TheMilVet Podcast
Your hosts, Brendan Aronson and Tim Hsia, interview the highest-performing military veterans & civilian allies on earth. Our guests include CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies, founders of incredible businesses, and legendary investors. Our goal is educate, inspire, and entertain you.
TheMilVet Podcast
14. Leveraging Tech to Support Local Government with Civitech Founder and CEO, Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith is a Marshall Scholar, West Point Alum, and Former Army Officer who is the Founder and CEO of Civitech - a company that develops technology and data products that help local governments better serve their community to create a fairer, more equitable democracy.
Jeremy joins Brendan to discuss his transition from the military to becoming a startup founder. He also talks in-depth about his winding path to entrepreneurship, the problems that Civitech seeks to solve, and what life is like as an entrepreneur.
You can find Jeremy on LinkedIn and find more information about Civitech at https://civitech.io/
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Hi, and welcome to the MilVet Podcast. I'm your host, Brendan Aronson. Today we're joined by Jeremy Smith. Before we jump into the episode, I want to take a moment to invite you to like, subscribe and leave us a five star review on Spotify or Apple podcasts, those reviews go a really long way to helping spread the word about the show. You can also feel free to follow us on social media, it's at the military vet on Instagram. We're privileged to be able to welcome Jeremy to the show today to talk to us about civil attack his journey out of the army and his transition. So welcome aboard, sir.
Jeremy Smith:Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Brendan Aronson:Jeremy, before we dive in, I'm wondering, can you just walk us through your background? Quickly?
Jeremy Smith:Yeah, happy to do that. I'm a West Point graduate and former Army officer. I went into the Engineer Corps, and the army route clearance, Id removal kind of focus stuff like everybody else during that time period, deployed to Afghanistan, in from 2015, to 16, as an Augmentee, for JSOC. And so kind of went like a different path near the end, did four back to back cycles with them to kind of round up my time in the army, which was a great experience. And then I left and ended up planning to go into like government work that didn't quite pan out. I think we'll talk about that. But basically, got more and more involved in politics, and especially the technology around the mechanics of elections, like how someone actually votes and what are the steps and requirements. And, and that's kind of where I ended up and what I'm doing now.
Brendan Aronson:Amazing. And I guess, can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing right now? What's your current role? How did you get to this role?
Jeremy Smith:Yeah, so I'm currently the CEO of a company called Civitech. And we are a data and tool provider for it basically different people touching elections from various sides, mostly nonprofits, political candidates, some government agencies who actually administer elections. And then for anybody who is like a partisan candidate, the Democratic side only. And there's specific reasons for that. But by and large, we are a kind of like a CRM and marketing tool provider for people running political campaigns or trying to make sure and make voting accessible to kind of local constituencies.
Brendan Aronson:Awesome. And if I'm a transitioning veteran, what can you help me understand what a CRM is, what the importance of that piece of software is, and the critical role that you guys play for marketing team.
Jeremy Smith:That's a great point, because I did not know what it was either. So CRM is essentially, you know, like customer record management and client recognition. But it's basically a note taking system, like a database to keep track of your relationships. And so if you think about like, once we get beyond a certain size, like you can't keep track of everyone, so like, if you're a platoon leader, or a company commander, you can have you know, your people, but you get to the battalion level, you can't keep track, it's two minutes, 750 people's too many. And so you need a system. And it's basically like, this is a log of all of the people in organizations and your interactions with them. So it's notes to remind yourself, what the stages of your of your relationship. So in our particular, in most cases in business, like Salesforce and HubSpot are the big two, I think two largest players. And companies use them to manage their sales and their marketing. For us, we're using them to think about voters and people and with the idea towards engaging people in a two way authentic relationship from the representatives making it much easier for someone who is a city councilor to talk to the people who live there and keep track of what those people are asking them to do. And so they can respond. One of the big limitations for them is, it's not that easy to keep track of 10,000 people's requests of US city councilor. And so you need a way to organize that. And that's essentially we're trying to make it much easier to organize that kind of information, to make it much more accessible to like, new leaders who want to come into public service.
Brendan Aronson:One thing that I always find really interesting whenever I talk to a founder is, you know, they see a problem that they know, they want to be involved in, they have a space that they're passionate about. I mean, you're wearing a run for office shirt, which I assume is partly, you know, your own marketing tactic, but also like, obviously, it's something that you're passionate about. So you had an interest in this space, and then I do know that there's a lot of that's obviously interested in elections in like our civic duty beyond the uniform. And I'm so interested in this because you found a business model that actually works. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about like that process of how did you identify the problem? How do you know you knew you were passionate about it? But then how did you identify like, Oh, this is actually a business model that could work here.
