Chapter 1: From the Valley to the Prairie Chapter 1 From the Valley to the Prairie On a windy fall day on the back patio of Eggy's Red Garter in Eveleth, Minnesota, I stood in front of twenty-five angry small business owners. Sitting on folding chairs perfectly spaced six feet apart, they glared at me with a collective grimace. Proprietors of bars and restaurants of this and a handful of other small towns on Minnesota's Iron Range, they'd gathered for a town hall to discuss the governor's COVID-19 restrictions. It was October 6, 2020. Margie Koivunen, owner of the Roosevelt Bar next door, took a microphone attached to a portable karaoke machine. Tall and somber, she'd become a leading voice in a local hospitality community that was fed up with pandemic restrictions. She held tightly to the yellow legal pad pages of a handwritten speech that flapped in the wind as she began. "Your one-size-fits-all restrictions on businesses don't make any sense up here," she said. "We don't have the same COVID cases here like you have down in the Twin Cities." For the last several months, the state government's business closures and limits on capacity in bars, restaurants, and other businesses had generated no end of controversy. Especially in rural parts of Minnesota. "I've tried to call the governor's office several times and got no answer," she complained. Then she turned to her fellow small business owners. "Could all of you please stand up?" she asked. As everyone rose to their feet, the intensity of their disgust felt suddenly stronger. "Now, please sit down when the following statement applies to you: How many of you have taken out a bank loan?" Several people sat down. "How many of you have laid off or terminated employees?" Several more sat down. "How many of you have dealt with stress, anxiety, or depression?" Margie joined the rest of the small business owners as everyone took a seat. "I've long since sat down," she concluded. The wind was really blowing now, and suddenly the pages of her speech fluttered from her grasp. I jumped forward and grabbed them off the ground before they blew away. "Nice reflexes," I heard someone mutter. I handed Margie her speech back and hoped the moment provided a bit of levity. But this was not a crowd in a mood to smile. I shouldn't have been surprised. For months I'd been hosting roundtables like this one with business owners across Minnesota, sharing the latest pandemic news and hearing their feedback on our efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Most of these conversations happened in my basement, over video conference. But being here in rural Minnesota, in person, felt a lot different. Looking someone straight in the eye who might be losing their business felt a lot different than seeing them on a screen. Dave Lislegard, the Democratic state representative from this area seated behind me, had invited me to come to his district a few weeks earlier. Getting the commissioner of the state's economic and workforce development agency to come listen to his constituents would make a difference, he said. He didn't have to tell me, but I knew he was also in a tough reelection battle. Margie handed the microphone to other business owners who expressed their frustration. They talked about having to take second jobs to keep their restaurants afloat. They complained about lack of government assistance. One business owner said his cooks were getting so overheated from wearing masks in the kitchen that they had to cool off in the walk-in freezer. But mostly, they groaned about the restrictions coming out of the capital, St. Paul. They argued that it was different in Greater Minnesota (what Minnesotans call the parts of the state outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area) and therefore the same restrictions need not apply to them. Why couldn't we see that? The pandemic had started seven months earlier, but it felt like seven years. When I joined the governor's cabinet to help grow the economy of my home state the year before, I'd been excited to focus on growth. Success would be measured by the number of startups we could help get off the ground, or the number of small businesses that succeeded under our watch. Our wins would come in the number of innovative businesses we could attract to Minnesota and the jobs we'd create. But now my job was exactly the opposite. To slow the spread of this deadly new virus, we were shutting down small businesses to keep people safe. I was helping hundreds of thousands of people leave the workplace and get on unemployment insurance. We weren't creating jobs--we were killing them. Minnesota lost over 416,000 jobs in the first month alone. From the first days of the pandemic, our newly elected governor, Tim Walz--whom I'd known since his upset victory for a congressional seat back in 2006--had asked me to serve as his point person with the business community. Alongside our state's health commissioner, I was tasked with advising him on what our economic approach should be in the crisis, and communicating those decisions to the public. Like every state government, we were operating without a playbook. Meetings ran around the clock, where we debated our approach to school closures, business restrictions, social-distancing