The FREOPP Brain Trust: Evan Baehr
Amidst all of Evan Baehr’s successes, his failures stand out even more.
Sure, Evan has degrees from Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. He has worked in the White House, at a hedge fund, and at Facebook. He wrote a No. 1 best-selling book on startups. And he has raised over $120 million for successful ventures.
But the best story about Evan begins in 2011, when he told Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg that he wouldn’t be going back to the company, because he had come up with a way to revolutionize the post office. Yes, the post office.
Baehr and a friend from Harvard Business School, Will Davis, had founded Outbox, a company with a digital alternative to postal mail that allowed people to never go to their physical mailbox again. The company promised to modernize one of the most antiquated features of the US government: a system in which letter carriers sort mail on what’s called a “Ben Franklin machine” because Franklin designed the one they still use.
Outbox built high-speed scanners, iPhone apps that decoded mailbox keys, and complex logistics systems. As they started to gain consumer buzz and loyal adherents, they were summoned by the U.S. Postmaster General to Washington, D.C. for a meeting. In the meeting, the “General” explained that Outbox was a threat to their main customers: junk mailers. Therefore, Outbox had to shut down. “You can have a thousand satisfied Uber customers show up at the Seattle city-council meeting,” Evan told the Wall Street Journal. “In taking on the federal government, it’s a 500,000-person organization.”
The Outbox experience refined and fueled Evan’s passion for building for-profit companies that solve complex social problems, an approach he first learned from his previous boss, Peter Thiel.
Evan sat down and co-authored a book — the best-selling Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams. He nurtured his love for public policy by working and serving on advisory boards for several think tanks: the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute.
In 2008, Evan founded the Teneo Network, convening a nationwide group of high-achieving Millennials “across art and finance, media and law, [and] medicine and entertainment” who are passionate about public policy from a free-market perspective.
As a member of FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, Evan has been an enormous resource, connecting FREOPP to some of the most talented public-spirited individuals of his generation. “No longer can defenders of the free market reprint old reports in sepia tone and hope that they will make a difference,” says Evan. “FREOPP will innovate not only in what it researches and how it communicates — yes, less sepia — but, more importantly, in how it operates organizationally.”
Evan lives in Austin with his wife, Kristina Scurry Baehr, a patent litigator; and children Cooper, Madeleine, Scott, and Eleanor.
Follow Evan on Twitter: @evanbaehr
