PAT:
Welcome to this episode of Like A Glove, the startup podcast about product-market fit. I’m your host, Pat East, and we are recording here in the podcast studio from The Mill in Bloomington, Indiana. Today’s guest is Josh Owens.
JOSH:
Hey, thanks for having me.
PAT:
So let’s start with a little bit of background on you. Your two most recent roles were as CEO of a tech company and as a gubernatorial candidate for the State of Indiana. So talk about running for governor. Running a campaign is very much like a startup. In any startup, the founder has an insight into the market. They feel like they can solve a problem that nobody else can. And so, let’s talk about a campaign like that. What moment or series of events led you to the decision to run for governor?
JOSH:
Yeah, I think in Indiana, we’ve had a generation of effectively the same, literally in a lot of cases, the same people running for office. And more generally, the same type of person running for office, same type of background, the same type of experience. And that’s not necessarily bad. By no means am I like a revolution, throw everything out type of person. But when it comes to public policy, when it comes to representation of individuals across the state, I really do believe that you want the biggest diversity of people running as possible. You want the biggest backgrounds.
PAT:
You want more points of view, right?
JOSH:
You want more points of view and you want that at the table because policy impacts everyone in a different way. And so you’ve got to have those perspectives there. At a minimum, they’ve got to be listened to, but I think it’s more beneficial when they’re actually at the table making those decisions.
And so, that’s just a theory I’ve always had. I just believe in that. And then from a more personal perspective, I’m a member of the LGBTQ community here in Indiana. It’s no secret that Indiana has not been—
PAT:
We’re not friendly.
JOSH:
The most friendly or welcoming place for queer individuals. And 2015 was kind of a watershed moment with—
PAT:
RFRA.
JOSH:
With RFRA. And honestly, the response to it from a state level over the last number of years has been slow, bungled, not great. It’s just a bad tone. It’s not welcoming. It’s not exciting. I can speak from that from the perspective of a gay Hoosier, but you talk with minorities in Indiana, you talk with women in Indiana, you know, you talk about people who didn’t have a chance to go to the college that they wanted to in Indiana . . . There’s a lot of people who have been left behind or their voices just haven’t been heard.
And my view was that doesn’t change unless people who have some of those experiences get out there and put their name on the ballot and try to spread those conversations. It’s not an easy thing, especially in Indiana. I was running as a Democrat. It’s a fairly conservative state, although a winnable statewide race. And so, if it wasn’t winnable, I wouldn’t have gotten in, but I certainly did think that it was winnable, but it’s uphill. And so it’s really about going out there and helping people understand who you are, helping people understand why you’re doing it. And then, the third thing is trying to connect with a set of not just issues, but principles that speak to, I think, a better version of what we all can be. And in politics, I guess the thing that . . . It’s very much like a startup, because you’re doing all of those things simultaneously.
PAT:
You’re doing all the things at once, right?
JOSH:
And it’s under-resourced. The other thing that’s different compared with the company is you really only have one day to go to market. Truthfully, while you can try to read the tea leaves, you can try to get a lot of support. You can certainly get a feel from fundraising, from how people are talking about you on social media, how many people are showing up to your events, all those types of things. There’s certainly signals that you get, but you don’t really actually get an opportunity till you get people going to vote. And so, it’s a little bit of an odd business because you’ve set the whole thing up to expire on some certain day. It’s a similar management type of situation, but the dynamics are a little bit different.
PAT:
So I have a bunch of questions from all that. That’s really, really fascinating to me. So in terms of the state-level response to RFRA from a moral perspective, like, humans are humans. Like we should all just be inclusive. There’s good business reasons, too. Right? So if you’re super capitalistic and you are very, very focused on money, then you want as many perspectives at the table as possible because you’re right, policy in the government impacts everybody, but everybody is your market at some point. And so, how do you understand your market a little bit better?
So there’s really good business reasons for inclusion as well, but just from a big-picture perspective, RFRA was not a good look for Indiana. So I’m glad that folks like you decided to step up and try to lead the charge.
JOSH:
Thank you.
PAT:
Yeah, absolutely. And so, it sounds like the pain you were trying to solve in the market, so to speak, among voters was you wanted to make sure that there were more voices at the table. You wanted to make sure that there was somebody that was quite literally different or the type of person was different who’s running for governor. I mean, it was Mitch Daniels, 10 or 15 years. Probably a little bit longer than that maybe.
