Tim Hwang is the Founder and CEO of FiscalNote, a privately held software, data, and media company headquartered in Washington, D.C. The global company has offices across America and in Brussels, India, and Seoul, and powers almost 5,000 of the world’s largest and most influential law firms, legal departments, and governments. Through FiscalNote, Tim has worked with and raised venture capital and acquisition financing from the likes of The Economist, S&P Global, Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Steve Case, NEA, Renren and others. Prior to founding FiscalNote, Hwang started his career in politics in the Obama ’08 campaign, assisting in the election of the first Obama Administration. He was elected to the Montgomery County Board of Education a year later, overseeing a budget of over $4 Billion for 22,000 public employees. As a student, Tim also served as the President of the National Youth Association and the founder of Operation Fly. Inc., – a national 501(c)(3) organization that served inner-city children in underprivileged areas around the country.
Tim was profiled in Forbes 30 Under 30, Inc. 30 Under 30, CNN’s Top 10 Startups, Business Insiders Top 25 Hottest Startups, and many others. He is a graduate of Princeton and attended Harvard Business School. He is also currently a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a Trustee on the Board of the Greater Washington Community Foundation, as well a Board member of The After School Alliance. He is a member of The Economic Club of Washington, D.C., the Council of Korean Americans, and the Young Presidents Organization.
Transcript:
Bryan Wish:
Hey, Tim, welcome to the One Away Show.
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. Great to be on here.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, absolutely. Great to have you. Been great to follow your journey for some time. What is the One Away moment that you want to share with us today?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. I think that there’s obviously so many that you can kind of point to throughout my career. I think maybe the first one that I can imagine from the very early days of when I was very young was actually during the 2000 presidential election. So I was about seven, eight years old.
And I remember actually, this was one of the first presidential elections where CNN was kind of using those big screens to talk about the elections. And as each state was kind of called, they would kind of color in the state, either red for Republicans and blue Democrats.
And I remember actually kind of watching a television program really, really late into the night. Because, if you recall, during the 2000 presidential election, they never called Florida on that night. There was a whole Supreme Court case and whatnot that kind of came out multiple weeks later.
But there was just all the excitement and attention and numbers and sort of deep kind of political and demographic analysis that was going into was it going to be Bush or was it going to be Gore? Why did a certain state go this way? Why did a certain state go that way?
And I remember, I was probably like in the second grade at the time, that leaving a really big impression on me. And if I had to kind of point to one particular interest of sort of how I got sucked into the political world is probably that was the most memorable moment of my childhood really watching that election kind of seeing how that played out on that Tuesday evening.
Bryan Wish:
All right. Well, that’s a good way to start. You’re leaving me on the edge here. So I vaguely remember, not in the detail that you do, so what I’m curious about and from a listening perspective, you said that was the first thing that gave you an interest, where prior to that election, I mean, did you have conversations at home with your family about politics and government? Or that, just for the first time, you became really fascinated with an election and what that meant for the place and the country that you were living?
Tim Hwang:
At the time, my parents had just moved to Washington DC, and my father actually from, I think, 1997, 1998 started working for the US government. And so, he wasn’t particularly politically involved or engaged, but I do remember having some conversations around the dinner table about the state of America and kind of politics and the reason why my parents had immigrated from South Korea to the United States.
Tim Hwang:
And just going back a little bit further, in the 1980s, Korea had gone through sort of a military coup. South Korea had gone through a military coup, and they kind of ended almost like 40 years of kind of military dictatorship. And they transitioned into a democracy, full on democracy.
Tim Hwang:
And that’s one of the reasons why my parents had come over from South Korea in the ’80s to really kind of pursue, I would say, a more stable and kind of opportunistic kind of economic and political environment. So I think that, while it may not have been explicitly discussed, it was probably something that was kind of in the back of my mind or back of the family’s mind.
Tim Hwang:
And I also just think that maybe at seven or eight years old, that’s kind of the first time where you can sort of critically think about certain things. You’re probably a little bit too young before elementary school. But around that second, third grade, you start to develop some interests and some thoughts and some opinions that I think were really critical for me in the future.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate you giving context to your parents and how they came from South Korea and what that environment and your dad and working in the military and kind of how that shaped things for you. So it seems like that night had a big impact on you. You described the screens and how they were showing up red or blue.
