Tech Startups Making Millions Off the Presidential Race

​By Julie Bykowicz | Bloomberg News 

BLOOMBERG NEWS - Four years ago, Michael Beach was toiling inside the Republican National Committee, overseeing a voter-turnout operation that was overrun by President Barack Obama’s technology-driven grassroots army. After the election, he and another former RNC aide, then both 28 years old, set out to start a high-tech political consulting company that is now an expanding 50-person operation with offices in Virginia and Boston.

One recent morning, 14 job candidates filed into his fourth-floor office in Alexandria, Virginia, where a wiffle ball net is stowed in 

the lobby and a pirate flag hangs in the conference room. How many might he hire? “Fourteen, if we like them all,” he said.

The rapid expansion of Targeted Victory showcases the rise of a new professional, political class: a core group of young technology experts who are shunning traditional campaign titles, starting companies and making millions off the most expensive presidential campaign in history. They are cutting a path similar to the one etched by television ad makers in the 1980s, with a dose of Silicon Valley and the dot-com boom’s edginess.

"Huge Market"​

“This is a huge market, and companies will keep forming to try to fill the need,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Media, a New York-based group that focuses on the intersection of technology, politics and civil society. “Every online technique used by Fortune 500 companies will be in the hands of politicians in the next four to eight years.”

Federal candidates and super-PACs have spent more than $46 million so far this election cycle for the services of just three firms -- Targeted Victory and the two major Democratic tech operations, Blue State Digital and Bully Pulpit Interactive, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of Federal Election Commission reports conducted for Bloomberg News.

Targeted Victory’s roster of 45 clients includes Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romneyand the super-political action committee American Crossroads, which was formed with the help of Karl Rove, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush.​

Billion-Dollar Investments

Meanwhile, inside the presidential campaigns, 30-somethings with tech titles are earning six-figure salaries usually reserved for veteran campaign officials. 

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New York Startups Help Fuel City's High-Tech Renaissance

By Gerry Smith | The Huffington Post 

THE HUFFINGTON POST- By appearances alone, this startup looks and feels like a movie set version of Silicon Valley.

The co-founder is a 22-year-old college dropout who wears flip-flops, drinks Red Bull and gives exuberant high-fives to his staff. The office has a pool table, a foosball table and growlers of beer in the corner. Young engineers in t-shirts write thousands of lines of computer code, sometimes past midnight.

But Codecademy- a year-old company that teaches amateur software developers how to code -- is located 3,000 miles from the fabled startup mecca, in a place that for years was not widely considered a tech hub: New York City.

That reputation, however, is starting to change. Codecademy is one of a burgeoning number of startups who have helped turn New York City into the nation's fastest growing tech sector.

The influx of budding tech companies in New York reflects how the industry has changed. Today, a successful startup is based less on building computer hardware and more on creating applications that deliver content and services over the Web.

New York -- epicenter of fashion, finance and media -- has become a destination for startups that want to be near those industries, which are being rapidly transformed by the digital age.
"There is a renaissance in the New York tech community," said Andrew Rasiej, chairman of NY Tech Meetup, which hosts monthly gatherings for tech entrepreneurs. "In the same way that hardware married software and created the legend of Silicon Valley, technology is marrying content and creating entirely new opportunities in New York City."

 From 2007 to 2011, nearly 500 startups in New York received investment. While startup funding dropped 10 percent nationwide during that period, it rose 32 percent in New York. More than a dozen established tech startups have moved to the city from tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston, and the number of IT jobs in New York has risen 30 percent since 2007, according to a recent report from the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank based in New York City.

To be sure, Silicon Valley still offers unmatched advantages for tech entrepreneurs. 

"If you're doing something that requires significant engineering, there is still no better place in the world than the Bay Area to start a company because of the density and absolute number of top engineering, design and product management talent," Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, said in an email. 

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A Challenge to Digital Influencers: Join The #One4One Game

​By Deanna Zandt | Forbes

FORBES - Who would you name? We all say we despise those lists that get created to showcase influencers and hotshots in our field. But secretly, (a) we wish we were on them, (b) they didn’t pick the same small group of people all the time, and (c) we all know that people love lists, or else we wouldn’t keep making them. So, how can we break out of ruts  that naming-games create?

We’ll create a new game.

Imagine if we could break out of the linear constraints that bind us when we’re making lists of favorite people. What if it were like a trading card game, where you got to pick your Babe Ruths, and also see who’s picked you? And what if we made one of the parameters of the game that you got more points for picking people in your field from underrepresented groups?

Thus, The #One4One Game has been born. Go to Twitter now, and, using the #one4one hashtag, tell the world who your One is.

The #One4One Game, created by me, Melissa Pierce, and Andrew Rasiej, asks digital influencers to name someone whose identity has a radically different trait as their One.

 If you’re a dude, name a woman. If you’re white, name a person of color. If you’re straight, name an LGBTQ person. You get the picture. Arbitrary points will be assigned by anyone else playing the game– all you have to do is use the hashtag #one4one and share your One (or Ones!), and reply to others’ choices. The best (arbitrarily decided, of course) Ones will be archived on the game’s website, where six smart men have already started naming women they want to champion.

A bunch of us who work in the tech and information industries are tired of pointing out that women and people of color are missing from lists, from panels, from articles about the industry, and that it’s the same six straight white guys having conversations about the future of media, technology and, well, everything. And a lot of people are tired of hearing it. So, let’s jump in and do something, and, as Rachel Sklar has been pushing for, change the ratio.​

Go to Twitter  right now, before you even finish reading this post, and share your One.

The #One4One Game was borne out of the brouhaha surrounding Newsweek/Daily Beast’s list of 100 digital power brokers. Only 7 out of 100 were women, and there were even worst ratios for people of color.

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