Joe Gebbia on america.gov: replacing 29,000 government websites with one AI-powered portal

Speaker 2: Okay. We have been switching up our schedule, but we have Joe Gebbia with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultra Dome and hear about everything from his perspective.

Speaker 1: What's going on? At the

Speaker 2: National Design Studio. Joe, thank you so much for joining the show. How are you today?

Speaker 7: Gentlemen, it's great to see you. Been looking Yeah. Forward to this for a long time

Speaker 1: Yeah. Great to have you. Caught us on the one day where neither of us is wearing a suit. Yes. So...

Speaker 7: You guys are bringing style to Silicon Valley. It's one one of the many things I appreciate about the show.

Speaker 2: Yes. And you're bringing design to Washington. Can you get us up to speed on your role, how you actually interface with digital services, what your day to day looks like, what your team looks like? Just sort of set the table for us.

Speaker 7: Yes. Well, it was about eighteen months ago I joined Doge Yeah. With a specific mission to fix a very outdated part of the government, which was how government employees retire. Yeah. It was, you know, based... Paper based. It was really hard to use. Mhmm. So in about six months, I recruited a couple ex Airbnb engineers, some great designers. We took the whole process online. It was a huge win for the admin. Went from six months to about six seconds

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: To to retire.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: And it spawned a bigger idea which is what if we did this government wide? What if we could go across every agency working with every cabinet member to actually reform the digital experience for the entire nation?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So what I'm interested in is like there's the National Design Studio and I think there's there are people still that think design is just like what color the button looks. And design is so much more than that. Like you are designing the system. I imagine that a lot of the design work that you're doing is actually interfacing with a ton of different stakeholders, understanding why a system was built. There's the Chesterton fence analogies like what does it actually take to move a project through the National Design Studio to to fruition? Because I imagine it's not just, you know, a new front end.

Speaker 7: It's more than that. You're right. The big idea was, well, you have the... There's now 29,000 government websites of all shapes and sizes. Some of are familiar with maybe the IRS every April 15 and some long tail websites that are more information based. And there was a realization a couple months back, earlier this year, there's no way... I mean, you spend your whole lifetime trying to go website by website to upgrade and prove to modern standards.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: And it became apparent and obvious at a certain point, well, what if we just used modern tools that are emerging in real time vis a vis AI and and gave people a place where instead of 29,000, what if there was just one? Yeah. What if there was just one website where people could go to search for the information that they need and also action it? Meaning that I could go search which Medicare plan is right for me or right for my grandmother or grandfather, and then right in the same site, I'd be able to enroll. And there's something very interesting here. So we built america.gov to do exactly that.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: And the site is a place to get information and also it's coming soon, action it. So the interesting thing is that because because we're in the government, our LLM is only official government sources, which means that we only return information that's published from the government. We don't scrape the Internet.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 7: So information, that means it's accurate and it's up to date. Mhmm. It also means that coming from in the government, we can integrate into agencies. Yeah. Meaning that with the enrollment for Medicare, we can actually connect into the Medicare database because we're inside the government and help somebody actually effectuate that change, make that decision right in one place and not have to go back into the maze the Medicare website.

Speaker 1: Yeah, talk more. America.gov launched right as there's so much excitement on the West Coast around personal agents and really all over the world as people have gone from just like getting information or or everyday people are going from getting information from LLMs to actually getting information and being able to take action. I imagine you've been thinking about that since the beginning of the project. You didn't need new agents to to get released. But how how good can this get? Like, because I can imagine a a one homepage for interacting with your government where again, you can learn about the services that the government provides and and laws and everything like that. And then be able to actually immediately take action and and let's say spawn an agent that goes and deals with another agent another agency, and and your agent is dealing with their agent, and then it brings you it brings you in the loop when you need... When it needs your input and things like that. I can imagine, like, the the perfect version of that product, but any I I... You're dealing with the actual realities of what it's gonna actually take to roll that out. And given how hard it's been to get agents right in the enterprise and and personal agents that are still very error prone, I can only imagine that it's gonna be, you know, just as hard or harder for your team to do.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Look, I'm sure that day will come and it's probably closer than we all think. For now though, don't even have to go to that that far because we're positioned inside. A lot of these agencies have APIs that we can connect to that, you know, outside third parties are never going have access to. So we have this advantage right now where we can just connect directly to those, and if they don't exist, we now have an executive order to help create APIs that that that we need in order to do things like that improve the experience for everyday Americans. You just move, you have to change your address post office. You'll be able to do that on america.gov, no stress. You want to learn about and actually enroll in an armed service, you can do that on america.gov in a couple clicks. You lost your Social Security card and needed to replace it. You want know a fun fact? We looked at the flow of the replacement of our Social Security card. It's 87 clicks to replace that piece of paper. Wow. And that's, by the way, with no errors. That's if you get it right the first time.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 7: And so what you'll see in american.gov in the months to come Yeah. When you're logged in, it literally takes one click. Yeah. And it ships your your Social Security card.

Speaker 2: So...

Speaker 7: So there's more than a 10 x improvement that's unfolding right now across the nation. I don't know if you can hear it. Marine One's taken off

Speaker 2: Oh, behind

Speaker 7: the White House here.

Speaker 2: Very cool.

Speaker 7: Don't if you guys hear that Wow. At

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's not coming through. Your your Nice to your team is

Speaker 2: Yeah, Dot.

Speaker 1: Set up a a good system. I wish we could hear it.

Speaker 2: Can you can you talk... Oh, Can you talk us through the the... Can you hear us okay?