protocols, PPE disbursement, and more. And every day at 2:00 p.m., we addressed the public in statewide press conferences live on television, sharing the latest information we had and explaining our approach. Under the bright lights of local news media and reporters, my job was to articulate what our business restrictions were, how they worked, and why we were doing what we were doing. I also had to introduce how unemployment insurance worked to thousands of people who never imagined that they'd need it. I myself had only been vaguely aware that the unemployment insurance program was part of the agency I was being asked to lead when I started this job, until my first day, when I had to sign a piece of paper to capture my signature to print on the checks that we issued to people. Now I was the face of the program to more than 5 million Minnesotans, many desperate for a lifeline. Every customer service complaint mattered, and our system and team were overwhelmed. I heard countless tragic stories of people struggling every day. How had I found myself here? My story is a story about coming home. It's a story about taking a very different turn in life, trying something different, and letting it take me somewhere new. It's a story about reinventing myself and investing in community at a time when America often feels unmoored. It's a story that, I hope, offers a fresh perspective to those who are looking for a new way forward in their lives at a time of great upheaval. Just a few years earlier, I wasn't even living in Minnesota. My wife, Mary, and I were firmly planted in an area of California that's bustling with new ideas and flooded with sunshine. In the heart of Silicon Valley, we lived in Menlo Park--just a few miles from Meta and a few more miles from Google, where we both worked. We'd met at the company, were married in Mary's hometown of San Diego, and had begun a comfortable life together in the Bay Area. We were happy living in the cradle of American innovation. Every day, I would ride my Vespa scooter fifteen minutes to the Googleplex in the sun, where I led a team that I had started, called the Google News Lab, focused on using Google's resources to help the news industry. Mary was the founder of Google for Startups, a similar outreach effort with a different target--startup companies around the world who would use Google tools to grow faster. We had incredible colleagues, big budgets; we built global teams and traveled the world. In our living room hung a map with pushpins for every country we'd visited for work, either alone or together. After a while, there were too many pushpins to count. I loved working in tech, even if I'd stumbled into it. I was a journalist and a teacher who spent much of my twenties doing what I might generously describe as "focused wandering." I taught English in Japan, worked for my dad's small landscaping business, and moved to Boston to do freelance journalism for a few years. Then I went to grad school for public policy, thinking it might make me a sharper journalist. By then, I'd racked up a considerable amount of debt and wasn't sure how I was going to pay it off. Truth was, I didn't really know where I was headed. And then I discovered YouTube while posting clips for a class project in grad school. I became enthralled with the new phenomenon of online video. Watching people create videos by themselves seen by millions, defining "viral" for the first time in the internet age, I became transfixed. A British senior citizen with the handle Geriatric1927 posted a two-minute video called "First Try," where he shared his "geriatric gripes and grumbles," and quietly racked up over a million views. A pair of high school pranksters calling themselves "Smosh" posted goofy songs and skits and suddenly become stars. It seemed like, overnight, everyone had a broadcast TV truck in their pocket. And the phenomenon instantly started shaping news and politics. In the 2006 midterm elections, the incumbent senator from Virginia, George Allen, was caught on video calling his opponent's campaign staffer a "macaca"--a clip that was uploaded to YouTube and became the first viral political video to make national news. The racist quip unearthed deeper issues with Allen's views that commentators claimed swung the election toward his opponent, Jim Webb (though just barely). Not only did that hand the seat to Democrats, but it flipped the entire U.S. Senate. YouTube Politics was born. I'd never worked in technology, but was blown away by how this new medium was changing the world around me. With nothing to lose, I sent a one-page letter to info@youtube.com, pitching myself for a position as "news and politics editor," which somehow caught the eye of the right person. The team brought me on board to figure out how, exactly, YouTube should play a role in this new space. I arrived as one of the first one hundred employees of the company, just as global attention was turning to YouTube and a sudden influx of new cash was coming in from its new owner, Google, to fuel growth. For the next four years, I built a small team and was shocked when everyone kept answering our calls. I found myself in places I really had no business being. We landed a debate partnership with CNN, the first-ever web-to-TV