CS183C Session 6: Jen Pahlka, Code for America

Jennifer Pahlka | LinkedIn

https://twitter.com/pahlkadot

Jennifer Pahlka

Our special guest for this class was Jen Pahlka, who was interviewed by John Lilly. You can watch the recording here.

Tribal Stage Notes

• In the class, we’re going to balance frameworks and specifics. The investors tend to think in frameworks, and the operators tend to focus on specifics

Code for America

• JL: Disclosure, I’m on the CFA board
• Jen took her entrepreneurial background and set out to change the world with CFA, and with the year she spent working with the White House
• Service Year: Take a year off from your regular career, change the world
• Began with 20 fellows and three city governments
• Has grown to helping local governments of all kinds (they do the service delivery) but also do some work with the states and federal government
• “I had been working on Gov 2.0, a sister to the Web 2.0 event. At first, it was just getting governments on social media. But Tim O’Reilly had the notion that it should be applying all of Web 2.0 to the work of government. The way technology is done at the government level is shockingly bad. I was pretty outraged about it. The idea to do a service year program came from a friend who wanted to do this for Tucson. I realized that no one else was going to do it. I had built a network of people who would be interested in doing this, and I thought I could bring that network to bear.”
• “I’m not technical, and I wasn’t entrepreneurial. I had only worked for big companies. Quitting my job was kind of insane.”
• Year 1: I quite my job (running Web 2.0 events) at the end of 2009, and opened up a call for cities to apply at the beginning of 2010. Spent that year getting the city partners…and the funding to serve them. “It’s amazing how having a decent-looking website makes people think you actually have something (even when you don’t).” We went and got customers, then we got our fellows. “You’re laying down the tracks as the train is reaching the part where the tracks are supposed to be.”
• “We made it a competition. ‘We’re not trying to sell you something, we’re giving you an award!’” First customer was Boston — the Mayor’s Office of New Government Mechanics (crazy projects that normally don’t happen in government — if it works, the departments can take credit, if it fails, our office will take the blame).
• How did you get them to apply (to your fake organization)? “A lot of Federal grants are challenge grants, so we accidentally played into something that they were used to doing. And having a decent website makes you look legitimate. You dance for Grandma, and somehow you seem legitimate.” JL: It’s not lying, exactly, but you have to give your customers the confidence to trust in you.
• “We made a lot of mistakes that first year. Were originally going to work with DC as well, but Mayor Fenty lost the election, and the new mayor fired all of our fellows before lunchtime on their first day of work.”
• JL: You often need to get early customers, who are more willing to take on risk.
• CFA business model: Governments pay (though not always the full amount), and donations covered the rest.
• Why don’t you make it a for-profit? “At the time, we didn’t think people would leave their jobs and do a service year for a for-profit. It’s changed some (the six spinouts) but it’s still largely true.” JL: Like Mozilla, it’s taking an asymmetrical approach to competition; non-profit status is a commitment to the community. Also, the model for an organization is changing pretty quickly now — the CFA Brigade is just a bunch of people who hang out together and do stuff.
• Where did the early funding come from? “We got three $10,000 checks. One from a friend, on my birthday, one from Jean Case, and one from afoundation. That was enough to pay for legal fees and FedExing packages to city governments. The Omidyar Network wrote a check that allowed us to pay salaries for the first time.”
• Fellows work in teams of three, with the complete set of skills needed to create a software product (engineering & design)
• When did you find product/market fit? “After one of the fellows in Boston stood up an application called Discover BPS. If you were in Boston, you could enter your address and where your kids went to school, and the app would tell you where your kids could go to school. The schools sent out a 28-page brochure in 6-point type, and parents couldn’t figure out which schools they could choose. Discover BPS took about 8 weeks between the Mayor’s request and the working prototype. Nigel Jacobs, our partner in Boston, said, ‘You realize, if we had gone through regular government channels, it would have taken two years, and cost $2,000,000.’”
• What is your product? For Firefox, there was a “product” (the web browser), but there was also the desire to put pressure on the ecosystem. “At the end of the year, our partner in Detroit told me, ‘I’ve spent 25 years in public service, and I’d given up on feeling like I could serve the public. With the tools you’ve provided, I feel like I’m serving the public again.’”
• In addition to the fellows, have 34,000 people who go to CFA brigade meetings — a volunteer fire department for technology.
• Have spun 6 startups out of CFA, including one founded by a fellow and a partner. We have former fellows who are in government and bring us in.
• CFA Accelerator: Around the end of the first year, we started thinking that to achieve our vision, it’s not just governments and people that need to act differently, but the government ecosystem as well. A lot of potential entrepreneurs don’t understand the value and potential of the government market ($200 billion!). So we set up a government market accelerator program. We didn’t think anyone would apply. 190 people applied.
• “We’re spending about $1 trillion per year on government safety net programs, and most of those are mediated by pretty poor technology.”

CFA focuses on 4 areas

• Health & human services
• Safety & justice
• Economic development
• Community engagement

“We had been asked to do projects in each of those areas during the first four years of CFA. Mayors like to bring us in — they get a PR bump — and then we work on what they ask for. But then once we’re in, we broaden our work to things where we can get real outcomes.”

