00:00:01.040 — Intro Kumar The most interesting work on today's hardest problems can't always be distilled into just bullets and books. I'm Kumar Garg and in this podcast, I talk to some of my favorite operators about how they work and how today's biggest problems really get solved. This is Tacit Knowledge. Kumar Hi everybody. Welcome back. So today we're going to be chatting with Cara Eckholm. Cara is a fellow with us who is building work that she's been thinking about for quite some time. That focuses a lot on how do we rebuild the relationship between researchers and technologists and government. You know, she's an urbanist at heart. She's worked a lot on the future of cities. And the thing that she's been most recently working on is how do we actually build, like, these really tight partnerships between city agencies, where they actually raise their hand and say, here's a specific problem we want help on, and then you pair them with a researcher or technologist who actually knows a lot about that and can actually help them. And how do we make that into like, this repeatable cycle that we could do across the United States? It's very tangible. And rather than a lot of like hand-waving about how do we restore trust, it's actually a thing we could do all over the country, and actually a way that we can actually start to kind of rebuild the the social fabric around how science and technology can serve the broader good. So I love what she's doing, and I think you'll just get to hear about the kind of - kind of entrepreneurism and passion she brings to the work. 00:01:51.900 — Origin Stories Kumar I think I was excited about having you on, partly because you've had this really interesting career arc where you've worked inside government, outside, built all these interesting things and you're doing lots of interesting stuff. And I think, you know, part of the goal of the podcast is like, how do you build careers of impact? And I think it's going to be really interesting to sort of dig through it. You know, most of the time when people become policy wonks, they want to develop a really good solution, and then they want to have some government agency do it, or they want to get into a role where they're playing that they're not spending that much time coming up with new forms of collaboration. You know, that's not where they nerd out. Was there like a thing that made you be like, you know, I “it's not like I just want to help New York City public agencies do better. I want to actually come up with this interesting way of getting them interacting with all these people that are not their day to day employees”. Cara Thank you for having me on. So the origin of this program was I did a one year fellowship at Cornell Tech in New York City, where I was working with the city's Economic Development Corporation on a plan for how to improve agencies innovation capabilities, and a variety of things came out of that planning process, one of which was a change to the city's procurement code. The second was an establishment of a full time fellowship program that embeds folks of the tech background into city agencies. And the third of - actually, there's more things beyond - the third significant thing that is still lasting to this day is this matchmaking program. And really, the insight there, I would say, came from two different prongs. One was I was spending a year at a university and realized that I was actually one of the only people at the university that was working with the city on a project. There was a lot of people who had ideas for how to improve the city, again, in search of a buyer, but they didn't necessarily have like a really responsive agency partner. And so I had people coming to me asking about - how do I find a partner in the city who will work with me on my project? So that was one. And secondly, as part of the research that I did with the city on how to improve agency innovation capabilities, we convened a roundtable that included representation from across New York City's, R1 universities. And, um, someone made the comment that a simple contract template, a little bit of funding and a forum to surface ideas would go a really long way. And so that was kind of the mantra going in, I think generally, just like an observation on both government and philanthropy perhaps, is people often really try to overengineered things relative to what you see in the private sector and specifically in the startup world, where you want uh, momentum, you want things to move quickly, and you often have to place many small bets for the right bet to emerge. So that was kind of the philosophy guiding the initial setup of this program. And I was just very fortunate. Um, I had sort of a passing conversation with the Sloan Foundation who seeded this. I never fundraised for any type of philanthropic initiative in my life. And they said, hey, if you want to try doing this event, uh, we'll sponsor it. And I was kind of like, okay, I don't know what I'm doing next. Kumar Yeah Cara So yeah, let me let me try doing this. Um, and so, you know, when I did the first year, I had no idea whether there'd be sustained demand for this, but there was enough interest the first year that we decided to do the second year and so on and so forth. So I kind of unintentionally fell into this, uh, this program. 