 This is the US Capitol building, and inside of this massive marble structure, all the laws the United States of America are created. Now, the current Congress is known as the Do-Nothing Congress. They haven't been doing a lot of that. In fact, their approval ratings are abysmally low, 13%, and they are among the least productive of all Congresses in recent history. But, it's an opportunity for a company called Capitol Bells to actually bring transparency to the process, to allow our representatives to get real-time feedback from their constituents about the bills they're about to vote on, and perhaps actually make this representative government we have even more representative of the very people who make it possible. I'm Alexis Ohanian, startup founder and Y Combinator partner. Over the last year, I went on a 200-event book tour and met people building small empires all across North America. Now I'm back with a new season, revisiting some of my favorite stops from the tour. Government has never moved quickly. It's designed to be a slow process involving much debate and considered decisions. But in the past few years, the American public has become increasingly dissatisfied with the way Capitol Hill has been behaving, especially in the wake of one of the least productive Congresses in recent history. This inefficiency and lack of action is something a lot of people are working on. One company, Capitol Bells, is taking a novel approach. By alerting constituents whenever a Congress person is going to deliberate on a bill, and letting those constituents give their thoughts directly to the Congress person by means of a vote, Capitol Bells is trying to use technology to make the centuries-old processes in Congress more responsive to the needs of today's America. I'm Ted Henderson. I'm the founder of Capitol Bells. What is Capitol Bells? For Congress, for people who work in Congress, Capitol Bells is an app that helps them do their jobs better. For constituents, for you and me, Capitol Bells is an app to share our positions and to connect to Congress. It's a modern version of the real-life Capitol Bells, but it's also a way to connect with the people who are in the room. It's a modern version of the real-life Capitol Bells that have alerted Congress to votes since 1890. So you've got sensors around D.C. that are picking up the signals coming out of the Capitol building, identifying it and then bouncing it right back in real time to everyone's phone who's got the app. How did you get this system installed? I was a staffer for Congressman Kildee. As soon as I was off the Hill, I realized I didn't even know when votes were happening. I was just in downtime. I was like, alright, I'm going to apply to my next legislative assistant position. And while I'm not doing anything, I'll make an app in the meantime. And so I called up the clerk's office and I was like, where can I find the API for the bells? And they say, what's an API? Who makes the vote alerts happen? Who makes the bells buzz? Well, there are these radio-controlled clocks, and someone hits the button and all the clocks will buzz when they get the signal. I was like, alright, great. What's the frequency? How do we get going? Why hadn't anyone done this sooner? This seems pretty obvious. I think part of it is just that most of the people on Capitol Hill aren't engineers like I am. They're local science majors and English majors, and it's an analog community we have here on Capitol Hill. And it's been working this way for a long time. There's a lot of sort of institutional inertia and things don't change. And that's why we kind of have the chance to do so much here. They're not taking advantage of modern technology at all. It's almost even gotten worse now because, you know, while we do have email, email has actually stopped us from one thing that did work in 1980, which was working together face-to-face and spending time together. Why is it important that a member of Congress can now see not only, hey, there's this vote happening, but also here's how my constituents feel about it? Well, if they can't see how their constituents feel about it, what are they basing their votes on? Aren't they representatives? What's the plan for Capitol Bells as a business? There are over 300 million people in the U.S. who need to have their voices heard that aren't being heard. And if we can capture Congress, we have the conduit to connect them to Congress. Capitol Bells is clearly onto something, and it is important. What is less clear is whether this is just a cool project or can grow into being a big business. Now, plenty of big businesses started out as cool projects. Look at Facebook. But the challenge here for Ted and his team is continuing to maintain this platform's authenticity while also turning it into a profitable business. What does a technology like Capitol Bells do to change the way business gets done here? It makes the operation of Congress more transparent. You know what's going on all the time. Before Capitol Bells, believe it or not, which is we're talking about like three years ago, when I wanted to know if a bill was being voted on, I had to literally call somebody at Congressional Office and say, Hey, when are you voting on the bill? It doesn't seem very efficient. It doesn't. No. Well, not only is it not efficient, but also like I'm lucky. I know who to call. But now anybody across the country can see when a bill is coming up. They can see what the history of that bill is, and then it's very easy for them to take action. How can the government be so disconnected at a time when technology is playing such a vital role in every facet of our life? Part of it is a generational thing. You know, the Congressional Offices are over our shoulder, and most of the people in there are older people. Number two, I think a lot of the innovation that's going on is if you're not looking for it, you don't see it. Entrepreneurs don't have the time to be up kind of walking around Capitol Hill and talking about what they're doing. So you actually have a situation where there are people in office with power who are totally disconnected from how the world is technologically. Is there a solution for this? Because it seems to be a pretty fundamental issue. I think that technology is disrupting everything, disrupting every industry, and government is one of those industries. But I do think if you look out into the future, you see a whole series of tools that will enable your average voter to become much more educated about the issues, and to organize with like-minded voters, and then to hold their representatives accountable. And I think that is going to lead to a better, more effective