Though I began my career in the financial services industry, I really found my calling in 2014 when I became an entrepreneur, following in the footsteps of generations of Goldfarbs before me. (Technically you could say my career began when I was 13 years old and started working weekends at my parents’ toy store; though not something I appreciated then, it was a truly formative experience in my life).

Over the course of a decade, my colleagues and I built multiple payments companies from the ground up - helping businesses and individuals send money around the world more quickly, more cheaply, and more reliably than existing providers. On the one hand, by any metric we were wonderfully successful: we’d end up with one IPO and one “unicorn,” billions of dollars per month travel over our enterprise payment rails and millions of immigrants and diaspora community members per month use our platform to send money home for free or almost free, and there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t benefited from our products and services.

On the other hand, to work in the fintech industry is to see first-hand the multitude of ways that the American government stymies innovation and inhibits building. I’m running in the Democratic primary for Congress here in NY-9 to change that.

Much as with building desperately needed new housing and public transit, decades of (generally) well-intentioned rulemaking has stacked impediment upon impediment, leading to progress moving as slowly as our roads and rail.

Nowhere is the opportunity to build more apparent than right here in NY-9. We have several major thoroughfares proximate to public transportation that would be ideally suited for constructing new housing; much of it is today single-story commercial space. We have large geographic footprints far from existing subway service; the completion of the IBX will vastly improve car-free transit for those communities (as would investments in safer cycling and more reliable bus service). We have large numbers of families, many in one- and two-family homes, for whom solar electricity would be a greener, cheaper alternative; increased upfront incentivization and a simpler permitting process would help expedite their transition.

At the same time, nowhere is government failure to meet the needs of our communities more obvious. Neighbors, especially immigrant families, struggle to access public services. Family roots are uplifted and sent elsewhere as new generations struggle to find housing in their neighborhoods. Congestion is omnipresent and traffic deaths are all too frequent. 

While not every issue we face in NY-9 is federal in nature, there are at least three specific ways our Representative could and should be doing more:

- Community engagement: back in my teenage toy store years I learned the lesson every small business owner knows: if you’re not responsive to the needs of your customers, they’ll shop elsewhere. Unfortunately, that’s not a lesson the incumbent has taken to heart. From unanswered messages from constituents, to neighborhood associations that have never been spoken to, to community boards that get infrequent updates (let alone collaboration), the Rep and her office are disconnected from, and unresponsive to, the community. An elected official separate from their community is an ineffective advocate for their community;

- Federal funding: NY-9 gets less federal funding than almost every district around ours (which, it should be noted, are all but one also represented by Democrats). A Rep that doesn’t fundraise, hasn’t drafted any meaningful legislation, and has no grassroots support simply doesn’t bring back the resources the district needs to thrive. Building costs money and our district doesn’t get our fair share;

- Vocal leadership: when a Congressperson speaks, people listen, including those in state and city government. And yet, even when our largest hospital nearly closed due to lack of funding, state and city elected officials found a Rep unwilling or unable to substantively engage on resolving the crisis (though the Rep takes credit today). One local elected official has said that they’ve never even met the Rep! NY-9 deserves a Rep that speaks more loudly.

There are many ways in which my opponent and I differ, most prominently:

(a) My opponent is, at best, a supporter of very, very incremental change - a quick look at her campaign website verbiage on, say, housing, will show extremely minor tweaks to the status quo. On the other hand, I believe that that approach has proven ineffective at keeping up with, let along making meaningful progress against, the key issues facing our community and our country. Our elected leaders need to be able and willing to think boldly about fundamentally changing how we think about the problems we face, the realm of possible solutions, and the means we can employ to arrive at a better future. (As a side note: the campaign website clearly has not been updated in some years - endorsements include elected officials long since out of office. Yet one more example of how constituents struggle to understand what their Rep stands for);

(b) In the private sector, my stakeholders judged my success not by what I said but what I actually accomplished. Whether through hard-work, ingenuity, compromise, or creativity, the expectation was to deliver for shareholders, employees, customers, and the broader community. The current Rep. has little to show for her decades in office (she the NYT endorsement of her 2018 opponent). An ineffective advocate is not truly an ally; even where the Rep. and I have similar views, we need more successful pursuit of our goals;

(c) I believe politicians should be beholden only to their constituents, their community, and their country. For that reason, I refuse to take Corporate PAC money. My opponent, on the other hand, received 2/3 of her Q4 funding from Corporate PAC's. Elected officials should put people over profits, a hard task to pursue when in debt to major corporations.

The path to victory in this district builds on the last midterm primary that the Rep faced, in 2018, when she won by ~1,800 votes against an underfunded challenger who had also not held elected office prior. His support drew heavily from the western part of the district (where I live), where the Rep. is rarely seen or heard from (this is a very high propensity voter base in what will likely be a very low turnout election). NY-9 is also the second most Jewish district in the United States, a community which frequently finds itself at odds with the Rep. (and a community of which I'm a part); 64% of Jewish voters here are registered Dems, eligible to vote in the primary. Last, my private sector life having been spent working closely with the Caribbean community, particularly the Haitian community, which has a difficult history with the Rep, there is support there from folks who believe the Rep has begun to treat the office as a lifetime appointment, with corresponding diminution of community engagement.