Bryan Wish:
As you look back on that experience and that childhood moment, what were some of those things that you saw yourself very interested in, or that really stood out to you that maybe started to put you down that rabbit hole around politics and the political shapings of our future?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. I mean, I think it just came down to a fascination around the political system and how this system could result in different changes for society. So I actually remember after that kind of election period, I just got kind of consumed by the political world. And I started, middle school, I ended up interning for district attorney’s office and for a couple congressmen entering constituent complaints and things into a database and helping out on campaigns.
Tim Hwang:
And for the longest time I wanted to be a prosecutor actually because I felt like being a prosecutor was on the edge of implementing law. So if the political system was about channeling our citizens’ opinions about what they wanted to enact from a country, a nation perspective, a prosecutor or somebody in law enforcement, their job was to take those laws and make sure that they’re enforced, that they’re not broken, that people abide by those laws.
Tim Hwang:
So I would say even through middle school and a good part of high school, a lot of my focus and attention from my career perspective was really trying to actually go down the prosecutorial pathway and in some ways be somewhat politically engaged in that process.
Bryan Wish:
I mean, so cool. I mean, you did get involved in middle school. If you recall, do you remember any of the complaints by constituents? Were there any patterns or things that stood out to you when you were entering those in?
Tim Hwang:
Honestly, most people, if they think about politics and they think about these big policy issues like inflation and fiscal stimulus and bailouts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but honestly, most people what they care about is just stuff in their neighborhood and local areas. They care about their schools. They care about potholes. They care about traffic lights. They care about just all the normal things that most people have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Tim Hwang:
And so certainly politicians do have to deal with large, national, country-moving issues. But I think that sometimes when you are involved in politics for too long, you just kind of forget that most people, they just kind of live their lives, and they care about their kids. They care about going to the grocery store and having a good job. And all those things, I think are kind of the things that people dial in about constantly to their elected officials.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s interesting. You see that at such micro level, opposed to the macro level that you hear when people are running for office. Tim, you said something about, out of the result of an election, you could see how decisions made at the federal level by presidents and surrounding decision-makers could shape, in effect, millions and millions of people.
Bryan Wish:
For you at the time, in your family, I mean, whatever you’re comfortable sharing, what were some of those maybe bigger kind of topics and issues that were close to you and that you hit home that you really started taking a strong stance on?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. I mean, I think it comes down to just the fact that I had come from an immigrant-born family. So I was born in the United States, but my parents had immigrated here from South Korea, as I mentioned. And a lot of the issues that they cared about were very, again, local.
Tim Hwang:
So they cared about having a great education for their kids. And so, the quality of schooling and education, I think was particularly important. They cared about immigration, so in terms of the community that they had, and a lot of the challenges and issues that other Korean Americans or Asian Americans were kind of facing a similar context in terms of folks that wanted to come to the United States and kind of build careers and long lasting jobs and build families here. And there’s quite a significant number of kind of political issues in that kind of scope and context.
Tim Hwang:
I think they care about economic stability. A lot of them had kind of come from countries where, I would say, again, going back to a little bit of history, Korea, South Korea sort of had almost gone bankrupt in the late ’90s as a result of the IMF financial crisis. And so, the state of the country, probably since the late ’90s or so, has been in constant flux as a result of very, very large companies going bankrupt or kind of causing a significant amount of economic instability. And so, the issues around economic stability for the middle class and the like, I think are very particularly important.
Tim Hwang:
And so again, at an aggregated macro level, it sounds like some very complex issues, but ultimately, people want just a couple simple things. They want great schools. They want to make it easy for them to be able to build a great life from an economic perspective. And they want to kind of believe in this dream that if you work hard and put your head down and try and make something of it, that’s something that you’ll get rewarded for that outcome over the course the next couple years or so.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, absolutely. Education, immigration, I mean, obviously major things. But for you and kind of your own experiences, I can see how you took a closer eye at that, as you should, and other people who are trying to take the same pursuit that your family did, making that path possible for them for the same opportunities, so very good.
Bryan Wish:
Tim, what was your, when you were young and you were in middle school, did you know, obviously what you’re doing through FiscalNote, and then some of our conversations about different aspirations, did you know then you were going to build a career in the political sector? Was that just very evident to you? Where did you go after middle school? How did this passion and this drive and hunger and thirst continue to develop?