00:05:46.340 — The Pitch Kumar So the pitch, I ask you, you know, hey, we're at some dinner party or we're at a meeting or something else, and, you know, maybe I'm a donor or I'm somebody who could help. And I say, oh, Cara. Tell me a little bit about your work. What do you work on? And, you know, uh, what's your - what's your elevator pitch on, something you're building, something you're excited about, that you want to, uh, you want to tell me about? So what's your pitch? And then the way we'll we'll do this is like, I'll listen, and then I'll try to say back to you to see what I heard. Cara Okay, cool. Um, so a few years ago, I started a small nonprofit initiative that really focuses on helping cities get the most out of the scientific expertise that already exists within their community. The basic idea is that American cities are really talent dense, and there's a lot of people who would actually like to work in a proactive manner with their local government, but perhaps either don't have the opportunity to do it full time or, you know, want to do it sort of on a on a part time basis, and there's actually relatively few opportunities to engage with government in that way. The kind of default is you show up to a community board meeting, and those forums end up being places where people lodge complaints. And so I sort of wondered, is there an alternative pathway? And I created this event where essentially city agencies pitched their problem statements. And then if you are a local expert - we started with academia, we've since expanded to the civic tech community - You can come to the event and apply through a matchmaking process to work with a city agency on their problem statement. Um, and part of the goal here was, um, I also saw in academia and in the civic tech community, a lot of people coming up with their own ideas and projects for how to improve, in this case New York. But they didn't really have a client on the city side. Kumar Right Cara So it was kind of people's ideas in search of a buyer. Um, and so I figured, you know, why don't we start with the buyer? The person that's having the problem in government. And see if we can find someone in a city like New York with 9 million people who can help them. So it was a very, you know, small program when we started out. I think it was maybe 100 people that came to the first event, a few agencies, and it's really grown in the subsequent three years. We now have 40 different agencies participating in the program, and we are expanding to other cities. Kumar One way I could sort of say back to you is, you know, we're living in this crisis of trust. You know, like people are like, what? What's happening? What is government doing for me? What are all these public institutions doing? And rather than writing another op ed or just complaining about it, you're sort of theory was, well, we should have people actually working with government, but government feels far away. And to the extent that people do work with government, they just kind of show up and complain. Why don't we actually flip? So city agencies actually say, here's something I need help on. You create an actual event where it's almost like a buyer's fair. Here's the thing I'm working on. You invite technical experts in the community to say, come show up. Maybe you can help on some of these things. Then you broker these partnerships. I guess the question is, is like, okay, you started doing this in New York is the hope that this is something that can replicate in lots of places. And then what is the thing that, you know, somebody said, I'm a donor, I'm somebody else who could help. What is the thing that you actually need help with? Cara I mean, in this upcoming year, we're going to be going to Boston, Hennepin County, which is Minneapolis, LA. Specifically with their water district. And I think there's one other location I'm blanking on. Oh, Philadelphia. Um, specifically with regional transit authorities there. So basically, in order to assess the demand, we put out an open call for city, regional and state governments that might be interested in hosting this type of program. Got a lot of inbound and then sorted that inbound by, you know, sort of degree of uh, being being able to actually execute on this type of program in the near term and ended up with this list of of four locations. And generally when people ask, you know, can this program work in my region? I say, well, you're you want to go to a place where there's, I'd say, a population of at least a million in the broader metro area where you have a government that is bought in. That's actually the hardest part I would say about this program, is finding the right person in government to be the internal champion and get everyone else to show up, and then you either need a, you know, local R1 university and/or a vibrant civic tech community who's going to show up and express interest in working on these projects. But most, most places actually check that last box Kumar Right. Cara So it's kind of a it's a pretty light lift entry product, so to speak. If you're looking to experiment with ways in which your government can harness local talent. And I think part of the mental barrier that can be a little bit tricky on the side of government agencies is this does require creating a forum in which you are openly sharing problems you are actively working through, which tends not to be the default way that governments approach how they communicate. And really kind of the insight, though, that that led to this particular format was I was a grad