As part of National Startup Day Across America, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith toured a startup company and a tech startup accelerator in Northern Virginia yesterday to discuss how entrepreneurial businesses create jobs in innovative STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields.
“Startup companies are critical to creating more jobs in America,” said Smith. “The businesses I visited are examples of the amazing ingenuity and talent in our country, creating products and tools that keep America at the forefront of innovation.”
Ms. Smith toured Zoomdata in Reston, Va., met with company executives, and participated in a live, large-scale demonstration of the company’s products. Zoomdata develops the world’s fastest visual analytics solution for big data. Using patented data sharpening and micro-query technologies, Zoomdata empowers business users to visually consume complex information in seconds, even across billions of rows of data.
“Every day we strive to help people analyze, visualize, and interact with data so that they can run their businesses more effectively,” said Justin Langseth, the CEO of Zoomdata. “We were delighted to have Megan Smith visit our company today so that we could show her how, as a nimble startup, we’ve been able to execute on a product vision that is attracting large customers across every industry.”
Later, she visited Capital One Labs in Arlington, Va., to learn about their efforts to support business growth. Capital One Labs was founded four years ago as the experimental tech and product innovation arm of Capital One. It is a mix of product managers, designers, data scientists, and engineers who are focused on designing and building the next generation of financial products and services. Ms. Smith met with several of the teams and learned about the products that are growing within the accelerator.
National Startup Day Across America is organized by Congressmen Jared Polis (D-CO) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) to highlight the important work of these businesses and the workers they employ. On this day, Members of Congress from throughout the nation each visit a startup company in their home states and districts.
“I hear from tech companies across the country about challenges in their workforce pipeline. I hope more young people get to experience the vibrancy and potential of tech startups like these,” Smith said. “Our schools would never teach reading without teaching writing, but right now they’re primarily teaching science and math without doing. We need to encourage a culture shift to active learning that shows children where their science and math classes lead.”