Jeremy Smith:Yeah, wasn't super obvious. And I definitely was not trying to. And I think that's kind of the starting point. So it's like, like many founders think, like, I stumbled into it. And it wasn't, I didn't have any concept I don't think I've ever really talked about or thought about being an entrepreneur founder, I do not care at all. It came from this background that prioritizes teamwork and like teams, and it's about like the individual. And so I think some of the Silicon Valley language around like founders and stuff is like, I think sometimes there are some truth like truths, do it, but it's also kind of a miss. So I wasn't none of this was on my radar. And I tried for years to help other people do what I thought was obvious to improve their business and their system, or their nonprofit or government service offering. Because it seemed like that is the right place for somebody to do this. And I cannot believe, but this does not exist. And it took a number of people saying, Well, you seem to have thought about this a lot and know a lot about it, why don't you do it, and start a company like I don't know anything about and, and eventually it sort of did started, the key moment for me came, I did not think that that made a lot of sense as like a business model, initially. But I thought I was thinking a lot about how do you make this sustainable? How do I incentivize somebody else, they have a money problem? How do I help them solve this money problem that I think can be used and harnessed for the good of the people who live there. And I was at this conference, just like, you know, visiting with people who I was interested in talking with, in January of 2019, is a venture capital and accelerator called Higher Ground labs, whose ideas their thesis is to get people to invest money in these kinds of civic good tool sets. And one of the other founders there. Her name is Alex, from that already told me a stat that I was like, stunned by, which is that there are more than 100,000 elections a year, I was aware that there are these other elections, but most people would say there are no or you know that this is an off year right now. 2023 is not an election year. And that is false. There are 109 days this year in which an American, like constituency is having an election. So it's election day, nearly every third day in America. And there are hundreds of 1000s of people who are running for office. And that number is huge. And all of these good, like tools and systems and companies that I was talking to, are in the doubt they're serving 1000 2000 3000 people, and I was sitting there like, wait a second, are we failing 97% of like everybody that is that there is and that turns out to be true. And that's when it clicked for me, like, hang on, there's a possibility here to make something that like it's a scalable approach. So instead of a consulting and like, large clients like advisory approach, you go for a small and medium size, like a product lead focus on a website that is accessible to a large long, like a very long tail of people. And that was the kind of the key insight where I began to see this is a thing that can be done now. It no guarantee that I'm the right one to do it. But But I but I started to see a path. And two months, or less than a month later, I think we created the founding documents precipitate. And hired refers people less than two months after that. But that was the moment where I had already been thinking about the problems. But I didn't have the sense of like a market fit or that there's a there's a there's a possibility here. And as soon as I knew that number, I was able to I've spent a lot of time into Excel, modeling out the finances and trying to come up with do I think I can afford to pay people under this paradigm? And I thought, Yeah, I actually think this is a thing that somebody should do. And it turns out, no one else really wants to or hasn't. And that's usually a good sign of like, it's really hard. So you should take that as evidence that you should really think hard about if you're getting it right. So it wasn't obvious to me. It's not where I started from. And but the idea formed over time listening to lots of people over the over a period of nearly two years of learning from other people about this ecosystem in this market and these needs and trying to think about various ways of engaging them. And I was doing it from a standpoint of, I just wanna be helpful to other people that I respect, I think should deserve our support. And so, that's kind of how it came to pass. But it was not obvious or like I wasn't aiming at the target and nailing it sort of I found myself running headlong into a target. And then kind of got started from there.
Brendan Aronson:Got it. That's really helpful. Before we dive, I want to spend the preponderance of our time talking about civic tech. But before we dive in too deep, can you tell me about like, what were you doing during that phase, that exploratory phase? And like, what did you think that you are going to do for a civilian career when you were in that kind of pivotal transition phase?
Jeremy Smith:Yeah, I definitely was all over the map did not know. And so I'll answer those in reverse, because I think chronologically, so I, at West Point, I was pre med, and I deferred medical school like I applied to, but through all these things, to get approved to go to medical school, I was very sure that that's what I was going to do. I got the scholarship, the Marshall scholarship to go study grad school in grad school immediately following. And I like my worldview broadened very fast. It was I was exposed to very talented people from a lot of different walks of life. And it was really the first time like being independent, like on my own, you know, I hadn't really left Texas, I think, maybe once for a vacation to Colorado or something. But the army all of a sudden, I go to New York, and at the Academy, I'm going all over the world on these trips and subsidised like events, and, and then I'm on my own in London, and with a bunch of people from various walks of life who do totally different things that have no idea that we are even still at war or like what's going on. And, and it just it, I started to think about things from a more of a systems perspective. And I got this reticence to go to that I wasn't sure that I wanted to sign up for that many years in the Army. And I also wasn't sure that my conception of like, where I my skills fit, and my interests lie was in like the emergency room, which is kind of what I was thinking. And I definitely started to look harder at things like public health and systems approaches. And I was studying epidemiology, which is the modeling of epidemics, which is the word nobody knew before. COVID. People used to be like, is that skin? In contact? Yeah, same thing. Yeah, same sounds similar. But basically, I just totally different conception, and then I ended up. Some of my classmates were killed during that year, within less than a year of graduating. And I thought about it, and I decided I was trained at West Point, as a combat arms officer. In preparation, I thought, I kind of want to realize this, I want to go serve where it is needed. And that's not to say that, obviously, medicine is not needed. But it felt like things were unclear on timeline, like, you know, what, if I had gone to medical school and fellowship, would the war still be there and seminaries would actually be filling that need in a timely way and shouldering the burden. So I decided to go back in to combat arms. And so as I was thinking, like, I'm sitting in JSOC, which is totally different worlds, doing very cool things, feeling very valuable. Meeting people who are just enormous ly talented, what they do. And I was thinking I was thinking about getting out, but I was I was thinking about coming back on the civilian side, at the National Security Council or working for one of those types of agencies. And bringing some military expertise to this realm that felt and it felt to me like unfocused, like, do we have a goal, right, like, our people are working really hard. We're doing a good job, to what end was like a kind of a question mark for me. And it felt like maybe the there was less of that kind of voice in the room at the time. So I was very interested in that. And that's where like the politics angle came to be. But at the same time, I was like, I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket, I have no idea if that's what I want to do for the rest of my life. So in the meantime, I looked into and explored business school law school, like tech jobs, consulting jobs, the FBI, Department of State, right, like I like was like, I'm gonna cast a wide net, because I don't know. I like all these things. They're all interesting to me. I'm not sure what the right fit is. And so I would ask people all the time, what do you do? Do you like it? That I do that to? This way up? Yeah, that's a good question. If somebody is doing a career for 20 years and tells you I absolutely would not do this again. You should listen. Right? Like it's like, there's, there's something there. And you can tease that out. And so
