About Darcy

I was a military kid, moving with my family to different parts of the US until I left for college at Harvard. I got a degree in computer science and economics and then got my first job as a software engineer at Lotus working on SmartSuite and NotesSuite. We shipped amazing products that lost in the marketplace, and I wanted to understand why.

Years later, in Microsoft's platform strategy group, I finally understood what had happened to Lotus. Some products get more valuable the more people use them — think telephones, office suites where everyone needs to exchange documents, or social media platforms. Once you reach critical mass, the millionth customer is vastly easier to acquire than the tenth. Windows had more moving parts: computer manufacturers load whatever operating system their customers want, software companies build for whatever's on the most machines, customers buy whatever runs their software. Microsoft invested in hardware adoption, built the best developer ecosystem in the world, and the cycle fed itself. It's why Linux couldn't reach critical mass. It wasn't about the product: it was structural.

I learned something else at Microsoft. When we wanted developers to build with web services instead of large standalone software, we created scenarios and videos showing them what they could build that wasn't possible before. Asking people to imagine things they've never seen is a big lift. Showing them is much easier. That turned out to be just as true in politics as it was in tech.

I carried that understanding of systems with me into politics. When I ran for Congress in 2006 and 2008, my campaigns became early examples of what online grassroots organizing could do. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the country helped in my race and others, building a community together that hadn't existed before. The work we did to build a coalition around A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq changed both election outcomes and international policies. But it also showed me how much structural forces determine what's possible in politics, in ways most people doing the work never get to see.

As its first Executive Director, I built the non-profit infrastructure for the Congressional Progressive Caucus and spent years working with members of Congress on policy, with organizers on strategy, with communities trying to build something durable. And everywhere I went, I kept recognizing the same dynamic I'd seen at Lotus: brilliant, committed people struggling against structural forces they couldn't fully see.

That's when the question I'd been carrying since Lotus finally became a book. If I could map the structural forces that determine who wins and who loses, maybe I could do for people trying to change the world what those scenarios and videos had done for developers at Microsoft: show them what's possible once you can see the whole system.