Recode Decode: RevUp CEO Steve Spinner

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And the best part? Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you?

Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's Odo.com. The microphone to recode senior finance editor Teddy Schleifer. Before this week's midterm elections, he sat down with RevOps CEO Steve Spinner for a fascinating deep dive into the art of political fundraising.

Let's take a listen. Thanks, Kara. I'm here with Steve Spinner, the founder and CEO of RevOps Software. He's a campaign chair for Congressman Rokana, and he previously worked as a California finance chair for the Obama Biden 2012 campaign.

Steve, welcome to recode. Nice to see you, Teddy. So we're here to talk about Steve's background in political fundraising. Obviously, a lot of listeners here might be more from that.

With startup fundraising, I used to cover in my old life campaign finance and donors and known Steve. But for folks who don't know who you are, I want to start with how you get to Silicon Valley. You're not from originally. Like so many people from California, they come from elsewhere originally.

Sure. I am definitely like that. I was born and bred in Long Island, New York to a doctor's family and Long Island, or if I'm supposed to correctly pronounce it, Long Island. Long Island.

A while since I've had that accent. And I broke my dad's heart in college when I took economics and fell in love with that and told him I wasn't pre-med. And ever since then, I worked on the East Coast and worked a lot internationally in my 20s. So I worked in Europe and then in Asia and then worked in Atlanta for the Olympics and then went to business school up in Boston and then worked at NBC in New York at 30 Rock Vell Plaza.

Did that in the late 90s when it was owned by General Electric for a number of years. What were you doing at NBC? Business development, corporate development. So was there when MSNBC was formed and was involved in all the internet activities that they did.

Had a fantastic time there and did that for a couple years in New York City. And then an opportunity came up that if the deal happened, I knew it was, they were going to ask me to leave the bosom of 30 Rock Vell Plaza. A wonderful, wonderful building to work in overlooking the Christmas tree. Sure.

Even though I'm proud with you. So you can still go ice skating now. That's the, you know, there's some. Yeah.

I'm not very good on skates. So but I love the office and then the opportunity came up and then had me come out to California and I've never, you know, looked back. Still with NBC then. Yeah.

NBC initially was there for another couple of years, had a wonderful ride there and, you know, had been doing business development, turned me into a general manager, turned me into an executive and really informative years professionally for me in my late 20s, early 30s. And I've been here ever since. I've been here for 20 years and I've done a number of startups out here, have done things on the investment side. But yes, did definitely get involved in politics for the first time in 2005 right after the salary loss where I first started getting involved in fundraising.

So growing up you were not, you would say we were political junkie kind of growing up or is it something you were just not really? No, the exact opposite. I am, I am the problem with the 20 something. So I am the epitome of that.

I was very, very focused on my career, learning, you know, skills that I thought I would need for the rest of my life professionally. And I was not at all, at all engaged, even though I went to Wesley University for undergrad and I'm a proud Wesleyan graduate. I was not politically engaged in my 20s and to my early 30s and I've regretted it ever since having not been involved earlier in my life. But I made up for it more than, more than made up for it in the year since.

There you go. So in 2004, John Kerry loses. You said that was kind of after that, that was kind of the moment where you started getting involved. What was the first moment?

What was the first time you kind of involved in campaign financing? Yes. So the first moment was a perfect example of Silicon Valley leadership slash potential naivete. And I was the poster child for that where a little old me after the loss said, you know what, maybe if I had been involved, maybe I could have had a small difference in the outcome.

And many of us felt the same way. And so very simple, I just called up a couple of friends of mine who had been very engaged in politics and had done that at a senior level were at the time known as very, very strong fundraisers. And I just said, hey, look, I can't work in politics. I don't want to work.

I like being a tech person. But I want to get involved. I try to see if I can make a difference, albeit a small one. And the aggregated adds up to a lot of people do.

And so they said, that's great. Come to an event. Come contribute. That's great.

I went to it in February of 2005. Who was the guy who was the guy who was the guy named Donnie Fowler who was running for a DNC chair. And the second one a few weeks later was for Senator Ted Kennedy. And after those two checks, the third one that I could ask for, and I'm like, whoa, you haven't met my wife, these checks are coming too fast and they're too big.

I can't afford to do all this writing. So if you can't write all these things, what else can you do? And that's when they introduced me to raising. The art of fundraising, which is different because I mean, you're not a billionaire, you're a regular guy.

Exactly. But the art of fundraising is there's there's kind of givers and there's fundraisers and some people straddle it. So it's 2005 and you're sort of introduced to this by a couple people in Silicon Valley. And that's it.

I tried to treat it like business and say, okay, if I'm going to do this, what are the right ways to do it? What are the best practices that you can share? And I was very quickly disappointed when they said there aren't those best practices. It's fundraising.

You get an invitation, you get an email, you get a link and you send it out and you talk to people. And after many times, many failed attempts to try to get the best practices of what are the do's the don'ts. I just kind of everyone threw up their arms and just started doing it myself. And I'm sure for the first six, nine months, I made every possible mistake you can, every amateur thing you could do.

