Elle & Ellory of The Atlas

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador and together we're going to uncover what technology San Diegans are creating with our own blend of local lifestyle. This podcast episode is proudly brought to you by our friends at Cox Business, broadband and cloud services provider to the modern tech company. As a longtime supporter of San Diego Startup Week and the San Diego startup community, Cox also puts on top tech awards.

Get started.

And most recently, quick pitch with San Diego Venture Group and Techcoast Angels. Thanks again to our friends at Cox Business for their support of the community. Welcome back to the Tacos in Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom. I am at the Atlas HQ Worldwide headquarters here at WeWork B Street in downtown San Diego. Ellen Ellery, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

Co founders of the Atlas. You guys want to give us a quick overview of what it is?

Yeah, absolutely. So the Atlas is an online community for city officials and staff built to help them more easily share success stories, learn what's working in other communities and build relationships with peers and partners.

So.

So we're really focused on accelerating innovation in local government.

Awesome. Govtech. We love talking about this. San Diego's a great place for it. We're gonna dive in a little bit deeper about the Govtech community here. Awesome highlight on that, but wanna get to know both of you a little bit. Where'd you grow up?

I grew up outside of Chicago, A little town called Deerfield, Illinois.

Yeah, I think I hear that in your voice a little bit.

Yeah, it comes out.

Yeah. How about you?

Hilary and I grew up split between Orange county and northern New Jersey.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that's pretty natural between those two cities. Sure. There's a direct flight between them.

Well, not like I spent the first part of my childhood in Southern California and then spent the rest of my childhood in northern New Jersey. I wasn't like a commuter.

Okay, got it. Yeah.

Subsequent.

Yeah. So curious. You kind of the founding of this. I think that takes us to. Your guys work in government at the federal government. Right. But did you both know you were going to work in federal government? Like was that a long time plan or how did you end up there?

I did. So I studied civil and environmental engineering at Rice University and have always, since I was a little kid, have wanted to work on sustainability, basically wanting to make things better for people and animals. And I have that whole background, a.

Little bit of A hippie.

Yeah, I have a little bit of that nature loving bent and bleeding heart too. Yeah, a little bit of a bleeding heart. A lot of it. And when I was in undergrad, I explored a bunch of different options. I worked for an environmental law firm. I did all kinds of internships. And one of my internships was with the City of London. And I realized that I loved government work because it gave you the biggest platform for impact. So rather than doing things as one off projects or one off initiatives that only impacted, I don't know, 100 people, if you work for government, you're talking about millions.

Yeah.

And with much, much bigger budgets.

I ended up in the same place but from a very different lens. So I don't have any one particular passion other than.

You're not a nature girl.

No, I love. I love nature, but I don't.

You're a stunt I don't like.

Do you know, I don't want to save turtles or something like that. I'm really. The things that I.

The turtles. Fucking turtles.

Elle.

The thing I care about is like solving the biggest problem in the most efficient manner. And so when I was. That's always what I've cared the most about. And so government is oftentimes the biggest problem. And definitely you can find more efficient ways to do things. And so I was a public policy major in college. I spent every summer interning across and around D.C. around originally I thought I was going to work internationally, so I did an internship at the un. Quickly learned that the UN is impossible to work in. And so I thought federal government was going to be way more efficient. I ended up working way more efficient.

Ended up starting a company from world to one country.

You'll see how I ended up becoming an entrepreneur because eventually the frustration of government became too much for me. But yeah, that's where we connected for sure. And ultimately where our passion lies.

Got it. So what was the entrance to the federal government? What was your first job there?

So when I graduated college, I won a two year fellowship working with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama administration. So while I was there, I worked a lot on the President's Climate Data and Tools initiative. And after Hurricane Sandy hit, I worked a lot on the Hurricane Sandy rebuilding task force. And those two things together is really what led me to believe that the opportunity for scale and impact was greatest at the local level rather than at the federal level. So those two initiatives were what really made me say, okay, I don't want to work at the federal Any federal level anymore. I really want to work with cities. Yeah. And Elle had a similar kind of.

