Jason Mayden
Oakland, California
Red Bay Coffee
Red Bay Coffee is Black-owned and beautiful. It’s great coffee, all from Ethiopia and other parts of Africa. It’s a place where you see predominantly Black people and southeast Asians, which make up the vast majority of Oakland, together in a Black-owned business. They could sit and hear the dialogues and discussions and how deep and intellectually rich Oakland is, despite what people try to show on television.
Oakland Zoo
The Oakland Zoo is a really cool, underrated zoo. It’s right in the heart of the city, right off I-580. They would get a really beautiful look at the city of Oakland, from the hills on down.
Jack London Square
Jack London Square is a great place to hang out. Historically relevant to the city of Oakland, particularly the Black Panther Party, where their first office is located. It’s beautiful, on the water. And there’s a lot of restaurants, shopping, lots of local artists.
Oakland is a very tight-knit, rich community where you can’t just come in and try to just tell everyone what’s wrong with it. You have to come in and really find what you love about it. There’s a lot of wonderful things that are going on. And there’s a lot of things that don’t make sense to people who are from the outside. And they come in and say, “Oh, I want to change it. I want to fix it.” It’s like, “No, Oakland is fully functional, and it’s beautiful for its uniqueness and its indifference to certain things that happen in the country.
Jason Mayden is a designer, an entrepreneur, a hoop fanatic, a teacher, and an advocate for children. Hard work and a fertile imagination carried the Stanford graduate into his lifelong dream in the form of a highly successful career as senior global design director at Nike/Jordan Brand. A higher calling has led him into the pinnacle of his life’s work, as founder of Super Heroic, a venture focused on innovating performance product and technology for elementary school-aged children. He now works as the CEO and co-founder of Trillicon Valley, an advertising, marketing, design, and development company.