Bradley Tusk on regulating tech startups state-by-state, mobile voting going live in Anchorage, and AI's political backlash in midterms

from his work with Uber. Thank you so much for waiting. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Good. Thanks for having me, guys.

Fantastic.

I am upset that it took us over a thousand guests on

I know. I have I have to say

I know. Uh, so you just hired a friend of mine name Jackson Foris. Do you guys know him?

We love Jackson.

So, and he I literally had the like call with him a few weeks ago where he's like, "What do I do with my life?" And I said, "Take the job." Those [ __ ] have never had me on. [laughter] And so those two things came together, but he could do it.

Yeah. But I mean, you're getting an incredible person in that hire. So, good really nice job there.

That's great news. Uh, tell us about the bookstore. I heard that you have a bookstore.

I do. So, first of all, anyone is looking to lose money, I highly recommend owning a bookstore. Um, so, you know, I've written a couple of books. I had started this thing called the Gotham Book Prize, uh, in 2020. In fact, we announced the nominees for this year today. And, um, I'd always thought like one day it'd be fun to own a bookstore, but kind of thing you would just do later in life. And then during co New York City just got whacked by everything and we lost, you know, half a million jobs.

And my thought was, look, if you're going to do something nice for the city from a retail perspective because I knew I wasn't ever going to make money on it, like now is the time, right? Don't wait till you're 70 or whatever it is.

And so, um, we started looking for space. Yeah.

And we found one on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, uh, if anyone knows where that is. And it's a great spot. So, it's about 3,500 square feet. It's an indie bookstore. It's a podcast studio that is free for anyone to use. You just go on our website and you can sign up and use it. If you guys are over in New York, you're welcome studio. Uh we've got an event space. We built an amphitheater that seats about 80. So, we have authors or different types of events like open mic teenage poetry or whatever. Pretty much something every night. Um and a cafe. And the store has a funny name. And the reason why is um so when I when I leased the space, I texted my dad and said um didn't the store that my grandfather started when they came to this country in 1950, wasn't it right around here? Because that store was closed before I was born, but I knew it was right around there. He's like, "Yeah, it's was one block over on Allen Street." And I said, "Remind me the name." and he said pnt knitwear because uh you know if you were an uneducated Jew that survived World War II uh the one job you could get in the US especially in New York was in the garment business and so my grandfather started a sweater company. No way.

And then my dad wrote PNT knitwear but you cannot name a bookstore PNT knitwear. So of course our store is called PNT knitwear. So, um, [laughter] so that's our store and, uh, yeah, other than the fact that, you know, nobody buys books, it is, uh, a really fun, uh, business to own and run and a fun place to hang out. So, anyone who is watching, if you happen to be in New York, you like bookstores, check us out.

That's very cool. Uh, what's it going to take to get it profitable?

I don't think it's possible. You know, there's not there's actually not one. So, because I've looked at like, okay, let's say I ran it aggressively. We charge for the studio. we charge for the event space, we didn't give the employees healthcare, all this, you know, other stuff. We would still lose money. [laughter] So, I don't quite understand how somebody actually makes a living running a bookstore. I'm sure Manhattan's sort of the worst place to do it, but still. But even like in LA, like my friend Zippy has a great bookstore in Santa Monica, but the same thing, she's, you know, lucky to, you know, have other money and she part of the way she uses it is to have this indie bookstore. So, um it does seem like sadly, you know, bookstore ownership these days is somewhat equated with philanthropy.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Uh well, yeah, let's get back to let's get back to business.

Um I want to talk about uh specifically uh these businesses that you've been involved with where you've been so helpful to founders on the local and state regulation level, how companies position themselves. Uh it feels like every company right now is focused on uh what's happening in DC, the federal level. Um how do you how are you how do you think about what's different when you're working with a company at the local level? What are what's the playbook? What works if you have a problem and you need to change local laws? What are you recommending to new founders?