This was 2006. In 2006, just trying to help. I was helping Mark Gornberg with Windback the House. A hundred thousand pounds.

A hundred pounds. A hundred pounds. A hundred pounds. But he was a major political fundraiser.

He's got slowdowns. He's not as active. In the last decade, he was ever since Obama won. Yeah.

But at the time, he had been Kerry's California chair. What I did for Obama in 2012, he did for carrying 2004. And so I just started helping him. And I just started realizing that there's a very high correlation to raising money for a candidate as a raising money for a company.

Really passionate about what it is that you are trying to get people excited about and inspired so much that they're interested in giving in whatever appropriate amount it is for them. And if you could just use certain skills that you would do in a business world, which is try to put the right ask in front of the right person at the right time and be respectful. And the key word there is be respectful. Then people are more likely to be interested in participating.

And it's the opposite of the spray and pray of sending out an email to five thousand people or 500 thousand people and getting 0.001% to click on it and then give low, medium high dollars. Mine was the opposite. I was just trying to be, if I knew someone like climate change to be able to put a climate change event in front of them, if I knew someone like to go to a small intimate event of 612 people to put that in front of them, if I knew someone like to go to big events of a thousand people to do that, if people were willing to travel to be able to do that as well. The big thing was, I'm preempting this here, talking about Obama, but the big event was the Obama-Ober event in Montecita, in Santa Barbara in 2007.

And that was one where we're involved in the Obama campaign and that's one that had just such interest nationally at the time. But I was able to be after Oprah herself, the largest fundraiser for it, just because there were so many people that would- Oprah and Steve Sener. No, no. There's a cool picture about that, but that's about the whole extent of that.

But let's just draw down a little bit more on how fundraising is done and what may, what you were doing different. I mean, fundraising is not that different from kind of basic human relationships where you're thinking about people you know and you try and kind of bond with people that you are not just going around and saying like, hello, these are the fours, 400, let's ask each of that for $2,700. It's basically you're kind of using, I'm still at Shirk First, a Silicon Valley people you know in town and kind of describe the art of the ask. How's it done?

And again, you know, the way- Great pre-level. Yeah, so well, before RevUp and even before me, historically for fundraising at very high levels, let's just talk about the presidential level. Let's talk about Obama, you know, in 2007, since I just preempted it with my last comment about Oprah. Before 2007, what had happened in 2004, what happened in the 90s, a lot of times the best quote unquote fundraisers at the time were uber wealthy individuals who had for many, many years been extremely exceedingly generous with their own funds, giving to their causes, more importantly giving to others' causes as well, so that when they got passionate about a gimmick that they wanted to see be president and they wanted to open their home and be a fundraiser, so that's when they would start cashing their chits and say, hey, remember when I helped you with your fundraising effort over there, can I have you help me over here with mine?

And there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. That's the way any type of fundraising goes whether it be philanthropic or political. That's the way it worked because those were big dollars being asked and given by big people. And you do it a lot of big numbers and those were the biggest fundraisers at the time.

And a lot of them got the perks of it being the ambassadors and so forth. Sure, and some of the big fundraisers are brand marquee names, you know, the George Shores of the world, Oprah's of the world, these are like more celebrities kind of asking other celebrities for money. Correct, correct. And that obviously could not be me.

I was super, super excited about Senator Obama at the time. I was one of the first 50 people to get involved in the campaign months before it was officially announced in early February of 2007. And I just wanted to help, do it full time, do it full time. I wanted to still have a job, still have a career, but be able to help where I could, which was if I can't write a big check and even at the time they couldn't take them, it was $2300 max, you could individual write.

But I could help by being a fundraiser. And by being a fundraiser it meant not calling all these chits because I didn't have those. It was, as I had mentioned, just know research and get to know my friends. And at the time I had about 2,000 people that I knew, broadly defined new through LinkedIn and Facebook.

Again, so many years ago, this is the early stages of social media. And I would just be very, very careful about just understanding, I'd have copious notes, copious pads of paper about who liked what, as I was mentioning earlier, who liked to go to big events or small events or who could write big checks or write only small checks, who could like to travel for events, who liked to go to a climate change event or a women's only event at the time. And I was just always tried to be very, very careful to put the right asking for the right person at the right time. And if you do that, you do that well, then rather than this point 0, 0, 1 yield that online does is you get 40% yield, 50, 60, 70, you know, per se yield.

Obviously, I mean, it's not, this is a very much underdog story, but it's not as if you had new zero people kind of means in America. Oh, of course. Yeah. Right.

I mean, I knew some, but I mean, I knew some, but I mean, I knew some, but I mean, I knew necessarily in this vein so much. And it's just when you write, when you take an email and you just customize the top line of it and you just recognize that, you know, Teddy, great seeing you the other day. I know you like to go to, I know you're particularly interested in climate change events. Here's a really good one for you.

