CRITICALITY SERVICES - Cracking the Code of Hard Tech:Pioneering Innovations in Government&Industry

Hey hey hey good people. Welcome to this really dope session on cracking the code of hard tech pioneering innovations in government and industry. This is going to be a session that’s all about the hard tech industry and how civic technologies and software engineers like yourselves can make a better impact nationally working with the federal government.

I’m super excited to be joined by two awesome panelists and two close colleagues of mine Ish Singh and Ross Dhakan. Ish is a seasoned innovation executive and his professional story is a blend of techn technological expertise, strategic thinking and entrepreneurial leadership. He works at Sandia National Laboratories where he oversees the strategic supervision of early stage innovation programs for the department of energy and the national nuclear security administration.

Ross is an entrepreneurial technologist whose background spans Silicon Valley startups, corporate enterprise, federal and state government, national nonprofits, and more, as well as academia. Ross served as the White House presidential innovation fellow in the Obama administration, and helped lead COVID 19 pandemic response efforts in the state of New Jersey. He’s currently the CTO of criticality sciences, a software company u that uses network science and propagating cascade failure simulation modeling to increase the resilience of national critical infrastructure providers.

Super awesome work that both of these gentlemen are leading. I’m super excited for this session. It’s going to be interactive.

So if y’all have questions please drop them in the Q&A and we will take a look at that. And I just want to call out that we’ll also have a brief survey at the end of the session that y’all filling out will be very helpful for us. Ross Ish, it’s a pleasure to have y’all both on the stage.

Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Yeah, thank you so much. Awesome. So, I think one of the things that is interesting is that there’s so many different pathways into like federal tech and like civic tech, deep tech, hard tech.

There’s all these different kind of words that speak to this industry that is focused on solving tough problems at the level of federal government. I’m curious if y’all both could just kind of describe a little bit about yourselves and like your pathway into what that space means to you because I know that for both of you you may have different meanings when it comes to federal tech or tough tech and curious about your pathways into where you all are at today. Either of you can start.

Sure, Ross. You know, would you like to start first? Please go for it.

Okay, great. So, it’s so nice to see all of you here. I wish I could actually see all of you.

Thank you so much for, you know, showing up and, making time. So, as Cam Hat mentioned, my name is Ish saying Singh. I’m with Sandia.

And to address the question on on tough tech, hard tech or deep tech, from my journey through life, I think one word that comes to mind is it’s got to be transformational, right? Complex technologies, tackling major global challenges on a state, local level, national scale. And we’re talking about quantum computing.

That’s that’s a pretty big hot topic right now. And innovations that require long-term investment, right? Typically in the early stages of the transition process, the federal government typically plays a you know major role in terms of not only providing the technical expertise but also the initial funds to overcome the valley of death at a later point and I’m happy to talk a little bit about what that valley is but in a quick nutshell that’s that’s what tough of tech is to me and I’m so proud of all of you showing up here today.

Yeah. Plus one. I was just scrolling through.

It looks like there’s I don’t know a good 50 people here. Yeah. I understand it’s the end of the day.

So, thanks for hanging in there with us. This is really exciting because I think Ish and I actually take slightly different approaches, fundamental approaches to the work that we’ve been doing. Ish is probably thousand times smarter than me and working on things like quantum and and really like the idea of deep tech or hard tech like really wicked problems from a technical point of view that are hard to solve.

My career has been more around hard problems that are hard to solve just because of our structures and just because of people and policy and stuff that gets in the way. So, for example, if you’re a veteran and you’re transitioning from the Department of Defense and you’re you’re about to retire from the army, right? Your medical record doesn’t easily get synced between the Department of Defense and and the and the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs.

How do you do that? You know, from a technical point of view, it’s it’s a little bit of data. It should go from here to there.

And it’s all one government, right? So, government, this is if you take something away from today, here’s a tip. There’s not like a government.

There’s the federal government and then within the federal government there are various agencies and then there’s state, local, tribal, territorial governments and within each one of them there’s like the treasury and then there’s you know the department of commerce, there’s health and human services, there’s housing, there’s all of these things and because of very well-intentioned laws and regulations that want to protect people’s privacy. Sometimes it’s really hard for even within government government to share data with government. So a lot of my work and so COVID response was a good example of this and I can get more into that, but we were able to sort of break down some of the barriers within government to say like, hey, maybe when somebody applies for a loan or a grant, instead of having to upload a PDF to prove that their tax clearance is or that they’ve made, you know, they’re clear on their taxes, we’re government, maybe we can just go get from this agency, you know, take their unique ID, their employee ID, number or their employer number and and ask for the data from another agency and do that kind of thing.

So, the program that you mentioned, the presidential innovation fellows that I did within the Obama administration, it started really hiring technologists and then they realized that a lot of the problems aren’t really that techy in nature. They’re more user centered design. They’re more I mean if anybody’s ever used a government website that doesn’t isn’t responsive on a mobile phone gives you cryptic error messages you know or worse if you’re you know if you have color blindness issues or whatnot.

