Khosla四轮投资政策数据公司State Affairs

Evan Burns. I hope you forgot the first time that we actually met. You are back with the new business here, along with Keith for boy for South Coastal Adventures, and it's a little bit different than what you did last. And quite frankly, it seems a little bit different than what Khosla typically invests in. So kind of explain state affairs, this idea of a policy platform and why it's actually even needed right now. Thanks for having us.

Happy to be back. It's been fun each time. The thing about state of affairs and you have such conviction about is that policy markets have as much or more impact on most companies panels than financial markets. Do you yet these executives or people in legal or government affairs don't have the ability to keep track of the movement of policy and regulation on a day to day basis like they can financial markets? So we have about a third of elected officials, state and federal, in the country, who pay attention to us and use us, as well as some great fortune 1000 brands, companies like Walmart and Mastercard and McDonald's and their trust in us, really for two reasons.

One, if you can make policy real time, like financial markets in real time for decades, you can navigate your organization through it well. And the second reason they trust us is they can really come to us and say, look, here's a mandate. We have. Our customers want this. Our board believes in this. And so they can come in the state affairs and say, we want to be involved in this type of policy, and we can integrate that throughout their whole organization so they can have a proactive strategy instead of just waiting to see what happens.

You often see people say, what happened? Yeah. Well, I do have to ask. You have and I mean, right now, everyone knows right now sort of what's driving Wall Street. What's driving business overall is largely emanating out of Washington. But are you worried at all that that might change when we get another administration, and maybe there's a little bit less emphasis from Washington on the policies that affect business?

Yeah, 250 years of American democracy, I think, and show there's been a there's been seasons of federal and seasons of state. I think we're going to continue to see state become more and more important in a state of affairs. We're building this for really all Western democracy. Can you build a real time knowledge graph around all policy and regulations? So that applies to federal, state, municipal. But states have a lot of impact right now.

Okay. I want to get your perspective. Because when I think about coastal Adventures, I think this sort of deep technology type of bets. And obviously there's technology involved in this. But to a certain extent this is this is reporting, this is information. Give me a sense as to what you actually were investing in. So as you know, Coastal Ventures is the leading investor in AI. And we've been investing in AI since we were the first institutional investor in OpenAI.

We believe, though, that every industry will be transformed by AI, including politics, policy, whether in the state and federal level. State affairs is the only investment in that area. It's the only company that's succeeding. So it was a no brainer investment. We've invested four times or I've invested four times. There's only one other company in my career that I've invested four times. It's called ramp. So we're equally optimistic about state affairs.

So what is the kind of the structure though? I mean, I saw this listed as a $70 million funding, not necessarily a funding round. Is there some distinction here? Well, of 70 million over time. So four rounds of financing as the companies progressed and you've been involved and I've been involved in all four. Yes, all four rounds. And I mean any. Can you share with me what your ownership stake is in this at all. It's divided into both Founders Fund and Crystal ventures, because I led two rounds of founders funded and two after I came back to Coastal Ventures three years ago.

Uh, so I haven't added the two together, but it's probably meaningful since we're like the only material outside investor. So, I mean, when I think of this company, I think of it, uh, sort of as a policy data company, as a software AI type company or data company or just, uh, kind of old fashioned newsroom. I think of it as a I company because, you know, I actually started my career in tech running policy and public affairs for PayPal, and I had 17 lobbyists that worked for me.

And Reid Hoffman headed, uh, Louisiana in New York, lobbyists and our general counsel had another set of lobbyists. And we did it all through email and basically pen and paper. 26 years later, nothing has changed until State Affair arrived on the scene to replacing humans that are reactive instead of proactive. Allowing visibility and transparency is something that the modern world needs, and AI is the perfect, uh, empowering technology to finally deliver this to executives so they can drive a strategy that leads to increases in market cap.

So give me a sense here, Evan. How many like paying like enterprise type customers do you have so far? Um, across the whole country, we have over 30,000 customers. Now, some people subscribe to one state. Other people, enterprises subscribe to the whole country, federal and state data. And really the ones that are subscribing to federal and state data are saying, we want to understand the real time movement of things that I can't just scrape off the internet.

When we think about AI. So this an AI company. One of the things that we think is important in the supply chain of AI is what's proprietary data that I can't get elsewhere. And we've been building the machinery to capture that out of these state houses in these government. For me, if I'm wrong, though, I mean, I feel like there's already a lot of competition in this space. You have, you know, Politico Pro and Fiscal Note and Quorum.

And, you know, we must sort of also not the Bloomberg government, which also competes in this space. I mean, what are you doing different that day? That's a great question. Yeah. Um, so there's obviously reporting that you have journalists out there doing a great job asking original questions, getting original information. But what we spent a lot of time on is building this knowledge graph of getting information you can't get online.

So it's sending people into the room, gathering those really important data points that matter. It's we call it available but not accessible data. And putting that into our knowledge graph that ontology matters. What are the relationships? How can I query when I have a question of how do I help make K-12 education better? And ask, who are the folks that actually have power and have momentum and can I can engage with across the country around this?

Like that's how we spend. There's also the art of separating signal for noise, especially at the state level. So there's 50 states. There's legislation introduced every day. And understanding which legislation has a chance of being enacted is it is critical, like you can't follow every piece of legislation introduced at the state level times 50. So understanding momentum and using data to alert a general counsel of, let's say, McDonald's, this legislation actually might be enacted.

You might want to pay attention to this. Versus is just, you know, some legislator that no one's ever heard of introducing some legislation so you can run for re-election in separating those out. The second thing is, is you asked we have 35 public companies that use state affairs, and that's always going to be it's going to increase the fortune 500. It would be irresponsible not to subscribe to state affairs will give me a sense.

This goes back to my question about the business model, though. Is the idea to primarily rely on the subscription revenue, or is there maybe a little bit more value? And I guess, quite frankly, the data and