All of a sudden you're going to read that email and you're going to recognize that that's a unique email that was sent to you. Yeah. And there's a higher likelihood, a higher yield potential from that. So let's talk about, I mean, you were very, very successful.

And, you know, I think in 2012, I know in 2012, you were top five. So I started on 2007, 2008, I was top 10. And I was like, who are some other people in India kind of stratosphere? Well, I mean, it wouldn't be, you know, a lot of names that people that follow here would necessarily recognize and so forth.

But, you know, there were a lot of traditional fundraisers in there and I was one of the few first time people in the top 30. And it was something I was exceedingly proud of. But what the campaign was really excited was, was the way that we did it. It was the first time that people had used quote unquote data in a way that it was now would be defined as data analytics.

Back then, it certainly wasn't that classification. You know, they liked that we got some great press around it and it continued the momentum. In 2012, I took that to a whole new level. In 2012, I was, you know, reported as being top three in the country.

And how much did that, how much did you raise in that respect? A lot. A lot. You can see kind of campaign disclosures.

But campaign fundraising is in some ways like venture fundraising. It's very competitive. There's a lot, there's, you know, there's some ego involved and kind of who's raised what. And, you know, so Steve is kind of focused more on, you know, on raising what is now 2,700 dark chunks.

But just for folks who are kind of not aware, I mean, there's a whole world of, which we can get into a bit called Soft Money, which is super packs and millions of dollars. And that's not the world. I like the hard money, the official, the FEC reported money where people are proud to, to make the contribution in their limits. They're limits.

I like a world of limits. And I would deal with everything from the max of, you know, not just the 2,700s, but to the committees of the DNCs, the DSCs, the CCCCs, the victory funds and so forth, which would be, you know, up to 75,000 dollars in total. But not the stuff that you read about the hundreds of thousands, certainly millions or even tens of millions of dollars. That's a world that I have not played in for, you know, professional, political and personal reasons.

Yeah. Do you ever kind of like just like step back and like reflecting how crazy the last, like, you know, I'm sure like, you know, you were talking before about how you never really been, you know, you didn't grow up kind of seeing yourself as a political animal, but like you kind of made it into the top tier of finance folks, basically just through hard work and kind of an innovative idea that I'm going to be more strategic about how it's done. Yeah. But also, and I appreciate that.

And there is obviously a great amount of truth to that, but it's also to do it in a way that is putting the donor first, you know, being respectful. I mean, and I've said that a couple of times I say that a gazillion times, like respect in fundraising. I can't say that enough, how important that is, not just for me, but for anyone who wants to do it, whether it be for politics or whether it be for nonprofits or academic fundraising, anything you do, if you compete with respectful of the other person, you're more likely to have a positive outcome and they'll feel really good about it as well. And then the last thing is that you had mentioned the competitiveness of it.

Absolutely. Historically, it had been terribly competitive. And in some cases, it still persists. What I've always enjoyed is working collaboratively, working in teams, sharing credit that the whole is greater than the individual parts.

And so it's not just the individual fundraising I did, but you know, I wrote the business plan for Tech for Obama, wrote the business plan for the Victory Trustees or the business plan for South Asians for Obama, because obviously the white Jew and me, you know, that's obvious that I would like that business plan. But that those efforts together raise many, many multiples of what I as an individual could, but you do it so that everyone participates, everyone gets credit for it. You know, it's the big 10 kind of thing. And that's where the real value of what I was able to do, you know, came in.

Because you know, my time, there's only a certain amount of time I can as a volunteer fundraiser. There's only so many people I know. But if you can build initiatives that take hold that grow, you know, roots and that not just one or five or 10 or 20 people, but a hundred or 300 people can participate in and they can make it their own, then you can have this huge, huge, huge multiplier effect and raise that much more money. All right, Steve, I have some questions for you.

We'll take a quick break. And now we're from our sponsors, and we'll be back to talk more specifically about RevUp where Steve is the CEO back in a sec. This week on Network In Shell, I'm joined by tanks and Atra, the meme king with over 15 million followers across tanks, good news, influencers in the wild, and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how meme culture think preparation age, starter packs, and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value.

Get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll, make you rethink what going viral is really worth and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash your rich BFF. We're back here with Steve Spinner, the CEO of RevUp. So let's kind of finish the story here.

So after 2012, you kind of pioneered this new way. You're still fundraising voluntarily. I'm still doing manually. Still doing manually.

This is, and remember, you didn't grow up dreaming of inventing political fundraising software. Absolutely not. How did this idea for RevUp come about? So one of my closest friends is Rokana, and he had been running for Congress, and obviously I wanted to help him.

I was helping him on the fundraising side. And a lot of opportunity came up where people had been reaching out to me about what I'd been doing for Obama, and would that be available? Would I help them individually? For this race or that race, et cetera.

