Sean Parker’s Brigade/Causes acquired by govtech app Countable

Published May 1, 2019

Causes grew to a jaw-dropping 200 million users as one of the first 10 Facebook platform apps. Started by Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, it was meant to turn a generation into activists and philanthropists. Causes acquired Votizen to augment shallow clicktivism with a way to remind friends to vote. But after Facebook went mobile and the web platform waned, Parker arranged Causes’ sale to his newer civic tech effort Brigade, for which he’d led a $9.3 million Series A and later fed more money. Brigade’s ballot guide was used by 250,000 people in the 2016 election, leading to 5 million Get Out The Vote messages sent, but the startup’s apps for connecting with campaigns or debating political issues never went viral like Causes.

Now both Causes’ and Brigade’s stories are coming to an end. In February, we caught wind of Brigade selling off its high-grade engineering team to Pinterest in an acqui-hire while it sought a home for its IP. Today, Brigade announces its technology and data have been acquired by politician-tracking service Countable. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s unlikely that Brigade’s Series A investors earned a return.

“While we didn’t reach the ultimate mountaintop, I think we moved the entire civic tech space forward,” Brigade CEO Matt Mahan tells me. “Countable offers a unique opportunity to bring greater scale to some of our best ideas, and our previous work will in turn accelerate their already impressive progress.”

Brigade’s features

Countable lets people view summaries of upcoming legislation, contact their representatives about their opinion and track the officials’ votes. “Brigade was founded with the non-partisan mission to reinvent how Americans participate in politics. When they decided to bring their journey to a close, Matt and Brigade’s leadership team sought a mission-aligned company to acquire their technology, and a responsible place to point any members of their community who were eager to remain civically active and engaged,” says Countable CEO Bart Myers, whose tech has powered 35 million civic actions. “They approached Countable — an obvious fit for our commitment to lowering barriers to civic entry and empowering meaningful action, and we’re excited to provide a home for their technology moving forward.”

Brigade CEO Matt Mahan

Mahan admits that a potentially fatal wrong turn for Brigade was pivoting its product to “debates” in 2016. “We quickly learned that this level of openness resulted in less substantive discussion, more personal attacks and fewer participants willing to add their voices: the opposite of our goals. By removing too many barriers, debates empowered the loudest and most aggressive voices in the room,” he tells me. The startup course-corrected to focus on making real political impact with petitions and tools for contacting representatives.

By 2018, Mahan realized that “after two election cycles Brigade had not achieved the user scale we know is required to fundamentally transform our politics . . . For a company set up to be a civic moonshot, this was simply not good enough.” Parker’s team did not provide TechCrunch a statement or commentary on Brigade’s decline. The startup’s San Francisco-based engineering team was too pricey for civic tech companies to afford, but those that could pay the steep price didn’t need Brigade’s IP. So after approaching a half-dozen potential acquirers, Mahan split the company, selling the team to Pinterest and the tech to Countable. The cash and stock deal will make Brigade investors shareholders in Countable, and Mahan is taking an advisory role.

To further their contribution to the democracy innovation community, Countable has agreed to open-source Brigade’s voter matching software. This allows apps to tie a user to their official voting record to offer personalized features, like reminders of upcoming elections, petitions for local issues and ways to contact their elected officials. Seth Flaxman, the CEO of civic tech software developer Democracy Works, which built TurboVote, says, “This is extremely difficult technology to build and can help TurboVote determine which of our 6 million users needs more help registering to vote. They are passing the baton, making it possible for nonprofits like ours to build off their progress.”

Countable

But there was one more loose end to tie up. Causes sucked in a ton of Facebook user data in the early days of the platform before restrictions were put in place (too late to stop Cambridge Analytica). So Mahan tells me, “Brigade proactively reached out to Facebook and worked with them and a third-party consultant to conduct a comprehensive review to identify and delete user data that was not essential for providing the existing app experience. In all, we deleted billions of rows of data that ethically we felt should not be transferred.”

As one of the most well-funded civic tech startups, Brigade’s breakup could cast a shadow on the space that includes MoveOn and Change.org. Consumer-focused apps for improving democracy are tough to monetize. It may fall to more sustainable democracy-focused startups like grassroots mass-texting app Hustle or nonprofits like Avaaz to arm the public with the equipment and knowledge necessary to participate in the political process. Given the deep polarization and animosity between nations’ political parties around the world, we need all the tools to amplify truth and civility we can get.

