San Francisco and its Tech Firms are a Prime Destination for Obama Alums
The city on the hill(s) for Obama alums
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
Barack Obama was a startup president elected by a tech-obsessed campaign, they say. Silicon Valley is the natural next step.
In part, it’s a reflection of America’s changing economy; New York, D.C., Los Angeles and a president’s hometown used to be the best places to cash out after a post-White House career. But for the people who helped get Obama elected and worked for him once he did, there’s something about San Francisco and its environs that just feels right: the emphasis on youth and trying things that might fail, chasing that feeling of working for the underdog, and even using that word “disrupting” to describe what they do.
“A lot of people who moved out here were present at the creation of the Obama ’08 campaign,” said Tommy Vietor, working the shears on a two-mushroom pizza at a restaurant in the Marina neighborhood, not far from his apartment. “There’s a piece of them that wants to replicate that.”
Vietor’s time with Obama goes back to driving a van before the first presidential campaign even started, and he rode the opportunity all the way up through being the spokesman for the National Security Council.
Vietor left the White House two years ago, and though he and his business partner, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, briefly based the communications strategy firm they founded in Washington, they soon headed west. Favreau went to L.A. Vietor picked San Francisco. Now they have a focus on speechwriting for tech and other startups.
“If you’re writing for a CEO out here, they’re more likely to be your peer than your grandfather,” Vietor said. “They’re young, they’re cool, they get it.”
Even that kind of communications strategy firm is about as conventional as it gets for the Obama alumni who’ve descended.
It’s more than just David Plouffe, who moved out for a multimillion-dollar job at Uber. The not nearly exhaustive list includes: Obama speechwriter Kyle O’Connor, now at Nest; Michelle Obama’s former deputy communications director Semonti Stephens, now at Square; director of citizen participation Katie Jacobs Stanton, now at Twitter; ’08 regional and field director Mike Masserman, now at Lyft; Brandon Lepow, who did advance for the Obama campaign and communications for the White House, now at Facebook; legislative affairs special assistant Nicole Isaac, now at LinkedIn; director of research Liz Jarvis-Shean, first at Tesla and now at Civis; campaign staff director for technology Jim Green, now at Salesforce, along with Obama’s first chief information officer, Vivek Kundra; ’08 regional field director Alex McPhillips, at Google; ’08 regional Gillian Bergeron, at NextDoor; Organizing for America digital director Natalie Foster, at the Institute for the Future; Tech4Obama program manager Catherine Bracy, now at Code for America; ’08 deputy Wisconsin director Hallie Montoya Tansey, at an education startup called Target Labs. Nick Papas, John Baldo, Courtney O’Donnell and Clark Stevens are all now at Airbnb. Jessica Santillo, the former White House assistant press secretary who handled much of the Healthcare.gov meltdown response, was the most recent to arrive, now to be a spokeswoman at Uber.
“There should be a welcome booth at the SFO airport,” said Jon Carson, the former Organizing for Action executive director, who commutes about twice a month from his home in Chicago as part of his job with the San Francisco-based rooftop solar-panel company SolarCity.
Ryan Gallentine, another Obama alum, recently moved out to San Francisco to work for Solar City himself.
Bobby Whithorne, a former Obama campaign aide and White House assistant press secretary who recently left Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action to join public relations firm Porter Novelli, admits he’s become something of a San Francisco new economy poster boy: the Patagonia jacket he wears back and forth to his office in SoMA, getting to the airport by Uber, booking his hotels on Airbnb, getting his groceries delivered with InstaCart.
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Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/san-francisco-city-hills-for-obama-alums-119722.html#ixzz3f7E2kJYW
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