Wall Street To Y'all Street

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Today's guest has seen how policy actually gets made from the inside and she's now building technology to completely change how people understand it. Laura Davis is the co-founder and chief business officer of US Ledge, that's us, L-E-G-E-A platform using artificial intelligence to transform massive amounts of legislative data into real time policy intelligence for businesses, government affairs teams, and decision makers.
Before entering the startup world, Laura spent years inside the system working as a staffer in both the US House and Senate raising funds at the US Chamber of Commerce and no labels, and later operating inside the Texas State Capital, where she specialized in technology policy and worked as a contract lobbyist.
After seeing firsthand how difficult it is to track legislation and understand what's really happening inside government, she decided to build the infrastructure she wished existed while working in policy. Today through US Ledge, she uses AI to connect policy data across all 50 states, surface what actually [00:01:00] matters, and help organizations make faster and smarter decisions in an environment where hundreds of thousands of bills are introduced every year.
Laura, thank you for being here.
First of all, we're at your podcast studio. I've taken over, I've hijacked your studio. This is wonderful. Laura's podcast, bills and business, where you talk about, I think primarily business, but also some of the legislative action, but through US ledge you are using just to explain it, it's ai, and making it easier to access this drug.
It's just a tremendous amount of information. but before we get into that and what you're doing now and how transformative it is. talk to us, if you will, a little bit about your upbringing and how that influenced you as a founder and entrepreneur.
you mentioned from the early years, kinda what inspired Yeah. What gives you the drive to be an entrepreneur, a founder?
'cause it is something inside a person I believe. You definitely have to have a competitive spirit, I think. And then I do love to win. That has definitely always been an innate enemy. And so I was born and raised. I don't know [00:02:00] if, if we spoke with this, but I grew up in the uk so I was born and raised in, little Village outside of Cambridge in England.
And my dad's an entrepreneur, so my dad, he has an aquatic center, so he's a small business. they do a lot of installations and ponds, aquariums, gardens. It's very big in England, as it is here. But, he always was real, real hard worker. and then I had an amazing mom who stayed at home with us, who was like my biggest cheerleader ever.
there's a lot of things that made me. Who I am and I credit 'em to my parents of course, and how I was raised. But one of the things that stood out to me when I was growing up is, all kids wanna follow along with the trends. As a founder, I feel like you always have to be okay to go a different path and be okay to be ridiculed and be okay with rejection.
And you have to have this like grit in you. And, my grandparents said, so I grew up in the uk Mom's, American dad's a Brit. And so I grew up visiting my grandparents in Texas who, were from Germany. So they were immigrants in the us. [00:03:00] And every summer I would have the best time. So I always knew I wanted to move to the US
So you would visit Texas? Yes. In the summers. Okay. I would visit Dallas and loved it. Okay. I loved the heat. Everyone was so warm. Loved that part. 'cause I've always been very warm and, people in the UK would maybe even more, a little bit more stoic you could say. Or a little bit more, not as a, not as public.
so there were times I would come here and whatever the fun trends were in the US were different to the uk. One of them I was really obsessed with. I don't know if it was a trend and I was definitely too old for this, but I loved Hello Kitty. So I remember in middle school I went in to, first day back after summer with a Hello Kitty backpack on Wheels.
And I go wheeling this backpack in. And I got so made fun of, I don't know if you can curse on this show. This is middle school in England. They're like. Where do you think you're going on holiday? Like, where are you going? And they were making fun of me so hard and I'm like 10 to 12 this time and, go home and told my mom, I said, they made fun of me.
And she said, do you think it's cool? I [00:04:00] said, yeah, I think it's so cool. I love it so much. I want to wear this backpack every day. I wanna roll it everywhere she went. Then it's cool. And so I'm so like grateful and blessed and happy to have a mom who was like that with me. 'cause I know I will do that with my kids.
and you're saying, I guess the translation in that for an entrepreneur and founder is who cares what other people think? You can't care. You can't care. You have to not be, now you have to care enough to want to get the deal and, wanna get in the investment and wanna serve your customers and do that, but.
I think you have to be okay to be bold and be brave and just get out and not really care and go against the grain and not be scared to do that. I think that's what I've seen in successful people in general is those people who, they start with no followers and they, go in and grow their audience.
Starting a podcast is a huge leap, right? It's a belief in yourself. You're doing something. Starting a business is a huge leap in doing that, growing up I was around that and then I was in theater. so I was really interested in politics and theater in high school, and so I did both of those.
[00:05:00] Theater really helped prepare me, I think, for debating, for public speaking and I love doing that now, presenting in a lot of ways. And it was between, do I go into politics or do I go into acting? I was like, ah. I'm pretty money motivated. I don't wanna go down. I dunno if I'll really, make it there.
so no, DC was definitely a goal of mine and knew I had such interest in coming to the US so I started looking at different universities and my parents did not want me to go, but really felt that it was, just the best opportunity for me.
Was there a reason they didn't want you to go just because they didn't want naturally their daughter, they don't want to leave? Or was there something specific? Of course. I think it's very much the unknown, right? Neither of my parents went to college. they didn't necessarily know the system, but also moving far away is the main thing.
Like it's a lot to go to another country and then go navigate all that on your own. but I felt like I was tough, but I could do it and I would just look back at like little 17 and a half year old being like, okay, let's move to the us. And they were like crazy.
was [00:06:00] originally wanting to go to a, SEC school. I was looking at SMU and in Dallas, then I looked at, Alabama. I, my grandfather, I got really sick and his dying wish was that I was in the military. And so I thought, you know what, that would be great experience for me going to politics.
So I enrolled in a military prep school for, the Coast Guards, the military chose, and it was my grandpa's favorite. And, yeah I enrolled in a military prep school, so did that freshman year of college in the US and it happened to be in Alabama,
after about three months, I knew it was not for me, but I stayed for the year. Okay. I did do it. There's a lot of reasons. It was a lot of corruption at the school, essentially. Oh, wow. Like really bad. Oh my gosh. That's a whole nother story. Yeah. And I was like, life doesn't have to be this much of a fight.
I was held really hardcore, so bad. And then, like I couldn't speak for a month. they took away our. Electronics, we couldn't communicate. There was like some real weird things that happened, like a lot of bad stuff. I wasn't into it. And did you finish?
so I did that [00:07:00] year at the prep school. Okay. And then about six months, they allowed me to change my major and I studied, I got so many credits that year. I did two years worth of all my math, science, classes out of the way. And then I transferred to the University of Alabama and was in a sorority.
