MY STORY
Maria didn’t get a smartphone until she turned 18.
By the time she was 19, she had 1 million followers.
When Maria started her freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley (as a math major), she decided to treat her newfound access to social media as a college course. Deep diving into analytics, obsessively monitoring trends, and tracking her own performance daily.
Her shift into politics came when she realized that social media isn’t just entertainment, it’s infrastructure. People with platforms don’t just participate in national conversations; they shape them.
When COVID hit, she posted a video encouraging her followers to get vaccinated. The response stunned her. Hundreds of comments poured in from people saying they had scheduled their appointments because of her.
Seeing that kind of tangible impact made something click. If a single video could influence real-world decisions, what could sustained political engagement do? She changed her major to political science soon after, determined to better understand, and responsibly wield, the power she had discovered.
After graduating from Berkeley, Maria and her best friend packed everything they owned into a Subaru and drove cross-country to Washington, DC, with equal parts optimism and gas money. She started out in nonprofit campaigns, cutting her teeth on digital strategy and rapid response, before being recruited as the first employee at a new political media firm, Four Lions Media.
At Four Lions, she worked behind the scenes with national advocacy organizations, labor unions, and Democratic candidates across the country: building messaging frameworks, shaping digital narratives, and helping campaigns translate complex policy into content people would actually watch.
At the same time, she was growing an online presence of her own. After surpassing 2 million followers on her spy interview channel, she began cultivating a second account focused on sharp, politically infused comedy. As that platform grew into the hundreds of thousands, her two worlds converged. She worked closely with the Harris campaign, traveling to battleground states in the months leading up to the election and producing content that generated tens of millions of views.
What began as side projects — campaign work and comedy — became a singular lane: shaping political conversation both on and off the ballot.
