Jason Putorti

After a year of building Votizen with the team, I finally had a chance to take a small break over the holidays and reflect. I’ve worked in the Valley for almost five years now. Crazy to think how fast the time flew by, and how I’m more excited than ever. Since I haven’t written much lately, I want to briefly share what I’ve been doing.

To tell you where I’m going, I have to first look back…

I arrived in Silicon Valley in 2007, originally looking to found my own company like many other engineers and designers. I had a decent idea, but execution was the daunting part, and after I lost my co-founder to a venture capital job, I had to make a decision.

Noah Kagan from Mint.com, introduced by a friend I grew up with in New York, met me for korean food, a Noah favorite, in the fall of 2006. He actually offered me a job before introducing himself— that’s Noah, all hustle. I politely said “no,” but he piqued my curiosity enough for me to meet with Aaron Patzer the next morning. He walked me through the pitch deck at the modest Mint office, at the time a few rented cubes in an old building in Downtown Mountain View. It seemed incredibly solid to me. Their path from startup to success was clear. As someone who is originally from the East Coast, skeptical of the odd business models and assumptions peddled by other startups, Mint struck me as cut above.

I joined Mint as their 5^th employee and worked there for nearly three years. We were acquired by Intuit in September 2009. I found out about the acquisition by reading the story in TechCrunch.

At that point, I knew it was the beginning of the end, and I began to think about what I should do next.

At my core, I’m a startup guy. I feel funny writing it because I’m not wholly sure what it means, but I know I enjoy leading and being the last voice in the room. I enjoy getting things done without a dozen-person conference call. Above all I’m driven to create and to win, and I knew once the chase was over at Mint (our raison d’être was Aaron being fed up with an Intuit product) it was time to move on.

During my time at Mint, something happened that got me really excited— more excited than the world of personal finance: The 2008 Presidential Race.

The most captivating political story of my lifetime was the Florida Recount battle following the 2000 Presidential election. I remember being so excited about the race and the drama around counties, the Supreme Courts, results seemingly changing daily, the characters like James Baker, Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, and of course the candidates. Just months earlier I saw Vice President Gore host a rally at Carnegie Mellon, and I shook Senator Kerry’s hand at another in 2004 during his losing campaign. In 2008, my excitement in politics was rekindled. Like many citizens, I followed both parties’ primary debates, caucuses, and elections. I immersed myself in the conversation and felt that I had the opportunity to participate in the direction of our country.

As opposed to 2000 and 2004, however, in 2008, I didn’t let this excitement go, I grabbed hold of it.

During the early part of the 2008 campaign, a light bulb went off in my head when I saw a tweet, oddly enough from now candidate Newt Gingrich, featured during a prime-time newscast on a major television network. Then again, when Sarah Palin began communicating to the world directly through her Facebook page, and the mainstream media was forced to pick it up. Politicians were going directly to the people.

Now, politicians talking to people wasn’t new, but the scale and technology was. And, that got me thinking. I wanted to aggregate all of this new, primary-source content. And, I became interested in narratives, specifically how the right and the left both had their own version of reality, and their own language. My solution was to build Capitol Circle to be a Bloomberg-style dashboard that showed conversations between politicans, pundits, and voters, as well as the top stories from the day, both from the left and right of the blogosphere. It was fun and interesting— but it wasn’t going to change the world.

After Mint, I started talking and getting introduced to a lot of smart people around the Valley about where this could go. It was around this time that I was introduced to David Binetti— who would eventually become my co-founder. David had successfully lobbied the Senate to introduce the first Startup Visa bill through social media efforts alone, without a paid lobbyist. At first, David and I decided just to advise each other on our projects, but a few months later I bumped into David on the Lean Startup circuit and pitched him on a crazy news/lobbying idea I came up with on a flight a few days earlier. In short, replacing large campaign donations given by lobbyists in exchange for favorable legislation, with a lot of smaller donations from voters.

In talking for hours with David, I came to realize that my approach was short-sighted.

This was the spark I needed I begin my journey building Votizen.

******

In politics, money is simply a proxy to buy votes.

That money is used to place advertisements through media like television and direct mail. The Internet is exponentially more powerful, but so far it’s only potential. David and I agreed that if we could create a system that leveraged our voting identities, and published them online, it could drastically alter the reach, precision, and tone of political communication and advertising.

And, thus, Votizen was born.

