Mayor. Marathon swimmer. Author.

Melissa Blaustein has spent much of her life pursuing difficult goals.

She lost an election. Years later, she became the youngest mayor in Sausalito history. She fell short of France during her first English Channel attempt, pulled from the water just two miles from shore. Two weeks later, she returned and completed the crossing.

In between, she built organizations, advised leaders, worked in public affairs, spoke around the world, and spent years chasing ambitious pursuits in politics, advocacy, entrepreneurship, and endurance sport.

For a long time, achievement seemed like the answer. The next goal. The next milestone. The next accomplishment. Like many ambitious people, Melissa believed success would eventually provide certainty, confidence, fulfillment, or peace. Instead, every finish line seemed to lead to a new question, wondering what comes next, and, eventually, a harder one underneath it: who she was trying to prove herself to, and what she feared might happen if she ever stopped.

That question, why so many ambitious people arrive at success and still feel unfinished, has become the foundation of her work.

Today Melissa serves as Vice Mayor of Sausalito, speaks on leadership, resilience, and achievement, and is completing a memoir exploring her own experience with the gap between accomplishment and fulfillment, and what it costs high achievers to keep chasing one while quietly missing the other.

She has been a featured speaker at the World Trade Organization, The European Commission, The European Parliament, USC Annenberg's School of Communications, UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, The Global Summit of the Americas, and many more. Her public service work has included roles at the Obama White House, with Governor Gavin Newsom, and with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and she went on to build an international policy nonprofit representing the tech startup ecosystem across 30 countries and four continents.

She and her work have been featured in the New York Times, ABC News, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, The Economist, The San Jose Mercury News, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a frequent podcast guest and television commentator, a Make It Better Media Woman to Watch, and a Business Journal 40 Under 40 award winner.

Her writing examines ambition, identity, public failure, meaning, and what happens after the goals we've spent years pursuing finally arrive.

Melissa holds a Bachelor's Degree with honors in American Studies from UC Berkeley, a Master's degree in Public Affairs from Sciences Po in Paris, and is pursuing a second Master's in Homeland Security at the Naval Postgraduate School. She speaks four languages and, in her spare time, can be seen swimming the Sausalito waterfront or walking her chocolate lab Bowie with her husband, Dave.