries, and especially as someone who was very young at the time, being able to actually feel empowered to do something about it, because I think the culture in London is very different. You know, as a 23-year-old in London, you don’t have nearly as much of an ability to actually make an impact as you do in San Francisco.

In London, there’s this real sense of an appeal to authority, and there’s this feeling that you need to have 30 years of experience before you go and do everything. Here I was just amazed to meet so many young entrepreneurs who were building these bold, ambitious projects, and to feel like I was really in the center of innovation and just in a place that had so much energy.

And so then from there you founded Kojo, a materials management platform for construction companies. How did you go from running a startup to politics?

• SF is so expensive, even doctors are working AI side hustles

• ‘This is really serious shit’: OpenAI policy czar thinks ‘doomers’ are playing with fire

I always paid attention to politics, but I think when we saw how much SF changed during the pandemic, I think that was a moment where that really inspired me to think, “Wait, we can actually have a real impact.” Seeing how SF was transformed from 2020 when it got really bad here to now, where I think the city is thriving, led us to think, “OK, this is actually something to pay more attention to.”

Do you identify as a Democrat or a Republican, and has that changed over the years?

I really focus on what are commonsense and practical politics, any party aside. If we just focus on California there’s a lot more that people on both sides would agree on than disagree on. And a lot of that is, how can we continue to make California the best place in the world to live, to work, to build a family, to build the future?

That was a very diplomatic answer, but I’m gonna push you a little bit. Do you have a favorite candidate for governor? 

We have met a few candidates who I think are great. I think Matt Mahan, for example, is fantastic. I think if you look at his policies, I think he’s focused on affordability, which is the No. 1 issue in California right now. I think he has a great plan for housing. I’ve just generally been really impressed with him.

So talk to me about California Renewal. It sounds like you’ve been working on this for about a year now. What is the elevator pitch? 

The elevator pitch is building an organization that is built to be permanent. Because one of the issues right now with California politics is that the vast majority of Californians only pay attention at very specific election times, and they get involved in very, very specific races. People are very passionate about ballot initiatives, but there’s nothing that is actually permanent in the sense of being a permanent voice for centrist policies; for being pro-growth and pro-entrepreneurship and pro-building safe and vibrant cities. And so the goal for us is really to build an institution that can stand the test of time and that can promote those values for decades to come. 

And how do you do that? What does that look like organizationally? 

Well, it starts with bringing together enough capital for this organization to actually last for a long time, and also building a team of people that are really passionate about it. I think especially after seeing what happened in SF, so many of our friends have become really energized about California politics. And then if you couple that with what’s happening in education, with just the fact that people don’t feel services have improved, we found that a lot of people want to get involved in this organization, and ultimately, to build a permanent organization.

A recent Bloomberg piece described you as a counterweight to unions, to organized labor. Do you think that’s an accurate description?

Public sector unions are incredibly powerful in California politics. And they’re not the only special interest that’s very powerful; the utilities are very powerful, oil companies. And honestly, we have admiration for a lot of unions. With my company, Kojo, we worked closely with a lot of the construction and builders associations and the construction unions. But what we’ve seen is that specifically public sector unions, they represent about 3% of California’s population, and 97% of California’s population is not in a public sector union, and we want to make sure that they and other private sector workers who aren’t part of any organized labor movements are represented too. 

Some of the first supporters of California Renewal were big tech figures — people like Lonsdale, Tan, and Mehta. And there’s a sentiment among people in tech of frustration around unions, organized labor, regulation. I’m wondering why you think that is.

I think it’s right in front of you, if you look at how much state spending has grown compared to how much services have increased. Only 25% of eighth graders in California hit the proficiency level for math. That’s shocking. If you think about the state of our roads, we rank 26th in the country for congestion. If you think about homelessness, we’ve spent $37 billion since 2019 only to have homelessness increase 20%. And I think a lot of the tech community has become very, very focused on setting California up to make sure that we don’t continue down this path of just constantly ballooning spending and public sector pension liabilities that are going to be very, very hard for California to actually pay.

But why are unions specifically, or organized labor, the boogeyman of this spending? 

Because they are extremely powerful and extremely effective. If you think about SEIU, they have 700,000 members. The wealth tax, which has gotten a lot of publicity, was proposed by a subsector of SEIU. And I think they get a lot of attention, because there have been multiple instances of making it very clear just how powerful they are in the state, and how much power they have in Sacramento, and how many candidates are elected with tremendous union support. 

I just wonder if it feels a little convenient that a lot of wealthy tech people are jumping in and saying, “Oh, we really need to work on affordability, we really need to counter regulations in the unions,” right around the time that some unions are saying, “We need to start taxing rich people.”

I think, naturally, tensions are much higher in an election year, and definitely the wealth tax has galvanized some people that were previously uninterested in politics, because it does affect them. But I think for a lot of the people that are involved have been talking about this for years. Talking about unfunded pension liabilities, the price of gas, how difficult it is to build. In California, the YIMBY movement has been heavily supported by tech for a long time. And so I think that what you’re seeing now, is that we’re in an election year, we are going to have a new governor, and I think there’s just a lot at stake.

I read that your goal was to raise $100 million this year. How close you are to that goal?

I’ll say the fundraising is going very well. And we’ll leave it at that. 

Are you also talking to people in L.A.? 

Yeah. I mean, after that Bloomberg article came out, I got an insane amount of outreach on Twitter, DMs on LinkedIn — I hadn’t checked my LinkedIn InMail in a long time before I started reading those messages. And it’s very clear that this has galvanized a lot of people. And for us, it’s very important for this to not be a tech initiative, and we want to be really clear that this is a movement that we’re building to represent all of California. People in L.A. are very passionate about this. People in San Diego are very passionate about this. People in Central Valley are very passionate about this. Truly, the goal is to make sure that we represent the entire state. 

Who is the most interesting or exciting person that you’ve talked to about this, that you can reveal?

I mean, you know what the answer is going to be to that question.

OK, I will just note here, that you did recently get a retweet by Elon Musk. Would there be interest in engaging with him on something like this?

[Smiles] We’ll see.