Venture Capital Giant Marc Andreessen Joins Board of Government Transparency Startup

A Silicon Valley startup that sells financial reporting software to state and local governments has made room for tech investor and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen on its board of directors. 

OpenGov, the Redwood City, California-based company that recently raised $25 million from investors and venture capital firms including Ashton Kutcher and Andreessen Horowitz, counts the cities of Palo Alto, Miami and Pittsburgh among its 500 customers in 44 U.S. states. (Customers pay an annual or multiyear fee to subscribe to the software service and pricing is based on the size of the government's budget.)

According to chief executive and co-founder Zac Bookman, OpenGov's system is a "productivity platform" into which customers can funnel their financial data. OpenGov's technology helps users share that data with government employees internally, or with the general public, he said. Most customers have used it to track spending, but others have used it to visualize trends in water consumption or 311 calls, for instance. 

In an interview with Re/Code, Andreessen noted that systems such as OpenGov could provide "transparency for people who run government, and for citizens whose tax dollars are being spent."

“Government spending by law is supposed to be public — this is all tax dollars, this info is all public," he said to Re/Code. 

Though its advisers include two former U.S. treasury secretaries -- George Schultz and Larry Summers -- the company has yet to break into the federal market. However, Bookman said the company is engaged in conversations with various federal agencies.

Nextgov spoke with Bookman about OpenGov's upcoming plans. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

NG: Does Marc Andreessen's participation change your vision for the company?

ZB: It's a huge vote of confidence in the company and in the traction...It’s also a vote of confidence in the sector, call it "GovTech" or "CivTech," but the idea that governments of all shapes and sizes are embarking on a multiyear, or perhaps even a multidecade, trend to modernize their IT infrastructure. 

NG: Does FITARA, legislation that aims to reform federal IT spending, create an opportunity for OpenGov to sell to the federal market?

ZB: We are eager to have discussions with the agency leaders who want to bring in the top technology...to their organization and take advantage of the cloud or the provide cloud [so] they can understand where their money goes, [and] understand how they're performing and operating.

I think federal agencies are going to be most interested in 'how do we take advantage of top technology to empower our people'. Congress or some of these nonprofits are going to be more worried about transparency, and we can obviously be helpful there. But this is really going to be about 'how do we bring in the best data visualization, the best multifund accounting analytics, the best in performance analytics and benchmarking' so that we can understand how we're operating. 

NG: Does OpenGov try to connect government agencies with entrepreneurs or nonprofits who can make new services using their data?

ZB: We're a productivity platform for government. OpenGov is not a nonprofit; it’s not an activist entity. While we're fans of some of things going on [in open data], we also remain a little skeptical. It's really hard to build enterprise software, it's hard for nonprofits to do it . . . there's too much innovation that's required, too much investment and too much maintenance.