by Lisa Prezioso Linnell and Heather B. Hayes
• Areva delays construction of new building
• Richmond-based Chesapeake Corp. may file for bankruptcy
• Deal to purchase Alpha Natural Resources falls through
• Sabra Dipping Co. to open manufacturing plant in Chesterfield
Some people were surprised two years ago when Gov. Timothy M. Kaine chose a largely unknown 33-year-old to be his secretary of technology.
By his own admission, Aneesh Chopra is no techie. He has no formal IT training, and in fact, the appointment represents his first real technology job. The New Jersey native is more of a strategy wonk. He studied public policy at Johns Hopkins and Harvard before co-founding an $11 million venture capital network investment fund and working as managing director for the Advisory Board Co., a think tank serving 2,500 hospitals and health systems.
To Kaine, such off-the-mark qualifications didn’t matter. He saw in Chopra, the son of Indian immigrants, the mix of qualities he needed in a technology leader: Kaine wanted someone who could work with others to define a problem and figure out a solution before deciding what technology could best support it.
Chopra, says Kaine, goes beyond his day-to-day duties to help other cabinet secretaries deal with their challenges. “I like that,” he says. “He really focuses on collaborative strategies. It’s just part of who he is.”
Chopra’s main role is to advance Kaine’s technology initiatives, such as expanding the state’s broadband infrastructure and promoting the use of electronic medical records to help patients and providers make better health-care decisions. But he also is gaining a reputation for coming up with innovative public/private partnerships beyond the traditional purview of a technology secretary.
Chopra, for example, entered the realm of economic development last year when he approached Arise Virtual Solutions, a Miramar, Fla.-based company that contracts with independent home-based customer service representatives. Arise provides call center support to more than 40 companies, including Walgreens and Verizon.
Chopra encouraged Arise to recruit independent contractors in rural Virginia. With his assistance, the Blue Ridge Crossroads Region, (which includes Carroll and Grayson counties and the city of Galax) partnered with Arise in October and began holding a series of information sessions for potential contractors. Officials expected about 20 people to attend the first meeting. Instead 80 people showed up. As Arise trains workers, Galax will house many of them at a broadband-enabled telework site. “It’s offering unemployed people there a lot of hope,” Chopra says.
The technology secretary seems to attract companies looking for a public-sector partner. Shailesh Rao, managing director of Google’s India office, immediately thought of Chopra when his company decided it wanted to show how its search engine could make public information more accessible. He met Chopra in the early 1990s at the Network of South Asian Professionals. Both men eventually served as president of the organization’s Washington, D.C., chapter.
“I was looking for a forward-thinking government executive, and Aneesh was clearly the right candidate,” says Rao. He describes Chopra as a dreamer and big thinker “who focuses on getting things done.”
The first-of-its-kind partnership between Google and the state was one of Chopra’s first acts as technology secretary. Google provides a user-friendly search engine tool that provides easy access to information from any of the state’s 90-plus Web sites. Before the arrangement with Google, users often had to know which Web site had the information they were seeking.
Chopra says his collaborating skills were honed in the private sector, where he learned to “listen first before talking…I don’t walk in the room asking for anything. I first offer to help before I ask for something in exchange.”
Those qualities came into play again after last year’s shootings at Virginia Tech. Microsoft Corp. officials contacted Chopra and worked with him to make real-time security information available to college students, faculty and parents. “They approached me and said, ‘Is there anything we can do?’” Chopra recalls. “We never spent a nickel and they were willing to teach and share the best of the best.”
Chopra says that his Indian-American heritage plays a role in his approach to such partnerships. “It was my Indian-American entrepreneurial instincts that lead me to the partnerships at both Google and Microsoft,” he says. “Culturally the India-American community tends to be entrepreneurial focused, which pushes me to think about new and innovative ways to accomplish my goals.”
Chopra’s enthusiasm, accessibility and creativity have served as a catalyst for innovative thinking throughout Virginia’s technology sector, says Bobbie G. Kilberg, president and CEO of the Northern Virginia Technology Council. “He literally is the Energizer Bunny,” Kilberg says. “He has a thousand ideas a minute and many of them are keepers.”
Aneesh Chopra
Born: July 13, 1972, in Trenton, N.J.
Education: Bachelor’s degree, The Johns Hopkins University; 1994; master’s degree in public policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
1997
Family: Wife, Rohini; daughter, Naya
Pet: Bailey (a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel)
Career path: Morgan Stanley, 1994-95; graduate school, 1995-97; the Advisory Board Co., 1997-2006
Hobbies: Fantasy football, basketball, squash
Fan of: Pittsburgh Steelers
Associations: President, Network of South Asian Professionals, Washington, D.C., chapter, 1998-99; co-president, The Indus Entrepreneurs, Washington chapter,
2005-06
Hindu faith outlines chapters of life
by Lisa Prezioso Linnell
The course of Aneesh Chopra’s career has been outlined by his religion.
“My Hindu faith tells me to think of my life in chapters,” says Chopra, Virginia’s secretary of technology. “My first chapter was to maximize my education
as much as I could. The second chapter is professional success. My third phase of life, my third chapter, is public service.”
Ramesh Rao, an executive council member of the Hindu American Foundation, says Chopra is describing a primary underlying philosophy of Hinduism known as
varna-ashrama dharma.
Loosely translated, “Varna means faith, ashrama means phases and dharma means order,” explains Rao, a professor and department chairman at Longwood
University. “The idea about the third phase is to give up the pursuit of singular pleasures and the creation of wealth for oneself so that you could
communicate with your community. In the past, it meant going off on a pilgrimage. Now, in the modern context, it is the pursuit of public service.”
Following the tenets of his faith, Chopra knows what the next phase of his life will be. “The fourth chapter of one’s life is essentially meditation and
frankly being on a personal journey to God.”
Rao concurs. “He is exactly right in thinking of the Hindu division of life’s phases and duties. It is the natural order of life.”
