TheBridge profile: Jeff Berkowitz
Name: Jeff Berkowitz
Current city: Washington, DC
Current job: Founder and CEO of Delve
Past job: Research Director @ RNC, Bush White House, & Giuliani for President; Advisor on Public Diplomacy @ U.S. State Department
Q. Favorite spot for a coffee meeting: Our Dupont Circle office – we have freshly roasted Vigilante coffee delivered every week!
Q. Describe one way how a skill you learned in a previous job helped you in your new job. In my previous work in government and politics, I learned how to quickly find and distill the facts that mattered most to decision makers. Now, there’s more information out there and accessible than ever before, making it even more important to turn mass amounts of data into actionable, user-friendly insights that can change outcomes for the better.
Q. Job advice in three words? Always follow up
Q. How are you (or your company, org, nonprofit) currently bridging the gap between politics and tech? Opposition research is done nearly the same way as when I started nearly 20 years ago, despite all of the dramatic tech advances during that time. To bridge this gap, Delve is creating proprietary technologies in-house, not only to make our analysts more efficient and effective, but also to provide our clients more secure and accessible ways to access competitive intelligence.
Q. Favorite restaurant? Frank Pepe’s Pizza in New Haven – it’s the best outside of Italy.
Q. Favorite app? Fly Delta, especially now that it has interactive airport map!
Q. Most underrated virtue in an employee? Curiosity. We look for specific values when hiring employees, with the understanding that specific skills – in our case actual research skills – can be taught, but attitudes and behaviors can’t. A curious person digs deeper, asks tougher questions, learns faster through experience, and makes for a great research analyst, as well as a great employee; industry not-withstanding.
Q. Startup to watch? Quorum. They forced the big guys to level up.
Q. Living person you admire? Patrick Lencioni (if you're starting, running, or dreaming about a business, read all his books!)
Q. What can DC teach Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley already knows that information is power, but DC can teach the industry that power rarely goes unchecked for long. As the industry enters our homes and lives in so many more ways, heightened scrutiny is going to follow, and the longer they wait to engage on the policy issues that matter, the more difficult it will be to help policy makers get it right.