Between the halls of Congress and the campaign trail, Jared Polis stopped by a downtown Denver skyscraper on a recent Saturday morning to share some advice with a group of military veterans trying to break into the digital startup economy.

The moment was quintessential Polis.

It was part tech, part entrepreneurial, part government, part philanthropy. And his message to the dozens gathered there with open laptops and bite-sized breakfast burritos was simple: Your idea is the most important part of the startup process.

“It starts with a vision and a plan,” he said. “It’s important to get the idea right.”

This fall, Coloradans will tell Polis, 43, if he has the right ideas to be the state’s next governor. He and Republican state Treasurer Walker Stapleton are competing to succeed Gov. John Hickenlooper, a popular centrist Democrat who is term limited.

The charismatic whiz kid who grew up to be a multimillionaire entrepreneur and congressman believes Colorado is ready to make big leaps on renewable energy, health care and early childhood education. Stapleton and other Republicans have largely spent the year attempting to paint Polis as a “Boulder liberal” whose ideas are “radical.”

A Polis victory, based on the promises of expanding state services, would mark a turn for the state’s electorate, said Ryan Winger, a data analyst for Magellan Strategies, a Colorado-based Republican polling firm.

“If Colorado elects a governor like Jared Polis, it would suggest we’re moving away from being center-right on fiscal issues,” he said.

Polis will be the first person to tell you his ideas are “bold” — it’s literally his campaign slogan and a sort of personal mantra. But the Democrat, who would become the first openly gay man elected governor of a state and a father of two with a longtime press-shy partner, insists his campaign promises are what voters want.

The limited public polls so far seem to back up that claim. Polis has led Stapleton by at least seven points in public polls released this fall.

“We’ll be able to help take our state to the next level,” Polis said.

The less pronounced question for voters about Polis’ candidacy may be whether he has the disposition to be the “convener in chief” he claims he will be.

From the beginning of his political career, Polis has been a self-funded candidate who hasn’t had to pander to anyone to keep his campaign coffers full. It’s just the opposite: Critics in both parties have wondered if he can effectively work with the state’s traditional power brokers — the very same people who, over nearly two decades of self-propelled activism, have felt Polis’ wake.

“One of the strongest moral compasses”

To understand Polis the politician, you need to understand Polis the person, those closest to the congressman say. While his opponents see Polis as temperamental and stubborn, his allies see him as passionate and committed.

“Jared Polis has one of the strongest moral compasses of anyone I know,” said friend Elliot Fladen, a lawyer and libertarian who says he often disagrees with Polis’ policy positions. But “that character he has of doing the right thing for his family, his friends, his constituents, his community — it’s what politics is missing today.”

Polis’ interests in politics and his personal principles began forming at an early age.

“His whole life he’s been very, very sensitive and compassionate,” said Susan Polis Schutz, Polis’ mother. Susan Schutz and Polis’ father, Steve Schutz, lived in Colorado when Polis was born but later moved to California. The couple started Blue Mountain Arts, a greeting card company, which they would later sell for hundreds of millions of dollars.

When Polis was 11, he spoke out against plans to develop a canyon near his family’s home. His testimony at a city council meeting changed the minds of council members. It was the first time Polis realized government could do good by voters, Schutz recalls.

In middle school, Polis and his classmates visited an orphanage in Mexico. The children there had no books, paper or pencils. It was there he realized not everyone was as fortunate as him.

It’s that experience that Schutz credits for inspiring Polis to run for the state board of education when he was just 25 and to later open a network of charter schools for immigrant students.

Those experiences could also help explain one of Polis’ more infamous outbursts. In 2013, he exploded on the floor of Congress when a Republican leader sanctioned another Democrat for recognizing a group of people in the country illegally who were in the House gallery.

“You think they want to be spending their time here, Madam Speaker?” he asked. “Is that what you think? … I want you, Madam Speaker, to address the reason that they are here! They are here because our government is tearing apart their families, Madam Speaker!”

Fladen, Polis’ friend, said that moment could easily be misconstrued.

“The GOP has used this moment as a purported example of Jared not having the right temperament for being governor,” Fladen said. “They have it wrong. This shows why Jared is the right choice. Because we want a governor who will not be indifferent when the defenseless are trampled upon by the government, but a governor who will become righteously impassioned.”

“He’s a weird rich guy”

One thing Democrats and Republicans agree on: Jared Polis is no normal politician. His immense wealth, accumulated in large part during a string of successes in the early days of the internet and now estimated as high as $387 million, allows him to play outside the conventional political structure.

While Polis has long championed progressive causes such as legalizing marijuana and a single-payer health care system, he also has a strong libertarian streak that pops up from time to time. For example, he wrote a policy paper suggesting the U.S. Postal Service should be privatized. He’s also a member of the Liberty Caucus, a small organization of federal lawmakers — mostly Republicans — who support individual and privacy rights. He railed against the national debt, calling it one of the nation’s biggest national security issues.

“He’s a weird rich guy,” said Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Denver. (Caldara also writes a regular column for The Denver Post.) “That’s why so many Democrats hate him.”

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican colleague in Congress who represents most of the state’s Eastern Plains, put it more diplomatically.

“Jared is hard to identify in a lot of different ways,” he said. “He’s hard to predict.”

