Why corporate America wants Obama's tech team

In an effort to reelect President Barack Obama earlier this month, the campaign's technology leaders hired a crew of top-notch engineers from companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to build a new form of software used to engage voters, bring in volunteers and fund the campaign.

Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote about the 'dream team' and how they accomplished their primary goal:

Of course, the team's only real goal was to elect the President. "We have to elect the President. We don't need to sell our software to Oracle," Reed told his team. But the secondary impact of their success or failure would be to prove that campaigns could effectively hire and deploy top-level programming talent. If they failed, it would be evidence that this stuff might be best left to outside political technology consultants, by whom the arena had long been handled. If Reed's team succeeded, engineers might become as enshrined in the mechanics of campaigns as social-media teams already are.

We now know what happened. The grand technology experiment worked. So little went wrong that Trammell and Reed even had time to cook up a little pin to celebrate. It said, "YOLO," short for "You Only Live Once," with the Obama Os.

Madrigal will join The Daily Circuit Tuesday to talk about his story. Joshua Green, senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, will also join the discussion. He wrote about the corporations chasing after the Obama's campaign tech team.

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