Marci Harris, co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, likes to say that her "first startup was a town." In 2004, an F4 tornado struck her town of Jackson, Tennessee, the night before an election for which she was running the campaign of the incumbent mayor. She became the town's Tornado recovery coordinator for the long process that followed. Her first interaction with federal agencies and Congress was as an advocate for thousands who lost homes and businesses.
This taste of public service led her to law school and eventually to the "law and government" LLM program at American University. In 2007, she became tax, trade, and health counsel to a senior Ways and Means member and led committee efforts on Medicare program integrity and transparency.
She left Capitol Hill in February 2010 to build POPVOX, which won the SxSW BizSpark Accelerator startup competition in 2011. Harris is a recipient of a 2012 Tribeca Film Festival Disruptive Innovation Award and was named #13 of the "Top 100 Most Creative People in Business" by Fast Company magazine.