Yeah. I mean the first thing is look human beings naturally or Americans at least when you say the words government or politics your mind kind of instinctively goes to DC so you think about the capital the white house Trump whatever it is but the reality is most regulation including most tech regulation does not happen at the federal level um there's some crypto biotech but by and large most things that touch a consumer in some way directly or indirectly are regulated either by state government or local government and that's actually a good thing. So what everyone thinks is oh I'd rather solve my problem at the federal level. It's a one shot stopping I one shot whatever I got my thing done I'm set but you know the phrase and act of Congress is literally synonymous with a miracle right you can't base investment strategies on miracles whereas in states um and you guys had my friends you know uh Adam and Matt from doctrronic on a few weeks ago where we worked with them to make Utah the first state to allow uh prescription via AI um in states you can get things done and we don't necessarily win in every state every time, but like 50 bytes at the apple, we can figure out this makes sense for a red state strategy, blue state, whatever it might be. It might not matter in that way. Um, and because states have sort of six-month legislative sessions in which typically a couple of hundred bills on average pass, you have a reasonable chance of getting your same thing done if you run a good campaign. And then once you establish president for it in one state, you have a stronger argument to then go forward in others. And so when we decide what we want to work on and what we want to invest in, we highly prioritize companies that can get their stuff done at the state and local level because I don't invest in stuff where I don't think that we can move the needle for the company itself. And I think our odds of doing that are so much better outside of Washington.

How confident were you that uh you guys could get this uh a deal like the one you got done in Utah with Doctronic? Like when you when you invested?

I was a little surprised.

Yeah. Yeah. cuz I was

Yeah, we kept having to like be like, "Really? That's what happened? Really? You can do this?"

I know. We e even we literally the people who do this for a living, right? I think I'm the only fund that does this. And even we were like, "Wow, that one was pretty cool." Um but uh you know there are states that are very thoughtful around AI regulation and there are a couple of states, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Kentucky um that have created regulatory sandboxes. Do you guys know what that is?

Little bit.

It's effectively like a notion of saying, "Okay, you know what? There's this thing that we know is really important. We know it's going to take experimentation and rather than subjecting it to the political process, let's put together a team of experts who can at least on a provisional basis say we're going to try out these ideas in our state and as long as it's working the way we thought it'll keep going." And those are four states that have chosen to do that. And so those were the obvious places for us to start. Um Utah is just a really well-run state. Governor Cox is is an excellent governor. Um and so we and they're not a typical state for a lot of reasons. Um and also they're becoming a very very techforward and friendly state because you're seeing migration especially from California let alone before the billionaires referendum tax thing happens. Um Utah is becoming you know silicon slopes are calling it. So um yeah, we're going to Texas next uh which is a giant market obviously the second biggest in the country um and you know once we start showing that it works you know even if you think so the very first tech company that I worked with was Uber um started doing that early 2011 and the thing that that Travis Kalanick who was the founder and CEO of Uber at the time um understood and he was right about is just get the genie out of the bottle. I mean, Travis didn't pretend to understand politics, but what he did know was that he had a product that was meaningfully better than the status quo. And if you guys think back to the first couple times you used Uber, it was magic, right? You couldn't kind of couldn't believe it. You just pressed a button and this nice car showed up and here they were and you have to like hail it down or deal with some crazy cab company or anything else. Um, and we knew that once people saw that it worked, they would fight for it and the arguments against it would get weaker and weaker and we were able to effectively mobilize our customer base.

Well, you have you have the two it's it's both participants fighting for it too in the in the you have the drivers and the and the users which is the most powerful dynamic.

Right. Right. And that so when you can do that um but you know it's funny there's a whole question as to when do you have a product or a service that people will fight for and sometimes it's you might have a really good company that's going to be a good investment but it doesn't sort of excite people in that way but what we found is um FanDuel worked really well u bird scooters worked really well ease which is uh cannabis delivery worked really well crypto that works really well for so you know you have to think about if you're a founder do I you're obviously passionate about it because otherwise you wouldn't have founded the company in the first place and made all the sacrifices that you've made but you have to be somewhat objective saying okay do regular people find this thing that I am doing truly critical and fascinating

you said you said fan you said fan duel so like are there people out there that will stand up and protest their state government if they try to for banning sports

betting so we we we did that so in 2016, um, the New York Times published an article effectively accusing employees at FanDuel and DraftKings of conducting a form of insider trading where, according to the Times, they were giving each other information to then put bets on the other's platform. It turned out to actually not be true. But putting that aside, it unleashed this total [ __ ] storm where a couple of dozen states in the course of a few days issued cease and desist orders to us saying, "You can no longer operate." And we had to all of a sudden go all over America and either pass bills to legalize daily fantasy sports betting or at least get them to understand that that we were ex complying with the existing laws. And the way that we did that is we went to our customers and said, "Listen, um if you like this product, we need you to fight for it." And every time they were on the app, we knew where they were located. And we'd say, "Hey, click here to tell your local state senator, state rep, whoever it might be, that you want FanDuel uh to stick around." And enough people did it that, you know, it shifted the political inputs. If you guys just take a half a step back in politics, if there's one thing to take away from this interview, it's that every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And there are some exceptions. I was Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager who ran for mayor of New York.