And it's just one of those things where there's only one of me and it's flattering as there is. I don't like to say no, but I just don't have enough time to say yes to everyone. What's your day job at this point? At that time I was helping, well I helped with Obama with the real act, and I was playing what to do next.

I was kind of, so I was helping Roe from a campaign perspective, but I was getting ready to either join a tech company out here or start my next thing. And so in that period of time of figuring out what I wanted to do next, I realized what we had done, what we had accomplished for Obama World, had been really unique and really successful. I think that I had done, and that there could be an opportunity to help many, many campaigns. So that's what I wanted to do.

And so we started doing that. I spoke to the lawyers, made sure that we could do the way we wanted to do it because it'd never been done before. I spoke to both sides of the aisle because the only way you could do what I wanted to do is if it was not a partisan play, and even though I'm a Democrat and I'm a well-known Democrat from the Gecko since incorporation, we had to treat it like a tech company, which means just like Google and Twitter and Facebook and Salesforce, works with anyone out there that wants to buy the software or leverage the technology, we would have to be the same thing, which politically is a challenge for me, but professionally and personally, you have to do, I have a fiduciary responsibility for the company and for investor investors, and that the product could thrive if it just had more people using it and testing it and so on. So he was our prototype client, then we moved to 15 clients for the next year, and then we moved to 50 clients after that.

And these are our clients, our campaigns and our committees or organizations that are trying to raise money that are in the political system. This is 2013? No, 2014, 2014. The idea came to me in 2013, but we started building the software in February of 2014.

And so as I said, Rose, our prototype in that year. Rose, now he's been on podcast before. He's now the Congressman for Silicon Valley. Yes, he loves coming down here.

Let's just don't look at what this is. So I mean, in the old days, there were professional political fundraisers who probably had something that they would call software. What is RevUp? And how does it work?

I know it's easier, and if you own a con or phone and computer screens, but verbally, let's give it a shot. Oh, I can communicate verbally. So for anyone out there listening, imagine you're someone that you're inspired by a candidate or you're inspired to help out a nonprofit or someone you know reaches out to you from a campaign or from your university that you went to or nonprofit that you're supporting and ropes you into, brings you into to be a fundraiser. The initial use case for the software was a as a fundraiser tool for a volunteer, for a bundler, as they call them.

And if you put yourself in that light, as everyone's imagining that, you all have jobs. You all have jobs. You all have something else for your life. If you're going to do this, it's not something that you have comfort in.

It's outside of your day job. And so you've committed. You've said yes, I'll help. And you're sitting in front of your computer and you have no idea who you should ask to help.

And we all know many people. Everyone knows hundreds of people. Some of us even know thousands of people. Well, what do you do?

You have two choices. You can either send out one email about the opportunity that you're fundraising for to everyone. That's not fundraising. But that's actually what the vast, vast majority of people do.

The VCC, hi, I'm trying to raise $1 million for K-APS. Can you get $2,700 bucks? $2,700. $2,700.

$5. And that's just spamming your network. Whatever comes in, you've raised. So in that case, you're a fundraiser.

And a lot of times, most of it, you won't get in. It's kind of a low dollar approach to high dollar giving. Right. But anyone that's doing it's an any dollar approach.

Any dollar approach. It's the only way that they know how because their time is valuable and they have no information to know any better, to do any better. They're doing the best they can with limited information. And that's the whole point.

other way of doing it is that you say, you know what, an individual ask or an individual email or an email to a small group of people that's customized is likely to have a higher yield. But who should I ask? I still know the same thousands of people. And so you sit there and you start thinking through your, your rolodex or thinking through your, you know, mental contact list here.

And maybe even you might actually even look through your LinkedIn list and so forth. And you're one by one by one going through this and as you're doing it, you're like, this is the most unprofessional, inefficient way possible and you get frustrated and you push your computer when you procrastinate. And that simple act of procrastination causes that fundraising effort to fail by 50% right there. And every day that you continue to procrastinate at another 5% of the failure rate until finally eventually like, oh my God, this only six days to the event.

And I haven't done much yet. I got to buckle down and do it. And you start just reaching out to top of mind people that come to people that you think are individually wealthy, people you think individually might be interested in this, people that owe you chits, just completely top of mind it. As you're doing it, you're like 95% of the people I should be reaching out to.

I'm not reaching out to and I'm reaching out to a whole bunch of people that I probably shouldn't be reaching out to. And I'm never going to do this again. And usually it fails. So with that in mind, we said, that's the problem.

No one in business would conduct their work that way, just winging it, sending out one email to every vendor out there and hoping that someone replies or just without any research reaching out to people indiscriminately. We would do research. We would try to handle it in a professional efficient manner. We don't do that in fundraising.

So what the software does is we said it's data analytics on the fundraising side. It is not the system of record. It's not the CRM. So we don't compete with any of the companies out there that take the money through their system.

You're not actually raising the money. It's the way to organize the contacts that are raising. We're not the links that the money's going into. And so there are a bunch of different companies out there of all different sizes.

