This Week in Startups - Noodlegate, the end of cancel culture? + Next Unicorns: OpenGov CEO Zac Bookman | E1267

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Jason opens the show with a brief recap of "Noodlegate" and the end of cancel culture (2:09). Then he chats with OpenGov CEO Zac Bookman for the latest installment of our Next Unicorns series (14:10) about what makes governments ineffective (25:46), preventing corruption (30:37), the challenges selling into governments (35:54), how some states like Idaho & West Virginia have made their detailed budgets public on the cloud and more!

Okay, everybody, we got an amazing show for you. I am still in Italy, but I'm working, doing podcast, and I'm writing my book. And if you follow me on Twitter, I'm taking a Twitter break, but I will post my word count and percentage to go broke 4,000 words today. I feel so good about the book. I cannot wait for you to read it. I'm not going to tell you anything about it right now. You can't pre-order it. I'm just giving you a little heads up that I'm working hard at the beach, writing. And then coming back, having a nice meal, doing a little bike ride, get a gelato, and do some podcast for you. And today is a great podcast. I've got OpenGub. Zach Bookman on the program. He is taking government and making it transparent and it is mind-blowing what he's doing in places like West Virginia and Idaho to take their entire budgets and make them public to citizens. It could change everything about our government. It's super inspiring. And I want to talk about Noodlegate. I want to talk about cancel culture and I want to talk about George Lucas and this new Star Wars anime series that's coming out on Disney Plus. I have a point to make about it. And I think it's a discussion we need to have, so stick with us. Season three of the next unicorns is brought to you by

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Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash unicorn. In our first story today, we have to talk about Noodlegate. And what I think is kind of the end game for cancel culture. I feel like we're at the end of cancel culture. So for some background before we get into this cancel chaos, there is an award-winning chef online known as Pippa Eats. I'm not aware of her before today. Her name is Pippa Middlehurst. She studied East and Southeast Asian cuisine for over 15 years. She attended the Lanzao Noodle School in 2019, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct, which is famous for teaching students

how to hand-pulled noodles, which I've had these hand-pulled noodles. They're amazing. She published her first cookbook on dumplings and noodles back in August of 2020. Rosalind Talethin is a culture writer and contributor for the AV Club, Bitch Media, Refinery 29, and Weiss. And she tweeted the following on August 15th. Why did a white woman write a cookbook about dumplings and noodles? Classic, cancel culture, dunk. Her tweet caught a ton of blowback with most people making fun of her ridiculous take, as you would expect. Pippa, who had been inactive on Twitter for a year, responded in a quite

reasonable way. Hi, Roslyn, trying to approach this without defensiveness. And it seems as though your issue is with the larger system of injustice in food publishing underrepresentation of BIPOC authors, overrepresentation of white authors rather than me personally. I think so. Anyway, attacking an individual, she continues, that you know nothing about pasting a picture of my face and calling me an arrogant and uncreative white woman allows others who respect your opinion to justify harassing me. In my experience, tweets like this don't challenge a systematic issue or instigate any other change. It just serves to temporarily make me the poster child for that system of injustice that no doubt

I am part of. That's an interesting statement on her part. She didn't personally do anything, I think, is what she's saying, but because she's white, she's, I guess, saying she's part of that system, and simply leads to dogpiling and bounds of threatening DMs telling me, for example, to go and drown in quotes, you deserve to fail in quotes, and she ended it there. After Pipa's response, Talison claimed the mob had turned on her

and that she was being harassed by Nazis, which she claims Pippa had enticed to defend her. And here's Rosalind's tweet, the Nazi and white supremacist harassment has been ongoing for about 24 hours by the time she posted this. She could have looked at the replies or quotes on my tweet she commented on, but her feelings were so hard that she didn't care, yada, yada, yada, yada. And now, before making her account private, Talison mentioned she was going to need therapy after two days of harassment from Nazis, and then she dropped her personal PayPal link for tips. Anyway, therapy costs $130 a session,

and I'm going to need it after this 48 hours of harassment. And she is asking. for money. The entire situation is obviously a crazy mess. Now, why are we talking about here on this week in startups? Well, I think this culture is enabled specifically by technology. Social media is the topic of the show. And I think, you know, this canceled culture, there are people who obviously deserve to be canceled for being horrible human beings. But I do think that when it comes to discussions about things that are delicate, if you're going to dunk on somebody, you need to get to know them a little bit and maybe these conversations would be better had one-on-one or face-to-face. And this is coming for me. You know, I've thrown a dunk or two

on Twitter. I try to reserve it for Professor Coltakes, but the Chad, I don't know who the chat is. This is some sort of joke account, I think. Had a funny tweet that I think actually speaks about this specific style of cancel culture. He says, tweets like this make me think I should open a rehab center for those addicted to Twitter clout. It would have to be constructed out of mature. that block Wi-Fi and cellular data with day trips outside the city and rehabilitation plans to help patients experience offline life. Don't I know it? You know on July 12th or something or 14th, I decided and I pinned to my profile on Twitter, Twitter.com slash Jason, that I'm taking a Twitter break. Now, I read Twitter. I'll like things, but I stopped engaging on there.

