Malcom Glenn, Director of Public Affairs, Better.com

What does your work look like, and what have you been working on lately? 

I’ve spent my career building partnerships between corporations, nonprofits, and governments, and trying to tell the stories of the impact of that work. I'm particularly drawn to opportunities to leverage public policy to improve people's lives at the local level, especially in areas like housing, transportation, economic development, education, criminal justice reform, and public health. In particular, I’m intrigued by trying to figure out how access to technology can create opportunities for people from traditionally underserved communities.

I’ve done this largely by advocating for socially responsible work and inclusive design principles. At times, I’ve been an internal advocate for that work, leveraging my position inside a company to push for change. At other times, I’ve worked from the outside, advising companies on what they can and should do to improve. No matter my positioning, the guiding principle has always been how we can make tech a force for good.

How has your career path unfolded? 

I’ve always been drawn to policy as a lever for change, and so after college, I immediately came to Washington, DC to work as a pollster and political consultant on behalf of progressive clients and causes. It was there, where I managed projects for the team focused on organizations and issue campaigns, that I began to understand the value of non-government advocacy. I then went to work in that world, leading communications for an education advocacy organization, before wanting to take those skills and apply them to tech, which had the potential to move at a speed and scale not present in DC.

Since then, I’ve spent almost a decade at major tech companies and in the startup community, and if that experience has taught me anything, it’s that while the potential exists in nearly every tech ecosystem to do good, people are what underpin those efforts becoming real.

How did you get into the field of Public Interest Technology (PIT)?

When I arrived at Google—the first place I worked in tech—I was enamored by the scale of the company’s work. Reaching billions of people in every part of the world, it was the first indication to me of the potential good that tech could do. I say “potential,” though, because what I also soon realized was that socially-aligned work was a small part of the pie, and that it took lots of internal advocacy to make it a priority. The other thing I started to realize there, which became an even more prominent part of my thought process as I traversed other roles in tech, was the importance of interrogating a company’s business model, and not to divorce it from their stated intentions around doing good and creating inclusive environments.

Because it became clear that, too often, efforts around social impact or diversity, equity, and inclusion were seen as separate from the business. Companies would make money in all types of ways and then use a small portion of those profits for causes that painted them in a positive light, or they’d focus on diversifying their workforce but not on the impact of their products on the very communities that were underrepresented internally.

And so I started to really internalize and understand the principle of inclusive design—the notion that a true measure of a company’s positive contributions to the world is not in how much money they spend separate from their business, or how much they focus on internal diversity and inclusion, but instead on how integrated those principles are into everything they do, from their core products and services to how they engage in communities. This led me to make public interest tech a key point of focus going forward in my career.

If students are interested in pursuing a career in PIT, where might they start?

My advice to anyone interested in public interest tech would be to ask yourself which problems you think tech can truly help solve, and then to identify institutions that have business models aligned with those goals. Too often, I see folks who say they want to work at a company largely because of its brand or its level of prestige, with little consideration for its impact. And while it’s true that companies with big footprints have lots of power and influence, there will always be an inherent tension between the business and the social impact. Instead of focusing first on the tech institutions, focus on the problems you want to solve and work backwards. Ask yourself who is using technology to solve those problems today. And if you don’t feel like you’ve identified someone doing that work, then maybe it’s worth starting something to solve that problem yourself.