• “These four areas are ‘hair on fire’ issues like community policing.”
• How difficult was it to close your first big deal? “It was difficult. We made it a contest, so the winners could put out a press release, and there was a deadline, so they had to sign the contract by 9/1 for our fellows to start on 1/1. Forcing functions are incredibly important, especially when it comes to government.”

2013: Up to 12 cities. Things were going great. Then Jen wrote to John, “I’m thinking about leaving for a year to work in Washington DC.”

• “Todd Park had created a program modeled after CFA, the Presidential Innovation Program, and wanted me to come run it. It was a good four weeks after he asked me before I even began to consider it. But I really liked Todd, and I really liked the idea. I told him I’d help him find the right person for it, and said he should broaden his vision to create a core digital service in government — I had seen the Digital Service in the UK, and pitched him on it. I didn’t want to do it — I have a 12-year-old daughter, and she wasn’t going to move.” JL: Todd Park is one of the most persistent recruiters in the world. Todd started Athena Health and then Castlight, and then decided that he had bigger problems to solve.
• “In the end, I said yes, because Todd went and created the opportunity to set up the American Digital Service.”
• “If I was going to spend the rest of my life asking people to work with the government, I had to be willing to do the same.”
• What did you learn from the experience? “It was quite a year. There was Healthcare.gov, I was setting up the Digital Service. At the end, I felt like I hadn’t succeeded…in retrospect, we did a lot a amazing things. I came back to CFA thinking, ‘I’m finally going to be able to get things done.’ But the organization had changed when I was gone. I wish I could take back the first three months I was back.”
• “I talked with the entire staff, but I didn’t ask the right questions.” What would the right questions be? “I didn’t ask specific enough questions about the sales offering, how we were framing it. I assumed that the things we were talking about a the board level had filtered down to the staff. I should have started from the ground up.”
• “I came back, and there were new programs, but they were what Eric Ries calls ‘zombie projects,’ without any success metrics. So I had to kill them off.”
• The staff doubled while you were gone — how did that change the job of the CEO? “We definitely need more operational strength in terms of managing. I’m due to get OKRs back to my functional heads, and right now I’m here at this class instead, which means they are being delayed. We’re hiring for a COO to keep things on track when I’m on the road or fundraising.”
• “It’s such a beautiful feeling when the words you say mean the same to the people hearing them. It’s like they can read your mind. But you can’t count on that. Where I fall down is when I don’t go back and confirm people’s understanding. ‘The problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.’”
• “I hate the term alignment.” JL: I love talking about alignment. The goal is for the organization to make the same decisions whether you’re in the room or not.
• JL: As the CEO, you bring in more and more people. You say words, and they’re perfectly clear to you, and to some of the staff, but they are Greek to the rest of the staff. At Reactivity (John’s first company), The CEO and I would disagree about short term priorities…it took a while for us to realize that when he said “short term,” he meant 18 months, and when I said “short term,” I meant Tuesday.
• JL: At a startup, things are changing all the time. You can’t change your message every day or your people will be confused. You have to keep delivering the same simple message, and when you change it, really change it.
• How do work with governments from the South? “You’ve got to just make this normal. The more they can look at cities like them, and say ‘they’re doing it,” the easier it is to get people on board. Something may seem nutballs, and then 10 years later, it’s just how you do it.”
• How do you tell whether you’re winning or not? “Officially, we set really clear metrics. We don’t have one metric to rule them all; we have a lot of different projects, and they need different metrics — not just users, but also retention, redeployments. We live and die by a dashboard where we tally our wins and report them back to our funders. Unofficially, I know we’re winning when we’re in the right place and right time to have an impact. In California, they’re getting ready to put out an RFP for a social service which will cost $1 billion for a 5-year project, which means it has about a 2% chance of success. We’re able to tell people, “Maybe there’s a better way,” and because we’ve had past successes, they listen.”
• “Right now, there’s a huge gulf in the experience you have when you interact with the government versus when you interact with a commercial service.”
• “The real way we’ll know we’re successful is when people have more faith and trust in government. It’s hard to trust the government when the experience you have leads you to think that the government is incompetent. If we’re going to spend $1 billion, it out to be for helping people, not the computer system.”
• What red tape did you encounter and how did you get around it? “Procurement. It’s a system that’s accrued over time to eliminate risk that has actually led to enormous risks. We buy software the same way we buy pencils — we spec things out to a very high degree and then put it out to bid. Every step is designed to combat fraud and waste. Unfortunately, that means that if you’re a startup, you might need 9 months to go through a procurement process. You have to certify that your bathrooms are labelled appropriately. That’s just to get the contract. Then they need you to build it for five years. It is changing. One of our startups made a rule, ‘If you complain about procurement, you’re fired. Deal with it.’ Some people though CFA was a procurement hack — instead of procuring software, procure people who can build the software you need.”
• “The problem are the tools at hand. People in government think, ‘Here’s what we need to do. We don’t have any tools to do this. I guess we’ll just do what we did before.’”