You will see me post this podcast and say, hey, the pod's up. You might see me, since I'm writing the book, talk about my progress in the book. That's about. it. And I can tell you, my head is so clear on my vacation and my ideas are flowing better. So this is a PSA. If you're on Twitter or other social networks getting wound up, take a break. It is wonderful. I am in month two of my break and I have recaptured hours and hours of words and cognitive cycles that I was wasting on Twitter. Now, Twitter is great for promoting your brand. It's a great intellectual sparring, but I think sustained Twitter addiction is a real negative, and it sends people into this type of rabbit hole, which results in pain and suffering.

You have two different people dunking on each other, and one of them has a mob of Nazis who are going to defend her, which she obviously doesn't want. The other one has a mob of woke people trying to attack the other person, which I'm sure she doesn't want the other person attack, neither of them want to see each other suffer. So for the love of God, can you just DM each other and maybe just maybe go out and have a meal together or talk about your mutual love of cooking dumplings and noodles? Maybe that would actually be productive, folks. And, you know, an account IGP, and I'm not giving any endorsement of these accounts, by the way, or their positions.

I'm just informing you of people's reactions. So don't take any of these things I'm really. as I endorse it or I endorse the person. I don't know most of these people, but L-M-A-O, laughing my ass off. The woman has been learning East-Southis Asian cooking for over 15 years and attended an actual effing noodle school in China. It's like you think it's impossible for anyone who is in Chinese to be just as versed in preparing dumplings as anyone else in the culture. Mike Solina never wanted to not jump into a bar fight, said pretty good noodle drama going on right now. This is interesting. Putting aside this instance, we did have

have a similar thing about cultural appropriation with food, with the Bon Appetit Petit Story and the Reply All Podcasts and that whole implosion, which again, I think we're probably a bunch of good people with good intent getting addicted to this dunking on each other and destroying each other as opposed to having conversations that are productive in private. Now, for the people in the Bonapete story who are not getting paid well, that's a different story. Obviously, if people are paying one group of people a low salary and, you know, who are people of color or Asian descent, and then paying the white people, you know, 10 times as much and putting them on camera with the group of, you know, underrepresented people's recipes, man, that's dark.

And I think the Bon Appetit story was pretty dark. But that's not what we're talking about. It's a dunking. But I want to pause for a second. Because after I saw this story on Twitter, And again, I'm reading Twitter, but not participating. It's been a great experiment for me. I highly recommend you all do it. Just take a 30-day Twitter break and put hashtag Twitter break and at mention me. Just go read-only. Or actually, that's a better hashtag.

Let's call it read-only Twitter. Just do hashtag read-only Twitter. And now I'll know you're doing that. I'll be interested in your experiences on this as an audience. I want to show you a really good example about how cultures can influence each other in a positive way, not through appropriation, but through inspiration. If you don't know, my favorite director after Ridley Scott is Akura Kurosawa. And it's just a slight edge for Ridley Scott because of gladiator and blade runner.

But Kurosawa, high and low, seven samurai, yojimbo, I mean, these are some of the greatest films ever made. Pure beauty, like watching a painting unfold before your eyes. Highly recommend watching high and low, just incredible film noir. by Kurasawa and Yojimbo and Seven Samuraii and Stray Dog, another noir film from Kurosawa. Because Kurosawa was inspired by the French noir detective stories. So the French inspiring Kurosawa. Kurosawa inspired George Lucas. A lot of the characters and a lot of the iconography in Star Wars comes from Kurosawa.

In fact, Darth Fader, if you can envision in your mind, the mask, looks a lot like samurai armor and headdresses. And in fact, that's where he got it from. And obviously, there are lightsabers and samurai swords. You get the idea. In fact, in the Hidden Forest, there were two characters that he modeled R2D2 and C3P, C3PO after, who were kind of like bumbling fools. I think there were guards, if I remember the story correct. I think it was called Hidden Fortress. So let's just pause for a second.

Kurosawa was a big inspiration to Lucas. But I am super excited that Disney Plus, which is the greatest online service ever, if you have a family, it is awesome. Whether it's the Mandalorian or Scarlet Witch or, you know, any of these shows, Loki, they're just crushing it. Well worth it. Give it my highest rating.

Disney Plus is doing six different Japanese animation studios, has charged six different Japanese animation studios to produce nine short films in anime style of Star Wars stories. They're calling it Star Wars Visions. So let's take a moment and look at how cultural sharing and inspiration can produce amazing products in the world. Some people will like to focus on, you know, tearing each other down for being inspired, a white woman being inspired by Chinese noodles.