student at Stanford, and I was watching how there's a bunch of classes there that orient on helping people find startup co-founders, and basically the way almost 100% of those classes start was they'll have an event prior to you applying to be in the class where you show up and talk about a problem that you're working on. It can be super half baked, and then, you know, you have the Stanford community, which then will self sort into finding one another. And then you create teams through this process. And so I tried to you know this this first year in New York now three years ago with a very limited budget. Um, tried to see if we could use that format of, hey, all you have to do is show up and talk over a slide for two minutes about a problem you're having, and then we'll see if we can find someone who can help you. Kumar That insight that like, oh, you have all these people on campus who have all these talents, but they're actually quite siloed. Yeah. And then you've got all these folks in government that, you know, are eager for help, but they're siloed, like sort of pull on that thread, because part of the whole point of this podcast is to pull on this substrate - the tacit knowledge that allows us to notice. Cara Yeah. Kumar - there's like real value here and pull on it. People can say, oh, people sit in silos all the time. But you were like, no, no, no, there's huge value. If I sort of pull on this piece and then, you know, sort of iterate on doing something. So where did that come from? Cara Yeah. I mean, so part of it is there's this kind of iconic example, um, in the early 2000, of an academic city collaboration that made a big difference. So there was this guy called Al Roth, who was at Harvard at the time, and he had a collaborator at Columbia. Um, some of the New York City Department of Education had read about their work on the medical residency match. Um, and the city at the time was having issues basically placing students in high schools they wanted to go to. And so he reached out to ask, hey, could you help me redesign the high school matching process? And this was just, you know, some public servant, I don't want to say random, but, you know, for the intents of, you know, New York City government has hundreds of thousands of people who work for it. It was like one guy, right, in New York City government who was like, trying to work on this high school mat drinking problem, read a paper, and sort of made the connection of, I bet you you could apply this to the problem. I'm having proactively reached out to these two researchers. They redesigned the New York City high school matching process they then replicated in Boston, and then Al Roth went on to win a Nobel Prize for both this and the medical residency matchmaking work. So that's kind of like the knock it out of the park scenario is you have this spontaneous interaction that leads to major developments, both in an academic field as well as major change in city policy. That level of success is, I think, very hard to replicate, but we've already seen through the program sort of low level versions of of that type of collaboration where you have someone with this, like really niche expertise who would perhaps not think to themselves, oh, actually, this could be relevant in this other field, but for hearing about the problem from the city. Kumar Professor Roth is like a famous example. Like, he went on, I interacted with him a little bit when I was in government, where he was also involved in kidney donation and basically building a system where you could do these pairwise, where one donation could set off us like a bunch of pairs where, you know, one live donation could actually allow seven matches. It's a great example of like, you know, there's a whole field of mechanism design in economics. Can you actually use that in the way that city governments are actually thinking about administrating some resource? I like that as like a push because there's something that made you think, hey, that Roth example is not a one off. There's like a aspect of engineered serendipity. Cara Yeah. Kumar I think sometimes the human instinct is to say, well, that was because Professor Roth is so interested in working with government or oh, that happened because, you know, the Mayor was into it. But actually, like, it takes effort. And just like I took the work to send this person an email or in your case, to engineer an event where city agencies come with their problems. Cara Yeah, yeah. And I think honestly, like the numbers speak for themselves here to show that that was not an anomalous scenario. This past year, as I mentioned, we had 40 agencies participate and we had 104 pitches. We just finished the match making process and 100 of those pitches had individuals expressed interest in working on those projects. In some case cases, projects got 20 interested researchers. So there's no shortage actually, like as long as you live in a place where people are generally civically minded, which is most US cities, like most US cities, people - Uh oh, maybe New York's particularly extreme on this - but people have strong pride of place in the US, right? There's a strong local identity. Yes. There's also a strong national identity. But I think particularly at this point in time, there's very strong civic identity. Um, people are looking for ways to, to help out and to increase the, you know, the relevance, especially those that have sort of been