So had the complete one, 180 from doing the military experience. But, and that was an amazing time. So that's interesting because I've met hundreds and hundreds of business people. I'm a veteran. I was in the military. But I have met very few entrepreneurs and founders who had any inkling to do anything military wise.
Yeah. It's just, it's not prevalent. and then how did that, when you went to college, was it business or what did you study? Political science. Political science. And, 'cause you knew you wanted to go into politics still? Yes. Okay. And I totally agree with you. Most people don't go into military.
It's very, there's a lot of structure, there's a lot of different mindset. And I know I'm not a follower. Yeah. I was like, 18 and I was like, I know my rights. You can't do it. And I was really, I would smile and they would haze me or, They'd be like, could I car gimme, a hundred pushups?
And I was just like you can't make me do [00:08:00] this. Found out I was the biggest rebel ever from that school. No, my grandpa was still really proud of me for going to do it. And it was a really good experience. I made a best friend from it in that way, but it was just not for me.
Yeah. Yeah, she went to West Point after and she said, oh, west Point was so much easier than this school. 'cause it wasn't a, it was a private school so they could do whatever they wanted. It wasn't, military run. But the standards weren't there as far as West Point is very much watched.
Yeah. Okay, so fast forward a little bit. So then you go, you graduate, and then where does working in the US House and Senate come in? Where does that? Yeah. So I definitely was, a hustler through college. so joined a sorority, did all the extracurricular things, loved it. But then I got involved in anytime there was a speaker who was a congressman or senator who came to the campus, I would go and meet with them and try and introduce myself
So then I started working on political campaigns to get my foot in the door. And, the US Senator of Alabama at the time was former US Senator Sessions, ended up being the ag. And so I remember meeting him a few different times and then [00:09:00] I said, oh. I wanna come intern in DC do you have an internship available this summer?
And he said, I think I do. You need to talk to my chief of staff. So I went and walked me to the chief of staff and was like, I really wanna come intern with you this summer. Didn't hear anything back for, like a couple months. And I thought, I really wanna get this internship. so I called up one of my references who was a congressman, former congressman from DC who I met at a speaking engagement.
And I said, Hey, I really want this internship. Is there any chance you could be just a referral for me? 10 minutes later, after I sent that email, I get a call from DC saying, you got the internship. You are gonna be here. Not a coincidence this summer. I was like, I was shake it up. It was crazy. And then the other part, I ended up, getting an internship at the RNC that summer, which was crazy experience.
And then, the governor of Alabama office. So I had three internships that summer and I just got the bug. Wow. I was so excited. I learned from all different sides of things. They were all really unique. state, federal, and then, the RNC. That was interesting. And yeah, it got me the bug for sure and wanted to go to dc.[00:10:00]
What surprised you the most about when you started working in government? What, was there something that hit you? Because you are on an efficiency like fix right now, right? if you will. Yes. But was there anything that struck you as wow, I didn't think it was this way. Oh my gosh.
I didn't realize how important those relationships and connections were until I really started in government. And I love that because I love people. I love to help people. I'm a real connector and I love helping in any way I can help see others succeed that are, they're good people, right?
So I realized that was a really good skill in DC and, just now in politics and in life. You meet. People, and you never know where they're gonna end up. And so many people that maybe I met at a happy hour in DC are now, partners of mine testifying on my company's behalf.
I think that's one of the craziest things, that it's very run by relationships, but also, yeah, a lot of inefficiencies. When I got my first full-time job on Capitol Hill, it was regarding constituent correspondence.
[00:11:00] So I was the legislative correspondent and, for the congressman. And so that meant all of the millions and millions of letters that he would get, we had to reply to. Now a lot of members want you to reply to every single one. This is way before ai, way before any automation. Even sorting them into folders was tricky.
And that's not my specialty, really, like writing those letters. But I studied poli sci. That was definitely a really good way to learn. but it was something that well, fans really pushed me to do. 'cause it was like, can we just edit this one piece and do this? 'cause it was so much, so there were some systems at the time, but nothing compared to I'm sure what we have now.
Yeah. For that type of purpose. So it was definitely, a lot of in inefficiencies, but also it was really fun. really interesting people. The one thing I will say for anyone who studied poli sci and is excited to go into government, a lot of people have a lot of political opinions in college, and that's the one thing they're not able to share.
So when you are working [00:12:00] for anyone in government, if you're, you know this from the military, I'm sure. Um, yeah. You keep your mouth shut, it doesn't matter. It's not applicable. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So with agents, state agencies, you have to be completely neutral. Federal agency is neutral. And then when you're on the hill, you represent that member that you work for.
So even if you don't agree with the letter you're writing, you have to be able to write it. And if you don't agree with the person who's coming to lobby you, you have to be okay. and that actually helped me become more neutral on issues because I saw every single side of a subject and I didn't know my opinion on things at some point, there were some times that I would say, wow, this healthcare stuff, I don't know the answer.
I've heard from so many different, sides that. I can't even give a hard stance because I now know what I don't know. it's interesting how that can change your perspective because you think you have this hard line and then you start hearing the other side and it's oh, wait a minute.
Maybe it's not as black and white as I thought. Nothing is. Everything's so nuanced and that was really fun to see. And then, of course people testifying and that's something I love, we're very involved in now with our company. And what we [00:13:00] share for transparency is you've got, thousands and thousands of government meetings from the local to the federal level happening simultaneously.
And yes, we can, know what happened in a bill through alerting, but there's no one doing live government monitoring. And so that's what we do and fill the gap in alerting you what people are saying about subject matter and things like that. So I wanna get into that here in a second.
But going back to how it works behind the scenes, most people believe policy making is like this highly organized process. And is it really, or is it really chaotic, like the other end of the spectrum? It's really chaotic. Absolutely. There's a lot of deals, negotiation, things like that going on behind the scenes.
Yeah. the legislators have a lot of opinions, but they're so spread thin, right? There's events, there's dinners, there's business meetings, there's interest groups, constituents, there's so much that people have to do. it's pretty chaotic. It's very fun though. And then you also have protesters who come in.
