Yaël Eisenstat Joins Betalab as Researcher-in-Residence

When we announced Betalab: Fix the Internet in March, we knew that investing in a new breed of start-ups was only part of the solution. It would take technology and policy change, diverse ideas and new approaches, and we would need to create knowledge and experience connections between start-up founders and the real-world (often unintended) consequences of the products they are building.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Yaël Eisenstat is joining Betalab as a Researcher-in-residence. Yael will be working directly with the Betalab portfolio companies, and developing ways to involve the broader start-up ecosystem in questions around data privacy, disinformation, ethical AI development and ensuring that the decisions companies make as they grow are grounded in an understanding of the societal implications of new technology.

We care about many of the same issues in technology and society, yet we come at these problems from very different backgrounds. What drove you to focus on this particular set of issues?

After 18 years in the national security and global affairs world — from countering extremism abroad to being a national security advisor at the White House — I began to view the breakdown of civil discourse at home as the biggest threat to democracy. I became increasingly concerned with how the Internet was contributing to polarization, hate, and division, and in 2015 I set out to both publicly sound alarm bells and to see what role I could play in helping reverse this course.

This led me to Facebook, where I was hired in 2018 to head the company’s new Global Elections Integrity Operations team for political advertising. Realizing I was not going to change the company from within, I left and am now a vocal advocate for accountability in the tech industry, including rethinking the rules that govern the internet.

Do you think it is possible to “fix the internet”?

So much of “fixing the internet” will require a re-alignment of incentives, driven largely by government regulation. I’ve written about the need to rethink the parameters of responsibility in the tech industry, particularly through revisiting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and about the need to update American laws to address digital forms of voter suppression and how political debate and campaigning has moved online. These are just two pieces of the larger legislative and regulatory puzzle that will need to be addressed, to include data privacy legislation and anti-trust questions.

However, beyond legislative solutions, we need a whole-of-society approach to “fixing the internet”. This will include educating the next generation of technologists in more holistic thinking (which I try to do at Cornell Tech) and investing in entrepreneurs who want to use their skills to build products aimed at rebuilding trust, protecting online consumers from manipulative practices, and fostering healthier discourse.

What attracted you to Betalab?

I want to be involved with start-ups who are focused on solving real societal problems, on creating a healthier information ecosystem, on using their technological skills and entrepreneurial spirit to create solutions to some of our shared challenges. I know there are so many entrepreneurs out there who share these goals, and it is exciting to see this effort to commit funding to get those ideas off the ground.

What excites you most about the road ahead with Betalab?

Young companies trying to grow often don’t have the capital, time or access to bring in and listen to people with a more diverse set of real-world experiences, and they certainly don’t have as much bandwidth to consider future potential risks and bake in protective measures from day one. One of the things I’m most excited about is to work with these entrepreneurs as a mentor, pushing them to think through potential unintended consequences, to challenge their assumptions, provide a different perspective, and hopefully help them think more critically about both the impact they want to have on the world, and the ways that it could possibly go wrong. And I’m equally excited to learn from them about the creative and new ways that tech can be used to correct course on some of the ways Silicon Valley has strayed.

In addition to mentoring start-ups, what will you focus on with Betalab?

Beyond the time I’ll spend working 1:1 with the Betalab investments, I will convene public conversations in an effort to bring a more diverse set of voices together to tackle these challenges. Through events, (virtual) roundtables, and written content, I hope to challenge siloed thinking and bring those affected by technology and those who build technology together to explore the often thorny issues regarding the real-world consequences of technology.

Betalab is an early-stage cohort-based investment program from Betaworks Ventures and Lupa Systems, combined with a year-long series of workshops and events — with the singular goal of catalyzing startup activity around Fixing The Internet. Betalab will find and fund a select group of entrepreneurs who are building software and services that work for humans first, and finding ways to fix the things that are fraying today. Join us. If you have a company in this category, or want to build one, we want to hear from you! Get in touch at betalab.com.