JOSH:
16 years ago was when he first ran.
PAT:
Okay. So it was Mitch Daniels and then Mike Pence was his Lieutenant Governor. Right?
JOSH:
He was. And he was a Congressman at that time, but he was—
PAT:
Oh, that’s right.
JOSH:
He was effectively the only candidate who ran after Mitch Daniels.
PAT:
So he was pretty high up in the leadership at the federal level.
JOSH:
Yeah, he was.
PAT:
And then the current governor, Eric Holcomb, was a chief of staff for Pence. Is that—
JOSH:
He was the chief of staff for Mitch Daniels, I believe. And then he was a Lieutenant Governor for Pence.
PAT:
Okay. Thank you for correcting me. I was in the right ballpark, but I started on third base instead of going to first. So yeah, it was definitely a lot of the same types of folks. And so, you really wanted to make sure you brought a different perspective. I think it’s really interesting how you think about this as you only have one opportunity to go to market. Right. And like you said, you can try to read the tea leaves and get signals from social media, can get signals from people who are going to your events. But even the events there are people who already like you, right?
JOSH:
Yeah.
PAT:
And so it’s not like you can just go to one event and say, “Hey, we’ve got a hundred people there and the next event, great, we got 110 people there.” Right? You really have to convert those folks who haven’t converted. And so in terms of product-market fit, how do you find those folks to convert that aren’t already on your side?
JOSH:
Yeah. It’s a great way of looking at it. And it’s very much the way that I was looking at this race as well. The limiting factor within politics is effectively, we’ve got a two-party system. And while both parties, even at the state level, are relatively weak, you do get a lot of hierarchy. You get a lot of people who have been in the system for a long period of time who have entrenched interest in either changing the system or keeping the system the way that it has been. And so, one of the central tensions that I think you see on both parties right now, but I certainly saw as I was running, is I looked at this race, and if you look at the numbers, it’s just evidently clear the way for a Democrat to win in Indiana is to bring about 200,000 new voters to the table statewide.
And you either get those new voters from people who have not voted before, which is certainly a pool of people that you can inspire and get excited. Those will tend to be younger voters. Those will tend to be minority voters. And that’s great. And then you also effectively have to convert some percentage of people who either have been disaffected or have voted Republican or have voted for Donald Trump. And you have to bring them over to that Democratic side and you have to basically build a permission structure for them to be able to do that without necessarily reorienting their entire identity or self or how they see themselves within the community. So that’s kind of the central challenge.
PAT:
That sounds pretty daunting.
JOSH:
Yeah, it is.
PAT:
That sounds like a lot of work.
JOSH:
Yeah, it’s really difficult. And you’re trying to do that at the same time that you’re trying to lock down your traditional base of supporters, within the Democratic Party. And so there’s a little bit of tension there because you’re trying to simultaneously get that locked down, but bring new people in. And there’s a bit of sequencing situation you have to run into and you have to work around.
From my perspective, we started the campaign from that perspective and basically running a general election campaign. And the hope was that if we were able to get it close, that me being young, having a nontraditional background, having a teaching background, having a running a business background, would start to get a number of things to break in our way. And we certainly saw some signs of that. But the thing that you have to do in a startup is you got to fund the thing.
And in Indiana, when you’ve had 16 years of the same party in control, even if you’ve got some people who don’t necessarily agree with all of their policies, kind of makes good business sense for a lot of those people to donate and to keep those individuals in power. And so you’ve got to have a really compelling case to not just keep them from not giving to anyone, but also bring them over. I think we had the start of that. We had all the pieces of it, but we couldn’t quite get the funding piece to click into place. And so effectively, we’re constantly running with just enough money to get to the next day. As anyone who’s run a startup and has had that experience, that is a painful experience. It’s tiring. And you get into the race trying to change, not just a set of views, but a set of policies.
