In January of 2020, a mentor of mine gave me a call. We first met in 2018 when I had pitched him on my start up, Ocelot Market. Having mutual interests in taking on big picture problems (climate change, income equality, etc) we continued to keep in touch. When he called me on that random January afternoon, I was two years into the start-up grind and very close to exiting. I was exhausted and ready to retire from entrepreneurship (at least for a beat). Founders, you get it.
“Come up to Time Square. I’m working on something interesting,” he said.
Any New Yorker knows, Times Square is about the last place you want to be on any given Monday. It better be damn interesting.
The urgency in his voice indicated this was something worth following up on. “Come in three hours. Bring sushi. There is a place downstairs. I don’t have time to go down there but just get whatever. I’m starved. I’m too busy to go downstairs and the food here is the worst.”
The afternoon was just getting more and more intriguing. What kind of place is in Time Square and is keeping you so busy you can’t eat but has food at the ready? I couldn’t figure it out.
Turns out a political campaign, that’s what. He wanted me to join. He wasn’t sure what I would do yet but he just thought I should be there. He had a feeling.
“Elise, just join for sixty days. I know you’re beat but just do this until Super Tuesday then reevaluate. It’s worth it. I promise. You can do anything for sixty days.”
I joined him two days later. Which was honestly a pretty big deal. At the tail end of exiting my company, I was ready to hightail it to Bali and just relax for six plus months. But, I had to admit he was right. It was like nothing I had ever seen before and everything he had promised.
An entrepreneur’s dream- a big mission, impossible timeline, big budget and impeccable talent. I could, in fact, not say no.
The interview was with just one person. And we spoke for five minutes. He asked questions about paid advertising, what I was doing before this and maybe even what I like to do for fun. I could tell that he was smart, that he was busy and that he wasn’t sure what role he was interviewing me for anyway. He just knew they needed smart and capable bodies. And that they needed them like yesterday. The rest would sort itself out.
Then began my journey on the Mike Bloomberg campaign. Something really special happens when you put together a team of people that are motivated to change the world. Everyone was hired from similar circumstances, it was a friend of a friend, it was “a guy that I knew from my last company that was the best at X”, it was a “a woman you might want to meet because they built this amazing Y”. The results were amazing. The energy was electric. It was people that wanted to be a part of political history. Go getters who wanted to make real change.
The coolest thing about this experience was that the people working on the campaign really related to Mike for who he is at his core- an OG entrepreneur. We all related to this man who built his own self worth and his own company. That bred a certain type of person with a certain type of energy. A real magnetism.
The only requirement being that you’d be willing to just drop everything, work weekends, work evenings, and just live eat breathe the campaign. It was not for the faint of heart. Imagine building a five hundred person start up in one month. My team expanded from three people to twenty in no time at all.
Our team was called the “experiments” team. The key point going into this election cycle for this candidate was- we just don’t know what messaging works for us to win. We don’t know what people are going to react to, what words that should be using, what people care about, etc. And what particularly makes us different from other candidates is that we would not be taking donations. This is extremely rare in politics. Most commonly in politics, donations are helpful not only because money helps win races but it also defines clear “buy-in” from supporters. It is a tangible metric of success which clarifies where you stand in comparison to other candidates. So a big part of our “experiments” were figuring out how to qualify “success” in a different way.
We were like a startup inside of a startup. We would run around ten experiments a day and let them run for two days time in order to collect theories with statistical significance. Once we had proven (or disproven) hypotheses we would be able to circulate them throughout the organization.
I wish I could go into detail but this isn’t the place. Happy to chat about it more for those that are deeply interested.
Super Tuesday was shocking. We’d work so hard. Heads down. Optimistic.
As mentioned, I really planned to do this for sixty days. No more. But in those sixty days, I fell in love with the mission of actually changing the landscape of the United States. The thing about the Hawkfish mission is bigger than one cycle. The democratic ecosystem needs true data infrastructure for it to live a long, progressive future.
So then the question was- what now? Who we are as an organization? We were “Hawkfish”. But what did that mean anymore?
I decided to stay on for the next chapter, being given the challenge of taking on product marketing and communications. This was a bit out of my wheelhouse, as I didn’t know a ton about the political ecosystem, but as an entrepreneur at many early stage startups, I knew a lot about what it was like to build a brand entity, have a voice and market yourself.
But this was hard. It’s such a complex product offering. We’re a data company. We’re a marketing agency. What aren’t we?
We sorted out our core thesis and value to the ecosystem and got to work. I worked with some super magical people and data to do really fun stuff like build a website (which we didn’t have), launch a newsletter for political pundits (to get people up to speed on what’s going on with the election), launched a blog with many case studies (to get granular on the data), worked with political clients (registering voters). My role changed ten times over. Each time, I was giddy. The more change, the more progress. The wheels moved rapidly and our client work was data-driven and worked.
One of the most impactful focuses of this past cycle was the push for public awareness of “Red Mirage”. We saw the research back in June, clear as day, saying that Democrats are going to be voting by mail. And as a result, we’re not going to have the results of the election on the night of the election. And, in fact, it’s going to look like Trump has won for a really long time. We saw this very early in June and began to lay out every single scenario that could result from this- outlining every aspect leading to Trump not conceding.. It was incredibly thorough and comprehensive and scary. The craziest part is, it all happened. Every bit. You even saw a bit of it this week.
We shared our research with everyone we could in hopes of tampering anxiety post election day. We figured the more education on this election the more peaceful the transition would be. Lots of voter education would be needed as no one had seen anything like this before.
I have never felt more rewarded than I did that Saturday post November 3rd. The feeling of emotional weight that was lifted was like nothing else I’ve ever felt before. I have even felt a comedown since. Like I was chasing a high all year.
The work is very clearly not done. We have done everything we can to get Trump out of office, but at the end of the day, 74 million people voted for him. This week was a very dark week for our country. We have work to do as a society to come together and learn how to become more empathetic with one another in order to restore the US to a more peaceful, unified society that doesn’t value tweets but values progress and empathy.
I would love to thank each and every person I got the chance to meet. It has been such an emotional experience for me. I know I come from a place of privilege when I say this, but I encourage you if you can to work on something that’s so much bigger than yourself. You will feel so immeasurably fulfilled. I hope I can continue to make an impact at the ground floor for the rest of my career.
Here’s to continuing to work hard, work thoughtfully and work empathetically.
I will be continuing to write about various topics and my journey through this channel from here on out. No promises on how regular this will be! But I do plan on speaking more about my next career path shortly. Stay tuned!