Profile: Evan Burfield – 1776dc!

Profile: Evan Burfield – 1776dc!

Hollywood On Productions: Chris Brown & Janet Donovan
Video interview credit: Chris Brown

“I never know much about the industries I go into. I’m always the counter example to “You’re supposed to start companies in industries in which you have deep domain expertise.” I’ve never really done that,” said Evan Burfield over lunch at Lincoln.  Burfield is the innovator with his partner Donna Harris of 1776dc that challenges entreprenuers.

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Art work at Lincoln by Maggie O’Neill

Burfield was raised in Falls Church, Virgina. As he tells it, he was not a scholar but was a very good rower. He got into Dartmouth purely on the back of being able to row, then just decided that he didn’t want to go to college. He punted on that and ended up, right after he turned 19, founding an enterprise software company. “We raised a million dollars right out of the gate. The money then openly raised over the total life of the company about 20 million and grew it up to about 13, 14 million a year in revenue and then sold it in 2002. That was software that Bank of America, Ernst and Young used,” he explained.

“My girlfriend at the time was a year younger than me. She was still a senior in high school and I would hang out around her house all the time. Her father was retiring and was constantly complaining about the solutions available to help retirees. Those series of conversations led to an idea for a better way to model personal financial systems and then I went off and wrote a prototype. He knew a rich guy who owned a government contractor. We went and I pitched him. Rich guy wrote a check for a million dollars and …well……..rich guys are very important,” he emphasized.

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Evan Burfield

“It was an extremely rich learning period.  At 19, you really don’t know much of anything.  I really went through the process of figuring how you raise capitol, how you build product, how you market, how you do all these things, how you organize companies and staff meetings.

Then after that, I walked the earth for a year and traveled all around the world and thought about what I wanted to do next. One of my mentors strongly encouraged me to think about going back to school. I was very skeptical. I was like, “I can’t imagine sitting in a freshman, 300 person lecture class.”  He said I should really think about it because the system at Oxford is a very different model. I ended up applying. I got in and I still wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I remember him sitting me down and going,”You know Evan, you’re exceptionally good at convincing people that you’re right, but if you really want to be great, you would probably benefit from being right more often.”  I went, “That’s almost a compliment.”

Burfield went, had an absolute phenomenal time, did his Bachelor’s and Master’s at Oxford and studied philosophy, culture and economics. “The whole time I was captain of my college rowing team again and also headed up strategy and technology for private equity firms. I spent half the year in Oxford learning how the world works in a very theoretical way and then I spent the other half of the year traveling around the world actually analyzing markets and looking at companies to buy and restructuring technology, doing all that stuff.  It was another incredibly fertile period of learning about markets and capital.

I stayed for two years. After I left Oxford, it was really hard to come back …”

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“It was ironic because I graduated with a first class degree from Oxford. I won the thesis prize for top economics review. It was very interesting to go from being told my entire life through the end of high school that I was a complete screw-up and then to come out of Oxford with this “You’re a scholar.” I’m like, “Neither of these are probably particularly true.”

After I came back, I wanted to do something that was more at the junction of technology and entrepreneurship and some of these big public policy problems. It is a large part of driving me back to D.C .  I came back in ’07 and started a new company. I brought a lot of my old team from my previous company and we ended up building out a lot of the gov 2.0 platforms for the Obama administration. We built recovery.gov, built treasury.gov and did a lot of work on data.gov, and then a bunch of other less high profile projects. It was a lot of the “How do we bring the cloud into government? How do we make government data open and transparent? All of that stuff.

I did that until about two years ago, 18 months ago. I really wanted to get back into more pure product stuff. Right after, Start Up America reached out.

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Photo credit: Start Up America

Start Up America was created by a request from the President by the Kauffman Foundation, the Case Foundation, Steve Case Chairman, Scott Chase CEO. They were evolving their strategy so it was much more on the ground regional initiative. They were looking for somebody to be the D.C. initiative. They got a group of us together. I was the one who had just sold my company, had a fair amount of free time so I took that on and started working really closely with Donna Harris who led the regional initiative. She was the managing director at Startup America, focused on the region.

In retrospect, after the second time that Donna and I met, we knew that we were starting to think through something cool we could build together eventually. It certainly wasn’t called 1776 at that point, I don’t know that we absolutely knew what it was. We just could sense that there was tremendous potential in the D.C. region that wasn’t really being tapped into. The great thing about Startup America was that we were really digging into what makes D.C. unique and the challenges and the opportunities here and the whole region, while also spending time in Boulder, Chicago, New York and the Valley……… really looking at what are other cities are doing that’s working. What’s not working? How do we …..?”

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Burfield calls DC  “the center of power globally.”

“The startup community in Washington from the mid to late ’90s was the first real wave of activity.” he said. “Now it has been more about the fact that D.C. is a nice place to live that happens to attract a lot of technical talent, some of which is entrepreneurial. It never has been really tapped into what it is that makes D.C. globally unique as a city, so a lot of the underlying premise of 1776 is to make Washington a premier global nexus for startup innovation entrepreneurship. We have to really figure out how to bring those worlds together, really tap into a lot of these networks.

It took me a while to fully appreciate this, just how unbelievably fragmented Washington actually is, jurisdictionally fragmented. It’s amazing to me how hard it is for me to get my D.C. startup friends to rent the Zipcar and drive out to Tyson, as it is to get all of my Virgina startup friends who hang at the Power Club going, “There’s no entrepreneurs anymore.” There are, just not any at the Power Club in Tyson anymore. That is a challenge. Also, my whole K Street public affairs world of friends think startup stuff is cool, see it’s all happening in the valley, but then there’s this government contracting world which has had remarkably little overlap in the D.C. world. You’ve got the fragmented startup world.  You’ve got the real deep policy activities that are going on. You’ve got the embassy international world. There are points at which they sometimes cross but it’s amazing to me how much my deeply connected uber network friends in one world know no one in these other worlds.

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These unique assets are the general case and nexus of every major global corporation, particularly ones doing things in highly regulated industries and have a presence in Washington D.C.  There is tremendous media coverage.  It’s the third biggest market for reality TV production in the world. People don’t think about that stuff in Washington.”

“I met a beautiful Russian girl fives years ago and married her.  She works in micro-finance. We both work on programs that support entrepreneurs, just different types of entrepreneurs, different scales and different circumstances.

We’re certainly not big socialites, we just love the neighborhood. It’s amazing the number of our friends who all live within a few blocks of us. A lot of them are also leaders in the startup community too. We’re sort of millennial generation people, like the Logan Circle lifestyle. We were joking, 1776 is a six block walk from our house and within that six blocks is our yoga studio, our gym, Whole Foods, like 10 bars, 10 restaurants, pretty much everything that we would ever need on a day to day basis. We’re constantly exploring the never ending supply of new restaurants on 14th street. B2 is next on our list that my wife hasn’t checked off yet. We eat a lot at Taqueria Nacional, that’s our new favorite little local place.

I spend so much time professionally managing broad networks that personally its much more about deep relationships with a much tighter network of people that … a lot of them are also professional friends. A lot of yoga. I ride my bike a lot. I spend a lot of time riding up and down Rock Creek Park. We travel.

Hollywood on the Potomac sat down with Evan Burfield at the 1776dc headquarters.  Interview by Chris Brown.

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