These are a lot of the challenges that government deals with that private industry maybe doesn’t always deal with because in government you can’t 8020 your customer and say we’re not going to care about this swath of society. We’re not going to care about people that are blind and using screen readers because it’s illegal and there are statutes making sure that you know if if the federal government is putting out a website that it’s accessible to all people. So some of that is you know deeply technically challenging but I guess I’ll just draw the distinction that it’s it’s been more sort of like human center design empathy applied engineering as opposed to I have no idea how to do quantum computing.

I wish I did, but I know it’s gonna be important. It’s interesting that you’re bringing that point up, Ross, about kind of the distinction between the the the hard technical skills you need and then like the softer skills that you might need to have as well to facilitate work in a in a landscape like the federal government where there’s a lot of different stakeholders, a lot of different departments, different organizations. And I know that oftent times as as young engineers and like early career professionals, we’re so focused on like the hard skills like, "Oh, I want to learn how to code.

I want to be the best engineer I can be." and you started talking a little bit about it from the communication perspective as well as the human- centered design perspective. And is I know that you are somebody who both has like a technical expertise and then also like business expertise. I’m curious like what other kinds of skills have you found being important in the in the space of work that you’re in and how do you approach leadership in this space that requires kind of balancing technical challenges with business considerations?

Yeah, that’s that’s a great question, Cam. So, I’ve I’ve definitely been around the block and one of my really good mentors, this amazing individual, she once told me this. She said, "Is make potential your north star and and I’ve applied that philosophy and what it truly means is to craft and chase experiences that resonate with your value with your set of values.

And it’s okay if things change along the way of life. I started off my career as a you know manufacturing engineer with a big oil and gas company. I transitioned then into the aerospace industry and throughout life I was pulled by a higher calling consistently to go into education to go into innovation and I found my way at Sandia where I have a really fun job of you know translating policy top down into workforce and economic development opportunities.

Unities, right? Kind of just making sure that opportunities trickle not only top down from the mothership, if you will, but also having that bottoms up approach as well. And Cam, you you had you had asked about some additional skills that I’m that I’m actually pursuing right now, and that’s foreign policy.

That is such a big crucial topic right now. If you guys had watched the news today, right, there’s a crisis that’s actually going on. So how do you now bring in common sense from a international affairs from a foreign policy perspective from a nuclear security you know perspective as well?

And how do you start blending in these topics into like some of the technical and business development work that I do. So for example in the nuclear security sector building a supply chain for critical minerals is a big deal. It it is a very hot topic right now.

So these are just some aspects that I highly encourage all of you to start exploring. Look beyond communications, look beyond, you know, leaderships, explore fellowships as well on the policy side and and and I’m happy to talk a little bit more about that later with some helpful organizations that I’ve I’ve been with. Thanks.

And Ross, I’m curious like, you know, as as a presidential innovation fellow, you started talking a little bit about like the the ways in which the challenges you’re encountering kind of require this like consensus building even, right? Like you have to figure out like, well, how do I build a system that like the the VA and the Department of Defense will both agree to use? And sometimes that that process of building consensus can be very tough.

I’m curious like if you could speak sometimes. Could you talk a little bit more about your problem solving approach and and how you find that like you know if you could summarize like the approach that you take in those settings so that if you’re in ever in a position as an engineer to have to make these tough kinds of decisions. What kinds of frameworks do you use to help make those problems easier to solve?

Yeah, for sure. It’s a great question. Before I answer it, Ish mentioned organizations that are good to check into and I’m sure there you might mention some like Truman fellows and whatnot.

I’m gonna paste one into chat right now too which is coding it forward before I forget and I’m happy to talk more about it, but that is an early career program designed for folks coming out of undergrad who want to contribute in the federal government some way and folks are placed in different agencies. And I wanted to just make sure I got to that because I think it’s it’s a direct way people can really get involved like immediately. Consensus building frameworks.

How do we do that? I think there are there are a few different strategies. There’s a group called 18F in in federal government and they’re they’re worth checking out too for sure.

I think it’s 18f.gov. I’ll put that in there and folks can check it out. And they’re one of their mottos is delivery is the strategy.

So we would do things like, okay, we’re gonna have a big kickoff meeting. Everybody gets in the room. You’ve got the tech folks, the design folks, the process folks, the the policy folks, the folks from the agency.

Everyone gets in a room, right? It’s really important to get everybody at the table. Megan Smith, who was the se second or third third CTO of the US, she helped start Google X and she actually invented the iPhone before it was a thing 20 years ago.

She used to say, you’ve got to have the tech person at the table. Oftentimes people the tech person is brought in later. Everyone else is like this is what we’re going to build and they design it and think about it and then it’s like let’s bring in a tech person to do that.

The tech person’s like I should have been here a month ago at least. So get everybody in one room and one of the fun things we would do is while the conversation was happening there’d be an engineer in the corner creating a prototype, an actual, you know, clickable walkthrough mockup sort of prototype. And at the end of the meeting, an hour and a half later, they would turn the laptop around and be like, "Okay, is this kind of what you’re talking about?

Because I just built it more or less, right? Not a real thing, but something people can click through and and that idea of it’s call it agile or call it you know tight iterations or whatnot, but getting end to end quickly is important. If anybody is old enough to remember when the Affordable Care Act Obamacare and healthcare.gov of was launched and had a bit of a catastrophic failure.