in the world of academia and the ivory tower increased the relevance of their work. And so especially on like transportation projects, we found those projects get like 20 interested researchers any time, um, an agency pitches something. Um, and so I think, um, you know, I kind of didn't know how animalistic that scenario was until we tried it. But every year we're seeing the number of, uh, folks, experts interested in working on projects exceeds the number of projects that, um, city and now state agencies we've expanded, uh, pitch. Um, so it's kind of this interesting, like supply demand balancing act where if I, if I had a critique of the program today, it would be that, um, not everyone who wants to work with an agency gets an opportunity to do so. We basically, um, have people express interest, send those expressions of interest over to the agency, and then the agency interviews folks and decides with whom they want to work. Um, and so that's, that's a, you know, a fortunate position if you're on the side of government because you're getting to choose between a lot of like really top caliber talent and in a number of cases, um, across this city with a wealth of talent to begin with. Kumar You know, there's a link between your own professional path and then the path you want to put these folks, whether it's in academia or technologists and others, and interacting with cities by connecting them, these academics and technologists interacting with the city agency around their problems might change their own career path. Right? What? What problems they're interested in, what they start to work on, how they're sort of interested in. In some ways, you you've gone through this path of like being a technologist. And so say a little bit about like where you're sort of inner drive on, like trying to be somebody who's like a tri sector athlete. Like showing up in technology company, showing up in academic settings, working and working with government. Like where's that thread come from and what set you sort of on that path. Cara Yeah. Um, yeah. In terms of career path change. It's it's interesting because I think I think very much, especially when you talk about the profile of like, the researcher, um, a successful collaboration with the municipality can change the course of what they will continue to research in the future. I do think that's a very particular profile of person where if I were to critique our current, uh, system of, uh, promotion in academia and what it rewards, you know, historically there's been an emphasis on rewarding research in a that that is defined as, you know, being published in a subset of journals. Um, and yes, the research that happens through this program can be published in a journal, but it's not the primary goal of these projects. And so I would really love to see a world in which the professors that are taking their time to work with a municipality on a project are rewarded in some way. For example, in their tenure track review process, in the same way that they would be rewarded for journal publications. I think there's actually I had an interesting conversation with the professor who will go unnamed, who had worked with the city as a housing policy adviser and then had worked in the white House as a housing policy adviser, and told me he actually didn't list either of those experiences on his tenure track application because he was worried that would make him appear as like an activist, basically, that there's this kind of fear in certain parts of academia of being too applied in your work versus theoretical. And so, um, part of the intent here is to try to change the discourse around, like the value of actually showing the relevance of your work in the real world. And in terms of my own career path. For lack of a better phrase, I've kind of just bopped around to things that I find interesting in the given moment and not not not overly engineered it. Kumar And where does the pull come from that something that draws your interest? Like whether it's tractability or like there's something here. What's been the pull? Cara Yeah. In the particular case of how I started working with the city of New York, um, I had a boss, uh, who I reported to in the private sector, but he used to be deputy mayor of New York, Dan Doctoroff. And, um, he was put in charge of this commission looking at how to revitalize New York's economy coming out of the pandemic. I figured he might need some help with that effort. So I emailed him asking, hey, is there any way I can support you? With the thought being that this was a unique moment in time. I had always been curious about doing work with government, but had not done so directly. And there was this this window that emerged. And when I sent off that email to him, like I had no idea if he was going to respond. He was actually like my boss's boss, like he knew who I was. But it wasn't like we were like super tight. And he said yes. And then that gave me this opportunity where I got to meet a ton of people across the city. Figured out how it worked. Work on a project that made an impact. That then sort of ended up defining the subsequent 4 or 5 years of my career. I'm chronically struck by how many of my opportunities in life have come from random emails like that. They're not random, but they're right. You know, for every ten emails I send with ideas that I have, probably only one of them materializes. Kumar Uh-huh. Cara But you got