Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the members of CUNY PIT Lab’s inaugural advisory board: six individuals brought together to help strengthen our capacity and continue to pursue our mission of making technology accessible, sustainable, and equitable for all.
This week, we spoke to Katie Bailey. Katie Bailey is Senior Director at HearstLab, where she works with founders, investors, and industry leaders to help scale startups addressing real-world challenges. Over the past decade, she has led initiatives spanning product, innovation, strategy, and business development across Hearst’s B2B software and venture businesses. A longtime advocate for technology as a force for positive impact, Katie is particularly interested in how technology, entrepreneurship, and human-centered design can improve outcomes for individuals and communities. She holds a degree in Urban & Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia and serves on the UVA School of Architecture Dean’s Advisory Board.
What is the background you’re bringing to this and what do you hope to bring to the board?
I work for a corporate venture team that invests in early stage technology startups. Obviously, when you approach technology with the lens of venture, it’s about making money and getting return on investment. What I have had the fortune of experiencing and seeing firsthand and proving out as a thesis is that you can do well and do good. So we have companies in our portfolio making millions and millions of dollars, but also fundamentally changing the foundation of local economies, of women’s health, of the future of infrastructure for the electric grid. And so I am especially excited to bring that business perspective, best practices, even bringing some of our portfolio companies to the forefront as real living examples of scalable business technology being applied toward making communities better.
Given the extremely dynamic and frequently disrupted state of tech, how can one best keep an eye to the horizon and try to anticipatethe unknowns, the corners that we’ve yet to turn?
I think that is the ultimate question. I think one thing that we try to stay true to our core about is: you know the technology is always going to be evolving and changing, but at the end of the day, I think it really comes down to two things. One being: what problem are you solving for, and is it a real problem? In our case: is it a problem that people are willing to pay to solve? And then second of all is, is this the right team to solve it? So we put a lot of emphasis on the founder, the founding team, the people behind the technology, just as much as the technology itself. A lot of people have access to AI, a lot of people can build apps these days, but if they don’t have the right sort of core expertise, if they don’t know about the industries they’re building for, they’re not going to get very far. And so I think those are two things we continue to double down on, even as technology modes are changing pretty rapidly.
AI is making a huge impact on work and on emerging careers. Do you see any industries that are potentially able to absorb these new technologies while stillremaining robust?
I think there are a few! One thing that we’re seeing that I think is actually quite interesting is the renaissance of “IRL.” There’s so much noise about technology — people are on screens and devices everywhere all the time. So we’re actually seeing a lot of interest and pullback to the human connection, and so I’m interested to see specifically how that plays out, especially for younger generations who have seen the older generations kind of mess that up. So I’m actually pretty optimistic that the answer for the future is somewhere in the middle of having technology as a partner to help accelerate good solutions, but at the end of the day, human judgment and humans still sort of in charge. I tend to lean towards a future vision where technology and humans actually work together instead of [being] replaced.