Part of the reason for that failure was that it was not iterative. It was not, hey, let’s let’s open it up to a few people. Let’s do a small roll out.

Let’s do an endto-end test. It was kind of let’s just flip the switch one day and open the floodgates and see what happens. But getting people on the same page.

This is where human- centered design and I know I keep saying that, but it’s so so incredibly important. Where you have the sticky notes, you know, and you do the you do the butcher paper and and I’m not well trained in that. And I’m not going to pretend that I am, but the people who do that are invaluable.

And if you do have a technical background and you can take some time somehow or another through, you know, through books or online resources to get a little bit of those skills, it’s it’s really invaluable. It’s it’s it’s teasing out, you know, it’s the faster horses thing, right? People will come to you and say, "We want you to build this." This happened a lot.

People would bring us in as innovation fellows and say, "Ah, we’re so glad you’re here. We want you to build us an app." And we’d be like, "Okay, why?" They’re like, "Well, we need an app." It’s like, "Do you like what are you trying to achieve?" And you keep asking the why, right? The seven W’s.

There are a ton of different methods for doing that. Again, I’m not an expert on these these actual practices, but let me let me do some quick Googling in the background here. I’ll make some recommendations.

But it’s huge. That makes add on there. Go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I think Ross really brought a really good point up and it’s like playing that role of chief instigator, right, if you will, right?

And when you’re working trying to build, you know, consensus across the board, you got to think in terms of you know, aligning the technology, the business and the pip and the people mission aspects, right? And that’s that’s the name of the game. How do you grow the pie?

How do you create and claim value with all your partners here? Yeah, I was going to say that it’s it’s all really incredible to hear about the one the different programs that you mentioned, Ross, and like ways that students can get involved. And also, I think y’all are bringing up a really interesting point about the the need for different types of thinking in the innovation process, right?

It’s like you need the builder, but you also need the design thinker and you also need the person who can maybe make the plan that keeps all of these people working together seamlessly. And so, it seems like in this space there’s room for a lot of, different types of people and backgrounds and thinking, when you’re trying to solve like the most challenging problems for the government or for, you know, states and cities and, and all of these things. And with so much going on in the world, like so many challenges with the environment, I’m sure that that can be very tough.

And ish, I know that with the the DOE boost program, you’re working very specifically on challenges with relationship to things like the environment or or like you know, broader excuse me, broader community based challenges that some of these technologies can solve. I’m curious like what have been some of the most exciting breakthroughs or innovations that you’ve seen that address community- based energy challenges and how do you see the next generation of technologists contributing to those solutions? Okay, cool.

So for those of you who don’t know what the DOE boost program is in in short think of it as a early stage incubation program where we match aspiring entrepreneurs firsttime founders even graduate students with a federal lab technology which is awesome. I’ve never se seen this model being deployed you know before and you’ll go through a eight 16-w week program with you know Candidia and with our industry partners in hope of spinning or launching your very own high tech startup the likes of you know Elon Musk right they have done similar you know processes in the past Apple for example have licensed a lot of technology from the DoD from NASA and from the other labs as well. So coming back to boost what I really love about this and what’s really amazing coming back to what I said said earlier about translating policy down in a way that it works is that this has got a community tiein, right?

So we worked with communities out in New Mexico, out in Alaska. We did a study there’s this environmental justice screening tool that the DOE has. So we leverage tools like that to kind of target specific communities across the US and be really thoughtful about how we can find entrepreneurs who care about sustainability, who care about the circular economy and find technologies that resonate with these communities.

So, for example, out in Alaska, right, having access to fuel generators, micro grids, strengthening their you know grid, their their power grid supply line. These were some critical issues that we had found great success with in terms of just, you know, having that nice little tie-in back to some of these ecosystems. And you know guys, today I heard about the word climate violence.

I’ve heard about marginalized environmental justice, but climate violence is a new term that I just heard about today and it seems like it’s starting to catch on as well. So, you know, the the news and the media definitely plays its its role and we are definitely keeping our eyes and ears open to create new you know programs, new types of studios that can now start addressing some of these issues ac across the US. That’s awesome.

Yeah, I’ve actually used the the CEJST, the climate economic justice screening tool in a couple of different projects. And I think one thing that’s real interesting about like working on working one in like this space of like federal technologies or like you have like different pathways that you can do that in. One could be, hey, I’m actually working in some of these departments as an innovator, as a technologist.

But other pathways might include, hey, I’m using some of these APIs that exist that some of the departments are maintaining in order to then build other things, right? And so Ross, I’m curious like in your experience, one maybe at criticality sciences, but maybe also outside of it. I know you’ve been working as an external business on some of the larger challenges that some of our cities and states and government organizations are facing.

Can you share more about like one the types of technologies that y’all are working it with and how you find that some of our nation’s infrastructure can be made more robust and secure? Yeah, absolutely. And I there are analogous things happening in the private sector and in the public sector and both can learn from each other and that was the impetus for this fellowship that I did as well.

The whole idea was what if we, you know, took some Silicon Valley technologists and threw them in government for a year? What could happen? And I learned a ton from that.

And I think there’s value in going the other direction as well. U and the idea is just to mix up ideas and just to get fresh thoughts coming in in in in both directions. Okay.

