Brigade

» see brigade.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Brigade was formed in San Francisco in June 2014 with Matt Mahan as chief executive and Sean Parker as chairman, and it started by absorbing two existing civic startups: Causes, which had been one of the largest Facebook applications ever built, and Votizen, which had spent years matching internet users to public voter registration records. The pitch was that American political participation was low because the tools for it were bad, and that a well-built consumer app could raise it.

The product asked you to agree or disagree with a political statement. It then sorted you into a side and showed you who had landed there with you. You could write your own positions for other people to vote on. Private beta opened on 17 June 2015. It was still effectively in beta when it closed.

The one thing that worked was the ballot guide. Ahead of the November 2016 elections Brigade ran a guide in San Francisco and in Manchester, New Hampshire, that asked you a series of questions and then told you which candidates and ballot measures matched your answers. Around 250,000 people used it, and the platform generated about five million get-out-the-vote messages between friends. That was the ceiling.

~ the case file ~

~ what sean parker bought ~

Parker led a Series A of roughly 9.3 million dollars, with money alongside it from Ron Conway and Marc Benioff among others. The founding team was five people with real credentials in the space, several of them straight out of Causes, and the company never had trouble getting a meeting or a press writeup.

What it never had was a reason for anyone to open the app on a Tuesday in March. Election-timed products get used at election time, and the rest of the calendar is a retention problem that no amount of Facebook-founder money solves. Five years in, Mahan approached something like half a dozen potential acquirers and could not sell the company whole.

~ billions of rows deleted ~

The winding down was more careful than most. Before handing anything over, Brigade worked with Facebook and an outside consultant to review what it held, then deleted billions of rows of user data it judged unnecessary. It also open-sourced the voter-file matching code rather than let it be sold as an asset. Voter files are about as sensitive as consumer data gets in the United States, and a lot of failing startups in that position simply hand the database over with the rest of the furniture.

~ the afterlife of a url ~

Pinterest hired about twenty engineers in February 2019. Countable, a politician-tracking app, bought the remaining technology and data on 1 May 2019, which is the date the thing stopped being Brigade. It was not an acquisition, it was a dismantling in two parts, with the team going one way and the code going another. Mahan's exit line was that they had not reached the mountaintop but had moved the civic tech space forward. He then went and did the analog version of the job: San Jose city council in 2021, mayor of San Jose from 2023.

The domain has a second life as inventory. Type brigade.com today and you get bounced to a listing on Atom, the brandable-domain marketplace, where the name is for sale to whoever wants it. A voter-matching app is close to the least exportable software category there is, and that is the honest reason this one stayed a story about the United States: the entire mechanism depended on the American habit of publishing voter registration rolls as records a company can license and join against. Turkey has electoral rolls too, posted by the YSK for citizens to check their own entry before a vote, but they are an administrative list rather than a commodity. There was never a version of Brigade that could have been built here, whatever anyone thought of the idea.

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