In anticipation of the San Francisco mayoral election, The Epoch Times is interviewing the mayoral candidates. This article is the second in the series. View the whole series HERE.
Joanna Rees is a venture capitalist who also teaches at Santa Clara University. She has degrees from Duke University and Columbia University, and learned first-hand the challenges in running a business by managing an inn, a restaurant, and currently a venture capital firm. She also has a background in marketing, and is known for her persistence and determination. An abridged version of this interview was first published on July 7, 2011 in the San Francisco print edition.
The Epoch Times: When did you begin to be interested in public service?
Joanna Rees: I had a great mentor in my life, a woman named Ann Richards, who was the first elected female governor of Texas. She always said to me, when you serve, not as you serve. But I had an obligation at some point to go into public service, and so two years ago I started what I called the listening tour and went around San Francisco neighborhood by neighborhood—like to Chinatown, went through the Sunset—and just talked to people about what they loved about the city, what they were concerned about, and what they wanted in the next stage of leadership. I heard from people across the community that we need a new approach to our most long-term problems and that was what inspired me to step up and run.
ET: You’ve worked in many professions. What’s the one thing you did that made the greatest impact on people, something you’re really proud of that you’ve done in your career?
JR: I’m very proud of having supported so many entrepreneurs—so many people with new ideas and helping them grow their companies into something that creates a lot of jobs and have a strong economic impact in the community and in the Bay Area. I’ve supported more than 60 companies. I’m very proud of that. I’ve created thousands of jobs.
ET: How come you became a venture capitalist?
JR: I became a venture capitalist not because the world needed to have a venture capital fund, but I have seen companies fail who actually built the technology that they said they would build, but they failed because they didn’t understand their market and their customers. I came from a strong marketing background and I’ve always focused on markets and people and customers. I said, “What if I kind of slipped venture capital investment where I focused on studying markets and then looking for technology solutions to meet the market need, versus the Silicon Valley model, which is to create new technology and then look for a market.” So, I came at it from a new approach, and it was a neat new approach in the industry.
ET: It was an innovative idea then?
JR: Yeah.
ET: Was it difficult when you first started?
JR: It was extremely difficult because everyone said, “It’s not going to be possible. You have no venture capital experience—you should go do something else.” But I continued to listen, to listen to what their objections were. I integrated those as I continued to develop the idea. I met with 400 investors over three years. I’ve heard “No’s” a lot, and those “No’s” ultimately turned into “Yes’s.” It was challenging, but I would say that persistence beats resistance.
ET: What are two other important factors in becoming a successful entrepreneur?
JR: Entrepreneurs have an idea that they want to pursue, but it’s so important to listen to market feedback. I was good at that—I went out and really listened. And this has even been the same approach for running for mayor—going out and listening to the community, understanding what the community needs are, understanding what the issues are and always listening—always iterating and changing and adapting to what the needs are of the community. That’s one thing I did well in venture capital. You have to have an interesting balance of listening and strength to continue to pursue your idea. Because if you just listen, you won’t stay focused on what you really believe something can be. You have to do both. You have to have strength to pursue your vision but you have to have some flexibility to adapt your vision to the market.
ET: Before becoming a venture capitalist you didn’t have any experience. How did you learn—did you go to school, did you learn yourself?
JR: I surrounded myself with very good people. I wasn’t coming from a venture capital background but I have a lot of skills. I have worked for a long time and I had success in my professional life. But I needed to strengthen and deepen my experience in venture capital so I brought in advisers, people that help me who have been in the industry for a long time and I balanced that with my ideas around innovation and new ideas.
I teach leadership at Santa Clara University and one of the keys of running anything is all about the people. Great leaders build great teams. That’s something I look forward to bringing to City Hall.
ET: Why do you want to run for mayor? And when did you start to have this thought?
