Corporate America has spent decades obsessing over every tick up or down of the stock market.
But increasingly, policy has become just as central to running an effective business, and companies need to keep a watchful eye on state and federal legislatures.
This can prove quite a headache. Last year, state legislatures introduced more than 135,000 bills; which is up more than 50% from 2024 — affecting everything industry from digital privacy to food delivery, flavored vapes, to whether you can ask for health advice from chatbots.
Tracking changes as bill progress can become something of a regulatory black box and in some states hearings are not even broadcast, requiring someone to be in the room to monitor.
One company is betting they can help by supporting local journalists, and they can give indications about how a bill is going to play out, which can often be more effective than hiring a fleet of lobbyists.
“Everything that Fortune 2000 companies do is through lobbyists. And lobbyists are both flawed, reactive instead of proactive, and are very expensive,” Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, told The Post.
“If the impact [of legislation] is obvious, you’re [more likely to] find out about it in time to impact it. But if the impact is subtle or nuanced, there’s almost no chance a company discovers this in advance, let alone has the opportunity to affect the legislation.”
To give companies an edge, Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures are among those who have invested in $70 million in State Affairs, a venture they hope will become the equivalent of Bloomberg Terminal for legislation and regulation.
The platform gives companies real-time visibility on bills, hearings, and policy developments across all 50 states and the federal government. Major corporations including Walmart, Mastercard, and McDonald’s have already signed on.
The company explains their edge is not just their AI dashboard, which lets companies sift through the information, but the human reporting and data gathering underneath it. They have 76 editorial employees embedded in state capitols, overseeing issues which many local news organizations can no longer devote full-time coverage to.
“I think of it as a tech company that’s founded in journalism,” Alison Bethel, the company’s founding editor-in-chief and chief content officer, told The Post, adding State Affairs is “putting journalists in places that have not had full-time 365-days-a-year journalists in a really long time.” Most months they publish more than 2,000 original reports.
State Affairs puts all of its information onto a single platform where customers can track bills, hearings, amendments, lawmakers, news coverage, hearing clips and policy trends.
“You can check in early and know when there’s movement towards, [for example,] outlawing flavored cigarettes… and know what that means for your business before it actually impacts your stock,” co-founder Jamie Roberts Seltzer added.
The dashboard lets users track issues that impact their industry — for example alcohol taxes for chains of restaurants and bars or AI and data center regulation for tech companies.
The platform can also pull out the most relevant moments from videos of hours-long hearings, compare similar bills across different states and assign bills a “momentum score” to show whether a proposal is gaining traction.
“You’re gonna see the majority of these organizations going from obsessing over financial markets to realizing if they engage in the democratic process they can actually have influence in a way that helps shrink the gap between what the voters want and what’s good for the organization,” Evan Burns, co-founder and CEO of State Affairs, told The Post.
“The states are moving so quickly and legislating so much,” Burns added. “Companies have gotta know what’s going on in real time, otherwise they’re behind.”