Tim Hwang:
Well, I think it just comes down to, again, creating an opportunity to make social change. And I remember as I was going through middle school and high school, I kind of was continued down this pathway of wanting to become an attorney and a prosecutor and potentially a politician and the like, largely because I thought that politics was an opportunity to express a lot of the interests that I had and the opportunities for change in that particular vehicle were very, very high.
Tim Hwang:
And so, as you know, I ended up working for Senator Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, which I thought was particularly a great experience because it was a very entrepreneurial kind of type of environment. It was one of the first opportunities that I had to sort of be very, very engaged from a political participation perspective in terms of organizing people and knocking on doors and working on policy and so on and so forth.
Tim Hwang:
And that’s kind of a great example of, as I was starting to become an adult, me starting to formulate some of the things I was particularly interested in. And then, when I was 17 years old, I ended up running for office myself, so decided that I was going to run for office at the localest of local levels at the Board of Education.
Tim Hwang:
And ended up getting elected and serving there and kind of seeing, not just the political process of getting elected and listening to constituents and kind of talking to voters, but actually the policymaking process, which actually is divorced from the political process somewhat in terms of writing policy and trying to pass some type of policy or legislation conflicting with a given legislature or a regulator or the governor’s office or the county council or whatnot, conflicting around tax policy or whatever the case may be.
Tim Hwang:
These are the nitty gritty of running government, which is very different from the kind of going out there and talking to voters and talking to constituents. And so, I felt like, by the time I was 18 years old, I did get a pretty good understanding of what the political process was and what the policymaking process was.
Tim Hwang:
But, to your very earliest point, I had no inclination that I was going to become a technology founder or technology entrepreneur. I graduated from high school, I’d done this whole political thing, and by the time I got to Princeton and undergrad, my fundamental view was that I was going to continue down this political pathway.
Tim Hwang:
And I went straight to, at the time it was called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy, trying to really double down and become a really great policymaker. But just kind of for, we can talk about this a little bit, a lot of different reasons, got turned around and ended up going into the technology world.
Tim Hwang:
But I think there was sort of this long arc from when I was very young to even all the way when I went to college where I was just laser-focused on policy and politics and trying to make a difference from that perspective.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I definitely want to get to the FiscalNote technology side of this in this interview. But the insight here I’m picking up on is just you got experience from all these different sides. I mean, from documenting constituent complaints to helping Obama on the campaign and on the writing policy side, you’ve been able to create a holistic and integrated view of how it all works.
Bryan Wish:
Something that I wanted to ask you about is you’re talking about Obama and helping him on the campaign, and then helping on the policy side and writing it and what that takes to go through and how they’re two completely separate but connected parts. What were some of your learnings when you were knocking on doors, when you were helping campaign? What did you see? I mean, Obama had such a strong message. Even with what I do, I’m curious, how was that message from the top down shared through at the local campaign level, and how did you distribute that?
Bryan Wish:
And then, I want to ask you about in the policy writing side after. But yeah, what was it like for you and what were some of your biggest learnings on the campaign trail?
Tim Hwang:
The thing that was so innovative about the 2008 presidential campaign with President Obama was actually it was one of the first presidential campaigns, it wasn’t the first, but it was one of the first that started to take advantage of online organizing plus the era of social media that kind of come up through the ranks.
Tim Hwang:
So Facebook was kind of coming up very rapidly through the early 2000s. Twitter was founded in like 2007, 2008. So you started to sort of see a lot of kind of information in that context of translating a national message into local objectives.
Tim Hwang:
So oftentimes, the national policy campaign would come out with a statement or some general policy framework. And then, what was very innovative was that they actually empowered local organizers to make determinations around how that particularly would translate into local communities.
Tim Hwang:
So the president would say, “We want to change this and this aspect of education policy.” Most people don’t really understand you need to be able to sort of turn that particular national policy into how it impacts your local school district, around standardized testing, around pathway to higher education, around whatever it is.
Tim Hwang:
And so you say, “What does the president’s desire around increasing funding for community college mean for this particular community college in your community?” And be able to sort of tie those things together. You could give a lot of autonomy to people on the ground to be able to translate the message into something that makes sense.
Tim Hwang:
So I think that because of the proliferation of kind of online organizing tools and social media in particular, you kind of created these feedback loops around what was working and what wasn’t working, and then these affinity groups around people that were attracted to other issues or other topical areas that really resonated with either the president or the opponent or whatever the case was.
