I started my career in Silicon Valley almost as soon as I was finished with my undergrad degree. I was always someone who loved tinkering with things and coming up with wild ideas of products to create and ways to make the world a better place. Building products that really mattered to people was always the thing I cared most about and is what first attracted me to Silicon Valley. This was a place where, at least in my imagination, people were building the products that were going to revolutionize the world, upend industries, and usher in a future where every family had a flying car and world hunger was a thing of the past.
While I loved my time in Silicon Valley working on some incredible projects and companies with brilliant people, it became patently obvious that what I viewed as “world changing” was not shared with what most venture capitalists and many of my peers thought was worth investing in and building. I have nothing against people who want to build a startup that enables home delivery of groceries in 10 minutes instead of an hour, but it’s not the sort of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. And in a city when my morning walk was past multiple tent communities full of mentally ill or drug addicted people literally dying on the streets, the cognitive dissonance of not working on solving the most urgent problems for society when you have the resources to do so got to me and I seriously began to rethink what enabled entrepreneurship, how incentives are structured, and how to really do good in the world at scale.
I’ll admit what happened next was totally unplanned; I somehow managed to end up in Estonia, a beautiful country that I had once visited for maybe twenty-four hours some ten years prior, with the idea of leading a team for the e-Residency program, which was billed as “a startup within the government.” Our work was centered around giving foreign nationals access to the E-Estonia infrastructure that had been built in the country in the previous years and which allowed citizens, residents, and now foreign nationals to do things like run a business and pay their taxes completely online (the latter of which is automated in the vast majority of cases and takes roughly 2-3 minutes to complete, something I am in envy of as I begin mentally preparing myself for filing taxes again here in the U.S.). That experience, and being in a country where the years of occupation from the Soviets and others before them still loomed large in the psyche of many, showed me just how impactful government could be.
Looking for ways to give back to my own country, I first did a graduate program at Georgetown in International Business and Policy, which only further instilled in me the resolve to not go back to the private sector and instead look for opportunities in the public sector where I could have a positive impact. I had heard about the TechCongress program some years prior and thought it would be a perfect opportunity for me to have the chance to meaningfully contribute given my global experience in tech. I was ecstatic when I received my offer and continue to be excited at the potential to give back to my country in some small way.