Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and chief executive of the nonprofit Better Angels, is running for mayor.

He’s another in a modest list of mayoral candidates with atypical backgrounds. While public office veterans Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman are leading the pack, the candidate pool is stacked with community organizers, a reality television star and now Miller – a private sector leader.

His technology background is woven into his candidacy. A core tenant of Miller’s campaign is what he deems as “operational efficiency.” He wants to create an app that tracks city data, budgets and project timelines for Los Angeles residents; streamline the approval process for building new housing; automate bureaucratic processes like permits and approvals for businesses; and use artificial intelligence to prevent traffic jams.

“There is an opportunity to drive innovation across all these different operational areas,” he said. “Whether we’re talking about technology that can be used for public safety, technology that would help mitigate against wildfires, technology that can be used to have better logistics management of sanitation operations.”

Miller, who is running as a Democrat, is wading into the campaign at a time when hostility towards technology is high.

A Pew Research poll released in September 2025 found the majority of people are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. Setting autonomous Waymo cars on fire has turned into a protest symbol against the government.

Polls found most citizens did not approve of how the Department of Government Efficiency initiative (also known as DOGE) – which at the time was headed by tech leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – were conducting projects within its first five months. DOGE disbanded as of November last year.

“It’s critical that political leaders have some awareness and familiarity with where tech is going and have the right advisers helping them,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But it’s even more important that their eyes are on what actually matters, which is supporting a healthy democracy and the economic and political health of their constituents.”

A career in tech and nonprofits

Miller has spent his career injecting technology into his civic goals.

He cut his teeth in 1999 as the founder and chief executive of Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., a Santa Monica-based education company geared towards boosting online learning for adults. The company went public in 2011 and was acquired by a private equity firm in 2021 in a $5.2 billion deal.

He founded LA-Tech.org, a nonprofit connecting the city’s tech ecosystem with interns and talent from East L.A. and South L.A. He co-founded and currently serves on the board of several companies and nonprofits that inject technology into health care access, veteran affairs and donation funds. Most notably, he co-founded a nonprofit called Better Angels in 2022 with the goal of using technology to combat homelessness. It became the catalyst for his mayoral bid.

“The deeper I got working with the city, particularly with Better Angels, the more dysfunction became apparent,” Miller said. “And the more frustrated I got with the way things were operating and how inefficiently the government was run, how poorly it was being led.”

The company’s Better Angeles outreach app is used by the likes of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition to connect homeless people with resources. Its shelter management system was created to keep track of which homeless shelters had free beds. Still, Los Angeles County does not have a centralized, comprehensive directory of its housing options for people experiencing homelessness.

“We have no streamlined process for getting people into those beds,” Miller said. “We don’t have any data sharing amongst all the various outreach workers. We’re extremely inefficient around how we’re tracking and understanding where the problem even is.”

Fighting tech’s reputation

When Miller declared his candidacy, Bass spokesperson Douglas Herman told the Los Angeles Times that “the last thing Los Angeles needs now is another self-funder who doesn’t understand the crisis of affordability in our city.”

“I do see by and large an incredible lack of understanding of the messiness of doing policy and governing democratically amongst people in the tech world,” said Srinivasan. “That’s not even about blaming anybody. When we study tech, we learn next to nothing about civic society, about governance, about democracy or even about economics.”

Miller knows his reputation in technology may precede his work. He advocated against apartheid in South Africa in high school, voiced his support of his school’s teacher’s union. He said he is a lifelong Democrat who plans on improving operations on the city level.

“You see that a new CEO comes into a company and all of a sudden the company turns around and starts doing great,” he said. “All of a sudden, a company that’s on a downward spiral has a full turnaround. All of a sudden, a company that was operating in a deficit becomes profitable. There are people that know how to scale, there are people that know how to operate, and there are people who don’t.”