Not for the good of the world. [laughter]

No, not in the slightest. Right. Mike, that's that's pretty much. So, um, as a result,

that's incredibly depressing. admitted, but it's also kind of a useful place to work from because then you have to understand what can I do to make said politician feel like doing what I want will either help them win the next election or if they don't do

so the tech industry should tell Roana we won't we won't trash you in the next election cycle if you don't put our industry in the dirt.

Yeah. or or quite frankly, it's funny just by, you know, Larry Page and others acting in their own self-interest and already saying, "I'm moving to Florida, the billionaires referendum is already on the ropes because of that." So sure, um, if you, you know, if you think about why, let's say in a place like California, there are unions at just SEIU, the teachers have so much power in Sacramento, it's because they have so much money that they can threaten any given politician and say, "If you don't do what we want, we're going to spend a million dollars, $5 million, whatever number they want against you in the next election." And everybody backs down because winning the next election is more important to them than any given policy or any given issue. So not every tech startup obviously has the kind of money that a union might have to throw around. So you have to be more creative about it and that's where your customers can be really useful advocates.

Interesting.

Uh what's your current outlook on the venture landscape broadly? We've been talking a lot about the the Kshape dynamic. Uh there's a whole bunch of headlines around uh lower total venture funding, more SPV activity. What what are you seeing?

Yeah, a few things. So I kind of I have it from both a deal by deal standpoint and then kind of a macro fund model standpoint. So on a dealbydeal standpoint I think we're in this very bifurcated world. So um I started investing outside capital my first fund in 2016. In fact FanDuel was the first deal I ever did and at that moment there was a period of irrational right everything was incredible and everybody threw tons of money at everything and every startup was going to be you know a unicorn or deck of corn or whatever. Then 2021 came, everything fell off the cliff and all of a sudden things like unit economics and margins and you know burn and all that stuff started to matter. Um and then AI came along and then so for AI companies, we're back to the 2016 days where people are just having valuations to me that sometimes make no sense whatsoever. Uh you know, I've seen seed companies, you know, with valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars with no product. Yeah.

Or certainly no revenue. That's crazy. And yet some of the discipline that you saw post2021 crash is still being applied to nonAI companies. And while I do think that overall if you had an ETF of private AI startups, it would do well over time, um that doesn't mean that any individual valuation is right simply because the letters AI are attached to it in some way. From a fund model standpoint, um I really believe that there's effectively only two types of funds that could work if you were to start now. One would be a fund with billions of dollars of AUM simply because at that point the management fees are sufficient that the GPS can make a living from that alone. Um as long as they can raise the next fund, you know, it doesn't really matter. Or a sub$und00 million fund or even sub50 you can get away with it where the hurdle is relatively low. you can get into carry pretty quickly. You're not making much on the management fee. So that's certainly you've either got to have other resources or really be super scrappy.

If you if you were if you wanted to start a fund with the the lowest chances of success, what would it be? For me, it would be a $200 million series A only fund.

Sure.

Yeah. A generalist generalist with nothing differentiating. Yeah. Even that subhund million still only works if you have something truly differentiating, right? So for me,

uh because we're the fund that does the regulatory stuff for better or worse, we're the people you call if that's the if if that's your issue. And if you don't have

how do you what's your framework? cuz cuz uh there's times where I've invested in a company where I'm like, "Okay, th this this founding team is fantastic and they don't understand, but they don't they're they're good at all this stuff, but they don't understand marketing. I'm very good at marketing.

I can invest and I can help. The problem is I'm I'm going to be in the room with them like less than 1% of the time, right? Like I'll do a handful of calls. I'll make intros. I'll help however I can, but I'm not actually on the team. And so I've ended up getting I've yeah I've ended up getting burned because I'm just like I I can't you know 1% of my time is not enough to take them from bad at marketing to even good. Right.