Brendan Aronson:every attorney I've ever talked to, I feel like says that
Jeremy Smith:a lot of people were like, don't And it's funny, I ended up deferring law school to so I figured that I should apply to business school now just not accepted or something. Just to round it out. Maybe seminary, but the I think I like taking tests. That's the kind of RB and Westpoint like part of me is like, I like like having a test to challenge myself with but the start wasn't not at all. I was not at all clear on like, where I was going to go and I was thinking very hard about where can I be useful? Where can I do something that is valuable like Hear about like a mission to my job, I was not interested in money. And I wanted to learn. So I thought, I don't want to go to, like, you know, McKinsey or BCG, just for like the opportunity to like make more money, it would be because I can learn broadly, I can learn fast about a lot of different things. And so I was I just kind of applied very widely. And then did none of them. And lots of people very kindly gave me room and time and applications and accepted me and gave me offers. And then I took none of those jobs. So in the meantime, what I was doing, I got out of the army, I go to join Vin, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign to try to get in on her transition team and join the new government on the side of the professionals working on national security. And that's sure it was very interesting. And I had the connections to get there and everything else. And just by asking people, I was like, hey, like friend from grad school, do you know anybody who's doing I asked tons of people. And lots of people, again, just very helpful connecting me onward. And I was on my campaign team, I loved learning everything about it, drinking it in, I would highly recommend to anyone else, if you are in like a moment of transition that is near the four year mark of American presidential election, it's pretty cool to go touch the magic and learn how it works. If you have a particular thing that you if you care, like I care about it, I think I would recommend it because I went there totally unpaid volunteer, working like 100 hours a week. Full time, right. And I absolutely thought it was amazing to see all of these people pulling together for a temporary endeavor. And kind of like, not all agree on everything, people don't actually all have the same policy views. But they they they band together and compromise to try to solve a particular thing and in a very small amount of time. And I thought was super impressive. And so I loved it. But then I obviously did not get the job. Because we did not win the election in 2016. And that was pretty like emotionally tough on multiple levels, like, feeling like I had, like, you know, like failed at this project and like, let people down who, you know, were outside observers or supporters. And so I traveled the world for a year, and just went all over the map, like some parts of the US, but mostly International, and just kind of spend time asking people all over the world, like, what do you do? Do you like it? So the answer is you should get deployed, save your money, and give yourself lots of room and options for your transition. If you don't have family obligations and other things, it makes it a lot easier. So I was just kind of wondering. And I was like, in and out on a bunch of different political things for a while, until I started. And that's where I was just learning. And so I have a particular interest in this. And the campaign, what I was doing, I like gravitated towards this team doing voter registration and voter protection, which returns for getting people signed up to be eligible to vote, and then also making sure their vote is counted after they go to, to cast it. And so, which, you know, sounds simple, but it's there's lots of little complexities that people get wrong, they they go to the wrong polling place, they don't do something on time, they don't submit the right paperwork, right in office, but they're still citizens, they still direct vote. And there's ways to, to correct most of that. But most people don't know it, and they shouldn't have to. And so we were creating these education systems of like outreach, and hotlines and information pages, and making people available to help other people solve this challenge. And so I was I was doing this a lot. And the reason that I found this very interesting is that when I was overseas in 2012, I was unable to vote, I tried. My first I turned 18 in time for the 2008 election. And that was my first election. I registered on voted, returns very proud to do so. You know, that was like a, you know, it's like what you're supposed to do. It's kind of thinking. And I knew nothing about elections and the 109 unique election days a year. So I ignore, did not pay attention was oblivious to the rest. And then in 2012, I go to vote again. And I'm overseas, I request a ballot to mail that vote by mail. And I don't know I don't receive anything. I don't get any word back. Nobody tells me anything I call the office. And it's coming up on the deadline where you have to submit and I was like, Can you email me the form? Can I download this? How do I get this in on time? And they told me we got your request, but we couldn't process it because you're not eligible to vote you you are not registered. And I was like, I don't understand like I was what I, that's my hometown, it's my home of record. I mean, the army, I'm obviously I voted here before. And what they told me at the time was, you didn't do this right, you have to re register every year, you have to, you have to get updated. And by this date, and if you don't do by this date, you're not allowed to vote in this election. And this woman was lovely, and she's very sorry, and, but she was like, I can't help you. It's past the deadline. And so I wasn't able to vote. And it just turns out, like, all of that is false, is just totally wrong. But this woman is clerk didn't know this. Or she was misinformed or whatever. And but I haven't figured that out for like another two years. And so I was reading a book by Ari Berman called give us the ballot, which is an amazing kind of book on all these different on the history of like voting rights in America. And I was reading it, I was like, Wait a second, this thing happened to me. And it's called voter caging. And it's basically a tactic that people came up with, to compete in elections to get rid to remove people from the rolls as a trick. And it was designed to basically interfere with college students who are studying away from home. So they send a non fordable piece of mail to your home of record your house. And if it's not, if you have a forwarding address, set up, kicks back. And they use that as a justification to say, This person doesn't live here anymore, we're taking them off, the buying them without letting the person do anything about it. Certain states allow this. It's a whole, it's a whole dumb thing. But what this does is it actually affects a lot of veterans. Right now, this is primarily done by Republicans, who I don't think are trying to target veterans, they are trying, they love it. And, you know, some people may be well intentioned and thinking that this is a way to help clean the roles of people who have left. But it's, you know, it's missing the fact that sometimes people work away from home for a temporary amount of time. And so, this removed me from the roles and this happens to lots of people. And I wasn't able to. And so when I learned about this, I was like, Hey, wait a second, this is my hometown. You