What happens when you pay someone $10K to move out of San Francisco? Doug Ludlow - CEO of Mainstreet

Sam foreign.

My name is Stuart Allsop, and this is my podcast, Crazy Wisdom, where I interview creative people about how they work with and manage the stress that is inherent in creative work. What I've realized over the past 10 years of my research is that anybody who is creating something of value that is significantly different from what has come before is considered crazy. Most of us have a fear, an ingrained fear of going crazy. So what I'm saying is, grab onto that fear, realize that it's there, and just go with it. Because the problems we're going to be facing over the next 20 years require crazy people in order to solve them. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Doug Ludlow. He is the CEO and co founder of Main Street. Their mission is to create jobs and opportunities in suburban and rural areas. And they've just recently announced that they're paying 10,000 people $10,000 to help people move to some of these places to get some opportunities like that. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Hey, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.

So where did this idea come from?

I'll start kind of from the very beginning. Right? So I grew up in a relatively small town called Modesto. It's in California, Central Valley. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was a good place to live. But over really, the last four decades, we've seen job after job leave town. Right? Factories closed, agricultural interests dried up, the good jobs moved out of town. And so my entire life, I've watched my hometown go from being this place that was kind of once the idyllic American dream, where there was a huge mix of working out of class families, professional families, to a place where the economy has really struggled. And this is a story that's not unique to Modesto. This is a story that's actually seen in thousands of communities across the country. So this is something I've been thinking about most of my entire adult life. Then, while over the last year at Google, I connected with some of my friends and colleagues. We started discussing this problem and realized that the communities they grew up in had the same issues as well. So we started brainstorming, what can we do to really solve this problem? And after a few crazy, harebrained ideas later, we came up with actually this. It's like, how do we link the talent that lives in these communities with the great jobs that. That are in places like San Francisco and New York? And how do we really take remote work, which is something that we're actually really passionate about, to the Next level.