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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When the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy bubbled up, MyBO also paid dividends. Vermont volunteer Jensen had set up and moderated the Obama Rapid Response Group, where bloggers and volunteers posted sophisticated, fact-checked responses to negative news stories about Obama. After William Kristol wrote a column in The New York Times claiming that the candidate was in the pews on the day Wright delivered a particularly controversial sermon, "one of our rapid-response people went online and found Barack's schedule in Florida and posted it to the listserv," says Lonnee Hamilton, a volunteer who started Pasadena for Obama. "Our group brought it to the Times, and it printed a correction!"

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As the campaign gained momentum, Hughes says he didn't seek Obama out much: "I didn't feel the need to. He knew who we were and that what we were doing was working. That was enough for me." By late spring of 2008, Hughes had won the battle for resources. "Our team just exploded in size," says Nikki Sutton, the campaign's constituency and voter-contact manager, who started as a volunteer helping Hughes manage the MyBO community. As staffers fanned out across the country, MyBO became a key tool for them. "Everywhere we went, we could plug in a zip code, and a list of really excited volunteers would pop up," explains Bird. Says Plouffe: "Indiana? North Carolina? We wouldn't have won those states without the grassroots."

The MyBO community also fed solutions back to the campaign professionals. "The field staff was open to our feedback," says Tracy Brady, a volunteer from Dallas. When it took weeks for the campaign to vet volunteers in Texas who wanted to canvass in nearby states, Brady proposed a streamlined online interview format that the campaign adopted, whittling the approval process to a few days. Back in Chicago, the new-media team routinely searched the MyBO blogs (as well as Flickr, YouTube, and other sites) for compelling stories it could use to emphasize Obama's core belief that the campaign belonged to the people. "We had a treasure trove of unbelievable content from real supporters to work with," Rospars says.

Hughes, meanwhile, was working with in-house and Blue State developers on two breakthrough tools. One was the online calling-and-canvassing tool called Neighbor-to-Neighbor that launched quietly in September 2008. Once a user logged in to MyBO, a list of Neighbor-to-Neighbor campaigns appeared on the left side of the screen; a few clicks produced a list of people, primarily undecided voters or "leaning Obamas," who needed to be called. "Chris put hours and hours into an overhaul of that system," Sutton says. It was highly integrated with data sets -- geography, age, profession, languages, military service -- to match volunteers with undecideds they might relate to. Volunteers used the tool to make some 8 million calls.

The second was the Vote for Change voter-registration site. The back end was a hellishly complicated dynamic database loaded with local voter-registration rules, while the user interface was a simple series of questions. There was a sophisticated strategy at work: If registrants were students, for instance, they were asked for both the state where they went to school and the state they came from. "We'd determine which state was most important for us to win," says Hughes, "and assuming that the law says that a full-time student can register there, we would suggest it." The site registered a million people, with only a handful of staffers working on it part time. Registering the same number by knocking on doors took some 2,000 paid staffers and volunteers.

The new-media team was still busy on election night. The 33,000-square-foot sprawl that was the campaign's 11th-floor Chicago command center was largely abandoned as staffers streamed to Grant Park, but the online crew still had a few million emails and texts to send once California was called at 10 p.m. Chicago time. They checked the electronic countdown clock on the wall as it ticked off the last minutes and seconds, and watched the TV as projections were made. California! Whooping, crying, laughing, and hugging, the team spun into action one last time, tapping, clicking, and then staring expectantly into computer screens. Hughes's eyes shine at the memory. "We were like, 'Okay, is it sending? Let's go!' "

Rospars and the others dashed for a trolley that had been arranged, complete with Secret Service escort, to get them safely to Grant Park in time to hear the president-elect speak. Hughes, waiting a few extra minutes to be sure the emails went off without a hitch, missed the trolley. With two friends in tow, he ran full speed down North Michigan Avenue, feet pounding on pavement. "It was so great, just to move," he recalls. "I was out of breath, but I made it. Just."

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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