In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Steve Grove, CEO and publisher of The Minnesota Star Tribune, about How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention (Simon & Schuster, June 2025). Grove, the former founding director of Google News Lab, left Silicon Valley and his work helping start-ups innovate and returned to his home state of Minnesota to explore a new kind of innovation: retooling Minnesota’s government systems. Grove shares how the dramatic career shift helped him realize the promise of strategizing, rebuilding, and innovating at the local level and understand what investing in community and connection means in today’s world. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why did you write this book now, seven years after moving back to the US Midwest?
One of the reasons I wanted to write the book is that I feel like the Midwest is having its moment right now. In the last US presidential election, the two national vice presidential candidates hailed from the Midwest.
Even more than that, there has been a lot of curiosity, especially from folks on the coast, about finding some other place to live in this country. I think the pandemic gave everyone that chance to ask, “Where is a great place to raise a family? Where do I want to live in the coming decades?”
The Midwest has seen some of that energy increase, and that was part of the reason I left the coast and moved to Minnesota. Another part was for personal reasons. When my wife, Mary, and I left Silicon Valley and moved to my home state, here in Minnesota, we rebooted our whole lives.
Part of that was leaving technology and jumping into state government. While I couldn’t have predicted it, it ended up being at a time that became very tumultuous for our state. We experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.
The experience I had of shifting gears in life turned out to be unique. As I started telling friends about this and writing an informal newsletter to people back in Silicon Valley about what I was learning and experiencing, a lot of them encouraged me to widen that audience. And I thought, “Gosh, maybe there’s a book here.” When I left state government and began work at The Minnesota Star Tribune, I had a moment to consider, “Do I have a story here to tell?” and felt ultimately that I did. I’m looking forward to seeing what people think of it.
Why do you feel the Midwest can offer different solutions?
Tech ecosystems across the country differ widely. I felt very fortunate to spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, arguably the tech epicenter of the planet. But I was starting to feel like the Valley was a bit of a bubble. A lot of the solutions that were generated from the start-ups invented there focused on challenges that could benefit from some perspective on what life is like outside the “coastal bubble.”
One of those areas I discovered here in Minnesota is related to medical technology. This market in Minnesota is home to one of the most fascinating medical-technology ecosystems in the country. In fact, people refer to Minnesota as “Medical Alley,” which is a nod to its having the most medical patents you’ll see in the country per capita. Along with the Mayo Clinic here and the University of Minnesota, there’s a rich ecosystem for medtech innovations.
A lot of the problems and solutions involve the application of artificial intelligence and medical technology. A company here called Delfina, for example, uses AI and predictive analytics to spot early challenges in maternal health. It addresses how to identify challenges that mothers-to-be have and to ensure they have the right interventions along the pathway of their pregnancy.
One start-up I write about in the book is called TurnSignl, started by an entrepreneur named Jazz Hampton, who was a lawyer and a computer scientist and wanted to solve the problem of traffic stops—particularly those involving Black men—going awry more often than they ever should. He built an app that uses videoconferencing with a lawyer on your phone during a traffic stop. The app enables the lawyer to be there while you’re engaging with a police officer, to put everyone more at ease, and to try to create a more positive experience or, at least, a safer one for those who are there.
Generally, when you get outside of the Valley, you start seeing technology start-ups focused on local problems and trying to solve problems in different ways, which can lead to different results. One of the things I saw in Silicon Valley is that when you’re working for a big tech company, the solutions and features that company is going to build must often operate at scale right away. Yet when you start locally and with a start-up focused on a specific problem that matters to it, you get more of a purpose-driven start-up market that is focused on the audience they’re trying to serve. That can lead to some unique innovations that you might not see in Silicon Valley.
Why do you say ‘modern America is increasingly disconnected from its promise’?
At times, America feels like it is being increasingly disconnected from its promise. That basic promise is that we’re a land of opportunity and there’s equality of opportunity. What you see at this unique moment is some real questioning of whether that’s true anymore, whether it’s between urban and rural, Black or White, or Left or Right.
There’s more division in our country than there has ever been before. The American dream itself feels as though it’s under question. The idea that your kids will have a better future than you do isn’t necessarily believed or assumed to be the case anymore, though it feels like it should be. Trust in institutions—which, I’d argue, are there to help make equality of opportunity a reality—has been in precipitous decline in this country, compared to most places in the world.
That’s a uniquely American problem—where everything from governments to media to business to the military is seeing a decline in trust. I don’t think any of that is inevitable. One of the things I surface in the book is that if we all agree that institutions need [to foster] more trust, need to be strengthened, and need to be modernized for this new era of life in America, the best place to start rebuilding them is at the local level.