Right. So for us there's first thing is we ask two simple questions. Is there a gating regulatory issue or opportunity that if it were solved could really drive growth and valuation and then if so can we solve it and that's what lets us invest in companies like FanDuel Lemonade Bird Rogue Coinbase Circle that so on um and then the other part though is take doctronic as an example we are their GRPR department um we effectively become the in-house group for a company until they get to a point where it's Okay, we're now big enough that we probably need an in-house team in which case like RO is a really good example where when we started working with RO back at the seed. Um,

you know, it's funny with electronic because it's prescription via AI when it was Row, which was really not that long ago. The question was, is tech is prescription via text legal? Um, nobody knew, right? Because they had no till Z. No one had ever tried to do it before. um and he saw something that was incredible and our job was to legalize us everywhere and we we worked on that and did it and then eventually they grew to a point where we helped them, you know, put together their kind of in-house people and then we still talk to them all the time. We jump in on stuff whether it's GLP1 compounding rules or when they want to be a COVID test provider, whatever it was. Um but for those early rounds, we really are part of the team and that's why we take equity for our work. um because you know we're lucky to be in a position where I don't need to take cash usually because I have the the resources to sort of fund it myself but uh you know we are there dayto day

talk to me about mobile voting uh we've heard about it for a long time do you think it's ever going to happen what are you doing in this space why is it important okay explain

so all right let let's start it's important because in a world of gerrymandering and I'll make the assumption that the viewers know what that is um the only election that matters matters is the primary. So, the New York Times did a study of the 2024 general election. Only 8% of congressional races were decided by five points or less and only 7% of state legislative races were decided by five points or less, which means well over 90% of elections are really determined in the primary. And the problem is primary turnout is incredibly low. It's usually about 10%. And so, who are those 10%? there are the extremes, the far left or the far right, or there are different special interests, whether it's the NEA or the NRA, either side, um, that effectively dictate what happens. And if you are a politician and all you want to do is stay in office, then you cater to those groups at the exclusion of everyone else. But because those groups are purists, they don't want compromise. They don't want consensus. They just want to sort of hold true to their principles no matter what the cost is. And so nothing gets done. Um, and the simplest way to solve that is to meaningfully increase primary turnout. But the only way to do that is to meet the voters where they are. Every single one of us has a supercomput in our pocket. Um, and if you can allow people to vote um, in at least state and local elections on their phones, you can get primary turnout from 10 to say 40. And now all of a sudden, if in order to get reelected, you have to represent 40% of your constituents instead of 10. that 40% is much more moderate and they want things to get done. So if that means working with the other side to find a reasonable compromise on immigration or guns or healthcare or climate or whatever it is, you can do so. It's not that government doesn't know what the answers are. It's that embracing them in perils re-election and they won't do that. And so um I started something called the mobile voting project in 2017 and the first thing we did was test the hypothesis that I just laid out. And so we funded elections out of my foundation. is totally philanthropic in seven different states were either people with disabilities or deployed military were able to vote in real elections on their phones and the answer was of course as you guys know when you make something a lot easier and you put on people's phones they do it so that was true

then the next question became okay but is the tech really good enough to do this at scale it was totally fine for 2,000 soldiers from West Virginia 3,000 blind people in Oregon but if we're trying to get every district from 10 to 40 and the tech that was on the market at the time wasn't good enough for that. So, we spent five years building our own mobile voting technology that is endto-end encrypted, endto-end verified, has biometric screening, multiffactor authentication, it's airgapped, and all of the code is open source, which means it's on GitHub right now. So, it's totally transparent, totally audible. Um, and the next part is then, okay, getting government to say yes, you can actually do it. So, that's about to happen for the first time in April. Anchorage, Alaska is making mobile voting accessible to all of their uh voters.

Hit the gong. Hit the gong for mobile voting

overnight. Thank you. And um we are running legislation now in five states uh Minnesota, Colorado, Vermont, New Jersey, Maryland that would allow cities in those states to start offering mobile voting uh as an option for local elections. citizens, I can imagine, are super excited about this. Who's not excited?

Polls really well.

Yeah. Yeah. Because you're just like, "Oh, no. I love going to the poll. I I I love I love taking, you know,

an hour out of my day to to go do this thing that Right."

