Innovate Your State | Head of Business Strategy and Marketing for IYS, Alexandra Klun

So yes, my name is Ali Klune. I am everything that he said and hopefully a little bit more. And I'm here today to talk to you guys about a transition and a pivot in a business model. How many of you have heard of Six Californias before you got here?

No.

OK. So I have a little bit of an overview to do for those of you who haven't heard about it. Six Californias was something that Tim Draper decided to introduce. It was an initiative. California is an amazing place. How many of you have heard of California before you came to Draper University? God, I hope so. Yeah, right? Okay. Exactly. Exactly. California is an amazing place. It's called the Golden State for a lot of reasons. We have the movie industry here. We have Silicon Valley. We have amazing weather. We have everything you could possibly want in any given area in this state. We are the 7th largest economy in the world. In the world. Bigger than India's economy. The only problem is that we are facing some issues right now. How many of you know that California is in a drought? Probably heard about it. Everyone's heard about it. How many of you have had the pleasure of dealing with California's traffic and the poor infrastructure that we have to deal with, especially down in LA, the 405? Used to commute on that quite a bit. Not fun. There are businesses that are leaving the state consistently. This is something that Tim has talked a lot about. I don't know if he's talked to you guys about it in some of your courses. But we are 50th out of 50 as the worst place to do business. No matter how many businesses we have, you know, coming here in Silicon Valley and things being done, we're still the worst place to run business in the country. And then if you have the pleasure of living in San Francisco like I do or even in some of the other city areas, you know that rent and housing is extremely expensive and things are consistently getting Getting worse. So it's not all doom and gloom, though. Tim Draper saw that there were issues in the state. He said basically, we are living under a monopoly, essentially. So you all in your business practices know what a monopoly is. And when you know that there's a monopoly, you know that there's opportunity for disruption. So Tim started thinking about this a lot. And he was thinking, what can I do to improve the state? He has lived here his whole life. You know, he has his family here. He has grandchildren that are gonna be raised here. Wanting to do something to improve the state. So his idea was Six Californias. Six Californias seems to be a little bit radical. You see a map of the state of California and you see that it's divided into 6 parts. So what, what does this do? So essentially, Six Californias was an initiative to create 6 new states within the state of California. So kind of startup states, if you will. States that would have the opportunity to figure out how to run their localized regions, how to figure out what was best for them. So we have 38 million people living in California. That is 12 million more than the second largest state in the nation. 12 million more. So that is quite a few people to satisfy. That is a lot of customers. And those are a lot of people with diverse needs and regional skill sets and things that they care about that are not all the same. taken care of and taken into account by the one government that we live under. So his idea was to separate it into 6 states. In order to do that in California, you need to pass a constitutional amendment, which means that you need to get— you need to go through the initiative process where you get enough signatures to actually get this idea on the ballot. So if you have an idea, you can take it to— and get the title and summary, and you basically pay a couple hundred dollars, and anyone can do this, But then the hardest part is getting enough signatures to get it to the ballot stage, which is where people will vote on it. So he did just that, you know, went out, got the title and summary, went to circulate for signatures. And as he was circulating for signatures, you know, realized that there were a lot of people who liked the idea or didn't like the idea, but there were a lot of people who had a lot to say. So through the initiative signature gathering process, You're required to get a little over 808,000 signatures in order to get it on the ballot for a constitutional amendment. Just, you know, over 1.3 million signatures were collected, which you would think would be enough to get this on the ballot. But through the signature gathering process, which is extremely old school, you basically have to take a petition, the paper petition, and you have to get people to hand sign it, and it has to match the signature that's on file with the DMV, which, as you know, is done through one of those electronic signature pages. which looks different than your signature than you sometimes sign on a piece of paper. You have to have a matching address, so if you've moved in the past couple of months and you haven't updated your voter registration, your signature doesn't count. You can't sign more than once, otherwise it's considered a duplicate signature. There are all these loopholes and all these things that you have to jump through in order to make sure that this, that these signatures are valid. So in the process of going through the signatures, the Secretary of State determined that even though we collected over 1.3 million signatures, there weren't enough to make the ballot for a constitutional amendment. So bummer. What are you going to do then? But you guys all know Tim. You know he's very persistent. You know that if he has a vision and a dream and a goal, just like you guys do, that he's not willing to give up. So what we did was we went back to the drawing board and we thought, okay, who are our customers? Our customers are Californians. They're not necessarily liking the product that we're giving them. The product being 6 states. What can we do to improve government? What can we do knowing what we have learned from our customers so far? Well, we learned that our customers are engaged. There were a lot of Californians who did believe that something needed to be done and did believe that the system needed to be fixed, but they had their own ideas. They weren't necessarily ready to sign off on a plan that, you know, made 6 states without necessarily knowing what they were signing off on. So, What can we do to encourage their participation and encourage them to get involved? And that's where Innovate Your State came about. So Innovate Your State is a nonprofit 501 organization that is dedicated to educating and encouraging public participation in government. So as you know, you see big business ideas every day. You guys are here. You guys are, you know, working on all of your projects and all the things that you want to see go through in the business sector. But there aren't a lot of these things for government. There are, you know, some civic tech companies, there are nonprofits, there are people that are trying to solve specific issues, and there are definitely people that are doing the best that they can. But we wanted to really create a platform for people to share their ideas and really find ways to fundamentally improve government, really give them the voice that they deserve, going back to what true democracy is. So we formed Innovate Your State, and we were issuing the first challenge, if you will, And the first challenge was for Californians. So we issued the Fix California Challenge, a contest to find ways to improve the state of California. So this was a call to action for all of those people that we had heard from, all of our customers who were thinking maybe Fix Californias could be an interesting thing, but I think I may have a better idea or I may want to resolve this or I may want to do that. We're giving them a platform to share their voice and share their ideas for improving the state. Under Fix California Challenge and under Innovate Your State, we're looking for ideas that fundamentally transform the state of California, that increase representation, that improve education, that are holding the government accountable and making it more transparent, are creating more opportunities, and are creating an overall renewal of the state. So that's kind of where this comes from, and that's where You know, we're looking for these ideas that will fundamentally improve the State of California, will essentially break up the monopoly if you're using business terms, and will satisfy the customers of the state. So what we did was we created essentially a crowdsourcing platform where we're accepting ideas on a website called www.fixcal.org. And this is a very easy-to-use system. You go in, you put in your idea. We made it a very low barrier for entry. It's our MVP. Trying to get everyone participating as much as possible, requiring a little bit of information from them, getting them to put their ideas up, and then eventually allowing people the opportunity to up and downvote and comment similar to a Reddit-style approach so that people are truly engaging on a platform for government innovation. And we created a term for this. It's called venture governance. So a lot of people haven't really heard this model before. Sure, there are platforms out there out there that are doing things for discovery and trying to get people engaging with government, but this is the first one that is essentially allowing a venture capital approach to it where we're going to be running with some of these ideas. We're open to what that looks like. We're not saying exactly what that may be, but the hope is that these ideas will get funded. So it's kind of merging 2 worlds. It's merging venture capital and business and the world of government, and this is something that hasn't, you know, really been done, especially in the state of California. Great.