Yeah. I'm a Chicago girl, so I. My first internship ever was actually with then Senator Barack Obama. So when I graduated college, I actually got a political appointment in his administration. So I was at the EPA in a little office called the Office of International and Tribal Affairs. Little tiny cross cutting shop at epa. That was super fun because it let me do a whole bunch of really exciting stuff that was basically priorities from the White House applied internationally on environmental issues. Again, I don't really know very much about the environment, but I love.

So somebody who worked for the epa.

But I really loved the opportunity to kind of again, be really creative in that space. And so that was. That was my first gig. And frankly, the project that I loved doing the most was a partnership between the city of Philadelphia and the city of Rio, where we were helping them basically share best practices on financing, stormwater infrastructure, and sustainability measures. And that, to me, again, gave me this, like, really awesome. I loved working at the city scale. I loved working with city staff and officials. So when we got the chance to kind of leave and work directly with cities, I took it in a heartbeat.

Because you're. At the end of the day, you're closer to the problems, which means you're closer to the solutions at the city level, which was so refreshing after being in D.C. yeah.

Closer to customer hearing feedback, which is what entrepreneurs love.

Yes. Yeah, it's just. Yeah, it's a shorter feedback loop.

So where did you guys actually meet?

We met through a colleague in the administration. So I had left government to help Rockefeller foundation kind of figure out their resilience and city strategy. Moved to San Diego because my husband's Marine Corps military, and got an email from a colleague who was Ellery's boss.

Used to be my boss at the White House.

Yeah. Saying, hey, this girl Ellery, she's great. She's also a military spouse moving to Southern California. I feel like you guys would really get along. Can you meet up? And so we grabbed coffee at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters in La Jolla, the original spot. And I sat down, and the first question I asked is, so tell me what you did in D.C. and her response was, well, I was super busy, but I'm not sure I did very much. I'm not sure I accomplished any, which, like, made me laugh out loud. Cause anybody who's worked in D.C. or worked in government knows that you're running around like crazy, but it feels like the goalpost is really Far away, all the time. And so from that point, we just got along swimmingly and figured out ways to work together. So we've been working together ever since.

That's awesome. How long ago was that?

That was like six or seven years ago. Yeah, it's crazy. It's nuts.

Yeah.

Six years ago.

Was the atlas an idea already at starting a. Or when did it start to kind of percolate?

We were doing at that point, we had left and basically managed this $3 million grant program from the Rockefeller foundation that was really focused on figuring out kind of what was the barriers to innovation at the local level, what was keeping cities from adopting more resilient, more innovative solutions. And I think we'd at that point, been doing it for about six months or a year and knew that there was something there, knew that there was this core barrier to innovation at local government that wasn't institutional, which is what we kind of gone in thinking. Procurement and financing were challenges, but there was this human component, and we didn't know what the answer was other than every time we propose something new to one of our city partners, they would ask, where has that worked in a city that looks like mine to solve the problem? So we had just started, like, collecting up cool projects, and we brought Ellery into the team to basically help think about how to solve that problem. That was a question that was consistent whether we were talking to San Francisco or El Paso, Texas. And so we figured there was something there. And so Ellery kind of jumped on that while we were still managing the kind of operations of the grant itself.

Got it. Interesting.

Yeah. So in the very, very earliest days, when the atlas was just a twinkle in our eye, it was literally an Excel spreadsheet of really awesome projects that were going on in cities around the world, and the different folks that were involved in those projects and how much they cost and all those kinds of things. And when we eventually launched the atlas a couple years later, that Excel spreadsheet was what formed the initial data that went into the case study database that we still have today.

Really cool. Yeah. So what were the kind of first steps to actually starting the atlas? What did that look like, going from ideation to pulling the trigger?