Well, let's take a moment here and just think about how amazing. amazing it is that the French directors inspired Kurosawa, Kurosawa inspired Lucas, and now Lucas is inspiring Japanese animators and anime. This is great. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see the trailer. I cannot wait to see this. We've got a great show for you today. Stick with us. Every startup needs business insurance and you should look no further than in broker. If you don't have insurance, you fail one of the first steps. In broker technology, saves you time and money. Prices are up to 20% lower with better coverage than the incumbents. You can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with Mbroker instead

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Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, next on the program, we're going to talk about the most inefficient part of our society. Yes, the government. And another absolutely boring topic, SaaS software. But we've got a very unique founder who is trying to solve that problem. As we all know, government is wasting all of our money constantly, and they're running on systems that are decades old in many cases.

We are fully in the SaaS software space three or four generations ahead of our government, and we keep getting taxed more, and they keep doing less for us. Efficiency in government is a disaster. And my guest today co-founded a company called OpenGov. His name is Zach Bookman and welcome to the program, Zach. Thanks for having me, Jason. Really honored to be here. Now, Joe Lonsdale is your co-founder, if I understand correctly?

Correct. Yeah. Fantastic. Nine years ago, Joe and two amazing young technologists from Stanford, we co-founded OpenGov with the crazy, courageous, naive vision that we could power more effective and accountable government. And we're building the all-cloud, all-integrated, ERP for our nation, state, and local government. So we're opening up the back office,

bringing efficiency, accountability, transparency to all these really complicated workflows that, you know, that touch our daily lives. Explain to the audience who doesn't know, what is an ERP system. So OpenGov offers budgeting and planning software. Minneapolis is defunding its police department using our software. Tucson, Arizona. Richmond, Virginia, and Suffolk County, New York. And think of that as ripping out the old Oracle Hyperion from government. We sell financial management systems. This is all the accounting and tracking of where all the money goes, all the assets, how

they're recorded, you know, right down to the paper clips. And then permitting, licensing, code enforcement, what we call our citizen services suite. So if you want to get a business. So ERP, just to be clear, is enter. enterprise resource planning. Enterprise resource planning. And in government, it's all these transactions and transactional workflows that very few people think about, but they actually bang their heads against the wall, both in the government

and as residents. So procurement and permitting and financials and budgeting. And then we put it all in our reporting and transparency platform. So that's it in a nutshell. And so explain to me and to the audience what is the example. that is most common when you go into a government agency. Are you going into city, states, towns, the federal government, who's the target here? And then what would be the first two or three things they would do when they turn on the software? So think about the mind run of the cities and counties

and towns that we all grew up in. There are about 3,000 counties in the United States, 19,000 cities and towns. There's actually another 15,000 townships, and there's about 20,000 state agencies. Many are too small to pay serious money for high quality web-based software. And a few are so big, they just want to hire the Accentures and Deloids of the world and custom-build things. But everything below the New York cities and L.A. counties and everything above the little three-horse towns in Wyoming, we can serve with this incredible SaaS platform. And so we help governments plan where every dollar goes. It's a major anti-corruption device, but they have to be. have to build budgets and they have to get input from the community. And it's a big pie fight on

how to spend taxpayer dollars. And then we account for where every dollar goes. That's our financial system. And then if you need a poodle shaving license or, you know, marriage license or open a business or outdoor dining permits or you want to renovate your house, all your contractor needs building and planning permits and all that is run through open gov and our permitting and licensing and code enforcement suite. And then, which we call citizen services. And then we actually help governments do their procurement. So a whole range of suites, application suites to power more effective and accountable government. So the classic playbook in SaaS has been, at least for the last two decades, bottom-up SaaS as David Sachs, my bestie, sort of perfected and created with Yammer.

People in the company would start using the product and then eventually somebody in the IT department or management would say, oh, what is this Yammer thing? we should pay for it so we get more tools. In government, I believe that doesn't exist as a concept. So how did you get product market fit and start the product market fit journey nine years ago with governments? So some courage, some naivete, but you are right. And David actually came by the company fairly early and offered some advice and help. governments don't accept free very well. Governments, you could have a magic button that will run the whole city and they don't have to do anything.

And they'd be very hesitant to even press the magic button. So it's a complicated enterprise sales process to get a technical win with all their technical personnel to get the political narrative for the value creation. And then, of course, the commercials. And so it's just expensive to sell into government. It's a huge barrier to entry, including for the governments. But as you know, our co-founder Joe has a lot of courage and conviction. They did this at Palantir. And we've been building just bit by bit.

You need a lot of product. Sweet wins versus best of breed. The old enterprise software contention. So the point solutions have a very tough time because they can't get the price points in government. And the suites, you know, have a tough time because it takes a long time, but you can charge higher prices and pay. for your sales and marketing and product development. So it's tremendously complex, and it's just getting better and better as we get more and more more software, more and more relationships.

We've got over a thousand governments across the country and growing multiple a week at this point. And so what you're saying is people want the Microsoft Office Suite. They want to have the parking tickets and the permits and the budgeting and the payments all in one package. They don't want somebody to just sell them parking meters and tickets and then somebody else to sell them, you know, their financial planning software. One throat to choke, one procurement, one support line.

