TheBridge profile: Jake Seaton
Name: Jake Seaton
Current city: Washington, DC
Current job: Founder & CEO, Column
Past job: Early Employee, Quorum
Q. Favorite spot for a coffee meeting? Emissary
Q. Describe how a skill you learned in a previous job helped you in your current job. As an early employee at Quorum, I worked day-to-day as a software engineer but also got to observe and participate in the growth of the business and the emergence of the company's culture (frequently as the chef behind our dinner parties in The Washingtonian). This experience gave me the confidence to start something new, the technical skills to code the initial version of Column's software myself, as well as a clear vision of how I wanted our business to operate and our team to work together.
Q. Job advice in three words? Just get started.
Q. How are you (or your company) currently bridging the gap between innovation and regulation? Column is a modern software platform for public notice. Public notice is a regulatory framework for distributing important information to the general public, so our platform operates at a unique intersection of government, technology, and media.
Q. What can innovators learn from policymakers? Stakeholder management. It's one thing to conceptualize a new way of doing things, it's something else entirely to align a diverse set of stakeholders who currently do that thing around the change.
Q. What can policymakers learn from innovators? Embracing uncertainty. We've experienced the fear of change and discomfort with uncertainty to be one of the main reasons that public notice regulations are often the same as they were 300 years ago, despite how much the world has changed in that time. In order to effectively build the future of this important democratic process, we are going to have to get comfortable with some level of risk.
Q. Favorite book/podcast/long-form article you recommend? The Outsiders by William Thorndike
Q. Everyday is probably different, but can you describe a "day in the life" of your job? We are a distributed, remote-first company with members of our growing team spread across the country, as well as customers, investors, and partners all around the world. Pre-pandemic, I was rarely in the same city for more than a few days at a time, and expect a high travel velocity to resume in the coming months. I'm focused on building our extended team, developing our relationships with early customers and partners, and planning for our long-term growth.
Q. Startup to watch? HData, founded by Hudson Hollister, helps companies manage compliance through the emergence of structured data regulations that Hudson spent much of the last decade setting in motion at the Data Coalition.
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