Where are all the tech people on Washington Life magazine's Young and the Guest List?

Mayor Vincent Gray was there. So was Rep. Darrell Issa. And entrepreneur and investor Steve Case. No, not some event in Washington, DC, but rather the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas this past week, talking about all things DC and startup.

There’s a lot of talk about a new wave of small tech startups in Washington, DC these days, and the recent launch of the 1776 startup accelerator space in a building across from the Washington Post has brought that excitement to a fever pitch. And it is exciting, with startups ranging from enterprise and cybersecurity types (Mercury Continuity, a continuity of communications company) to consumer technology (Hinge, a dating app), to fashion (SNOBSWAP, an upscale clothing marketplace) getting some investor love and media attention.

So when I saw that Washington Life magazine’s annual Young and the Guest List for 2013 came out, I was curious to see what tech folks made the list. After all, you might predict that some new people had popped onto their radar.

The Young and the Guest List, or YGL, is touted as “A guide to Washington’s most influential 40-and-under young leaders.”

Are you...on the list?

Full disclosure: I’m on the list. It’s a nice honor. So okay, I work for Microsoft, there’s one tech person on the list. Who else? Well, Jesse Suskin from Google’s communications and public affairs shop made it; he has a background in Republican campaign and staff positions, including a stint in the White House.

And then, well, there’s…um… hmm.

I can’t find any other people from big tech companies on the list. Perhaps they’re hidden deeply among all the Members of Congress, baseball and football players, restaurant and bar owners, and White House staffers, but I can’t find anyone from the Apple’s, IBM’s, Oracle’s and Salesforce’s of the world. I can’t even find anyone from Facebook. Twitter. Tesla. Square. Reddit. Yahoo. Anyone.

What happened?

Well, it’s not like tech’s YGL forces have waned. I went back and quickly checked last year’s YGL from 2012. Not many tech people on there, either. No totally brotastic people from Twitter and the like (there was one from Facebook but he’s since moved to San Francisco). Not even someone like Adam Sharp, who not only used to work for a Senator and at CSPAN but now runs Twitter’s team that acts as “ambassadors” to important government officials and staffers, and also effectively controls the flow of information between Twitter’s databases and the political pundits and professionals who want to know how many tweeple participated in a Twitter roundtable with President Obama, or how many people tweeted with positive sentiment during a political debate, or which way people on Twitter are saying they voted in a national election.

So, if not someone like Adam Sharp and if not larger organizations like Twitter, than surely, some of the hot young startups with their slightly younger founders?

Well, there are a few of them, but less than you might expect. Evan Burfield, co-founder of the aforementioned 1776 startup accelerator is a veteran of the list and still on it, as are Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo who run the TechCocktail media company, and Shana Glickfield, a partner in the Beekeeper Group, a tech-savvy public affairs consultancy, and a couple of the co-founders of LivingSocial. Blake Hall the CEO of Troopswap is another returning veteran, as is Navroop Mitter, the CEO of Gryphn. Steve Ressler and Goldy Kamali, founders of government news/media companies Govloop and Fedscoop, respectively too. And who can forget Macon Phillips, the now long-time head of digital strategy and new media for the Obama Administration? In different ways, these are all tech/startup community leaders; no surprises here.

But new, up-and-coming people in the tech and tech/startup space? I could only find three.

One is Matthew Corgan, the CEO of Hotpads.com, a real estate site. Another is Justin Herman, currently the director of Federal social media policy and programs at GSA. And finally, Laura O’Shaughnessy, the CEO of SocialCode, a consultancy to help advertisers leverage Facebook and Twitter better.

That’s it. That’s all I could find. So for all the angel investing and meetups with 1,000 attendees and sojourns to SXSW and mainstream media attention, effectively zero of the founders of new, hot DC-based startups made the list of “Washington’s most influential 40-and-under young leaders.”

Is DC Tech irrelevant to DC society?

This isn’t a criticism of Washington Life’s list. The list is what the list is. And actually, I was kind of impressed with the fact that while the list grew a little (to 300, I believe), but the magazine simultaneously removed quite a number of people I know personally from the list between 2012 and 2013. So, some care on their end was definitely taken with choosing the names.

No, this is not a critique of Washington Life. Perhaps it is a tiny critique of the DC startup community. It’s easy to criticize any given person on the YGL, but overall it’s fairly representative of the most visible young people in the area and the young people most likely to be known in other major cities and therefore the young people most likely to be considered “ambassadors” abroad. It’s also a fairly good indicator of the people you’re likely to find at a Sundance Film Festival, a CES or SXSW, a Summit Series event, a Davos, or a NY Fashion Week (for what it’s worth).

Correlated with that, the tech and tech/startup folks I named above also tend to be those people. Evan Burfield was just with the Mayor in Austin. Peter Corbett, a longtime member of the list, was just in Davos. I was recently at New York Fashion Week helping to run a hackathon. We all have day jobs, but we also tend to take on larger roles of “ambassadors” (for lack of a better term), representatives, storytellers, wider networkers. Next year, I’d love to see some up and coming people from Acceleprise, The Fort, 1776, or other places emerge as the start of a generation of even younger leaders and genuinely start to displace us with new voices and opportunities and leadership.