How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign

By: Ellen McGirtTue Mar 17, 2009 at 5:00 PM

The untold story of how Chris Hughes, today only 25 years old, helped create two of the most successful startups in modern history, Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign.

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Hughes, on the streets of New York's Soho | Photograph by Peter Yang

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Hughes had his own revelation: Obama's belief in the power of real people to be agents of change dovetailed with his own. "I connected to Barack as an individual first. It just so happened that he was in politics," Hughes says. "By 2007, we were finally living in a culture where people get what networks are and what technology can do to connect people." Facebook's business was taking off. Its user base had grown to 10 million and Zuckerberg had spurned buyout offers from Viacom, Yahoo, and others (as Fast Company covered in "The Kid Who Turned Down $1 Billion," May 2007). But Hughes heard a new muse calling: He felt compelled to help Obama.

Love arranged a phone interview for Hughes with Brayton in January 2007, as the campaign's exploratory site was going live. Just weeks before Obama's official announcement, Brayton and Hughes met in person over coffee at Union Station in D.C. "It was wonderful to hear someone outside the campaign who understood the potential for organizing online," Brayton recalls. He had already hired Joe Rospars, cofounder of marketing firm Blue State Digital, to run the campaign's new-media team, but decided to hire Hughes on the spot. Rospars would have to play along.

"It wasn't much of a job interview," Hughes says of his meeting with Rospars, then just 25 himself. "Joe said to me, 'I hear you get it,' and I became new-media employee number three." (Brayton left the campaign soon after for family reasons.)

Hughes recalls the awkward conversation when he told a stunned Zuckerberg his plan to leave the rapidly growing Facebook to join Obama: "He kept saying, 'Really?' But I wouldn't have left Facebook for any other person or at any other time."

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To understand what the campaign was up against in the early days, it's necessary to excise the memories of Obama speechifying to record-breaking crowds and raking in pots of money, and remember what he was in early 2007: a little-known senator with a scary-sounding name and a thin résumé, who had neither Hillary Clinton's inevitability nor a Rolodex of wealthy supporters. "The entire campaign was only focused on Iowa," says Hughes. "Every staff meeting, David [Plouffe] would ask, 'What did you do today to help us win in Iowa?' " A victory in the Iowa caucus in January 2008 would prove that Obama had mainstream popularity and create momentum. The plan, standard fare for presidential campaigns, was to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008.

The day Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007, two sites went live: the main campaign site, BarackObama.com, and MyBO. Nearly a thousand local groups were created the first day on MyBO, generating so much traffic the site nearly crashed. A week later, Hughes held a conference call with some 300 volunteer group administrators to say hello, express thanks, and let them know that the campaign would be providing more support in March. "As soon as I unmuted the button to let them ask questions, it was complete chaos," he remembers. "I learned early on how much structure people need." What Plouffe observed was a young technologist who got the bigger picture. "Chris made sure MyBO was always available to supporters. But he personally was always available on MyBO," he says. Customer service was job one. "He was just like a field director that actually shows up in a state. Any question or problem they had -- didn't matter what it was -- he handled. He was tireless."

But at first, the Iowa focus meant Hughes had few resources to put in play. While campaign workers flooded Iowa and other early primary states, Hughes was the only one charged with online organizing. He did the best he could with what he had, shaping a structure for the growing army of volunteers, giving them ways to organize themselves and stay excited. The goal: to keep them interacting with one another out in the real world. By March, supporters had organized 5,000 house parties and a National Day of Action, and gone back to the site to report what they'd learned; people who were having luck with fund-raising were tapped to share their expertise on conference calls.

Neil Jensen, a professional webmaster for the University of Vermont who was an experienced blogger and former Howard Dean volunteer, was on the MyBO site from day one, moderating groups and helping volunteers new to campaigning to get their bearings. "The person whom I communicated with the most was Chris," he says. "I would ask Chris for a semiofficial response to things like campaign finance, like what are the rules for setting up events as a volunteer and getting money." Jensen then used the listservs and blog functions on MyBO to get the information out.

From Issue 134 | April 2009

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Recent Comments | 42 Total

March 18, 2009 at 8:47am by Neil Jensen

Thanks for the mention, Ellen! And especially thanks to Chris Hughes, who displayed an admirable humility throughout the campaign, and helped set the tone for the entire MyBO "community."

How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign

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Recent Comments | 42 Total

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