know, these people know me and respect me and like me, and you know, are proud of me. And that sort of stuff. I'm proud of there. I'm like being from there irrationally, right, you know, as you do for your hometown, it was really bothered me that I that this was happening to me, and it's happening to lots of other people. And I gravitated towards these teams that were addressing this and finding ways to restore people to file, help them out before the election and make sure they have all the right information, check, like teaching people that you should just go check, make sure that you're all set. And so I was doing this periodically, throughout 2017 For all these special elections going on. And then heavily in 2018, I started a nonprofit that was very focused on solving some of these particular challenges. And that's kind of where I was, but it was meant to be temporary. I was like thinking about going to law school. And I was scheduled to go live in the fall of 2018. And then ended up deferring because I hit upon something that was working in a very large scale, that was unintentional, I was originally trying to help people an order of magnitude, like a few hundreds or 1000s. And then in like four months, we did like 156,000 voters in Texas. And yeah, it was like this thing is, is working. And there's actually a lot more to do. And there's a bunch of variations now of things I think we can do. And people began to come to me as like this person who's solving this problem, etc. And so I and that's kind of, but I wasn't, I still hadn't thought of it as like a company. Or as a model that would work for hiring a lot of people I was funding this from my savings from deployment. And that's how I started the nonprofit is like, putting like $47,000 of my own money in to make this thing work for people and paying for their postage and their paper. And, and then people very generously started also providing resources and making that a lot easier. But that's kind of how I got started. So all that to answer your question of like, what was I doing? Kind of whatever, whatever I wanted. And the biggest advice I would give to people who are transitioning is like, think about your situation and your obligations and your timeline. And take some time for yourself to kind of figure that out. Because I think you don't need to know the complete answer in the future. And I think it's more normal. Now. You don't have to think about doing the same job for two years in a row. It's totally okay to like switch careers and switch paths and to to learn broadly or deeply on some other realm. So that's kind of what I ended up doing and, and it led to the insights that allowed me to create
Brendan Aronson:I feel like transitioning out of military is this like unique opportunity for reinvention, where you've been in one lane for for you from the time you were 18 until you were 28 ish 27 Something like that. And then you have this awkward tunity to pivot entirely into a new lane. And as you mentioned, this is something that people actually do relatively frequently, at least in their professional careers. I do feel as though transitioning out of military is more of like a mind body spirit kind of endeavor, frankly. So but that process of reinvention can be really challenging. And I just wanted to highlight a few notes from what Jeremy just said, that I think are really important and really interesting, is like, first, you kind of gave yourself room to explore quite a bit without necessarily knowing what the end state was going to be. And I think your story makes so much sense when you look at it in retrospect, but I bet when you were doing your lap of the globe, and you were like, you know, I've I would never be a part of any organization that would have me if a medical school accepts me, I won't come if the law school accepts me this off, right. Kinsey, the fact that you would make this offer means that I'm not going to accept it. I think at that time, if someone had asked you like, where's this going, you would have been like, you know, I really am not sure. And you probably would feel a lot of the same things. I imagine that a lot of our listeners feel, which is like, uncertainty about the future.
Jeremy Smith:Yeah, uncertainty, anxiety, like, and not like, I wasn't. It wasn't like, like, I was worried about, like, failure, and like, no one will take me I did understand. And I had seen a lot of vets before me kind of from our backgrounds, be able to successfully transition to all manner of things. So I was confident that I could like find someone who could work hard for them, I could prove myself, I knew I could do that. But I was anxious about like, what should that be? Like? Right, what is worth throwing myself into. And to be clear, I think it's a totally different situation for other people who have families and financial obligations. I, you know, didn't have any of those things. And it gave me personal freedom to like make other choices. But I think for a lot of people, the right choice is to line that up ahead of time, and to plan it a little bit more clearly. But I would say that, you should give yourself room for that, for what you can do to be much broader than whatever you think your current skills are. Because the thing about the military is, what we are really good at is like problem solving, teamwork, logistics, like getting things done on time. And that translates pretty much everywhere, like, you know, and it's, uh, you can go and research things and learn stuff, it's, there's a lot of different opportunity there. And so I think my experience working with that sort transitioning is that many of them are trying to pigeonhole what they have been doing and find that as the what they need to do next. And I think it's actually much more important to find something you're interested in if you can. And if you have that, like fortune in the world, working on things that stimulate your intellectual curiosity will just, I think, make you happier. And that was important to me. So that's kind of what I was getting into uncertainty. And I was also looking at my bank account, just slowly running towards looking at a trend line and being like, I think we're walking to this next city. But I was like, for example, I was, I was planning to hike from Panama back to Texas. It just turns out, there's this are a bunch of trails, and like, you know, it's cheap, it's a cheap vacation for many months. But immutable Barloworld is totally normal. Like, there's all these European, like, young people on that gap year. So like, high school, it's totally normal to just hike in these areas. And, and it's not, I think, seen as normal in the US. But I was just like, following other people who knew more than me and had researched it and like, so this is what I did a lot, I travel and I would stay at the International hostels. And people have done all this research. And I'm, like, that's perfect. You seem to know a lot more than me about the city already. And it was great. And I could sometimes translate or host people and various things. And actually, when I was in California, I was like traveling up the coast of California, I would stay in hostels for international travelers. And so all these people were coming to America, and I was from here, and I was staying there too. And I would help them know, just like, Oh, you want to go to this place? Like yeah, I mean, I'll get you there. And I'll introduce, and I'll take I'll handle any translation or whatever problems and, and so but these, these people, like knew a lot about San Diego, and I knew nothing about Santiago. And so it was it was like very enjoyable. And so I, I found a lot of value in community in just walking with people from all kinds of all walks of life. And so here I am, like in the jungles, and it's beautiful. It was wonderful at a great time. Sometimes you take like, you know, like buses from place to place and you go to different visits, like places to stay. There's lodges there's campsites, and I was scuba diving all the time, just like snorkeling and scuba diving up and down. It's like an awesome trip. It was wonderful. It was a great trip. I get to El Salvador, and this is like July 2017, or something. And then President Trump announced we're closing the border with Cuba after the historic reopening in 2016 or 2015. When that happened, and I was like, Well, I don't want to wait