It is never a dull day in Congress or in [00:14:00] any state capitol, because there's so many different groups that come in and it's really fun to learn about the world, really. You get people from all over the world that come in. at the beginning you have a plan, the congressman or senator comes in with a plan and then, who knows what's gonna end up happening.
It can, anything can derail just with, one, Scandal that happened, and then you have a new person that has to come in or, you have anything can really happen. but it's fun. So it's very fluid, very chaotic. but somehow things get done right. What bills get passed or introduced and passed, how have people tracked what's going on?
Because there's so many bills introduced, I think you were saying, I don't know how many thousand in Texas alone, for example. How did they track it before? we really do, we're in all 50 states and local government and federal, but we have a real focus on state governments because those are the ones that are the most disparate and hard to find bits of information.
But it's probably the most active, legislative process. Going on, like [00:15:00] everybody knows the headlines in DC and there's a lot of standstills and there's a lot of blocks. State government things are getting passed all the time. And same with the local government. So before AI and before our company offering solutions, states have individual websites.
So think each state's like its own country that runs things completely differently, has a completely different interface, and then will file bills, through the government. The government has to create a system. So you're thinking right away, there's a software that the government has to create typically bad news already, right?
It's hard. there's funding problems. Like they don't have a product person. now running a software company, I'm like, okay, you need someone in product. You need someone as a CTO. You need then developers to develop this and make sure nothing breaks. Then you need, someone to guide the vision of the company and talk to customers and users of how to even the flow would work.
They don't have that in the States, right? the data's disparate. there are some competitors out there that have just done keyword searches. [00:16:00] So essentially You can't search all 50 states. That's what we built a system that you can search all 50 states bill data.
But, you could in the past, or currently go to, one of our competitors and type in a key word of a bill. The big problem there is lobbyists. Don't wanna put the key word that's gonna flag for you in that bill. I was a lobbyist. I know.
A lot of them are attorneys and they, a lot of them will finagle the language so that, that word you're looking for isn't what's ever going to show up in the bill. So it's very hard to know. there's a lot of relationships and then the bills change, right?
There's 15, 20 versions of some bills and one version could be. Completely innocuous, and then five versions later it becomes a Christmas tree of amendments on the bus bill. That is just, that's how people sneak things in. So we're, with ai, what's so cool is you can do a contextual AI search. So even if it's an acronym or a word, anything that would be similar and relevant will populate.
But then also when you're hearing about a bill and a [00:17:00] committee, the old way was you had to go to the state site, find the video if it was available. Sometimes they don't post it for days after the hearing. That's very valuable information and time wasted if you can't get in there as a lobbyist or any kind of interest group.
And then you'd have to click through an eight hour hearing to try and find the right point that you were looking for. Very inefficient. And that was like a year ago. Yeah, it's a very inefficient process that we are making. Efficient. Okay. So the, basically the policy system was just drowning in information.
Because that's one bill. Go find that video. But then there's so many, it's literally across the country, hundreds of thousands. But within Texas it's thousands, right? It's 12,000 just in Texas alone. there's, now we're working with companies that represent all 50 states.
And even though they have the budget to, they aren't gonna send someone up to Alaska unless there's a real need. so there's really big corporations with five person lobby teams. And I don't know how they're tracking things across all states and local because local and regulatory side, there's also rules changing.
we [00:18:00] get access to the state agency information too, and videos because things that happen in rule, you can't lobby the agencies. You can't lobby them, but they can change a rule like that. So that is also very important to track the regulatory side. It's very complicated though. What you said is people are getting too much information that's not handed to them on a silver platter.
Contextually relevant. Yeah. You drown in it. I don't know how else to, to what other analogy. Sure. But okay, so are there statistics, like what percentage of laws are passed that people or corporations just, they're like, they had no idea it was coming and it really affects them? I talk to people like that.
All the time. And that's actually the reason we have success. I don't have any, stats or numbers for you, but every single customer and prospective customer I talk to says, Hey, this happened and I missed it. I had something happen that I missed and this is why this software didn't work for me. Or, I can't afford to miss something.
Contract lobbyists who represent multiple clients, they will get, their client won't let them go if the client finds [00:19:00] out about something before they do. So there's a lot of challenges in the space of just keeping up with data and some teams that have a hundred people still can't monitor.
Wow. 3000 meetings a day. Yeah. so it's impossible. It's impossible. I would say, maybe you let me know, is this too strong a statement? It's impossible to monitor what's going on a legislative basis that's in a state without these kind of tools, without us ledge. Yeah. Actually we are the first people to do the live government monitoring.
So we have a feature called Radar that. We transcribe everything and then we automatically scan it through a system. So say Airbnb, they're focused on short term rentals. VRBO. That's a really hot topic right now. And I know this because I put in a radar alert that scans every single government meeting across the country.
And then lets me know when Airbnb is mentioned in a negative way. I just turn it off because they're talking about short term rentals, trying to ban them across the country in different cities and, counties and at the, state level.
Yeah. You can't have enough people. And even the big teams, maybe, a hundred, 200 lobbyists [00:20:00] for really large policy teams is the max I've seen. Just impossible. It's actually impossible. Yeah. That brings a question like how far level you go down, right? Yeah. Because you talk about state and local, but there's no way you're going HOA 'cause HOAs are banning short term rentals too.
So where does it stop? Is there a certain size municipality or is it how does that, we actually go on customer demand. Okay. So if the new partner comes on and says, Hey, all I do is mud districts, municipal utility districts, then they'll say, great, which ones do you want? And we put in them in for them.
So it builds the library for everybody, as we do that. But typically we'll get, the largest counties, largest cities. and then of course like the legislative and regulatory videos. But then there are some really nuanced school board meetings. School boards. Okay.
That's pretty micro. Yeah. That's down there. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of lobbyists that are interested in what happens there. And a lot of what's talked about is then put into legislation. Gimme an example. why would anyone care about a school board meeting? Pepsi wants to put up a billboard on the football field.
what are they concerned about? Typically? Education lobbyists to think of [00:21:00] different types of schools, whether it's public, private, or charter. There's so many different types of schools that want to know what's happening. advocates for sure.
I would say anyone in education, policy space. There's a lot of even think tanks, associations and, the schools themselves and schools have lobbyists, so that's an interesting one too. Yeah. No, I didn't know that. Okay. So you identified a problem. Yes, you're in government, you're like, this is silly.