Tim Hwang:
And I think that over the course of the last 12 years or so, we’ve seen how those affinity groups and social media can actually distort kind of political perspectives. But going back to 2008, 2007, these kind of tools and tactics, I think, were fairly innovative in terms of turning up the vote and creating common communities of people to kind of come out together.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, absolutely. I love what you said about when President Obama said kind of the policy, the education level, thinking about how that boils down to the local community level and the integration of that which is the job behind the scenes that needs to get done. But I don’t think the everyday viewers just kind of listening is.
Bryan Wish:
Thinking about, I mean, it’s got to be… My question is, it has to be extremely complex to integrate, what’s going on behind the scenes from what you’ve seen to kind of bring some of those efforts into effect and then make sure something at a national level is distributed to the local level? I mean, how does that work?
Tim Hwang:
Well, I mean, I think that just comes down to the everyday conversations you have with people over the phone and door-to-door and things like that. So a lot of that is being able to organize large groups of people in a very, very short amount of time, over the span of, let’s say, 6 to 10 months or so, and get them out into key districts and areas that are really important to flip.
Tim Hwang:
So in 2008, in order to flip Virginia blue, the president needed to win Hampton Roads, Richmond, kind of that general portion of kind of eastern Virginia. And that’s like one of the areas where you just have to make sure that you’re organizing very, very well, you’re talking to as many voters as possible, and you’re kind of getting the president’s message out there in some form or fashion.
Tim Hwang:
Again, a lot of people think when you’re kind of watching CNN or MSNBC or Fox News that politics is just a bunch of suits talking to each other. But in reality, electoral politics, it really comes down to individual conversations with individual voters in their houses and over the phone. That’s how you win an election. You have to talk to as many people as possible, and you have to get your message out there. And that’s, it’s just the kind of rough and tumble of politics as you’re kind of working through each of those things.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, just from our shared [inaudible 00:21:22] days, that boots on the ground, talk to the right people at, and the masses, works around the central message. So totally, very cool you got that experience.
Bryan Wish:
And then on the policy side, before we kind of shift into kind of where it’s led for you from a career perspective, for those that are maybe not as informed or don’t really understand how it all works behind the scenes, what does it take… Obama wins, and now it’s time to go in and pass legislation. What’s that process like behind the scenes from what you understand and how that works, and maybe some of the things that people you walk on the street and have a conversation with would have no idea around the complexities or what it takes to actually do this and do it well?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. I mean, from a policy perspective, I guess it’s a very complicated thing, and it’s a very, very messy process. And I think people kind of inherently understand that, but just because you win an election, whether you’re in Congress or the White House or city council or mayor or whatever it is, it doesn’t necessarily give you an unlimited right to pass whatever you want whenever you want.
Tim Hwang:
The country is very complex. We have hundreds of millions of people, 300 million plus people around the country. And these 300 million people across our country, they come from different economic backgrounds, different racial backgrounds, different ethnicity backgrounds, different careers and life experiences, rural and urban and whatever it is. And so, people have interests. So they have interests around making sure that they want to live a better life, that they want to advance their particular agenda.
Tim Hwang:
And so, what’s very complicated about this is that it takes a lot of prioritization to think about, of all the problems you could solve in the country, what are the key critical problems that you want to resolve in a very short amount of time? Because it requires a lot of effort and time and resources and campaigning and winning people over to actually get to that point.
Tim Hwang:
And if you live in Washington or around Washington, you kind of understand that all these different people and all these different constituencies are represented by large organizations or nonprofits or trade associations. So you might have labor unions who are representing their sets of constituents and workers. You might have trade groups and trade associations, so the American Medical Association or the American Home Builders Association or whatever it is. You might have particular special interest groups, so groups like the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood or the NRA or whatever the case is that have their own particular interests.
Tim Hwang:
And then, you have the broader kind of country and their particular sets of constituencies and interests. So you have an election, and then you kind of toss all these interests of people, and they’re trying to all pass policy at the same time, in the same 365 days of the year.
Tim Hwang:
And that’s what politics is from a policymaking perspective is that you sort of set an agenda, “Here are the things we’re going to pass. Here are all the people we kind of have to drag along or work with in order to kind of make that particular policy possible. Here are all the people that are going to oppose it. Here are the reasons why they’re going to oppose it.” You kind of have to work through that process.
