Working within the system: How GSB’ers are making a difference in politics
Was Uber right to choose a growth strategy that required defying regulators and intentionally disregarding laws?
This was our professor’s question in a first-year GSB strategy course. I couldn’t believe the near-consensus that disrupting the taxi industry justified guerilla tactics. Circumventing regulators was necessary because Uber was trying to change the world, said one classmate. When the professor challenged this idea, another raised his hand: “Rosa Parks broke the law — what’s the difference?”
On the surface, GSBers — like much of Silicon Valley — often disdain regulatory process and admire the solve-it-yourself startup mentality.
At the same time, many of us aspire to work on civic and political causes. For her LOWKeynote Talk last year, Val Young (MBA ’16) surveyed nearly 300 GSB students to ask if they would ever consider running for public office. 77% of men and 44% of women said they would. Young’s point was to highlight the absurd gender gap in aspirations for public office. But the high overall interest in elected office shocked me too.
In the Manhattan Project era, I suspect many of us would have been physicists; in the 60s, activists. Today, Silicon Valley is Florence, so we came to business school.
But even in business school, many of us, it seems, crave opportunities to work within our political system—not around it. Here are stories of a handful of GSB students and recent alumni who’ve done just that.
From McKinsey to organizing
Catherine Vaughan (MBA ’15) was seven months into a job at McKinsey when she took a leave of absence to work for the Clinton Campaign in Ohio. After the election, she and her team decided to continue full time with their political work. She became CEO of flippable.org, a nonprofit that connects volunteers and donors to high-impact local political races.
At the end of February, Stephanie Hansen was elected to Delaware’s state Senate by a narrow margin of about 12,000 votes. Her campaign credited flippable for bringing in a quarter of its $475,000 in donations and 1,000 volunteers.
Vaughan’s leap from McKinsey became an incredible professional opportunity. Less than two years out of the GSB, she’s leading a team of 10 and building an organization in the spotlight as we move towards Virginia’s autumn elections.
Product Director and Mayor?
Cameron Johnson (MBA ’08) is a product director at Netflix, but since 2013, he has simultaneously served on the San Carlos City Council. Last year he served a rotating one-year term as mayor, without giving up his Netflix gig.
The path wasn’t easy — he applied to and was rejected from serving on San Carlos commissions three times before finally earning a spot on the city’s Economic Development Advisory Commission.
When he decided to run for City Council, Johnson was concerned about how Netflix would respond. He posted on Facebook about his plans. To his shock, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, whom Johnson barely knew, publicly offered support. Hastings soon contributed $2,500 and encouraged other Netflix executives to donate, too. The gesture helped convince Johnson he could juggle both paths.
Among his recent accomplishments is helping to develop an energy utility called Peninsula Clean Energy, which provides residents an option for 75% greenhouse-gas-free electricity at rates cheaper than PG&E’s.
We don’t have to be self-made billionaires to run for office late in life. It’s possible to serve locally, and to do so without abandoning a typical GSB path.
The heart of bureaucracy
Dan Liss (JD-MBA ’18) made an unusual summer choice for a business school student: he joined the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.
“I chose the DMV in particular because it touches nearly everyone and of course it has an unjustly negative reputation,” Liss said. He researched the top DMVs in the country, guessed the email addresses of the commissioners of the top three, and reached out cold. Each offered him a position.
To hear Liss describe the DMV makes me rethink some stereotypes. Rick Holcomb, the Virginia Commissioner, was the first DMV commissioner to introduce a DMV website back in the 90s, Liss explained. “Since then he has innovated constantly, allowing prisoners to apply for IDs while in state custody so that they can get back to work more quickly, or setting up a program to help veterans become truck drivers more easily.”
Liss, who is not from Virginia, called his experience in Richmond “one of the greatest summers of my life.” He said he came away “Truly inspired.”
Part of his job was to interview employees from customer service representatives up to the commissioner. In Roanoke, Liss reported long lines of people waiting just to drop off license plates. “The team back in Richmond subsequently allowed hundreds of thousands of Virginians annually to mail in or drop off plates at the counter rather than waiting in line.”
How many interns make changes that help hundreds of thousands of people? Top-tier experiences in organizations like these might be surprisingly accessible to GSBers. If you could find the right opportunities, they could become a rocket ship career experience, albeit different from the Silicon Valley path.
The talent gap
“Do you want to participate with a very engaged team on problems that are not that important to the world?” asked Cameron Johnson of the choice between tech and government work. “Or do you want to find yourself trying to work with a team that’s pretty disengaged but working on problems that feel really important?”
In a recent meeting about whether to lock the Android version of the Netflix app in the portrait orientation, “There were passionate arguments on both sides with great data and arguments presented.” Shortly after, Johnson attended a City Council debate about a $2 billion transportation plan. There was “not a lot of curiosity or expertise.” In his government work, he said, “The level of passion and expertise and curiosity is often a lot lower.”
As a result, he sees a huge opportunity for GSBers to have an impact. “I try to infuse culture that’s been successful in the business world — outcomes, performance metrics, KPIs, to change the budget process in the city and empower the department heads. Now our Parks and Recreation Department talks about how many kids were served.”
Vaughan, too, sees a need for GSB skills in the political process. “Organizations are springing from people in the political world who might not have skills to institutionalize processes,” she told me. “I’ve been using the skills I learned at the GSB so much now…how to hire people, establishing something new…It’s surprisingly valuable in a political context.”
Political entrepreneurship
Closer to Palo Alto, several GSBers are combining interests in tech and government to launch political startups.
“Rather than try to change the political system, I’m trying to engage more people in it,” said Caroline Vik (MBA ’17). Vik launched pol., a for-profit startup to help people engage in political advocacy.
“If you’re an active citizen in New Hampshire, you’ve probably met candidates multiple times,” said Vik, who wants to use technology to extend the experience of a New Hampshire primary voter to the masses. Pol.’s app, which went live in the Apple app store at the end of March, aims to make it easier to write to politicians, share what you care about, and take actions like calling or donating.
Oz Johnson (MBA ’17) and Charles Zhu (MBA ’17) are experimenting with a service they’ve christened micro-lobbying. It will allow citizens to pay a small fee to have a lobbyist place calls to elected officials on their behalf.
I spent much of my own GSB experience developing a startup to help local election offices communicate with voters to increase turnout. Imagine receiving a text from your elections office that tomorrow is the absentee ballot request deadline and inviting you to reply yes if you want to vote absentee. One of the surprises was a flood of engineers eager to work on this kind of problem.
Will 21st century activism often come as political entrepreneurship?
What matters most?
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, in her “View From the Top” talk in January, described her proudest accomplishment as “just the rare privilege to work at a company that changes the world.” It seemed to me like a line out of HBO’s Silicon Valley.
“In Silicon Valley we think about creating big disruptive change,” said Cameron Johnson. “You get that mindset at the GSB that your job is to make big change. That kind of approach is not always a great fit for government. Government is really good at providing stability, basic public safety.” He believes that making changes that risk bankrupting San Carlos just don’t work.
Sure, changing the world sounds great. But maybe in this particular moment, more of us should favor the right kind of impact above disrupting for the sake of change.
Every year dozens of GSBers start a company right after graduation. Campaigns are startups, too. I hope we’ll start to see graduating GSBers bootstrapping a shot at state legislature. As Young put it in her talk about running for office, “You’ve never shied from something hard. If not you, who?”
Cameron Johnson put it this way, “If I were to leave Netflix, someone really smart would fill the job. If I left my government work, would someone else do as good a job?”