to take a lot of shots. Kumar And where to where does that come from? Cara This like sending ten e-mails? Kumar Yeah. Well, like. No, just like a willingness to be, like, I find this interesting. I'm gonna. I'm gonna raise my hand. Sometimes no one will respond. Yeah, but sometimes, like, somebody will say, yeah, come, come. Like you can. Yes. Like come help. Cara You know, in that particular case, I had a friend who had been on this FTC commission, and I was like, he was in business school. How did you get appointed to that? And he was like, I literally just emailed the chair and said, hey, I'm willing to work for free. And then the chair very generously made me the editor of this report. And so I think, you know, I was at a particular moment in time where I had just left business school, and I sort of was a little bit more willing to do things on a volunteer basis for the career upside that came with it. Um, which is often, you know, if you want to segue into a new industry, you often need to do kind of pro bono work at the beginning to make that transition. Kumar Right Cara Um, but generally, I'd say as a person, like if I see something that I think, um, could be improved in the world, my instinct is always to try to figure out how to improve it, which means I do send a lot of emails about things that are for which I'm not totally I'm not totally unqualified, but I'm also not totally qualified and hope that through a well-articulated email, Kumar Yeah. Cara I can convince people that I can add, add value? Um, and I'm actually really surprised by, like, if I think on the cold emailing front, um, I, I get a lot of them and they're a varied qualities and I can tell you like the 3 or 4 people now who have emailed me at some point in my life who I did not know previously, who I thought had sufficiently compelling pitches to motivate me to help them in some way or give them some type of opportunity. Um, their emails really stand out relative to the kind of like masses of random LinkedIn requests you get. Kumar What about the email - can you remember - what what sort of jumped out to you? Cara The most extreme case I've encountered is someone who emailed me when they were like a freshman in college and were like, hey, I want to be a housing developer in New York City. I've been interested in this topic for my whole life, and it didn't it didn't come across as someone who's like, parent had scripted this for them. Like it actually came across as really genuine. I want to talk to you about career paths. I have these like a few different internships I'm assessing. Can you, like, talk me through how you think about which one to take? Basically. And that same person that has followed up with me basically every two years since she was a freshman in college, updating me on how her career has been going. And she like easily is now, I think she's probably 30 at this point, has like one of the most impressive career arcs that I've seen. And I'm sure I'm not the only person she's emailing, but just been like really consistent over time about what she wants to do and has been collecting a variety of experiences, I think through sending really well crafted emails. Kumar Yeah. Cara Kind of obtain the necessary resume lines to get her far ahead of where she should be by the age of 30. Kumar Yeah. I mean, I remember when I started as a fellow in the white House Office of Science and Tech and any of these jobs, I'm surrounded by folks who are deep experts, Nobel Laureate in the mix, all that stuff. And I would be like, well, what's my. What's my value add? And I was talking to, uh, the person I worked for and they said, well, you know, it's not that you don't know things. It's just like sometimes it's the willingness to go figure out the answer when you only know a little bit. Cara Yeah. Kumar And they said that one of the challenges sometimes with somebody who's a 30 year expert is they're like, well, it took me 30 years to be an expert on this, this new thing that the president or the chief of staff needs information on. I don't know enough about that. So I don't know if I feel comfortable and the job is to be, like, curious enough and open enough to say, I'm not going to have the answer, but I can call around and at least try to get to a baseline like the email thread on it's, you know, like sometimes people don't respond, but putting your interests out there in the world, but also saying, I'm really interested in this thread, is there something here? Like I respond to people's emails all the time where they're like, I'm interested in this thread. Am I on the right thread or is there someone I should talk to if I can be helpful? You know, like that can actually put people on quite the path. 00:26:58.550 — Tacit Knowledge Kumar You know, the podcast is Tacit Knowledge. Is there a piece of tacit knowledge that you feel like you're constantly coming back to in your own work? Uh, that like or when you're giving advice to people, what's something that's like hard to write down but seems to constantly sort of shape, uh, things that make people effective. That sort of comes up a lot in your life. Cara Related to the email point. You kind of have to have delusional confidence to to assume that you can email, you know, when I receive cold emails, like, I'm not a very famous person. But sometimes I do try emailing like pretty famous people just to see if they will respond to me. And in the case of emailing, my