And so, from my perspective was also looking around and saying, well, if we’re not able to get that financial support that we need, we had enough to be able to continue to be competitive, but not enough to just super break out, what’s the best way to be able to move that forward? And so that’s when we had chosen to pull out of the race and support the last Democrat who was running, Dr. Meyers in this case. And while that’s a difficult decision, it really goes back to that product-market fit in that you have a fleeting amount of time to be able to build that support. And so, you’re trying to do all those pieces at the same time. It’s like a startup on steroids. And so, that’s really fun. I love that part of it.
PAT:
That’s a fun problem to solve.
JOSH:
Yeah, exactly. Obviously from my perspective, I wish things had worked out slightly differently. I think we were there. There was certainly a case to be made that you could just keep going after it. And maybe some time down the road, the financial piece hits in place and you get that swell of donations that really changes the game. I think that possibly could have been the case, but you got to make the right decision for the moment and make sure that you’re still building as big of a movement as possible. And sometimes that’s leading it. Sometimes that’s trying to consolidate it behind someone else.
PAT:
For this startup, you had two constraints. One was, you’ve got the election, right? You have to have everything in place in order to win it. You have to have everything in place on that particular day, but you also have the constraint of money. And that’s not just a capital constraint, that’s a time constraint for you because you’re living right up until the next event or the next big push within the campaign. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
For you to create this “permission structure,” as you called it earlier, where you want folks to come to your side without having to change completely how they think about things, right? You want to literally give them permission to vote for somebody that may not look like them or 100% agree with them. I would assume that’s the case on the other side, too, and why some many politicians continue to win because they’ve built up 5, 10, 15, 20 years of quote unquote permission of, “Okay. Yeah. I voted for this person.” There’s that inherent permission built in where, “Okay, I’m just going to keep voting for them.” And so, at what point do you think you would have gotten more permission from folks? Is it a watershed moment where just all of a sudden the dam breaks and you start getting more donors in or are there signals up to that point that make you believe, okay, that watershed moment is coming?
JOSH:
Yeah, I think in politics, particularly running a campaign, it does tend to be watershed moments and not unsurprisingly. I mean, you can certainly have them around a launch and have them around some exogenous change in the market. Your competitor does something horribly idiotic or something like that, and those happen, those are real. There’s primary elections. And then there is a component of momentum that can begin to create that, that certainly on the national level, you can see that a little bit clearer because there’s so much media trained on it, that when those things do happen, they tend to happen pretty quickly and publicly.
When you get down to state and local elections, that’s a little bit harder to follow, because it’s not that there’s no press around it, but as a candidate, you’re doing everything you can to create the story as well. So I think that those things, those are important parts of it. And I think when you’re trying to build that base, certainly money matters. And in the way that our elections are structured now, particularly post–Citizens United.
In Indiana, for example, where there’s unlimited individual contributions in our state level, it really puts a premium on coming to the table with either your own large set of money that you’re willing to put into it, or a few set of individual backers who are going to really change the game for you. And that either happens from the start or you’re able to win them over and have those kinds of dynamic changes that . . . Then it becomes a little bit dominos. If you get two or three of those, then you really can go to the next 10 and say, “Well, she’s already on board helping us. Can you help?”
PAT:
Sure.
JOSH:
So you tend to get that. Not too dissimilar from fundraising for a startup or something like that, but the timeline is certainly much more compressed. And I think the final thing with all of that is with the startup, it’s interesting because certainly it’s SupplyKick, I was out there, there was press around Josh Owens as the CEO of SupplyKick. So there’s a certain amount of that that exists, but really the brand is still the company. When you’re running for office—
PAT:
The brand is you.
JOSH:
The brand is you.
PAT:
100%.
JOSH:
And in every single article, if you’ve been in it for a long time, you’re probably used to it. If you’re in it for the first time, you go through that tension period of like, oh, I’ve got a lot of people speaking for me. And it’s not some brand that they’re speaking about. It’s my name. And that’s what’s going to continue to be there long after the campaign is over, whether you’re successful or not. And so, you have those dynamics to be able to manage at the same time.
PAT:
And so, as you’re trying to create this story about you and maybe trying to manufacture some of these watershed moments, right? You’ve got primary election, you’ve got the launch and maybe some of these other things. It occurred to me, is that why creating these watershed moments, is that why endorsements are important, because you can kind of manufacture them on your own? You get permission from this other person’s voters to start voting for you. It creates another story that you can tell by yourself?
