How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign

By: Ellen McGirtApril 1, 2009

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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Sitting over dinner in downtown Manhattan in February, Hughes is still in a philosophical mood. During the transition, he helped transform MyBO into Organizing for America, now a project of the DNC. But he waffled on joining the new administration's official new-media efforts. Government, he recognized, is far different from a campaign -- all bureaucracy, very little startup. (Rospars, who has returned to Blue State Digital, agrees: "Join the ranks of people in suits and bad laptops?" He smiles. "Not for me.") Hughes is proud of the tools he helped develop, including Organizing for America, which have now been folded into Blue State's offerings for progressive candidates and causes. Yet he's ready to move on, knowing that "the causes I care about have campaign-tested technology to work with." Ultimately, Hughes relocated to Brooklyn, where he is busy furnishing his first real apartment. "I'm nesting," he says.

Hughes remains good friends with Zuckerberg. They spent an afternoon together in New York, when the Facebook CEO was on his way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But Hughes insists that a return to his Facebook roots is not in his plans. He does muse about the Facebook that might have been had he not left to join Obama. "I wonder if they're doing everything they can to help people really share information most efficiently," he says, mentioning the site's current emphasis on news feeds and status updates. "In no way is that a criticism -- just fun to think about."

Hughes is waiting to feel the call of what's next. "I am a person who feels compelled and then gets immersed," he says. He talks about the seeds of interest that are starting to take root, options he's been offered in venture capital or in old media, the information ancien régime that is desperately in need of innovation. "I've been in the business of building technology that networks people," Hughes says. "So far, the goal has been to make it easier to communicate and self-organize. Depending on what I do next, it may be to make it easier for people to learn about the world around them."

He can't help but obsess about making technology less obsessive and simpler for everyone to use. He has started to Twitter, albeit reluctantly. He worries about how overconnected people are, even himself: "I keep an eye on it." He thinks that Web 2.0 underemphasizes the real world and that businesses trying to tap the technology often miss the main point. His philosophy, he says, is unchanged from his first involvement with Facebook: "It doesn't matter if it's a company or a campaign; you build around commonality. If it's real people and real communities, then it's valuable. Otherwise it's just playing around online."

In the campaign, Obama was that commonality. But the community-organizer candidate wanted a nation of organizers, and Hughes made that happen. Meg Galipault started the Obama volunteer group in Knox County, Ohio, a rural area about an hour from Columbus. The challenges there were intense: the rift in the Democratic Party between Clinton and Obama backers, the state's conservatism, the racism that occasionally surfaced. MyBO helped Galipault and her nervous volunteers find their way. "Instead of reciting a list of why we wanted people to vote for Barack, like we did for Kerry," she says, "we were told to ask what was important to people and listen to them." They fed back what they learned via MyBO and used that knowledge to create local service projects that continue to this day.

"People have always communicated, organized around campaigns," says Hughes. "We just made it easier." Even he is sometimes surprised by what the technology revealed. When he plugged his hometown's zip code into MyBO's event function toward the end of the campaign, he wasn't expecting much -- "they went pretty solidly for McCain there," he says with a smile. But search a 50-mile radius around 28601 and a different picture of Hickory emerges: Flag after flag pops up, indicating groups that organized for Obama. "I would never have guessed that they were there," he says. That may be the biggest lesson of the campaign: Trusting a community can produce dramatic and unexpected results.

From Issue 134 | April 2009

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Recent Comments | 48 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 | 48 Total

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