The Tri-Sector Athlete with Cara Eckholm

About this Episode

In this episode, host Kumar speaks with Cara Eckholm, the founder of Pilot City and a Fellow at Renaissance Philanthropy. An urbanist at heart, Cara has thought deeply about how to build relationships between local governments and their constituent researchers and technologists.

Describing herself as a "tri-sector athlete" who has moved between government, academia, and the private sector, Cara talks about growing Pitch Fest, which pairs city government agencies with academics and civic technologists willing to help solve specific, openly shared problems, from 100 attendees and a few agencies in its first year to 40 participating agencies and 104 pitches, with 100 of those pitches drawing at least one interested expert.

Cara talks about collaborations, cold-emailing, and the power of connection.

*Tacit Knowledge *
Hosted by Kumar Garg
Presented by Renaissance Philanthropy
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Produced by All Together Now

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/cara-eckholm-506b2236/

KEY QUESTIONS AND TAKEAWAYS

What is Pilot City

A matchmaking program, started by Cara Eckholm in New York, where city agencies pitch specific problems they need help with and local researchers or technologists apply to work with them — flipping the usual model where academics pitch ideas in search of a government partner.

How does the matchmaking process actually work?

City agencies present problem statements in short, informal pitches (originally modeled on how Stanford classes help students find startup co-founders). Interested researchers and technologists then apply to work with a specific agency, and the agency chooses who they want to work with from the applicant pool.

Why build a "buyer-first" model instead of starting with researchers' ideas?

Eckholm observed that both sides were siloed: academics and civic technologists had ideas for improving cities but no government partner, while city agencies had unmet needs but no channel to reach outside talent. Starting with the agency's stated problem — the "buyer" — rather than a researcher's proposal solved the matching problem directly.

What makes a city a good candidate for a Pitchfest program?

A metro population of at least a million, a government champion willing to publicly share unsolved problems (which runs against how most agencies communicate), and either a research university or an active civic tech community — most U.S. cities already have the latter.

What's a real-world example of this kind of collaboration paying off?

Economist Al Roth was approached by an NYC Department of Education official who had read his work on medical residency matching and asked him to help redesign the city's high school placement process. The redesign was later adopted in Boston, and Roth went on to win a Nobel Prize for that work and related market-design research, including kidney-exchange matching.

How much traction has the program gotten?

In its most recent year, 40 agencies submitted 104 pitches, and 100 of those pitches drew at least one interested researcher — some drew as many as 20. The program is now expanding beyond New York to Boston, Hennepin County (Minneapolis), Los Angeles (water district), and Philadelphia (regional transit).

What's holding academia back from more of this kind of applied work?

Tenure and promotion structures reward publication in a narrow set of journals, not applied public-sector collaboration — to the point that one professor Eckholm spoke with left his work as a city and White House housing policy adviser off his tenure application, worried it would make him look like an activist rather than a scholar.

On career and confidence

• Eckholm's own path into this work began with a cold email — she reached out to her boss's boss, former NYC Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, offering to help with a post-pandemic economic recovery commission, with no idea if he'd respond. That opportunity ended up shaping the next several years of her career.
• Her tacit-knowledge takeaway is what she calls "delusional confidence" — treating open calls for applications ("apply even if you're underqualified") literally, and being willing to send many speculative emails knowing only a fraction will land.
• She distinguishes this from overconfidence: the goal isn't to claim expertise you don't have, but to clearly articulate what value you could add and let curiosity — not credentials — carry the pitch.

Episode Links

• Cara Eckholm — Founder of Pilot City; also founder of AKA Urban, an advisory firm for public-sector building projects.
• Pilot City — A program of Renaissance Philanthropy aimed at strengthening state capacity by helping cities, counties, and regions tap into the scientific and technical expertise already present in their communities. Its flagship format is the Pitchfest — a bottom-up matchmaking event where government agency staff pitch problem statements and get paired with regional experts. Pilot City began in New York in 2023 and, with support from the Sloan Foundation and later Coefficient Giving, has since expanded the Pitchfest model to Boston, Hennepin County, and other regions.
• Renaissance Philanthropy — The organization producing Tacit Knowledge Podcast; Cara is a fellow there.
• Cornell Tech's Urban Tech Hub — Where Eckholm did her original fellowship and where Pilot Pitchfest first launched.
• New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) — The city agency partner from Eckholm's original fellowship research on agency innovation capabilities.
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — Seed funder of the first Pitchfest event.
• Al Roth — Economist (Harvard, then Stanford), 2012 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences for work on market design — the "knock it out of the park" example Cara cites, where a cold outreach from an NYC public servant led to Roth redesigning the city's high school matching process.
• Mechanism design — The field of economics concerned with designing rules and institutions — like matching markets — to produce a desired outcome; the broader discipline Roth's work belongs to.
• Medical residency match (NRMP) — The National Resident Matching Program, also known as "The Match" — uses the applicant-proposing algorithm that Roth's research built on and that also underlies the NYC high school match and kidney-exchange matching.
• Dan Doctoroff — Former NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Development (2002–2008), later CEO of Bloomberg L.P. and Sidewalk Labs — the boss's-boss Cara cold-emailed, which opened her path into city work.
• Sidewalk Labs — Alphabet's urban-tech incubator, where Doctoroff later served as CEO and which Cara also applied to.