JOSH:
Yeah, they certainly helped for that. Endorsements seemed to be an inside game because they tend to not matter that much to the general public, but you certainly can use them for fundraising and for individuals.
PAT:
And then, that creates the watershed moment. One on one, when you’re talking with somebody who may be a big backer, that changes a little bit of the narrative to say, “So-and-So is on board, will you be?” But it matters less for your ultimate market in terms of voters.
JOSH:
Yeah, I think that’s very true. I think you see that national level for the most part, and certainly at a state level. Locally, I think that’s the case. Where I might just expand on a little bit is I think one of the things, especially in a state like Indiana, where I guess that Hoosier hospitality can sometimes be taken very seriously by people, right? Just very kind in general, right? Which is great. It’s a fantastic thing to have, but it also tends to mean that you’ve got a lot of people who have important voices in the community, who for any number of reasons can talk themselves into a box and not want to say publicly who they’re supporting. And those endorsements act as both a useful thing for watershed moments and to be able to change people’s opinion and fundraising, but it also gives you as a candidate, when you’ve got those individuals out there publicly, that gives you that momentum that you need individually to be able to say, “Oh yeah, I’m not crazy. We’re actually doing something that matters.”
And people are, you’re seeing that they’re along for the ride and they’re willing to be out there and say that as well. And so I do think that they have an individual impact on the race as well. That might be more important from being able to continue that campaign in a useful, supportive direction.
PAT:
Almost a mental, moral support. If you are the campaign, you matter as a person.
JOSH:
Yeah.
PAT:
It’s not just, you’re a zombie and you’ve got this staff around you. Like you have to be motivated to continue the slog and continue building this machine.
JOSH:
Exactly. If you think about a startup, for example, most startups have a board. If you’re CEO of a company, you’ve got some sounding board to be able to run off of. On a campaign, again, it’s you and the staff. And so, you’re managing all those different pieces. You’re out there doing a lot of publicity and those type of pieces, but what’s often lacking, unless you’ve got a real strong party structure, in that case, is that board to be able to . . . So effectively, those endorsements in some ways become that board of, “Yeah, hey, I’ve got that feeling that there’s others along.”
Certainly as a candidate, you get that feeling when you’re out there and you walk into a room of 50 people and two weeks ago, that place was only 20 people. You can see those individually, but it is certainly a situation in which you question yourself a lot, because at the end of the day, it’s your voice. And so, you get to a place where you have to trust a lot of people, but it is hard to know that when you’re right in the middle of it, if you’re speaking with the clarity that you think that you are, and when you’re not. And even more importantly, when you know that you’re not, being able to find your footing to start doing stuff.
PAT:
Start doing it.
JOSH:
And that’s a difficult thing to do, and you got to have some really helpful people along with the ride with you.
PAT:
You mentioned tension a handful of times throughout this podcast. So I want to ask a couple of questions about that. In this case, when you’re running for governor, you really can’t switch the market, right? Your market is voters of Indiana. You can try to find disaffected voters to maybe switch from Republican to Democrat. You can find folks who don’t vote, but really your market is still literally all of Indiana. And so, you can’t switch the market.
That’s product-market fit. There’s only a couple of variables in there. And so you have to switch the product, which would be you and your campaign.
JOSH:
Yep.
PAT:
Just talk to me in general about the tension of doing that. How much do you change about your beliefs or how you message those beliefs so that the market, which literally can’t change, you change your product, but not change it so much that you’re just telling voters whatever they want to hear?
JOSH:
Yeah. Effectively where you can find more people and persuade them.
PAT:
Yes. Absolutely.
JOSH:
Well, I think you set it up the right way. You do have two options, you can either change who you are and your beliefs. And that certainly happens in some ways. And in some times that happens for a healthy reason. I mean, when you’re running for office, you get more information than you’ve ever gotten in your life. You’re getting information from everyone. And so, there’s times when you do look at it, you’re like, ah, maybe I wasn’t looking at that the right way.
PAT:
Yep, yep. Now I have a more informed decision. I’ve got more information. I’ve talked to these folks, absolutely.
