About Carole
Technology never wins on its own. People decide.
A data scientist and researcher, Carole Lawson has spent two decades studying how human behavior, not technology alone, drives lasting change.
California's state web
As Director of eServices for the State of California, Carole oversaw all CA.gov initiatives: roughly 400 sites and 4 million pages. Her push to rebuild them on modern web standards took California from 47th in the nation (per Brown University's rankings) to the top, winning “Best of the Web” from the Center for Digital Government.
Inside the room with the platforms
As Chair of the Governor's Innovation Council, she worked directly with early leaders from Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, pioneering early digital, social and open-data initiatives. The work is widely credited as central to the “Government 2.0” movement.
Recognized for it
InformationWeek named her to its InformationWeek 500 Top 10 Technology Innovators two years running, and she served on its Editorial Advisory Board. She has twice delivered keynotes at Oracle OpenWorld and was invited by the United Nations to speak at the World Tourism Organization.
MarketStorm, 2018
With Rick Brown she co-founded MarketStorm, an AI-first marketing and advertising company built years before AI was mainstream, without ever taking outside funding. MarketStorm writes custom algorithms for its clients rather than relying on third-party audiences, and has worked with more than 700 clients.
Today
As Chief Data Officer, Carole is MarketStorm's forward-facing voice on where marketing and consumer behavior are headed next: why the funnel no longer reflects how people decide, and why trust is overtaking traffic as the internet's core currency.
By the numbers
A state web, rebuilt.
“My concern was we (Californians) would lose the thing that's most precious to us, and that's our own creativity…”
Carole on What Gets Measured, on why the state didn't just hire a vendor to save it.
“People have shown intent and then you can follow that intent and actually influence the decisions. You build trust for that company over time.”
Carole Lawson in The Entrepreneur's Logbook