It just, it, they want the one, including because we as a polity have made it so hard for governments to buy. So one of the reactions. Well, you get a corruption scandal and then everyone in town or everyone in the state says, let's put more regulation on governments and how they spend money. And they're, they're, you know, people say, oh, they're all incompetent and dishonest. So what do we do? We put more regulation on them.

And what does that do? It raises the price and the cost and the time it takes to buy things. And, I mean, you know, we're running a company at OpenGov. I've got dozens, if not 100 plus SaaS subscriptions. Government has so much technology that it needs. And literally even keeping track of their vendors is a massive effort requiring a lot of software across a huge range of business lines. So government is basically just a holding company.

And it's a weird holding company because you never mix, you know, trash collection with road maintenance, with sewage processing, with electric power generation. It's like, huh? This doesn't even make any sense from a company perspective. But that's what our nation's governments generally are, is general purpose holding companies with lots of different business lines with huge ranges of workflows and needs. Knowing what you know, what is the worst situation of inefficiency and red tape you've been presented with on this journey. And then I'll ask, what's the biggest win you've had, like in a very

specific example? So both sides of the coin, the biggest train wreck and the biggest win. There's some spectacular and very sad, really, government failures. The city of Bell, California, the citizens were disengaged. And the mayor and city council built hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars from a small, poor community outside of L.A. A spectacular corruption scandal. We actually went into Bell afterward and brought them transatlanticse. transparency software and help them try to build trust. Even the city of Cooperino had a serious corruption scandal, a dishonest staff member turned out to have been stealing. They then brought in OpenGov budgeting and planning to clean up the whole budgeting process so that every dollar's

accounted for. It's all tracked and it's all open to the community. And it's been a huge success story in Cooper Tino right in the heart of Silicon Valley. I could go on and on and on about both some of the, you know, sad and incompetent situations we've seen, but also just a lot of people working really hard accountants, lawyers, public administrators and managers across the country fighting every day for their communities. And it's actually a more positive story than most people think it is. There's a lot more competence, I would say, than most people realize going on in their local governments. So why do we perceive it as so incompetent then, knowing what you No. You know, I think we see the failures. I think we don't understand how these organizations work. And it's kind of funny because we are the government. Let's just be clear. We elect our local city council members and county council members and our state legislatures and state leaders as well as our federal leaders. Very few people really understand how a city operates. They don't understand, well, a city manager is actually the chief executive or chief appointed officer as opposed to a May or.

They don't understand how the agencies work and fit together. And it's the lack of knowledge, the lack of interest that leads to a lot of these ridiculous situations. But we create the laws. We create the rules. We create the regulation. So it is a little funny when we rip into our local governments. And I do this as well.

I live in the city and county of San Francisco. And I have as many gripes as the next person. But it's the political culture here. Let's just be clear. How much time and money do you spend integrating a bunch of different software products together at your company? Let me guess. Way too much time. Well, Odoo is here to help.

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I'm sure you saw that. I saw that. How does something like that happen? I think it's a little, I read that, and I had the same thought. This is spectacularly insane. What I heard is, it was a pilot. to test out auto-compacting trash technology. And so it's a bit of a journalist's story making a stink.

There's a lot of things to make a stink about cleaning up the streets and beautifying the city being one. Yeah, excuse the pun. But, you know, running a pilot, I actually think that's what we want our governments to do, be more innovative. And so they're operating in glass houses with everyone throwing stones at them. So it's an extremely difficult operating environment. you a couple examples. I'm running an enterprise software company. I don't take a software purchase for my board to approve. We've got an amazing board, one of the best boards, Mark Andreessen, John Chambers, Joe Lonsdale. They'd laugh me out of the room if I took, you want to buy an extra

few Salesforce licenses, but believe it or not, most of our nation's governments, local governments, have to take certain purchases to their board for approval. It's crazy. And then everyone sits around and throw stones at that. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? Imagine running a company like that. Or imagine running a company where a journalist is going to be writing up, you want to do this for your product feature?

That's a very difficult operating environment. And so I don't know the specifics on the $20,000 trash cans, but when I started reading, they're running a pilot and it's technology that auto compacts. I said, still sounds crazy, but it sounds a little less, you know, it's not a rubber meat. So could be fake news. could be the press trying to get a headline. It does sound interesting, an auto compacting garbage can, but also seems incredibly wasteful. I think what I heard is we're trying out four or five of

these, and if it works, you know, they'd still be unbelievably expensive, maybe a couple thousand apiece, but you know what else is expensive? Paying salaries, benefits, and retirement for people to walk around and run around and drive trucks around the city picking up the trash. Pretty darn expensive to maintain our parks, our roads, to haul trash, to cut trees. It's kind of unbelievable if you think about it, but these are real people and they get paid and it's massive expenses. And so I assume they're trying to innovate to actually cut costs in the long term. It doesn't mean they're doing a good job. But there's a lot more to a lot of these stories than people realize. What government in the world is the most efficient that you've modeled

the software or the strategies and best practices on that you try to educate. people here. I'm sure you've done some studies of, hey, how does it done in Finland or Norway or Tokyo or whatever high functioning Sydney comes to mind city? And you try to bring those lessons back here. So we're focused domestically on the U.S. We see a lot of interesting and innovative stuff going on. The city of Tucson, Arizona, for instance, the city of Tampa is Tucson is using our budgeting and planning to kind of streamline the massive collaboration required to spend a billion dollars a year across a whole range of services and departments. City of Tampa is working really hard on dashboards, performance metrics.

