Founder, CEO of OpenGov to serve as 2018 Spring Commencement speaker for the Department of Government & Politics

When Zac Bookman (GVPT ’02) and his business partners first started telling people they were going to launch a company aimed at making governments more transparent, they were met with more than a little skepticism.

 

“We got laughed at a fair amount and heard a whole lot of ‘Nos’ and ‘Good luck with that,’” Bookman said.

 

Still, Bookman and his three co-founders from Stanford University were convinced they were on to something. They had discovered that most governments in the U.S. were operating with antiquated systems to store various types of important data, preventing them from accessing and analyzing it efficiently to make impactful decisions.

 

In 2012, the foursome started OpenGov...