On a hot summer day in Meridian Hill Park, looking out over Washington, D.C., Harlan Yu is dressed in a green cotton T-shirt, blue shorts and oxford-style sneakers. Sporting a scruffy goatee, Yu, who has biked to meet me, looks nothing like the suited men and women traipsing around doing the business of governing, policymaking, lobbying and otherwise plotting the affairs of our nation.
If he looks more like a Silicon Valley coder that’s because he is — or at least, a Valley-bred guy, a computer science Ph.D. turned technologist who’s trying to get the government to upgrade itself. Yu and co-founder David Robinson (who calls his partner a dose of “West Coast chill” in swampy-stressed D.C.) act as consultants, via their firm Upturn, to Beltway Luddites. The category includes government agencies still publishing data in PDF form and legislators who’d like to change laws without “literally taking a red pen” to a stack of hard copies of a law, as Yu puts it, as well as civil rights groups and collaborating with the NAACP among others. In short, he’s the translator, teaching the stodgy about more than just how to use Twitter. At a time when privacy is the word of the day and Silicon Valley seems blissfully divorced from Washington politics, 33-year-old Yu is well-positioned to corner an open market (see: healthcare.gov).
- Date Published:09/29/2015