Phillip Hedayatnia
Phillip Hedayatnia
Phillip Hedayatnia is an American Social entrepeneur, Columnist, Political strategist, and User experience designer. He is the cofounder of Solver Labs, and formerly cofounded RealPolitics News and GoForge Cloud. Phillip currently attends Rice University and works on education innovation research as a Fellow at the Liu Idea Lab for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Hedayatnia has written for Lockergnome, Yahoo, and RealPolitics News.
Education
Hedayatnia attended Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio before attending Rice University as a Trustees' Scholar. While attending Rice, Hedayatnia became one of the first Fellows of the Liu Idea Lab for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and was appointed the Associate Vice President of the Rice University Student Association as a freshman. [1]
Career
Hedayatnia founded his first company in 2013 as part of the LaunchHouse accelerator, YouCue TV, to build a connected television platform for online digital media creators.
At the time, Hedayatnia was 15 years old.
After selling the technology behind YouCue, Hedayatnia launched his second company, HybridSite Creative, to support his freelance user experience design and web development projects.
In 2015, Hedayatnia merged HybridSite Creative with Palo Alto-based cloud computing startup GoForge and joined the company as CEO alongside co-founder David Tesler.
In order to focus on media and education projects, in early 2016, Hedayatnia left GoForge to co-found millennial-focused news site RealPolitics News, where he served as Editor-In-Chief and co-hosted a podcast entitled "The RealPolitics Podcast".
Hedayatnia also traveled on the campaign trail, covering campaign events from both main candidates and anchoring RealPolitics News's live video coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention, which was later documented in the award-winning documentary film A More Civil War.
In late 2016, Hedayatnia announced the creation of a "project" to rethink the role of problem-based learning in education, called Project Solver.
In early 2017, the project was renamed as "Solver Labs" and a closed beta of Solver Labs's education project platform was launched at South by Southwest EDU.
Politics
Hedayatnia describes himself as a centrist, claiming that he seeks a "healthy political climate" irrespective of party.
In the 2016 US Presidential election, Hedayatnia initially supported Ohio Gov. John Kasich and joined his digital content team as a developer and strategist, but later joined Gov. Gary Johnson's candidacy as a lead digital strategist, constructing the campaign's web presence and advising the campaign on messaging.
Prior to his activity in the 2016 election, Hedayatnia became the Chief technology officer of the Millennial Institute, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit "dedicated to reducing voter apathy and informing millennials on pressing political issues."
After leaving the Gary Johnson campaign, Hedayatnia returned to the campaign trail as a journalist while serving as Editor-In-Chief of RealPolitics News.