Title:GTA Alumni Spotlight: Mike Callahan (SFS’90)

Meet Mike Callahan (SFS’90), Chief Administrative Officer at Rivian Automotive and GTA Board Member!

Please introduce yourself.

My name is Mike Callahan, and I graduated from the School of Foreign Service in 1990. I majored in non-Western history, and diplomacy was my concentration – I’m not sure that exists anymore. I did a certificate in Arab studies in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. I’m the Chief Administrative Officer at Rivian Automotive where I have global responsibility for public policy, legal, regulatory, human resources, communications, sustainability and philanthropy. We are a U.S. manufacturer of electric trucks, SUVs, and commercial vans.

How did your time at Georgetown influence your career path in the tech industry?

I’m not sure I had any sense when I was at Georgetown that I would be working in technology. My major wasn’t something that you would say would naturally translate to law school and then onto a career in the tech space. I think what I took away from Georgetown and what was nurtured there was the heavy focus on the fundamentals of liberal arts, inquisitiveness, experiencing classmates from all over the world with all kinds of different backgrounds, being challenged by faculty with different viewpoints about different topics, and space to explore things away from thinking about them as a career. That was a unique experience for me coming from a small town in Connecticut, where the high school I went to was the regional and vocational agriculture school in our area.

I think that is how Georgetown influenced where I ended up – I learned to be curious, ask questions, and try new things. If I look at where my career is now – I’m 57, and I’ve worked at several different companies, law firms, and in the academic environment – it’s really stayed with me even in my 50s, continuing to find new opportunities to learn and engage in things that I’m interested in. 

My last job before this, I was a Professor of the Practice at Stanford Law School, teaching a variety of different classes at the law school and organizing programs at the law school and the business school. After five years at Stanford, I decided to enter a space I’d never worked in before. I’d spent my whole career in internet and social media and software and Silicon Valley as a lawyer. Choosing to work at Rivian, particularly with the technological advancement that we’re doing in electric, sustainability, and the future of mobility, was based on a Georgetown value of trying to have an impact in the world around you. One car company is not going to change the world, but everyone that buys one of our vehicles is not buying a gas-powered vehicle. Rivian is engaged in the future of electrification and sustainable mobility, which long term is where I believe our markets and our world is heading. I’m enjoying being a small part of that engine of change.

What does the day-to-day look like in your current role?

We are a U.S. based company, but we do have global operations and a global supply chain. We are heavily influenced by public policy and regulatory standards across the world in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. Our company manufactures in the United States, but the products and the raw materials that go into our vehicles are sometimes purchased from all over the world. I spend the first part of my day understanding what’s happened overnight and in other countries to determine how it affects what I’m prioritizing. We’re a public company in the U.S. with roughly a $16 billion market cap, so there’s a whole host of public company issues in jobs like mine. I try to stay abreast of media reports, inquiries from investors, and anything that’s happening in the markets that may affect our space

I was a student-athlete at Georgetown on the lightweight crew team and sports, athletics, and activity are a big part of my life, so I have time carved out in the morning for some sort of exercise – a lot of tennis. Then usually I’m in our Palo Alto office, where I have a series of standing meetings with our executives and members of my team, and I work through other projects. I have some nonprofit obligations, things I do with Georgetown, so I try to check in with that each day. I usually try to carve out a little bit of time every day for reading, reflection, and thinking about what we need to focus on as a team, industry trends and policy and regulatory developments. I have found over my 30 years or so doing these kinds of jobs that you need to find time to think – even if it’s just for 30 minutes. If you go from meeting to meeting to meeting, you’re not spending any time harnessing what you learned, what you processed, and how should it be applied. Given my responsibilities to lead a number of different teams that have influence on our operations, I prioritize that.

I do have travel obligations – sometimes I’m at our plant in Normal, Illinois where we build the trucks, sometimes in southern California where we have a major development presence and sometimes in Washington, D.C. for meetings with regulators and policy makers. My kids are away at school, but when they’re home we spend time as a family in the evenings. My wife is the CEO of a nonprofit, a pediatrician and a faculty member at Stanford Medical School and serves on a number of boards, so she’s very busy but we try to find time to spend together and see family and friends. Usually that involves watching sports. My wife was a college athlete and a college coach, so we are either talking about sports, doing sports, or off doing something related to that. That tends to be a day in the life!

You were one of the founders of the Georgetown Technology Alliance. Could you share a little bit about how the group came to be?

