Hey all.

Today, I’m writing to share an interview with one of Silicon Valley’s most divisive characters: Chesa Boudin, who called me yesterday to gamely take on his critics across the industry.

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In some ways, I was surprised to see Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s embattled District Attorney, at a party where he was likely to see not just fans but some of the business leaders who would like to toss him from office this June. (At one point later in the evening, I saw Chesa literally standing back-to-back, in separate conversation circles, with the political operative who is leading the largest outside group behind his recall.) But in other ways, I was not. Chesa is daring, irrepressible, and unafraid of the people lobbing tomatoes his way. Many tech elites have cast Chesa as an avatar of out-of-control progressivism, a hapless oaf who presides over San Francisco’s deterioration into a woke, crime-infested Hobbesian hellhole, in part because he has generally sought more lenient sentences and declined to prosecute some juveniles as adults. But the son of imprisoned 1970s radicals was precociously interested in reimagining the criminal justice system, even radically, well before he went to Yale Law or became a Rhodes Scholar. He is no slouch.

And yet Chesa is, without a doubt, in serious trouble...