Meet Eric
“I lived the American Dream. I'm running because I can't promise my kids this country will give them a brighter future.”
SCROLL TO LEARN ABOUT ERIC
If there is a specific topic you are interested in, click one the following links to take a deep dive:
Eric’s Story • Eric’s Family • Eric’s as a Business Leader • Eric as a Nonprofit Executive
Where I come from
I grew up poor in a small town in rural Maine — local businesses, farming, and timber.
My father is a veteran. He came home from war with injuries he would never fully recover from. He worked as a farmer. Then a run of back surgeries went wrong and left him severely disabled.
Small-town Maine in the nineties had almost nothing for a man in constant pain. So they gave him pills. Then stronger pills. He was addicted to opioids long before anybody was saying that word out loud, and our medical debt ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
My mother was our savior.
She raised boys on food stamps while working long hours. Then she went back to school at night.
She became a nurse.
She worked 60-hour weeks, and a second job in some years, raising three sons and caregiving for a disabled husband.
Our family relied on food stamps, on Medicaid, and on disability checks. We relied on our church. We relied on our community.
She told me it was going to get better. She told me that I would build a better life than the one we had, and that this great country would give me the chance to. I believed her.
The path
Education was my path. It was the only one I could see.
It started with books: novels were my escape during a challenging childhood.
Thanks to great teachers, I thrived in high school.
Then, on a full-ride scholarship, I went to Yale University as a first-generation college student.
During my junior year, my father nearly died. He was read his last rites. He made it through, but he was never going to get better in Maine, and better healthcare cost money we did not have.
So I took the internship and job with the biggest signing bonus I could find. We moved my parents near the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where my brother had been stationed in the Navy.
At the Mayo Clinic, I saw for the first time what incredible healthcare looks like in our country. An amazing team of doctors, nurses, and (importantly) mental health professionals saved my father. I finally "met" my dad when I was 20 years old — he was a changed man.
Financial necessity drove me to a job in finance. I spent less than a year at that first job in New York City.
I went on one date while living in New York — that's when I met my wife, Rachel. We are a team at home and at work, and we have integrated both of our family lives and work lives. I could not be more lucky.
What I built
I moved to California to help start a firm that didn't exist yet.
I spent the next decade helping entrepreneurs with great ideas build businesses. I put together executive teams, set strategy, built out boards, raised money, and would step into operating roles at critical periods.
By the time I left, our business was one of the most successful investment firms in the country. I'm proud of that.
I chose to focus on healthcare because of my father — Maven Clinic and Lyra Health. I helped build Chime and Nubank, two financial inclusion companies that gave bank accounts to people the banks would not take, and Duolingo, which made learning a new language accessible to anyone with a phone. The companies I helped build now serve millions of people.
And I spent years helping pilot new ways of getting care to seniors in rural counties, with Medicare and CMS, under both a Democratic and a Republican administration.
I am now fully detached from my prior business career and entirely focused on public service.
What we give back
Rachel and I run a family foundation based in Napa. Our distribution network gives out thousands of free car seats for families who can't buy one. With Nation's Finest, we launched a support community for women veterans. We help protect a historic theater in downtown Vacaville that was facing closure. We expand reading programs in Sonoma County schools, because I remembered my childhood — reading was the first step in my path to a different future.
When schools shut down during COVID, I led an effort that raised more than $10 million to get low-income kids in-person tutoring.
I also founded the American Dream Institute, which works to protect and expand free speech online.
My family
Rachel and I have two kids.
Our son Owen was born with a congenital heart defect and went into open-heart surgery as a newborn. His doctors saved his life.
We moved to Sonoma in our late 20s. For Rachel, this was a coming home — her great-grandfather built homes here. Her great-grandmother rode her horse to UC Davis.
We moved to Napa in 2021. We wanted somewhere quiet and safe and close to doctors, but also a place with a heartbeat. My parents live here too, three generations of us in this district. I came back to my faith in the hospital with Owen, after a long time away from it.
Being a husband and a father is the best thing I have ever done.
Our Why I'm running
My daughter was born in the fall of 2024. I was holding her when it hit me that I could not give her the same promise my mother gave me — that all of this was going to get better, that she would build a better life than the one we have, and that this country would give her the chance to.
20 years from now, I hope that my daughter will be graduating from college. Our world will be very different. I want to be able to promise her the same future that my mom promised me, but I can't. My generation will be the first in America to have it "worse" than our parents. At this trajectory, the future looks bleak for our children and younger generations. That is our reality if we don't do something.
I've signed a term limit pledge. I take no money from corporate PACs, special interests, or foreign interests. I want a ban on members of Congress trading stocks, and an end to gerrymandering.
The only reason I can refuse all that money is that I can afford to pay for this myself, and you shouldn't need to be an exception with wealth, connections, or virality to compete against the system.
But that's the way it currently is, with all the money in politics. It maintains their power and creates mediocre career politicians.
Nobody earns a lifetime appointment in Congress just for showing up.
CA-4 is nine counties — Colusa, Lake, Napa, Placer, Sacramento, Sonoma, Sutter, Yolo, and Yuba. Almost half the people living here have never once been represented by the man who holds the seat.
I'm running to redeem the American Dream for my kids, and for everybody else's.