So, criticality sciences what we do is it’s essentially data analytics for utility companies and critical infrastructure providers right now. So, to simplify it, if I’m a power utility, I want to know if a truck goes off the road and hits that power line versus that power line or that transformer versus that transformer, which one’s going to be worse? And whichever one’s going to be worse is probably where I should put some of my mitigation dollars.

I should build a wall around it, or I should put a second one there as a backup and generate some have some redundancy. What we do is try to when disaster hits, keep the water flowing and keep the lights on. And disaster can be, it could be a flood, it could be a hurricane, it could be an earthquake, it could be squirrels.

They actually chew through a bunch of power lines and cause a lot of havoc in the Northeast. It could be an intelligent adversary. People, I don’t know if you remember seeing in the news a year or two ago, folks were shooting up substations with high-powered rifles in I think it was North Carolina and Washington State.

So it’s not if something happens, it’s when. Because this infrastructure, you know, the Boston water system, for example, is over a hundred years old and it’s eight feet underground. And how do you how do you maintain that?

And how do you expand it? And how do you keep it robust and working? And what happens when one affects the other?

So the Texas freeze a couple years ago, it got really cold. So what happened? The liquid natural gas froze.

When that happened, they couldn’t generate electricity. When the power went out, they couldn’t pump water. Well, they did for a little while, but then the backups ran out or the batteries died or the the battery backups or the backup generators didn’t work on the water pumps.

Same with Hurricane Katrina. Freshwater pumps failed, flood water pumps failed. So what happens when you have this domino effect or even or supply chain issues like like Ish ish mentioned or if anybody remembers during COVID there was a a national baby formula shortage because there’s one big primary factory that makes baby formula in the US and they couldn’t get they couldn’t get water in and they couldn’t get their supplies out and everything was jammed up.

So how do so we try to model those things and to your question we use network science for most of this. So you can you can model these things like a water system or a transportation system or even a human network as a graph of nodes and links between them. And once you model them as a graph, you can start using network science and graph theory to say all right well if this node were taken out we call that a n minus one analysis.

What would happen? What if we do two nodes n minus2 analysis? And as soon as you start to do this over thousands and thousands of nodes it gets really computationally expensive.

And this is where kind of the hard tech comes in for us. You can’t get a perfect answer because it would take years and years and years of compute time. It just scales exponentially.

So what do you do about that? We do things like Monte Carlo simulations to to give probability based answers rather than traditional engineering based answers. And there I could bore you with other things.

The National Academy of Sciences has called for more probabilistic measures. You there’s there’s this famous saying, right? You can’t fix it if you can’t measure it.

So part of what we do is we want to put a met a metric a number say 1 to 10. How resilient is your power network? How resilient is your water network?

How resilient is your is your supply chain network? You know if you’re building phones and you can’t get transistors or if you’re building cars and you can’t get chips again same thing that happened during COVID, right? You’ve got an issue.

We could in it’s interesting because networks are everywhere and everything can kind of be represented as a network. So you could even model this as you know a viral contagion. So how fast does COVID spread and do you have hubs?

Do you have super spreader events? Or the opposite. How fast does misinformation spread?

And if you want to contain something false or a secret that leaked or whatnot, can you use network science to say, well, if it makes it to this hub, then it’s going all over the place and there’s no way to put the cap back in the back. So anyway, we deal with network science. Our founding scientist created the homeland defense and security institute or center at the naval postgraduate school and what we do is based on on his methodologies.

Wow. So it’s Yeah. And it’s interesting because it is a hard science but we’re using it in real world ways.

Everybody knows what a water system is, right? You turn the tap on, the water comes out. If it doesn’t come out, something’s wrong.

But it’s it’s people don’t often think about what powers those systems. We’re lucky that we’re able to take it for granted in this country. Yeah.

No, that’s really incredible to hear. And like going back to like the points that both of y’all are making about the types of technologies, I think it’s real interesting thinking about like this demographic of young engineers in the chat right now and you know, folks graduating college or still in college right now thinking about like how do I enter into this industry? So, I want to transition over into like getting into more of those kinds of tips and questions.

But one thing I want to point out is like I feel like as an engineer often, especially when you’re doing a lot of these big like technical interview preparation courses, a lot of what you’re focusing on are things like data structures and algorithms. And it’s often hard to figure out like, well, where do these things where do these things apply, right? Where where am I going to need to, you know, know my graph theory for for lack of better words or like, you know, reverse this link list in some capacity, right?

And it sounds interesting about like how when you’re solving large scale problems and you can model things in these algorithmic ways sometimes then those data structures and the algorithmic conversations that folks might be getting tired of in our sessions come really in handy. So it’s cool to hear that how y’all are using graph theory in the work that you’re doing. Ross, I’m curious.

Ish Ross, y’all both are working in some interesting spaces and I’m sure like there’s a lot of questions in the Q&A that we’ll go through related to this theme, but I’ll give you a chance to just talk about it now. How do you feel like u early career engineers can be engaged in the work that y’all are doing? Right.

And what would be like some advice or some tips you’d give to graduates or current students who want to get involved in like public interest technology but might not know like the best path. Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. Happy to take that one first here Cam.