In 2007, myself and four other alums who were working in Silicon Valley started what we called the Georgetown Technology Alliance (GTA). The goal was to connect the University to the technology community and the community to the University, and to get all of the people that were working in tech in Silicon Valley from Georgetown together on a regular basis. We had engaged speakers and programs, and we continue to do this with GTA, but also networking for parents, students, graduates, and alumni. The reason we did that was because there were a number of folks at senior levels in different companies in Silicon Valley who had graduated from Georgetown. Few of them were on the technical side. That’s changing, in that Georgetown now has a really robust computer science major and a whole bunch of technical folks, but I graduated in 1990. Most of us had come up through one of the liberal arts, economics, business, or through SFS or other areas.

What do you wish more people knew about the tech industry?

The thing that I wish people knew more about tech, and I think it’s one of the great things about technology environments, is that it does require a lot of skills. We have a number of amazing engineers and brilliant folks who design, engineer and build our vehicles and software, do our autonomy that allows the car to drive itself, and that’s a pretty special amount of technical skills. There’s also folks who don’t have engineering skills who work here on my team that spend time on policy and product privacy, consumer regulation, things that are important to how you build a brand, marketing, recruiting talent and building teams, managing corporate reputation and risk and others. 

It takes a lot of different expertise to build a technology company. I spent a number of years at Yahoo. Yahoo had a vision about how we could change the way information is shared and how people communicate on the internet, but the business behind that needed to change and adapt over time. The input from folks who are not necessarily computer scientists, but instead business people or they have insights about filling a product need from a marketing perspective, is really important. Now, there’s the layer on top of that of ethics, and how you think about technology companies and the influence they have on the world. There’s a lot of discussion now that wasn’t there before in terms of the value of those careers. Georgetown’s Tech & Society initiative, the programs at the McDonough business school about ethics, and how business people should think about more than just the bottom line are really important. Tech requires a lot of different expertise, not just great computer scientists and engineers – though you do need that too, you can’t build the product without it – but you also need folks who work around those people to bring that vision to life.

What is your favorite app or website, and why?

My current favorite tech product is a whole home battery backup system that I use in my house. Basically, during the day it stores solar energy into backup batteries. There’s a controller in the system that balances the load in terms of what energy I’m using in my house, depending on the load that my house needs to run, the cost of electricity that I could purchase from the local utility, and the amount of solar that I have stored up. The app – you can geek out on it forever! – shows if I am pulling from the grid, using the solar I’m generating, or pulling from the battery. I’m getting really into understanding more about efficient energy use and my own personal footprint, so that’s an app that I love. 

I’m a total news junkie for business, social, sports and political news – anything to do with the market or financial news, so I use the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg apps. Having worked at LinkedIn for 5 years, I’m big on LinkedIn in terms of what I’m hearing in my network and who’s doing what. Yahoo Finance is another app that I spend a lot of time on, seeing what’s happening in the market – particularly now where there’s so much movement. I got a Whoop for Christmas which monitors all your biometrics, in addition to keeping track of heart rate zones. Energy, news information, finance, and personal health – there’s no one favorite app but those are the interests that I’m focused on now.

What is one quick piece of advice you would give to a Georgetown student that is interested in tech?

Perseverance. The tech market is broad and there’s a lot of different kinds of industries. Take time to talk to people about your interests using the Georgetown network. I try to make myself as available as possible and other alumni will do the same thing if you reach out. It might not be that day, it may take a couple weeks to get it on the calendar, but we’ll find a time to do it. Stay in touch with people and explore your interests – the Georgetown network can be great for that.

The second piece would be to not get too focused on one particular area because technology markets change so dramatically. Two or three years ago, you did not hear people talking about or focused on the business models behind AI. If you look now, there is an incredible number of companies that have sprung up that are creating enterprise software to manage AI usage inside the corporate environment. I think not getting too focused on “I want to be in this kind of space” and instead thinking about all the ways that these different companies and different technologies can interplay is important. 

Also, you don’t have to be a technical person necessarily. A lot of great product leaders — which is a cool job inside technology companies — come out of a variety of different backgrounds. You can have a really eclectic bunch of interests and find yourself working at a technology company. My background is in history and diplomacy and Arab studies, and I stayed at Georgetown to coach crew for a couple years, and then I went to law school. You could do a whole bunch of different things with that background, and I decided that technology and being around entrepreneurs was something that I really was interested in and wanted to pursue. My advice is to be open to a variety of different opportunities, use the Georgetown network, and don’t think one set of skills is what you need – that there can be broad applications.

For more GTA Alumni Spotlights, click here.