Coworking with…Sean Evins

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

Working with governments and explain[ing] how Meta tools and products can be used for better governance in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). For instance, supporting the launch of our Covid or climate authoritative information centers across the region, ensuring election integrity, and pursuing creative solutions for delivery of government services.

My job is thinking about those in government and the civic space, and their understanding and use of our tools and our products—identifying opportunities for collaboration and partnership, or helping identify opportunities and use cases to potentially create new products in some spaces or adapt them as appropriate.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

AR/VR and the metaverse are probably the most exciting, because there’s applications for unknown things, like education, certainly, if we do this the right way.

If you’re a schoolkid in downtown Manhattan, or where I come from in Greenville, South Carolina, you might not be able to see the seven wonders of the world—but if technology companies do AR/VR correctly, you have an opportunity to not just learn from a book, but learn with a coordinated visual element that goes along with that, and a haptic element. So it all of a sudden just expands your ability to learn and understand things.

I’m least excited about robots. Because so far all the robots I’ve seen are not what I thought they’d be, like in The Jetsons. We have a long way to go. I’m also not super jazzed about holograms—not a big fan. I hope those don’t make a comeback. And I’m not wild about flying cars.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

Golf and BBQ are huge passions that don’t translate to LinkedIn. I went to college in Memphis, Tennessee, and I grew up in South Carolina, so my knowledge and tastebuds of the barbeque spectrum are pretty complete, if you will.