By Chris Quirk

The door to the technology industry for Nate Yohannes, JD ’12, was that of an Uber.

It was the spring of 2016, and Yohannes was a White House appointee nearing the end of his tenure there. He had just attended a one-year memorial for Sheryl Sandberg’s late husband, Dave Goldberg, in Palo Alto and ordered an Uber— a shared ride as it turns out—to get to San Francisco. As his car pulled up, a woman walked over to the same car. “We’re at the point where we’re both touching the door handle, and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I think this is my car,’” Yohannes recalls. “She looked at the license tag and it was her car too, so we hopped in.”

Yohannes’ companion for the ride happened to be Ana White, then a general manager in human resources at Microsoft. “Why would a senior HR leader at Microsoft order a discount car service? It must have been an accident.” The accident led to a new career path for Yohannes. Over the course of the 90-minute ride into the city, he recalls that the duo had a meaningful conversation about technology, their lives and ambitions. Not long after their talk, he was contacted for interviews and was soon offered a position at Microsoft.

It was a serendipitous moment, but his success is not driven by luck. Yohannes, a creative problem solver whose career had already traversed law, business and technology, also has the grit that is borne of challenges. His parents are from Eritrea and were granted political asylum in the United States. They landed in Rochester, New York, where Yohannes was born and raised. And while they eventually thrived, the first several years were tough. “Some of my earliest meals were from a soup kitchen,” Yohannes recalls. “My parents built up the best platform ever to springboard into the American Dream.”

In just over a decade, Yohannes has progressed from law school to the White House to his current position in the upper echelons of the technology industry. After notable achievements at Microsoft and then Meta, in July of last year he was named president of the Data & AI Lab, and global head of research and development, at Zeta, a company that combines AI and consumer research to assist marketing divisions of major corporations.

“Nate embodies the emerging model of the cognitive professional and business executive—a dynamic, perpetually curious learner with exceptional social intelligence,” says Lila Tretikov, partner and head of AI Strategy at New Enterprise Associates, and the former CEO of Wikipedia, whom Yohannes worked for at Microsoft.

Yohannes says he always had technology in mind throughout his professional career. “I love politics, and I love law, but also as a kid I was taking apart machines and putting them back together, and in law school I worked in the IT help center. It was always a part of my mojo.”

After earning his degree at UB, Yohannes took a position as associate general counsel for the Money Management Institute. It was soon after the global financial crisis of 2008. “The MMI represents the wealth management industry, and this was during the crux of the Dodd-Frank years,” he explains. Congress was in the process of beefing up financial regulations to prevent a future market meltdown, and Yohannes was in the thick of it, working with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Treasury Department and Congress to hammer out details of the new framework.

The government connections led Yohannes to the White House in 2015, where he served as senior advisor to the chief investment and innovation officer at the Small Business Administration. He was evaluating proposals and helping to direct billions of dollars of private equity and government grants to promising businesses. “We had this pool of capital, and it was reserved for American small businesses focused on high growth R&D,” he says. “I loved working with moonshot companies that wanted to build bones out of mushrooms or create fertilizer that could grow corn in extreme temperatures.”

Soon after meeting White in the Uber, Yohannes began his formative chapter at Microsoft, where he started working with AI regularly. “These were the early innings,” he says. As an AI product manager, Yohannes was charged with managing details across the company so products would launch and operate smoothly, a massive and high-stakes enterprise. “You work with the engineers, hundreds of them, and then you have legal and marketing and finance, as well as the ethics team,” he recalls. “If there’s one hiccup, [it’s] on the front page of The New York Times.” Within a couple of years, he became director of product and strategy for the office of the CTO, which was leading Microsoft’s early investments in OpenAI.

Soon he was catching the eye of tech leaders, and Meta offered him a post on their AI team at a crucial moment. Meta’s Instagram app was losing market share to a newbie, TikTok, a video-based social media app loaded with eye candy. “The Meta suite wasn’t solving users’ needs. It was serving up static images, and content from people you followed,” Yohannes says. What users clearly wanted was short-form video and the chance to discover new content. “Our job was to infuse state-of-the-art AI and digitally transform Meta. I joined a team of firefighters to fix that algorithm.” The result, Reels, is now a principal feature of Instagram. “The experience sharpened my AI skills like no other, because consumer AI moves fast.”

One constant throughout Yohannes’ career in technology has been his advocacy for the user, a commitment he traces back to the listening skills he honed as a law student at UB. “Great lawyers must be great listeners,” he says, “and that translates directly to AI.” Now leading the development of next-generation AI products at Zeta, he focuses on understanding his users’ pain points and devising thoughtful and inclusive solutions.

At the end of the day, he points out, humans have always created tools to make life easier, and AI is simply part of that tradition. “I view AI from a sociological and anthropological standpoint in terms of advancing the human journey,” he says. “And I look at AI as a meaningful tool to open the door to where the human journey can go.”