Tell me about your decision to run for Congress.

"I gave a speech two months ago and the throughline was, If not Marin, where? If not Northern California, if not [the 2nd] District, where, as an incubator, as a catalyst [there is] so much good… And I walked off stage, and people said, 'How can we get you to run for Congress?' I had a week and a half between that day and the filing [deadline].

"I talked to a lot of people, I spent a lot of time calling those I respected…mentors, leaders, and expected them to smack me down to size, expected particularly my best friends to put me in my place… I don’t fit the mold of what I think of as a politician, but everybody said, ‘Do it. We need that voice in government — that is not represented.’ Most people wait until after having children to run for office, [or] they forgo having children. You need to do it now. My best friend, my conscience, the person who keeps my ego in check said, 'Yeah, there are plenty of reasons why you could wait, but why not run while you wait?'"

What’s the campaign experience been like?

"It is magical madness. It is so much more work than I ever could imagine. I don’t think that’s naïveté — I think it’s, you don’t understand until you’re there. Our district…stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border. It’s a third of the California coast. It’s almost 800,000 people. It’s five and a half counties. So just, geographically, it’s huge and we are driving up and down the coast and we are there, boots on the ground…But what does it mean? It means meeting a lot of people. It means talking about the issues that matter. It means engaging to co-create policy solutions. It means fundraising. Let me tell you, it takes a lot more money to run a political campaign that I ever imagined."