The entrepreneur
At 16, Kendall Tucker was already involved in politics, knocking on doors for the candidates she supported in her home state of Massachusetts. By the time she was 19, she was managing state senate races. At 20, she decided to run herself and was elected to local office. After college, she had to make a choice to stay in politics or to pursue another path.
Frustrated that most campaign dollars are spent on television advertising rather than more effective door-to-door outreach, Tucker decided to take another path, joining the advisory firm Parthenon Group to figure out what was next. That road quickly led her back to politics.
While in her management consulting job, Tucker worked with some friends to put together a software platform called Polis, that automated much of what campaigns needed to go door-to-door and win. Tucker got seven local city council members to use her platform and they all won re-election by at least 20 percent. In 2015, the presidential campaigns of the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein signed on to use Polis, as well as 107 other political organizations. Polis had clear traction in politics, but, after speaking to a large security company eager to use the product, Tucker explored an even larger opportunity: Selling to corporations that rely on door-to-door marketing to make sales.