TheBridge profile: Austin Carson

Name: Austin Carson

Current city: Washington, DC

Current job: Founder & President at SeedAI

Past job: Government Relations at NVIDIA; Executive Director, TechFreedom; Legislative Director for Chairman Michael McCaul

Q. Favorite spot for a coffee meeting: Bakers and Baristas

Austin launched SeedAI in October 2021!

Q. Describe one way how a skill you learned in a previous job helped you in your new job. Understanding what was helpful and what was frustrating from outside groups from a staffer perspective is invaluable to my work at TechFreedom. The way staffers, industry, grassroots, and civil society groups interact is hard to understand without context, but small considerations and a bit of research go a long way.

Q. Job advice in three words? Be excellent to each other

Q. How are you (or your company, org, nonprofit) currently bridging the gap between politics and tech? We bring information and expertise from the technical sector, marry it with legal / philosophical analysis, and translate it to be valuable to policymakers

Q. Underrated virtue in an employee: Empathy

Q. Living person you admire: Arthur Brooks

Q. What can Washington, DC teach Silicon Valley? Ignore large chunks of the population at your peril

Q. Best advice you've received: People hire you for your enthusiasm and weirdness, embrace them.