JOSH:
So there are healthy times where that can happen, but generally, I think for all the reasons that we all would agree with, that you don’t want to see someone doing that a lot. And I certainly didn’t do much of that in the campaign. I think the second version that you’re bringing up, which is a lot more true, you start looking at saying, well, here’s generally what I’m trying to achieve and what are the other ways that I can talk about this, that I can contextualize it, that I can connect it to you as an individual that makes you either more receptive to it or more interested or really connects in a visceral way that makes you so energized that you’re going to go tell people about us and post on social media about us and maybe donate?
And I think the thing that I loved the most about running for office is it’s just real time. You can test things today and figure out from a messaging standpoint if that connects with people or if it doesn’t. You can do that with your email list. You can do that in events that you’re at. You can do that with articles that are being written about you in the press. And so that’s really exciting. And I think that’s a lot of fun. And I think that’s really probably where we played around with it the most in the campaign.
We tested a lot of different types of messages, not changing the core focus of what those were trying to achieve, but what were the better ways to talk about it? Maybe the best specific example was really around my education platform. Education is over 50% of the state budget. It is the single-most important thing that the governor is in charge of, especially in Indiana, where we’re consolidating all education policy under the governor’s office, starting in 2021.
Rightfully, that was both one of the things that pulled me into the race, because of my background and expertise in it, both teaching and from a policy perspective. But truthfully, looking at our state and saying, we could be doing so much better across the state for all of our students. So we really fashioned up a policy proposal that was all encompassing, that had a lot of meat on the bones. The flip side of that is when you’ve got something that has a lot of meat on the bones, there’s a lot of different ways you can talk about that.
And so, I probably went through 15 different iterations of what I led with when I talked about the policy, how I talked about it, what I got super energetic about versus what I tried to talk about in detail. And it probably took . . . I really wish it would have happened faster, but it probably took me a good two months and I knew it intimately. So it wasn’t a spectrum of like horrible to great, but it was a spectrum of like, we started good, and it really took two months for me to be able to get to a place where I was talking about that in a way where I could walk into a room, I knew what to expect of what I could get out of people. And 90% of the time could connect and get them to the place where they were viscerally energized about what we were trying to do.
PAT:
90% seems really high.
JOSH:
Yeah.
PAT:
And I would think that in a lot of the cases you said, “Hey, I wish I could have done this faster than two months,” but I would think that in a lot of cases, you’re not talking to the same types of people every night. So it’s not like you’re just saying, okay, let me take another stab at this. It’s let me take another stab at it with a completely different audience. It’s let me figure out the right messaging that hits for them personally. That seems . . . The whole things about running for governor seems daunting to me. That’s the thing that I keep coming back to is it’s just a lot of work and a lot of problem solving.
JOSH:
It is. And that was the part that was scary to me, but it was also the part that was exciting and interesting and a worthy challenge and something that very clearly can make a giant impact. Not just from winning, which obviously I wanted to do, but came up short, and in also being able to have a voice at the table. And I think one of the things that I really do like about politics is that it is a startup, and it’s why I encourage as many people from as many different backgrounds to run. Young, older, all types of things. Have your voice out there, in the school board race, in the local city council races, in the congressional races, in the state house races, and governor races.
It’s incredibly important because it’s in running, it’s in the campaign where you’re traveling around, talking about ideas, talking about lived experiences and how to make that life better. And if you’re lucky, you get an opportunity to win and have that position and actually enact those things. But the inspiration, the ideas, those all come from the campaign. And that’s why I think it’s really fantastic when we have a lot of really great, smart, diverse people out there having those conversations around campaigns.
PAT:
It brings everybody together, starts to create a coalition, and starts to move forward ideas. Really, one last question. Your campaign seemed to be focused around education. And okay, everything is going to consolidate under the governor in 2021. And so, what do you think the market, meaning the voters of Indiana—I mean, that’s what you felt they needed, right? What do you feel like they actually want, though? Do they want that? Do they want something else? I’ve got a 14 year old or an eight year old, like hey, what’d you have for breakfast this morning. Pop tarts, this granola thing with chocolate on it. Hey, how about you maybe have something that’s not so sugary? And I’m not saying obviously the voters of Indiana are kids, but kind of that same thing. What do they want versus what do they need?
JOSH:
Yeah. You struggle with this a lot when you’re running a campaign, because it’s hard to know if you’re speaking to the right desire. If you’re telling people what you think we need to do, and you’re trying to bring them along, or if you’re trying to meet people where they are and inspire that.