People are drowning in this information. Yeah. You go from inside government worker to where you are outside now solving this problem. But talk to us about the entrepreneurial spark. Like how did you come up with this idea to where, not to where you saw a problem, but to where you're like, I'm gonna fix it.
I'm gonna create a company. Started after a bath of wine and thought, you know what? Huh? Spark outta my brilliant ideas. I just, and meant to Eric, who you're about to speak with as well. who is your co-founder, your husband and husband as well. We weren't even married at the time. We were engaged and, through [00:22:00] this legislative session, I was frustrated that you were reengage.
We wanted start wedding planning. I couldn't, I was getting home at midnight and I said I just took hours to do things that should have taken me really minutes. And I now know I can probably do that with AI in the future. What year is this? 2023. Okay. So January 20, 20, 23. Checking come out. Yeah. LLMs just began.
Yeah. And so I started playing around with chat bt and it wasn't good. No, it didn't understand a bill language at all. Oh, wow. 'cause it has to know the, underline and strike through what that means and it changes the bill. So it was seeing it as a whole, so like a 13 page bill, that had a lot of modifications.
And it still can't, because the state only publishes data in different ways. Either we have to use OCR technologies like, or it's either PDF or photo of the bill. So there's like a lot of different ways the data comes in. And then we have to train an AI to understand the underlines and strikethroughs.
And I had no way to search it at all. So I had to go, when was that look through? I did [00:23:00] this when I was lobbying too, just trying to debate, prepare debates and arguments for my client based on past sessions, like debates and arguments against them.
And then I couldn't do anything with it. I had to send this link of a eight hour video or whatever it was, and say, go to this hour, this minute. And then I said, Hey, maybe Senate does something. So I reached out to Senate Resources and said, Hey, can I get a transcript of this?
And I was hoping to just manually transcribe this piece, but that's frustrating. And then we'd have constituents ask for it too. And I thought AI can do that. Like AI can do that for sure.
And that was really early days. And I thought having the transcripts available and being able to index the points would save me hours and it would also help me accelerate my work because I could do that so many times and I could win any debate because I could go search back through history and find times that things had happened or I could learn so much more.
And then strategy and then relationships. 'cause in the capital, most of it is you have to go negotiate a bill or have to negotiate a subject, but you can't know without the facts. So getting the [00:24:00] facts, AI is so good at getting the facts.
It gets you the information you need, really quickly. And that's what I love about it. So that was the first idea, and I said that to Eric and I said, Hey, everyone I know would use this. This is something that would say to everyone I know so much time. And he said, it's a really good idea actually. And I was like, I know.
And then he was like, but you know how hard it's to start a startup. I was like, it would be great. And he's no, seriously. And then he would tell me all his worst stories, But, because that's his background, startups.
yeah. And scrappy startups from the beginning. Yeah. And so even though I heard these stories, I was like, oh, it won't be like that. and it, to be fair, this is definitely going better than any of those companies that he had worked for before, which is great. but it's still a slog and it's so much work.
early days I started floating the idea to a lot of lobbyists and I meet with 10 lobbyists a day. So I had a Rolodex of lobbyists at the end of session to just catch up with and meet with. And I started saying, Hey, if I built this software. What would you pay for it?
They're like, I paid two grand a month for that, if you could build that. And I was like, okay. [00:25:00] So I ended up getting 500 people that said that to me and I was like, alright, we need to now co-founder, who's a technical co-founder, we've got something here. So we, acquired a really small newsletter that was a non-partisan political newsletter and that's how we started.
So we could then blast out, hey, book a demo here. And we would talk to 'em about the vision. And then, if they were in on the vision and we're interested, which most really were, anyone who reached out seemed really receptive. Then we said, great, we have a product rule, but, and then it really went from there.
So talk to us about the timeline of that. So you identify this problem and then you have your wine with your husband and he's are you crazy? I know startups. And you're like, I don't care. I'm doing it.
You formed essentially a focus group and you obtained a mailing list through this newsletter. And you start reaching out to people and you're gaining traction from the identifying of the problem to getting that newsletter and starting to really build it.
what was the timeline of that? How many was that months? Was that years a month? Wow. And month. [00:26:00] Okay. About a month before. So June, may is when I was really at the end of session and said, we should do this. June was when the session ended, and so everybody wanted to go on vacation, including me. I really wanted to, and then we were so excited about this business.
then we started doing focus groups over the summer, and then that summer we purchased the newsletter about July. So it was about a couple months. We really went all in, and then brought on our co-founder in October. we did launch a product MVP before actually an engineer even came along.
Of campaign finance data that we manually entered. And that was what we had acquired essentially. this guy, Jeff Blaylock, gave him all the shoutouts in the world. He was a journalist who he's still around.
He lives in New Mexico now, and he's in the, crisis communication space. And, he shut it down just because it was so manual, what he had to do. And we had talked to him about our vision of automating this data. Think of also we talked about the regulatory and legislative side, but there's also the campaign finance side, like in the off season these candidates get donated to. And then, it's huge. [00:27:00] There's a lot that goes on. There's a lot. My son does that. So Cool. Yeah. Okay. what kind of work does he do? He does, he just got someone elected. So we. Acquired that, data set and then just really learned how to do that process. for transparency, that information. And now if you can imagine comparing campaign finance information with vote history and how that changes over time, like this data is like impossible to gather even with a hundred person team.
and that's over the years, I wanna do analytics of 40 years of the history. to mine. That data would take forever. And there's no way to scrape it from the state. So we did end up, we first launched that, it was like $50 a month, for the data and the newsletter.
And we were so excited, started, we out a thousand dollars in annual reoccurring revenue and we were like, this is it. Yes, we did it. but yeah, brought on a co-founder who is the best. His name's Ben Gruer. He is our CTO. And Yeah, we met him on the Y Combinator co-founder matching program.
Really? That's wonderful. Yeah. [00:28:00] Wow. Yeah. Did a lot of interviews, but he was just the best, just match and he we're best friends for life now. Wow. Yeah. I jokingly say yes because I believe this company is a unicorn. I believe . Something I appreciate. Huge. And I think in the short time you shared with me earlier you started in Texas, correct?
