Chris Philbrook, Maine Startups Insider
On a weekday morning in Portland, Hannah Pingree is talking about parenting her daughter and son, visiting mobile home parks, entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence, and why her husband recently became a volunteer firefighter. None of it sounds rehearsed. All of it feels connected.
Her daughter is fourteen. Smart. Detailed-oriented. The kind of kid who asks the same question ten times because she needs to be sure. Pingree understands that instinct. She lives with it every day, at home and in public life. There is homework. There are basketball practices. There is the quiet recalibration that happens when responsibility meets reality.
Watching her kids play basketball, she says, is one of the small things that brings her outsized joy. It is also where public life fades fastest. On the bleachers, none of the titles matter.
This is the rhythm of her life now. After public office, but not removed from public work. It is not all that different from the rhythm of the place that shaped how she thinks about responsibility, community, and change.
Pingree grew up on North Haven, an island town of roughly four hundred people. It is the kind of place where everyone holds multiple roles, some that pay and some that do not. Her parents were EMTs. They served on the school board. They started small businesses. Her mother helped launch an economic development nonprofit and later the local newspaper. Her father a well-known boat builder. If something needed doing, the answer was never to complain. The answer was to gather the neighbors and build it yourself.
Nobody else was coming to do it for you.
That belief became muscle memory early. As a child, Pingree attended town meeting with the entire school, kindergarten through twelfth grade. She watched adults debate how to fund the school, whether to rebuild the dock, how to make the town work. Government was not abstract. It was a room, an agenda, and a vote. It was messy, practical, and unavoidable.
In middle school, her science teacher convinced a group of seventh and eighth graders to take on the town dump. Recycling was not standard yet. The students spent a year sorting trash, building piles, counting what could be reused. They went through their neighbors’ garbage. Nobody objected. The kids brought their findings back to the town. The town listened. North Haven eventually adopted a recycling program that still exists today.
Pingree was thirteen when she helped start a bracelet kit company with a friend. Her mother ran a knitting business that employed a dozen island women. When a large order came in from Land’s End, the bracelet kits suddenly needed to scale. Thirty thousand units. Five kids in a class. Every afternoon after school for a year, they assembled kits. The money went to the class, saved for a future trip. It was exhausting. It was instructive. It was a startup before she had language for one.
Looking back, she says it probably could only have happened on an island.
That same logic runs through her professional life. Pingree does not separate politics from community responsibility or business from civic obligation. In Maine, employing your neighbors, keeping people housed, and helping a town adapt all function as forms of public service.
Her path reflects that belief. Legislator. House Speaker. School board member and chair. Running a small business. Director of the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future. Each role looks different on paper. Each one, she says, was driven by the same question. How do you improve people’s lives where they already are, using the tools actually available.
At the Office of the Future, also known as GOPIF, the mandate sounded abstract. Bring people together. Think long term. Tackle climate, housing, and workforce challenges. The work itself was anything but.
The office functioned more like a delivery team than a policy shop. Reports mattered, but execution mattered more. Clean energy became about deployment. Heat pumps installed. Local capacity built. Funding aligned so projects could move. Housing quickly turned into zoning, land access, financing, and speed. What breaks projects. What unblocks them. Where time and capital are lost.
Pingree pushed dashboards and scorecards because measurement creates accountability. Not what the state planned to do, but what was actually happening, where, and how fast. The point was not to sound ambitious. The point was to prove progress.
It is a mindset familiar to founders and operators across Maine. Limited resources. Real consequences. No one coming to fix it for you.
The best advice she ever received, she says, was simple. Everything is about relationships. Politics. Work. Implementation. None of it moves without trust between human beings. That belief shaped how the office worked. Convening mattered. Listening mattered. Progress often depended less on authority than on whether the right people felt brought along.
She points to mobile home parks as one of the clearest examples of innovation aimed at stability rather than headlines. Working through the budget process and with housing partners, the state put real dollars behind resident ownership, helping people buy their parks and convert them into cooperatives. It required fund design, legislative buy in, and a mechanism that could move money quickly through MaineHousing. It was not flashy. It worked.
The GOPIF office soon developed a reputation inside state government. Legislators and agencies began sending their hardest problems there. Forestry. Housing. Workforce transitions. In many systems, issues stall when they are passed along. In this one, people saw movement.
That reputation was built quickly. It was built through delivery.
Pingree believes Maine has spent decades focused on survival. Keep young people from leaving. Keep any jobs at all. She thinks that mindset is finally shifting. She sees ambition now. Entrepreneurs. Builders. Talent attraction. People asking not how to keep up, but how to lead.
She believes Maine could be a national leader in housing innovation, forest products, marine industries, technology, and life sciences. Not as an extension of Boston, but on its own terms.
She also believes rural and blue-collar innovation remain deeply underestimated. People understand how hard rural Mainers work, she says, but they often underestimate how much intelligence and creativity exist there. Some of the sharpest people she knows are fishermen, plumbers, and builders. Innovation shows up wherever people are solving real problems with limited resources.
Technology fits into that worldview with both optimism and caution. Before leaving state government, Pingree helped launch Maine’s AI task force. She sees opportunity in forest products, fisheries, climate modeling, and healthcare. She also sees real risk that must be discussed openly and addressed deliberately.
Leadership taught her one lesson the hard way. Messaging matters. Policy without public understanding is fragile. Housing. Clean energy. Tax and regulatory reform. Complex ideas can be distorted quickly if people are not brought along honestly and consistently. Change requires trust, and trust requires conversation beyond the walls of government.
What keeps her grounded is simple. A small town where nobody cares what office she held. Children who care far more about homework and basketball games than headlines. A husband driving to practices and making dinner. A community that knew her long before campaigns did.
When Pingree talks about Maine in 2035, she talks about systems working together. Adequate housing in every region. An economy that supports fishermen, healthcare workers, entrepreneurs, and families alike. A state where young people can create something meaningful, scale it without leaving, and build a good life for themselves and their families.
She hopes Maine learns to say yes more often. Yes to innovation. Yes to housing. Yes to growth. Yes to change that preserves what people love without freezing it in time. Environmental stewardship and economic opportunity, she believes, are not in conflict. They are interdependent.
When she thinks about how this chapter is remembered, she does not talk about titles. She talks about outcomes. About whether Maine itself becomes the answer.
Politics and business, Pingree says, are both means to improve people’s lives. Her career, she believes, has been about listening to smart people with good ideas and helping remove the barriers that keep those ideas from taking hold. She is open to listening across industries, across the state, and across political lines, because Maine’s future works best when more people are part of shaping it.
The island taught her that.
If you want something to work, you show up. You pitch in. You build it together.
Nobody else is coming to save you.
Excerpt from The Interview
