Pivoting to Civic-Tech and Nava
When I’m old and I look back on my life, I believe it’s safe to say 2017 will be a year that will stick out in my mind.
A year of self-discovery
The year started out with change as I left Buffer, a company I poured my heart and soul into building and growing and loving every minute of working there.
I knew it would be incredibly hard to say goodbye to a team and mission I loved and move on to something else quickly, so I decided to take it slow and spend a few months toying around with product ideas with Leo to help companies build more inclusive and diverse teams. While an idea that attained true product/market fit never materialized, I’m very glad to have taken the past several months to focus on D&I. In doing customer research, I met some of the most forward thinking people committed to make working in tech better for marginalized and under-represented groups. I had many thoughtful conversations, dug into a lot of data and spent time deeply reflecting and meditating on very timely and important concepts like privilege, socio-economic inequities, sexual and racial harassment, civil disobedience, attachment, and identity.
I saw the past few months as a rare time for me to let my curiosity run wild and strengthen my empathy muscle. It was a quiet time for me — I did not write or tweet much. I simply wanted to listen, read, learn, and try to understand the world that I live in and how we got here. 2017 was the year a lot of my assumptions of the world I lived in were shattered.
How did tech and startups — an industry I thought was progressive and forward thinking — become tainted with bad actors who break labor laws and abuse their positions of power? How did America, the land I grew up in and believed was the country that moved the needle forward for much of the world seem to revert back to a time before I was born. Was it always this way and I was just oblivious to this?
These questions led me to question my own impact on society and the world. I’m incredibly lucky and have been blessed with skills and experience that give me great privilege. As I was looking on to what was next for me, I was faced with a choice: do I use my skills to solely enhance the well-being of myself and those closest to me? Or do I use those skills to help others outside of my own circle who struggle more? I believe everyone who works in tech is faced with this choice.
One of the most important issues our generation will face is whether technical innovation should be to the benefit of everyone or just the privileged within our own circles. It simply cannot be the latter.
Nava
When thinking about what I wanted to do next, these thoughts were continuously on my mind. With that mindset, I came across Nava — A small startup in Civic-Tech focused on improving government services for millions of Americans. I had a few conversations with the founders, and quickly fell in love with the mission. They recognized that tech has largely abandoned helping federal, state, and local government be more efficient. And when we have a bad user experience dealing with government services, we build up our distrust of a functional government.
After several interviews I’m incredibly grateful to have received and accepted an offer to join the team working on modernizing and improving the VA benefits appeals process. This is a critical process that affects millions of veterans and the result of which can often be the difference between a veteran being homeless or having a comfortable life. I’m sad to know there’s a large backlog in processing these appeals and for a veteran can often take several years to receive a final decision. While I’ve never served in the military or experienced the VA benefits appeals process first hand, the veterans who have given us so much are more than deserving of my time and focus.
Services like this and others Nava works on are incredibly complex and often touch millions of Americans. In order to be built efficiently and effectively they need the best and the brightest engineers, product managers, and designers focused on them. This is Nava’s (and other great orgs like the USDS, 18F, and Code for America) mission and I’m incredibly excited to have an opportunity to help move the needle.
Last week I moved from Berkeley, CA to Washington, DC. My wife and I decided to take 10 days to drive across the country, stay in small towns and experience a side of country we’d typically bypass 36,000 feet in the air.
Here are some of my favorite pictures of our road trip:
