Tom Serres on Piryx — uncoiling the long tail of politics

Tom Serres bootstrapped Piryx with his partners Naveed Lalani and Brian Upton -- launching the company with $1k made while waiting tables 3 years ago as a college sophomore.

Flash forward to today, and Piryx already been seed funded, and is currently in talks to close their first series A investment round. Although we'd been communicating online for a while, I finally meet Tom for coffee at Blu a few weeks ago. Tom told me the incredible story of Piryx, and agreed to be our co-host for the GeekAustin E-nauguration Party.

Lynn Bender: Tom, tell me about Piryx.

Tom Serres: First off, Piryx is a non-partisan suite of web tools, offered in a self serve environment. Think Google or Facebook, but designed around the political process. The idea is to offer a portal that empowers citizen candidates, political entities, and social activists with a combination of web tools and social media services to affect change in public policy.

Lynn Bender: What are the specific tools?

Tom Serres: The tools are built around our four pillar strategy – the four basic needs of any political entrepreneur.

1) Government Compliance - Every political entity has to be in compliance with law.

2) Fundraising - Every political entity has to generate revenue, just like a business needs to generate revenue to cover expenses.

3) Constituent management - Every political entity has to manage people, just like any business would manage its customers.

4) Virtual Identity Management - Every political entity has to manage the virtual representation of oneself. Aka, Facebook Fan Page, Website CMS, YouTube, Twitter...in this case these virtual outlets are like television channels on a cable network. You have to distribute the appropriate messages to the right networks.

COMPLIANCE

One of our first tools is a government compliance system. Every campaign has to report their financial operations to the government. For the average small business this translates into a software product
like TurboTax. Think of the tool we built as a "TurboTax" for political entities.

Lynn Bender: How does this work? Someone clicks on a dropdown that says "mayor, council member, governor, etc" then a dropdown that says "Select state or municipality?"

Tom Serres: Pretty much. When you create an account - you get a global Piryx account. Then just like Google, you set up each tool. When you set up compliance, you choose your filing jurisdiction (local, state, federal). Once your jurisdiction is chosen, the system syncs you with the appropriate online filing strategy.

Lynn Bender: How do you handle roles and entities? Someone could be a candidate, but also a constituent, etc.

Tom Serres: Many political candidates or groups operate in multiple entities. Take the Republican or Democratic Party for example: the "R/D party" is actually a grouping of multiple entities - generally a Federal Political Action Committee and a State Political Action Committee. A candidate can have its own committee, and a few different PAC's that raise and spend money differently. You generally only see this in the upper tiers of political campaigns.

Lynn Bender: Is there a lot of variation in the laws from state to state? did this increase the difficulty of building the suite?

Tom Serres: Yes, every state has its own election code -- which only matters for those running in state races. It's incredibly difficult. You're taking the equivalent of tax code and smashing it into user friendly software. If you're running in a federal race, there's only one election code. This is why education is important.

Lynn Bender: In my mind I'm imagining the database schema to store all this data.

Tom Serres: The database schema is ridiculous. Every Piryx account can manage multiple entities -- if you have a State PAC, Federal PAC, and a Candidate you shouldn't have to go to 12 different applications
and access multiple accounts or data sets. We've come up with workflow automation's that have made doing things like this a lot easier. There's a lot of ambition behind this project -- not to mention international goals which will make it even more monumental -- but we're taking it one piece at a time.

Lynn Bender: It would seem that the differences for each type of office made it extremely difficult to abstract the data and generate the rules.

Tom Serres: Yes very difficult, but I think that's what makes us unique. We've spent a considerable amount of time researching the problems.

Lynn Bender: To bring it back down to the user level -- can someone wake up one day, decide that they want to run for office, create a Piryx account, and be walked through the entire process?

Tom Serres: That's the goal. We want to make it so incredibly easy to effectuate change in public policy, so that it ultimately comes down to who has the message that best resonates with the public.

Lynn Bender: That pretty much sums up compliance, yes? you decide to run, and log into Piryx. That's pretty disruptive.

Tom Serres: It really is. I call it the "Longtail of Politics" - which if successful has amazing ramifications. You'll essentially have a virtual battle ground that creates political micro stars who can collectively guide the change country.

FUNDRAISING

Lynn Bender: What about fundraising?

