From Tech Founder to Politician—Meet Brynne Kennedy: The Information’s Weekly Newsletter

I can’t believe there are only eleven weeks left in 2020. I repeat, eleven weeks. And while we’re all thinking about what we hope to get done during the remainder of this strange, strange year, I want to make sure you are all aware of a few upcoming The Information events I’m very excited about.

On November 13, we are hosting a half-day event on SPACs.

You have probably seen a lot of headlines about SPACs. They are public companies formed with the sole purpose of buying a business. A number of tech companies are trying to use them as a way to go public, and the trend is accelerating very quickly. We will explain why, what they are and (most important) how they fit into broader trends in the public markets, with around a dozen speakers who are leading the most important deals of the moment. I’m a little in awe of how quickly this event has come together and of the amazing speakers who are participating. We hope you will join us. Details here.

And next Thursday, Kate is hosting a virtual subscriber discussion about the future of audio startups. She’ll be joined by two exciting speakers, the former head of global marketing at TikTok and the founder of Chalk, a fast-growing voice community. Don’t miss it.

A Female Tech Founder in Congress?

While tech leaders with opinions about politics are a dime a dozen, those who actually jump in and run for office are very rare—which is why I was intrigued when I learned that Brynne Kennedy was running for Congress.

Kennedy is clearly ahead of her time as both a female executive in tech and the founder of a company that makes software to manage remote employees, Topia.

She faces a tough fight in a Republican district in California that includes Lake Tahoe and Yosemite.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about how running a company translates to running for office, how she would regulate tech if elected and other things that have surprised her on this year’s unusual virtual campaign trail. Edited excerpts below.

Why run for Congress?

I spent 15 years in the private sector, and most of it at my kitchen table, and grew to operate all over the world. As [Topia] got more successful, I was invited to Washington to give some feedback to lawmakers on where the economy is going. And honestly, I was horrified. I felt like people in both parties are so disconnected from the reality of small businesses, working families and innovation, and how we can ensure our country is a leader in the world. This is the biggest problem we all face—putting our government back together and preparing our nation for the future. So I jumped in.

What has the transition from being a founder to running for Congress been like?

A lot of it is, day to day, very similar. When you’re starting and growing a company, so much of it is having ideas about how to do things differently, getting people on board with them, raising money to fund it, and sharing the vision and bringing people together behind that, which is very similar to [a] campaign.

The big, big difference—which honestly was difficult for me and still is in some ways—is people in our nation love entrepreneurs. Everyone wants to be one. People hate people running for office. It is a polarized environment, so people would be like, ooh, you’re a candidate. You’re a politician. Well, two months ago, when I was an entrepreneur, you had a very different reaction. I’m still the same person, and [I’m] running because that reaction is what we have to play with so that we can put our country back together.

Why did you start Topia and where do you think work is headed?

In the early part of my career, I worked in finance. I lived in Asia and in Europe, and during that time, I was coming back to the U.S. regularly, and I was kind of noticing that people were no longer going to work at one company in one office nine to five every day. People were working in different cities. They were working partially from home, partially from the office, partially from a plane or a coffee shop. And I thought, gosh, this has huge implications for the future of work, because not only is it a personal mess when you’re working like that. It is also an opportunity for us as a country to say, OK, if you don’t have to live in the city, you can live somewhere with a lower cost of housing where your community is and connect to a broader economy, and maybe just travel into the office or on a business trip.

And that has massive implications for communities like mine because people could stay in the community. They can spend money locally and on independently owned small businesses. So I wanted to build the defining company around where I saw the economy going. And it was kind of ahead of its time initially. But now, Covid comes and just changes the way we work overnight.

What are the consequences of remote work that could come around to bite us if we don’t start thinking about them?

The thing that I think we’re massively overlooking is infrastructure investment, which is the thing that most people say we need and then can’t agree on in Washington. If you don’t have broadband connectivity, you can’t work from everywhere. And in my district, as an example, this is California, this is 2020. This is America, and we have a massive internet desert. We have children who had to sit in cars and parking lots to connect to the library’s Wi-Fi to download their schoolwork. I mean, that is not OK.

What’s it been like running for office remotely?

I have definitely missed some of that energy that comes from live events, and I think any candidate who doesn’t say that would be lying, because that’s part of the campaign trail—looking people in the eye, connecting with them, and feeling their hope and their energy and sharing their stories.

That being said, it’s been fine. I mean, it is actually just like work, probably arguably more efficient. We can do more gatherings of people in a broader geographic area. We can call more people than we can drive between different communities to their door. We can fundraise more because we’re calling and reaching out to people more regularly from the living room. And we can really target that campaign. The team has pivoted fabulously. So have the volunteers, and we’re in an incredible position, despite the environment.

You’ve been a woman in tech, which is a very male-dominated industry. Now you’re a woman in politics, also a very male-dominated industry. Are there differences?

