Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 5)

Lori Steele Contorer: We began to focus on United States for serving overseas and military voters. We did that because the numbers were staggering. 70% of the time that people tried to vote from abroad, their votes weren’t counted. That’s not because governments don’t count the vote unless they have to. That’s a misperception. Governments always have to account all the ballots that come in as long as they come in on time. Because of the challenges of voting from abroad with the mail, that wasn’t happening.

We helped to get a law passed in 2009 that required every State in the US to offer digital ballots to their overseas voters. They could still choose to vote by mail if they wanted to but we were going to give them the ability to offer a secure digital ballot. That’s where the big change in the market began. I’m beginning to see that sort of change not just in United States but internationally.

Sramana Mitra: We have no idea what the size is of your company or how you’ve grown through the years. I need something to anchor the story in.

Lori Steele Contorer: I could say that it took us years of piloting to have steady revenue growth. That is in part because we were too early to the market, trying to change something really significant, and focusing in the United States. We were doing it at a time that the market had just turned over nearly 100% of the systems.

Right around the time we started, something called Help America Vote Act was passed. It was passed because of the 2000 election. At that time, the Federal Government put $3 billion for the first time in history into voting systems in the States. The problem is the States bought 30 to 50-year old technology because we weren’t established enough to have been selling it to that market.

As we were bringing in our voting systems and saying, “We have a better product.” They’re saying, “It’s great but it turns out we don’t need a new product. We just spent $3 billion across the country on a new product.” We really struggled for years in getting people to adopt our systems. While we had only a couple of years to get to a million, we quickly dropped back beneath that and stayed flat in revenue for several years.

It wasn’t until we had this inflection point where we started doubling revenue almost regularly. The company has begun to grow significantly and it has been a long hard battle because of the state of the market at that time. Now, we’re at a point where all of those voting systems are reaching their life expectancy and everyone is very aware that buying hardware-based systems don’t make any sense. Now, we’ve hit an inflection point where we think going from single or double digit millions to hundreds of millions, or even billions, will happen in less than the next presidential cycle.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer
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