Uh,

so there's the people there are a few smaller opponents and there's in reality the big one. So the smaller ones are there are some cryptographers who have said it's impossible can never be done something can go wrong and they're not wrong something could go wrong but things go wrong at inerson pallet places all the time things go wrong with mail and voting all the time and the risk of inaction is where we are today and this is not sustainable for 20 more years um and there are groups like this one called verified voting that are kind of like the antivaxers of voting so they're just like in paper, on paper, in person, nothing else, you know, and they're the crazies, just like the antivax people in my view are a little crazy. Um, but the real opponents at the end of the day are the status quo because if you are an ideologue or a special interest and primary turnout is 10%. You have a lot of power because you can your threats go a long way.

Well, yeah. you look at who's showing who's actually turning out for the primaries and you can concentrate budget correct on influencing that subgroup which is much better than having to appeal to

an entire region or or you know a huge age range. So,

right. Exactly. So, that's what we're really going to have to fight through. But, you know, if you think about every major right in this country that's ever been won, women's right to vote, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, samesex marriage, Americans Disabilities Act, whatever it is, status quo didn't want to do any of those things, right? Enough people stood up loud enough and long enough and demanded their rights and eventually they won. And it's not easy and it takes a while and it's expensive, but that's what we have to do here, too. And we're trying.

Amazing. Really quick, I I know we're mostly out of time. Uh how do you think uh what do you think the dialogue will be around AI in the in the midterm elections? Uh

uh negative. I think it's going to be pretty bad.

Yeah.

Um

and and is this the kind of thing that certain certain politicians are going to make their entire brand anti- AI? Well, so I think what you're going to see, we just give we can get Cali a poly mark or someone to take take a set a line on this is the word that will be cited the most in the midterms. By the way, it's not just Congress. There's 36 governors of state, most states legislators, um is affordability, right? So that's the word, right? You heard Trump say it, you heard Montami here in New York say it, everyone's going to say it. So then the question is where does AI fit into the affordability puzzle? And it fits in in a couple ways. One is job laws. I do believe that some of the jobs data that we saw in 2025 reflected layoffs typically kind of bigger tech companies that are the earliest adopters of of AI and new technology using it realizing this works pretty well. I don't necessarily need as many people to perform any given function. So you're going to have layoffs. The second is energy prices. So right now in the way that data centers were conceived by the hyperscalers was you know we'd build these things and we would consume a lot of energy and that would be from the grid and the problem is everyone else who's on that same grid then has to pay the price for that and so there are a lot of states where AI data centers have already come online where people are paying 30 40 50% more in their energy bills every month. The problem is no consumer on either side of the aisle is interested in having to spend more money out of their pocket to help make San Altman or Jensen Wong a trillionaire. Right. [clears throat] So are starting to push back.

People were like, I want Uber in my area around where I live. Nobody's like, if I don't get a data center in my backyard, I can't use CHD is going to work no matter where the data center is.

It's going to work. And by the way, the data centers don't even create that many jobs, right? So there's not even like you could mobilize that for it. And you see now a bunch of different states on both sides of the aisle start proposing legislation that would find ways to curtail um the ability of the data centers to impose those costs and externalities on consumers whether it's around having to use different types of energy or alternate forms of compute or water or whatever it might be. And so AI is going to get blamed, not wrongly in some ways, for both job loss and higher energy prices, um, along with things like mental health chatbots having weird problems with teenagers and things like that. And so I think it's going to be a huge attack uh, vessel for um, challengers against incumbents, you know, in pretty much every election this year. Mhm.

And I think that, you know,

when we in the tech world just think everyone loves AI because we love AI, that's not true. And if that is the mindset you take, you're going to lose.

Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense.

Agreed.

Yeah. It's going to be a really important story to follow this year. We'd love to have you back on the show to talk.

Yeah. But anytime love talk about this stuff, so anytime it works for you guys, just let me know.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Expect emails in the morning when

you got it. Come on.

You got it. Great. expert

and thanks for pushing Jackson over the line.

No, he's he's he's going to love it. It's going to be

Have a great rest of your day.

And Barnes & Noble is opening 60 stores. They're going to Somebody sent us.

So, I think just don't don't limit yourself, right? If you know, make it up with scale, right? Open 50 more stores.

Make you make it up with volume.

Yeah, for sure.

There we go. There we go. I just have to, you know, just make it I need another Uber to be able to afford that.

[laughter]

We're working on it. So,

thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Goodbye.

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