presidential debates, where YouTubers got to ask questions. Sitting in the front row of the CNN-YouTube presidential primary debate, watching YouTube questions from hospital patients, college professors, schoolkids, and even snowmen ( How will you combat climate change? ) play on the big screen as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and eight other candidates looked on, I pinched myself. Was this really happening? Sitting next to me were YouTube's founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt. When the debate was over, Eric turned to Steve and Chad and told them, "Gentlemen, you've arrived." And that's what it felt like--that technology's moment had arrived on the biggest stage and I was lucky to be a part of it. In those days it all looked like upside. Those already in power now had to answer to those who'd gained power through new platforms. Giving power to the powerless, a voice to the voiceless, felt deeply meaningful. What could go wrong? The power of technology in our lives, of course, only increased with each passing year that I was at YouTube, and continued when I moved on to Google. Rising the executive ranks in the world's most innovative company was exhilarating. A sense that anything was possible ran through the company, a feeling that we had the power to do anything. We were moving fast and focused on the upside more than any unintended consequences. After more than a decade at Google, my view slowly began to change. Being in the cradle of innovation was starting to feel oddly confining. It wasn't just Google, it was Silicon Valley. As a region dominated by one industry, the Valley was starting to feel like a bubble. Yes, tech companies in California were building things that changed the world, but it felt like sometimes we weren't connected to it. Highly affluent and professionally obsessed, the culture of Silicon Valley doesn't look much like the rest of the country, let alone the world that it seeks to change through its groundbreaking innovations. I worried that I was starting to lose some perspective. Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the Googleplex every day is a luxury. So is a campus with everything from a wave pool and climbing gym to a concert hall. But I started to ask myself if the magical kingdom that Google had created was making me smarter about the world or more insulated from it. I grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, in a family that had to work hard to make ends meet. My dad started a landscaping business with nothing but a wheelbarrow and a shovel, and my summers working for him gave me a front-row seat to what it meant to grind out a living as a small business owner in a small town. It was hard. I remember my dad bartering landscaping services with our town doctor to pay for the hospital bill that came with my youngest sister's birth. We didn't have health insurance for most of my childhood. Every day at Google, I felt further and further from my roots. At the same time, I started seeing how the influences of platforms like YouTube that had drawn me to Silicon Valley in the first place were not , in fact, all upside. When the Arab Spring exploded on YouTube in 2010, we scrambled to develop a curation process that could get verified videos of the protests to news organizations to use in their coverage. The mere existence of YouTube gave protesters the confidence to document their struggle to the world and build support for their cause. But those same clips also gave the Egyptian government the ability to identify the protesters and jail them--or worse. YouTube wouldn't create a face-blurring technology to help protesters protect themselves in videos for several more years. The technology was moving too fast for us to keep up. And then came "fake news." The Russian attempts at online interference in the 2016 election shocked us at Google, and changed forever our understanding of how technology's power could be manipulated. It also changed how we engaged with the media industry, who had gone from telling us to leave the truth-telling to them, to being outraged that we allowed people to access fake news on our platforms. Things were shifting under our feet faster than ever. I remained an optimist about technology, but there was something about the changes underway that made me wonder if these new problems, along with other major challenges that seemed to be rushing toward America at breakneck speed, were best solved in Silicon Valley. Maybe other places had perspectives to offer. Mary was starting to feel similarly. She'd spent the last five years building startup ecosystems around the world and saw innovation happening everywhere. From Milan to Milwaukee, she was building partnerships with local startup incubators, and in some cases building physical coworking spaces for Google to help the next generation of startups get off the ground. Often I'd travel with her and noticed the energy and excitement that existed outside Silicon Valley. Those tech economies felt different from California. More connected to other industries. More focused on solving people's real problems. And free of coastal elitism. And then, five years into our marriage, our lives changed when Mary became pregnant with twins. We'd struggled for