So you can start to understand if we're going to pay this much for these services, what are we getting back and trying to run the city with some outcome orientation? What's an example of that outcome and metrics? That sounds fascinating to me is actually holding how holding the government accountable for outcomes seems like a great idea. Of course, it is more red tape and it is more infrastructure. Exactly. There's a tradeoff on these things, Jason, and it's more complicated than we want to admit, you know, you need to mow parks. Okay, how many freaking mowers and how many acres are being mowed per week? And at some point, it's useful. And then another point, it's like,

all right, this is, we don't measure any companies at this level of detail. So how do we do just enough and not too much? Because at some point, you've got people walking around with clipboards all day as opposed to doing the actual work. But I mean, there's a mountain of things to be measured from tree trimming to, you know, the number of road miles paved to the number of potholes paved to the number of business licenses issued, to the revenue that's driving, to the outdoor dining permits, to the speed of response on citizens. I could go on and on. Another great government we work with is the state of Idaho, the state of West Virginia. These are governments, focused on accountability, on transparency, and on responsiveness to their citizens.

Tell me about the one at a time, because you're going pretty fast there. The one I'm interested in there is transparency. How does transparency manifest itself in this case? Go to the state of Idaho, do a quick search either on Google or the government's website, and you can pull up powered by OpenGov every single dollar that the state has spent, every single dollar over the past, if I remember correctly, five or ten years. You can find out what it went to, where it goes, what it was for. So when we're talking transparency, we're talking... Basically, an open ledger on the website. Correct. And it's... Is it in real time? It's nightly. Wow. It's no, it's unbelievable. It's a huge number of transactions across billions and billions of dollars. This is the state of

Idaho. You can do the same... The whole state of Idaho. Correct. And so I wonder, are journalists now or are people who are competing for that business now able to see where the money's flowing and then report on it or compete on it. Have you seen examples of that where this transparency led to either more competition or reducing corruption? I mean, I guess the act of just publishing it makes it easier to steal. You mean harder? I'm sorry, harder to steal. Yes, much harder. Yes. It makes it easier to stop corruption is I guess what I was going on. We hear unbelievable anecdotes from journalists are saying, wow, you just saved me hours and days of my life pulling information on budgets and expenditures. You hear citizens, they'll go to their council or legislative meetings

and say, you know, thank you. Like, I trust you more. You're putting it out there for us to analyze and see. We've had stories where we've actually uncovered discrepancies that turned out to be serious problems and the government found corruption or fixed. Example? We had, in the state of Ohio, our data and our technology helped the Attorney General of Ohio find a price-fixing scheme for road salt. Sounds funny, sounds odd, but there were two major players, if I remember correctly, and they were colluding, which is against, I think, either state or federal antitrust laws or some price-fixing laws, and they found it doing analysis through the data that was published through OpenGub.

And so we talked about transparency. And then you also talked about response time. Where would that response time be seen? And are people actually recording the response time for, I don't know, 9-1-3-1 and then publishing it? So they actually, a lot of data is being published on response time. Public safety is a whole space unto itself. You could say that OpenGov is the leader in public administration.

software. Public safety does the computerated dispatch and the records management for jails and arrests and other things. It's a big and exciting space itself. Those response times are frequently published on OpenGov dashboards and stories pages and transparency. There's all sorts of other types of response times. For instance, if you're a vendor or a developer, a contractor in the community, what's the response time for getting a permit issued? What's the response time for opening a business or getting a liquor license? What's the response time for, I want to bid on something the government needs. I'm a purveyor of road salt and I want a fair competition to sell my freaking product. Can I compete? Can you tell me how to compete? Can you get

back to me if I'm the low bidder or the best value? And so OpenGov procurement streamlines all of that for the vendors and the developers that are trying to compete for business and grow business in the communities. before we get to the ad read, I want you to go to LinkedIn.com slash unicorn and post your first job for free at LinkedIn jobs. That's right. A free job posting from LinkedIn jobs. Your founders, you're running a company. You need to get talented there to help you out because your company is growing so fast and you're so busy. Time spent searching for and interviewing the wrong candidates for a job opening is wasted time. You could be putting that into your

