Some personal/professional news — after a great few years, December will be my last month with stac labs. This is for both personal and professional reasons — on a personal level, as many of you know, Michael and I recently welcomed our second kiddo, Maeve, to the family, and I really want to take just a little more time with her. Plus - I’m burned out. I haven’t taken a real professional break in years — since well before I joined stac, and I don’t feel equipped to go into the Trump presidency without some recharging.
Professionally, this is also a good moment for me to pass the baton. I’m incredibly proud of what stac has accomplished over the last few cycles — since Citizens United decimated much of the hard side infrastructure, state parties have become an incredibly under-resourced and under-leveraged part of our ecosystem. I've seen first hand what a difference a strong state party makes, particularly for down ballot races, and am so incredibly proud of the work stac has done to support and build that infrastructure — from making sure campaigns have accurate data to helping state parties build their candidate support programs at scale.
To brag on the stac team for a minute — things our clients have said to me in the last two weeks include, “We would never have been able to run a cure program without stac.” “The difference between my state’s program now and when I started is night and day and that’s because of you guys.” “Every morning I would look at [stac reports] and be able to use them for accountability with all our partners. It was game-changing for me.”
That doesn’t even touch the incredible behind the scenes work that our engineering team did — if you had up to date polling locations in IWillVote.com or were pulling AVEV lists to refine your GOTV for a campaign this election, there’s a good chance you had access to up to date and accurate information in part because of the stac engineers.
And have I mentioned the work our product team did building out platforms like DemLaunch that helped state parties provide tools — from VAN to district snapshots to candidate toolkits to texting platforms — to down-ballots at scale? Well, it was awesome — since launch, it’s helped get more tools in the hands of over 4000 campaign committees faster and more easily than ever before.
That said, stac’s board is considering some strategic pivots to address some longstanding challenges the company has faced (have I mentioned how state parties — our only client base to date — are under-resourced? well, they’re under-resourced. Please go donate to yours) and it would be helpful for them to have a fresh perspective and partner in making some of those business pivots — so it’s a good moment to make this shift.
As for me, I’ll be transitioning out this month and taking some time to reflect, recharge, and reconnect with people.
Next adventures — coming soon.?