JR: It starts with a deep love of San Francisco and a deep love of the community and San Francisco to really take advantage of all that it can be. We’re the innovation capital of the world but we haven’t fully embraced that in terms of who we should be going forward. So that’s where it really started. It was about going out into the community two years ago, just listening to people and hearing validation that my background, even though I wasn’t a City Hall insider, was something that was appealing to people. It’s something that people were excited about. It was about [the fact that] someone’s going to come in who is going to take a new approach to our challenging issues and hopefully get them solved and fixed.
ET: You’ve been in the investment industry but never in the public sphere, as an official. Do people have questions for you?
JR: People always ask that. It goes back to what I said earlier about people—about being effective going into the current fully nascent City Hall and figuring out who’s great and what are their needs and how they can continue to build their team to better serve the community. So it’s working with the existing system but bringing a spirit of entrepreneurship.
ET: The economy and jobs are very important. What will you do to create jobs?
JR: Job loss is the number one issue. We lagged—the Bay Area—in job creation, for more than a decade. So this is not [that] San Francisco has fallen behind in the last year or two, this is actually a problem that has gone on for a long time. We’ve lost so many of our large employers because of the tax structure. The number one thing is to change the tax structure to keep jobs in San Francisco. We’ve done that with biotech companies. We want to attract biotech companies to the Mission Bay area. We eliminated the employee payroll tax; we do not tax stocks for biotech companies and now we have more than 2000 biotech companies in San Francisco. So we need to do that across the city, not just in Mission Bay and not just in five blocks of Market Street related to Twitter. We have to do that across the economy.
For small businesses, for San Francisco, its backbone is really the merchants. We have to streamline their ability to run their business. We put a lot of burden on small businesses whether it’s doing things like filing for a permit or a license. People have to take time off of work, they have to go down to City Hall, file paperwork in person. It’s a burden. [Let’s] move that online to streamline it and make it easier for small merchants.
ET: What will you do to improve public transportation?
JR: A number of things. First of all, I love that San Francisco is a transit-versed city. To be a transit-versed city we have to have a world class transportation system. I’ve been supportive of legislation in the past that enables us to restructure the city’s ability to add part time drivers to meet peak demand when people are going to work in the morning and leaving work in the evening. I think that’s critically important. A lot of it has to do with how we maintain the budgets in the public transportation system, that it’s not an area that we cut back. I’m also supportive of a $100 vehicle mitigation fee to provide more funding for public transit. We have to be smart about how we run the public transit. Whether that’s creating rapid transit lanes on some of our major corridors and other things like even demand-based routing, where the buses go where there is a high population of people.
ET: What do you think of the subway project? Should we invest in the central subway, when Muni has a deficit? People are concerned about using funds for this.
JR: I’m supportive of the project—it also creates jobs. When I was on my listening tour, one thing that I heard from merchants in Chinatown in particular was the problem with parking. Especially in the evening, when some of the garages close, they felt that it was hurting some of the restaurants and stores that were open in the evening in terms of bringing more people into that area. I think this will help.
ET: Community leaders in Chinatown are concerned that the subway is too short. It will cost a lot, and won’t go all the way into Chinatown.
JR: I’ve heard some concerns but I think overall the project is a good project. It’s going to bring more people into Chinatown who don’t have to worry about parking their car and not finding a place to be able to park. It shouldn’t be an either/or that if we have this project we can’t have good municipal transportation. I think we need to have both.
ET: How will you reform city hall and make it more transparent?
JR: There are three major themes I heard when I was out listening to the community for the last two years. We talked about the first one, which was jobs. We have to grow our way out of the deficit and the way we’re going to do that is with jobs. Then if we believe in jobs then we have to support businesses. So we have to have a tax structure in place that helps businesses grow, not put a fine on businesses.
The other issue is public education. I always talk about it as my moment of obligation. When I knew I had to run, I was convinced that the only way we’ll have a significant impact on improving public schools is that the mayor makes it a high level priority.
