The Billion-Dollar Startup That Quietly Makes America Run

In 2012, Joe Lonsdale and his co-founder, Zac Bookman, started OpenGov with a fairly straightforward idea. “We thought there’s room for something to really help governments run a lot better,” said Lonsdale, who’s also a venture capitalist and a Palantir co-founder.

Since then, they’ve found plenty of room in that market of selling software to local municipalities—enough to fetch a 10-figure valuation: Days ago, OpenGov sold itself for $1.8 billion to Cox Enterprises, an Atlanta conglomerate run by a family of billionaires that owns a varied collection of things, such as Axios, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, Autotrader and Dealertrack, a maker of software for car dealerships. Their century-old wealth traces back to progenitor James M. Cox, a media titan and one-time Democratic presidential nominee.

The OpenGov deal is remarkable both in terms of when it happened (during a time of limited M&A) and who’s involved (a pile of boldface names, like OpenGov board members Marc Andreessen and former Cisco CEO John Chambers). Intrigued to learn how a humble maker of government software turned into a unicorn, I spoke with Lonsdale about OpenGov’s origin, sale and future. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed, appears below.