We have spent a long time building and designing an entirely new database. Briefly, we’ve acquired and normalized the voting rolls across all 50 states in the U.S. and the District of Columbia. In the average Congressional race, only about 30,000 people decide the race, out of a total of 850,000 who could theoretically vote. If a candidate gets a majority of those 30,000 votes, he/she will win. Therefore, if you could encourage more people to register to vote and, more interestingly, identify other people through their social connections, those grouped formations could rally around location and/or issues, so much so that the politicians would ignore at their own peril.

This is why candidates seek endorsements from unions, for example, because these existing groups and organizations are expert at spreading their message, getting voters registered and to the polls, and supporting the candidate that brings them what they want.

Today, social media is making this type of self-organization possible among any group. Votizen gives that organization teeth, a sort of “certificate of authenticity” for a grassroots movement. We’re able to do this because we can prove our users vote, and we’ve architected a system that segments citizens across different voting profiles. For example, we know those who vote frequently, those who vote but only infrequently, those whom have never registered to vote, and those likely to support given candidates or initiatives. From this segmentation, Votizen users, or votizens, can use social pressure and more precise messaging to motivate others to join movements and take action.  These tools have been available for a long time now, but they’ve been reserved for political parties and large PACs who want to direct mail or robo-call you. We are taking that power, and giving it to you the voter. We feel political messaging will always be more effective coming from someone you know, and this transition from top-down command and control, to bottom-up through social networks is where we’re headed. As Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, “all politics is local.” To us, all politics is social.

As 2012 starts, movements are swirling all around us, but not affecting real change.

The Occupy protests are powerful, but ultimately, what impact will they have on the ballot box? They’ve shown the ability to raise awareness of a message, but what about the tactical part? What if hundreds of thousands of people could build strong voting coalitions around wealth inequality and use their mass to increase pressure on politicians to act?

Nearly everyone in the Valley has a vocal stance against SOPA, but the fact is, accountability in Washington is dangerously low because we continue to re-elect the same representatives. People and groups with lots of money exert outsized influence over voters, because money buys advertising, in many cases negative, and a host of other means (like lobbying) to convince you to vote a certain way— possibly against your own interests.

What frustrates me about most of these efforts is that the only thing that really matters to a politician is the threat of being removed from office. Capitalists need capital, politicians need votes. If enough people boycott Walmart or GoDaddy, the companies are pressured to reverse their course because it affects their profits. In politics, it’s much the same, except that votes are the currency. Without depriving them of votes, they seek dollars for their reelection coffers. There are lots of wonderful and responsive public servants in this country, but this is the reality. For instance, here in the State of California, 65% of the bills in the State Assembly are mostly written by the lobbyists, usually with a campaign donation on passage for the assembly member who introduced the bill. This is not what students are taught in civics class.

*****

So, this is where we are. And, this is where I am.

Since my time at Mint and Bessemer, people have asked me: “Why Votizen? Why politics?”

It’s a fair question. Committing yourself to a startup focused on politics isn’t normal in Silicon Valley. But, this is where 100% of my passion is right now, and those who have heard this story in person, are left with no doubt of that passion.

I was born in Schenectady, New York. General Electric had a big plant there. Before GE left the city, under frustrating political circumstances, it was known as the city that, “lights and hauls the world.” My great-grandparents came to America from Italy. They built locomotives and power equipment. Then, I moved to Pittsburgh for school, another place known for people that build things— once it was the largest industrial center in the world. Silicon Valley historically has also been that kind of place, but I’m not the only one lately who tires of the ridiculous startup pitches and founders more interested in making a quick flip or cloning another business.

I have been both deeply interested in and frustrated with our country’s politics. I have chosen, for right now in my life, to commit myself entirely to building something of real value to address a significant problem and to leverage networks, design, and technology to disrupt a market that is in dire need of disruption. Silicon Valley has shown the power to change the world for the better through technology, and I want to be part of that legacy. I want to serve my country by doing something simple yet powerful: Giving it back to the voters.

I hope you will take it, and join me on Votizen.

My presentation from Warm Gun called “The Developer’s Unicorn: Tactics for Recruiting (Good) Designers” — full blog post is coming soon. You can see the video on the 500 Startups Livestream if you jump to 32 minutes in. The Slideshare is available too if you prefer.

Designers, what do you want to tell all those developer/founders that are looking to hire you? Any stories or bad hiring / recruiting experiences you want to share?

Engineers / Founders, what do you want to know about catching unicorns finding, recruiting, and closing design talent?

Please tell me in the comments, you can leave them anonymously. I’m giving a talk on the subject at the Warm Gun Conference on Friday, and will follow up with a post.

My Votizen open letter on the Oakland A’s