Scott Burns had a technology company and a distinctly analog problem. GovDelivery had grown from a basement operation into a business with 250 people across eight locations. To keep track of them, he traveled with a binder: photographs, an organization chart, notes about who did what. The software entrepreneur had become the custodian of a portable filing cabinet.
There is an appealing indignity in that picture. A company can get better at reaching the world while its chief executive gets worse at remembering the people down the corridor. Burns’s response eventually became another company, Structural. But the binder also supplies a useful way into his working life. Again and again, he has encountered institutions full of useful information and people who cannot quite get to it.
A useful email, a real business
The story reaches back to Dartmouth, where Burns studied economics and environmental studies and graduated in 1997. On campus, he and friends used the college’s BlitzMail system to draw people to grassroots events. A small organization could suddenly find an audience. Email had a practical virtue: people turned up.
He began his career at McKinsey & Company, then worked at an early software business. In 2000, he and Zach Stabenow were building a venture around putting government documents online. Stabenow was a friend from college skiing. The initial business, GovDocs, dealt with compliance information. A related opportunity was taking shape: help government communicate directly with the public.
Governments already possessed information that people needed. Getting it from an agency to a resident was another matter. A website could hold the answer perfectly well while requiring the resident to remember to come looking. GovDelivery offered a subscription-based route for information to reach people through email and other digital channels.
By 2009, its customers included St. Paul, Minneapolis, federal departments and the British Parliament. Burns described the business as helping agencies make relevant information more accessible. The scale was international; the underlying transaction was wonderfully ordinary. Someone needed an update. An institution needed a dependable way to send it.
A colleague’s expertise.
Searchable directories.
A team finds help.
Government has its own rules of play
Burns resisted the easy claim that government merely needed to behave more like a private company. In a 2012 discussion of leadership, he compared the two sectors to different sports: similar enough from a distance, governed by different rules once you step onto the field. Importing a business habit without understanding the institution could produce a poor result.
That distinction is especially relevant to a company selling government software. The customer has obligations beyond buying something that works. It must serve a public, explain its actions and function within a particular system. Burns’s observations of civil servants focused on their ability to turn broad missions into objectives that colleagues could understand and pursue.
He also paid attention to the person on the other side of the sales conversation. His preferred question was, “What’s important here today?” It invited the customer to describe a pressing problem before the discussion disappeared into software features. A vendor’s enthusiasm for its own product can occupy a remarkable amount of oxygen.
In October 2016, GovDelivery merged with Granicus after its sale to a Vista Equity Partners-led investment group for $153 million. The combination brought together public communications with tools for government meetings, records and transparency. Burns was GovDelivery’s co-founder and CEO. The company’s place in Granicus belongs in his story; so does the distinction between the business he built and the combined organization that followed.
What a ski coach could see
Long before the office binder, Burns had watched another kind of leader organize a group of individuals. Growing up in Duluth, he raced Alpine skiing. Each competitor had a separate run and a separate result. The team still needed a reason to behave like a team.
He remembered his coach, Scott Ransom, giving people room to pursue excellence in their own ways. Burns carried that example into management. Employees arrived with different abilities, limits and ambitions. A leader needed to create a shared direction without insisting that everyone perform the same little dance.
This also shaped his account of becoming a more experienced executive. He described learning patience, taking a longer view and recognizing the labor between a promising idea and a finished result. The analogy he chose was writing a novel: the idea is only the beginning of hundreds of pages of work and revision.
Later, discussing workplace culture with Maria Ross, he emphasized giving employees opportunities to stretch and learn. Smaller assignments could let people try something new. Coaching could become part of daily work. Those are specific management choices, with consequences for who gets noticed and who gets a chance. They fit comfortably beside a product intended to make people’s capabilities easier to discover.
The directory becomes the company
Structural launched in 2017 with Burns as CEO, Chip House leading marketing and Indianapolis venture studio High Alpha involved in its creation. The starting proposition was straightforward: companies already had information about employees, scattered among systems. A usable directory could bring skills and experience into view.
At launch, Burns offered a concrete example. Someone needed a colleague who understood design and spoke Spanish. The application could help find people with both abilities. A job title would rarely answer that question. Neither would an organization chart, however carefully aligned its boxes.
The idea had room for employees as well as managers. Knowing who has relevant experience can change whom you ask for help. Finding an internal opportunity can change what you attempt next. Structural developed dynamic directories and internal opportunity marketplaces around those connections.
In October 2022, Augeo acquired the company after a multi-year partnership. The acquisition took effect on October 1 and was announced on October 4. Structural’s technology joined Augeo’s workplace engagement tools. Investors in Structural had included High Alpha and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, linking the St. Paul company with founders and investors beyond Minnesota.
Burns urged other entrepreneurs to pay particular attention to their decisions about people. He also acknowledged wishing he had sought help earlier. Building a company had taught him the value of coaches and mentors with a different view of the same difficulty.
“People decisions are the most important decisions they’ll make.”
Scott Burns, on advice for entrepreneurs
The founder takes the other chair
In August 2023, Burns joined Mairs & Power Venture Capital as a general partner. Investing had already been part of his life since 2010, through direct investments and venture funds. Now it became his full-time work.
The partnership carried some shared history. Fellow general partner John Bergstrom had been an investor in GovDelivery. Burns brought experience starting, operating and selling businesses; Bergstrom brought years of investing, finance and governance work. They were familiar collaborators taking on a different assignment.
By December 2024, the fund reported a portfolio of thirteen companies. Burns described talking with two to five portfolio businesses a day. The work included helping recruit a technology leader, reconsider a sales approach and refine a growth plan. An investor’s contribution could be measured in conversations and practical decisions as well as money.
His current public profile describes a Midwest focus and an interest in founders who understand the industries they want to change. It also emphasizes capital efficiency. The geography is deliberate: his operating experience was built in the Upper Midwest, and his investing work continues there.
There is a small reversal in the career. The executive who once needed help remembering everyone in his own organization now spends his days helping other executives build theirs. He has moved to another chair at the table, bringing the experience of being the person expected to have an answer.
Still working on St. Paul
Burns’s commitments extend into the city around the companies. He serves on the Star Tribune’s board and has held leadership roles with the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce, Friends of the St. Paul Library and the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundation. In 2021, Governor Tim Walz appointed him to Minnesota’s Council for Economic Expansion.
His September 2026 essay about St. Paul began with a memory from 2000. Sean Kershaw, working in the city’s planning and economic development office, walked into the small Lowertown office on an impromptu tour. Burns recalled a simple question: how could he help? The encounter helped validate the idea behind GovDelivery.
Burns used that memory to argue for practical improvements in how the city supports businesses and investment. He wanted processes to pay attention to outcomes: whether a business could open, whether customers could reach it, whether a worthwhile project could proceed. His argument allowed a meaningful role for government while asking it to examine the experience of the people navigating its rules.
The details have become larger over time: government agencies, distributed workplaces, investment portfolios, a downtown’s prospects. Yet the work still returns to a recognizable human situation. Someone has knowledge, resources or authority. Someone else needs a way to reach them. Burns keeps finding businesses, and civic work, in the distance between the two.