Brigade, a Civic Engagement Platform | CEO of Brigade Matt Mahan

Good morning. Hope you're all doing well. It's a real honor to be able to come speak with you about what you all are doing. I'm gonna keep it pretty short. This is my presentation. I've got it on one little piece of paper. I thought I'd just speak kind of off the cuff about a few things I've experienced and learned over the last few years, and especially this past year starting a new company called Brigade. And then we'll do a quick product demo and then keep most of our time for Q&A, 'cause I'm sure your questions and thoughts are gonna make for a more interesting conversation. So I thought I'd start with just what Brigade is about. The vision for Brigade is one that for me actually goes back about a decade. I first got involved in political organizing and campaigning a long time ago because it— there were a number of issues I cared about from education reform to immigration reform to the environment, and on all those issues what I found was that the path to change continually bumped into the political system. It was very hard to actually make change on my own, and so it often seemed to be that a piece of legislation would need to get passed, or funding for a program would need to happen, or some piece of regulation would need to be lifted or put in place, and that got me very interested in creating change through the political process. And so I got involved in a number of political campaigns, and I did a lot of organizing at my college, And then as was just mentioned, I got to a point where I thought the next step was law school and that I would go to law school, get a law degree, get involved in politics, and that's how I would change the world. And I had this great dinner conversation with a guy who happened to be in my dorm room in college named Mark Zuckerberg who started this thing called Facebook, which at the time didn't seem like that big of a deal, but obviously is a really big deal. And he said, why do you want to go to law school? I thought, well, I'm gonna change the world. You gotta change laws and get funding for things, and that's where change really happens. And he said, well, what about technology? And he pointed me to the fact that right around us, and you guys, this won't be news for any of you given what you're doing here, but right around us, new tools are being built for helping people connect with one another, communicate, get information, buy things, make other kinds of decisions, get organized in new and more powerful ways. And he proposed that the amount of change I could have by getting involved in building new tools was 100x, maybe 1,000x, maybe 1 million x greater than would ever be possible by going and getting a law degree and maybe passing a few laws. And I actually have to admit, I found that very challenging, but I also found it very compelling. And so, I got involved about 7 years ago with a company called Causes, and we launched one of the very first Facebook apps. We were one of the first 10 apps on the Facebook developer platform. And our vision was, well, if people are getting connected socially, why not add an organizing layer on top of that that enables them to express what they care about and pool their resources and take action collectively? And we didn't really have much of a vision beyond that. We just had this intuitive sense that in a new place where lots of people are getting connected, this should be a good place for organizing, for helping people organize to get things done. And that ended up being a really wild ride, and we don't have time for me to tell you all of the ups and downs of the roller coaster of that company, but I'll summarize it by saying that we had a period of incredible growth where we ended up adding about 200 million people who started over 700,000 causes, which were essentially communities of like-minded people taking action together. And they in aggregate ended up raising about $50 million for charity and spreading a lot of awareness and doing quite a bit of advocacy. And I start with that part of the story because I think it's important to recognize that most of the great ideas that break through are the process of many years of iteration and thinking and trial and error and ultimately often mistakes and failure. And so Causes never actually achieved what we had hoped. We thought that it could be the organizing app that everyone online would use to organize around everything, and for a variety of reasons it didn't end up achieving that vision. It did a lot of great things, but it wasn't that. And so out of that though, about a year ago, some of the folks I had worked with at Causes and then some new people who I came to know through through that experience, we started circling around a slightly different idea, which was related but was a unique take on it, which was networking the world's voters. If the political process is actually the blocker for a lot of change, but it's also an opportunity if you can get it working properly, why isn't it working today? And so we started really diving into what's wrong with our political process today. And what we found was that And there's sort of 2 big barriers to getting people more engaged in the political process. As you guys may or may not know, the political process in America is pretty broken right now. Faith in government is at a historic low. Congress's approval rating's in the single digits for the first time, consistently in the single digits for the first time in years. In California in the last midterm, millennials voted at a— somebody guess, what do you think the voting rate was for millennials? 