Yes. Now you're on all 50 states, and I had asked you and Soly, corporate lawyer, but I'm like, are you gonna go to other countries? And it's just and then what would you step back and think about it? The US alone is such a huge market. You are just getting started. And you don't know what's going to come , from what you're doing, but.
Do me a favor now and just explain in, in a couple of sentences what US Ledge does. Yeah, so we make access to really hard to find information accessible. So we live government, monitor all of the different regulatory legislative, city and county meetings, and then we alert people what happens. So that's anybody from [00:29:00] government agencies themselves who are looking to access the information on video, but also on legislation on the regulatory side.
There's a lot of team management and delegation that's involved. So state agencies are a big group legislators themselves around the country. Some of them don't have as big a staff as the, as New York, Texas, and California. So they need a system like this to even know what to vote on because they don't have every single bill up in front of them when they're getting the bills come at them very quickly.
We also serve lobbyists and interest groups. Anybody who has some kind of association, lobby firms, law firms, have government relations arms. So there's a pretty broad base as well as news organizations. That's a new one that we are helping people even break news because. News isn't in every single government meeting, but we can be for them.
And then they are able to find out that information faster than any headline and they can break that news. So that's been a really cool use case. And this is on a [00:30:00] subscription basis, like a month to month subscription? Is that how it works? It's a software as a service. We do two year contracts in Texas, two year contracts, but it's yeah, subscription.
So when you talk about lobbying obviously is huge and has such an impact, and you are ultimately leveling the playing field. And I would say you're fundamentally changing how lobbying works because you are giving these smaller players who can do a two year contract, the same level playing field as a huge firm.
I would say that has a huge impact on what's going to happen Where do you see that taking policy in the future? Like how does that go down the road that is so astute of you, not being in this industry to mention? 'cause that's absolutely accurate. it allows, access to a nonprofit, for instance, that doesn't have much funding, but to lobby or try to lobby gets them the same information that maybe a large lobby firm would be.
So we're constantly developing the software. Where I really see it going is it's gonna fundamentally change lobbying. Absolutely. And that's gonna be relationship focused. people will hire lobbyists to [00:31:00] go in, make the deals, negotiate, get bills passed. But they'll be able to take on double the amount of clients.
We've already helped a lobbyist who was a legislator double his revenue from using our platform. Wow. With zero extra hours work. That was crazy. But one of the big pieces with that is he didn't have to go manually do all this work.
He didn't have to hire someone to do research poorly. Like I did research at one point. It is not my skillset. It is not something I'm good at. And it took me so long and my skills could have been better used another way. So where I do see, just like AI is automating a lot of work, this industry is not gonna be as affected in that the government affairs, public affairs, lobbying world, I do not see being disrupted.
I think that's gonna grow, actually. But what I do see being disrupted is anybody in a research only role. As we've seen with law firms. As we're seeing with, marketing agencies and all these different industries, consulting groups, [00:32:00] consultants. There, certain work that isn't human is gonna be automated.
So doing things where you have good, just social understanding and, sales ability can market yourself. I see it becoming a more creator economy in the future, where like everybody has their own thing that they're monetizing. I don't see big companies, like the big tech companies existing in the future as much as there'll be a lot more players.
That's a prediction. but I do see with this space, it is completely changing and in a good way. Like I would love to be, I would enjoy lobbying a lot more now. With the tools that now exist versus what I had to do, that was not fun part of my job. Interesting. Do you think that policy making government has become too complex?
That we can't understand it now without ai actually Yeah. Dark point. An dark side of it. Absolutely. There's some states that are saying, let's [00:33:00] put a they're advocating for, okay, let's put a limit on the amount of time this law can exist because there's laws from 200 years ago.
Sunset provision that are like, this is terrible. Yeah.
You can watch a little bit and get the idea of the kind of questions he is asking. But no, these are really good questions. Are you okay on time? yeah I'm good. I don't have anything for the rest of the day. Okay. I just have a few more questions.
do you think going, keeping on the AI theme Yeah. Could AI predict policy before it happens? I would, yes. Absolutely. so predictive analytics are really interesting to me because it would be it, no one's really done this in aggregate of the entire United States, seeing which way policy shifting based on changes over time.
Like no matter what, when companies lobby, they move the needle a little bit. Even if they don't pass the bill, their goal is to move the needle. An example could be gambling, right? Even if they don't pass it fully, they wanna move the needle a little bit. And they have been doing that in Texas, right?
What I see is being able to predict what changes would need to happen in order [00:34:00] for X, Y, Z to pass? And you'd be able to ask AI in layman's terms that you could then find your advocates, find your allies, find your detractors. And then, politics is gonna get crazy because I'm just thinking about that strategically now.
And then someone in a campaign firm could go say, okay, we need to out seat these people so that this law can get passed. And that's what politics is now. That's what people are doing. But it takes a lot of research to do that. I do see that. The good part is it's just gonna be radically more transparent and anybody will have access to that information now.
'cause it's publicly available data. Yeah. It's becoming more accessible. It's, yeah. Leveling the playing field. So one last question and then I'll get to speak with your husband. Yeah. Your co-founder. Going back to the founder perspective, you wanted to go into government, you never, I didn't hear from your upbringing, you didn't wanna be an entrepreneur, although you grew up in an entrepreneurial household.
What would you say to that person out there who is in an industry and sees a huge problem that they think they can solve? but maybe they're trepidatious. What would you say [00:35:00] to them? I find out why are they trepidatious first? Is there, are they scared? Are they of their idea? Whatever that may be.
I would say go for it. Like anytime you think you have an idea, what's the worst that can happen? and I definitely, definitely did think I would be an entrepreneur. I thought I would be a lobbyist. So that was my goal in politics. I didn't wanna be in politics, I didn't wanna run for office. I wanted to, focus on things I cared about and wanted to advocate for.
So I thought my entrepreneurial journey would be starting a lobby firm. That's really where I thought I was gonna go with it. and I knew I needed to know how the sausage was made first. So I do recommend anybody, go into an industry that they know so they can learn from it on what the problems are.
what I find interesting is when I work with my co-founders who haven't been in the political sphere. It's actually really helpful for me to bounce ideas off of because I may have a very complicated, really lengthy process workflow that Ben or CTO will be like, oh, that's super easy. Have you thought about doing it with one click like this?
