Rich Lennon
I am an engineer by education, which mostly means I have always been interested in numbers and in what they actually say once somebody looks at them. That is most of how this started.
I served on the board of a Virginia nonprofit, and what I watched there stayed with me. To get timely information out of the General Assembly, and somebody on hand who understood how the legislature actually works, the organization had to raise serious money. I sat in on several lobbyist interviews myself. Eight to ten thousand dollars a month was the going number, and that is every month, before anyone does a single thing with the information. None of this is secret. Lobbyists register with the state and report what they are paid, and the organizations at the top of that public list report six figures a year.
I kept thinking there should be a model that fits the everyday person. Somebody who wants to know what is happening, form their own judgment about it, and make their own phone calls. I have always believed the people on the front lines are the best lobbyists. They live the thing being voted on. What they lack is the data to know who to talk to, so they hand it off to somebody who has it. I do not want to be a lobbyist. I want people to have what they need to make progress in their own community.
So I started reading the record myself. Every bill, every recorded vote, every member, four sessions back. All of it is public and it always was. It is just buried, and reading it is a full-time job nobody was doing. The question I could not get past was whether a regular person could use AI to go deep into that data the way a large organization does with a staff, and get the same answer without the staff. It turns out you can.
I was already tracking the legislation for myself. Then it was obvious that other people in the community could use the same thing, most of them volunteers on boards doing this by hand at night. So I set the price where anybody trying to make an impact on their own legislature could afford it.