Jared Kushner took a very Silicon Valley approach to running the Trump campaign
Kushner, who is Trump's son-in-law and the older brother of New York venture capitalist Josh Kushner, used techniques from the tech startup world to build Trump's campaign strategy almost from nothing, according to a new profile out from Forbes' Steven Bertoni.
"I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff," Kushner told Forbes. "They gave me their subcontractors."
But Kushner's work extended beyond calling in Silicon Valley's top talent - he began testing out tools known well to the tech community, but not as well to the world of politics, and ran the campaign with a lean startup mentality.
That ended up working to the campaign's advantage.
Targeted advertising over traditional spending
The campaign's approach took basic ideas common to the "lean startup" movement promoted by Silicon Valley gurus like Steve Blank and Eric Reis, where young companies try a lot of ideas in an attempt to find product-market fit, and quickly discard ideas that aren't working. This philosophy is often encapsulated in Facebook's early motto, "Move fast and break things."
As Kushner told Forbes, "We weren't afraid to make changes. We weren't afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn't working, we would kill it quickly," Kushner told Forbes. "It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked."
The campaign also used the kinds of technical tools that lean startups use to attract customers.
Early on, it avoided spending heavily on traditional (and expensive) advertising like TV and internet ads, instead going after social media audiences, and using machine learning to fuel its fundraising efforts and send out targeted ads. Among other things, Kushner built a geo-location tool using Google Maps API to plot location density for different voter types, like those worried about immigration or healthcare.
Kushner also tested out Facebook's ad targeting tools - which allow promotions to be shown to specific audiences - to help sell campaign merchandise like the "Make America Great Again" hats or promote videos of Trump talking to the camera.
"We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote," Kushner says. "I asked, How can we get Trump's message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?"
In the final days of the campaign, Kushner had spent so little money and relied so heavily on data, the campaign was able to unleash one last rallying cry in the form of on-the-ground volunteers and new, targeted TV ads.
It makes sense that Kushner adopted Silicon Valley tactics, as he has ties to several notable tech investors and CEOs, like his younger brother; billionaire investor and Trump transition team member Peter Thiel; and Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba and an investor in Kushner's real estate startup, Cadre.
Read the full interview with Kushner on Forbes here-->