And I was like, never. That's amazing. So I do think there's room for everything, but anyone who's [00:36:00] looking to be an entrepreneur, go for it and just, yeah, go into the industry, really learn about it from the people in it, and then go make some amazing creations. Love it. Laura Davis, thank you for that.
Thanks. I look forward to speaking with Eric. Yes. The other side of things, you can ask all the crazy stories. the business side I guess. Yeah. so thank you. So did you guys have most people spend this period, and I'm just talking off the record, where they're like there's a long period and then they finally do it.
But you literally just jumped into it. Were you, why? Yeah. Is it that you were burned out or you were this is such a huge pain point, like I know how to solve it. Because chat was new, how did you know it was going to advance the way it has? I've always been like, interested in aliens.
In aliens did you say aliens? I did. And like technology. Future. And all those types of things. Okay. So I always was a futurist, and I actually really like this, author, mic Kaku. Have you heard of him? No. He's this, physicist who writes books. I loved is my favorite that
it's called the Future of Humanity. And like [00:37:00] in that was predictions about the future in general. And so that's why I worked in technology policy. I was really interested in how technology was advancing in general and in college, I think I said there will be robot lawyers one day.
And that's crazy. There's things like that. I hopefully not legal tech. There's legal tech companies, right? No, you're right. All certain types, not all types of no, you're right. you touched on how personality is more important than ever and having a personal brand , and how everyone has to have this platform where they can sell and you're spot on.
And it, yeah. I don't care what industry you're in, if it just, it can be replicated. To answer your last just piece on that. It we didn't jump into it without doing the research. We really made the business plan.
We interviewed, 500 people got there. Yes, I wanna do this gungho, and then started building. But really, MVP. Do the minimum viable products that, would sell, that, would get people in the door. We haven't changed our pricing since we did that MVP that we launched in April of 2024.
So really when we launched a full MVP and we've just grown from there. And we knew [00:38:00] after we took over Texas that first session, we had something and then, we raised some funding to take us across the country just to accelerate it And go even faster. Yeah. Which was great to do, especially with, engineering.
But it, it was like a rocket ship, but also there was incremental stages. And I, Eric, I think can tell you a little bit more about the very early stages that I didn't talk about. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for this. Thank you.
I'm here with Eric, Laura's husband. Eric is a serial entrepreneur, spent almost a decade in Silicon Valley. had a hundred million plus dollar acquisitions. talk to us a little bit about.
your upbringing or your early years and what gave you that gumption to go into startup land? I wish it was more of a, everything led me to this moment type of thing. It wasn't, I feel like I was a dumb kid who did dumb things just like everybody else, And growing up it was, upper middle class.
My parents were great. was in Sudbury, Massachusetts. and then, always had, I would say, if anything, I had a little bit of a [00:39:00] wanderlust, right? I wanted to Check out the world and really see it. So I went to University of Vermont, did that thing. I was never really a school guy.
I did okay in school, don't get me wrong. now looking back, I'm like, the idea of paying a ridiculous amount of money to go work really hard just didn't make sense to me. It just did not make sense to me. And even now, theoretically a grad school would be a missed opportunity for myself at this point.
'Cause we work really hard here, and, we get paid to do it rather than have to pay to do it So is good when that math works. Like it does the effort math, for sure. But you know how I'm not anti-education. if it's something that's important for anybody, then then it's absolutely something that they should do.
But really my formative years, the things that got me into the startup game was my time in Silicon Valley. I will share a story that I've never shared before. but I, so I went in literally, wanderlust. My brother was living in San Francisco. I'm like, Hey, you got a couch I could stay on?
So I've always had a little bit of sales experience. So I got hooked up [00:40:00] with a recruiter staying on my brother's couch for a little bit in Silicon Valley, San Francisco. And, I got hooked up with this job, I was there for about three months and it was just like an SDR role so that you just dial for dollars, right?
And that's where I learned that's tough grit, right? The number one thing that you need to have in the startup game is the ability to, pain tolerance, right? And you're sitting there making, 80, a hundred calls a day. and I was, full of piss and vinegar, if I'm allowed to say that on your podcast.
and, was having like a little verbal sparring match for fun with my boss at the time. And guy, he took it way, not what I was hoping to. He ended up headbutting me in the face, telling me he would beat my ass and then fire me. And this guy was a former UFC fighter.
Like he fought, we could do it. Hey I was like a state champ, wrestler. I could do it. This guy would whoop my behind Yeah. He was, six, like six three, dude who won several professional fights, [00:41:00] like at, yeah, I, I was not, I was out of my league right there for sure. So it was at that moment I decided that, that probably wasn't the role for me.
my roommate, who also is my best friend. connected me with, the CEO of this company. And it was literally two people and I was 23 years old
And then ended up, connecting with him and he said, Hey, we need somebody who can just run through walls. And I'm like, I could try. I'll do it, or I'll die trying. did it and then that was what was the rule? So the rule was, sales, right? Okay. Account executive.
So if you've done sdr R and for those who don't know SDR R is cold calling, you're doing 80 to a hundred calls, maybe you're getting a two to 3% success rate.
It depends what you, it success, but like 98% of these people are yelling at you on the phone or just hanging up. So I've been cursed at more than the average person for sure.
Okay. So then you go into a sales position. Go into
a real sales position for sure was full cycle sales and in the industry I knew nothing about. It was in the automotive industry. But, bottom line is that if you know where it is very much, where there's a will, [00:42:00] there's a way kind of situation here, and that no one at that company knew anything about the automotive industry before he jumped in, we just said, Hey, everything's being sold online.
Probably gonna have cars being sold online as well. So essentially what we developed is a system that had, that would give a checkout experience for all the components of car sales. So car dealerships worked with us and, seven years later, I was, really running sales for that company.
we required for a hundred million dollars, right? at that point I was in Silicon Valley. They said, Hey, we need somebody to go open up the office and really lean into the, Austin world, which is where we were opening up that sales office. But I did everything at that company from bottom to top.
Sure. I I sweeped the floors. I was a , chief janitor. So we did whatever had to be done, but then it was acquired by, Upstart, which is a publicly traded company, was a nice liquidation event as they say. And, that's really what cut my teeth. But, there was even, that was one of the hardest experiences I've ever done.