Speaker 7: The... Can you see the helicopter there?

Speaker 2: Oh. Oh, yeah. There it is. Wow. There you go. Oh, it's about to land.

Speaker 4: Still alive.

Speaker 2: Crazy. There you go.

Speaker 1: Wow. Would you look at that.

Speaker 2: Landing right back.

Speaker 1: Pretty good for a... For an AI background.

Speaker 7: Isn't it? It's this White House background option that seems really pain on them.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I... There's the humorous sort of fake quote, we don't do things because they're easy, we do them because we thought they would be easy. You don't strike me as somebody that would be super naive. I assumed you imagined that this work would be, you know, incredibly difficult. Not because like designing the front end would be difficult, but this sort of complex coordination. But when it comes to just making everyday everyday interactions with with the federal government easier, has has have some elements been been been relatively straightforward? Or has it all been a slog that that that makes, you know, starting a YC startup feel easy?

Speaker 7: There are elements of YC here. There's a lot of elements of Airbnb. You know, some would say the hardest marketplace to start is when a stranger is going to rent out their homes to another stranger. So, you know, that was definitely a lot of lessons there of... And a lot of enjoyment of taking on a really hard problem like that. Like how do you create trust between people you've never met and take that to scale? So you know, it takes about ten years before we pulled it off. And... But it's a it's it's a huge problem here. There's... It's... The government's the largest employer. It's 2,300,000 employees. It's got systems that go back to the nineteen seventies. Mhmm. They still are actual mainframes running important systems in our government, in our nation today. But it's 2026, guys. What are we doing? It's The United States Of America. Yeah. We lead in everything else. We lead culturally, economically, technologically. Let's also be a leader in the citizen experience. It doesn't have to it doesn't have to be the way it is. It can be better. Right? Like, let's let's put... Plant a flag Say enough is enough. Yeah. Like, I'm I'm embarrassed actually.

Speaker 1: You know,

Speaker 7: as a as a tech guy, as Silicon Valley Yeah. As a designer, fact, the way our nation shows... Had shown up digitally is no one would... No one admires it. Yeah. And they should.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's true.

Speaker 7: So that's that's why I'm here.

Speaker 2: How do you think about the differences between your work at Airbnb to now your work in the government, specifically around how you measure success. I mean, sounds like you do think in KPIs, but maybe it's not specific click through rates, the more minutiae of when you have designed Airbnb from scratch. It was a greenfield project. So you're not starting with a mainframe. But you still understand that just going from 86 clicks down to just a few is going to be a huge improvement. How much of what you're doing is driven by the traditional software metrics versus more intuitive sort of higher level of abstraction metrics just like this is a mess and we should just reduce complexity and the KPI looks a little bit different than what you were doing before.

Speaker 7: I'll tell you the first difference that came to mind is when you're starting your company, you're a founder, you know, Airbnb was... That was Brian Nate and I's universe.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: Right? Like, we called all the shots. Yeah. Here, it's it's president's universe. Yeah. You know, it's it's different. So you're you're working in a very different context where

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: You don't... You know, the the authority that you have as founders is different, obviously. Yeah. That was that was the first big change. Second is I'd say the way that we're measuring on America Dot Gov ultimately will be about hours saved.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: It's not about the number of websites used or information on the site. It's it's really comes down to hours saved. There's a stat published from the government that Americans spend 10,000,000,000 with a B hours every year trying to get things done in the government. That's an absurd amount of time.

Speaker 2: That's a lot of time.

Speaker 7: And the level of inefficiency that that that creates that is... It's over. Like, we're ending it. Yeah. The whole point of america.gov is to end that. If we 10 x the improvement of getting stuff done, getting some information you need, or getting the the action done, the enrollment, the application, etcetera, That's billions of hours that go back into people's lives. Yeah. And maybe also back into the GDP.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for everything you're doing and thanks for coming on and breaking down...

Speaker 1: Last last question. Please. Do you think in another life the president would have been a product guy? Or is he more of like visionary like, but but you know, does he have opinions on on button colors and things like that? Or is he more higher level like just just get it done, Joe. I I trust you.

Speaker 7: Well, thankfully, you guys, we have a president who cares about this stuff.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: He's a hospitality guy, remember.

Speaker 2: Oh, true.

Speaker 7: And so he he cares about the experience that our country has when it comes to these things. And so you think of america, think, .gov as a concierge to the government, he loves that. He's a builder, he's a fixer, and the credit goes to him for supporting this effort.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Final final question, and I know we're over, but what can we do about state state governments? Are... Mhmm. Do you think there's learnings that can be passed down to them? Is there shared infrastructure that could be basically, you know, owned and operated by the state but effectively code that that can be passed to them. Yep. Is it possible to open source this stuff for the for the states so that... Because I think like If it's... Spending ten billion hours with the federal government, they're spending, you know, probably an equal amount of time locally.

Speaker 7: You have to imagine there's states that have already reached out about that. Sure. There's other countries that have already reached out about this just in the last three days Mhmm. Saying, you know, how do we bring this to our country? I won't say their names yet, but multiple countries have reached out Cool. Asking how do we bring this here. So states have already reached out other nations. I think if we can do this right, when we do this right, which is phase one, actions to information, phase two is actioning that information in the next couple months, We'll set a new standard for the citizen experience to inspire states and other countries alike.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Speaker 1: Great to catch up. We Thanks for the work.

Speaker 2: To come and chat with us. Have a great rest of your Have

Speaker 1: a great weekend.

Speaker 7: See you guys.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era.