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for free. Terms and conditions do apply because they're giving you something for free. I just had a crazy idea, which I'm sure you've had yourself or maybe heard. If the budget is on the website and every expenses, it would be de minimis to put a button there for citizens to log in with their Facebook handle and comment on a transaction. Or to share that transaction or maybe say, I would like to bid for it and put in another bid. Have the governments now that they're transparent and sharing this stuff, are they bold enough to say, let's have a conversation where that data exists? And has anybody ever suggested that? I'm curious. Yeah, it's a great suggestion. And in the OpenGov Reporting and Transparency platform, we have an open town hall

capability with many governments leverage. And it's to actually have a dialogue two-way with the residents and the citizens. And you get everything from, you know, people saying, you freaking idiots, why are you doing this way? Or I love you and thank you. And thank you. you, I'm a mom and I've got kids and a job and I can't come to town hall on a Tuesday night, but I can log in and make my voice heard. And so there's a lot of dialogue and citizen engagement going on through OpenGov as well as many other vendors in the space. So does that manifest itself in a video conferencing call or in chat or in a message board or in a one way back and forth? You can kind of do all of it, but it's a lot of public forums,

basically. So think of it as the Agora, but online. And so digital messaging and they can run surveys, they can get feedback. So, you know, if you want to build a stadium in the community or a new park, you might want to solicit, what do you all think? And then everyone pours there. I love it. I hate it. Not in my backyard. And you get that going online. You get more participation, more buy-in and frankly, more productivity. Alignment leads to execution in a company, and it does in a community as well. And so what about issues? where you have some huge divide, I think, the homeless slash addiction, whatever, however we want to frame the homeless problem in San Francisco, which are part of the community.

I'm just curious, you know, it's a little outside the mandate of OpenGov, but I'm curious how a system like OpenGov, if it was deployed in San Francisco, I'm assuming it's not, because San Francisco is incompetent. They would not, they have declined on multiple occasions to leverage our technology. And that's because they're incompetent or they're just using something else? Yeah, no comment. I'll say it. Like, can you imagine if the amount of spending we have on, I mean, it's also a lot of corruption in San

Francisco. That's been proven through many different arrests that have occurred and stings and all kinds of stuff over the decades. But if we could actually share the spending on the homeless problem, I'm using air quotes here for those of you listening and not watching on YouTube, that could have a dramatic impact because I don't think people understand where all this money is going. I agree. I agree 100%.

In fact, many years ago, our first product was transparency. It shows off all the spending in a user-friendly way and you can drill through it. We actually offered it to the city of San Francisco for free and then for some unbelievably low price, like $25,000 or something. And they had a homegrown system. It took seven seconds per page to load. and they said no. There's one way to decrease usage.

It takes seven seconds. Are you able to ingest public records for a city, like say San Francisco, it would be interesting to if you were in a thousand of the 50,000 cities, if you could ingest the other data, and I know there were some nonprofits doing this kind of sunlight projects, if you could adjust that, you could actually benchmark city versus city, what they're doing with homeless, what they're doing with construction, what they're doing with permits. Has that happened yet where we actually benchmark cities against each other?

And have you thought about adding that to the product? Jason, you are very impressive with your product suggestions. That was one of our early, part of the early vision was to allow cities and counties to learn from each other and share information and benchmark to get more efficient and even get kind of competitive. We have a number of capabilities to help that, but to be fair, it's been very, very difficult. And I've learned a lot over nine years of building this. I started out, I'd say we started out with a little more of a kind of aggressive posture. And after understanding the challenges of running a city, there's so many unique parts of it. Is your, you know, does your fire department,

How many branches does your fire department have? Are there, what's the climate? What's the wildfire this? The hills there, the train tracks there. So it actually is harder than you think to measure even basic things like police response time or fire response time. It sounds funny. My father was the head of traffic for the city of Seattle. And is an interesting story.

They get a blizzard about once every 10 years. And so it's a terrible use of taxpayer money to invest in a huge amount of social. snow removal equipment, including because it's a, it's a one of those seaside kind of roughly temperate environments where the snow melts in about a day on average. And it was the blizzard of 10 years, and it took about 50 hours for the snow to melt out. And the all of a sudden, Charles Bookman and the government of the city of Seattle are the world's stupidest people because they couldn't plow the side streets because they didn't, hadn't invested in snow plow equipment. Now, if you were running it, you wouldn't want to waste tens of millions of dollars on snow plows.

They're going to sit there and rust out. But when the blizzard hits, everyone thinks you're the stupidest people in the world, and it's very hard to explain what's going on when everyone wants it in a soundbite. Let me know if that makes any sense, but it's the kind of thing that... It does seem like something if, you know, that is hard to communicate to people who are frustrated to have to stay home for two days and can't get their cars out. But in reality, you know, very simple. Would you like to pay X amount more in taxes and burn it?