When you start local, you see a lot less division. You see a lot more trust. You get a shot at rebuilding the core parts of American society that make our promise possible.
It’s hard to imagine that top-down institutional reform coming from outside of Washington, [DC,] will be the solution to rebooting the American dream and reconnecting us to our promise. The argument I make in the book, and one that has been played out through my experiences, is that when you start local, you see a lot less division. You see a lot more trust. You get a shot at rebuilding the core parts of American society that make our promise possible. But you must start local. That’s something I hope people take away from the book.
In this journey, what did you learn about local government bureaucracies?
When I left Google to join state government, I suddenly found myself leading a 1,400-person bureaucracy. Few people are really qualified to do that from the start. You must find your way. I found some surprising things when I entered government. Of course, the bureaucracies of government have the reputation of being slow, hard to move, opaque. Part of that is for institutional reasons. You want your government to have enough stability that it’s not moving so fast that it upends the basic social safety net.
I found that public servants, while they had a lot of great ideas and wanted to do innovative things, often did the risk/reward calculation, and said, “Well, gosh, the public is going to have a field day if we get this thing wrong. So should we really try to innovate and try something new? I don’t know. It seems sort of risky.”
That has led people to lose trust in government, because government often doesn’t innovate at the same pace that we expect our modern businesses to. But citizens must give government the space to innovate and try new things if we want to get government right.
I found a lot of people with good ideas inside governments, but the culture related to the idea was sometimes challenging. The big difference, and the thing that’s exciting for anyone in government, is that when a crisis hits, that all goes out the window. That’s because when a crisis hits, a bureaucracy must innovate and find new ways of doing things. For me, that was the unemployment insurance system during COVID-19. We suddenly had to make billions of dollars in unemployment insurance payments.
To see our state government in Minnesota completely retool our system, find new ways to make payments, and accept new clients took an untold amount of innovation that was really imbued in the DNA of the organization. Yet it hadn’t had a chance to try these things for fear of failure.
Bureaucracies earn their reputation, on the one hand. But on the other hand, if we’re going to have better governments, we need to expect different things and create a space for government to innovate. I’m all for government efficiency. That idea is an important one. But I’d say innovation is how you get there. Shaming or denigrating government employees or making that job seem like it’s full of a bunch of lazy bureaucrats, is not the way forward. Our public servants work very hard for us. Giving them a lane to innovate and try new things is a much better path to creating stronger government infrastructure for our country.
As CEO of the for-profit Minnesota Star Tribune, you want taxpayer money to strengthen local media.
The book starts with me leaving technology to join local government. It ends with me leaving local government to join local news. That is something I never would’ve thought of as a career path until having spent time in government and seeing just how important local news is to basic societal harmony and a sense of understanding.
Having a common set of facts for a community is one of the things that leads to greater voter participation, less polarization, and higher volunteerism. The values of local news are clear. But the model is fundamentally stressed. Since joining The Minnesota Star Tribune, we’ve experienced the need to rethink our whole model for delivering great news content to a community that needs it.
While we’re making great strides on digital subscriptions, and certainly on other models for generating revenue, what’s clear to me, and to anyone in this industry, is that if we do value journalism as a civic good, if it’s a public good that we all agree is important for us to have, we must start treating it like one. That does mean ultimately finding the right, appropriate, and safe way for taxpayer dollars to help fund journalism.
There are models of this across the country—not in Minnesota yet, but in Illinois, California, and New Jersey. There are different tax incentives for local news organizations to hire journalists or to incentivize businesses to advertise in local news organizations. These are new models that are being tested right now. But until we put our faith in news organizations to be that kind of foundational source of information and do so by funding them to succeed, it’s going to be challenging for local news to survive.
If we do value journalism as a civic good, if it’s a public good that we all agree is important for us to have, we must start treating it like one.
In Minnesota alone, we’ve lost two-thirds of the journalists in our state over the past ten years. That’s a trend line that is true almost everywhere in the country. Investing public dollars in journalism is not a new idea. It’s an idea that can make people scared, because they think, “Oh, well, that will influence the coverage.” There are models to ensure that it doesn’t. But I don’t know how you get the kind of journalism at scale that we need to understand the basic facts of what’s happening in our community unless we really reimagine the model for how it’s structured.
Most news organizations today need at least a nonprofit arm to be able to take in philanthropic donations. I’m bullish on the nonprofit model for news, so long as it’s run like a business. Nonprofits that start up just as nonprofits, unless they’re really fine-tuned in their business dynamics, can start to feel like charities pretty quickly. Instead, it should feel more like healthcare companies that are nonprofit. In those situations, you’re driving a strong balance sheet and managing profit and loss, but you happen to be a nonprofit in your tax status.