So the first resource I can think about is the I core program, right? Some of the federal labs do do administer their versions of the I core, but I believe there’s the National Science Foundation one. So, check that out.

Your university or your college should have a local I core hub. What I would do is I would explore your patent office, right? If your university has a tech transfer office, they should have a patent portfolio list which you could explore.

Get in touch with someone there and see if you could, you know, grab a piece of pattern that you want to explore and run it through your local I core hub. So, that’s that’s the first piece of recommendation there. It’s it’s it’s a really neat way to kind of just build your chops around customer discovery.

Failing forward. It’s it’s a very safe space to kind of just test your passion, right? Figure things out if starting up is for you.

I’m such a riskadverse individual that I typically just stay behind the scenes and I’m happy to support entrepreneurs. But check that out. The second piece here would be think in terms of science policy and science diplomacy.

There are a lot of clubs and societies across the US. The Alexander Alexander Hamilton foundation for example is one such or your college or university should have a science diplomacy club as well. And that has been such a helpful resource for me while I’m pursuing my MBA right now actually with John’s Hopkins University and phenomenal resources phenomenal resources in terms of just the various fellowships that I could apply for and they typically run throughout the year.

So these are the top two things that kind of just come to mind right now. Thanks is I’m g turn it to Ross. I mean, so number one would be if you really want to jump in and actually, you know, do have a fellowship in this area and start an early career in this area, do check out coding it forward.

I think that’s the most formalized way in at the federal level right now. But again, the government is I’ll put it in terms of a a data structure. The government’s a tree.

Got the federal government, you’ve got states. Under each state, you’ve got counties. Under each county, you’ve got cities.

And so many of them have I remember, for example, friends worked at the San Francisco Office of Innovation. And there there are hundreds of examples all over the place. I worked for the New Jersey Office of Innovation.

So check those out. If you can make yourself aware of the landscape, and just spend an hour going down the rabbit hole. Google these things.

Look at USDS, the US digital service. Oh, USDR is another cool one. The US digital response that was spun up as a volunteer organization during COVID of just dogooders that were like, "Hey, I want to help somehow." And and they ended up helping government.

So, when I was in state government, they came to us and said, "Hey, do you need extra developers for free?" We were like, "Wait, what? Sure, yes, please." and you know got somebody that like worked for Twilio and somebody that worked for Uber and they built us little tools on the side. It was awesome.

So that could be a cool one. Code for America for sure. I’m going to put this in the chat.

They run a summit every year called the Code for America Summit. I was thinking about saying if you want to go and you can’t afford it, I’ll pay for anybody to go that’s on this. But we’ve actually got quite a few people on this so far.

But I’m still going to toss that out there. Check out the Code for America Summit. It I forget it’s not it already happened in 2024, but it’s it is sort of the canonical it’s the meeting place for all of the civic tech nerds.

We’re all there. Everybody’s there. The founders of everything are there.

Mikey Dixon’s there, Aaron Snow’s there, people from the Beck Center are there. I mean so check it out, but but really like familiarize yourself with the landscape. So I mentioned 18F, I mentioned USDR, I mentioned coding at Board, I mentioned the US Digital Service, Presidential Innovation Fellows Program.

Sign up for their email list. Just see what people are doing. Code for America too, you can get a great idea for what they’re working on.

It’s you know, people being able to check their food stamp balance on their phone via text message and whatnot or clearing their their record automatically if they had marijuana convictions previously. These are all great things. It’s talk to anybody.

It’s the the network of people doing this work is growing and growing and growing. But there isn’t really like a central there have been attempts at like hey let’s put it all under one umbrella but none of them have really I would say sort of stuck. So talk to everyone you can just show up.

Somebody said you know decisions are made by those who show up. So it’s just kind of being a part of the conversations. There are actually also slacks.

I forget what exactly they are. I haven’t been in Slack for a while. But yeah, also, yeah, Ish said get an industry mentor for sure.

And just talk to people. Hit me up on LinkedIn. Hit I mean, go find other presidential innovation fellows or people that work at a place you would be interested in working.

I love getting cold calls on LinkedIn, especially from, you know, folks earlier in their career. Hey, I’m so sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if you could tell me about Absolutely.

I’ll talk all day long about X, Y, and Z. And I think a lot of other folks would, too. You know, especially if it’s genuine and it’s like, "Hey, I’m, you know, I’m a student.

I’m interested in this space. I’d love to hear about your experience or any suggestions. Because all I get on LinkedIn all day are people trying to sell me things.

So, get that profile going and and just talk to people and get in get involved." There are also there were I have to check to see if this is still a thing, but there were like code for organizations in lots of different communities. So it was kind of a spin-off of code for America through meetup.com. People would have like code for DC, code for Chicago, code for Oakland, and people would just get together once, you know, a month and have pizza and talk about, hey, I made us a visualizer to see like what would it be like if our sidewalks were wider or I don’t know, using a there there are APIs like Cam you mentioned there APIs for everything.

There’s I’ve seen APIs for every single tree that’s planted by a single municipality and like, hey, I made a cool map of this thing and nerds would just get together and and geek out on really cool ways to use tech or invol involve themselves or or utilize the the open technology or the open data that’s available from from different governments. So yeah, get involved, find the communities, find the people doing it and start talking. It’s it’s the great the great thing is is that about this community is that so many people are open and and willing to help I think and welcoming.