How inefficient is the average city if you had to look at how they spend money? Do you think they could be 10% more efficient in spending, 50%? What's the range here of lift? We think that's a massive potential lift in terms of efficiency. Again, very tough to measure efficiency in a public sector organization. But just the cloud is coming to government. Opengov is bringing the cloud to government. The cloud offers a tremendous array of benefits, as we know.

total cost of ownership down, manual workflows down, strategy up, digitization up, engagement, transparency, accountability up, work from home, remote work, increased ability to fend off the cybersecurity attacks, the ransomware attacks, which are plaguing governments. So a huge array of benefits, and it's really happening. COVID, very bad for the world, very good for cloud software. And I'd say, kind of Aaron Levy mentioned that this, I think five or 10 years of progress is going to be made in just one or two years, given what's happening in governments. And I think there's just a massive lift coming to the productivity of governments.

But let's step back and understand that these are collections of human beings, very complicated communities with massively diverse interests, and they're not designed for efficiency, Jason. It's what most people don't understand. We've designed these organizations to move slow, to think about generations, not quarters or weeks, and to foster public participation, which, as you can imagine, is about the least efficient thing you can do. I think, you know, I'm just for folks who are watching, they might see my eyes moving around,

it's because I'm on transparent Idaho, which you can look at at transparent data.aito.gov. And, you know, we're having this sort of discussion as a very high level, but I'll have my team pull this up. I just sorted in three seconds, in beautiful, you know, very well-designed, responsive website. The pay rate of people in Idaho.

And it turns out the president of Idaho State University is the most well-paid person in the state at $400,000, which I think is the average salary of a teacher or firefighter in San Francisco. And Idaho State University's clinical associate professor, the president of Lewis Clark State College. It seems like the top university folks are the highest paid. And you can even do like just to sort with the data and sort ascending or descending and can see that the liquor division or other controllers are paying seven bucks an hour for a clinical lab, somebody working in the research lab. And you can see the name of the person.

And you can see the payroll costs and the workforce tenure. I mean, this is an incredible, incredible system. Just to look at that information has got to make the people working there think twice about doing anything that would be a shenanigan. And then also are we paying the proper rate is a really valid question. Maybe some of these salaries should be increased, you know, if they're so low. It could work both ways. What other transparency has worked really well?

Are people transparent about things like, you know, people, you talked before about how long it takes to get a liquor license, et cetera. Is that something that like San Francisco or other people not using OpenGov are actually publishing and I'm curious. Yeah, there's the government's across the country. We've really, I mean, look, we do the technology, the governments do the politics, but in some respect we started a movement to bring more transparency, effectiveness, and accountability to our nation, state, and local governments where we interact every day and which

really touch our lives. And it's going on all over the country. An anecdote that you'd find fascinating, the state of West Virginia used very similar technology to power overall spending transparency and discovered that some of the Supreme Court judges were buying $20,000 rugs. And rugs? Wow. Unbelievable expensive furniture and adornments.

And they were all thrown out of office as a result of opening up the spending, increasing the transparency. Yep. Okay. This is fascinating. You can go to the state of West Virginia, which I believe is the poorest state in the union or amongst them. And so the budget here really does matter. They also, conversely, did the best job of vaccine deployment of any state in the early months of the pandemic.

So they are actually on it. It's a very impressive governor, in fact, at least from when I saw him doing that. They literally have, I guess the Capitol Dome is being repaired. and they literally have every vendor and how much they're being paid for the Capital Dome repair in real time on their website. That is extraordinary, as well as rainy day funds, employee compensation like we talked about, and the top 200 state vendors all listed. Wow.

It's super fascinating. You can lose yourself in this data. Absolutely fascinating stuff. Yep. The auditor there, J.B. McCuskey is. a rabid user and has achieved tremendous results with it for the state. And I agree, it is, it is fascinating and there's a lot of depth. And it's also just straight up educational because we spend most of our days thinking about how we build our families or build our lives or build our

businesses. And these public entities were a part of. And it can really teach us how they run and how complex they are. I mean, I'm on the state of West Virginia and there's literally a button that says tourism advertising expenditures digital broadcast out of home advertising social media and i can click and see the social media budget for the state which is 35 thousand dollars a year is what west virginia is spending and you can see they're actual and you can see it over the years so 2021 they dropped down to 35k and they were spending you know a million in 2020 for some reason. And in 2009, they spent 231.

I wonder if that had to do with the pandemic. Maybe they spent extra money on, you know, trying to get people to travel. Who knows? But it does lead to questions. You know what's interesting, too? I don't know if you use Notion or a Wiki. There kind of is a change log where you can see where the changes are occurring. Do you have that feature in here where I could just look at the change log?

You've got this incredible podcast and media work and an amazing background. But if you're at all interested, I mean, we might have to get you on the OpenGov product team. We do have notation capabilities because, as you can imagine, this stuff's very complicated. Why did this go up? Why did this go down? And so you can actually notate things in there. But of course, this takes the administrators of the system, namely those in the government, to take the time and energy to do this.