30%. 20 or 30. It was 8%. So I heard 10, 20, 30, but it was 8%. It's the lowest it's ever been to my knowledge, at least in the last 75 years. So faith in government's at an all-time low. However, in the last 75 years, government spending is up 3x. So what's happened in the last 60, 70 years is we are spending 3 times as much via the vehicle of government. Our satisfaction is 1/3 what it was. So there is a fundamental flaw in the system. Participation is going down, and as we all know, if nobody participates, eventually we end up with tyranny, with something that is not democracy. And so we became very fascinated by this particular problem. We wanted to take what we had learned about using social media to get people organized and bring that into a new platform that— where the solution that we think we've hit upon is Finding a way of networking voters around shared values so that they are not alone, and leveraging social pressure to get them to activate together, particularly around voting. And the reason we think this is the right solution is that as we analyze the problem of our political system, there seem to be these 2 big problems. One really revolves around information and the friction involved in the system. It's very hard to understand, to make sense of the political system. Guess how many elected officials there are in the US, people elected to office. Have a guess. 500,000. Wow, you know the answer. All right, are you working on something in the political space? No. Wow, you're the first person who was— I'm interested, yeah. Yeah, you're the first person who's ever guessed it correctly. Most people guess between 5,000 and 50,000. The answer is there are 515,000 elected officials in the United States. The average American is represented by somewhere between 40 and 50 elected officials at all levels of government. Those 40 to 50 elected officials pass laws and make decisions on trillions of dollars in funding that touch every issue that affects your lives, from whether or not you pay for parking out here, to crime in your neighborhood, to the quality of schools, to— you understand, right? A wide range of things. So the first problem is information. The system is big and complex, and we have less and less time, and we're used to everything being on demand. I can now, with a couple of clicks, have something delivered at my house the next day. So the political system, in contrast, is old school, offline, complex, really hard to make sense of. That's problem number 1. Problem 2 though I think is much more interesting and much deeper. Even if we leverage information technology to solve the information gap, we're still left with this broader problem that I think is a cultural problem. And it's really a crisis of confidence or faith. People no longer believe that their individual participation matters. So they no longer think that going out to vote matters, and to some extent they actually have a point. Unless you think you're gonna be the one vote over 50% in a given election, which you by definition almost never ever are, then your vote actually doesn't have a very measurable concrete impact. But as I was saying a moment ago, if we all thought that way, if we all thought from that very kind of self-centered, selfish, hyper-rational, standpoint, many of us would never do any of the things that make society better, and we would have this incredible tragedy of the commons in which we would basically be left without a functioning political system at all. And this is exactly what's happening today. Because faith in government is low, because people's faith in the efficacy of their own action is low, participation is low, and what that means is an actually more stagnant system. So 92% of Americans believe you should have to get a background check before buying a gun. The NRA and groups like it have membership equal to about 1% of the population. That 1% of the population has more power to block change on that particular issue than the 92% of people who think that we should have background checks. Why? Because they believe in the power of their participation, and they all participate, and they are highly organized, and they are very good at pooling resources and acting collectively. So we think that the path forward, the way to make the political system more responsive, to make it work better, to make people have faith in their own participation in it, is to get them connected with other like-minded people and build tools that are sort of like what the NRA does offline, but bring that online. Productize the notion of a PAC, what's called a citizen PAC, where people can find each other, get together quickly and efficiently, pool their time, their money, their votes, and then deploy them collectively. So that's really the vision for the company, and it comes out just to leave you with one thought there and then I'll quickly run through the others. It comes out of personal experience. It comes out of 10 years of trying to organize, running campaigns, working with candidates, listening to citizens who are frustrated with the political system. And I'm sure as all of you with your particular companies, it really comes out of a personal deep experience of frustration and why can't this thing be better, why is this thing broken, there's a better way to do this. Thank you.