another few decades to be able to explore this place. So I hopped on a flight from El Salvador, I think San Salvador to Havana, and then I spent some time traveling around Cuba and the Caribbean And before implemented, I mean, I think it's still a little bit more open now, but it's stricter than it was during that time period. And so but the idea was, you can, you know, you have a lot of freedom to like to do this sort of thing, I went to places that are way out there, like I made a list of like workplaces to go to that it would be hard to take kids to later. So like, smarter gas car, oh, morose, Mauritius, the Seychelles, small Caribbean islands, hiking in Central America. And part of that idea was to just explore, learn about various to kind of refreshed what I knew, and meet people. So yeah, to the point you were making, giving yourself options, I think, is very valuable. And so I, when I was deployed, I like cancelled, or turned off every subscription like Netflix, Xbox, you know, put all my stuff in storage, got out my lease and everything. And so you're making tax free money. Without any I had zero expenses, I think the whole year, no phone plan, nothing. And I want to be, you know, Verizon, and Netflix. And Microsoft actually made that very easy. They have these systems for deploying soldiers that I was able to access online or call. And they kind of put it on hold. So I didn't lose my data, and I didn't lose my accounts. And I appreciated the fact that we actually live in a place where that thought and consideration has been put in place for, for people in a very respectful thing. So I had no expensive, so I saved a lot of money for back to back appointments. And that they gave me options. And I knew that, but I monitored that with that uncertainty of like, okay, well, I have options for about six months, or I have options. It's like, we're going to stay in the hostel in the cheapest room for$15 instead of the hotel room for $100. And so and I walked a lot, and I took buses and ferries and and the idea was just to like, maximize time. But what I would say is I recommend this to people, I actually think taking a transition between careers, anytime you do it, you should give yourself a little bit more room like, like, I know, it's people want to set up the next job opportunity. But I think taking three to six months is a great thing to do if you can. But after about nine or 10 months, I started to feel not useful, then that that like weighed on me. And it just seemed like I need to get back to somewhere I can make a difference and help people I just, you know, I'm I have enjoyed this for like months, like one to nine. And then for the last few it was kind of like, this is beautiful. This place is wonderful. These people are lovely. I feel anxious about not contributing.
Brendan Aronson:Yeah, makes sense. No, I think makes perfect, perfect sense. I am not sure that maybe they teach you this on your Marshall scholarship, I was actually having dinner with two martial scholars last week. And they were about to embark on a vision quest. And there's like this period of just like wandering for a few months, one of them had just stepped back from a company he founded. The other one is in between gigs probably going to kick a new startup in the coming months. Both of them incredibly bright. I mean, martial scholarships, not like you. There's a obviously the academic portion of it is the requirements are very stringent. But I do hear a lot from founders who are like, Yeah, I just was kind of like in between things. And I gave myself the time and space to kind of re caulk. I did this last year, stepping back from the first startup and thinking about what I wanted. And I was just reading a lot and working out a lot and like taking things really slowly. And then I just started writing, you know, I was like writing to myself at first and then I was writing a newsletter. And then I was writing a lot of content and the mail that sort of came from all of that. And it was really just having the unstructured space to think about what was going to be next ended up being huge. And it's something that I do hear about frequently from people, both on the podcast and elsewhere. I think one thing that's really interesting about your company, and what you guys do is essentially, and this is true of a lot of different businesses and how value is really created is you guys organize structure and figure out the dissemination of information. Would you say that that's like an accurate way or like mental model to think about what you guys do and what you enable your customers to do?
Jeremy Smith:Yeah, definitely. Like we're thinking about it in the standpoint of access to data, making it like much more accessible through affordability, through ease of use, like you need to have no Python or SQL skills, which are coding languages that are normally used to manage data and data flows. How do we design it for people who don't know any of that or how do you how do you make data accessible through visualization exploration tools to cut lists and break them down and segment them into bite sized pieces. And and the idea behind that you is, it's actually comes from my time in the military. If you're familiar with the Blue Force tracker, I'm trying to make essentially that available to people in politics. And so it's this idea. It's built on the notion like every Soldier Sailor is a is a sensor, right? Everybody has eyes, ears, a brain hands. They know stuff that can see stuff that can tell you stuff, I can solve problems there. If you enable them, and you empower them, and you communicate well. And I think what politics is missing is the communication and coordination layer that those kinds of systems allow. And it's also missing this notion of like respect for individual voters and people who live in their neighborhoods as the experts, like they know their own community better. They know what their neighborhood means better. They may not be super informed about citywide infrastructure, but they can tell you the need, and similar to the way you build products in a company, you listen to user needs, and then you try to get experts to design solutions. And that's really, I think, for sure, like what we're doing, we're trying to gather data that no one else has gathered, find insights in it, and then disseminate it. How do you really like lots of people are good at those first two is like analysis is something lots of people will do? Well, the challenge of solving for distribution is very real. How do you now take useful information and get it back into the hands of people who need it in some sort of sustainable way? Because it takes an enormous amount of human efforts and labor, which you need to compensate to pay for? And so how do you design a financial model and a product model that lends itself to that success, because I think our approach is most impactful and successful at very large scale. And the value of interlocking data and network data really pays off at size and scale. So you have to find a way to get there because you start with nothing. And you can't really get a network effect by having 10 people out of 100,000 person marketplace, you really need to get into the 10s of 1000s, before you will realize the promise of what you're delivering. And something that gave me a little bit of confidence on this was actually listening to Reed Hoffman, one time in 2012, who was a Marshall Scholar, he was in the UK visiting, to meet with their government about how to how to make more innovation in the UK economy and how to bring, like the kinds of success that he was having at LinkedIn at the time there. And he was telling the story about starting LinkedIn, and how he would go around to investors and audiences and say, this product will not be useful until a million people signed up, it will benefit you for hunting for a job and everything else. But you need to sign up because it will once we get there. And he talked about how hard that was to like, tell people like, Yeah, our product, can't do anything for you until a lot more people sign up. But that's why you should sign up and succeeded at it. But that notion of like, you can see the end state and you can work backwards, and you can find ways along the way to create value for people that gets you towards your eventual goal. That's something that I think we do very well. That's awesome.