Tim Hwang:
And so, that happens at the national level. That happens at the state level whenever you have a governor and a state assembly that’s elected. It happens at the local level, whether it’s a new mayor and a new city council. They’re trying to pass some new zoning regulation or some new curriculum change to schools, that’s the policymaking process. It’s a very messy, very entrenched process. It’s just very complicated, I think, as you kind of go through working through it.
Tim Hwang:
And that’s why we have a democracy and why we need continuous new people and new energy and new ideas to kind of get flooded into the system so that the whole system works in terms of making the country a better place once you kind of get to the other side of that system.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean the layers and the complexities and, I mean, just the hoops and ladders you have to go through and then think through and kind of navigate the relational level. I mean, takes a lot of shared determination and clearly a political ability to communicate and connect. So I appreciate you sharing. I just think it’s great context to kind of what’s led up to your own experience.
Bryan Wish:
So, Tim, let’s jump to kind of the genesis of FiscalNote and kind of the founding and the birthing story for you. You had been getting all this experience, what led you to starting the company? How did you see an opportunity to say, “You know what? I’m going to make a go at it at an entrepreneurial level”?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. I think that for all the excitement that I talk about in terms of politics and policy, when I started to get into college, I just became really jaded and disenfranchised from the kind of political process. And I felt like the policymaking process was too hard and too slow to actually make real societal change.
Tim Hwang:
And at the same time, I think that I had kind of grown up through the post-era of the .com kind of bubble. And the technology landscape was just starting to rapidly accelerate again, as I was entering into college. And so, a number of companies that were just kind of popping out there, it wasn’t as crazy as today, but just the excitement around startups and the conversations around what was possible in terms of social networking and mobile devices.
Tim Hwang:
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007. The opportunities that presented in terms of location and mobility, the future in artificial intelligence, I felt like that was going to be the area where society was going to be fundamentally transformed, and that no amount of public policy or politics was going to be able to make a difference relative to the changing landscape of the technology world.
Tim Hwang:
And so, the driving force of affordable healthcare was not going to be people in Congress. It was going to be through enterprising technology founders that made healthcare more affordable. The driving force around banking the under-banked across America was not going to be through the Treasury Department, but it was going to be through new FinTech and mobile applications that made it easier for people to interact with financial products.
Tim Hwang:
And so, I fundamentally felt like the market or the broader kind of industry and whatnot were changing. And I wanted to build a technology company that really kind of combined my two interests in government and technology kind of together.
Tim Hwang:
And I was maybe 20, 21 years old at the time. I’d just gotten accepted to Harvard Business School from Princeton. And I was matriculating to HBS and I just kind of one summer grabbed two of my buddies from school and said, “Hey, guys, let’s, let’s take a one way flight to Silicon Valley, plop ourselves there for a couple of months, and see if we can come out with an idea that could be viable.”
Tim Hwang:
And, as I said, we were like 21 years old at the time, we kind of didn’t know what we were doing. And so, we kind of flew out there, a couple thousand bucks from summer savings and jobs and internships and things like that. And that was really the genesis of FiscalNote. I mean, we were living out of a Motel 6 in Sunnyvale. And iterated through a bunch of different ideas and ended up on what is today FiscalNote, and that’s kind of how the company was born.
Bryan Wish:
Wow, incredible founding story. Just curious, was it as random as it sounds? Or it sounds like you had a bit of a urge, like an inner pull, that said, “You need to go do this. There’s an opportunity here.” You just didn’t know what. If you trace your steps back to that moment, was it just a true random act or was it a true pull from inside?
Tim Hwang:
I mean, it wasn’t completely random. I mean, we definitely thought about it and, at the time, a bunch of my classmates at Princeton, they were going to internships at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs and at Google or whatever. And I just felt like, yeah, you can always get a job at one of those companies. But we’re young, we have some ideas, we want to test them out, let’s just spend a summer seeing if they work.
Tim Hwang:
And it was a very calculated risk/reward kind of process in our heads, which is that, okay, so if this fails, we just gave up three months of our lives. I mean, it’s not that big of a deal in terms of kind of testing it out and seeing if it works or not.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. So you get out to Sunnyvale, I mean, it sounds like you have maybe some sense of an idea, but a ton of experimenting. I mean, where were you guys meeting people? I mean, what were your first moves and your first set of actions once you came out to the Bay?
Tim Hwang:
The technology landscape has changed so much in 2021 and 2022. There’s this whole ecosystem and all these blogs and Twitter and stuff about how to build a startup. And there’s all these books and communities and lectures and webinars and whatnot.
Tim Hwang:
But when we were getting started in 2013, 2014, there was basically nothing. I mean, there was a couple blogs on the Y Combinator page and some articles here and there about starting a technology company. But it was kind of like a Wild, Wild West.
Tim Hwang:
And so, I remember us spending a lot of time talking to other people that were thinking about starting companies. We went to a lot of meetup events talking to investors and venture capitalists and just kind of trying to get involved in the community.
Tim Hwang:
I mean, it was a grind for sure. I mean, we were just trying to meet people. And at the same time, every single day, we were probably working from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning to like midnight every single day, seven days a week, building a product and talking to customers and trying to raise maybe a little bit of seed capital for the company. And that was, we probably spent the first couple of months just kind of doing that, trying to meet people and trying to build a product and trying to scale the business.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Wow. Very cool. What were some of the early… Well, we’ll just go back to what you said. You were out at the time when, like you said, not a ton of education, it must have been hard, but also that naive, just because you didn’t know, you could kind of throw yourself into things and just figure it out. So I’m just, for you, what were some of maybe the early working product models for FiscalNote that you started to formulate and maybe see could be the direction for the future business? What were some of the early learnings?
Tim Hwang:
Well, luckily at FiscalNote, and we actually hit product market fit very early, and to this day I’m pretty thankful for that. But I kind of studied a bunch of different business models of companies that I respected and emulated, companies like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters and FactSet and Morningstar where their entire business model was basically taking some data and selling it to customers on a subscription basis.
Tim Hwang:
And I felt like, for the last 30 years or so, 40 years, Wall Street was transformed through being able to kind of build these machines that aggregated stock prices and fixed income yields and the weather and commodity prices and whatever, and then could sell that to traders and to banks and institutions at a pretty good economic model.
Tim Hwang:
And having kind of come from the political world, I felt like people needed the same information about what the government was doing. So all the policies and the legislation and the regulations and what congressmen were saying at any given, what the Federal Reserve is going to do, be able to sort of take all that information and then put it into a machine and sell that software tool to customers at a 20 or 30 thousand dollars a year product so that they could essentially understand all the stuff that was going on.
Tim Hwang:
And that was the initial kind of version of the product that we created. And we tested different customer segments. Were hedge fund’s going to buy this? Were law firms going to buy this? Were companies going to buy this? We tested different price points, different marketing strategies. And then, ultimately, ended up on kind of at least initially selling to companies and then expanding from there to kind of government agencies and expanding from there to nonprofits.
Tim Hwang:
But it really kind of came down to that particular business and that particular problem that we wanted to solve. And then, just iterating and talking to a bunch of people eventually to get to a point where we felt a lot of conviction around what we were building and that the fact that the market wanted to buy it overall.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, that’s super cool. You studied all the models, and then how can you do it for the political sphere? So from that work and those early days, tell us today what does that product and sets of products, what does that look like 10 plus years later?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah, no. So FiscalNote is, I think we’re a category leading company in the space now. I mean, we are one of the largest technology companies headquartered… We moved our headquarters back to Washington DC. So one of the largest technology companies headquartered in DC. We service 3,000-plus customers around the world, hundreds of government agencies, so FBI, CDC, NIH, the White House, the Federal Reserve all use FiscalNote to monitor policies and regulations around the country and in different countries around the world.
Tim Hwang:
We service over half the Fortune 100 and their legal departments. And then, all those organizations I was talking about, the trade associations and unions on K Street are customers of ours.
Tim Hwang:
We’ve expanded the company quite dramatically actually to covering now, parts of the UK, the European Union, big portions of Asia across India and Singapore and Korea and Australia. We also coverage areas in Latin America. And so, really kind of creating this globalized view of what any policymaker, politician, regulator is doing from Indonesia to India to Indiana and really kind of looking at every aspect of what policymakers are doing.
Tim Hwang:
And I think we built a really interesting business, just hundreds of employees that are kind of really devoted towards this particular mission of helping people to understand what policymakers are up to. And it sounds almost cheesy, but it’s been this outgrowth of everything that I’ve been interested in into channeling it into this kind of company and kind of scaling it over time.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. And, I mean, it’s a foundation for, like you said, all your interests, so you can pour into and kind of learn a ton. Just curious, as you guys are watching and sharing information around policymaking, what have been some of the maybe byproducts of this product and business that maybe you weren’t expecting, perhaps more ethical decision-makings around policy, or policymakers having more of a keen eye on their own behaviors given kind of how you do things?I’m just curious what you’ve maybe seen that you maybe were weren’t expecting beyond the monetary kind of impact from the business?