In Congress, Polis was a champion for public education. He has said that one of his greatest achievements was helping write the Every Student Succeeds Act, which won bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015. More recently, Polis has also been a member of the Problem Solvers caucus, which has worked on health care, transportation and immigration. However, none of the bills from the bipartisan group has received votes in either chamber.

Polis also takes credit on the campaign trail for helping move Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act through the Rules Committee.

But Polis’ investments in the health care industry, including a company he helped start before going to Congress, have raised eyebrows. Polis denied any conflict of interest. Still, Polis’ wealth, blind trust and numerous business interests have been repeatedly attacked by the GOP this fall. His campaign has said that the congressman has complied with every rule in D.C. and pledged to do so as governor.

Polis likes to say his independent wealth means he isn’t indebted to the special interests that help pay for many politicians’ campaigns and drive policy debates.

Party leaders and lobbyists “know that I don’t work for them,” he said in an interview. “Honestly, I think that was part of Donald Trump’s attraction to voters, is that people felt that he was somebody who wouldn’t be beholden to the traditional power structure to shake things up. And I think that’s part of my appeal.”

Caldara, who remembers when in the early 2000s Polis would call in to his late-night radio show to discuss all sorts of topics, agreed that Polis has Trump-esque qualities. He, though, likened Polis to Trump based on both men’s tendency to fluctuate on positions.

“He’ll say he stands for one thing and then two months later it is something else,” Caldara said. “Here’s a guy who wanted to privatize the post office and did nothing with it. He’s been pro-gun, and now he’s taking on the NRA.”

Caldara isn’t the first person to suggest Polis talks out both sides of his mouth, but Polis dismisses these claims.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. “I’m pretty passionate about where I stand on things. I don’t think there’s any question where I stand on issues.”

“Polis had good intentions, but …”

Polis first splashed onto the state’s political scene in 2000, when he spent about $1.2 million of his own money to narrowly win an at-large seat on the State Board of Education. Four years later, he successfully pooled his resources with three other left-leaning millionaires to help elect more Democrats to the state legislature.

But it was Polis’ support of Amendment 41 in 2006 that really pitted him against the state’s power brokers — in both parties.

Amendment 41, which was approved by voters, limited gifts to elected officials, state employees and their families, and banned lawmakers from lobbying for two years after leaving office. It also created a new ethics commission to investigate complaints.

The law’s effects — and unintended consequences, which were widely foretold — were immediately felt. A ruling from the state’s attorney general found that state employees could not accept monetary awards for service, nor could their children accept scholarships to college.

Since then, the courts and the very commission the amendment created have issued guidance that has diluted the law as it was originally interpreted. A dozen years later, political watchers wonder given that lobbyists still hold immense clout at the legislature whether the law has made much of a difference.

“Since that time, everyone has adjusted,” said Paula Noonan, a longtime political observer. “Polis had good intentions, but it hasn’t worked the way it was intended.”

“He was certainly determined”

In 2013, during an uptick in oil and gas production, Polis declared himself the face of the anti-fracking movement in a five-minute documentary posted on YouTube.

He made the video after drillers erected a towering well across the street from his family’s home in Berthoud. At the same time, numerous communities in Polis’ congressional district were discussing a variety of different fracking bans, and lawsuits were making their way through court.

A year later, after the state legislature failed to come up with a compromise to appease both the oil and gas industry and local communities worried about safety issues, Polis went to work funding nine different ballot measures that would drastically change the industry.

His goal was not to ban fracking but to protect local control, he said at the time.

Months of intense negotiations among Polis, Hickenlooper, and the oil and gas industry followed. At times, it appeared voters would be asked to wade through competing ballot questions to decide the outcome. Hickenlooper, who was running for re-election that year, and his allies worried the measures would harm Democrats at the ballot box.

Reports at the time portrayed Polis as an immovable object bargaining in less than good faith. Time and distance has tempered views of Polis held by some of those involved in the negotiations.

“He was certainly determined,” said Alan Salazar, one Hickenlooper’s top aides at the time. “He had a strong point of view and drew a line in the sand. (But) he was never unpleasant, never once.”

Ultimately, a compromise was reached. And while that might have settled tensions with his colleagues in government, supporters of fracking bans were incensed. A day after Polis announced his agreement with Hickenlooper, protesters challenged Polis at a town hall.

“Our air and our water is not yours to gamble in a backroom,” one protester said.

Polis’ compromise still follows him. When he spoke at a gathering of oil and gas executives this past summer denouncing a ballot proposal to ban fracking 2,500 feet from homes, schools and parks, he was heckled by a small group of protesters.

“Ready for a problem solver”

Back in front of a friendlier crowd, Polis gave the veterans gathered in the Denver skyscraper another piece of advice that would seem to answer a lot of criticism about the candidate: Know what you’re good at and then surround yourself with people who make up your deficiencies.

“I can be, to a fault, ahead of my time sometimes and always in a rush to accomplish things,” Polis said after the event, when he was asked about his own strengths and weaknesses. “I’m always trying to move people faster. And my staff and those I surround myself with are always trying to slow down a little bit.”

While Colorado has been on the forefront of many issues such as legalizing recreation marijuana, the state’s voters have also rewarded centrism in their candidates and incremental changes. Polis is betting his political career that they’re ready for someone bolder.

“Our state is ready for a problem solver, for somebody who is a creative innovator,” Polis said, “for somebody who will challenge the power establishment on both sides of the aisle and the status quo, to improve the quality of life and protect what makes Colorado great.”