Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. I'm here today with Jim Gilliam, who is the founder of Nation Builder, all the way from Los Angeles.

Downtown Los Angeles. All right, representing. Jim, you guys, we just spent a day, and in particular, you spent a day, talking about community. And you said one thing, you made this statement that community is everything.

It's the whole thing. What did you mean by that? And, like, how did you get to that conclusion?

Yeah. So, Nation Builder is, you know, helps people build community, helps people organize communities.

And it's the, it's, you know, it's software to do that. And so that and so but you know we've spent a fair amount of time

understanding kind of what that really is and including how that applies to our company itself

um so like i go back you know uh years and sort of you know why we started the company and

um there's sort of a lot of elements of community. We made documentary

films and we organized people around the films because we couldn't like sell them to a studio or

anything. We did that 10 years ago and that was community organizing, right? And I, you know, I needed

the double lung transplant. We organized a community to kind of help me do that. Political

campaigns, the Obama campaign.

All of this was community organizing.

And so for you, community was a sort of tools the wrong world,

but it was a mechanism to help you get things done.

And a wide variety of things, from lungs to politics to, you name it, right?

Yeah, and so the genesis and the idea of

nationhood was that you know that should be that power should be available to

everybody right there was this sort of widening gap this widening digital

divide that was happening where the folks who had a lot of resources could organize

because they could hack together all these different tools you know everything

from donation processing to email marketing and stuff like that.

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