Who is this guy?

Hey. Thanks for checking out my blog.  I like to say I have intellectual Tourette’s: I love a wide range of eclectic topics, including:

  • paper prototyping, lean startup, design thinking
  • the Everybody Codes movement
  • innovation, incubation, and shepherding technology to improve lives
  • social capital meets web 2.0 (Veblen, Bourdieu, and whuffie)
  • time & product management, efficiency (Getting Things Done)
  • marketing, word-of-mouth, crowdsourcing
  • liberation technology: new media and emerging democracies
  • liberal democratic theory and pluralism
  • moderate Islam and the future of democracy (Roger Scruton)
  • conservative political philosophy (Wendell Berry)
  • civil society (Tocqueville and Nisbet) and civic engagement
  • religion and public life (Reinhold Niebuhr, Nicolas Wolterstorff, and Alasdair MacIntyre)
  • reformation theology

Beyond that, Evan Baehr loves people and ideas… and works to bring them together at the intersection of technology, public policy, and venture capital.  He is currently launching a technology company in Austin, TX, with his HBS classmate Will Davis.  They’re bringing disruptive innovation theory, cutting edge mobile UX, digital marketing, and US Post Office reform together in one company in order to create a new channel for content delivery.  In a given week he chats with magazine publishers, warehouse experts, tablet UX gurus, and the world’s largest printers.

He recently graduated from Harvard Business School, where he spent time on entrepreneurship, online economies, mobile technology incubation, and the everybody codes movement, which teaches MBA types to participate in basic web development.

Most recently he worked for Facebook helping to build out the Facebook Platform, which enables partners to create rich, social experiences around the online and offline worlds.  In an earlier life he worked with PayPal founder Peter Thiel to build a civic engagement social media company.  He has also served as a legislative aide for foreign affairs to Rep. Frank Wolf and as the co-staff director of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, where he helped found the Task Force on International Religious Freedom. Baehr has also worked for the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Baehr graduated cum laude from the  Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Princeton Tory, president of the College Republicans, cofounder of Princeton Votes, president of Students for Academic Freedom, cofounder of Princetonians in the Nation’s Service, and the Republican candidate for Princeton City Council.

Baehr later graduated summa cum laude from Yale Divinity School, where he studied ethics, law, and Islam, and co-founded the Yale Forum on Faith and Politics, host of Voices & Votes. Baehr was the recipient of the James Madison Program Fellowship, the Center for Human Values Fellowship, Princeton’s Lilly Endowment Thesis Prize, the Civitas Fellowship from the Center for Public Justice, and Yale’s William F. Burger Fellowship.

He serves on the board of the Heritage Foundation‘s New York Committee, the Manhattan Institute’s Adam Smith Society, and the New Canaan Society. His wife, Kristina Scurry Baehr, is a graduate of Yale Law School and is a patent litigator with McKool Smith. They live in Austin, TX, with their two year-old son Cooper, and are loving eating from every food truck in town.