It warms my heart to see all of this chat activity going on and yeah. So Ross, I wish I had met you like 10 like 10 years ago, right? I’m like, Ross is Ross is dropping all of the resources and the Slack links and everything.

And I really appreciate that because yeah, it’s it’s hard when you’re a new engine a new grad or you’re about to graduate. Figuring out your pathway from college to career is pretty difficult. And I know that y’all two have very different experiences with that too.

Like ish coming from international, being an international student and then coming and working in the US, right? Could you talk a little bit ish about your background from coming from Singapore and then coming to the US and starting into this work because I feel like your story will be really inspiring for students who maybe like hey I also am curious if international students can get into this space and your advice for folks in that regard. Sure.

Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. Happy to tackle that one. So I was born and raised in Singapore.

Moved out here officially about 7 years ago and now I’m happy to say that I’m a US citizen. You know there’s just so much opportunity here in the US and it’s it’s truly about identifying what are some of those you know white and green spaces that you can that you can apply yourself towards. For me I found a passion.

I found a calling in you know building folks up and that’s through the federal you know machinery the federal engine through collaborations with a lot of incubators accelerators here here in the US and it’s just been a phenomenal you know journey. My my initial time here was really tough. I was kind of just bouncing around between different startups.

And I had so much growing up to do. I thought I was this amazing manufacturing engineer with a lot of global experience, but it was very small compared to starting up fresh as a brand new immigrant in this country. I was very fortunate that I found the right mentors because if you want to be the best, you’ve got to find the best and just taking that mindset, putting ego aside, even going back to school, right?

I’m doing my MBA right now. Building that supportive network of engineers and public policy experts and health care experts is has has been such a safety net like yeah it’s been such a strong safety net. It’s been a great community and and and ecosystem that one has to keep investing in.

Guys, I am burnt out. I’ve got a a really heavy day job. I’m doing a part-time MBA.

I’ve got a I’ve got a little kid and I’ve been applying for tons of fellowships as well, but trust in the process that it’s it’s all going to work out and there’s there’s plenty of opportunity. Just find the right mentors who can help you you know kind of just open up the right doors for you there. Can you I just want to add mic drop to Ish’s points.

If you want to be the best, you got to find the best as mentors for sure. Real quick, because I know you, as you just mentioned, you have so many things that that are calling to your attention and our time with you is limited, but can you talk a little bit about your journey getting your mentor? Like, how did you go from, hey, I fresh here trying to figure out my pathway to finding your first mentor that opened up those doors for you?

Yeah, that’s that’s that’s a that’s a great question, too. So, coming back to knowing what your values are. I did this really amazing, career assessment tool.

It’s called Clifton Strengths. And I was shocked to learn that my number one strength was actually ecosystem builder. And that just rang like all the bells in my mind.

And I was so sure when I when I saw that study and I was like, "Okay, I think I really want to get into economic development now, workforce development now." So, knowing what your values are, leveraging resources from your career center, and just giving yourself a good 360 view, and then start designing experiences that you want to go after. You could lead a life by working backwards by knowing what career or position you want to get into or you could go down the life design path which is something that I’ve done. So economic development is the name of the game for me right now peppered with a little bit of foreign policy and conflict resolution.

That’s that’s where my heart is being pulled into right now. So, we’ll we’ll see where that goes. No problem.

Thank you so much. So, I know that that issue might have to drop off for some other federal related duties. So, I just want to give you a second I want to give everybody a second to give you some love in the chat.

Y’all just send some love to Ish. Any words of affirmation or things that you learned from him on the panel? I’m sure he’s going to appreciate reading as he as he slides out.

But one of the things that I’d love to do with the time that we have left is get to some of the questions that students have answered. I feel like we’ve answered quite a few during the pro presentation. But Ross, if you can help me out, I’d be curious to know like what would you let me maybe we just do a little lightning round through some of these just to make sure we get them really fully addressed.

If you could go, what were the top three skills in demand in the federal landscape among tech enthusiasts and engineers in your circle, I should say, because there’s a lot of different folks in that space. Yeah, I’m going to abstract it to just the top three skills, period, because I think there there’s this fallacy that there’s like X for government. Whoops.

What happened? There you go. They’re showing the question.

Go ahead. Still here. Okay, cool.

Okay. Communication. If you are a smart, nerdy engineer and you know how to actually communicate with people, you are gold.

I’m on the I’m on the board of my my alma mater’s engineering school and the former dean actually created a requirement called acting for engineers. He’s like we have a problem. We have really smart people and they’re graduating but it doesn’t matter so much if you you know know how to balance a binary tree or whatnot if you can’t actually communicate that to other people.

I was just hanging out with a friend of mine who worked at Google for 10 or 15 years. And our other non-technical friend was like, "Chad, what do you do?" And he goes, "Honestly," because he’s he’s like a hardcore engineer and he writes a bunch of Python and stuff. And he goes, "Honestly, I just make analogies all day long." I’m like, "Okay, so imagine you had four buckets, but D, right?" Like find So communication, I’m gonna That’s number one.