But, I don't think there was ever a moment when I actually thought about quitting though. Yeah, no, like you said, you have to [00:43:00] have that grit and it's amazing. There are very few, areas in the world or in life where you can just learn so much. About so much in such a short period of time.
in any startup, you are wearing so many hats, and if you're not wearing that hat, you are next to the guy who's wearing that hat and you're picking stuff up. And so absolutely. That carries with you into your next ventures. And so from that exit, and you're here in Texas already, right? What happened?
You leave the company, what happened with US Ledge, or what happens then? Yeah. I knew after it was acquired that, I put in my time I did my work here. I had a great, resume builder, get some confidence behind me.
so then I spent, I spent time doing a couple things, right? So I founded another company that worked in was selling cars, essentially. we worked in the automotive industry and. Yeah, ended up, going full cycle, actually made a decent, did pretty well at that company.
the market changes, the cost of vehicles just cratered after COVID, so that wasn't quite a viable [00:44:00] company at that point anymore. ended up consulting for quite a few companies as well because there's very few people Who know how to get the first couple customers in this game here, right?
It's tough. You have to define product market fit. You have to have a thousand conversations. You'd be told that your idea is bad and not take it personally, and then rework it until you could find a way to make it work. So I did that for about three companies, getting their first couple customers and really showing them, Hey, this is how you penetrate the automotive industry.
and then I was at one of these companies with the former founder of another company that I, that I was at. and he, and then, Laura just brought up like, Hey, there's this problem. That is just so obvious that no one is solving right now.
I guarantee you, if you build it, they will come. Was this an ongoing conversation or was it like one night you guys had this talk? It was one night. Really? It was one night. We were actually like, we were going to bed and I think, Laura maybe had a couple glasses of wine or something like this, and she's it like CHATT is so good. Like [00:45:00] what, how has no one done this and this. She named all the problems and from my perspective, if I hear okay, if there's a problem that a very large group of people is running into and that they're willing to pay for it, have the means to pay for.
That is the equation for a really good company right there. So she just brought it up and then it just happened. It just happened. And then, two years later, a little over two years later, we're, we're working with the majority of lobbyists in Texas, we're in all 50 states.
We have a really good reputation. So I was glad I, listened to my wife on that one for sure. It's funny how that works out. I know, right? So what did you learn from your prior success in startups and then I think the best founders are also ones who've had a bit of a downturn and experienced that.
What did you learn and take away from those experiences that you think have helped? Contribute to the success here? Yeah. So there's, very tactical things that I could say, which, I could say a couple of 'em, like how to find your first couple customers and how to, there's something called the mom tests, if anybody works in software, has, is listening right [00:46:00] now.
the mom test is okay, if you know you are my mom, and I'm like, Hey, I got this great company idea, you'd be like, that's great, sweetheart. Right? And a lot of the time you get that motion when you're asking people about early stage oh, this young kid is make some stuff happen so people lie to you.
Nothing happens until the credit card is charged, right? Until they're actually paying for the actual product right here. But that doesn't mean you still don't have to ask the questions before it was built, right? So I would say, the motion of starting a company and getting your initial first customers is saying, Hey, what's the biggest problems that you're running into ensuring that you have somebody.
If we're talking software, that's my game. who's somebody on the technical side that can actually build the thing that actually solves it? And then get them to pay for it. Have them sign Lois. Letters of intent, and actually get a, it goes as hard and fast into something small that you've built that's good enough to have somebody pay for it as you can.
You have to follow that strategy. Otherwise [00:47:00] you get a bunch of engineers saying, oh yeah, this is a good idea, but they don't actually speak to customers and then nothing actually happens. Interesting. I've never heard of the mom test. that's spot on though.
You're right. And the most objective feedback you can get is, are they spending money on it? Absolutely. So those are some of the tactical things, but I would say the thing that, would give, and is in line with grit, but, nothing is ever as good as it seems and nothing is ever as bad as it seems.
There, there's times when, my team and I, we talk about, stoicism and being hard nosed a lot. And, we've been copied like blatantly plagiarized. Sure. a couple times. and it is what it is.
it can get you in a little bit of a funk for sure. But just focus on yourself no matter what is thrown at you. it's not end all, be all nothing's done until the acquisition is made, or you go public for a liquidation event.
And, that's why one of our company, Tess, is, celebrate the wins and then plow through losses. Because it happens. You have to be ready with the ups and downs And it's tough as a founder, as an entrepreneur to, to stay [00:48:00] focused when you do have that noise of people copying you and you need to just keep it home and realize execution is what matters, right? Ideas are cheap. Execution is very expensive. And I think that right now, especially with ai, right? People, I have conversations with investors all the time, right? And they say like, how is what you are building right now not going to be built by Claude Code?
and to me it's almost funny to hear that in that respect because, number one, we spend so much money in data costs, just data storage, AWS, all the above, all the pipelines into these different systems that we have.
I think it's interesting to say that it almost is like the robots are taking over. It's, quad's going to build and replicate what you have. But it's tougher than that. the execution, clearly the relationships.
staying on top of things because just because you build something, the ongoing maintenance is necessary. And relationships, right? Yeah. That's one of the things, the premise of our company is that, we are going to replace the admin work, right? If somebody is made some of our customers are [00:49:00] making a million more than a million dollars a year to their pocket, right?
So every hour that person spends doing admin work, typing up a message or an email, right? That is, like their hourly rate is very high, right? So it's, very important for them to be as efficient, as effective as possible, which is, mind-boggling to me when you get people who are saying like, Hey, oh, I don't really use artificial intelligence, right now at all.
And a lot of the time we are the ones who. Show them it for the first time. There's been a couple people who thought we invented ai, which is pretty funny. but yeah, we correct them quickly. It's amazing. 'cause the adoption rate, wall Street Journal and New York Times, I can't remember last week, did a big graph.
It was a very good article, but they had a graph and they showed the adoption rate in businesses of ai and it was minuscule. Yeah. it's, we're in early days here. Early, early days. That is hilarious though. But, that's good. So how do you, so you get the first couple of customers extremely difficult, right?
So you are either having to tweak the product or tweak your pitch of it, right? Or a little of both. Whatever it is. You get the [00:50:00] credit card charge, the lois are signed everything, money's in the door. Okay, this is what we're going to do and replicate the engine starting. What's the next step?
Next step is scale. And, you need to hire the right people to be able to handle that. generally though I'm a very lean mentality business person. I make sure that we're not burn, any, a venture funded company burns cash. It just is a normal thing.
