Mike Allman - Founder & Executive Chairman of Voterfied

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, 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 another episode of the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm here with Mike Allman, founder and CEO of Votafide. Thanks for being here.

It's my pleasure.

Mike, why don't you tell us real quick, what is Voterfi?

So Vodafi is an online platform that will revolutionize the way that elected officials and government officials interact with their constituents. It's an online platform where the mayor or your congressional representative can pose questions, provide information, and then you as a voter can decide and express your opinion. Am I in favor of this issue? Am I against this issue? And it's a way for constituents to better communicate with their representatives.

That's great. I think there's going to be a really cool story how this obviously came to be, so we're going to dive into that. But why don't you take us way back? Where'd you grow up?

So I grew up in western Michigan. Small town called Spring Lake, Michigan, where nature smiles for seven miles, they call it. Only a couple thousand people, but yeah, sort of rural western Michigan.

Okay. And you come from a family that was in technology at all or was?

No, not at all. My father was a salesman, my mom a secretary. Sort of middle class life. Growing up in the 70s and 80s in rural western Michigan. As I like to say, it's a great place to be from.

Got it. Okay, so what brought you to the San Diego?

Oh, it was a roundabout way. So I went to Michigan State University for my undergraduate degree in engineering, moved to the big city of Chicago and worked there for about eight years and joined a management consultancy that moved me around the world. Spent a few years in Johannesburg, South Africa, few in London, England. Found my way to Los Angeles and one of my clients hired me. So I moved to San Diego back in 1998 and we've called that home for the last 20 years. Love it here.

Yeah, that's great. What was the atmosphere like in San Diego? 98.

So I was just commenting about that the other day. It was a little different. I think what I noticed was downtown is really rejuvenated since it was a bit grittier then.

Let's say baseball park.

Yes, new baseball park. The Gas lamp district hadn't quite gotten developed yet and was just starting. So it's really changed a lot. I think it's a great place to live now. And of course the surrounding communities, North county, etc. I spent most of my time just a beautiful place to live. Hard to imagine finding a nicer spot.

Yeah. So what company was it that you were working for?

So Sempra Energy, the large energy holding company. I had a number of different roles with them. I was the chief deal guy, head of economics and corporate planning. I became the president of Sempra Generation power generation unit where we pivoted the company to green energy and I started the utility scale energy business. Interesting. So everybody can think of solar panels on their roofs. Our innovation was to put it on the desert floor. What that does is allow for big scale. So we built the largest solar plants in the world many times over, started that industry to green ify the world in America. And there's probably been 500 billion with a B dollars invested over the last 10 years and something I'm very proud of that we started that industry.

Wow, that's great. And all homegrown here. San Diego.

All homegrown here. Great team, a good environment, you know, supported by regulators and the like. So it was a great deal.

Yeah. Take us through maybe a little bit about clean tech in general in San Diego around that. Was this so revolutionary or were there people already and private companies really open minded to this already?

Well, it was revolutionary at the time. The risk of global warming was just starting to get a fair amount of traction. And California led the way by requiring what they call the renewable portfolio standards where the utilities had to buy green power a certain percentage of their throughput. So 10%, 20%. Now they're shooting for half or upwards towards 100%. But at the time the utilities were struggling to meet that. The industry was nascent. There were a few wind turbines around, but solar had just been a blip. And we own some power plants throughout. In the desert where the land is very cheap, the sun shines all the time. Perhaps most importantly, the electrical interconnection and infrastructure is there. So you know, a guy came into my office and said, I got a great new solar panel. It's the cheapest that's been made. Why don't you get in the solar business, Put it up on the rooftops in San Diego. Said, I don't want to get into that. That's a pain in the butt. But how about in the desert? Says, well, what are you talking about? So can you give me a quote for say a million panels? He about fell out of his chair. That was a year or two's worth of production, but it turned out to be a great deal. When you put the panels on the desert floor, you get good production because the sun shines all the time. But it's also a lot less expensive. You're not having people climb up on roofs. It's like a Henry Ford assembly line where you could literally put a million panels out in the desert in an efficient manner and make utility scale, some large scale solar power. So it was new, but now it's like I said, a lot of money's gone into it. And California continues to lead the way, pushing for more and more green power to save the planet one panel at a time.

Yeah, got it. So that was pretty fun to be a part of in the beginning. You went on to do more green energy, clean tech projects or so.

Yeah. So from there I became the chairman and CEO of the Southern California Gas Company. It's the largest natural gas distribution business. Then became a tech entrepreneur. So after running the gas company, I joined a company called bitstu Systems. It's based out of Vancouver, Canada. And Bitstu is in the burgeoning industrial Internet of things space. So how to connect sensors to big from big industrial equipment to the cloud where it can be analyzed. So it's a big data analytics. Take a whole bunch of data from different sensors and turn it into actionable intelligence. And in 2016 we sold that company to General Electric. So they now have integrated it into their asset management platforms to help people get businesses get the most they can out of their assets.