Sean Parker’s govtech Brigade breaks up, Pinterest acqhires engineers

Published February 11, 2019

Facebook co-founder Sean Parker bankrolled Brigade to get out the vote and stimulate civic debate, but after five years and little progress the startup is splitting up, multiple sources confirm to TechCrunch. We’ve learned that Pinterest has acqhired roughly 20 members of the Brigade engineering team. The rest of Brigade is looking for a potential buyer or partner in the political space to take on the rest of the team plus its tech and product. Pinterest as well as Brigade CEO Matt Mahan confirmed the fate of the startup to TechCrunch.

While Brigade only formally raised $9.3 million in one round back in 2014, the company had quietly expanded that Series A round with more funding. A former employee said it had burned tens of millions of additional dollars over the years. Brigade had also acquired Causes, Sean Parker’s previous community action and charity organization tool. For now, Brigade’s product will continue running managed by a skeleton crew until a partner or buyer can be found.

After Brigade launched as an app for debating positions on heated political issues but failed to gain traction, it pivoted into what Causes had tried to be — a place for showing support for social movements. More recently, it’s focused on a Rep Tracker for following the stances and votes of elected officials. Yet the 2016 campaign and 2018 midterms seem to fly over Brigade’s head. It never managed to become a hub of activism, significantly impact voter turnout, or really even be part of the conversation.

After several election cycles, I hear the Brigade team felt like there had to be better ways to influence democracy or at least create a sustainable business. One former employee quipped that Brigade could have made a greater impact by just funneling its funding into voter turnout billboards instead of expensive San Francisco office space and talent.

The company’s mission to spark civic engagement was inadvertently accomplished by Donald Trump’s election polarizing the country and making many on both sides suddenly get involved. It did succeed in predicting Trump’s victory, after its polls of users found many democrats planned to vote against their party. But while Facebook and Twitter weren’t necessarily the most organized or rational places for discourse, it started to seem unnecessary to try to build a new hub for it from scratch.

Brigade accepted that its best bet was to refocus on govtech infrastructure like its voter identification and elected official accountability tools, rather than a being a consumer destination. Its expensive, high-class engineering team was too big to fit into a potential political technology acquirer or partner. Many of those staffers had joined to build consumer-facing products, not govtech scaffolding.

Mahan, Brigade’s co-founder and CEO as well as the former Causes CEO, confirms the breakup and Pinterest deal, telling us “We ended up organizing the acqhire with Pinterest first because we wanted to make sure we took care of as many people on the team as possible. We were incredibly happy to find that through the process, 19 members of our engineering team earned offers and ended up going over to Pinterest. That’s about two-thirds of our engineering team. They were really excited about staying in consumer product and saw career opportunities at Pinterest.” A Pinterest spokesperson told us “We’re excited to welcome Brigade engineers to Pinterest, including former Brigade CTO John Thrall and VP of Engineering Trish Gray. As experts across areas like Growth and Product Engineering, they’ve spent years building products that inspire people to go out into the real world and take action.”

Brigade had interest from multiple potential acqhirers and allowed the engineering team’s leadership to decide to go with Pinterest. Several of Brigade’s engineers and its former VP of Engineering Trish Gray already list on LinkedIn that they’ve moved to Pinterest in the past few months. “We had a bunch of employees that took a risk on a very ambitious plan to improve our democracy and we didn’t want to leave them out to dry” Mahan stresses. “We spent more time and more money and more effort in taking care of employees over the last few months than most companies do and I think that’s a testament to Sean and his values.”

Mahan is currently in talks with several potential hosts for the next phase of Brigade, and hopes to have a transition plan in place in the next month. “We’ve in parallel been exploring where we take the technology and the user base next. We want to be sure that it lives on and can further the mission the we set out to achieve even if it doesn’t look like the way it does today.” Though the company’s output is tough to measure, Mahan tells me that “Brigade built a lot of foundational technology such as high quality voter matching algorithms and an entire model for districting people to their elected representatives. My hope for our legacy is that we were able to solve some of these problems that other people can build on.” Given Parker’s previous work with Marijuana legalization campaign Prop 64 in California and his new Opportunity Zones tax break effort, Brigade’s end won’t be Parker’s exit from politics.

Brigade’s breakup could still cast an ominous shadow over the govtech ecosystem, though. Alongside recent layoffs at grassroots campaign text message tool Hustle, it’s proven difficult for some startups in politics to become sustainable businesses. Exceptions like Palantir succeed by arming governments with data science that can be weaponized against citizens. Yet with the 2020 elections around the corner, fake news and election propaganda still a threat, and technology being applied for new nefarious political purposes, society could benefit from more tools built to amplify social justice and a fair democratic process.