I think security is only becoming more important and is relevant to every every every every possible company, every possible sector and it’s been overlooked for a long time and we’re kind of paying the price for it now especially with some of these breaches that you’re seeing you know publicly. So if you are an engineer who is security conscious, security savvy and can communicate, you are. Now if you wanted to add, if I had to pick one more, I mean I kind of feel bad saying this, but honestly AI like it’s I’m so bullish on AI changing everything.

At the same time, it is a little bit of a gold rush and I wouldn’t totally ignore everything else. You know, get all the fundamentals, but if you can be aware of AI and the different tools and modeling and, you know, pandas and all that kind of stuff, that’s huge. I’ll I’ll say one more thing, too.

This guy Tom Khalil, who I think he was in the White House running innovation for like literally 16 years. It was all of the Clinton administration and all of the Obama administration. He’s got all these great quotes and his team cataloged them.

And this guy, Kumar Gar, he put that tweet out with that whiteboard picture that I put in a link. And one of the things Tom says is you should major in a subject and minor in an issue. Pick something that you care about, whether it’s the environment or human rights or the organ donation weight list or you know, the disparity in pay between between genders and tech.

Whatever your issue is, pick something and and educate yourself on that and be able to speak to it and be able to tell people why it’s an issue and what your thoughts are on it. And being able to pair up those two things, tech as a lever for change and the thing that you actually want to change is hugely hugely impactful. And the people that I saw in the White House and in government who did the most and moved the needle the most and moved the ball down the field the most had like a thing and they focused on that thing and they just really really hammered on that thing.

I had a hard time with that because I was I’ve been a generalist. I’ve been I do a little bit of everything, right? I never really had like the one thing that I cared about all that much.

And so I sort of developed my thing being education. I kind of re realized or reasoned that if we can help early childhood education and child and K- through2 education, you can do a lot. You can help eradicate poverty down the line, if people are more educated, they’re able to work more and then they can bring in food and and you know and income and you can teach people about proper dietary nutrition and eradicate help eradicate type two diabetes and alleviate the health care system and whatnot.

So anyway, I I could go on and on and on about that, but I love it. I I think one other skill that I’ll bring back from the conversation earlier too is the human- centered design bit as well, because you know, we can have as many technical skills, but if we can’t figure out like how do we build something that solves a particular person’s need and like gets at that it can be tough working in this space. And I think anybody that spends time learning human- centered design in their work can be really really invaluable at their at their organization.

The next one, let’s see the next question that’s here. Can I one more comment on that? By the way, please.

Because tech is just there to help humans. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re creating programs and services for people. It is so important to have diverse teams that understand the needs of different people in different places.

I’m the least diverse person you can maybe think of. But it was really, really encouraging to have. I mean, we literally, fun fact, if you write a letter to the president, the White House keeps them all and they catalog them.

They go in the basement in, something called the Office of Presidential Correspondents and they tag them. So, when when my colleagues and I were working on, a program to understand why people fall off of food stamps. People will enroll in food stamps and then they’ll forget to renew.

And that the drop off rate is huge. We we pulled we went down to the office of cor presidential correspondents and said, "Hey, can you find us some letters that people wrote about this to the president and then we literally went and knocked on their doors." So, I literally went to the Bronx. I was like, "Hey, you wrote a letter to Obama.

We’re here to talk about it." They were like, "Seriously?" Yeah, absolutely. But that’s what you have to do. I can sit in a room and try to imagine what it’s like, you know, to be a single mom working two jobs who can’t pay for a bus to get across town and like submit a document to the to the government to like, you know, renew her license or whatnot.

But it’s so much more impactful to talk to them in person, be like, "Oh, okay." And to say, "Oh, but you’ve got a smartphone. Oh, yeah. I wish I could submit my license through the smartphone." And like, "Why do I have to go in person and do this things?" Like, then you start thinking, "Oh, okay.

Interesting." It’s only through talking to these people that you really, you know, talking to people in general that you really understand what their needs are. There’s there’s building the thing, right? That’s being a good engineer.

And then there’s building the right thing. And that’s actually understanding what people’s needs are. All right.

Thank you. No, it’s another one of those there’s so many of these little sayings, but they’re so true. You can build the best thing in the world, but it if it doesn’t solve somebody’s needs, it’s it’s not going anywhere.

It doesn’t make a difference. So anyway, that’s Yeah, that right there is a mic drop moment. My team’s collecting quotes.

Somebody write that down. But it’s so true, right? Yeah.

No, it’s true. It’s 100% true. Thank you so much.

So, how about like advice for new graduates, right? So, the next question here is, hey, do we have any advice for recent graduates just to get their foot in the door? I know that we’ve talked a little bit about it, but let’s address this person’s question very specifically.

I think the internet might have troubled up a little bit. They’re like, "Ross is saying too many dope things. We got we got to cut him off." Like, don’t tell them about those letters to the president.

Wait, are we back? Can you hear us? Testing one, too.

Yeah, we can hear you, bro. Okay, there we go. I’m so sorry.

I’m in a hotel. No, you’re good. You’re good.

Wi-Fi. Okay. Yeah.

Advice for recent grads, getting your foot in the door. I I think it’s talk to anyone you can. Literally anyone.

