District 13 state Senate race

He left the State Department in ’97 for a business career as a managing partner in a U.S. investment firm in the San Francisco office. By then he had a wife and a 3-year-old and the young family moved to Burlingame. He served on the Burlingame Planning Commission for eight years. He was elected to the council in 2009. Dave Pine was his campaign chairman and Brownrigg entered the Senate race late believing Pine would run. But before that, he had started a new business named Total Impact which advises and helps source investors for enterprises, whose goods or services will make the planet better off. He has four grown children.

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Redwood City Vice Mayor Shelly Masur was born to very young parents. Her dad was a college student at the time. The family moved to Oregon (dad’s hometown), then to Alaska (mother’s home), then to Washington state. By the time Masur was in sixth grade she had changed school 11 times. She went to high school in St. Louis where she lived with her mother, stepfather and five stepsisters. She majored in sociology at Macalester College in Minnesota. She then moved to Seattle where her dad lived.

Her first job was working for a New York nonprofit to protect homeless women and their children. She met her husband in 1992 while she was volunteering for women’s health clinics during attacks by Operation Rescue. She became president of the New York Clinic Defense Fund. She and her husband moved to the Bay Area in 1999. She worked for the Teen Pregnancy Coalition and developed parent education program with Sequoia High School. In 2004, she was appointed to the Redwood City Elementary Board where she served 10 years. In 2012, she lost a race for county supervisor to Warren Slocum, but was elected to the Redwood City Council in 2015. She is the CEO of the Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation which works with the State Department of Education on labor management issues. She has three grown children.

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Josh Becker, a 20-year resident of Menlo Park, was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father was a law professor and his mother a social worker and biology teacher. He attended Williams College. After graduation, he and a friend went to Central America to help those ravaged by war and poverty. On their own, they discovered a small village in El Salvador of repatriated refuges where there was no school. So they started one to teach basic literary and math. Becker was fluent in Spanish. When he returned to the states he became press secretary to U.S. Rep. Marjorie Margolies. Her son would become Chelsea Clinton’s husband. He earned a double Stanford law and business school degrees in 1999.

He received a Jefferson Award for he creating the Full Circle Fund, which he started in 2000 and still heads, a community leadership/policy innovation organization which funds nonprofits which are creating positive changes in the region.

Becker cofounded New Cycle Capital which funds for profit social ventures with responsible missions, mostly in clean energy. In 2011, he ran Lex Machina, which began as a public interest project at law school and grew into a company with the resources to purchase legal documents. Data was provided free to academics, judges and members of Congress and staff. Law firms and other big companies paid. Becker served as CEO until mid-2018. The company was acquired by LexisNexis in 2015 and is a staple of most law firms around the world.

Jerry Brown appointed him to the California State Workforce Development Board six years ago and in 2005 he became a founding trustee of the University of California, Merced. He ran unsuccessfully for the state Assembly in 2010. He and his wife have two children attending public schools.

Sue Lempert is the former mayor of San Mateo. Her column runs every Monday. She can be reached at sue@smdailyjournal.com.