boss's boss's boss used to be deputy mayor of New York. Like, uh, I think probably I didn't ask him did you get other e-mails? But it was like a little bit bold. And so I, I'm very fortunate to have a mother in particular who, um, from the day I was born, kind of conveyed that you can do anything you apply your mind to mindset. I think a lot of a lot of kids don't have that, and a lot of women in particular don't have that. And so, you know, they always have that thing at the end of applications, like you should apply even if you think you're underqualified. Um, I interpret that pretty liberally. And as a result, going back to the rejection point, like same thing when I was applying for college or applying for business school. Like I don't get in everywhere I apply to. I don't get everything I try to go for it. But if you are delusional, be confident and apply for like ten things that you are underqualified for, one of them might work out. Kumar There's a sense of confidence and willing to put yourself out there, but there's also curiosity. You know, you're not just like, oh, I and I know all the answers. It's like, I don't know all the answers, but I but I want to be, you know, I want to push and try to try to learn. And I would love to learn from you or learn in this new environment or this new opportunity. Cara Yeah. Yeah, I think exactly. Yeah. You can't you don't want to be overconfident to the point that you alienate the person on the other side, but figuring out how you can add value to whoever it is you're getting in touch with, with the skills that you have and then, um, spending time on. It's not like the, the, you know, go to an event and randomly network. It's like really think about like what are what are the areas where you have an interest and would be excited to work. Find the people that you'd be excited to work with. And then sort of make the case for your own involvement. Kumar Pull on that thread, which is like I think sometimes when people ask me for advice, but like, they're sort of starting out, you know, you'll say, well, what what are you sort of interested in? They're like, well, I'm still sort of figuring that out. Is there a way you sort of, through working on things develop like, oh, there's something really I mean, obviously curiosity is part of it, but like, how did you actually develop things you were, you know, genuinely sort of interested in pushing on whether problems worth solving people to work with areas, all that stuff. Kumar A lot of it's grounded in personal experience. So, like most of my career has been spent in the field of cities, very broadly defined. I think cities are a great field to work in because there's so many different aspects to them. Everything from like social services to housing to energy and to some extent, I have kind of segued through those different areas of working on municipal policy and projects. Um, my own interest in the topic really came from I'm from New York, but then I grew up in Beijing in the 90s as the kid of two journalists. Maybe that's also where the kind of tendency towards inquiry comes, because journalism is a lot of like cold emailing, hoping people will respond and putting yourself out there and becoming a pseudo expert quickly in a subject you don't know very much about, but sort of watching China go through its economic development in the 90s, it was hard at the time. I would have never said, oh, I'm interested in cities, but even by the time I was kind of like early midway through college, I, um, realized that was a field I wanted to work in. I just didn't know what jobs existed in the field. And then I went around and spoke to a bunch of people, candidly, did not get very good advice. I hadn't yet figured out like who to ask for what. I also think that's partly the fault, as much as I love my undergraduate institution, like their career services weren't well suited for someone like me who didn't want to just go into like, finance consulting. Kumar How do you get good advice? Cara If I had had a better sense of the field and the types of orgs in the field, I. I would have known who to contact. I mean, well, to some extent. So what I did instead, I can tell you what I did instead, which ended up working out, was I was like, okay, I want to do something in cities. I applied for a job in the city of New York. Never heard back. I kind of like didn't know what to do from there. I ended up instead, um, getting a job as a consultant, but specifically doing it in Copenhagen because I had learned in urban planning class that Copenhagen was like the place that apparently is doing cities well. And I was, I guess, unintentionally subscribing to the philosophy that I've often heard people preach, which is like, you want to go to the location that's the epicenter for the industry you want to be in, and being there you will meet the right people. And to some extent that did play out for me. I didn't, you know, after my job in Copenhagen, I was not in the field of cities. I was a consultant there, but I was in a city that people in the field of cities find interesting. Um, when I then went back on the job market a few years later, I applied for basically two things a job at the city of New York again didn't hear anything. And then a job at Sidewalk Labs, which was Google's urban tech incubator, just getting started at the time. There was no job listing. That was another case of like a lot of emailing to get in the