Brendan Aronson:Yeah, network effects are fascinating topic. Actually, there's a book on the bookshelf behind me, I won't reach and grab right now. But it's called the cold start problem by Andrew Chen. So if anyone's listening, and they're thinking to themselves, like, oh, like I'm interested in startups, what is this network effect thing that Jeremy's talking about? Highly recommend the book, it's really entertaining. It's well written. He's been writing online for like 20 years. So he's got a lot of practice. And the book is like best practices from scaling network effects. It's a fascinating read. Anyway, I'm gonna ask you a stupid question here in a minute. But before I do, what I think is interesting about your founder journey is that you actually built the distribution channels first. So you were you identified a problem, you are plugged into the community by virtue of doing this nonprofit work, which is, I assume, was incredibly valuable as you actually launch the business. Most of how I encourage people to think about startups now is through the lens of like, what distribution channel am I going to reach a customer through? How am I going to get the word out? Because that tends to be the first thing, the first problem that people truly run into. They fixate maybe on a product or a solution or like a cool idea that they have without necessarily thinking like, how am I going to get the word to the people that need to hear it so that I can get paid? So it sounds like you started you by virtue of working on the problem in advance of starting the company, you already have these relationships, which I assume ended up being helpful, but I want to ask you the stupid question that I promised is like, what was the hardest part of getting this thing off the ground? At the beginning, like from its inception?
Jeremy Smith:The question it's not a stupid one. But it's hard to pin down imagine and like it's this weird thing where you know this, like if you're if you're a startup, if you have a startup, right working on a project, you start from very small and then you get bigger and so like my problems now are very different from the back then. And you have to reinvent the company and self constantly to focus on what is most important, and the early days I think the I mean, the core challenge was like, was money like, like, we're we want to take on the state of challenge. And we want to make it really easy and accessible to people, we need engineers, we need a lot of them to deal with a very large volume of data. And to work on the the, it's like a CRM that we talked about earlier. It's like, it's a bad startup idea, just in general for people is that you don't want to start there. It's like starting your landlord, you've done that you don't want to begin there, right? Like, you can't, it's too big. And there's too many features and too many pieces, which you have to it's a it's a critical component of a lot of different platforms and systems. And so you have to think about what are the other pieces and to your point? It's like, what are the distribution channels we're going to use? And what can we solve for them. And so we needed to come up with milestones that we could hit with a small team very fast, to prove ourselves worthy of investment on our idea. And we need to meet with a ton of people in the meantime to validate to validate that they would invest in something like this. And so that was definitely like the the hardest challenge, just like thinking through what we really need, like, I'll tell you the number I've whiteboard this a lot. And I've thought it through and put it in Excel and a lot of different ways. And I think, roughly we need about 130 people to attack this problem. And to be able to solve it sustainably in the way we aspire to. We are not there. People we we started with to write. And it's like a question of what can we accomplish with two people and say, a few hires. So like five was our kind of day one team once we hired some folks, and what can we accomplish in the next 30 days that would that would satisfy some portion of this market and need an investor to show progress towards the future insane. And that was hard. It was like very hard to think about that. For somebody like me who didn't come from money, I don't have a lot of money. In the army, they don't teach you to manage money, right. But yeah, it uniquely one of the best things about the Army's you don't ever have to solve for money, like everyone gets paid the same. There's not a lot of arguments about money. You don't have to deal with it for soldiers, other than the fact that soldiers and sailors sometimes need help managing their money. And often don't have enough. But the so I was like dealing very quickly. So one of the heuristics that I thought was funny is like very early in our company, we were paying more in monthly, like our monthly expenses were more than the total amount of money I've made in my life. Wow. And so the mental heuristic of how much is a lot of money is weird. And I would sometimes screw this up between my personal professional life, were talking to my wife, she'd say that something costs x. And I'm like, that's another thing, personally. And because she was calling me ridiculous, and it was like, it's totally worth buying. It's like, No, it's not like not even your personal account. But from a business account of 20 people or something. Yeah, that's not that much money. And if that enables your team, it's like, but it's hard when you're like somebody who's never bought anything that cost that much, ever, and needing to like, I just lived in Excel, and really Google Sheets, and I lived in the spreadsheet all the time to say, Yeah, this is a good choice or not. And so being being responsible with other people's money, because that's the other thing is nobody, nobody owes you their money. And so for you to take someone's money is a trade, you're making a trade and an agreement. And you need to be very responsible about that, and clear and transparent and honest and have a lot of integrity around that. And I feel that weight all the time of making a trade with other people for their money, right? To pay people who work here and in inviting people in and recruiting them to work here and promising them a paycheck. That is that is a lot of like burden to take on. And it's a very real film. And that responsibility is not something that like I think anybody should take lightly. And that, you know, sometimes I hear people say like, they want to be a founder, they want to be an entrepreneur, but they don't have a particular thing they want to do. And I tried to recommend like, Well, then don't do that, like until you anything else to solve, it's really not a good choice. Because unless it's your own money, right? If it's your money, whatever, do whatever you like, but but it's really different to make a promise to somebody on the plan and then try to deliver on it and know that they expect you to probably fail because most of their investments fail and whatever. You can see most businesses do and to try to not do the same and really to believe in the approach that you have and to be serious about the planning. So I think that was hard. That was like very hard early on. And one thing I was bad at was hearing the know from people like like it was I feel like I'm pretty good at picking up on people but when people would say Uh, yes. Like we'd love to support this. Let's talk next week, I heard you're giving me money. For the most part. All right, I heard that like, I'm almost there when sometimes what it is, is like, No, we're definitely not going to fund this. But we like you'd be you're smart, and we don't mind knowing you. And I think people like VCs and other people should be very clear when they with a No, I think it's a disservice to someone to not communicate, honestly. But in particular, I have people who committed yes in writing. And then I hired people, I was like, I think this money is coming in next week. So you