The third thing that I always talk about is transparency. Because what I’ve heard from people in the community is—I’m willing to pay my fair share, I’m willing to pay for services that support the community, but you have to tell me where my money goes. People talked about it in an emotional way, about parking tickets, especially because we have very high-priced parking tickets. They’ve almost doubled in cost in the last seven years. You try to pay your parking ticket online and you pay an additional fee. If you pay online, there’s no one to process. It should be cheaper! When that happens—when we add punitive fees and fines, it breaks down the trust between the community and our local governments. So transparency is critical. This is where we need to use technology. We need to use technology to put budgets that are easily accessible, easy to read, in multiple languages so that everyone can understand where the money is coming into the city and where the money is being spent.
I’m also a huge proponent of what I call bottom-up budgeting. When we have a budget deficit, we cut every city department by the same percentage. When we go department by department, there are things we should not be cutting at all because they are critical to serving the community. And there are some things that maybe are no longer meeting their intended purpose, and we shouldn’t continue to fund them.
ET: What will you do to improve the budgeting process?
JR: Make it a bottom-up budgeting process, so rather than telling each department everybody gets cut equally, you start at the bottom and you say what are the services we need to best serve this community, where should we be investing, and then looking for other ways that we should be looking for efficiencies to reduce the spending, and go department by department to do that across the city.
And then make sure this is all fully transparent and show accountability. When we spend money for something, we show the effectiveness of what we’re spending it on.
ET: What about pension-reform, and health-benefit reform?
JR: We have several groups working on this, which means that we’re going to make some progress on pension-reform. Something, maybe several things, will be set on the ballot in November, and it’s up to the community to decide which initiative they want to support. I’m happy that we have collective groups working on this in collaboration.
ET: As for the current mayor’s proposal for reform, do you agree with it?
JR: This is where we always choose the citizens. Coming from the private sector, it’s helpful because when you run a business, it’s all about your customer. If you’re not serving your customer well, you don’t stay in business. That’s a great skill to translate into how we serve our community—that it’s about serving the community. So it’s important that we let the community decide what they believe the best structure could be.
ET: What would you do if other officials think differently than you?
JR: I’d work with them in a collaborative way and invite everyone to the table so we hear everyone rather than have groups working against one another—make sure everyone’s ideas are listened to and evaluated, and collectively we’ll come up with a proposal.
ET: What are the steps you’ll take to improve education?
JR: The mayor has the ability to work with so many constituents in the community. We’re going to need a community-wide effort to improve public education because we’re working with such limited funds and there’s no more money coming from the city.
One thing that I’m very supportive of is neighborhood schools, where a child can walk to their school, and the school has a number of additional services located onsite at the school, things like social work and mental health programs and afterschool programs. There are so many organizations we already fund in the city that support children and families, and locating them at the school is critically important. There is a summer school program that had a teacher offsite, and they asked the teachers if you had $20,000 what would you spend it on. The predominant issue for the teachers was the social worker. Because the teachers needed additional support—we expect them to do everything in the classroom—so having that support is really critical, and also making it possible that a parent can drop a child off at 7:30 in the morning and pick them up at 6:00 in the same place. I drop them off at school, and it’s a comprehensive full day, and I know that they are going to be cared for in one safe place.
I also think there’s opportunity to engage the business community to support our schools and provide internships for people. San Francisco has a big philanthropic community, [though] support has not come as much into the public school system. They think there’s a real opportunity since we’re on such limited funds.
ET: Do we need more funds for afterschool programs?
JR: [What’s critical is] getting additional support from the business and philanthropic community to fund those programs.
ET: What kind of programs?
JR: Tenderloin Community School has a lot of these services onsite. The students are there for an extended day. They even have a program with UCSF that provides dental care—it’s terrific that kids can get their teeth checked right at school. For dental students it gives them an opportunity to continue to practice. So it serves both [needs].
There’s another school, E.R. Taylor, that has a healthy structure program that provides social work and a nurse and a mental health professional. That school was a failing school; now it’s a Blue Ribbon School, and they attribute this to the healthy structure program.
ET: What about incidents in Chinatown, such as the shootings?
JR: This is where the mayor has to effectively use the platform to be able to make sure that the communication back to the community is: We can’t cut these services, because they’re critical. Investing in our young people by providing a safe place for them to be all day. If parents are working long hours we need to recognize that and provide services that support parents and those families. A school’s a great hub to do that.