Tim Hwang:
Well, I think that I wasn’t particularly surprised by it, but one of the things I was particularly interested by was the pace of change in areas where there’s a significant amount of technology development.
Tim Hwang:
So if you can kind of imagine areas like ride sharing or shared economy in the early 2010s, obviously there’s a significant amount of kind of regulations that kind of happen as a result of what was going on in the particular context. So Uber and Lyft facing significant regulatory challenges in different markets or companies, Airbnb, working directly with attorneys generals around different states and really kind of seeing that intersection between regulation and technology.
Tim Hwang:
And then now, you’re seeing actually today in things like cryptocurrencies or cannabis or online gaming or sustainability and the environment where policymakers are just acting much more swiftly, much more aggressively than they were before. And that’s in response to the pace of technological change that’s going on overall. And so, I’ve just been consistently surprised by the clashes of where that’s been going on.
Tim Hwang:
And we used to do this event down in Silicon Valley called the State of Regulation of Silicon Valley. And maybe this is like 2014, 2015, when we’ve first started it, we had like 20 people showing up to this stuff. I mean, it’s like, I would have local congressmen and regulators from CFPB and the SEC and stuff talking about how they’re viewing particular regulations. And now, if you go on Twitter, it’s like all anyone talks about is like, “What is the SCC going to do about regulating cryptocurrencies,” or whatever.
Tim Hwang:
So I feel like the technology industry has come quite a long way in terms of their interactions with regulators. And it’s something that I’ve been particularly surprised by over the course of the last couple years or so.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Wow. And which is, what you said earlier, one of your early frustrations in getting to college was the slowness of change. And now, you’re seeing shifts at perhaps a faster pace in a way that’s compounded from those events in 2014-15. Very cool.
Bryan Wish:
Tim, one of the things, you talked about building this global company now, that’s you have oversight on different parts and regions of the world and know what’s going on. Of course, the data is extremely valuable. One of the things that has stuck with me since our last conversation was you talking about expansion and acquisition.
Bryan Wish:
And to what degree you can share, I’m just curious, from a business strategy perspective and how you’re thinking about things, how have you thought about your expansion strategy, so the audience can hear, and what does that mean for the future of FiscalNote in your eyes?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah, well, I think just getting down to the brass tacks of business, our business is a subscription business. And so, it’s fairly simple in terms of how you grow our company. The first and most important thing is that you renew your customers every year, and that serves as the base and foundation for future growth.
Tim Hwang:
Once you kind of look at the renewals of our existing customer base, there’s two ways to grow. Number one is you get more customers. And so, we’re looking at opportunities in getting more customers in places like Europe or in Asia, and certainly in parts of America as well, particularly in state and local governments where we haven’t seen as much penetration as we have historically.
Tim Hwang:
And then, the second way to grow is to take your existing customer base and give them more things that they can use. And so, that’s an area where we continue to innovate and also acquire new businesses to be able to kind of offer more and more things to our existing customers.
Tim Hwang:
So in that context, I think that we’re really interested in two things. The first thing is we’re interested in getting more data. We’re interested in getting more understanding and a broader understanding of what’s going on.
Tim Hwang:
So recently, we made a couple of acquisitions, companies like Oxford Analytica or FrontierView that expand policy intelligence action to market intelligence. So helping in things like interest rates or labor, kind of average labor rates in particular markets, manufacturing or kind of supply chain costs that are the downstream impacts of, say, inflation or fiscal policy.
Tim Hwang:
We’ve made some other company acquisitions of companies like Aicel in Korea that give incremental kind of data sets around things like ride sharing patterns or share economy patterns or eCommerce or retail patterns that are the kind of the broader implications of stimulus or kind economic policy.
Tim Hwang:
And then, the second thing that we’re interested in is workflow or software solutions that can extend the use of this data. So you might say, “Okay, thank you, FiscalNote for giving us all this information about what policymakers are saying companies have to do about environmental regulations. So now what?”