have a job now, and I wanted to grow it and my team needed the people. And so we had someone in particular commit in writing $500,000. And it was, like someone, the person who works with them, as a close friend, I trusted them, they told me this over and over again, the check will be there in August, all this kind of stuff. It never came in, like, you know, and I hired a bunch of people. And all of a sudden, holding this bag, and I don't have enough money. And so if I had to launch a safe and go out and raise some, you know, friends and family kind of money, and lots of people were very supportive, and we close that round, and it was great. And it took about like a month to get three fifths of that, like 60%. And the last 40%, probably took another three months after that. But it was enough, it was like enough to get through. Without me needing to go back to all these people I just hired and got them to quit their other jobs, and telling them I'm sorry, which easily could have happened, this could have gone a different way I feel for other founders who probably ended up in a similar position. And a quick plug that like, we built a bunch of products that were designed for in person politics, like door to door Town Hall, like in person management. And we launched, we got our first product out the door in less than about 40 days. And we launched our core platform and our big idea in February of 2020, with contracts with people for this big in person thing and politics across America. And a month later, everyone in the world became afraid to rely on one another, and our product, right, like we put it ice, all of our contracts evaporated, we didn't have the heart to like, you know, force people to try to continue or whatever. It didn't make sense, there was no product market fit all of a sudden, and we had to adapt, and we did a lot more stuff by mail during that timeframe, but it became this thing of like, we have about 30 days of money now and a bunch of people who just started the job. And so I like quickly next day is like a meeting to be like, we're shaving off everything, we're focusing on these four major projects, I'm devoting 100% of my time to this problem. This, you know, our CFO is gonna like, jump onto like figuring out this newly announced PPP loan. And the plug I want to make is that, without that PPP loan, we might be probably could have taken a loan from someone, but at the, but we did not have enough money. And that gave us like an extra month and a half of time to figure it out. And we did and we ended up having a profitable year and are very proud to have paid our taxes like and I tell people that because it's like it to me, it's a success of like, community and society banding together and creating opportunity for restaurant workers and restaurant owners and businesses it gave us it gave us a breathing enough breathing room to work very hard and figure it out. But if you if I had started the company, like two months later or sooner, it could have gone that could have totally changed the math. And we could have crashed out, right? Because we either wouldn't have had the product and we've been over committed or we would have like had run we would have been we lower on the bank account at that time when we lost everything. So like, it's you know, it's not, it's not obvious that like, this thing would have succeeded every time but the roll of the dice. And I appreciate that. And I'm thankful for that, that our team was strong and capable. And that the timing worked out for us. But I think if you if you get yourself into startups, as a founder, the the key is to have clarity about the idea that you're pursuing and, and be relentlessly focused on how you make it sustainable as fast as possible, how you reach that next critical milestone. And if you're not honest about what those are, I think that's a very easy path to early failure.
Brendan Aronson:You know, what's interesting is, like every other entrepreneur, I've been told no more times than I can count. And I raised an institutional check for my first startup, and that was after hearing No, about a million times. And I recently had to say no, for the first time as a VC sitting on this side of the equation, and I hate it, I hate it. It's like I just like I hate it because I do believe in people's businesses. I believe in them as founders, I believe in their ideas. And I I wrote out like a clear list. I was like This is what I wish someone had done for me. I wrote out a clear list of like, this is why we're saying no. And I found myself censoring, because it was like, I don't know that I can deliver this needed, I have to have, you'd have like good bedside manner too, especially because the founder for this particular idea was like, I couldn't root for this person any harder. You know, I was like someone, I really believe in solving a problem I really, really, really care about. It's in the health space. And it affects a lot of transitioning veterans and veterans more generally. And like, it was savage to have to say no. So it is like interesting now sitting on this side of it and figuring out like, why are VCs the way that they are? Like, why do they always say maybe like, Why are they always like stringing me along instead of just being like, it's not going to work. And here's why. Some people did say that, to me,
Jeremy Smith:got totally good, I think impression, I had a good appreciation for this. Because like, when I launched the company, we put up some open job descriptions, and we have like, 800 applicants for the first. And I was like, There's no way I can read, like, and so we had to use these like quick screening techniques to try to get it down to a manageable size. And we did, we worked so hard to review as many of them as we could. And there were people who were like, friends of ours and friends of friends connecting us with people they knew, and they wanted us to succeed. And they liked us, and we knew them. And, and this happens all the time, to me, like people will make an interview like so it's I would love to work for your open job. And I'm like, I am happy to talk to you, I will like gladly do so what I want you to understand is 343 applicants today, and I'm not the hiring manager, my team is going to hire for this right appealing to me will not change the outcome. And what you need to do is what we're looking for, it's in the job description. It's very clear, we try to be super transparent in our process, we tend to read ahead to people with like, these are the questions we're going to ask, and we want you to be prepared. And this is no games, no, no trips, we literally want to see people come prepared and attack this from the exact thing that we need, like, what is it we're hiring for. And we do a good job of this. But I feel this pressure. And I have to I have to say no, tons of times to people who know me and are like, hey, my daughter wants to work there. My son went my brother, my, my spouse. And I have to say no. And it's a it's so I can appreciate the position that is like a VC to get 5000 pitches and be able to make 10 to 12 investments. And I think what helps us to communicate transparently to people just kind of information and say, look, here's how many we get, we only have enough money to do X. And so I think it helps people not take it personally if they understand and a lot of people don't really, and yeah, totally like, it would be nice to get clarity. Feedback on pitches is great. But again, if you have 5000 pitches, you can I could not respond to all those applicants. And so we have to send a generic letter to many of them. And some of them were like, Well, why didn't I get the job. And it's like, like a lot of applicants budget, we're good. Like we're making a guess it's a gut instinct thing sometimes, or it's an assessment against a rubric, and somebody else had more of a fit for what we're trying to do. And it doesn't mean you wouldn't be wonderful and successful here. It just means it didn't happen this time.
