The Billion-Dollar Startup That Quietly Makes America Run â The Information
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In 2012, Joe Lonsdale and his co-founder, Zac Bookman, started OpenGov with a fairly straightforward idea. âWe thought thereâs room for something to really help governments run a lot better,â said Lonsdale, whoâs also a venture capitalist and a Palantir co-founder.
Since then, theyâve found plenty of room in that market of selling software to local municipalitiesâenough to fetch a 10-figure valuation: Days ago, OpenGov sold itself for $1.8 billion to Cox Enterprises, an Atlanta conglomerate run by a family of billionaires that owns a varied collection of things, such as Axios, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, Autotrader and Dealertrack, a maker of software for car dealerships. Their century-old wealth traces back to progenitor James M. Cox, a media titan and one-time Democratic presidential nominee.
The OpenGov deal is remarkable both in terms of when it happened (during a time of limited M&A) and whoâs involved (a pile of boldface names, like OpenGov board members Marc Andreessen and former Cisco CEO John Chambers). Intrigued to learn how a humble maker of government software turned into a unicorn, I spoke with Lonsdale about OpenGovâs origin, sale and future. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed, appears below.
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