I make sure we don't burn that much cash. And generally what we do is we burst at the seams in a certain area until we cannot do it anymore. And then we hire somebody. Like in the beginning it was literally Laura, myself and our co-founder Ben. and I was doing all of the sales, all of the account management.
All of the customer service and I didn't have enough. Really what I needed to spend time on is getting more money in the door, right? Getting more customers, right? That's what makes you venture fundable. That's what makes you profitable. and then at that point, we said, okay, what is the thing that I can hand off?
And generally, my math on this is if I can hand something off to someone and they're going to do 90% [00:51:00] maybe to 90% of the decisions that I would make in that specific area, then that is absolutely something that I would hand off, right? So first thing we did is we hired an account manager, right?
Somebody to come on, get people onboarded, do the training. It's very time consuming so that I can do the sales side. Then we started getting a lot of deals coming in. and I couldn't handle it all right? I couldn't do it all. So then we brought on a sales person immediately freed me up so I can actually do.
we kept going in that motion, and now we're at the point where there's people on the team who we had to hire because they're going into avenues that I have no skills in at all, right? Marketing never studied marketing in college. Why? I'm not a school guy because I still don't know the four Ps of marketing.
I could probably fight through it if I needed to. but now we have some executives on the team that are really leading the charge in that area and really doing a great job, right? but as a whole. Some of the mistakes that I've seen and, this is what happens if you get some kind of late career people who are used to [00:52:00] managing and as starting companies.
The first thing that they do, hire people. some companies that have had the best engineers and the best salespeople as their leader and then they hire people to do sales and engineering on their team. And they burn cash three times as fast.
'Cause they're hiring a whole team under 'em instead of just doing it themselves. Being a little bit more lean, mean, figuring it out themselves.
Yeah. I would imagine that lesson came from that, or you liked that before it was It was before. So the company that I was at, prodigy Software, shout out to the prodigy crew for sure. they're great. I learned so much from that experience. and it's more than any cash that I got from being part of that company.
What was the experience there? But that company, they definitely put on a brave face a lot. Sometimes that company almost failed at least two times. Like I had somebody come up to me and say, Hey, we got a problem right now, and then we need you to solve it.
But, it is one of those things where, you know, I know a million dollars is, [00:53:00] it's a lot of money. It's really not that fast. It goes fast, especially when you're, you have, five mouths to feed like in that. And, I've heard horror stories of.
Of, founders thinking they're burning like 200,000 a month and then accidentally figuring out that they're burning like 500,000 a month. And that it is nothing that craters a company faster than not knowing where your financials are in the right way. So making sure that you actually know, and not only your model is written in the way that's consistent with Hey, we're burning X amount of cash, but looking at the bank account and making sure that your plan, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, right?
So making sure the reality is consistent in that respect. Interesting. Wow. Yeah, no, it's funny how that mapping out works the other way, where you think it's 500,000, but it's 200,000.
So you have such an advantage as a serial entrepreneur and having learned these lessons firsthand, not in academia. seeing the impact of it and [00:54:00] having taken it and seen it all the way to a hundred million plus dollar exit. And I don't know if you can share or not, and who knows what the future holds, but what are the plans for us ledge down the road?
So we have a couple avenues here that we could go. first thing I'll say is that any entrepreneur who's at a 2-year-old company who tells you exactly where they're gonna be in another two years is either naive or lying to you. and if I were in a, vc, I actually say this to VCs all the time, is like, what's your plan for an exit?
And frankly, it's a trap because they want, if they say oh, I'm looking for an acquisition at this point, then they're like, oh, not enough, right? Oh so I tend to try to stay away from that question, but the thing that I am very confident about that I can absolutely say.
You know for sure that we are going for, we're trying to build a sustainable business, right? We're trying to build a business that helps people, that solves problems, right? And the best companies are ones that zone in on a single or maybe one or two things, the biggest problem that a specific industry or [00:55:00] group of people is facing, and they relentlessly execute on fixing that exact issue right there.
So we know we wanna build a business, right? Just so that we have options, right? if I want to go be profitable, I could have this business right now, be a very profitable business, right? But we're choosing to go beyond that reinvesting every dollar and then some into the actual development of the product, into our customers, and improving that process right there.
I love it. I love that you're laser focused. I love that answer. I, like I said earlier, I've been married 28 years and I have started a business with my wife and we had a seven figure exit, and then we rolled it into another company and we lost it all. And we've rebuilt back, been there as well yeah.
And so you learn a lot from both sides, but There's nothing like having a great partner, but it adds a dynamic when it's your spouse. Talk a little bit about how you guys adjusted to that, because you guys were not working together, and how has that been?
it has, pros and cons for sure, as I'm sure But, The good stuff about it is that, when you win [00:56:00] together. frankly, Laura and I, we work so much that if she wasn't doing this with me or vice versa, it would be very challenging to have a very healthy, and good relationship for sure.
Because she gets it. And if you're spending all these hours, I can just say Hey, this customer is having a problem. She gets it. If I have to go run on a plane and then go figure it out, we don't have kids yet also, which very much helps in that.
celebrating the wins together is awesome. and then, I will say to an extent, being there for the losses and the difficult times is good. but anybody on the team, I could say Hey, you messed this up.
You need to fix this. let's get on it. What's the plan for the future? I have to say things a little bit differently to my wife, so there it's, yeahLaura's great and it helps how great a reputation she has.
everyone knows her, she's the face of the company. This is maybe second podcast that I've done. This is The hundredth one that she's done. I'm more of a behind the scenes guy and, she's speaking at South by Southwest, and she's able to really harbor these [00:57:00] relationships in a really awesome way, which is great.
So there's a lot of challenges, but as a whole net positive for sure. And we meet each other very much. She knows she's the domain expert. I've never worked a day of politics before this in my life. so she's able to guide us in that direction. versus myself, I've made a lot of mistakes when it comes to, the startup life that I've been able to learn from.
It is wonderful because there's very little overlap, but there's so much, you guys each bring strength to the business, obviously to the relationship. And there's obviously the underlying trust that's there. And you can have frank discussions.
I think you guys are a unicorn. I shared that with Laura. I'm excited to see you guys grow. I'm grateful for your time and her time, and it'll be exciting to see. How the company progresses. Eric, thank you. Thank you for this.