We are thrilled to announce that we just closed $500,000 in funding from a handful of angel investors including Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and the chief online organizer for Obama's 2008 campaign. Ramin Bastani orchestrated this first round of funding. He is a good friend and the founder of Qpid.me, a brilliant mobile health startup dedicated to stopping the spread of STDs.

With all that money in the bank, Jesse and I just doubled the size of our team! Adriel Hampton will be our chief organizer, and Jacob Green will be our super smart math and engineering wizard. They both officially start next week.

Adriel previously worked in the San Francisco City Attorney's Office and is well known in the Gov 2.0 community for his Gov 2.0 Radio show, the SF Tech Dems, and all kinds of conferences and meetups. He drew national attention with his social media fueled campaign for Congress in 2009 and was actually the first candidate to ever use NationBuilder, an early incarnation back when I was still imagining how this might one day work. He brings a unique breadth of experience, passion, and personality to this critical role. I know you will all enjoy working with him. Read more from Adriel.

Jacob is from MIT and comes from a background writing code for cryptography software and high volume ad servers. He will be working on our backend infrastructure and crunching the analytics to make your dashboard even more addictive.