Congressman Khanna on the future of technology jobs.
Khanna has a politically progressive view of dealing with Silicon Valley’s challenges
SANTA CLARA » U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara believes in the power of Silicon Valley — warts and all.
As Silicon Valley wrestles with its spate of issues, from the ever-constricting housing crisis in the Bay Area to Facebook’s data privacy fallout, Khanna, the first-term Democrat representing Sunnyvale and Cupertino to the west and Fremont and Union City to the east, calls himself a “technology optimist.”
But in an interview with this news organization last month in his Santa Clara office, Khanna echoed a politically progressive outlook in how to deal with Silicon Valley: its wealth and power is too concentrated, and it is time for other Americans from East Palo Alto to Youngstown, Ohio to get a slice of the pie.
The export of technology jobs and knowledge to the Rust Belt and other parts of the country will not only revive the economically depressed regions but also relieve the Bay Area of its housing and traffic woes, Khanna said.
“I think we can have distributed networks of jobs, where these jobs don’t all have to be concentrated just here,” he said. “The digital devices have allowed people to shop, communicate and find entertainment in different ways. But the challenge is how are we going to allow people to earn a living in different ways as well.”
Having grown up on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Khanna constantly has the Rust Belt in mind. In February, he organized a tour with several Bay Area-based venture capitalists in a multi-city bus tour through Flint, Michigan; South Bend, Indiana; and Youngstown and Akron, Ohio, to encourage new tech incubators in these cities.
Khanna, who worked with Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio to set up the tour, believes that these cities can become niche hubs of technology based on their existing strengths. For example, Akron and its nearby metropolis Cleveland can focus on health care technology because of its large health care infrastructure.
Khanna said the trip was productive, with one Flint-based startup incubator receiving $100,000 in funding, and may pave a way for Silicon Valley to want to invest in the future. Venture capitalists who joined the trip shared the same optimism.
“Technology and entrepreneurship will create more than enough economic activity to go around,” said Roy Bahat, founder of the venture capital firm Bloomberg Beta. “This is a classic ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ situation.”
In a blog post featured on Recode, Bahat acknowledged that going on this trip was a form of carpetbagging — outsiders moving into an area to take advantage of a situation that may profit them in the future. However, technology company founders in Flint expressed no issues with their visit — and their investments.
“I don’t see any downsides,” said Derek Sommer, founder of a Flint-based custom software company called SPUD Software. Sommer said he met with the venture capitalists when they were in town. “It’s a great market to tap. We do have the brains, the energy and the drive here, and we need that financial backing to take it to that next step. It’s a lot tighter community here than what I imagine in the Bay Area.”
Paul Knific doesn’t need to imagine. Knific, a Flint native, moved to the Bay Area for a few months for an internship in Sunnyvale. He grew homesick and experienced a culture
“I think we can have distributed networks of jobs, where these jobs don’t all have to be concentrated just here.”
— Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara
shock living in a dense urban metropolis, where people commute to work in packed trains, not by pickup trucks.
Knific now runs a company that uses information technology to help sell fresh fruits and vegetables in Flint, a city still reeling from a water crisis in which more than 100,000 residents were exposed to high levels of lead.
“One way to combat poisoned water is providing nutritious food,” said Knific, who also attended the meeting with Bay Area venture capitalists. “The way we build companies is different here. Our companies don’t burn through a lot of cash. We have low overhead and we find a customer fit. We will use resources from California to scale up.”
But not all feedback from the tour was positive. A New York Times article chronicled the trip — which was lampooned on social media for being a “Rust Belt safari” trip — and included Khanna saying “some of the engineers in the Valley have the biggest egos known to humankind.” Khanna pushed back,
saying the story was inaccurate and that the writer, Kevin Roose, came in with a preconceived slant.
“The article talked about the decline of Silicon Valley, and I don’t believe that for a minute” said Khanna. “He tried to take a three-day
trip and take people’s comments out of context to support his storyline.”
Khanna also wishes more attention was paid to his work to close the digital divide in underprivileged communities in and around his constituency.
He noted the partnership between Merritt College in Oakland and companies such as Facebook to create a pipeline for cybersecurity jobs.
Such moves to open the job pipeline would be one key way to close the income
inequality, which continue to haunt underprivileged communities such as East Palo Alto, says Timothy Russell, program director for the East Palo Altobased business incubator Renaissance Entrepreneur Center.
“We need more than funding, we need opportunities,” said Russell. “Can you imagine a small business getting a contract with Google or Apple? Not only will it change the business owner’s life but also the employees.”
Khanna also asked Apple and Google to step up in hiring more local talent and to invest in housing and transit projects to alleviate the housing crisis in his constituency. He carried the message with some urgency, saying there isn’t a lot of time before artificial intelligence may lead to massive changes in the American job market.
He wants to see Google CEO Sundar Pinchai and Apple CEO Tim Cook help the people left out of the digital economy.
“In my view, we had the Industrial Revolution, which took 40 years, the change from manufacturing to services that took about 20 years, and now we are going into a revolution in the digital age, which will take 10 years,” Khanna said. “I think we are just scratching the surface on how much tech is going to impact our economy.”