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Let’s take the statement: Process should serve, not obstruct, outcomes.

When I mention elsewhere that I founded multiple payments businesses, that’s true, but it omits the actual origin story. 

The very first company, Segovia, was initially set-up to improve the process of getting aid to recipients in emerging markets. (The payment rails got built as a byproduct of this work).

International aid organizations working in places like Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda - the three places we began our efforts - had spent decades giving out “in-kind” items: food, blankets, books, chickens, etc. Their goals were commendable: reducing hunger, lack of shelter, and access to education, among other considerations. But the process was riddled with inefficiencies. Items were purchased in far-away places (often the United States) and shipped over vast distances, taking time, costing money, and having meaningful environmental impacts. The same contents were delivered en masse, with little regard for the specific requirements of an individual or household. Local small businesses lost revenue as their wares were substituted with the new imports. And the system for identifying who was supposed to get what, when, how, etc. was little more than a sheet of paper kept in a filing cabinet. An inordinately complex process was standing in the way of - was obstructing - the intended outcomes.

Our goal was to overhaul that process in two key ways. First, we worked with organizations to shift them from “in-kind” contributions to monetary disbursements. Put simply, give recipients money with which they can purchase the items they need. Rather than hand them corn and soybeans from Iowa, let them buy produce available locally. Instead of preordaining what each recipient should get, let them choose the items most relevant to their particular circumstance. Create a virtuous cycle of local economic activity. The enormous financial savings would mean helping more people more substantially. 

Second, we provided organizations with software to help manage these new cash transfer programs in ways hitherto unheard of. The process of identifying recipients, obtaining their relevant information, and establishing the amount to be received (based on conditions including number of children in a household) could all be centralized; payments could be scheduled and automatically transmitted to local digital financial service providers (e.g., mobile money operators). In addition to further lowering costs, this meant improved data security, reduced rates of fraud and error, higher quality reporting, and easier coordination/collaboration among organizations. 

Same intended outcome, much better process.

Three primary obstacles stood in the way of progress:

(i) Politically connected stakeholders invested in the status quo: the folks who grew the corn and soybeans in Iowa (or made the blankets, or published the books) were unhappy with the change and let their elected officials know;

(ii) Recalcitrant development “experts”: the people at the development organizations who had always seen things done one way and were reticent to embrace change, perhaps out of fear that their particular expertise would be less relevant;

(iii) The “know betters”: people who believed aid recipients could not be trusted with unconditional cash grants. Wouldn’t the recipients spend the money on sinful items (gambling, alcohol) or frivolities? Don’t the aid organizations “know better” what people really need?

Ultimately, we prevailed. We worked with organizations including GiveDirectly, Save the Children, International Rescue Committee, and Mercy Corps to run programs from Kenya to Nigeria to Serbia/Greece (for Syrian refugees) to Pakistan. Working with our clients/partners, we used quantitative comparisons of our programs to those of generations past to build a coalition of stakeholders focused on program efficiency (“bang for the buck”). We identified leaders willing to embrace change and used them as entry points into their respective organizations; initial successes put pressure on less enthusiastic supporters to follow suit. And our partners’ work on recipient outcomes (including via randomized controlled trials) clearly disproved naysayers' concerns about what would happen once the cash was delivered. 

The share of cash transfer programming in the international development space only continues to increase and I’m wonderfully proud of the part we played in helping accelerate that transition and returning the focus to outcomes, not process. Around the world, cash transfer programs have now unambiguously led to better outcomes than the old way. It’s amazing what is possible when we are willing to do things differently.

- Building new infrastructure: the need to modernize and scale the US' aging critical infrastructure should be universally recognized. Recent legislation (2020 Energy Act, IIJA, IRA, etc.) has failed to enable more efficient delivery against that need. One idea worth considering (that I have borrowed, not created) is the creation of a National Infrastructure Authority (a government-sponsored enterprise) that would centralize all federal infrastructure programs. The benefits of efficiency and scale could meaningfully shift the timelines and costs for developing and deploying everything from energy upgrades to transportation improvements.

- Supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses: new businesses create jobs (businesses open <1 year create an average of 1.5 million jobs annually), reduce wealth gaps (Black entrepreneurs have 12x the net worth of peers who work for employers), and make our communities more diverse and vibrant. Congress should make business ownership a key priority - from eliminating red tape that strangles honest entrepreneurs, to providing expanded financial and educational resources and supporting local entrepreneurial ecosystems, there's much to be done. At the specific legislative level, I'd be keen to build on the framework laid out in the Strengthening Place-based Access, Resources, and Knowledge (SPARK) Act.

- Expanding the supply of housing: we're building far fewer homes than we used to (2.2mm housing units/year in March 2026; 1.5mm in June 2025) even as our population continues to expand. Tackling this problem will have to be many fold, from federal grants to support office-to-residential conversion, to incentivizing expanded modular home use, to penalizing locales with exclusionary zoning, to ending tariffs on housing related items, there's much to be done. Two specific bills of late that would help are the More Homes on the Market Act and the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.