many years to get pregnant, and finally succeeding after multiple rounds of IVF gave us a new perspective. Every parent is changed by their kids, but for those who've struggled to build a family the process takes on a new gravity. We felt lucky. And the process also made us more deliberate people. What would be the best life for our new little girl and boy? Where did we want to raise them, and what did we want to expose them to? Did we want to live near our extended family? Answers to questions like these are different for everyone, but the questions got us talking. Mary is the daughter of Thai immigrants--entrepreneurs who found their way to San Diego to start a chiropractic business. Her mother passed away after a long illness a few years into our marriage, and her father still lived in San Diego. Her sister, Annie, was in Chicago and her brother, Joe, in the Bay Area, though he wasn't sure he was there for the long haul. Meanwhile, my family was all concentrated in the Midwest. I'm the oldest of four kids and have fifteen cousins, most of them in the middle of the country. My sister Kelly lived about one mile from my parents' farm in Northfield, with her husband and five kids. What if we actually moved to Minnesota? I hadn't lived there in twenty years, and Google didn't have offices there. Mary had been born in Iowa, but hadn't lived in the Midwest since she was two. Nothing was forcing us to move other than our own conversations about what we wanted the next chapter of our life to look like. We stumbled around that conversation for months. Growing up, I had always wanted to leave Minnesota and seek new horizons. But the more we spoke, coming home was beginning to feel just as exciting. As I talked with others, I realized we weren't alone in our thoughts. The Bay Area has seen some of the highest out-migration in the country over the past ten years. Minnesotans in particular are famous for moving back home because the quality of life in the state is so high. Minnesota always finds itself on top-five lists of places to live in the country, based on everything from education and infrastructure to amenities and professional opportunity. Mary was intrigued, too. Her work building startup ecosystems all over the country gave her the sense that there was possibility outside the Valley. As a native San Diegan, though, could she stand the winters? What was it like to live through five months of snow every year? We both agreed that we loved having twins and raising them with family around to help could be a big, welcome change. I don't know that there was just one reason we decided to take the leap. Mostly, we felt that reinventing ourselves in a new place would be an adventure. And that maybe, in a moment of so much disruption and pessimism, we'd find purpose in it. What made it possible wasn't me, but Mary. She'd been offered a new job with a venture capital firm started by AOL's founder, Steve Case, called Rise of the Rest, focused on investing in startups outside the coasts. It was based in D.C., and the assumption was that she would work from Menlo Park. But living in the middle of the country could be a powerful way to live out the mission of her new job. What if, she suggested, she did the job from Minneapolis? I could hardly contain my excitement. The momentum of our discussions had grown and this seemed like the perfect path to give Minnesota a shot. Within a month, Mary had taken the job, I'd agreed with Google to work remotely from Minneapolis, and we were searching for a new place to live in Minnesota. It happened fast. In fact, it happened so fast that part of me wondered if either of us really understood what we were getting into. Especially Mary, who was taking an even bigger leap than me, something that would present us with some challenges in the years that followed. In April 2018, we moved to a new home in Minneapolis. We planned our arrival to hit in the spring so we could begin our new chapter by enjoying the precious few months of good weather Minnesota has every year. A week later, an April blizzard dropped a foot of snow on our new front yard. This is a story of coming home and reinventing my life in my home state. In reflecting on this major personal transition, I hope my journey might offer an opportunity to look at where American life is going. Reinvention has always been at the heart of the American ideal, but it's happening in a more uncertain environment than ever before. So much of what we've taken for granted in this country is shifting. The headlines of America's diminished trust in its core institutions can make the way forward seem less and less clear. Yet I discovered that the way to a stronger country starts, as it always has, with building stronger local communities. With investing in a physical place and finding purpose in it. For all that technology has done to connect us globally, the deepest purpose we can find comes with investing in our chosen communities and making them feel like home. Moving home to Minnesota was my first step in that journey, but it wasn't the only one. Eight months after Mary and I moved our young family to Minneapolis, I had the opportunity to leave Google to join Minnesota's state government, becoming the commissioner of