It’s a very natural thing to do on your first day of work: fire up your computer, check a bit of email, and read up on the upcoming events of the week.  On this particular day, reading up on the events of the week meant looking through the materials for our upcoming Limited Partnership meeting.  Contrary to popular belief, the “LP meeting” is not one of those shrouded-in-mystery type events; it’s fairly straightforward.  The team presents to the investors on the state of the portfolio, fields questions, and gets to hear from a few select speakers. 

It struck me that the job description of the keynote speaker at the Venrock LP meeting was unusually sizable: “Aneesh Chopra's job will be to promote technological innovation to help the country meet its goals such as job creation, reducing health care costs, and protecting the homeland.”  Wow.  Kind of puts things in perspective.  Aneesh is the Chief Technology Officer of the United States and was appointed by President Obama in 2009.  Even more importantly, he is the first person to hold this title (and what a great title it is).  Just thinking about this…the ENIAC, which is widely regarded as the first computer ever invented, was built in 1946.  Fast forward 63 years and we now have our first CTO.  There’s a definite thoughtfulness in the selection approach for this role. 

Aneesh covered a wide range of topics in his discussion, but underscoring all the themes that he touched on was the issue of data analysis.  The US government generates unbelievable amounts of data across every category you can imagine: packaged food composition, mining production, reservoir water levels, medical facility ratings, and my personal favorite, the American Time Use Survey. All of this data has been coming online over the past few years and there is still a tremendous amount of data that is not yet accessible.  A number of interesting companies have already begun to use these datasets to gain a powerful advantage.  As @jonathanmendez pointed out, one great example of this is Urban Mapping. I am confident that many more will emerge.