a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: The Internet Is Your Movement

Episode Date: December 9, 2016

Clearly disruption plays out not just in business but also in politics. Whether it was the Scottish national party, recent election campaigns, or local school boards, people grew and organized communities online all last year through NationBuilder -- which provided a software platform for those otherwise underserved from an established technology perspective (hence the disruption theory reference). Harnessing the energy of communities goes beyond politics though, to all kinds of movements. But what happens when people remain in filter bubbles on the internet -- the very internet that NationBuilder CEO Jim Gilliam famously called his "religion"? What happens when that religious fervor or energy can be... "rabid"-like? Especially in a context where money, media, and other traditional institutions might not have the same impact or control they once did? "The internet can reflect back whatever it is that we want it to -- and we need more leaders to step up and say, 'Look, this is the way that I want it to be'," argues Gilliam in this episode of the a16z Podcast in conversation with Ben Horowitz (based on a session recorded at our recent a16z Summit event). Movements, it seems, are really about leadership, and the future is not written yet as people create new models of voice and choice. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. Today's episode is based on a conversation that was recorded at our recent A6 and Z summit event. It features Ben Horowitz interviewing Jim Gilliam, CEO and founder of NationBuilder, and the conversation focuses on the role of that platform in the recent elections, but more broadly what it means for the nature of movements, how people

organize, and the future of leadership. Just a quick bit of background. Nation Builder, the platform that Jim's company builds, was the underlying software that 40% of the national campaigns in this election ran on, including four of the five presidential candidates, including President elect Trump. So he has a special insight to this. First of all, the Republican nominee, when he became the nominee, had zero support from the mainstream press. Nobody from the National Review, nobody from Fox News, nobody from the Wall Street Journal wanted Trump to win the Republican nomination. That was like absolutely not the guy they wanted. The Republican Party he didn't want him to win the nomination.

And then he gets the nomination. And I don't know what the count was, but it was like 99% of newspapers endorsed Hillary. And so the mainstream media had no impact on the election. The political party had no impact on the election. And more than that, she outraised him. Seems like we're in the brave new world. What does have an impact?

Is this what we're living in from now on? Like all the old rules are out? Or is this just an anomaly at one time? thing. Yeah, there's been a lot of analysis from a political perspective of what happened, and obviously I come from a technology perspective. All of the outsider presidential candidates used nation-builders. Our perspective, and we've looked at this, is in sort of classic disruption theory. And a lot of times, you know, you would think of like, oh, the software itself, right, is what we're disrupting. You know, the software to run political campaigns was extraordinarily

expensive. You needed all these army of consultants. You spent millions of dollars, particularly at the presidential level, Hillary Clinton spent eight times more on software than Alan Trump did. And so in disruption theory says that, okay, well, then there's an opportunity at the low end of the market for all the folks that have been ignored by the traditional software offerings. Nation builder is into that zone. We're a much more affordable option. It's much more accessible. It's affordable for people running for school board, you name it. But we're actually disrupting the political parties. The political parties have traditionally been sort of the gatekeepers to whether or not you can run for office, who gets the resources. And what they've

done is over time, they've gone to sort of service towards the very high end of the market. They contested elections, right, the presidential races, the Senate campaigns that matter. And the result is that the vast majority of the company is ignored. And so that provided an opportunity for us to start to go in and start to provide those services. We're nonpartisan. Anybody can use our software. That was a total revolution. It didn't matter. But political party or what your ideology was, but then we started to provide the voter file. Okay, so take a step back, because you said that very fast. So you're providing the voter file. What does a voter file mean? Like, why is that important? So in order to like know who can actually

vote, right, you need to know, have like the database of who those voters are in your district. And that's compiled by counties like all of the country, the election boards. Now, what the parties have done is that they've consolidated that. information into sort of central databases and try to like add value to it over time to differing sort of levels of success in general the democrats have one system there's a monopoly behind it everybody has to use one system on the republican side it's much more there's a lot more competition the voter file is really key and the result is in order to get access to that voter file you have to be blessed by the party and so as you can imagine in primary situations the folks that

