Five years ago Steve and Mary Grove left big jobs at Google in California and moved to Minnesota with their twin toddlers to start a new chapter. Since then, the married couple has navigated a pandemic, job changes and, earlier this month, the start of first grade.  

“We both made a bet on Minnesota,” says Steve Grove, who grew up in Northfield and started as CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune this spring, after serving four years as the state’s commissioner of employment and economic development.  

While Steve Grove was the public face of the state’s effort to keep businesses and workers afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mary Grove has been less visibly building Minnesota’s startup culture. She arrived in Minnesota as a partner in an investment firm founded by AOL billionaire Steve Case focused on investing in startup businesses outside of Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. Now she runs her own venture capital firm that skews heavily toward tech startups in Minnesota and companies started by women and people of color.  

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with Steve and Mary Grove about their marriage and shared commitment to the state.   

It’s the second installment in a series called Power Pairs. It features conversations with people you might know separately, but when you get them together, you discover a different side of them.  

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  Lessons about friendship from two prominent Minnesotans
  
  

 
Guests:  

• Steve Grove is the new CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune, after serving four years as the commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. He spent more than a decade at Google, where he started and ran its News Lab. He also headed up YouTube’s first News and Politics team and worked short stints at ABC News and the Boston Globe. 

• Mary Grove is managing partner at Bread & Butter Ventures, an investor in early-stage companies. She has a long track record supporting tech startups as a partner with Steve Case’s investment firm Revolution and before that as director of what’s now known as Google for Startups. She is also co-founder and executive director of Silicon North Stars, a nonprofit that she and Steve founded in 2013 to help young Minnesotans from underserved communities pursue careers in tech.  

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Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.