Pradnya Desh is an attorney, a former U.S. diplomat, a college board trustee, and a startup founder and CEO. Now she wants to add Bellevue City Councilmember to her resume — and address challenges in the city with a focus she honed through tech.
“I want to bring a founder’s mindset to government, the kind of thinking that we’ve used to solve problems,” Desh said. “Because in tech, if something’s broken you don’t just wait, you have to solve it. We study a problem, we build, we talk to users, we iterate, and we constantly make it better. And that is missing from government.”
Desh is the founder and CEO of Advocat, a startup that uses AI to help small companies create, negotiate, review and track legal documents, providing a layer of support to companies that might be priced out of traditional legal services.
The Bellevue City Council is made up of seven at-large members who represent the entire city, and five are up for re-election in the fall. Desh is running for the non-partisan position against Councilmember Jared Nieuwenhuis, and has received the endorsement of King County Democrats and others.
Policy priorities spelled out on Desh’s campaign website include the usual hot-button issues in the region — affordable housing, expanded transit options, social equity, public safety and more.
But she’s bullish on the role she thinks she can play in government to help to boost the city’s and region’s startup ecosystem alongside founders, investors, accelerators and others. Just don’t associate her move-fast-and-break-things mentality with the way Elon Musk approached his role in the Trump administration.
“It’s strange to me that he did it the way that he did because one of the things we do in tech is also try to understand the problem pretty deeply,” Desh said. “You understand the user’s pain, you understand the environment, and then you build.”
Building more affordable housing and more transportation infrastructure — not just in Bellevue but across the Seattle area — is one way Desh envisions making the region more startup friendly. Bellevue is a good place to start because she says it’s a place that “can move a little faster,” but it can still become a lot more tech friendly and business friendly.
Amazon and Meta, and previously Microsoft, have all shown a desire to build and grow in Bellevue. And the city has attracted others to set up offices recently, including TikTok parent ByteDance, Shopify, Zoom, Snowflake, and Shein.
Desh said big tech has a responsibility and an interest in making sure its employees can get from place to place and make the community around it better.
“We have a lot of the dots, but they’re not all connected,” Desh said. “What do startups need? We need funding, we need customers, and in general we need support. We need an ecosystem that supports us so that we find the right connections, we find the right employees — the city has a part in that.”
And so does the state.
Like others across tech, Desh is concerned about the impact of new taxes on businesses in Washington and the potential to drive tech companies out.
“Here we are trying to make our state much more startup friendly, to rival the Bay Area as a startup hub, and it pulls us in the wrong direction,” she said. “I understand that the legislature was in a really difficult position in the fact that there’s such a big budget shortfall. But we need to solve it in a different way.”
Maybe she’ll solve it at the next level of government.
Desh, a mother of three with two sons at the University of Washington, first has to win a City Council election, but she said she does plan to seek higher office at some point.
“I want to see what I can do to help Bellevue now, and especially help our region right now,” she said. “And I think City Council is a very good place to start solving problems now. I’d like to make as much impact as I can at this level and then broaden it.”
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