The bench

Seasoned policy leaders, at your side.

Our partners have built and led policy teams at major technology companies. They've built teams, made the calls with executives and lived with the results. We also bring in an extended network of specialists as each project needs.

Founding partner

Derek Slater

Derek is a tech policy strategist focused on media, communications and information policy. He helped build Google's public policy team from 2007 to 2022, serving as Global Director of Information Policy for his last three years. He led a global team of experts on access to information, content regulation and online safety, and testified before legislators in the US, the UK and elsewhere.

Along with deep strategy and subject-matter expertise, Derek is a skilled campaigner and coalition builder. He worked with startups, venture capitalists and civil society to organize campaigns on online copyright in the US and Europe, including the successful defeat of the overreaching Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012. As Head of Policy Strategy & Campaigns for Google Fiber, he mobilized national and local organizations to pass broadband legislation in Nashville and San Francisco, which later became the basis for federal action. For this and other work, the Coalition for Local Internet Choice gave him its Private Sector Champion award in 2016.

Before Google, Derek was the Activism Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the first student fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He holds a bachelor's degree in government from Harvard College.

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Founding partner

Betsy Masiello

Betsy is a tech policy strategist with experience across tech, media and telecoms, public health and urban transportation. As an early member of Google's global policy team, she led the company's privacy work from 2008 to 2015, heading a team of experts on economic policy, privacy and child safety.

She built and led Uber's global policy and economics team, which set Uber's positions on labor, environmental and urban mobility, and safety policy. In her most recent in-house role, Betsy was VP of Public Policy at Juul Labs, where she built a global policy function and developed a global policy framework to eliminate the use of combustible cigarettes. She has also worked with startups in hard tech as VP of Marketing at Rigetti Quantum Computing, in gov-tech as VP of Policy at Remix, and as co-founder of the prop-tech company Catapult.

Betsy began her career as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, advising telecom companies on business strategies for emerging technologies. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Wellesley College, a master's degree in economics from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a master's degree from MIT's Technology and Policy Program.

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Deep expertise? Put it to work.

We're adding a small number of folks to our bench. If you want to apply your know-how to real-world strategic challenges, reach out.

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