Project Blueprint

Jay Carney is joining venture capital firm SV Angel as a General Partner and Head of Public Policy and Communications.

For decades, founders have relied on SV Angel not only for capital but for unrivaled access: introductions to customers, investors, media leaders and policymakers. As technology becomes an increasingly important focus of public policy, we believe the next evolution of SV Angel is to formalize and expand that role by becoming the most effective bridge between the technology ecosystem and policymakers. At SV Angel, Jay will lead the effort to connect portfolio companies and their founders with policymakers in both Washington, DC, and key state capitals.

SV Angel’s objective is straightforward: provide founders, entrepreneurs, and technology leaders a trusted partner who can help them navigate Washington while helping policymakers better understand the opportunities and challenges created by emerging technologies.

As a major focus of Jay’s work, SV Angel is launching Project Blueprint, a comprehensive plan to partner with tech founders and lawmakers to shape policy around artificial intelligence (see below for more). AI will be the defining policy issue of the coming decade, with four major policy currents taking shape:

• Managing AI’s Risks (frontier model governance, safety, privacy)
• Winning the AI race (national security, international competition)
• Ensuring the public benefits (workforce transition, economic disruption, wealth concentration/taxation)
• Managing AI’s energy demands (data centers and infrastructure)

The good news is that there is growing potential for broad, non-partisan agreement in Congress on many of these issue areas. Technology leaders who understand these dynamics early will be better positioned to engage constructively and influence outcomes.

A veteran policy and communications strategist, Jay comes to SV Angel after more than eleven years scaling and running the global policy and communications teams at both Amazon and Airbnb. Prior to his experience in tech, Jay served as White House press secretary to President Obama from 2011-2014 and communications director to then-Vice President Joe Biden from 2009-2010. Before government, Jay spent 20 years as a reporter for Time magazine, including stints in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union and in Washington covering the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies.

For more information, contact press@svangel.com.

There needs to be a trusted bridge between the people building AI and the lawmakers who will help write the rules governing it. Without one, both sides are worse off. And so is the country.

Project Blueprint is SV Angel’s effort to help solve that.

What it is. Blueprint will bring technology leaders and policymakers together to forge consensus on practical, durable solutions to the hardest AI policy problems. The goal is to build non-partisan policies durable enough to survive changes in power.

Why us. In 2023, SV Angel founded the AI Ad Hoc Working Group, which convened the leading AI companies on the problems none of them can solve alone. We are invested across the field — frontier labs, open-source platforms, data infrastructure, applications — so we do not carry any single company’s brief. SV Angel’s founder, Ron Conway, has spent four decades earning trust across Silicon Valley and building relationships with policymakers in both Washington and Sacramento. Jay Carney, who has joined SV Angel to lead this work, spent five and a half years in the Obama White House and eleven years running policy and communications at Amazon and Airbnb.

What we believe. The concerns driving debate around AI are legitimate. They’re not exaggerated or a proxy for something else, and they shouldn’t be dismissed.

• AI systems now have real offensive cyber capability, and defenses have not kept pace.
• Children are using these products, and the safeguards are not adequate.
• Job displacement will arrive faster than the retraining conversation is moving.
• We will need more data centers. But the backlash in the communities absorbing them — over power bills, water use and the eyesores dotting their landscapes — is real and growing. Ignoring the backlash and complaining that the public is misinformed is a mistake.
• The U.S. cannot afford to lose its lead to China. That is both an economic and a national security imperative.
• If the gains from AI accrue only to a handful of companies and their investors, the politics of AI will end badly. In the age of AI, everyone should share in the economic benefits.

These aren’t Democratic or Republican concerns. They’re concerns shared by Americans across the country, regardless of how they vote or where they live.

What we also believe. AI is an immensely powerful technology. Without effective guardrails, it can cause harm. But if we stifle its development and allow other countries to take the lead, we will also forfeit some of the extraordinary benefits that make AI so promising: drug discovery at a fraction of today’s cost; tutoring for children who can’t afford a private tutor; breakthroughs that mitigate climate change; cheaper energy; earlier cancer detection; real movement on Alzheimer’s treatment and prevention; and more.

The public deserves that upside, but most Americans have not been given a reason to believe they will ever see it. They may have a vague sense of AI’s promise, but they also have misgivings. They suspect AI is behind their high utility bill, or they worry their job may disappear. They may even fear a coming robot apocalypse. That is a failure of the industry's making. But just talking about the benefits won’t be enough. They have to be real.

We’re launching Project Blueprint because we can help bring industry leaders and policymakers together to solve the challenges around AI policy, and because solving those challenges will define who we are as a country for generations to come.