door. Um, and, uh, I think probably one of the reasons they hired me relative to the other, like pretty junior candidates at that point was I was different because I had spent time in Copenhagen and could have an intelligent conversation as a result around like bike lanes and subjects that, you know, it's seen as something that other a place that other cities are trying to emulate. Um, and so, um, at the time that career move, going to Denmark, um, I think a lot of people thought I was really crazy and it was really risky. I did have a job offer from a hedge fund in New York that I had interned at the prior summer, which is kind of what everyone did from my undergraduate institution. I turned that down to go take this, like, very speculative thing in Copenhagen. But, um, so far it's worked out. Kumar Yeah. Well, that willingness to sort of branch out, I think, then starts to define you, and then you're like, well, you know, that worked out. So maybe other things in branching out will work. 00:33:58.650 — Asks and Offers Kumar So why don't we close with any. Uh, I think you've covered a little bit of this earlier, but any asks and offers you have - anything that people should read up that could get them more informed about you or the work, or an ask you have of people you'd love to have reach out to you, other than, of course, people reaching out with advice now that you've told them that you're willing to sometimes give it. Cara Yeah. I mean, I think with this, this, um, matchmaking program, it's called The Pitch Fest. Like, if you're interested in doing one of these in your city. We are currently supporting a bunch of cities to execute the program. The key thing is that you do need to find the person in your city that is willing to be the internal champion of it. So, um, that that is kind of the profile of the person that we are generally looking for. Um, and then on the offer front, yeah, I mean, I, um, always like hearing from people who have, um, interesting ideas as to how to improve, in particular in New York where I'm based. Like, that's a world that I am well positioned to, I guess, give advice on. But, um, anyone who wants to get into the field, like, I, I don't know, I've written because of my own poor experience looking for jobs in the field I've since written down. Like, hey, here are the different types of companies that exist in this space and can share that with people if they're interested. Kumar That's great. Well, it's Cara, it's great to have you. It's great to like both learn about the work and also your story. And then yeah, I think we learned a bunch. So thanks again. Cara Thanks for having me. 0:35:35:000 — Outro Kumar All right. Well, I really enjoyed that conversation. You know, I'm. You can tell I'm like, a big Cara fan. Part of it is just that, like a lot of folks who have technical backgrounds like Cara does get very focused on building the solution. And I think Cara has really been focused on building systems. You know, how do we build really good partnerships between technologists and cities? How do we find really good ideas? We just need more innovation there, more ideas there, because we're going to sort of build rebuild democratic trust if we're going to get these thriving tech centers to be ones that actually ones where technology, academia and government and others are actually working together, like we're going to have to actually like, build that future together. It's a lot of it, as Cara said, like we're going to have to experiment our way through it. What I love about what she’s been building is just like you can actually understand it. You know, like, let's have a pitch fest where city agencies show up with their problem. And we invite really smart academics and technologists and other people in the community, and then we pair them up, and they actually work on those things together with the hope that that build really good solutions. So I really love that basic idea. But the nice thing about, as you sort of heard from Cara's arc, it's just that like she's just been interested in just coming up with things that work and trying to do them in more places. And I just think like, you know, that's the nerd spirit I want. I want to see more in the world of, like, we can do things and we can do things that are cooperative and positive some. And she just brings that into our work. And just like I'm going to lean in and figure things out. Yeah, I definitely encourage, um, folks to sort of follow up. And, you know, if you want to learn more and follow Cara, you know, she's we’ll share links to the pitch fest work she's doing Pilot City, which is her program at Renaissance, and then also ways to be in touch with her on LinkedIn and others. And so, yeah, as she said, you know, if you're interested in doing a pitch fest in a city near you, you can definitely reach out, especially if you have ideas for how to get the government, uh, the local government involved. And then, of course, you can follow all of our work on our Substack. Uh, I hope it gives you inspiration on the kind of career you want to have and how you can be much more proactive in actually noticing problems and taking action. Thanks again. Kumar Thanks for listening to this latest episode of Tacit Knowledge, hosted by me, Kumar Garg and produced by All Together Now for Renaissance Philanthropy. Find out more about our guest and all of our work at renaissancephilanthropy.org. Until next time.