I wasn’t lucky enough to be born here, but I did the next-best thing: I married a New Yorker, moved to the city more than 30 years ago, and fell in love with it. Susan and I raised our three (now adult) daughters here, and it’s where I founded a half-dozen businesses and 10 nonprofit organizations. 

My 35-year career has been primarily in the business world, but I’ve also worked tirelessly to help disadvantaged communities, especially children, as a founder or board member of Teach for America, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, KIPP charter schools, Democrats for Education Reform, and Central Synagogue’s community activism group.

 I have a long record of going after big-name Wall Street firms and large corporations when they are fleecing individual investors. For example, I went on national television repeatedly to warn about the Internet bubble, the housing crisis (on 60 Minutes) and the meme stock craze, and have called out dozens of sleazy companies like Lumber Liquidators (again on 60 Minutes).

 While the analogy isn’t perfect, I think our city is ripe for a turnaround similar to the many I’ve seen in my investing career, in which a once-great company – laid low by mismanagement and/or external shocks – is restored to its former glory by a new CEO brought in to be a change agent. The CEO hires a new senior management team, and together they develop a strategy to fix the problems, run the organization better, and develop and implement great new ideas. This is the playbook New York City needs, and I know it well.

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