ET: Do you have experience working with the business community to support education?
JR: For the last decade I’ve worked with the New Schools Venture Fund, and we support educational entrepreneurs and help them develop new ideas that can have an impact on student performance. The early things we supported were things like Teach for America that were bringing high quality teachers into low income schools. Now we’re supporting new technologies and teacher training, and all of the funding comes from the private sector for New Schools. It’s not coming from the school district.
I’ve also been part of something called “Nifty,” which is a network for teaching entrepreneurship. I chair the board in San Francisco that’s teaching young people how to be an entrepreneur, how to build a business. We have found when students went through the program when they were in the ninth grade, they stayed in school all the way through twelfth grade because now school had context for them. They understood if they were running a t-shirt business they needed to know math, how to write, marketing materials. It’s been an incredibly effective program, and that program is also fully funded by the private sector.
ET: What about the homicide incidents in Chinatown? What is the effectiveness of gun control?
JR: I’m supportive of gun control but it’s not the answer alone, unfortunately. Because the situation is that young people in particular are out on the street because they don’t have community programs and community support that keeps them engaged and active and focused on their education and their own development. We have to couple that with educational programs along with supporting gun control.
ET: Do you have specific ideas how to improve business in Chinatown?
JR: I did a series of roundtables and did one on traveling and tourism, talking to community leaders. How do we bring that business in—everyone talked about the critical role Chinatown plays in tourism.
ET: What about having shuttles into Chinatown?
JR: It’s a jewel in the city and I don’t think we’re doing enough to support our jewel.
ET: What about the shark fin issue?
JR: I’m a huge supporter of heritage and maintaining cultural traditions. I also love animals and I’m very concerned because of the cruel treatment.
I’m incredibly supportive of culture, about job creation, merchants and public education, and I hope those issues would speak to who I was in serving that community versus an issue about what they eat.
ET: Is there anything else you want to say?
JR: I’m always listening. If there are ideas to improve, I would always love to hear those ideas. I think we need to continue to listen to the community, and once in office it’s the same thing. It’s about continually listening to the community because the community is on the ground—the community knows what the issues are. Our leadership is not on every street, every day. I think it’s really important to maintain the listening. I would love to hear back from people.
ET: How did you cope when you went through difficult times?
JR: I’ve fallen down a lot in my life, when I was starting venture capital. People who were very well known in the field told me, “If you’re not failing, then you’re not really trying for something exceptional. When you try to do big things, you’re not always successful and you fall down.”
My son always talks about this—he’s 22 and we talked about what he learned from me. He said, “I’ve learned more from my mother from when she failed than when she’s successful because what I learned in her failure was how she picked herself back up. She had a resilience to continue to move forward, she didn’t have failures define her.”
I always take that as learning. Whenever something has happened in my life and things didn’t work exactly as I wanted them to, I always think, “What can I learn from that? How can I take that and do better next time? What were the lessons from that?” That’s how I’ve been able to move through difficulty and continue to move forward.
ET: What do you do in your spare time?
JR: Part of my leisure time is when I’m campaigning. I like to walk. I knock on people’s doors and talk to them about the mayor’s race and my leadership. I do a lot of merchant walks. When I do walking for pleasure I like to do it in nature. Walking is probably my peace moment. I love to cook—cooking is another way of unwinding.
I like to do crafts. I like to sew and make my own curtains. I used to make all my own clothes when I was younger. I just find making things very relaxing.
ET: Do you have anything else to add?
JR: What brought me to San Francisco was that San Francisco was a collection of so many different communities, so many different cultures that were together having their own cultural identity but at the same time feeling that they’re integrated with the city—unique in its different neighborhoods, but collectively together. I wanted to raise my family in a community like that. The Chinese community is such a critical piece of who we are, of our fabric and our history. I want to make sure the Chinese community continues to thrive. It’s really important for me. It’s important to who we are in San Francisco.