For news organizations, the benefit of moving to a nonprofit is clear in terms of the relationship to funding the mechanisms, whether it’s government or donations. The only thing you really lose at a basic level are things like the ability to do political endorsements. As we’ve seen over the past few years, that dynamic of news organizations’ role in our society is shifting rapidly and may be less valuable in today’s world than it once was.
I’m bullish on the nonprofit model. We’re for profit. As we look into the future, having nonprofit status may come with a lot more advantages than disadvantages, something that every news organization needs to take seriously.
Under you, the Star Tribune has stopped making election endorsements.
During the last political cycle, well before US Election Day in November 2024, we decided to pause on doing endorsements. We did that in part because we became a statewide news organization. Doing endorsements at a hyperlocal level across the entire state required a level of focus and resources that we weren’t ready to deploy.
Also, we weren’t sure that hearing from the Star Tribune editorial board on who you should vote for is as valuable a service in today’s environment than some other approaches.
We’ve leaned into individual voices in our opinion coverage more, and into turning to the audience to lift up viewpoints across the spectrum. It’s an experiment. We may go back to election endorsements. We’re not sure yet, and we’re still testing it.
But communicating that decision several months before the election, explaining to people why, and being honest about the fact that it was an experiment helped us. We’re trying to reimagine every aspect of what a news organization traditionally does. This is just one area where we felt like a new approach might be warranted.
So where is Steve Grove on the reinvention journey?
This book charts both the reinvention of this community I’ve chosen to call home here in Minnesota and also my own reinvention. My reinvention from tech to government was a big one. Plenty of people have their own reinvention stories. But the story really charts that experience for me and how that played into my own thinking on our state, our country, and myself. The personal reinvention I went through covered a whole bunch of terrain that is different from just the professional side.
For me, coming back home gave me a chance to reconnect with my family more deeply. I grew up in a very fundamentalist, sort of evangelical, religious household, which turned me off to matters of faith and religion. Coming back home allowed me to reconcile some of that with my parents and find my own church and spiritual journey that feels more meaningful. My relationship to my community, with my wife, with my kids, and how I want to be as a father has shifted. They’ve been both personal and professional reinventions, like many of us have.
The book ends with my reinvention story of leaving government to join the media and reimagine our local news organization here. It has been a lot of fun. It feels like it matters, and not just to me but to our community. Writing a memoir at the age of 47 takes a certain amount of belief that you have something worth saying. I certainly don’t think I have the wisdom of someone at the end of their career. I’m only partway through. But I felt like I had something to say about the power of going local that maybe our country uniquely needs to hear right now.
If this book lands, I hope it inspires people to try something different in their communities. In this country, we’ve been talking about people’s sense of place and community for a long time. The internet and social media and the field that I used to work in have contributed a lot to that sense of disconnection. As a country, we’ve known that we need something that feels more rooted in our physical community.
Part of my journey of moving to the Midwest and Minnesota has involved investing in the community right outside my front door. I hope my journey inspires other people to want to invest in their communities, to not lose hope that we somehow can’t connect with our neighbors and our friends or that, somehow, we’re polarized beyond all reconnection. I think there’s a lot of common good to be done in a local community. If my book can help inspire others to make their own reinventions at whatever level makes sense for them, then I hope it’ll have been successful.
I felt lucky to have worked at Google, and that journey has been uniquely rewarding for me. But I don’t think the book is a prescription that that’s what everyone’s life should look like.
You don’t need to move to reinvest in your community. The book is about making wherever your chosen home is feel more like home, and investing in your neighbors, your friends, and your institutions. You don’t have to leave your job and join state government to do that. But maybe you spend time with the institutions that hold your community up and contribute to them. They’re worth your time.
I hope my journey inspires other people to want to invest in their communities, to not lose hope that we somehow can’t connect with our neighbors and our friends or that, somehow, we’re polarized beyond all reconnection.
I hope people read the book and don’t think, “Oh, I have to totally change my life completely.” Investing in some of these core institutions, whether it’s government, media, or local technology ecosystems, can have a real impact. And I hope this book gives folks the sense that the investment is worth it, in whatever small or big way they want to do that.
What’s next for you? Electoral politics?
I really enjoyed public service. I could see myself doing it again in some capacity in the future. But there is no secret plan with the book. For this chapter I’m in right now, I’m really enjoying The Minnesota Star Tribune and what we’re doing. It’s an awesome task. It’s not public service in the same tradition of being in appointed or elected office. But it does feel like public service in terms of the mission.
Watch the full interview
