A Technologist's Take on the State of the Union

Admittedly, Obama's speech two nights ago wasn't an Apple WWDC keynote, so I'm going to have to stretch a little bit to make the headline of the day fit the theme here. In my opinion, Obama talked about at least two topics that are important to the technology world--immigration and government transparency. Government policy has an impact on high tech companies through immigration because many of the best programmers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries come from other countries. As far as government transparency goes, technology has a profound effect on the accessibility of information.

In order to see the effect of immigration on technology, one need look no further than Silicon Valley. An uncanny number of the most influential technology companies were either founded by immigrants or featured immigrants in very prominent roles. I'm not claiming that the following anecdotes are conclusive, but here are some companies that you may have heard of. Microsoft was founded by two Americans, but one of its early architects, Charles Simonyi, is the creator of Microsoft Word and also is an immigrant. Hotmail was founded by Sabeer Bhatia, an immigrant. PayPal was founded by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery. The first four named are all immigrants to this country. Thiel went on to be one of the earliest and largest investors in Facebook. Those involved with PayPal during its founding have had a disproportionate impact on the software industry since. Colloquially, the group has come to be known as the PayPal mafia and the software industry would be undeniably different today without these individuals.

One last annecdote. I had dinner last night with a friend from high school who went to Stanford. He told me that one of his foreign college friends has to travel to Canada for three days this week before starting work at McKinsey because of visa restrictions. What logical reasoning could possibly support the requirement that a Stanford graduate on his way to work for one of the most prestigious consulting companies in the world jump through hoops in order to work in this country?

Obama did a great job of expressing exactly this sentiment. He said, "There are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers... and others come here from abroad to study... But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense." I couldn't agree more. Immigration is a complicated issue, and I don't know enough about it to provide all the answers, but the case of highly educated immigrants seems like it should be a no brainer.

Secondly, Obama touched on using technology to increase the efficiency and transparency of government. Obama said, "Now, we’ve made great strides over the last two years in using technology and getting rid of waste. Veterans can now download their electronic medical records with a click of the mouse." This is an excellent example of using technology to make government more efficient. It reminds me of something New York City did to make non-sensitive government information available to software developers.

For the past two years, New York City has run a competition called NYC Big Apps. The city released massive databases of public data a few years ago. The challenge for developers is to make a piece of software that uses that data to make the city more "transparent, accessible, and accountable." Past entrants have included augmented reality applications that help users find the nearest subway and an application that helps parents compare schools. Outsourcing the task of making this data accessible to private developers is the only way that these applications will ever be created.

Obama went on to propose a website that would allow people to see how tax dollars are spent and with what lobbyists senators are meeting. Technology has always been a powerful force opposing cover-ups and corruption (Wikileaks, anyone?). This is precisely why the internet is severly restricted in places like China and North Korea. Putting information about government spending online will provide voters with more information allowing them to make better decisions. The ubiquity of the internet makes it an obvious choice for proliferating this information.

I've already run on too long, but I'll summarize. Obama's comments on technology (as scant as they may have been) were encouraging--almost as encouraging as his comments on education. If he can make progress on the issue of immigration, he could have a huge impact on technology companies, and if he wants to come through on his promise to make the government more transparent, the internet is certainly the way to do it. Now everybody go read an article about the state of the union that might actually tell you something useful about what Obama had to say.