There's a lot of desire to kind of keep the outsiders out of the game or the folks that, like, haven't played ball or that kind of stuff. And so people are frequently declined access to the voter file. If you had to spend thousands of dollars through private vendors to get access to it, it just wasn't viable. And so we went and built a whole, we compiled the voter file nationally and started to provide it for free. Offering software for $29 a month to go run for office. First time anybody's ever done that, provided for free to anybody running for office. even if you don't use Nation Boulder. So if the genie is out of the bottle then

and the kind of hold that the political parties had on candidates and the influence of the mainstream media had on the population and the fact that, like, you know, so much money's in politics, does that matter anymore? Money is going to be in politics. Well, it has a great return on an investment. So it's always going to be in politics. But I think what's exciting is that as the money sort of has flooded in,

it has become less relevant because the macro trends that play is that you can't just buy people's attention, right? You can't just like, you know, advertising industry is like, is dealing with this marketing teams or dealing with this. You can't just buy it. And so what matters is that your message and reaching people matters an awful lot more. It's a ton more money in politics, but it's becoming less and less relevant. So now that the old rules are gone, now like that I can no longer win an election by getting an endorsement from a major party, getting an endorsement from the media, raising a ton of money. If I can't win like that, then how do I win? You have to have people who care about what you're doing. It can turn that energy and that attention into donors,

turnout for events, and volunteers, like real-world actual results. And so that's the big opportunity for folks. You've got to get out there with a message that really resonates. And what we've seen is that the campaigns that's been an awful lot of time putting together the technology in different ways, they lose sight. of like, oh, what is the actual message that's going to reach people? How do we get creative with what our campaigns look like? We saw this happen very early on with NationBuilder where the Scottish National Party was really interested in using it.

We were one of our first beta customers. And you may know the story now, but they've since, like, they've won this historic election. They held a referendum on declaring independence from the UK, all kinds of amazing things. But what happened in that very initial campaign, was that they'd spent like a year, a year and a half trying to like pull together all of their different tech systems and they weren't really getting anywhere. So even an early version of

Nation Builder, they were able to like stop focusing on all those things. And instead, they actually started to find all those folks that were tweeting about them, right from the countryside, engage with them, get them to host parties and knock on doors and stuff like that. And they tripled their party membership in the course of two and a half months. And that's how they actually won. So it's like the folks that are spending all their time trying to make the tech work is he don't have to do it anymore. So in the presidential campaign, I've been reading everything like all the post-game analysis. And one of the things that really struck me was in Hillary's television advertisements, or in Donald Trump's television advertisements, 10.2% of his ads

mentioned Hillary Clinton. And in Hillary Clinton's television advertisements, 100% of the ads mentioned Donald Trump, do you think that was reflective of a lack of a message? Or how does that happen where two people are running against each other and they take such different tactics? And did that impact the outcome, do you think? Hillary Clinton very deliberately built a kind of a technocratic campaign that is a deep part of the culture of the Democratic Party. And that's also who she is, right? She's like an extremely extraordinary tactician in like getting things done and that. But the result was like that was the belief was how they were going to win. But it was, it really distracted them from, okay, what is it that people actually care about right now? Not 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago. What is it right now? And that pulling the eyes off the ball was the thing. And meanwhile, Donald Trump tapped into an energy source that was like extremely powerful. And he knew it. He was in he knew it intuitively. you could tell and just kept stoking it and stoking it and stoking it. You can do that and you

can do it for like whatever it is that matters to you. It doesn't have to be, you know, ideologically if you don't agree with him, a lot of people don't. You've got to be able to tap into that thing. And so the Trump campaign weren't running the campaign the way you're supposed to. But at the end of the day, what he did was on his cell phone, whatever it was that was coming up for him, he like put it out there in the world. That energy could turn into donors, volunteers, and people turn it out at those massive rallies. And one of the things that you mentioned to me in the past was that his supporters, like when you look at just supporters of political candidates,

were unusually rabid-like. How does that manifest itself and why does it matter? Yeah, because that energy turns into like people actually doing things for the campaign. And there was a kind of a double whammy that was happening on the Clinton side where like the energy wasn't particularly strong to be. with and on top of it, they were super confident that they were going to win. So there was no real urgency. And they tried to create urgency around Trump, but nobody ever believed it because everybody thought there was no chance he could ever win. If you look at the number of votes

over the last couple of presidential elections, you know, Trump got the same, roughly the same number of votes as like the previous two Republican nominees. But Hillary Clinton got dramatically less than Obama did. And that was the real difference. We've got Brexit. We've got Trump, is this a better world? Or have we entered, like, a much worse world? So I really love the Internet. I put a book about my life called The Internet is My Religion. And a lot of people are really questioning, you know, is the world that we're making.

