a16z Podcast: Government Transparency Powered by Software

The a16z Show

a16z

Culture, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Software Eating The World, Disruption, Business, Technology, Science

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2014

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

What if we could tap into our government with the same speed and ease as our smartphones and search? Can technology make a difference in how government operates, and how we citizens interact with it? Two-time Mountain View Mayor Mike Kasperzak, OpenG...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. We're here today with a very special A16Z podcast. My name is Tom Reichert,
0:07.2	and today we're going to be talking with the CEO of OpenGov, Zach Bookman, and also Michael
0:13.2	Kastorzak, who is a council member of the city of Mountain View, California, and the former mayor.
0:18.4	I'm a partner here at Andreessen Horowitz, and I co-led an investment
0:22.2	recently in OpenGov, so I'm very excited to talk with you about technology and government.
0:27.3	I think the innovations that OpenGov and other companies are doing can make a difference for everyone
0:31.3	in our country. And so today we want to talk about some of those trends and how to work with
0:35.8	government and some of the opportunities for entrepreneurs.
0:38.9	So I'll first ask each of our guests here to introduce themselves.
0:43.4	So, Zach, if we start with you and hear a little bit about yourself in OpenGov.
0:46.5	Glad to. Thanks, Tom. My personal background, my first business was when I was eight years old back in Maryland.
0:53.2	I grew up near government,
1:00.3	near Washington, D.C., but I started mowing lawns and then went to study government at the University of Maryland, later went to law school and did a master's degree in public administration
1:04.7	before going to Mexico, where I studied corruption in the Mexican government. I later went to
1:10.4	Afghanistan and served as an
1:12.3	advisor to two United States Army generals on the Transparency Task Force that was set up by General
1:17.4	Petraeus at the ISAF headquarters. And we started OpenGov in the late 2000s after, well,
1:24.1	we started looking at data visualization in the late 2000s after we saw two major trends.
1:29.2	One is that post-recession government revenues were drying up, and everyone in government and out of government was wondering,
1:35.9	hey, where's all the money going? How can we see this better?
1:38.9	And at the same time, there was the rise in the cloud and in web-based technologies, things like Tableau.
1:43.5	And we thought the latter could help the former, and we went and talked with cities in the cloud and in web-based technologies, things like Teblot. And we thought the latter
	...

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