Well, we started building it initially thinking that we would hand it off to a nonprofit or a philanthropy. Like, we were like, this is a cool idea. Clearly there's a problem. Clearly there's interest at the cities to be able to share more efficiently so that it doesn't take forever for a new solution to scale this kind of recreate the wheel, how to hack that. And so we started building it as a mapping interface using a platform that already existed. Like, so we kind of started building it and eventually we landed in a place that said, well, first of all, we had kind of a give a massacookie situation where every time we would do something, a city partner would be like, well, that would be cool, but I would love to also be able to do that with this data. I would love to be able to send a message to the city to ask questions. I would love to be able to track something else. And so we kept kind of building out with the no software knowledge that we had, a platform, essentially. And we said, well, if this is really going to have the impact that we think it can have on cities and the impact that we'd love it to have on cities, it needs to be something that's scalable and self sustaining and self sustaining in and of itself. It's not something that philanthropy can have and maintain because they just don't have the incentives to maintain a software platform, frankly. And so we spent a lot of time kind of looking at the market and figuring out if there was a business model that would scale. And after, I think a lot of time thinking about it and doing a lot of research and reading, we just decided that there was a business model to be had and there was a scalable business there. And so that was kind of where we dove in. So not, I don't think either of us set out to be entrepreneurs, but we landed there because it was the most efficient way to solve this big problem that we were seeing in our day to day lives.

Got it. Okay. Interesting. How did you immediately kind of divide out tasks? Who's gonna work on what?

So in those earliest days, we had a series of long walks together on the beach.

True story.

This is actually. This is totally true story. And it's a very San Diego story too. We had a series of long walks together on the beach with our dogs. And we would walk and talk and talk about what we thought our strengths and weaknesses were individually and as a team, and the work that we liked to do individually and together as a partnership. And where we landed was it became really obvious that Elle is really, really strong in strategy, day to day operations, sales, finance, all that kind of stuff. And that I'm really, really strong interacting with our cities, with cities themselves. And I'm really good in the product details. And frankly, I mean, it's awesome because I would never want to do Elle's job. And Elle would Never want to do my job. And I wouldn't be good at Elle's job and Elle wouldn't be good at my job. We have very clear, like a very clear division. And it's been like that since the earliest days. But I can't tell you how often we look at each other and are like, I'm so glad that we're not doing this alone. This is so, like, this is so wonderful that we have a co founder.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I mean we were very deliberate and very strategic about it from the very get go.

Yeah.

And so it's been about three years, right?

2016.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of that time was just the two of us.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Most of that was just the two of us. It's really only in the last year that we've built out a team which has been an exciting phase of the business. Definitely a big evolution.

Yeah. So take us through some of those evolution phases of the product and the team, I guess, helping build the product.

I have lost track with how many versions of the atlas.

You want me to go for it?

Yeah, go for it. Yeah. I remember. This was your job.

I was gonna say. I remember, I remember very, very carefully. So the very first version of the atlas was really, I mean, first of all, we started with just a landing page. That was the very first thing that we did. Just capturing interest, people could put in their email addresses kind of thing. Then we built a super, super beta version that was a mapping interface that we did literally with just some like cache that we had on hand from some of the projects we were doing and contracts that we had ongoing. That was the very earliest days. This was when Elle was saying like it was an if you give a mouse a cookie situation. That was the platform where the city officials that we actually went and kind of like workshopped the product with. They were like, this is wonderful. But in order for me to use this on a weekly basis, I need to be able to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, a whole list of features that they wanted. So we took a look at that and said, okay, really what they're asking us to do is to build an online community. They don't just want the data, they want an online community on top of the data. So then we then.

And that was when we spent all the time on the business model because we were like, okay, that's actually what needs to be built.

Bingo.

This is where we need to have a scalable thing. So that's where I did a ton of research. I started my mba. So I was doing like a ton. Yeah, a ton of market research, a lot of analytics about market size, you know, spend, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. And that's when we realized there's a huge opportunity here and we're the right people to do it. To do it. That was when we realized that. So that was when we committed, just the two of us, to building out what essentially was like our MVP is what I would say. We built that with an offshore team, and that was a quick and dirty proof of concept of all of the online community functionality. So with that MVP, we were able to grow, bring on our first 100 cities, we were able to capture our first sales. On the company side, we hit some really important milestones. Probably most importantly, in retrospect, that MVP is what enabled us and that initial traction that we got was what enabled us to bring on our head of engineering, Angela Merle, who lives in San Diego, who is wildly, wildly talented, and saw what we had done, just the two of us, and was like, oh, my gosh, you don't have any tech talent between the two of you. I want to join on and see what I can do. So Angela then joined as our head of engineering and basically, very quickly was like, guys, we need to do a full stack transition so that we can actually scale and grow.