Those are all of our partners. We are very, very careful not to do anything like that. What we do is we help the fundraiser or now we also help disproportionately even the finance staff, the development staff, the advancement office. The tool now is transitioned even more so into a staff-driven set of tools.

So now as a bundler, if that same analogy is now with one click, you can upload your Gmail, your Outlook, your LinkedIn, your contacts, your iPhone contacts, any Excel spreadsheet, CSV list you have. And if you know thousands of people, it'll merge purge, dedupe them, clean them all up, single-rolladex. And then it goes out to thousands of political and charitable databases. And it will bring all that data, put it against your contacts, put it against the profile of the organization that you're raising for.

And based on that profile of that organization and all those 10,000 databases will then force rank every single person you know high, slow, as likelihood to be interested in potentially giving. So you have, let's say you're raising for O'Connor's campaign and you have someone in Palo Alto who is a doctor who's given money to democratic congressional candidates. Sometimes, not always, maybe they're South Asian and then it matches up with O'Connor. He's a new candidate.

He's South Asian. It matches up. And so maybe this person is a, they should be in the 75th percentile for the people you call. And then someone else who is only given Republicans for their entire life with the last 60 or they give every single Democrats suddenly is an easy-ass, it's basically a way of ordering thousands of people you know into high-priced times of your time.

Right. So the part that I'm particularly attracted to is not going back to the same well over and over and over again. And that's a major, major problem in political giving is that the same people are getting hit up many times every single day. If you can believe this, only 2% of the US population gives money to politics.

I thought actually. And most of that money is by 0.1 of 1%. And so everyone calls the same folks and everyone really, really calls that 0.1%. And so yes, the software will certainly have that 2% in there and certainly will have the 0.1% in there.

And it'll say have a given before but haven't given currently. Have they given less now than they normally give to go back and ask for more? Have they given to other things like you but they don't know you so maybe if they only knew you they'd want to give to you? Absolutely we go and there's many different types of filters and parts of the algorithm that will boost people up and boost people down of people that have historically given.

Absolutely. My passion is to go after the other 98%. Introduce it to people that have never been given before. And so the Rokan example as you just mentioned, sure there are some wonderful donors in the tech in the South Asian community that have given to politics for it.

Those are obvious people. And those have been some of those. Those would be like the top of mind person. Maybe they don't need the software.

Exactly. You always need to know in what order and how fast and what's the likelihood and what's the appropriate ask and all that good stuff. Again, you're trying to be respectful here. But the power of it was to go and identify people who had never written a check is on no one's list.

But maybe because they're a South Asian male in tech living in Silicon Valley, maybe rather than a 90 or 80 or 70 score, rather than getting a 0 score, maybe you get a 43 score. And you focus your time and energy on people in the 60s and the 50s and the 40s, people that no one talks to, no one reaches out. Most people don't even know they exist. But because there are hooks, respectful hooks of potential interest, of attractiveness, of a connection that that campaign or that organization or that university might have with that person isn't it a better thing to grow the pie and go after people that nobody goes after and there's much higher likelihood of them saying yes because there's no competition for the same dollar.

What did the pushback be in the tree for this before that? Part of any human relationship is just like the soft touch and the ability to, maybe there's some, they don't check any of the demographic or historical attributes that would indicate this person likely to give. But maybe you're just really good friends with them and you feel like, or maybe you saw them last week at the coffee shop and you're just that human connection that like the software can't predict. How do you deal with that?

I mean, look, you should always preference people you know and touch points that are more current and more accurate. So if you know things about people that are outside of software, that trumps anything that any software will be. So even if it says it's not a giver and you're like, you just have a maybe just something in your belly that makes you think this person will give, you just don't think about. Right.

They're not a giver yet. That's all things they haven't given yet. That's the part that I find is both the opportunity as well as the challenge and I'd like the opportunity part. So let's talk about what you're doing now.

It's seven, half million dollars, you know, set last week or a couple weeks ago. Yep, a week ago. By the time it was Aaron and probably a couple weeks ago, this is this, you know, your background is a politics. This came up as a political idea.

But you mentioned development offices, down in select just like man's team of things, political fundraising is a very small amount of fun, the fundraising world overall. So this is a bid to kind of make, you know, the Princeton University development office or a hospital or anybody that's raising money. You're kind of now pitching this as a software for anybody who has to kind of call a database and figure out who to call exactly. So if you think about giving last year in fundraising in the United States, it went up to you across 400 billion dollars that this country was generous to open up their wallets and gift of that only seven billion in total over two years in this cycle goes to politics.

So people act like, I mean, that's always a common criticism of campaign finance report for performers who say there's so much money in politics and I think Commissioner McConnell maybe John Boehner has this, you know, quote about more money being spent on two tastes on politics. Exactly. That is an unfortunate show. The reason why that feels the way it is is that so much money is used on broadcast television because it's still exceedingly effective to getting up the message so everyone sees it and so they see more money, more ads and you just get, you know, oversaturated with ads.