Facebook is getting attacked. You know, the Internet's getting attacked by the mainstream media. You know, they've lost the power, so that's not that surprising. But I would say that people are scared. And that's part of why they're voting this way. you know, there's a shift that, or that's not even a shift, it's like, it's a massive transformation that's happened as a result of the internet. For me, you know, I believe God is what happens when humanity is connected. And what's very different about my God is that we get to decide how it is that we'll behave. Like each of us contribute to that. So the future is not written. The internet can like reflect back whatever it is that we want it to. And we need more and more leaders to step up and say, look, this is the way that I want it to be. So what gets me excited, particularly right now, is that there's so much energy that has been stirred up where people are actually like, hey, like, it matters what it is that I think and what it is that I do.

The world isn't happening to me. I can make the world happen. And so that's what I think. I want to shift that energy from like, oh, this is awful to, wow, anybody can have a really significant impact. and then we can make the world that we want. So I'm really excited about it. So I guess it's who knows where it goes at the end of the day. We don't know.

Like it could go horribly wrong and awful or not. And that's why y'all are here, you know? Okay. Well, that's a happy way of looking at it. But if God is humanity connected, there's a very strong argument that humanity's getting much more balkanized. People are sticking to their special interest group. They're only reading things that they already believe.

they're not talking to each other outside of their circles. And, you know, part of the shock, and there would have been kind of, I think, shock on both sides. I think that if Hillary had won, a lot of the Trump supporters would have been going, like, I can't even believe this. I don't know anybody who voted for Hillary. Are we ever going to get past that? Or is there a way past that in terms of getting to a more common culture, more shared values, or are we going to continue kind of running down opposite directions?

the path that we're on right now is definitely going down opposite direction something has to change absolutely the thing for me is like i grew up like as a kid in this sort of christian evangelical bubble and um back when it was like really hard to create bubbles like we had our own bookstores we had our own media we had our own satellite television we had like you it was like this carefully curious i didn't even go to normal school like all these things so you had like liberty university television yes uh sky am I went to Liberty University for those you remember the Reverend Falwell. Yeah, yeah. And so I actually kind of know something about bubbles. And so I saw the Internet as my way out of that bubble. And that's what I loved so much about it, is that there were all these, like, crazy people that I never had access to before. So for me, the Internet is the exact opposite. It's not about creating the bubbles.

It's actually breaking free from the bubble. But now, like, everybody, they want to create their bubble. And this is a normal human tendency. It plays in all kinds in our life all the time. It's why folks move to the suburbs. It's why, you know, all the things. And so that is not a good force going forward. We have to, like, very intentionally figure out ways for people to come together

and start to hear and understand each other in ways that are really deeply meaningful. It's impossible, I believe, to occur at all online at this point. The Internet is my religion, right? We've been dealing with what it brings up for our own staff. As you can imagine, everybody has their own political beliefs. Yeah, how did some of your employees, go home and say, hey, yay, we just, our software, you know, the president was on it, president elect, and, you know, some of them really fear and hate Trump, how did that go over for them?

We screen pretty heavily for folks who are ready to be facilitators and where it's no longer about you and what you want. It's about facilitating what other people want. We're ready for it. So it's intense being in this role, but it's also incredibly important because if, we start to decide who has the right to run for office, or who has the right to lead or who has the right to organize. It's a really, really slippery slope. What are the other things they shouldn't have because I disagree with them? That's what America is built on. That is what we are exporting to the world.

So we've now gotten past the will of the party, the will of the media, and the will of money, and we're at like the actual raw will of the people. And there have been a huge number of pieces that have come out saying maybe democracy is bad. Maybe, you know, we should change the rules. Is that right? Is true democracy actually not a good thing? Is the kind of filtered democracy that we've lived in a better system? Are they wrong?

Are they right? Do they have a point? I believe this country was founded on freedom and opportunity for everybody. That was like the basic thing. Democracy or a representative democracy, rather, was sort of the best way that we'd kind of to come up with that. But if you think about elections in particular, it's majority rule, which means that the minority doesn't necessarily have freedom and opportunity. So it is not an ideal system at all. I think if we go and we say, okay, well, if democracy is really about

everybody having a voice, everybody having freedom and everybody having an opportunity to do what is that they want to do, we need to start thinking about moving beyond elections. That is think about the fundamental cultural value that it's creating here. We are at combat with each other. Fundamentally, we are not about understanding each other. We're not about coming together and solving our bigger problems. We're saying that fundamentally it is about conflict. And that is so deeply baked into American culture, it's actually hard to imagine that not being there. And I think until we look at new ways of solving our problems that are fundamentally democratic meaning like everybody can be involved and like in where and everybody's voices are heard we're

