Innovation vs. Regulation

Guest Mark Farrell joins the pod to talk about balancing the need for innovation against the need for regulatory guardrails to keep us safe and ensure fair competition.

Mark is uniquely qualified to weigh in on this topic given his role as Managing Director at Thayer Ventures, a leading VC firm focused on the travel, transportation and hospitality sector, and his prior experience in government as a former San Francisco Mayor and City Supervisor. His time in politics coincided with the emergence and rise of Uber, Lyft, and AirBnB, giving him a front-row seat to this exact battle.

We dig in to a number of juicy topics:

• Lessons learned from his experience with Uber, Lyft and AirBnB
• The perspective of regulators, what their objectives are and what they need from the private sector in order to do regulation right
• His recommended playbook for startup teams on how best to engage with regulatory authorities in a constructive way
• What does the regulatory environment look like for current innovations like AI and driverless vehicles in these early days
• Why politics can be a rewarding path, and why it’s so critical that we get more technology brains into government at all levels