Yeah.

So she then brought on a couple of other really talented developers and they began completely rebuilding the Atlas from the ground up in a way that would actually scale and grow. And that's the version of the Atlas that launched in April that we're working off of now. So that's like the version of the Atlas that can actually scale and is actually scaling. But it's been a journey. We didn't start with the version that we have now, and we've learned a lot along the way.

Well, I mean, marketplaces are hard, as you guys know. Tell us a little about the two sides of the market, supply and demand. Like, what's that been like, seeing those interactions?

Yeah. So the two sides for us of the community are obviously, one side is city officials and staff, and they use the Atlas for free, and they always will. That's a huge part of our vision, our mission. That's core to why we did this. And really, that's our North Star. That's why LRE sits on top of all of our city engagement and product. It means every product decision is made with the focus on does it deliver value to our city officials and to our city users, because if they're not there, then there's no value to anybody else. And so that's kind of our core focus. That's our North Star.

And that's considered supply in a certain regard.

Yeah, that's kind of the audience, if you will. Yeah. If you think about. If you think about the atlas, like LinkedIn in a little bit of ways. Right. You see LinkedIn, companies, advertising or something. Right. You need that audience of folks that are using it. And so that's kind of the one side. And that's again, our real focus is on building out a product that they can use every day, every week to solve a problem in their own lives. Our revenue side comes from companies. The B2G market is huge. Cities in the US alone spend $1.6 trillion a year on products and services. And I'm not talking like printers and paper. I'm talking like technology and software and infrastructure. So it's a huge market opportunity. Lots of companies playing in this space that have very few channels to actually understand what cities care about and communicate effectively with city officials. And so what we've built for companies is a channel where they can productively engage, where they can highlight work that they've done, where they can receive and answer questions from city officials, where they can get information and engage in a way that actually builds relationships rather than sells. And that really dynamic is important for us. It's why we protect our city officials. In that they can't receive sales emails. Exactly. From through the Atlas. It's very much a community for the cities where companies are providing content and value in terms of their thought, leadership and expertise in doing this work across the country, around the world.

Got it.

This is a tech podcast, so I feel like I can give this analogy.

Go for it.

When we've structured the dynamics between how cities and companies interact on the Atlas, we've structured it like as if it's bumble. So where the cities are the beautiful women. So they have to initiate all contact. All of the contact and relationships between cities and companies are on the city's terms. They're the ones that initiate things. And for the companies, it's great because it means that when they are having a conversation or they are starting to get to engage, that means that those city officials and staff, they want to be there. They really are interested in learning more and they're ready to have a productive conversation.

That's great.

Nobody likes to sell to somebody who doesn't want to get sold something.

Yeah, totally. That's great. We're not to ask a cliche question.

Yeah.

But what's the big vision. What is success? When you're like, look back and be like, here's what we built, what do you think that looks like for the Atlas?

I mean, so success for us is being the online community where every city official is and wants to be. We would love for the atlas to be LinkedIn for cities. It is the place where everybody is, where they go, where they communicate, where they learn, they share. That's kind of our vision of what the product ultimately looks like and feels like to the users. What that means in terms of our macro goals. You may have a different answer to this, but I think ultimately what I would love to see is just increasing the velocity of innovation in government and how this platform is able to do that. There's a stat that said that it can take seven years for a solution in one city to be in 1% of cities. That means that a solution that's working really well to solve a problem in one city could take seven years to solve that same problem in another city. And that's a frustrating fact. And so if we can, by just increasing transparency and communication about what's working, decrease that timeframe even a little bit, that's a huge success for not just the cities, but for residents, you know, and companies, but residences, ourselves.

