Rachel Haot
Rachel Haot is an American businesswoman. She is currently Chief of Staff at Bedrock. Prior to this, she was executive director of the Transit Innovation Partnership, a public-private initiative of the Partnership for New York City and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Haot was previously the chief digital officer and Deputy Secretary for Technology of New York State for two years. Prior to this role, Rachel was Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York from January 2011 to December 2013. She co-founded and ran GroundReport between 2006 and 2010.
Early life
Haot was born in 1983 in Manhattan to parents Paul Sterne, a former IBM managing director, and Anna Sterne, the director of patient services at a nonprofit healthcare organization. Haot largely grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn and Dobbs Ferry, New York. She graduated from Dobbs Ferry High School in 2001. She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in history from New York University in 2005.Career
Ground Report
From 2006 to 2010, Haot was one of the founders of GroundReport, a global crowdsourced news startup.Columbia Business School
In 2011 Haot taught a course on Social Media and Entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School as an adjunct professor.New York City
In 2011, Katherine Oliver named Haot to the post of Chief Digital Officer.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 and was the precursor to LinkNYC. Haot led the relaunch of official City of New York website , integrating city services, realtime data, cloud-based scalability and responsive design. Haot also oversaw policy and strategy for the launch of New City's top-level domain, .nyc.
New York State
As Chief Digital Officer for New York State, Haot was responsible for digital products, programs and policy. Haot led the relaunch of State website ny.gov in November 2014, overhauling design and architecture. The well-received update was the first major change in over 15 years. Haot's team was also responsible for digital content production and social media engagement.In March 2015, Haot appeared on NY1 to highlight the Governor's $500 million universal broadband program, which was later passed by the legislature. On the first anniversary of the NY.gov relaunch, New York State announced record breaking digital growth, including quadrupled page views and doubled users, a year after the design and technology overhaul.
1776
In January 2016, Haot announced that she was resigning from the State to join global incubator and seed fund 1776 as Managing Director, applying her experience to help startups navigate government and bringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, institutions and investors to support economic growth.Haot left 1776 in August 2017.