Exeter led to Brown, which led to law school and then to a law firm in New York City. As Yang tells the next chapter, he became disenchanted with the law. His firm, Davis Polk, had become “a temple to the squandering of human potential.” It’s also helpful to note, though, that his next step was to immediately jump into the frothiest startup market in the history of mankind, which was a temple of similar design.

UBI has started to gain traction in Silicon Valley, in part because that’s the place most attuned to disruption, the place most interested in crazy ideas, and in part because, if income disparity leads to revolution, we know whose heads roll off the guillotines first.

He and a friend from the firm founded a startup called Stargiving.com. An early press release notes that “Stargiving, a high-profile celebrity/charity event platform, enables fans to become everyday philanthropists by allowing internet users to send money from corporate sponsors to charity. At the same time visitors to the site are entered into a raffle to win a unique experience with featured celebrity.”

Despite an early partnership with John Leguizamo, or perhaps because of it, the company went belly-up. Eventually, though, Yang built a test-prep company that he sold to prep giant Kaplan for somewhere in the low tens of millions. The deal made Yang wealthy, but not as wealthy as many believe. His net worth, according to Forbes, is just one-twelfth that of Elizabeth Warren. “Andrew worked his butt off, and that ethic came from his parents’ hustle,” said Nagesh Rao, a friend. “Immigrant families: Everybody’s got to earn their keep.”

After selling to Kaplan, Yang founded an organization called Venture for America that helped entrepreneurs start companies throughout the country—with a special focus on the sorts of places where people don’t start a lot of companies. And this is when, like so many other people in recent years, he came to believe that technology is hollowing out our economy.

Yang’s recent book, The War on Normal People, is a story about the costs of automation and the uneven distribution of wealth in America. At one point, he writes of seeing the country as a place where the most ambitious people all do one of six things (finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia) in one of six places (New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, LA, or Washington.). And as economic growth centralizes there, it disappears elsewhere. “In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart,” he writes.

This means Yang had a different perspective after Hillary Clinton’s balloon drop at the Javits Center was canceled, and as Trump swaggered toward the White House. He had an instinct that economic change had done this, not Vladimir Putin. Yang started reading the research and talking with people in and around politics. He lived in midtown Manhattan with his wife and two young children, but he worried about the rest of America.

As Yang explained to me in his offices on West 39th street—where he had ridden in on a battered Schwinn bicycle with granny bars and a child seat in the back—the data seemed entirely obvious to him. “If you look at the voter district data, there’s a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots and the movement toward Trump in each voting area in the Midwest. And so I went through the numbers and said ‘Oh my gosh, this is an economic and automation story.’”

The canonical meeting—at least as the story has solidified—was in early 2017 with Andy Stern, formerly the head of the SEIU, one of the largest labor unions in the country. Stern had written a book arguing that America needed some kind of universal basic income as a way to counter rising income inequality. Yang agreed and told Stern that he’d run for president on that platform if no one else was likely to.

In February 2018, Yang sent an email to the contacts in his Gmail address book. “Hello all, I'm writing with some big news to share—I’m running for president as a Democrat in 2020,” he wrote. He explained his signature policy issues, asked for some help, and signed off “Andrew Yang US Presidential Candidate (D)” and his phone number.

Many recipients were confused, but intrigued. “My jaw dropped,” Rao says. “I chuckled and thought this is pretty darn cool!” Even the people who knew him well enough to get personal calls were surprised. According to Rachel Sheinbein, a San Francisco investor who has known him for years, “when he called me to tell me he was running for president, I couldn’t believe it.” She asked him “president of what?” Other friends, he just forgot to tell. One, Andrew Chau, told me that he had hung out with Yang and only learned the next day that he had declared for the presidency.