And probably truthfully, successful politicians are ones who can do both. And I think we had moments where we did do that. I think we were 100% spot on, on the issue. The main issue in Indiana in the 2020 election is going to be education, specifically public education, specifically funding, both for in classroom education and for our teachers, paying them what they deserve. And that is not just because it impacts our future generation. But from a community development standpoint, paying our teachers more puts more money into every single one of our communities all across the state. And because teachers tend to live in the communities where they teach, it is a direct economic impact.
PAT:
It circulates all that money within the community.
JOSH:
Yes.
PAT:
Absolutely.
JOSH:
And so it’s not just building a better future, educating our kids, but it’s also about community development. And really, that was the story that we were telling it and why we’re so focused on a minimum $50,000 compensation package for all teachers. Why we were looking at $300 million a year to put into public education. Why we were looking at those reforms, and that was connecting with people. What I think at the end of the campaign I got much better at, though, was you can have all of those policies. You can have all of those ideas.
And people do want them and they respect them. And that matters. You can’t have nothing. Like you have to have that as a base, but what they really want is to be inspired by what they’re living in. They want to know that there’s a future that is exciting, that will keep their kids there when they get to decide where they want to live, that gives them individually more options.
And generally, that they don’t always have to agree with, but they feel like they’re included. And I think a lot of today’s politics can be, “Well, we’re going to include these people at the expense of those people.” And what I got much better at certainly towards the end of the campaign was being able to talk about a set of principles for Indiana. Being able to talk about a set of values, being able to talk about a vision for Indiana that was much more inclusive than things that I’ve heard from politicians in the state. And that was exciting. And that was a fun opportunity. And those were the times when I would walk out of the room and get back in the car to drive three and a half hours back to Indianapolis and just feel really great about the experience.
PAT:
Feel good about it, yeah.
JOSH:
Yeah. And just be really inspired. And I do firmly think that at the end of the day from politicians, that is what they’re looking for. They want them to be leaders within the community who can inspire them and help them see, even if they maybe don’t believe it yet, help them see a future that is just a little bit better than what they have today. And if you can do that and back it up with policies and bring that right tone and that right leadership, I think that’s where you get a really awesome leader that goes down in history for helping change that community. And it was part of the conversation this time around. We’ll see what happens in the future. But I do think I certainly learned a lot of those lessons.
What’s fun for me, and this is just probably in closing, something that I’ve always found that’s been useful for me. I’ve taught in colleges, I’ve run startups, I’ve been involved in politics and in policy. And all of those to me have always seemed very entrepreneurial. And the number of lessons that I took from teaching in a classroom to running a company was all about communication and how to manage teams.
And from a campaign running this, all these last parts that we just talked about, I’m so excited for this next thing that I’m going to take on in life, because I get to bring all of those experiences and those learnings to this next venture, whether it’s an organization, another startup, something in academia, or something in politics. I think we’re better when we’ve got a diverse set of experiences. Not just for people at the table, but also individually. It’s probably the liberal arts side of my background.
PAT:
Wabash College.
JOSH:
Yeah, it’s just continue to be a strong part of it. And I can confidently say after that experience, I still believe that to be the case. And so, I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to do it. I’m glad that people invited me in for six months across to Indiana to have those conversations. I certainly am better for it. And I hope the overall conversation is, too.
PAT:
Well, I think that’s a great way to end the podcast. I love that your perspective on voters and politicians is people just want to be inspired to know that their life, their future is going to be better. And how do we help them do that? And how do we create policy around making lives better for everybody? I think that’s a really good message.
JOSH:
Thanks.
PAT:
Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast today. Really appreciate it. If folks want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way they can do that?
JOSH:
You can find me on social media for I think just about everything would be @JoshuaDOwens and feel free to reach out either Twitter, Instagram, anything in between.
PAT:
Awesome. Thanks very much. I appreciate it.
JOSH:
Cool. Thank you.
Like a Glove is a production of The Mill, a coworking and business incubator space in Bloomington, Indiana. Our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies, and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. You can learn more about The Mill at dimensionmill.org. Thanks for listening and be sure to check back every other Monday for new episodes.