sevenFOUR
Team Bios
Joshua Woodford
Last year, Josh and his and his wife Allison sat down to discuss who they should vote for in the important and rapidly approaching mid-term elections. They found they didn’t know where to begin. They didn’t end up voting, and they deeply wished there were an easier way to learn about the issues and the candidates who stood for the positions they believed in.
Josh graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in Political Science. He worked for a short time in the US Senate, followed by two years at Goldman Sachs and two years marketing a highly successful technology startup. Josh will graduate this year in strategic management with the Wharton MBA class of 2011.
Keya J. Dannenbaum
Keya studied international relations at Stanford and spent the next two years abroad working for non-governmental organizations first in Bogota, Colombia (as a Fulbright Scholar) followed by Mumbai, India (as a Melman Fellow). She returned to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in politics at Princeton, but quickly discovered that the academic life was not for her. She left after two years and with a master’s degree to join Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She stayed in politics for three years, eventually rising to the level of campaign manager. She is currently studying entrepreneurship in the Wharton MBA class of 2012.
Keya’s favorite class in Ph.D. school explored the sharp divide between the ideals of democratic theory and how people actually vote (or, rather, don’t) in practice. She is thrilled to put her energies towards developing a service to bridge that lamentable gap.
Paul A. Jungwirth
Paul got his start in computers with a Tandy 1000 at age seven; he still remembers when he realized the purpose of GOSUB (“Why would I want to GOTO…and then come right back again?”). In high school Paul and a friend launched a company connecting BBSes to Internet services like FTP and Gopher. He has spent the last 10 years building professional web applications in Boston and studying at Harvard, and he is currently earning a Classics Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
Paul believes in sevenFOUR because it solves a problem that plagues American politics with a simple solution: information. When information is free people become free. This is what the original MIT hackers believed, and this is was we see today in revolutions fought with blood yet facilitated by that most “trivial” of internet applications, Twitter. If representative government is only as good as citizens’ knowledge, our contribution is to offer that knowledge in an easy, fun way, and in so doing spark new enthusiasm for good governance at home and even around the world.
Fun Facts
- Keya: Loves Elvis Presley, Manchester United and Voting
- Josh: Has two little girls, bakes fresh bread every week, and rides a scooter to school.
- Paul Jungwirth: Dosen’t have a spleen. Hosts ancient Greek scrabble nights with a set from Thessaloniki. Brews his own beer
Business Summary
SevenFOUR is a voter-candidate matching platform that connects voters to national, state and local candidates on the basis of issue priorities and solution preferences.