Tom Serres: In compliance, entity type is very important, but in fundraising entity type is pretty much irrelevant. When you set up fundraising, it's just like paypal. Enter banking information and create online campaigns. The key difference is that all of these are just tools in one suite. When raising a dollar online through Piryx, that data can flow from there to all the other tools in the system. BUT each tool can also operate independently.

Lynn Bender: Nowadays, candidates may have a donation site, a separate store, or maybe two or three stores. There is the possibility that someone can go to the donation site, donate up to the max, then go to the store and purchase a few thousand t-shirts. How does Piryx handle this, and help keep the donations legal?

Tom Serres: When someone donates though our fundraising system, Piryx electronically deposits that donation into the campaigns bank account, stores all the appropriate data with analytical tools, and propagates the data into their government compliance tool. It's a paperless process from donation to reporting to the government.

Lynn Bender: Do online donations complicate the recording process? multiple email addresses, multiple credit cards, etc?

Tom Serres: They can, if you don't have proper tracking mechanisms. We provide the tracking and data management tools. Everything ties back to the donor, and that donation history is tied back to the donor for
reporting purposes.

Lynn Bender: what are the key fields used to identify the donor? SS number?

Tom Serres: There isn't a specific identification field...it has to be multiple -- name, location, voter id, d.o.b, etc.

Most campaigns do this poorly. This is primarily because they have data in 12 different locations, that's not tied back to a central data management system. That's where the tools come into play. The tools offer ways to manage that data more efficiently -- not to mention, reporting the contribution to the government. This helps campaigns keep track of all the information pertinent to every transaction. This is important especially when you're dealing with smaller campaigns who usually don't have the funds to build anything remotely equivalent to a sophisticated software system. Our goal is to be hyper local - and make it easy for everyone.

Another aspect of what we're doing is providing tools for government entities. So that local governments can catch up with the technological revolution that's occurring in the political industry.

Lynn Bender: Do you currently have a set of APIs in place?

Tom Serres: We don't currently have any APIs open to the public yet... there's a lot of education that needs to happen before we reach that point. The political system/industry is pretty complex - from an
operational and logistical point. However, the ultimate goal is to allow politically motivated developers to build "Piryx Apps" that integrate with the foundational system. This would be similar to building Google or Facebook apps.

SOCIAL NETWORKING with PIRYX

Lynn Bender: Tell me about the social network aspect of Piryx.

Tom Serres: The constituent side of Piryx will offer tools to the average political supporter – with identification as volunteer, donor, voter, or any combination thereof. Tools will allow them to find, connect, and organize with candidates that support specific issues in particular areas.

Lynn Bender: What is the status of the suite of tools?

Tom Serres: Compliance and Fundraising are complete. Both are in private beta right now. Compliance was the absolute most difficult part to build. It's like taking Tax code and smashing it into software. We already have hundreds people who have requested beta invites, and have been releasing them slowly.

Lynn Bender: Can candidates contact you if they want to be part of the private beta?

Tom Serres: Absolutely. They are welcome to contact us.

CODEBASE

Lynn Bender: For our more technical readers, can you tell me something about the codebase / backend?

Tom Serres: We're ASP.NET, C#, MySQL

Lynn Bender: MySQL on windows machines?

Tom Serres: Heh,ya.

Lynn Bender: are you participating in the BizSpark program?

Tom Serres: We are. It's saved us a great deal of cash. The biggest problem we had was licensing fees, and yet we're most familiar with the .NET environment. We've saved tens of tousands of dollars by not having to purchase licenses for servers. It was a blessing we really didn't ask for, but made our lives much easier.

Lynn Bender: and obviously, since you are using MySQL, there was no requirement to be an all MS environment.

Tom Serres: Right.

Lynn Bender: So who do you work with at MS?

Tom Serres: Jacob Mullins.

Lynn Bender: What's in store for the future?

Tom Serres: Well, I have a much larger vision that goes out about 5-10 years...but that would require a much longer interview. The vision of the future is ambitious, but we're very focused. Planning has been one of our greatest strengths. I can't begin to tell you about all the people in the political world that chuckled at our ideas -- lots of negative folks to say the least. The idea of a technological surge in the political industry was just ridiculous -- well -- I think Obama is having the last laugh.

Lynn Bender: and maybe you don't want to reveal it yet.

Tom Serres: Heh, Not yet. But I promise it'll be…disruptive. :-P

Although Tom will be in Washington, DC, at the big inauguration, come meet the Piryx team at the GeekAustin E-nauguration Party on January 20th, at Union Park.

Financial support for this interview provided by Smart Bear Software.