Marci Harris is co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, the award-winning online advocacy platform that meshes real-time legislative data with users’ personal stories and sentiment in a format optimized for Congress.

She jokes that her “first startup was a town.” In 2004, an F4 tornado struck her town of Jackson, Tennessee, the night before an election for which she was running the campaign of the incumbent mayor. He directed her to “find out what people need and get it,” which led to a position as Tornado Recovery Coordinator for the long process that followed.

This taste of public service led her to law school and eventually to the LL.M. program at American University, where she specialized in administrative law, with internships for the U.S. Attorney in Memphis, Chief Judge of the West TN U.S. District Court, and the House Ways and Means Committee.

In 2007, she became Tax, Trade, and Health Counsel to Pete Stark and managed Medicare program integrity and transparency issues for the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee.

She left the Hill in February 2010 to co-found POPVOX, which won the SxSW BizSpark Accelerator startup competition in 2011 and was named one of seven Top Open Government Websites by Read Write Web. Marci serves on the board of LaunchTN, public-private partnership focused on supporting the development of entrepreneurship and high-growth companies in Tennessee. She is also a mentor at the Code for America Accelerator in San Francisco.