Yeah, and when we're talking about impact, when you're talking about cities, you're talking about the issues that we care about most. You're talking about climate change, mobility and access. You're talking, I mean, clean drinking water. Yeah, we're talking about like really, really like the issues of our day and of our generation. And cities are at the forefront of that. So when Elle says we want to make it easier for cities to adopt the solutions that are working and that will work, those are the issues that we're talking about. We're talking about water, waste, transport, like the most important things that impact people in their day to day life.

Yeah, that's awesome. It's going to be a huge impact. So thank you guys for continuing to work on that. Yeah, tell us. We want to get to know your guys favorites within San Diego. You both moved here from elsewhere but obviously call it home.

Yep.

The hard questions. This is when the lights turn down. The hard part of the interview. You have a favorite taco spot.

So I'm going to go with the tried and true. We're sitting in wework. We're directly across the street from the taco stand and we eat there basically like every other week with our team. So I'm going to go with Go with them. Spicy shrimp tacos are my favorite.

Ooh, even has a favorite taco.

Yeah.

Pretty good.

Yeah.

I'm gonna go probably with an audience favorite. I love Oscars. Specifically the original Oscars in La Jolla.

Yep.

The fish tacos are.

Yeah.

Incredible.

And shout out from my wife, anytime Oscars is mentioned, she has to cheerlead their ceviche.

Yeah, ceviche is.

Oh, yeah. Ceviche get awesome. Ceviche is amazing. Yeah. But you asked about tacos.

I know, I know. But Oscars in general, purveyor of great food.

Yeah, agreed.

How about coffee? You guys big coffee drinkers. You obviously met at Bird Rock.

Yep.

So maybe that has a whole special place in your guys hearts.

Definitely has a special place in our hearts. My husband turned me on to like the make your own espresso at home answer.

Like full on.

Like, I have espresso Magicine.

She makes fancy coffee.

He did that because in D.C. not Nespresso pods. No, I have like a whole thing. He did that because I had a Starbucks addiction when I was in D.C. and he wanted to break me of that. So I do drink most of my coffee at home, but if I'm gonna go out, it's probably Bird Rock.

Okay. It's impressive though, making your own. How's your latte art?

It's committed.

Horrible, actually. I have no artistic touch.

And your drink of choice is a latte, which is surprising.

Yeah.

Something to work on.

Yeah, you're right. Fair.

How about you? Do you have a favorite coffee place?

I really like wholesome coffee in North Park. It's delicious.

Yeah. Great. On the beverage trend. Favorite breweries or beer? Local.

I am from the Midwest, so I love all beer. Essentially. Just like a real stereotype there.

Great. Easy answer.

Yeah.

People. People who are listening to this are gonna think she had a Starbucks addiction.

It's bad.

And she loves all beer.

It's okay. Our dev team calls me basic. I get it. I would say probably ailsmith. I just like, love their beer's great. But also just like the vibe is my favorite. I like going there. You could spend all day there, hanging out in the sunshine. And it's pretty chill, generally speaking. So that's probably my favorite spot. Nice, tried and true.

And you have a favorite as well?

I do. My favorite local beer is definitely Cali Creamin. It's delicious. Tastes like a root beer float.

My husband's favorite too.

It's so good. So pretty much anywhere where I can get that.

Yep.

Especially on nitro. On nitro is gonna be popular with me.

Yeah. I feel like a little ice cream in that.

Yeah.

Cali cream and vanilla cream float. It's got to be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They should put that on the menu.

Yeah, definitely.

I would for sure. I would for sure order that.

Oh, yeah, they do it at. In north park at Belgian Beaver. They do root beer beers.

That's one of my husband's favorite places.

All right, well, thank both of you for being on the podcast.

Thank you for having us.

You guys are active on social media. Where can people find you?

We are on twitter@ the Atlas4Cities.

Okay.

And my personal handle is elleremonks. And els is hempen.

Yep.

Lbhempen.

No, I think it's just el hempen.

Just el Hempen.

Yeah.

All right, we'll put in the show notes.

Awesome.

But thanks so much for what you guys are doing. Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

Keep doing it.

Awesome. You too.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. This has been a partnership with the San Diego Venture Group and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation's SD Life Changing Campaign. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eealbloom and on LinkedIn.

Sam.