One day I needed one minute of a hearing transcript.
"We do that manually. It'll take about a week."
A week. For one minute of something said in public, on camera, in a government building.
That was my life in politics. From Washington, D.C. to state capitols, as a tech policy director and lobbyist: eight hearings at once. Ten thousand bills a session. Hundred-page omnibus bills read between meetings. Nine conversations a day that actually mattered, and midnight data entry that absolutely didn't.
The work was important. The tools were from another century. Everyone I knew was drowning, and everyone had decided that was just what the job was.
Then 2023 happened. AI stopped being a demo and started being useful, and I couldn't stop thinking: what if it could sit in every hearing so we didn't have to? Not just track legislation. Understand it. Search it. Hand you the exact minute that matters.
So I pitched Eric (my co-founder, who also happens to be my husband) at our kitchen table in Austin. He laughed. Then he went quiet. Then: "Wait. That's actually a really good idea."
We hit the road. Five hundred meetings in a few months. The feedback was unanimous: people hated their legacy tools, and they liked that we actually knew their work, because we'd done it.
Ben came on as our third co-founder and CTO, and we started shipping at a pace this industry had never seen. Early users shaped everything. By Q2 2024, it was real. The bootstrapped idea from an Austin apartment now hears every hearing in all 50 states and Congress: 2.4 million hours of government, searchable in seconds.
And the part I'm proudest of? We didn't automate the human side of this work. We automated everything else, so the humans can go be brilliant in the room, and still make it home for dinner.
