Tiffany Moore planned to pursue a career in foreign service after graduating from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. With no offers and running out of options, in the spring of 1996 she switched gears and joined the office of then-U.S. Congressman Fred Upton.
Tiffany Moore’s title at the Consumer Technology Association is senior vice president of political and industry affairs — which means an array of different responsibilities fall under her purview.
CTA, formerly the Consumer Electronics Association, is a trade group that represents the $505 billion consumer technology industry in the United States. The sector supports more than 18 million jobs.
Moore is not only in charge of advocating CTA’s efforts at the federal level, which impacts the consumer technology industry, but she also oversees its political strategy and programs, including its political action committee. In addition, she leads an internal team responsible for the launch and management of a $10 million fund that’s focused on supporting women and venture funds that invest in women, people of color, and other underrepresented entrepreneurs.
It’s all in a day’s work for a woman who happily recalls her early days growing up in Detroit.
“I guess my fondest memories are my neighborhood, which was near Seven Mile and
Greenfield roads,” Moore says. “I remember walking to Perry’s, which was the drug store at one corner, and then you went toward Eight Mile and there was Shields Pizza, where my mother would sometimes splurge and get us pizza.”
Moore was an only child, and her mother played a critical role in her life, first and foremost by the example she set for her daughter.
“She was a single mother and she worked her tail off,” Moore says. “My mother was the inspiration for everything. She worked her entire career as an executive secretary at Rockwell International in Troy.
“But there was also a group of women who, along with her, raised me in Detroit. They effectually became known as my ‘godmothers.’ They played a role in picking me up from school, dropping me off, and making sure I got where I needed to go when my mother was working.”
In her role with the Consumer Technology Association, Moore has met numerous dignitaries, including Laurent Bili, ambassador of France to the United States.
Moore was barely out of diapers when she first met one of her godmothers.
“I went to Sleepy Hollow Educational Centers for preschool and Dr. Johnnye Summerville was my kindergarten teacher,” Moore says. “She was the epitome of what a kindergarten teacher should be; she inspired curiosity and excitement. I was a smart kid but I also needed some focus, and she cared so much about her students. We all got personal attention, and she became a great family friend who knew me my entire life and inspired a curiosity in learning.”
Moore continued her education at several Detroit schools — first at Burt Elementary, then St. Scholastica, and finally at Christ the King.
“When I was 12 or 13, the city was going through some challenges and my mother wanted
In early January, CES 2024 drew more than 135,000 attendees to the Las Vegas Convention Center.
me to be able to go to a good high school. So we moved to Rochester and ended up sharing a townhouse with one of her coworkers, and I went to Rochester High School.”
Following graduation, Moore enrolled at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where she pursued a curious double major: Spanish and Japanese.
“I was the first in my family to go to college, and my mother wanted me to get a business degree. She didn’t think I would ever find a job with language degrees. But I had an amazing Spanish teacher at Rochester High; her name was Gay Wittenstrom. I took (Spanish) every year and loved it.
“So it just seemed very natural to continue with it. And then I studied in Japan at the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies in the summer of 1995, which was actually the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
As it turned out, the value of Moore’s decision to double-major in two languages was solidified even before her memorable summer in Japan.
“In August of 1993, I’d just completed my freshman year at Western and declared my Spanish major, and was probably just starting my first Japanese language class,” she says. “I made my first trip to Washington, D.C., on a bus, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the March on Washington. And I knew I needed to be in Washington, D.C.”
Fast-forward to the spring of 1996, when Moore graduated from college. At the time, she was solely focused on a career in the foreign service, where she hoped to travel the world. She researched any job in Washington that seemed to offer that opportunity, and flooded the city with resumes.
“The day before I moved to D.C., I still didn’t have a job,” Moore says. “Then I got a call from then-Congressman Fred Upton’s office, telling me to give them a call when I got to D.C.”
Upton, whose district covered Kalamazoo, had noted the return address on Moore’s resume.
“I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me,” Moore says. “I didn’t have a political background. I wasn’t a donor’s kid. But he gave me a chance, an opportunity, and a month later I started working for him.”
Moore stood out from her first day on the job.
“She started with the very basics by answering the phone and greeting constituents,” Upton recalls fondly. “It’s a schedule that’s like a doctor’s office in terms of appointments, and it gets interrupted quite frequently with votes. But Tiffany proved herself from day one. She’s very talented, a good writer, and she connects really well with people.”
Years before websites became common for every member of Congress, Moore launched one for Upton.
“Along with her job at Rockwell, my mother had a part-time bookkeeping job and her own desktop publishing business,” Moore explains. “When she bought our first computer to make extra money typing dissertations for students or other projects, I soaked it all in.