I mean, when I applied for the Presidential Innovations Fellows program, I DM’d every former fellow, literally every single one, and said, "Hey, I’m interested in this thing. Can you tell me about it?" and they didn’t pull any special favors or anything like that, but they were able to tell me about, oh well, the US Digital Service is doing this and oh, this is how things work. So, by the time I had an interview, I was able to speak more intelligently about it.

And it was clear that I’d done my homework. So any company you’re talking to, any organization you’re talking to, do your homework. If you’re applying to Google, go read about Google in the news.

If you’re, you know, follow up. Abs. You know, I’ve done hundreds of interviews with people over the years and I I kid you not, maybe like three of them sent me a thank you email.

It’s the simplest thing in the world, but it really goes a long way. This is all just a generic advice in terms of, you know, getting a job. The other one I love is if you want to get a job somewhere, just start doing it.

Literally, like I’ve had people I’ve had a couple people apply for things and it’s like, "Hey, interested in the UX job. By the way, I redid your website. This is how I would do it.

It’s like, wow, cool. All right, good job. And if you just kind of like start doing things, it you know, really accelerates.

But specifically, so I think we already covered this a little bit, but specifically with regards to public interest tech or civic tech, check out those organizations, go to the meetups, talk to anybody you can. Follow the blogs, get on the email lists. If you’re on if you’re social media person, follow the the Tom Khilles and the Megan Smiths and the Kumar Gargs of the world.

And and just kind of follow along for sure. And be persistent, be tenacious, right? Be be out there and like and go for it.

And like you said, I think the the the thing about like just do it is like so important because especially in the public interest space, there’s already so many problems and so many challenges worth solving. And like you said, just figuring out what’s the issue area that you care about and how might you connect with other folks that are working around that issue area, reaching out and saying, "Hey, I’m willing to do some work here." How do you how would you balance kind of for students who are like, "Hey, I I want to do the thing, but I also trying to figure out a job." Right? Because I think oftent times in public interest things, sometimes you have to volunteer.

Sometimes you have to do work for free. What might be like some like your thoughts on you know striking that balance between how much can we do just off of the volunteer aspect and how do we find like opportunities even like with criticality sciences to make business around solving these challenging problems. Yeah.

I mean part of it is on the employer right? Like nobody should ever have unpaid nobody should offer unpaid internships because guess who can do an unpaid internship? Somebody that doesn’t need to worry about money.

So I think just that’s fully unethical and I think even in Congress we saw the congressional fellowships changing with with appropriate pay. But yeah, it’s I mean I think everybody’s got their own advice. Mine is hustle.

At some point it’s a numbers game. You know, you submit 40 resumes, you get 10 emails back, you get three interviews out of it and maybe one works out. But it’s it’s just it’s hustle.

It’s, you know, instead it’s it’s the decisions you make and sometimes it’s what you say no to. It’s like, okay, I’m going to skip that hour of TV tonight and I’m going to, I know I’m applying to work for somebody that is in the health care space. I’m going to go like find a free API on where all the hospitals are and I’m going to put them on a map.

And I’m going to visualize them and I’m going to plot out how far they are from the bus stations or whatever something right and I’m going to put it on GitHub and then I’m going to be able to send that to people as you know make it your own little hackathon make just do cool stuff like that and show people and just get get those creative juices flowing and it’s also really helpful if you do that to understand what public data is available I’m going to I’m going to be really vulnerable here for a moment and say that so I’m about to move back to New York City from Miami and I was like, "God, I wonder where the people my age are living right now." And I did the nerdiest thing I could possibly imagine, which was I went and found census data on the the the dennial census data and you can break it down by age, right? I was like, "All right, cool. So, like, where are the 35 to 40 year olds living in Manhattan?" And it’s like, "Oh, in this census track versus that census track." All this data is out there.

And I mean, that’s that’s a simple example, right? But there’s everything from from wage information to, you know, it’s and it’s your data. We as taxpayers pay for this and so it is made public and there’s weather data and there’s just everything under the sun.

So check out check out what is available and anyway yeah getting back to what can you do you can differentiate yourself by by hustling by showing what you can do. When I applied for Google once upon a time they said okay like we started the interview and they’re like I don’t want to talk about juggling. They’re like I just want to watch you juggle.

So open up a Google doc and we’re gonna live code together. Wow. Okay, cool.

In that spirit, if you can show someone how you can juggle by building a cool thing that is somewhat related to what it is you want to actually do and if it happens to use public data and if it happens to, you know, your your code is a publicly available, all that stuff just sets you apart, you know, in a huge way. Again, it’s kind of just just start doing it and build that portfolio. I love it.

I just think that’s the perfect space to end on. Thank you so much, Ross, for all of the gems. I want to thank you to Ishan the ether for all of his gems and contribution to this conversation as well.

This has been a really amazing hour. I hope everybody took some value from it. If you did find value in the conversation, drop some love in the chat.

I want to make one more reminder for y’all to fill out the survey. Your opinion definitely matters. This is the data that we leverage to help improve our sessions.

So thank you again to Ross and thank you again to Ish for their time on this particular panel. U I want to close us out by bringing up one video from our host Bobby D, but thank you’all so much for tuning in. Thank you for joining us in this session.

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