Neither Pandemic Nor Recession Will Prevent This Stanford MBA From Doing A Startup

A self-confessed political junkie, who does a daily check of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Leff studied government at Cornell. “I saw how ridiculous and antiquated it is,” he says. “I used to work at a call center and you would randomly dial people around dinner time and hope that they would speak to you 30 minutes about who they planned on voting for. I got really good at rejection which helped me in my dating life but it just made me think about how to solve the problem.”

His thesis at Cornell explored the effects of exposing partisan Americans to unanticipated information about their political leaders. “You tell Republicans that more jobs were created under Obama and you tell Democrats that Obama deported more immigrants than Bush and find out how people process and respond to that information,” says Leff. “People would find interesting ways to reject the facts. When we told Republicans that Democratic presidents created more jobs, they would say, ‘Well the President doesn’t actually have that much control over job creation.’”

So when he arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2018, after spending two years at Goldman in impact investing and a summer at Peterson as a venture investor, Leff had decided to use his time at Stanford to incubate a polling startup. Unlike traditional pollsters who generally contact respondents by phone or pay for people to participate in their polls, Reality Check largely leverages Facebook and Instagram to reach people, often using entertaining ways to engage users, and builds viral tools to do so. Before the primary election in South Carolina, he collected political views by asking what kind of dogs different voters liked. “In our dog poll, we found out that only 40% of the people could even tell us that Pete Dog poll only 40 to 45% of people could even tell us that Pete Butticheg was the mayor of South Bend.

‘WE COMMUNICATE WITH VOTERS IN THE WAY THEY WANT TO BE COMMUNICATED WITH’

“What we do that is different is that we are communicating with voters in the way they want to be communicated with,” says Leff. “A lot of our polls are launched on social media. That brings entirely new people into the political conversation. In a traditional poll, they hang up on you at the end of the call. And that’s it. We ask would you like to continue to have your voice heard? And a lot of people say yes. About 40% will give us their email or phone number.”

While a poll to qualify for the Presidential debate stage had a sample size of only 298 people, he notes, the BuzzFeed quiz, “What type of potato are you?,” garnered more than 154,000 respondents.

So far, their polls have been picked up by the New York Post and CBS News. “After Andrew Yang dropped out of the race,” says Leff, “we emailed everyone and asked where their support had shifted. It was Bernie Sanders No. 1, Trump No. 2. That was in the New York Post and my dad went down to the newsstand and bought every copy he found find.”

‘THE KEY LEARNING: JUST GET OUT THERE AND START DOING IT’

He and his co-founder, Sam Riber, who had worked in M&A at Evolution Media Capital, have just finished the school’s iconic course for would-be entrepreneurs, Startup Garage, and has been testing his concept out there for the past two quarters.

“The key learning is to just get out there and start doing it. During the first few weeks, we wanted to perfect the poll and our acquisition strategy, and have the most beautiful website anyone had ever seen. And they teach you absolutely not. Just get out there into the field and start collecting data immediately. That was key learning number one.

“The second key learning is to always run experiments and learn from them. So we began running multiple polls in South Carolina with interesting results. And each poll taught us something new. We asked people, ‘Do you want to impeach President Trump?’ That question actually had the highest response from Republicans because people wanted to tell us how wrong we are and now we have their email addresses and their intention of voting. That is important data to have when Republicans are thinking about messaging or Democrats are thinking how do we change some of these beliefs with our political ads. So the concept of getting out there and experimenting was spot on.”

TEN DIFFERENT POLLS TO DATE

Two weeks ago, a Coronavirus poll done by Reality Check found that 30% of the people who live in New York had already lost all their income; 50% believed that supermarkets are likely or very likely to run out of food, and when asked their biggest concern due to the pandemic, 60% said that the potential for them or a family member to get sick was their biggest worry. Only 17% said a downturn in the economy was their most important concern, while only 9% identified food or supply shortages. At that time, two weeks ago, almost 50% of the respondents believed the government was under-reacting to the health crisis, while only 15% believes the government was over-reacting.

So far, Reality Check has launched ten different polls to date, two were focused on understanding Andrew Yang supporters and got the attention of CBS News. Leff is now busy looking for funding after investing under $10,000 of his own money into the venture. “We are early on in the initial fundraising process to get moving on the 2020 election,” he says.

One advantage, says Leff, is that “it is easy to be capital efficient with this kind of business because people assume that everyone is reading national polls. Nobody in politics cares about that. They care about 18 zip codes. Political scientists have narrowed the election down to 18 zip codes. It is the key swing suburban areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. That can make my work extremely efficient and lower the capital investment.”

Nonetheless, he concedes that given the health crisis and the recession raising money to hire a data scientist and built out his modeling capabilities will likely be his biggest challenge in getting Reality Check off the ground. But given the past success of Stanford MBAs raising money for startups, he’s at least in the right place to make a go of it.

Besides, laughs Leff, “nobody is going to question what you do in a recession or depression. If you work on a wacky idea, good for you.”

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