Tech and finance were pretty similar. I experienced some pretty terrible things. It’s one of the reasons—in addition to seeing Washington firsthand—that I decided to run. I lived through all of the comments that we all hear in the boardroom or from investors, and I survived a violent sexual assault when I was 23 and working in banking. So I know what it’s like to be treated differently.

But there’s a broader kind of turning the page of leadership that I want to be a part of that also really inspired me to jump in on the campaign trail. [In politics,] I think it’s more of a bias toward this party or that party than it is gender these days. The No. 1 thing I hear on the campaign trail is you don’t look like a Democrat, you don’t sound like a Democrat, you don’t dress like a Democrat. I really believe that we need to get back to the basics of connecting as people, putting aside these labels and respecting each other again as Americans instead of Republicans or Democrats or men or women or another gender, and that’s what my campaign is all about.

If elected, you will confront a lot of proposals on tech regulation. Should the large tech companies be broken up, and what other regulation might be necessary to check their power?

We need people in the room that understand what their business models are and what’s actually going on. Respectfully, I would say there are not a lot of those people. I will be the first female founder and CEO ever in Congress. There are very few male founders and CEOs. I believe 6% of Congress has a software background. [It] is deeply difficult to regulate something that is as nuanced as these businesses unless you really understand what’s going on.

We need to update and reform antitrust law for the modern era. [Our laws] were built in an era where the primary risk of monopoly was price control. That is a risk today, but I think the bigger risk is information control, both personal information and broader societal and news information. And I think the first question that we should be answering is, how do we understand what’s happening in the economy today and rearchitect antitrust law so that it is relevant for today and for the innovation of the future? The other question is, what is the most urgent? With the growth of the platform economy, I believe it’s actually disinformation. If we don’t get our arms around the disinformation epidemic, we will continue to devolve into tribal partisanship that tears us apart.

How can we do that?

There are technologies out there, AI-driven, machine learning–driven technologies emerging almost daily, identifying disinformation and identifying deep fakes.

Should those [kinds] of technologies be [owned by] private companies, or should there be a broader institution to make sure that information is true and reliable? Can someone correlate the rise of disinformation to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine? [The Fairness Doctrine is a now overturned federal law that required broadcasters to provide multiple opinions on controversial subjects.] And what does a modern Fairness Doctrine look like and how is that implemented from a regulatory perspective? It is not going to be implemented by humans. It’s too broad of a scale; the businesses are too sophisticated. So I think we need people in Congress that understand what the issue is, how the algorithms work, how we can, at scale, regulate our algorithms, which probably is going to come from [some] sort of an AI- or machine learning–driven solution.

What advice do you have for any entrepreneur who wants to run for office?

You don’t get to sit here and roll your eyes and say it’s messed up and not do anything. So my advice is, the greatest problem that we face as a nation [is] that Congress doesn’t work for the American people. And rooted in that is the problem of polarization and toxicity that creates apathy and that feeling that people don’t want to be involved. If you are an entrepreneur, what you do is you solve big problems. I think every smart person, every person that loves solving big problems, every person that is frustrated should summon their service to our nation, their patriotism, their problem-solving ability and should jump in to help us serve our country back together.

Upcoming Events:

Thursday, Oct. 22: Why Audio Is the Next Social Media Hit (subscriber video call)

Thursday, Oct. 22: The Information Technology and Engineering Roundtable: Scaling Engineering Teams (invitation only)

Thursday, Oct. 22: The Plug Presents: Evolution of Next (discount code THEINFO for all The Information subscribers)

Thursday, Oct. 29: Preview of the Global AV Industry (subscriber video call)

Friday, Nov. 13: The Information SPAC Conference: The Dawn of a New Era or the Beginning of the End? (virtual half-day event)

This Week's The Information Articles:

• Microsoft, AWS, Others Boast of ‘Exclusive’ Cloud Customers Who Aren’t by Kevin McLaughlin and Amir Efrati
• Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code From Home by Nick Bastone and Amir Efrati
• SPAC Pioneer Is Vindicated by Boom, Even as Bigger Banks Take Over Market by Ross Matican
• New Amazon Data: Retailer Wins Sales While Losing to Merchants on Listings by Paris Martineau
• Cover Wall Street for The Information! by The Information Staff
• New Data Show Reality Behind Self-Driving Truck Startup’s Funding by Yunan Zhang and Amir Efrati
• The Rise of ‘Retention Rates,’ the Software Metric Investors Are Obsessing Over by Kevin McLaughlin
• Ad Boycott of Facebook Proved to Be Boon to Snap and Pinterest, Data Shows by Tom Dotan
• The People With Power at Stripe as It Gets Closer to an IPO by Kate Clark
• The Information’s 411 — Working Remotely, or Not Remotely Working? by Tom Dotan
• Virtual Events Startup Hopin Discusses Valuation As High as $2 Billion in New Round by Kate Clark