The other reason why is that a very, very small percent of the population is just getting hit up so much and they're very, very vocal about that as they should be. And so that's why you're getting that view. So the much larger market by so many orders of magnitude are nonprofits, you know, at large and especially as you mentioned, higher ed and healthcare as very large components within that. And so that is what we're doing with the stuff we've had a very successful couple of years coming out with, you know, first prototype or alpha or beta coming out of self mode a couple years ago growing we now serve over nearly about 300 campaigns and committees and so forth and we'll continue to grow that next year will be super exciting given that it'll be a presidential cycle and so many races as well there.

But we did do the financing to very specifically go into the larger markets and do what we do in data analytics working with the CRM's with MS partners but now go into these larger categories and do exactly what we've done in politics into these larger categories because they're, they're chomping at the bit for next generation type of tools. It's pretty sad, not staging institutions but like these are, they have formal development offices, these are, I mean, like what, is there any part of you that worries about just some of the skills not translating or some of the stuff we're not translating? I mean, everyone does it in their own way. There's certainly best practices of how a lot of these, you know, organizations do it and these are very, very professional people.

The larger the organization, the more people they have and the more structure they tend to be and as a result the more professional they can be. They, you know, they can have more staff, they can have more tools, they can have more training, etc. But everyone, I mean, they're half a million nonprofits. Everyone's raising.

It just depends on how much, you know, how much resources you have at your disposal and so we just want to be a tool to compliment what they're currently using and a lot of these guys are using whether it be razorsedge or blackbod or they're working with Salesforce and probably a hundred other companies out there as a system record to be able to help them on the data analytics side for both staff as well as volunteers to have the same level of effect in those verticals as I'm honored to say that we've had success this last few years. I mean, we've been just blessed with all the awards in the industry that we've won. We won Best Fundraising Technology, most innovative product of the year, two years in row, best startup, best analytics. We deployed our mobile app last year.

We won the award for Best Mobile App. And so what we're doing as a data analytics company has not been done before in these three verticals. And what I'm super, you know, proud of is where I've lived the last two decades is to be a Silicon Valley company bringing Silicon Valley tech to these three verticals that have historically not had the opportunity to benefit from that, at least from a data analytics perspective. Got it.

We're going to take another quick break. We'll be back after this with Steve Spinner, the CEO of RevUp and we'll talk a little bit more about politics. We're back here with Steve Spinner, the CEO of RevUp. So this is software that you're back, obviously, or, you know, it's well known on the internet, you're a Democrat, but this is the software where you're definitely kind of using there's some prominent public clients out there.

How do you kind of balance, you know, I guess let me describe how much you do politically, personally these days? Yeah, I've had to cut back in many cases, which is very, very hard for me on a personal level because that's my genesis in all this. But like for instance, you know, we'll be very involved in the presidential races next year. And I won't, as an individual, be able to participate because how can I be personally helping one when I'm working with five, 10, 15, 20, you know, people that may or may not be running?

Sure. So on a personal level, I've had to do some cutting back. I mean, I still help this candidate over here, this candidate over there. Obviously you're still in Fort Worth, Rocanna.

Still helping Ro. There's this guy, Sreekel Carney in Houston, Texas, who is a very, very exciting candidate that is basically the row equivalent on the foreign policy side. He's 14 years state department in a bunch of different, very, very challenging environments. He's been over the years.

He speaks six languages fluently. Very exciting candidate there that's running in a Houston district. And so I've been, you know, helping them as well. So I still help a number of candidates here or there, but where I really, really dug in was National Finance Committee and Chairman of this or Co-Chairman of that and so forth.

I probably won't be able to do because- Give up, give up those fancy titles, which is- How can you do that when you're helping them from a professional purpose? And that's the whole point, which is that's how I can work with Republicans as well as Democrats. That's how I can work with multiple Democrats in the same race. Here we are.

I'll be kicking all higher, you know, they can all use the software. Right. I mean, here we are in the state of California. You know, on the dem side, you know, there'll be races where there were four, five, six candidates in the same race for a congressional district that we just experienced for the last year and a half year.

And in June, you know, most of those all but one or two will lose. But we were able to help with multiples of them because, you know, we're just a tech company. So if you pick exclusives, then you're, you know, trying to pick horses, you're not really a tech company whatsoever. And you're part of the advocacy apparatus.

Yeah. And that's just you can't build a- I don't know if you like a Google Facebook software platform that folks can use or not use. And that's independent, though, from like, Hi, I'm Steve Spinner. I wasn't even a Final Fantasy.

Exactly. Exactly. And I'm going to trust you that you're going to treat them the same as the other people because you treat everyone the same. And we try our best from a customer service, a partner success perspective, treat everyone exactly the same.