government. The way the federal government does procurement and does IT is just generally not very efficient. How do you go about bringing technology into an industry like government that has generally been really reluctant to it? Government and technology have very different logics and operating principles. Government is supposed to be slow and deliberate and judicious. Technology is about, in many ways, disruption, innovation, and a very quick pace. And so what I've seen from my time working on the Hill and the executive branch and now at the OpenGov Foundation is the difficulty really is syncing up the pace at which things move. What is the goal of the OpenGov Foundation? Our mission is to make government accountable, accessible, and understandable to citizens using technology. Right now, your government is making new laws, new taxes, new rules that directly impact your life. Did you have a say in shaping them? Why should government be accountable to its citizens? As a citizen, it's really easy to feel disenfranchised from it all. The government stems of the people, by the people, and it's supposed to work for the people. And that all adds up to accountability. It was baked into our Constitution, and it's hard to find around here sometimes today. So there's a lot of talk about opening up the data within government, but there is a big difference between taking laws, for instance, that are currently in a dead tree book, and turning them into PDFs versus turning them into machine-readable data. Can you talk about that a little bit? For many, the PDF is the apotheosis of Internet-based document technology. It works, but it doesn't work as well as it could. Explaining the value proposition behind open data and all the things that it can do with you is the first place to start. And I think that the technology community has not done a good enough job telling that story. We can help you, government people, do your jobs for citizens way more efficiently and effectively at lower cost with open data and open-source software. What do you think of a modern Internet tool like Capital Bells? I love Capital Bells. I think it's a great hack in the original sense of the term. Looking at an internal system like the House radio system for votes and getting that very, very tiny, in the grand scheme of things, data point attached to your mobile phone and attached to all of this other information that's available about what Congress is doing is brilliant. I high-five Ted every time I see him. What's been the biggest challenge so far? You're starting a startup that is working with the government. That's usually an industry that does not rank very high on the list of industries startup founders are excited to work in. This isn't something that's sexy to most people in Silicon Valley and to developers and to the average Joe. And one of the hardest things for me has actually just been finding technical people to work with on my team. So we've raised money now and it's still difficult to find good engineers to actually get applicants to find who want to be on the founding team of Capital Bells. How do you go about thinking about building this into a big-time business? I want Capital Bells to be where the data is. So I want to be able to say, here's what's happening right now. Here's what's happening in Congress. Here's what's happening in your state capital. Here's what's happening in the agencies. Here's the data of government. Here's what your government is doing for you right now. And here's the metadata of what those people are doing and what these people are thinking. A government that is by the people and for the people should be open and transparent with its data. That data belongs to us after all. But 300 years ago when this country was getting started, it was a lot harder to spread ideas. There are only so many quill pens and horses to go around. But today, because of technology like the Internet and software, it's a lot easier. In fact, the thing that's holding us back today isn't the technology, it's the rules. Rules that have been in place for centuries that keep us from going forward. When you look at a place like this that has gobs of money, that has lots of power and influence, well, why doesn't it have the best tools to do its job? There are rules barriers there. Up here, people that make laws love to make rules. And the body is governed by technology rules and technology infrastructure that are out of date. And so things like open source software, it's not clear if you can even use it here. And that was actually one of the main reasons that we left the Hill. We have to get the heck out of Dodge and create this in an infrastructure outside of government. And it's because there are rules that straight up prevent really cool innovative stuff from happening inside the walls of government. I think in the ideal world, we stay and we improve the institution from the inside. But right now, we have to do some work to change those rules and make the House open source friendly, just like the White House down the street. Can enough people using an online platform be enough of a force, if they all say, yes, we want this bill, to motivate someone on the Hill to be the first one to say, all right, I'm going to get behind this. Because it normally seems like they're just looking to their peers around the Hill for that first step. Well, members of Congress act because people ask. That's part of it. Many of them bring their own agenda. They might read what's in the papers. But if people ask, Congress will act. And that's really what it comes down to. This is another opportunity to give Congress an idea of what the people are asking for. What does the average citizen get wrong about lobbying? They assume that money buys action, that special interests control the agenda and control the votes. That's not how it works? You're not going to get access with your dollars. You're not going to change white to black or yes to no. But you are going to be able to support the people who support your cause. So that will give you the opportunity. What money does is gives you a seat at the table. What we're able to do electronically through Capitol Bells is give average citizens a seat at the table. With all the things you'd be doing, given your experience and everything, why Capitol Bells? Well, one of the things that I miss most about the time that I was on the Hill is working together with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I hope that Capitol Bells will provide an opportunity for members and staff to communicate with each other in ways that they haven't done for years. There's a lot of information on the street these days, a lot of it free. But