You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

I'd like to introduce our special speaker this week.

Jennifer Polka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, a San Francisco-based

nonprofit that, according to the Washington Post, is the technology world's equivalent of the

Peace Corps, offering an alternative to the old broken path of government IT.

In addition, Jennifer has served as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer

in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Jennifer is well known for her TED Talk called Coding a Better Government,

where she noted that we will not be able to reinvent government

unless we also reinvent citizenship

and asked, are we just going to be a crowd of voices,

or are we going to be a crowd of hands?

Please join me in welcoming Jennifer.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for everyone coming today.

It's a nice big group.

And it's an honor to be asked to speak to an institution that has such an amazing reputation,

I think, for technical excellence and also for an entrepreneurial spirit,

especially on a topic that isn't always associated with those two things. But I hope today

to talk to you a little bit of why it should be and certainly can be. I did want to start

with a slightly unconventional question of all of you and bear with me here.

...