And, you know, I mean, people that know that we have multiple clients in the same sector, it's never been an issue in four years. People that know that we sometimes have clients on the opposite side of the aisle. It's never been an issue in four years where I take that as a one of the things I'm honestly most proud of is because I'm a proud dem and I'm a card carrying scar-ridden dem that I can meet with Republicans. I mean, where did I meet you?

I mean, you two conferences. I think that's covering what I was saying. So what is the, I talk about how fundraising has changed a little bit over time. I know you started in 2005.

This is pre-sidence United, one of the key Supreme Court decisions that created SuperPax. And you know, I think there's been a lot of discussion in the media and people in my industry used to cover political money about has Trump changed the game at all with fundraising? I'm just curious. I'm just raising, you know, working on 2020 cycle in midterms or in a couple of weeks.

It's fundraising different than it was a decade ago. It's much larger. I mean, it's much, much larger and it's much more successful online than it's been. You know, every four years you get this new bar that it crosses and you don't think it can get any more successful than that.

And of course, four years later, it's twice as much as it was before. So, yeah. So it continues to evolve. A long, long ways to go.

There is a certain amount of marrying of spray and pray, blind fundraising. Just increase the size of the list and you don't care about the certain. It's an online, low-dollar, you know, you're on the Beto work email list. And that's a holding down the industry.

That's not your industry. It's not me at all. And I can't stand it. But because it's the opposite of the respect part that I talk about.

How many hundreds of email fundraising emails do we all get every day? And the late 99 point of them that I can't stand but. They also have a lot of some screaming headline like, you know, the country is in crisis. Well, that's actually one of the things that's helped, you know, worsen the narrative in politics.

And it's on both sides. It's on both sides. Big changes that have happened. And, you know, there are many people that would say this.

I'm not the only one. Is Democrats historically always had a huge, huge advantage with small-dollar online donating. And that started with Howard Dean in 2004. And it's only picked up ever since.

For the first time ever in the last couple of years, the Republicans with Donald Trump was able to do a certain amount of that and do it quite effectively in 2015, especially 2016. And that's persisted through this cycle, through the fundraising that they've done on the RNC side. But outside of that, one anomaly there on the Republican side, there's still a huge difference, huge competitive advantage of small-dollar on the Democrat side then on the Republican side. The other thing is that Democrats have Act Blue, which really is a...

It's a portal, which you want to start with. Yeah, no, I mean, it's just it's a way to be able to easily make multiple donations over time, stores all your information, makes recommendations and so forth. And it's just been very, very successful for Democrats. And you know, they have a company called NGP Van, which is one of our partners that's also, you know, very, very good at being the system of record.

And so the technology has always been historically an advantage on the dem side, especially as it deals with small dollars. On the big dollars and especially on the soft money dollars, Republicans have historically always had a lead on that, especially obviously ever since since United. Yeah, so just to claim it for folks, I mean, so basically the way that most lots of campaign dollars were raised today, and the only way they were raised pre-says united was, you know, there's a federal limit for how much a candidate can give to a campaign or a committee. And after since United, they've created the creation of SuperPax, pools of cash where people can cut checks on limited size.

And that's kind of what a lot of the headline-grabbing stories are, PRT will give you a million dollars to the club for growth or Shel Naddleson giving $25 million to, you know, a kind of party-sponsored Senate super PAC. That's kind of what people think of when they read a campaign finance story. And there's also just kind of the, I mean, $2,700 is not nothing, obviously, but it's not $25, it's not $25 from Shel Naddleson. Right.

So you have the super PAC where you can write unlimited and it's disclosed. There's also right unlimited and it's still not disclosed, and that's what they call dark money. Thankfully, that's decreased, but that's still something I'm very, very uncomfortable with, and many, many people are very, very uncomfortable because of the lack of disclosure. Right, and there's some Democrats that were more and more comfortable.

This is kind of epitomized by Charles and David Koch, who created a large network organizations that are 501c4s, so they get some sort of tax exemptions in exchange for being theoretically non-advocacy-renicidials. Right. But the thing is, I'm always very protective and defensive of donors when they give hard money up to the max. And when I say that, protect them meaning that they're allowed to do it.

And if they want to do it once, that's great. If they want to do it, you know, 2,500 times, they should be allowed to do that. And they shouldn't be hit for donating. I always have a problem when donors get hit because they support when they get criticized.

It's all public information. Public information they're required to, but you know, they're doing what they're allowed to do because they're inspired to do that. There's something about that can't make that they like a lot and they can't necessarily give time, they can't necessarily travel from them, but they can write, you know, $250, they can write maybe $2,700. They shouldn't become part of an attack ad.

And some people do that. I mean, there are... Well, no, it's usually on the Republican side to Democrats historically, but where it's really gotten bad is on the larger checks, the soft money, where, you know, now those guys are writing the large checks, they're getting hit. And, you know, in many cases, they deserve to get hit for that.

