I didn't start thinking about Collective Capital because I wanted to start a political movement. I started thinking about it because, somewhere along the way, I realized I hated the choices our politics kept giving us.
Red versus blue. Capitalism versus socialism. Government versus the free market. Everything gets reduced to two opposing sides, as though we have to choose one complete package or the other. But that's not how the world actually works.
We already live in a mixed society. We have private businesses and public roads. Private property and public schools. Entrepreneurs and libraries. Corporations and fire departments. Markets produce incredible things, while shared institutions provide foundations that markets either cannot or should not be expected to provide.
I don't particularly care whether an idea gets labeled capitalist or socialist. I care whether it works.
Something doesn't feel right.
At some point, I started comparing the life I was building with the life I remembered growing up. My parents were able to buy a nice home. There seemed to be more expendable income. We traveled, had adventures, and enjoyed a comfortable life on considerably less money than I earn today.
I eventually became a Lead Software Engineer. That's a career I once assumed would provide my family with substantially more economic freedom than my parents had. Instead, supporting a family can still feel surprisingly tight.
I'm doing okay. This isn't a story about poverty. I have a home. I can save money. I'm paying down debt. My family has opportunities, and I'm grateful for what we have. But that's almost what bothers me.
If someone with a successful engineering career can feel the pressure, what does the economy feel like for everyone earning half as much?
And I don't think I'm imagining the answer. I see younger Millennials and Gen Z struggling to buy homes, start families, save for retirement, pay for healthcare, or simply establish the kind of stable adult life previous generations considered ordinary. Meanwhile, enormous amounts of wealth continue accumulating at the top.
We spent decades hearing about wealth trickling down. Maybe we should start building an economy where prosperity grows from the bottom up.
I didn't do this alone.
There's another reason this matters to me. I can look at where I am today and tell myself a flattering story about hard work and perseverance. And yes, I worked hard. But that wouldn't be the whole story.
When I lost a job, I had a family business where I could find work. When I struggled, I had family supporting me. When I was young and didn't apply myself as much as I should have, my mistakes didn't permanently destroy my future.
I had runway.
Eventually I figured myself out. I found something I was good at. I built a career. I became productive. That support didn't make me lazy. It gave me enough stability to eventually succeed.
And I did absolutely nothing to earn the circumstances I was born into. I got lucky. That realization changed the way I think about social programs. I don't want everyone to have my life. I want everyone to have the kind of runway I had.
A child shouldn't need to win the birth lottery to receive a good education. Losing a job shouldn't mean losing healthcare. Making mistakes at twenty shouldn't condemn someone at forty. Falling down shouldn't mean falling forever.
A good society gives people room to recover, learn, and try again. Not because we're interested in eliminating personal responsibility. Because human potential is too valuable to waste.
What happened to building things for the collective good?
Another piece clicked for me while traveling across the country. I kept seeing the physical legacy of earlier generations. Highways. Bridges. Dams. Parks. Electrical systems. Universities. Public buildings. Water systems. Entire pieces of civilization that people decades ago decided were worth building.
The Interstate Highway System is perhaps the most obvious example. Whatever its faults and unintended consequences, previous generations undertook projects at a scale that fundamentally changed what the country was capable of doing.
And I kept wondering: Where are our projects? What are we building today that Americans fifty or one hundred years from now will look at and say, “I'm glad they did that for us”?
Why aren't we modernizing the electrical grid? Why isn't high-speed rail connecting our major cities? Why aren't public buildings covered in solar panels? Why aren't we rebuilding aging infrastructure before it fails? Why aren't we investing aggressively in science, nuclear energy, clean energy, resilient agriculture, water systems, public spaces, and the technologies that will define the next century?
We are an extraordinarily productive society. We should look like one.
We can build again.
I don't want to recreate the past. There is plenty about earlier America that deserves no nostalgia whatsoever. The prosperity of previous generations was distributed terribly. Racism and sexism were embedded into institutions and public policy. Some of the very programs that created opportunity deliberately excluded people from it. We should learn from that rather than romanticize it.
But there is something worth recovering from the period that followed the Great Depression and World War II: the belief that we were capable of building things together that none of us could build alone.
We can combine that ambition with everything we've learned since. Universal healthcare. Excellent public education. Modern infrastructure. Competitive private markets. Strong labor. Entrepreneurship. Scientific research. Environmental stewardship. Civil liberties. Public investment. Broad private ownership. These things don't have to be enemies.
And now we have tools previous generations couldn't have imagined. Artificial intelligence could dramatically increase human productivity. Automation could reduce tedious work. Clean energy could provide abundant power. Advances in medicine, agriculture, materials science, computing, and manufacturing could create extraordinary prosperity.
But technology doesn't decide who benefits from it. We do. If productivity increases while nearly all of the resulting wealth accumulates among those who already own capital, we've missed an enormous opportunity. The gains from greater productivity should expand prosperity throughout society.
Call it trickle-up economics if you want. Build strong foundations underneath people and see what they build on top of them.
Leave more than we inherited.
Eventually, all of this became personal in another way. I'm trying to build something for my children. I don't want to spend my life accumulating wealth simply so that everything I've built can eventually disappear into the cost of my final years.
I want my children to inherit something. A home. Financial security. Knowledge. Opportunity. Maybe some land. Hopefully some wisdom. And I hope they add to it. Then I hope their children add to it. That's stewardship on the smallest possible scale.
And eventually I realized I wanted the same thing from society. Each generation inherits things it didn't earn: roads it didn't build, scientific discoveries it didn't make, institutions it didn't establish, forests it didn't plant, technologies it didn't invent, and communities it didn't create.
We get to use all of it for a while. Then it's our turn to decide what condition we leave it in. That became the question underneath Collective Capital:
Will the next generation inherit more capacity to prosper than we did?
Not simply more GDP. Healthier people. Better infrastructure. More knowledge. Stronger communities. Functional institutions. Productive businesses. Financial security. Healthy land, water, and ecosystems. More possibility.
I don't expect us to fix everything in four years, or eight. Some of what I'm talking about could take generations. That's okay. Planting a tree whose shade you may never sit beneath isn't wasted effort.
Why Collective Capital?
Because I don't believe our choices are capitalism or socialism. I don't believe prosperity has to come at the expense of stewardship. I don't believe helping someone stand back up makes them dependent. I don't believe private success and public investment are opposites. And I don't believe we should accept declining expectations from one generation to the next as inevitable.
I believe we can build a society that gives people strong foundations and then gives them enormous freedom to determine what they build upon them. I believe people should be able to work hard, create businesses, own homes, accumulate wealth, and leave something meaningful to their children.
I also believe nobody's future should be determined entirely by whether they were lucky enough to be born with the support I had.
Most importantly, I believe we should stop asking only, “What can we afford today?” and start asking, “What are we leaving tomorrow?” That's why I started Collective Capital.
Build What Lasts.
Leave more than we inherited.