Tim Hwang:
Well, you have to comply with those regulations. You have to start collecting data around carbon emission. You have to start collecting data around your carbon footprint. You have to report that data to the SCC and to the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, whatever it is. And so, we’ll give you the tools to be able to comply with those regulations.
Tim Hwang:
And so, we’re really very interested in either acquiring or building out tools in those spaces. So other areas like cryptocurrencies or cannabis or autonomous vehicles and the like where there is a significant amount of regulations coming down the line, and companies and organizations now have to comply with those regulations, those are the areas where we’re investing very aggressively to kind of drive some level of growth into the future.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, seems like just a deeper way to drive analysis and action and what’s coming and how it’s going to apply to everyone’s lives operating in those spaces.
Bryan Wish:
So what’s interesting is, growing up, you talked from the early part of the interview about just seeing some societal shifts, that early election back when you were seven and seeing Bush and Gore and now you have a business that can provide data to people to be a part of some of those big shifts that are happening around the world. And whether you’re in the office or not, you have a company that can really drive a lot of behavior, and I think in a very impactful and open, transparent way.
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. No, I mean, it’s been a really interesting kind of ride in being able to really channel a lot of my interests. And I think that a lot of founders, they ask me like, “What is your big piece of advice about starting a company or whatever?” And as cheesy and as corny as it sounds, I always say like, “You should just really build something or found something in the areas that you’re interested in, and to really kind of like follow your passion.
Tim Hwang:
Because I fundamentally believe that technology is intersecting every industry, financial services, healthcare, energy, real estate, politics, every single one of these industries is being fundamentally transformed by technology.
Tim Hwang:
And so, the intersection between technology and whatever your interest is, there’s probably an unlimited amount of opportunity in that particular vector. And the kind of unreal advantage that you’re going to have is that you’re actually personally and individually interested in being able to make a change in that particular industry. And so, yeah, it’s definitely been a really interesting ride in just being able to channel that into building this company.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Well, no, I think the advice, all the advice, don’t follow your passion, and don’t do this, I mean, I think you’re right. You got to be intellectually and passionately stimulated by what you’re working on day in and day out. Because when things get super hard and roadblocks come up, the push to keep going.
Bryan Wish:
So, Tim, closing out here, whatever you can share, as you look ahead the next 5, 10, 15 years, what do you see for your life? What do you see for evolution, business, you, all the things that are in front of you based on kind of what you’ve built to date?
Tim Hwang:
Well, I think that FiscalNote is obviously out there right now trying to go public via SPAC, and that’s something that we’re very committed to, building FiscalNote into a long term, sustainable, growing, durable, public company. And I’d like to see the company be at a point where we can sort of look towards the future, how do we get to from 100 million revenues to half a billion revenues to a billion revenues and so on and so forth, building a very, very long term sustainable business for the future?
Tim Hwang:
And I think that, for me personally, I love to be in environments where there’s sort of a large amount of opportunity ahead of us in a very kind of entrepreneurial and very kind of dynamic and fast moving kind of pace. And the kind of phase of where FiscalNote is right now is actually really interesting because it’s sort of emerging into the public markets, and it’s kind of entering into this point where there’s sort of like an unlimited amount of potential.
Tim Hwang:
And so, I think that I’m pretty focused on trying to make that happen right now. But I’m obviously always interested in a number of different kind of technology trends. And to my earlier point, if there’s even just personal ways that I can assist in some level of societal change or whatever it is, I’m always looking for ways that kind of help out both from a business perspective, but also from a personal and kind of personal interest perspective as well.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. No, very cool. It seems like you have the right things in your mind. So when they show up in front of you, you kind of know where you want to dive in and kind of let your passion follow in those areas, and have a great long term plan to build. We don’t hear too many CEOs of today say, “I want to build a long term sustainable business to grow revenues to 100 bill.” I think having that long term view is awesome, and more should emulate.
Bryan Wish:
Well, Tim, this has been wonderful. If people wanted to reach out or follow along or find FiscalNote, where do they go?
Tim Hwang:
Yeah, we can always go to our website, fiscalnote.com.
Bryan Wish:
Great.
Tim Hwang:
My email is tim@fiscalnote.com. I’m on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever the kids are on these days. And my handle’s always the same, it’s Timthwang. So always happy to engage with the broader community here.
Bryan Wish:
Awesome. Well, thanks for your openness, willingness to do this with me. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.
Tim Hwang:
Yeah. Great to be on.