Tom Temin: You were a long time lawyer. Seven years at the Justice Department and at state level. What are you doing here? What have you built?

Brian Levine: Well the interesting thing is, what we built is just simply a directory for government and military professionals, former government and military professionals. It’s not limited to federal, but it’s federal, state, local, tribal and foreign, meaning outside the United States government and military professionals. And the idea is to make it easier for people to find them and for them to be found.

Tom Temin: Is it all in the legal domain?

Brian Levine: No, it’s not just in the legal domain. We have initially focused in the legal domain because that’s who I know and that’s my background. I know how to help these people. But there are government workers on the federal, state, local, foreign and military level that do all kinds of important work, that have all kinds of expertise, knowledge and insights. And we want them all to be able to find and be found on the platform.

Tom Temin: And what is your methodology? Because there are social platforms. Everybody’s on LinkedIn, which is becoming kind of a professional Facebook, if you look at all the braggadocio on there. But I mean, how do you get this information?

Brian Levine: Yeah, it’s a great question. So first of all, the members have to join themselves. So we are not reaching out and pulling people’s information from different places. One of my focus is within the law and within consulting is data privacy. And so I don’t want people’s information that they don’t want to provide and they don’t want to make public. All the information we make public is the information they give to us and they make public. And you’re right, people are on social networks all over the place. And I’ve talked to hundreds of them at this point, and all of them told me the same thing. They haven’t gotten a single client, they haven’t gotten a single job. They haven’t gotten any of the benefits that they’re that we’re hoping to provide them through this directory, through the social networks and the way we’re different, the way we’re going to do that is, first of all, we’re just a directory. We’re not going to show them a lot of videos of puppy dogs and other things that are going to distract them, and the people that are going to look for them. Secondly, we are structuring the data that they’re providing us in a way that it’s never been structured before, structuring the heck out of that data in order to make it easy for people to find them based on exactly what they used to do in government and exactly what they’re doing currently.

Tom Temin: And to get people, then you see them, and then you reach out and say, would you like to be on this? In other words, because how do you know who you don’t know?

Brian Levine: Well, exactly. We just launched last week. So we started with a mild launch on social media. Prior to that, I had been reaching out to various private sources and individuals that I know because I do have a fairly large network, but eventually we’re going to be hopefully everywhere in terms of media, advertising, marketing, PR, etc. so hopefully everybody helps get the word out there and we get the word out there.

Tom Temin: You do have a flair for this because here you are sitting talking to me about it.

Brian Levine: So far so good! The interesting problem we have to solve is we are not just advertising for members, we want the members to actually find the product helpful. So we’re going to spend a lot of time and energy advertising and marketing to searchers. The searchers are people like in-house counsel, people like media like yourself who are looking for guests. People like event organizers who are looking for speakers, companies that are looking for board members for the directory, people looking for arbitrators or mediators. So we really want it to be helpful for everyone. We want it to be passive business.

Tom Temin: Sure. And you say we but it’s not an effort of your current employer. It’s something you’re doing they can use. But it’s a Brian Levine effort.

Brian Levine: It’s a Brian Levine effort and I have a big team. I can’t take credit on myself. Working with a number of really brilliant marketers, advertisers, PR people, developers, designers. So, you know, I know some things, but I can’t claim to be able to do all this myself.

Tom Temin: And you were going to offer this as a subscription to people or is it available free to the public?

Brian Levine: Well, right now it’s available for free. If you joined today, if you joined before March 11th, you will get a year of free membership, standard membership. And this is something new. We weren’t originally going to start that way, but things shifted in the world in the year that we had been working on this, and we realized people need it now, some of whom don’t have a job or don’t have a direct plan for what they’re going to do next. And we wanted them to feel comfortable on the directory. But ultimately, we have to make it a paid service because we want to be able to reach out to the searchers or the searchers, find the members, and that’s going to cost us some money to do that. We want this to be passive business development. We want it to work really well for all of our members. And so we don’t want them just sitting there on the platform and not having helpful people reaching out to them.

Tom Temin: Right. So those listed and those searching, they’ll be revenue?

Brian Levine: No. Great question. So the members will pay a small fee to be part of the network. I expect that in most instances their employers will cover that cost and or reimburse it. The searchers will be free. Now, at some point, we may create a category of power searchers. If their whole job is just to search the site, then they might need to contribute a little bit to it since they’re contributing to the cost of it. But initially the idea is that the searches are free because we want the members to be found.

Tom Temin: And how many people are listed in there. At this point, as you near launch?

Brian Levine: Well, at this point it’s just open for people creating their profile. So we have many, many people creating their profile the day we launched. We underestimated the level of interest that we would expect. And so we sort of crashed and we improved our ability to take new members. Now we can take up to 50,000 a day, which we think, at least for the foreseeable future, should should cover us.

Tom Temin: So you had to buy more capacity from Amazon or something.

Brian Levine: We had to restructure a couple of settings that we had set artificially low, because I think we were concerned about attacks, but that turned out to be a concern that we didn’t have to worry.

Tom Temin: About so much. And speaking of attacks, tell us a little bit about yourself because you have some cybercrime experience in your background.

Brian Levine: Yes. So when I was with the Department of Justice, I was in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section. I was a cybercrime prosecutor and I was national coordinator for the other 300 cybercrime prosecutors around the country. This was a fantastic job. I will not minimize it in any way. I got to travel to Romania like seven times chasing cybercriminals over there.

Tom Temin: I hope you brought a baseball bat.

Brian Levine: I did. I brought a baseball bat and a thumb drive. All the weapons you need against a cyber criminal. And some of them are now serving 20 years in U.S. prisons as a result of that work. So. But it’s whack a mole when it comes to any kind of police work. Or maybe it is any kind of war. So, you know, for every cybercriminal you get, there’s another waiting. And it takes a long time to do these investigations. The average case I worked on at the Department of Justice lasted seven years, the entire time I was there.

Tom Temin: Yes. And getting back to this new database, the former gov database, could you have anticipated that there might be mass layoffs coming or threatened from the federal government. It’s almost as if you had providential timing.

Brian Levine: I did not anticipate it at all. A lot of people have talked about it as serendipity or providential timing, to use your words. Our focus was on something entirely different, and so it was not necessarily timely. We were just shocked that there was no directory out there for former government and military professionals, particularly given how much expertise, insight and knowledge these people bring and how unique it is. And so we didn’t really think we had a tight timeline to roll this out, because it didn’t seem like anybody was working on anything like this. But then this happened, as you’re aware, as we’re all aware, and we wanted to expedite and get it out there as soon as possible so it could be helpful for many more people. And that’s what we’ve started to do.

Tom Temin: And do the search parameters and technical makeup of it enable you to inculcate, say, millions of names or hundreds of thousands of names and still help searchers pinpoint the exact dozen they might want to look at.

Brian Levine: That’s exactly right. So what we are trying to do is help people find the government needle in the haystack, if you will. What we believe is if you have an important opportunity with the government, whether it’s federal, state, local, foreign or military, if you have an important opportunity or a difficult challenge, the best thing you can do is to work with someone who has previously worked in the exact office, or as close as you can get to the office that you’re going to be dealing with. And so the whole site is based around natural language searching and filters and practice areas that help you get to the exact person you’re looking for.