Government agencies produce some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the greater Washington region, according to the founder of a new artificial intelligence startup.

Justin Antonipillai ran the Economics and Statistics Administration at the Commerce Department, which includes the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, before starting his own company Wire Wheel.

Antonipillai wanted to make the vast amount of data collected by the Census Bureau available to the public.

“We wanted to make it easy for different parts of our country to use. We wanted nonprofits and charities, and small- and medium-size companies to be able to access and use that data just like hedge funds do, just like bigger companies,” Antonipillai told What’s Working in Washington.

“I had low expectations to start… I had a guess that D.C. wouldn’t be the best place to do it, honestly,” he said.

“It turned out, there’s really a lot of talent here in the area, and there were people that were willing to come to D.C. because they cared about the mission,” Antonipillai said.

He pointed to the National Science Foundation, NASA, the local universities and the development community. “There really is an unbelievably sophisticated technology and advisory committee to help you get started,” he said.

Antonipillai said that government employees like him have fantastic potential in the private sector. “They know how to run major agencies, they know how to run and manage people. They’ve been doing it in an environment that’s challenging sometimes, and if they went outside and started, they’d be able to do some pretty magical things.”

“We had a project, for example, where we wanted to share healthcare information,” said Antonipillai, noting it is extremely important to disseminate to the whole country data such as insurance status for smaller populations and children.

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