Tomicah Tillemann

Tomicah Tillemann is a partner and Global Head of Policy for the a16z crypto team, where he builds public policy architecture to support the next generation of the internet.

Previously, Tomicah served as Senior Advisor to two secretaries of state, leading a team of experts that built 20 major initiatives in 55 countries. He joined the State Department in 2009 as Hillary Clinton's speechwriter and spent four years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee working with Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and John Kerry.

Tomicah also served as the Executive Director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at New America, where he led programs to address social impact, finance, and governance challenges worldwide. He authored extensive research on how to harness frontier technologies to strengthen democratic institutions, and launched successful efforts to use decentralized platforms to combat public corruption, increase government efficiency, and promote private sector accountability. He helped deploy the world's first decentralized land registry and managed development of open source technology platforms for city, state, and federal agencies in the U.S..

He has served as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the United Nations World Food Program Innovation Advisory Council, the Lantos Foundation Board of Trustees, and as Chairman of the Global Blockchain Business Council.

He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University and holds a Ph.D. with distinction from the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.