Beauty with Brain...Rachel Haot

Rachel Haot

Rachel Haot is an American businesswoman and entrepreneur who currently serves as the Chief Digital Officer and Deputy Secretary of Technology for New York State under Governor Cuomo's administration. Prior to this role, Rachel served as Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York for three years under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, from January 2011 to December 2013, leading NYC Digital.
She was also featured in Vogue Magazine

Rachel Sterne Haot is the chief digital office and the deputy secretary for technology for New York State in governor Cuomo’s executive chamber. Her focus is to realize the governor’s vision for the state by improving the way that government and public engage online, and supporting collaborative innovative with the technology community. 
Prior to this role, Rachel served as chief digital officer for the city of New York for three years under Mayor Bloomberg, from January 2011 to December 2013. At the city, she established the first urban digital roadmap in the country, achieving all initiatives by October 2013. Major milestones included the pre launch of official city website nyc.gov; tripling the City’s social media audience to over four million; hosting the first hackathons in municipal government and launching tech sector initiative and campaign We Are Made in NY to support the digital industry.

Before her role with the city, Rachel server as founder and CEO of GroundReport, a pioneering global citizen journalism platform, from 2006 to 2010. She also launched and ran upward, a digital strategy consultancy, taught as a Columbia Business School adjunct professor and worked in business development for the consumer web industry. 
She has been recognized as a ’40 Under 40’ leader by Crain’s, Forbes and Fortune.
From 2006 to 2010, Haot founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of GroundReport, a global crowd sourced news startup that was one of the earliest examples of Citizen Journalism. In 2008, Haot founded digital strategy consulting firm Upward, and later served as an adjunct professor of Social Media and Entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School. In 2012, she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and serves on the digital advisory board of Women@NBCU. She has been recognized as a "30 Under 30" leader by Fortune and Forbes.

In 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg named Haot to the post of Chief Digital Officer. Her responsibilities included the development and multi-stakeholder execution of the New York City's Digital Roadmap, a plan unveiled in May 2011 to realize the City's digital potential for all New Yorkers, spanning 40 initiatives across the areas of Internet connectivity, STEM education, Open Government and big data, online engagement and technology industry support. 
In October 2013, Mayor Bloomberg and Haot announced that 100% of initiatives had been completed, and introduced new goals submitted via public listening sessions to build on this foundation in the 2013 Digital Roadmap.

A major milestone of the Digital Roadmap was the complete overhaul of the user experience and architecture of Official city website nyc.gov for the first time in a decade, featuring fully responsive design, data-driven information architecture and improved customer service functionality. In addition, Roadmap initiatives included expansion of public Wi-Fi to more than 50 parks, low-cost broadband connectivity and training for over 300,000 low-income New Yorkers, paid technology sector internships for underrepresented minorities, more than 40 digital learning programs that have served over one million New Yorkers, the release of over 2,000 public data sets, the first municipals hackathons in the country, the expansion of 311 on mobile and social media, an official City mobile app store and the launch of 

We Are Made in NY, an economic development initiative and marketing campaign to support New York City's tech sector. One component of We Are Made in NY is an interactive map of the sector's companies, investors and incubators, which show the locations of over 2,000 technology companies in New York City, and allows users to filter by hiring companies, visit job listings and add new startups to the map.
Haot was interviewed by WNYC in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, where she detailed the efforts her office was undertaking to bring the city back to its feet from a digital infrastructure standpoint, especially in Lower Manhattan. In addition to the City's first official hackathon, Reinvent NYC.GOV, Haot's office hosted the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge, a competition to promote the re-purposing of New York City’s public pay telephones for the digital age, which garnered over 100 submissions from design firms and universities.

 In February 2013, Haot and Mayor Bloomberg introduced We Are Made in NY, an economic development initiative to support tech sector growth in New York City.