there's very little communication. And what good could Capitol Bells do by connecting these people? I think they'll be able to do their jobs better. I mean, they really need the exchange of information. There is not that much discourse that goes on between members. Members are here from Tuesday to Thursday. They don't make Washington their home anymore. And as a consequence, even the staffers don't have the kind of relationships that they had within their party or across party lines. For as long as there's been voting, there has been voter fraud. And for all the advantages of software that make it possible for people to have their voices heard from all over the world, also let people fake voices from all over the world. Plenty of social platforms can wait until much later to deal with it. Look at things like Instagram and Twitter that are rife with fake accounts. Capitol Bells is not one of them. They need to have 100% authenticity from jump. If they're not 100% authentic, those representatives aren't going to trust those votes because they're not coming from their constituents. They could be coming from anywhere. Say I'm a senator from New York, and I see that there is a bill that's come up and I can see on Capitol Bells how my constituents believe I should vote on it. How do I know that they're actually my constituents? Constituent tallies right now is based off of emails and calls that they receive. So you can call a congressman's office and say, hey, I'm so-and-so and I live at such-and-such address and here's my opinion. But they don't really know if that person's coming from the place that they are. If we have an online system, a web-based system that's open and it's covered all districts, we can actually track which districts a user is voting from. We can see are they just trying to hop around a whole bunch. If you start trying to vote in different places, we can see that you've switched multiple times and it looks like you're gaining it. And we can basically give you a warning, like, hey, you've changed your location three times in the past three months. You really have to make sure that you get your address right or else you're not going to be able to change anymore and now your votes are going to get wasted. With Capital Bells, the most important thing that it does is it tells you what's happening on the floor. It tells us that we're in session, shows us the bills are going on right now that they're considering, and it gives us a play-by-play of what has been happening on the floor. So seven minutes ago, they just begun 40 minutes of debate to suspend the rules and pass this bill, HR 4924. I think it's really interesting now with technology, you know, every staffer is on her iPhone checking, you know, they can see how much people like the photo they took of their lunch. Wouldn't it be interesting if they could get a sense for how people are feeling about a bill? It would help. The wildfire of what goes on in the 24-hour news cycles, every crevice needs to be filled with information. That's part of why we're trying to lend some textual nature to it so that there is some quality to that discourse. You make sure some Canadian doesn't fire up this app and try to have her voice heard on Capital Bells. Currently, you can only download it from the United States app store. How do you then make sure that the, you know, good congressman from the state of whatever knows that every one of those votes is coming from a constituent instead of some sneaky Canadian? I guess I don't. Alright, fair enough. Was there anything in particular that surprised you going into this? Every time that I think that I'm on the cusp of something new, that horizon just kind of gets farther and farther away. Like it's a constant struggle. You have to constantly push it to get it to the next level. Why do you do what you do? Are you jumping out of bed because you love bringing data to the world from the bowels of government? I get out of bed every morning trying to give people a voice in what happens in their government, whether it's at a state, a county, local or a federal level. There are so many people in this country who are brilliant, who have good ideas, who are crying out for government to meet their needs that they should be, that aren't heard because they aren't rich. They don't have lobbyists, they don't have influence and they don't get through. And where technology comes into that is it makes government fundamentally able to listen. I do think if you look out into the future, you see a whole series of tools that will enable your average voter to become much more educated about the issues and to organize with like-minded voters and then to hold their representatives accountable. And I think that is going to lead to a better and more effective government. Awesome. Well, I'm hoping for it because we are their bosses. For me, my vision for Capital Bells is that we have tools that don't just let constituents say, hey, here's what I'm voting on. But allow you and me to be able to form into a group and say, hey, we want to share our votes together. We want to bring strength in numbers to an issue. And I know that Alexis, you're really on the ball with Internet policy and I want to make sure that we're all following you on that Internet policy and that we can make sure that it's not just my voice or your voice, it's all our voices. We don't know for sure if Capital Bells or some other service is necessarily going to fix government. But at the very least, we need to try. Anything that helps our representatives be more accountable to their constituents is a major success. So to that end, ring the bell and cross your fingers and hope for a better, more responsive government of the future. Marketing your business is already an essential part of being successful, but the marketplace has moved far beyond newspaper ads and television spots. While many companies like Capital Bells start by spreading through word of mouth, a smart marketing strategy needs to be used to take it further. Consider utilizing these tips for your company. During business hours, focus on getting information across quickly or helping customers get stuff done, like easily getting a price quote. During evening hours, people are using their devices to relax, to send more entertaining messages. You can even tie them into popular TV shows or events to help better connect with customers. Lastly, consider your demographic, know your audience and adjust the message and timing based on who you want to talk to. For more business advice, visit the AT&T Business Circle. Okay, why am I running up the hill though? Just like, alright, okay. Alright. That's weird. Oh, f*** you guys.