going to have this problem you know that's why nation builder is leadership softers is about leadership right you don't have to run for office to go and find the 50 or a thousand or a million other people who care about what you're doing and going and make that happen that's a great thing about capitalism but it's also the great thing about communities like in crowdfunding and all these sort of new things that we're exploring online is that those opportunities are becoming more and more available. And people don't quite realize it yet. They don't realize that like there's a lot that you can do yourself if you just are willing to kind of have that courage to stand up. But I think as more and more people do that, you know, the institutions of elections and politics and even

government will become less and less relevant to people's lives as completely new systems are built by leaders outside of that system, creating something new. And we'll see that. That'll be a big shift that the internet enables? Can technology change the way we have the conversation? We have had this fairly crude thing, which is a vote. And, you know, it's not a vote to get what you want. It's kind of vote, and if 50.01% of the people agree with me, then I get what I want. And if they don't, then I don't.

So it's not like you actually have choice. You just have a vote. Is there something beyond the vote that we eventually get? get to because now we can keep track of everybody and what they want. Yeah, I think what we're going to see is a massive explosion in the freedom for people to choose how they want to be governed. The Internet really enables this because the borders and geography matter less and less. I identify more with people that are like me in a totally different way than the folks that like live near me. Part of the reason our company's called Nation Builder is the idea that there

won't just be 250 nations in the world anymore. There'll be 250 million of them, right? And there's such an opportunity for folks to lead in that era. And so as that happens more and more and as the technologies, if it's the blockchain and other things, allow sort of these different entities to start to relate to each other, the old way will become less and less and less relevant. I believe that ultimately that gets us to the fundamental principles that this country was founded on, which is freedom and opportunity. But it's going to be extraordinarily messy and painful. And what troubles me a lot is that we don't have leadership, like the folks that people are looking to as leaders right now, which is largely political leaders, who the

president is or any of the world leaders, they're not talking about this. massive transformational shift. Like people, so people are afraid legitimately, right? They don't have jobs. They don't know what's going on. As we start to accept that, oh, wow, this is, everything is changing now. Everything. We can start to put together the stories, the narratives, the policies that will sort of lead

us through that transition in a really healthy way so that we can create the world that we actually want to create instead of the world that the technology is, just kind of like spiraling us towards. We saw a massive spike in signups to our site, runforoffice.org. He's got a site called run foroffice.org. It turns out there's how many offices in the United States you can run for? There's like 500,000.

We don't have, 500,000 offices you can run for. So there's 500,000 jobs. You can run some, you know, you can be an elected official. So there is energy for folks to actually get engaged in the process, which is exciting. But fundamentally, the internet is, and technology is like moving, so fast. It's just so hard to keep up with it. So we need a much more distributed, decentralized way of doing that. The problem is that folks haven't made that flip in their

minds, right? There's that Steve Jobs quote. As soon as you realize that everything that exists in the world was created by somebody. So give me an example of something that somebody did that the government would ordinarily do, but they were able to do much easier by themselves. My favorite story of this is really early on. It was very inspiring to me. There's this beach in Hawaii. It's called Polyhale State Parks. Beautiful beach, of course, it's in Hawaii. And the rainy season came, and it washed out this key bridge that was going to sort of allow people to get to the beach. There was like a 13-mile dirt road. And they're really concerned because all of the tourists, small businesses, the renting kayaks and stuff like that,

weren't going to have any customers once the springtime came. And so they went to the government and say, hey, guys, can you come, you know, fix the bridge? And they're like, yeah, sure, we'll get to it probably a couple years. And, well, actually, you know, maybe not because, like, it's going to cost about $8 million, we don't really have any budget. And so, you know, these businesses would have gone out of business. Like, it just wasn't an option. So a surfer, his name is Bruce, a surfer was like, we can figure this out.

So he got, like, 20, 25 people together. He got somebody to donate a crane and somebody else. to donate some wood and a ditch digger and all this stuff. And they fixed the bridge themselves in eight days. Wow. My hero, Bucky Fuller, he said this very clearly. You don't change things by trying to sort of fight the existing reality. You change things by creating a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.

There is so much opportunity now for everyone to create those new things that just make the other ones obsolete. And that's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, everybody.