“Email was still new, and members of Congress were just figuring out the internet and web pages. The favorite browser at the time we were building Congressman Upton’s first website was Netscape.”
Even as Moore was working her way up the ladder, she couldn’t let go of her dream of working in foreign service.
“I was about a year into working for the congressman when I signed up to take the foreign service exam, but I didn’t pass it,” Moore reveals. “I only had the background in foreign languages, not the broader kind of undergraduate program — and actually, the foreign service exam is one of the hardest to pass.
“It’s multifaceted and includes military history, foreign policy, and the history of Europe. But there are people who are foreign service officers who failed it multiple times and finally passed, so I wasn’t too demoralized.”
Especially when Upton expanded Moore’s responsibilities in his office.
“The congressman said I could work on policy and cover foreign policy issues for him,” Moore says. “I ended up going to grad school while I worked on the Hill. They let me leave work at four o’clock so I could make it to my classes.”
Attending as a part-time student, Moore earned a master’s degree in international affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School, and continued working in Upton’s office for 6.5 years.
“She had a meteoric rise,” Upton says proudly. “I mean, here’s a person who started at the front desk, and in a short span of years she ended up running my legislative office, going into my senior meetings with our leadership or committees, and the different groups I was in. (She was) one of the best hires I ever made, absolutely.”
Moore worked with Upton through the 9-11 terror attacks, when her job portfolio swelled even more.
“It was a chaotic time on Capitol Hill, and I very much appreciated the opportunity to work on issues related to homeland security after September 11,” she says. “But I was also working on other issues for the congressman, including agriculture policy.
“I started working closely with Kellogg’s, and I ended up leaving to go work for Kellogg’s as their Washington representative, as director of government relations.”
Still living full-time in D.C., Moore traveled back and forth every few weeks to Kellogg’s corporate headquarters in Battle Creek, and in 2006 she made another career move to a position as an assistant U.S. trade representative for intergovernmental affairs and a public liaison.
Suddenly, the young woman who didn’t pass the foreign service exam was working on behalf of the United States to advance better trade relations with other countries.
“Crazy, right?” Moore says. “I believe in serendipity, and the fact that I was able to represent my country on trade matters after failing the foreign service exam made it all that more special, and reminded me that I could serve my country in a different way.”
In 2010, around the time an influx of entrepreneurs began to create business models for an array of different ventures and ideas, Moore started her own consulting company.
“I decided to follow my mother’s entrepreneurial instincts to launch my own firm,” she recalls. “It allowed me to continue working as a consultant for Kellogg’s and focus on building out a technology policy practice with an all-women firm, TwinLogic Strategies.”
Moore’s specialty was advising corporations, trade associations, and other coalitions on how to influence technology and innovation policy before Congress and the White House.
“The Consumer Electronics Association was one of the first organizations we pitched, and they became one of our first clients,” she says. “They hired me to join them in-house in 2015, and I’ve been there ever since.”
The technology sector nowadays is almost too vast to describe; it’s exponentially larger than it was 15 years ago when Moore started her consulting firm.
“Every company is a tech company now,” she says. “I have the opportunity to influence advocacy at the federal level, particularly at the White House and on Capitol Hill. We represent about 1,300 companies within the entire tech ecosystem, and 80 percent of them are small businesses and startups.
“It can range from issues like self-driving vehicle policy to artificial intelligence, blockchain, patents, copyright, how they’re dealing with privacy and data security, you name it. All of those issues are at the intersection of tech policy, and we do that fearlessly every day.”
And then there’s CES, the annual trade show owned and produced by CTA, which features the latest groundbreaking innovations on the tech landscape. At this year’s event in January, nearly 140,000 participants converged on Las Vegas, where 300 of the Fortune Global 500 were represented, along with a record 1,400-plus startups.
Moore was somewhere down there, smack in the middle of it, reveling in every minute of the exciting chaos. For years, she’s been a well-known and highly respected lobbyist and executive who may have left Detroit decades ago, but has never forgotten the impact of her hometown on her life and career.
“Those kind of ties, they don’t leave,” she says. “I may not live there, but I still consider myself a Detroiter. I’ve worked in D.C. for 27 years, but you’d be hard-pressed to get me to call myself a Washingtonian. I’m so grateful for my experience growing up in Detroit, and for the work ethic I inherited from my family.
“(My mother) was an entrepreneur by necessity to make ends meet,” Moore says. “She wanted me to have the best future possible. She was always willing to make any sacrifice so I could succeed. I am her wildest dream come true, the ultimate fruit of her hard work and labor, and I can’t wait to show her this article.”
