State Department's One-Man Mission to Scout Silicon Valley

The Homeland Security and Defense departments have recently been vocal about wanting to issue technology contracts to cutting-edge commercial startups with both established formal offices in the Silicon Valley area last year. 

The State Department has also been exploring ways to connect with small, private tech companies, but with significantly less publicity. Last year, the department dispatched Zvika Krieger to California to be its Silicon Valley representative. He's spent the past several months zipping between Menlo Park, Cupertino, Sunnyvale and other tech enclaves to understand how commercial products could be used in foreign policy. 

Almost a year in, Krieger doesn't have a formal office yet. Unlike other agencies that publicized their Silicon Valley efforts, his job started, "to borrow Silicon Valley jargon, in stealth mode," he told Nextgov. "We went under the radar, to send one person out here."

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One of his goals, he said, is to figure out whether should the State Department even be exploring the tech hub.

Krieger shared some of his findings with Nextgov. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Nextgov: How is the State Department's approach to Silicon Valley different from other agencies'?

Krieger: We learned from ... the experiences of other agencies that set up Silicon Valley offices. They did this huge fanfare, they had the secretaries come out and give a big speech. That sets expectations sky high. In Silicon Valley, first impressions are important and you have very little time to actually prove value. If you’re all talk in Silicon Valley, you're going to get discarded very quickly. 

I came out here initially on a 1-year assignment [to find out] should the State Department be here, why, what's the value proposition, will companies even want to work with us? That was not a given. If so, what kind of companies? On what would they want to work with us?

The initial idea ... came from Deputy Secretary [Antony] Blinken. He basically said big companies are having more of an impact on foreign policy than most countries to which we have full embassies. Yet, there was no one whose job it was to build relationships with those companies.

Nextgov: What have you found?

Krieger: Technology as a tool could actually move the needle for so many of the issues we work on. But the State Department is not full of technology people. Technology is not first or even 10th on our list of tools to solve foreign crises or international challenges. We needed to work with the people who know how to do that.

This year['s focus areas are] refugees, nuclear proliferation, clean energy and climate change, and countering violent extremism.

Nextgov: How are you hoping to work with those companies? 

Krieger: Unlike other agencies like DOD or DHS, we're not here an on acquisitions mission because we don't have money to spend on big fancy technology. We're really here more in the partnership or collaboration mindset.

Not every collaboration that the State Department does has to have the State Department stamp on it. A lot of people here are reluctant to work with government because we are slow and bureaucratic. [But] we use our convening power to bring all the right people together. We bring our credibility to direct them to certain issues, like "You guys need to get involved with refugees. This is one of the biggest crises of our time."

Then, we bring our expertise from years out on the ground and say, "Here's where we think the opportunities are." And then, we help them identify solutions, work with them to reality-test them based on our experience. They pick the solution they are best suited to implement. We help bring the right partners together and then we get out of the way. We're nudging them. We have zero budget out here. We're not contracting. 

Nextgov: What kind of technology are you looking at? 

Krieger: We are working with Airbnb on how they can use their platform to help support refugee resettlement. We are working with Google on building educational resources for refugee children, whether it's sending tens of thousands of Chromebooks to refugee camps in Europe. We're actually building educational resources ... Coursera [is] opening up their courses to refugees, and now more than 1,000 refugees have gained online certificates that they can now put on their LinkedIn pages to bolster career opportunities. 

There are technology trends [we're watching] on the horizon. One is around bitcoins, blockchain and digital currency. One was gene editing and CRISPR technology. The third was on [artificial intelligence] ... AI and disinformation and AI and the future of work. 

There's lots of disinformation about the U.S. and U.S. motives. With bot armies and troll farms ... how do we compete with that? Do we start building our own bots? Do we fight fire with fire, or do we ignore it? Internationally, bots and trolls ... are starting to disrupt elections, create corruption, undermine governance and these are all issues we work on at the State Department. 

Nextgov: Any plans for a physical office in the Silicon Valley area?

Krieger: We have some plans in the works that I can't quite divulge at the moment about how we may expand or build on what we've been doing out here. This is now an official part of the State Department org chart with resources behind it. We can show direct correlation between outreach we've done here and outcomes in the field. We're looking at establishing a physical presence. 

Nextgov: Will the incoming administration be supportive of your efforts? 

Krieger: Campaigning is one thing and governing is another. Particularly on an issue like this, where the incoming president did not say one way another ... [it']s definitely hard to tell, but I think you have a businessman who worked in the private sector. That at least provides some indication that he's open to private sector ways of doing things. ... I have to be optimistic, but I think it's too early to tell.