Got it. A little bit of a leap from cleantech to this. Or was it actually something you were already doing industrially? You were measuring and putting sensors on everything you did anyway, A little bit of both.

So sensors have become much less expensive than they used to be. They're now popping up everywhere. There's more devices now connected to the industrial Internet than there are to the Internet and it's going to be 10 to 1 here within a few years, I'm sure. So we were right at the beginning of a wave. It's something that I had an interest in and always dabbled in one way or the other. And when the opportunity came up to help this startup company scale, we took it to a small, regional, single vertical company into something much bigger, International, European and Australian and Asian opportunities, until the growth was so strong that GE took a look and said, we wanna own this thing.

Yeah.

So that's how we got to there.

Got it. Okay. That's a fun ride to do the startup.

It was a fun ride, you know, when you start with just a group of about 30 or 40 people when I joined, and then we grew IT to over 100 and the revenue is screaming northward. It's the opposite of a big company like Sempra with 30,000 employees or what they have. So I've had to had a taste of what it's like to work in a big company, and there's some advantages and disadvantages to that and what it's like to work in a small startup company. And there's some advantages and disadvantages to that.

Yeah. So you had both experiences. You saw the company. What do you want to do next after that?

Well, that was a good question. And I was looking for something to do. And I was watching TV one night and I was watching the news and I saw a town hall going on during the attempt to first repeal the Obamacare law in, I guess this was early 17, I guess it was. And it wasn't going well for the congressman, to say the least. There was a lot of yelling and, you know, sort of typical of, I think, the way town halls can devolve to whoever's got the largest microphone, the loudest microphone, a megaphone really kind of holds the day.

And whoever gets their grip on the.

Microphone, if you can keep that. Yes. And in fact, that's what this guy did in the audience. He grabbed the microphone and he wouldn't let go. And he was giving the congressman everything he got. The congressman had an interesting reply. He, I think, did a reasonable job of letting the guy vent. But he said, you know, sir, I hear what you're saying, and obviously you and a lot of people in this room are against an attempted repeal. But let me tell you as a congressman, he said that I represent not only you, but a total of about 750,000 people. He said, I can tell you, the people on the other side of the mountain here, many of them feel very differently. Oh, and that just set the crowd off again. And it was an ugly scene. But it got me thinking, what is an elected official to do, say, a congressman who represents three quarters of a million people who have divergent opinions and some people are going to be pro an issue and some are going to be con an issue.

What do you do?

Well, I think a natural place to land. Of course, historically it tends to be party driven. Well, you elected me as a Democrat so here's what the party thinks. Or you elected me as a Republican and here's what the party thinks. I wonder if there wasn't a different way. Instead of going party line, what if you went issue by issue and can we poll or have our constituents vote in a way that's more like, well, where are you on green energy? Do you favor spending perhaps more money on energy for the benefit of it being clean or on health care or international issues? Any issue of the day. And the thought was well, can't we find out where constituents are on an issue by issue basis? And I thought, well, with technology doing what it is and how we live on our cell phones, why can't we create an app for that?

Sure.

And that's what really was the genesis of voterfied.

Got it.

As I started doing some survey work and laying the ground, I found out that it was something that people were attracted to and we needed a system though to make sure that we could communicate with people and make sure that everything is adds up. And that's really the genesis of voterfied. Then I thought that well, you should probably eat your own cooking. So I decided to run for Congress and I did in 2018. This last election couldn't make it through the primary. I think maybe just a little bit ahead of the times. We're not in an environment, let's say, that is conducive to moderates, let's say someone who would vote with Democrats sometimes and Republicans other times, depending on where the constituents are. That is what our region is. They tend to be somewhat fiscally conservative but more socially liberal. So you know, pro marijuana legalization and women's choice, but really want to have the government stay out of their pocketbook as much as possible. So that crosses parties. But we're still very partisan. So I couldn't make it through the primary. But what I found out was that the platform of voterfied where elected officials can communicate with voters was very interesting. So we sold the developed the platform for third party applications. Not just me but other customers. We sold it to the mayor of Carlsbad. He used it very successfully in his re election campaign. So now we're going to make a business out of it.

That's great. I mean for you to be the test case first really get in there and learn the customer, which, which is you, and then go on and find, you know, a bit of a product market fit. That's the startup way.

Right. And I learned a ton. It was the first time I ran for office and learned an amazing amount about campaigning, about the political environment and about the technology and what works and what doesn't work. So we're working on version 2.0 now and I think it really has an opportunity to make a big difference in our country and could be a good business.

Yeah, that's great. I'm curious, I'm sure you had, while you were running, you had multiple technology ideas come to you, right. You probably saw how old school backwards politics were, did this, you were always working on this. Or did other ideas bubble up around the government?