For the Face California Challenge, my question is, it seems like the approach that you're taking is very people-centric, right? Coming back to the citizens. A lot of other organizations out there, political advocacy groups, they kind of tackle from the other perspective. They tackle the legislators, people in Sacramento or Washington, D.C. Why don't you do that? Why are you focused on people, which I guess is a little bit far shot, right?

Yeah, and that's a great question. So there are so many people doing that approach, why would we kind of go go on that bandwagon? Why wouldn't you try something a little bit different? And again, this goes back to kind of the true democracy. So, you know, everyone has a voice, but everyone has their agenda and everyone has their money and everyone has their kind of pride on the line a little bit. So when you take this kind of ground-up approach, bringing the citizens' voice to the top, it really allows for new ideas to bubble up. And what we find is that there are a lot of the same people giving the same ideas up in Sacramento and potentially in, you know, other government places. So, you know, you're talking about the entities and states. So really giving the voice back to the people for what they want. So these are the people who live under these laws. These are the people who have to deal with it on a day-in, day-out basis. And, you know, of course we've gotten some of the lower-level ideas like there's a pothole on my street and I need it filled. Like, you're gonna get that. But you're also gonna get some of the ideas for people who have been thinking about this for years and years, potentially could be political science or public affairs majors and never had a voice or a platform to share their voice. So So that's kind of the approach that we went instead of taking the more traditional approach.

Is this accurate to say they're less likely to be implemented because they're just ideas of voices of people?

Yes, I would agree. And I think that also this platform provides an opportunity for the community to see how many people really get behind that idea. So having the voting system, you can see how many people are really interested in this, how many people it would affect essentially at the end of the day. So you can have, you know, some There are some moneyed interests that go to lobbyists and try and persuade them one way or the other, but this is truly coming from the people and what they need and want. Yeah. Oh, I already— sorry.

Hey, my name is Ran. Thank you for coming here to speak. So my question is, as we know, California is a Democratic state, and when we separate California into 6 different states, the political power is going to shift. And nobody wants to give up their power to Democrats. And as we know, if we split California that way, there'll be a few Democratic states as well. So my question is, don't you think that since in California the majority of people are Democrats, won't they want to preserve that? Representation power, and how would you tackle that?

So that was a great question, and that's one of the many thoughts that we got back from people within the state. You know, there was a study that was done— we didn't conduct it, but someone did— that kind of broke down what voting behavior would look like based on the past election and what these states would be if they would be Democrat or Republican. And this is all, you know, speculation, but it essentially would have evened it out. So definitely there are some interests who would not want that. There's a definite stronghold here and people that are very interested in preserving that. But that's what the Californians wanted. They said no to 6 Californias and we listened to that. And our goal here is to really pivot and really try to find the right approach for our customers. And if that's something that they were concerned about, then maybe looking at something different that doesn't take into account the red and blue.

If an idea was funded or selected for pursuit, Who is actually executing that idea? The person that submitted it? The business that submitted it? Or are you guys?

So that's a great question. And that's something that we're still talking about. So again, I don't think I told you guys yet, but we actually just started in January. So we are a startup just like you guys are. We have 2 full-time people and a couple of consultants. And we're working through that. We're basically riding this out and listening to our customers. I think that's the biggest thing that we learned and the thing that hopefully you guys will be learning from this conversation is that when we made the decision for our customers instead of listening to them, it was something that didn't have a great outcome. So the hope is that if there are a couple of ideas that look like good ideas and there are people in the community that are finding these interesting and they want to fund and we have a couple ideas that are funded, we're not going to shy away from that. We're basically going to be listening and seeing what the plan is that we should develop moving forward. And then from there, who executes it is kind of TBD based on who wants to be involved.

And I mean, with that being said, like, where would the ownership of the idea go? Because for the people, like, in this class that are pursuing their own businesses on it, you know, I think that they should be hesitant to submit their idea to you if there's a chance that you will get funded and execute it.

Great question. So if it's a business idea, your idea would be funded for the business. If it, however, is an idea that would require going through the initiative process and going through a campaign and signature gathering and all of that, then that idea would probably be elevated to a larger group of people that would be involved. So Tim's idea was 6 Californias. What's yours?