Brendan Aronson:And I feel like for any transitioning veterans that are listening to this, just like recognize, like you're going to hear no 1,000,001 times, and you may take it personally at first. And hopefully you will stop taking it personally at some point and realize like everybody wants to help you and you can't go do you definitely
Jeremy Smith:will stop taking it personally cannot be cannot ask enough times like to be successful, you're gonna have to get told no, so many times that that you must dismiss it. Otherwise, that's right, the heat and the frustration will get to you.
Brendan Aronson:Totally. Well, Jeremy, look, I am so grateful for your time. I know you're incredibly busy. I want to open up the floor for any kind of parting shots that you might have. So what you know what words of wisdom do you have to share for anyone that might be in career transition right now who's thinking about the next thing? Maybe considering being a founder or working in the political space? Like, open open mic for yourself?
Jeremy Smith:Yeah, I think the general advice to politics or any other landscape is like, like do a survey recon, right? Like you make sure that you are actually solving a real need, validate the need, and also check to see if someone else is already doing it. Because maybe it would be best to go put your firepower into a place that has a starting point and existing channels, rather than like duplicating reinventing the wheel or not realizing that like three people's problem is not 100,000 people's problem, and three people aren't going to pay you enough. And so making sure validate the need. I think I a lot of people come to me with an idea that has been done like 100 times and has never succeeded. I'll give you an example. For anybody who wants to pitch me Again, it's like Uber for getting to the polls, like Ryan's to the polls app, there are dozens of these, and none of them are successful. And the reason is like a temporary rideshare app that happens every two to four years is not a good system. And because there's 30 of them, you have people who actually have a need, read about it, download the app, as per ride. But then there's no dispatchers. Because it's been defunct for years, and no one took it down. And now it actually harms people. So more people, I think, go on to these things, looking for help, and they don't do it. And Uber and Lyft will give you a free ride to the polls. And so you don't need to reinvent this as an example. And I don't mean that to disparage the idea is that it's very hard business model. And it's nearly impossible, I think, to make work. And lots of good people have tried and I have watched it happens from 2016 to now. And if you talk to some people who've done it, that's a really good way to find out that this why this is not workable. And then you have to think very hard and be honest with yourself, can you change that fundamental or that paradigm somehow, to make it work. And I think that that's like, requires diligence and requires an awareness that like, you don't know very much about a thing if you're just getting started, right. So so that's my recommendation for anyone. And then in particular, if you are thinking about getting involved in local politics, and I encourage you to I think everyone should just so everybody understands this, like I talked about, there's a election nearly every third day in America. But the average turnout for local elections that are not tied to federal elections, like in Texas, for example, is 4.2%. So nearly only one out of 25 people is voting to decide who is leading their city, and their community on average, right. Some places are a little bit more like some places are 20% of like Austin, which is the high water mark in Texas. And I think that that is a tragedy, it doesn't need to be that way. Because these are public servants who should be responsive to like all of us. And I think there's value in that. And there's value in the exchange of ideas and participation that way. So I encourage everyone to be more involved in general. And to not get turned off by the fact that politics is often a dirty word in America. And like politician is used as a pejorative. That is like true, how it is going on and how people use it. But it doesn't have to be true. And part of the way you make things better is by like pitching in and shouldering the load. And I think that's something we all are very good at, as veterans is running towards fire, like picking up the log with everybody else. And like carrying it for a time and helping out, you don't have to do it all. You don't have to be there. It's not Hercules, right, there's no one person who carries an entire team or platoon. It takes a system of people doing their jobs in their roles. Well, so I would encourage people to get more involved. If you're thinking about running for office, or you know, someone who is we have tools still and like civic tech is very interested in doing that. And so in terms of the future, if that's something you're interested, you can come to our website@siprotec.io or just searches online, and we will be glad to help you in your community. Because our bet is that people who care about serving their community are worth investing in. And if we can arm them with the infrastructure, to talk to them and their own neighbors, they will do a better job of building that community than if somebody tries to do it from the top down. And I think that that is core to our thesis. And so very supportive of like people getting more involved, happy to help and wish anyone luck with transitioning because I know it can be anxiety inducing. But the key is that like, you have skills worth contributing, and there are lots of needs. And if you are open to the idea that the one single thing that you might want to do most is may not be an option, or it may just not be available yet. Take your time, find something that is a good fit. And you can always search from there. And so I would encourage you to to broaden that search and think widely about where you can apply your life's work.
Brendan Aronson:Awesome. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. We actually have a couple politicians on the upcoming episodes. We have Patrick Murphy, who's a politician from Philadelphia, a congressman. Yeah. And then I think he's Undersecretary
Jeremy Smith:at the beginning of my like little journey. He was very helpful to me in in guiding the early on to thinking about what to do.
Brendan Aronson:Yeah, he so we're looking forward to having him on. And then Philip Jones, who actually just won the mayoral race in Newport News. And before that, he spent four years as my company mate at the Naval Academy. And then we went through the basic school and the FG officers course. So we're looking forward to getting both these guys on to talk about, you know, politics and transitioning into that space. So Jeremy, thanks so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.