Yeah, there were other ideas. So this was my first idea about really polling or allowing to vote. It's like an online voting engine, but instead of voting for an individual, you're voting on issues. That was the core idea. And then as I was running, I got exposed to a number of other technologies that really started to blow my mind. Some of them, for example, many people are used to, and some of them much of us get annoyed by. But more sophisticated email campaigns, but also texting campaigns now. Right. Where you're sending messages that please vote for me or donate $10. But also some of the geolocation stuff turned out to be very interesting where you could find out what devices are within a given geography at a given time. So you draw a ring around the concert hall on a day that a pop concert's going and then messages can be tailored through advertising to that demographic. Right. It might be younger people who like pop music. On the other hand, you could have draw a geofence around the gun show and now you know that you've got people who are interested in the second amendment. So you could much more target and micro target advertising. Lots of interesting technology out there.

So is this space considered election tech? Is there a name that's actually used in this?

Ooh, you know, that's a good question, I think. Yeah, Govtech gets thrown around a bit, although it's a bigger bucket. So maybe we are creating a new space here. Election tech. But there is a govtech vertical where it also includes a number of efficiencies within what can be the biggest bureaucracy out there. Right. So how do we make our government more efficient is really the bigger govtech. But I like that. Maybe I'll, I'll start using that. Election tech.

Great tech. Yeah. I Like tech. I like that. You got it. So take us a little bit through through voterfight. I mean, what's the. Some of the background of the technology and kind of the team you've put together?

Yeah, so the core of the technology is the blockchain. So many of your listeners are, I'm sure, are familiar with bitcoin and that's been around, boy, a decade now since Satoshi wrote his paper. And the cryptocurrency as a currency has gone in and out of favor and up and down I haven't seen lately. Maybe Bitcoin's in the 25 to $3,500 range. Of course, it was $1 or $2 when it started, so a lot of people wrote it up and down. Well down from its $20,000 peak. So it's up and down. That's one and perhaps the most famous use case. But the underlying technology of blockchain, which is a distributed database that can't be hacked, has an excellent platform. It is an excellent platform for other applications, including voting. And there are a number of startups who are starting to facilitate actual voting for elections using your phone and blockchain and other encryption technology. Don't need to tell anyone who's followed that space that threats of Russian hacking and the rest are something to be concerned about. But imagine if we could vote on our phones in a trustworthy way. It could really change participation and lots of different benefits there. So we're applying that blockchain technology to our online voting on issues system that we call Voterfied. So that's the underlying core. We've got a small team out of Solana beach, about a half a dozen people, some mostly coders and tech, but also some marketing. So we're just about ready to launch nationwide marketing. We're in the fundraising mode, raising a series a convertible note. So it's the classic entrepreneur startup. Got an idea. Self funded so far. I've got a partner now and we're going to go raise some money and try to make this a nationwide software as a service, a SaaS model where we'll charge elected officials or even governments. We found that, for example, city governments want to know what their constituents think the priority should be.

Absolutely.

And where are they on different issues. So for a fixed fee per month, we can provide access to our platform and it'll improve the voter government communications.

That's great. We're really excited to see it roll out too, especially coming out the next election cycle 2020.

I think that'll be a big a Big test case for us. Right. These big elections happen every couple years. If we can make some inroads and get some people excited about it, we're going to market through the political consultants. We're going to market directly to candidates and elected officials. You can get tremendous leverage in the software business. So we don't need a lot of customers to show a profit. But if we could get to, you know, even a thousand customers out of the 500,000 elected officials, we can have a very profitable business.

That's great. Well, we're really excited to continue watching you guys grow. You've mentioned you have a team in Solano Beach. You're been a North county guy for a bit. Take us through a little bit. Some of your favorites about North County. You have a favorite taco spot?

Well, I'm partial to Rubio's. It's been around a while. And I love their burrito. The family loves to go there. We probably have visited Rubio's once a week for 20 years. Who probably could own a franchise location at this point if I would have been smart enough. But that's my favorite taco spot.

Yeah. San Diego born and raised, too. SDSU alum. What about coffee? Are you a coffee drinker?

I am, yes.

Favorite place to go.

So my favorite place is Lofty Coffee in Solana Beach. So we lived just a block from the Belly Up Tavern in Lofty and loved walking there for a morning or afternoon coffee. So that's. That's the favorite spot to hang out.

Yep. That's a good one. As well as Swell coffee where we met up just.

That's right. We used to hang out there back when it was panicking and other places. Exactly.

Another good spot. How about. How about beer, you local craft?

I do like to have a beer now and then. And you know, my favorite is actually the Pizza Port. Red.

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

I love. Again, in Solana beach, we used to walk to Pizza Port and we'll drive there for lunch sometimes. And I love their red beer. Great flavor.

Yeah, yeah. Another local one. That's great. You know, this is really great getting to know you. We're excited to kind of watch the launch here. What's a good place that people can keep track of everything? I mean, Voterfied or your own. Are you on Twitter or anything like that?

Yeah. So ealmikeallman is my Twitter handle. You can follow me there or friend me on Facebook and on the web, voterfied.com so it's like Verified voter is how we got the name. So voterfied voterfied.com and sign up to follow us and watch us grow and really make a difference in the world.

Absolutely. Thanks for everything you're doing, Mike.

Thank you very much for everything.

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 eelbloom and on LinkedIn. Sam.