According to 2002 political science graduate Tucker Bounds, being the national spokesperson of a presidential campaign is a lot like running a startup in Silicon Valley.

Sound like an odd comparison? Not to Bounds, the former national spokesperson for John McCain during the 2008 presidential election and the current co-founder and president of Sidewire, a political communications startup based in Silicon Valley. 

“You pour yourself into it,” Bounds said of both positions. “It’s long days, it can be draining, it can be a difficult experience, but there’s no shortage of adrenaline.”

Bounds, who lived in Caswell and at the Lambda Chi Alpha house as a student, got involved in politics as a volunteer while still at the UO. Starting out with city council campaigns, Bounds worked his way up to assisting Greg Walden, BS ’81 on Capitol Hill, where he “merged mailing lists in a closet shared with two servers.”

When John McCain announced he was running for President of the United States, Bounds went to work for his campaign. When McCain became the Republican Party’s candidate, Jill Hazelbaker, BS ’03, McCain’s national communications director, enlisted her fellow Duck—just six years removed from his graduation—to serve as national spokesperson during the general election. 

“Myself and a few other members of our band of pirates started running the campaign's media out of DC,” he said.

Following the 2008 presidential campaign, Bounds went to work for Meg Whitman as her communications director during the 2010 California gubernatorial election, then moved on to Facebook where he served as the company’s director of corporate communications.

In 2014 he left Facebook to strike out on his own, and in partnership with Andy Bromberg launched Sidewire, an app that adds the “why” to the “what” of political news. Sidewire is a political news service that, in essence, has insiders from both sides of the aisle as commentators, adding context to stories beyond just what journalists include.

“We have representatives from Clinton to Bush to Rubio to Christie,” Bounds said of the app’s contributors. “David Axelrod, Dan Pfeiffer, Chuck Todd, Chuck Schumer, Speaker Boehner, university professors, and campaign planning experts are all stakeholders.”

Take, for example, a recent New York Times article about Paul Ryan becoming the next speaker of the House. Open the article in Sidewire, and you’ll see Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein, former director of communications for Rick Perry Eric Bearse, Washington Post reporter Paul Kane, University of Iowa associate professor Tim Hagle, and more weighing in on what Ryan’s move means for the Republican Caucus and for America. Those commentators don’t just add their own notes in a vacuum, either—they can also comment on each other’s thoughts, turning the app into a public conversation between industry experts.

While the spotlight may not be as glaring in Silicon Valley as compared to a presidential campaign, the pressure is just as real and the hours are just as long. However, said Bounds, eager to put himself through the wringer again, “I know for myself there’s nothing I’d rather do.”