the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) under Governor Walz. It was another reboot. The job was a massive change, for unknown outcomes, with not much assurance of success. Bureaucracies are famously challenging to run, and I would be a complete outsider. But it also felt like a chance to focus on the very things that inspired Mary and me to move to the heartland in the first place. And when the pandemic hit, that possibility took on a whole new meaning. Leaving the comforts of Google to run a 1,400-person government bureaucracy during a global health crisis gave me more insight into how American life is being transformed than I ever got working in technology. And it gave me a shot at making a real difference in the place I grew up. I wrote this book to share the insights I discovered to a simple but important question: How can we find purpose in our lives and build community in a modern America that feels increasingly disconnected from its promise? My journey home taught me many answers to that question. It taught me the power of going local. It taught me that putting yourself in an entirely new situation is often the best way to learn. It taught me that public service is a unique way to make a big impact. It taught me to invest in what makes your chosen community unique. It taught me the benefit of spending time with people who aren't just like you. It taught me about family, faith, and making friends in your forties. It taught me about reconciling old differences, about the kind of father I wanted to be, and about what it really means to have a partner in life. And it taught me that crises can bring communities closer--when we invest in strengthening the things that bind us together. I also got something else from moving home to Minnesota. Bringing fresh eyes to my native state gave me a lens into why this place, I came to believe, is uniquely worth watching for insights on where America is headed. My new community, I discovered, was both exceptional and paradoxical. For example: Minnesota has boasted the lowest unemployment rate in American history, yet it is home to some of the steepest workforce shortages in the nation. It enjoys the moniker "Minnesota Nice," yet has some of the worst racial disparities in the U.S. The state has made decades of outsized investments in education and infrastructure that have helped build the densest Fortune 500 metro area in the entire country, yet tense urban-rural divisions are reshaping the state's political climate--especially since the pandemic. It is consistently named one of the best places to live in the country, despite having some of the coldest temperatures in America. And nestled among a sea of red states in the Midwest, Minnesota has not elected a Republican to statewide office in almost twenty years. It's a unique place. But most people probably don't give much thought to Minnesota, or to the Midwest in general. "Flyover states" don't get national attention unless they become important in presidential elections. Yet our country ignores the Midwest at its own peril. There is more happening here that has something to say about America's future during a time of great upheaval than you might think. Just a few months after COVID-19 had arrived, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer, and caught on video by a bystander, just a few miles from our new home. I heard sirens all night, and walked through burned-out neighborhoods that had been destroyed the next day. As protests unfolded around the world, Minnesota became the center of global attention. The racial disparities that led to George Floyd's murder, and the protests and riots that followed, run deep. They are complex or simple, depending on your view. And they exist everywhere. Minnesota has had a challenging history of racism, I would discover more deeply in the weeks and months that followed. Tasked with negotiating with legislators for state dollars to rebuild the neighborhoods that were destroyed, I saw up close the challenges and controversy that shape our conversations about race. They served to highlight just what an inflection point we find ourselves at as a state, and as a nation. And so, in the pages that follow, Minnesota itself is a character in my story, as much as the people and family I connected with in my new community. But I'm not here to cheerlead Minnesota or the Midwest. Rather, I hope my home state's story, like my own, is one worth telling that sheds light on the promise and peril of community renewal. The story you're about to read is a personal one. It's the story of going from riding my scooter in the sunshine to work at the world's most innovative tech company, to standing on the windy back patio of a bar in northern Minnesota debating the appropriate table size and social-distancing protocols with restaurant owners during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. And how I learned to find purpose and build community along the way. My story, like everyone's, is both unique and universal. It's the story of a place and a country that is reinventing itself--through the eyes of a person trying to do the same. Excerpted from How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention by Steve Grove All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