I like to protect up to the max, the 2,700, and then beyond that, it's discretion. Well, I mean, I think the... This did change when Harry Reid... Because Charles and David Koch, for instance, not using household names, they're obviously extremely wealthy, but this became a big deal with Harry Reid, who kind of went out there and attacked the Koch during 2012, 10 grand by name, I think, on the Senate floor.

That's on the soft money on the big 789 figures. I'm always very, very protective of, you know, when they... Someone expressing the Democratic right, $2,700. Or $250.

I actually saw a Dem on Dem hit piece last week. It's right here in the Bay Area, two Democrats, an assembly race. And I saw someone doing an online posting there where they just were hitting people for writing $250,000 or $500,000 because they were supporting the other candidate. That really kind of upsets me.

Yeah, I think it's $200, right? It's $200, right? By the end of that, that's when you start getting named and campaign financial support. Right, just the folks out there, if you give them $200, you will be finable by people like me and I guess people like Steven and other folks as well.

Trump, I mean, this is the most under Republican side. There's arguments we made. I wrote a lot of stories about Trump's fundraising woes during 2016. There was a lot of Republican donors like the folks at the Romney Summit we were just talking about who felt Trump is running against the system, draining the swamp.

And I think it's kind of led to at least some budding conventional wisdom that political fundraising doesn't matter anymore. Trump can just cog the airwaves, the whole point of raising money, presumably is to buy media attention. And to the extent you think he has actually kind of changed how political fundraising could be done at least. I mean, this is a much longer conversation than the last few minutes of this.

I mean, he's definitely changed some aspects of it, absolutely. But I do not believe that in the next cycle, the real act, if he is the candidate on the Republican side, that the media will do in that race even as a sitting president, what they did in the last one, because it was comedy. You can't even cover it, yeah. I mean, just it was Trump 24 hours a day on all networks, not just the Foxes, but he was also on MSNBC all the time.

And as a sitting president, they're even now starting to cut back. There's been a lot of news about that over the last month, month and half that. One of the reasons why the president's going out so much is because a lot of his comments are not getting covered as much. And the rallies, even those are not getting covered as much.

And so he's trying to say things that are newsworthy or he's trying to make the newsworthy to force him to get coverage like what he did last night in Montana, because people are trying to cut back on that because he realized it is an unfair advantage. He won disproportionately, whether many reasons why Trump won the last cycle, but one of them is that he just had so much earned media that he didn't have to pay a penny for and 10 times more than his closest competitor and 100 times more than some of his other competitors. You feel like that was a moment in time that Trump was because he was maybe there was a media fascination with him and he obviously also self-funded somewhat. He self-funded his Republican primary race almost entirely.

He gave some money, not as much as he promised to give during the general to his campaign, but at least in the primary, he was outspent and he loved to make fun of Jeb Bush. Right? But that's how he was able to make up for the shortfalls. Right.

He did fund himself to the level that he needed to get in the game and have a team that he needed. But he was able to more than make up for it with his comments that caused him to get all this for media. He starts out as having higher name ID than almost anyone else on the stage. When you start out just by your name ID from TV from the apprentice being able to have 15, 17, 18% support and name ID of 35, 45, maybe even up to 60% name ID, how is anyone else supposed to be able to compete with that?

Do you see that as not necessarily that consequential for the way that your business support fundraising has done? No, not for me. You still have to fund your campaign. The part that actually gets me excited from a rev up perspective is historically money is the number one and the only one that matters in can you do you make a decision to run for office or not?

Can I raise the money? And if you believe you can raise the money, then you raise your hand and you run for office. I actually hate that. I believe that money should not be the reason why you decide to run for office.

It should just be part of the execution plan. You should run for office because you think you can do a better job, that you can help people and you can move us in a positive direction. And what rev up can do in politics, what rev up can especially do for nonprofits and universities is lower the bar for you to more easily be able to raise the amount of money you need if you're a candidate to run a competitive rate. You agree in general with the money is necessary, not sufficient for competitiveness.

Yes. So the idea that you don't need to have the same amount. You don't need to have the same amount. You don't need to have the same amount.

You don't need to have the same amount. They don't have 30 million dollars a month to be a competitive candidate. And you might lose. Absolutely.

But yeah, absolutely. Or you can have races where you're raising $28 million and you lose like crazy to someone who you've raised three, four times more money. You can have other races where you raise $1 million and it's one fourth the amount of money as the other person and you win handling. But you have to raise a certain amount to get in the game.

You have to raise to be able to have a team and to be able to get your message out. And there are other things that matter. Absolutely. That's why it's called a campaign.

There are many facets of it. But money gets you in the game. And that's what Rev is focused on in politics is to lower the bar to make it easier for you to raise the minimum that you need to be able to run a competitive race. And the same thing, fulfill the entire mission and charter for a nonprofit and a university.

Right. Doesn't mean you win, but at least you can kind of play the game. Exactly. Steve, fastening conversation.

Thanks for coming on the show. And thanks to all you for listening. You can find more episodes of Recodeco. Don't have a podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts.

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