And it's a lot because it's very wide ranging and very in depth. Well, I mean, here's, I mean, these are some brave people in West Virginia, and I just got to say, like, kudos to them. They faulted, by the way, Jason, from one of the lowest ranked states in the country in terms of transparency to number one as a result of what you're seeing and what we did with them. I mean, basically, if you're not using this, I think this is where the Justice Department should start their search. Like, if you're not transparent, that's probably a good place to look for corruption. Whoever doesn't want this should be at the top of the like, hmm, maybe we're not. we should drill down in here and take a look at what's going on. But I mean, talk about bold. On every page of West Virginia's site is a tweet and a Facebook post button and a Facebook like

button. And I noticed on this page, there's like a, you know, they've got whatever and thousands of likes and stuff like that. That's really fascinating that they want people to amplify it and send people to it. They've actually are trying to offer it as is the state of Idaho potentially to all their counties and cities so that the entire state, not just the state, agencies in the state government, but that the local governments operating within the state can take advantage of this type of technology and offer the transparency and reporting capabilities to the community. And the thing is, Jason, that we haven't talked about is extremely valuable for staff members because they often have to prepare reports on budget versus actuals or brief their executives

or elected officials. And just collecting that from the old IBM. mainframe or your, you know, your SAP system, which has green screens can be an unbelievable amount of labor and effort. And then you're hammer and tongsing it in Excel and preparing PowerPoints. And you can do it all in your open gov system or, you know, other cloud capabilities, which are coming online. Yeah. I mean, the visualizations, it's great, too.

You guys have, you know, a lot of great charting features here where you can just immediately dub it into a chart. And let's face it, if you're working in government, maybe you don't know exactly how to, you know, move data around efficiently. Maybe you're not used to using air table or notion or sharing the stuff. It's extraordinary as we wrap here. What have you learned about being a founder and a CEO over this journey and choosing to climb a mountain?

I know you like to climb mountains. To climb a mountain that let's face it, you'd have to be a masochist who want to do this. I always tell people like, you know, healthcare, music and government are where startups go to die. And I don't know which is the most difficult vertical, maybe healthcare to summit, or maybe government. I mean, music's gotten a little bit better. The music industry is being a little bit reasonable. Actually, they're being a lot more reasonable this day. They actually see like Palaton and other partners as partners. So that's great. They see a lot of revenue. What have you learned in doing something so crazy? I mean, this is a, this is a taller mountain than any of the

when you've climbed. It's it's all about the team. We've assembled an amazing array of talent. And these are people with not just extreme skills ranging from the specialties accounting and budgeting as well as of course the technology. But they've got the passion and we've got the team spirit. And so we're 400 strong and rolling rapidly. And very fortunately, the company's really attaining purchase and growing really nicely. We've made every mistake in the book. We've been through the journey. All the cliches are true in terms of how hard it is. And my joints hurt just kind of thinking about it.

But it's also among the most, it's about the most fulfilling work we could possibly be doing. For me, we want to go home in five or ten years, tell our parents, tell our kids, look what we've done for our country. Look what we've done for our communities and our society. And I think the whole team at OpenGov feels that and our customers feel that and the prospects feel that. And so we're driving as an insurgent with tremendous energy. into this old lion industry. Yeah, I'll appreciate you doing it. And I was about to say, like, how do you find somebody motivated to do this?

And the truth is, there are people who are working in government who have already shown they're motivated. So I'm guessing when somebody deploys this in a state and have a great experience, they might actually want to come over and work on building the software. So you've actually got like a really great funnel. If you work in government, go work for OpenGov. It's such a great idea. We've seen that many, many times.

Tremendous talent, believe it or not. coming in actually from our nation's governments, but they also like to tell their neighboring governments. And so there's a lot of word of mouth and viral growth. And the other thing most people don't realize is it's actually a pretty big industry. Our nation's government spend a lot of money, including a lot of money on technology. The private equity firms are swarming. There's billions of dollars being invested into public sector technology. There's, you know, one of the top performing stocks of the past 20 years is is a publicly traded incumbent on the S&P 500 that sells software exclusively to state and local governments. So there's a lot more potential to build a big business here. It's just got its

own dynamics and it requires unbelievable persistence and the best employees and teammates and frankly backers and board members possible. All right. Listen, thank you for doing it on behalf of all Americans and taxpayers. Keep up the great work. If you're out there and you've got technical skill and you got some government experience. This is a great opportunity to go work for Zach over at OpenGov. I'm assuming opengov.com slash jobs or careers or something works. Type an opengov jobs or careers into Google and then go take a meeting with Zach and figure out how you can help save our government and to the city of San Francisco.

I know you're going to be last, but we're watching you get your shit together. All right, Zach, I'll see you next time. Jason, thanks for having me. What an honor to spend some time and wishing you the very best. Okay. And maybe at some point we can grab a coffee in San Francisco. I'd be delighted to do that. Are you going to stay in San Francisco?

Are you the last person there? I might be the last. I almost left last year. It got really bad. But it's actually turning up a little bit. And the technology community is still serving as an anchor. But yes, everyone I know has gone to Austin in Miami and New York. Joe's going to pull you into Austin.

And the boy is going to pull you into my. I think he's enjoying it. Yeah. All right, brother. I'll talk you soon. Cheers. Have a great one.