At the beginning of 2012, Zac Bookman was living in a shipping container with two soldiers in Kabul. He was advising General H.R. McMaster’s anti-corruption task force at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force. Back in California, three co-founders were preparing to start a software company. The contrast was sharp: one colleague near a war zone, the others looking at the quieter crisis of how American towns tracked money.
The common subject was government capacity. Bookman had studied transparency and corruption in Mexico as a Fulbright fellow. He had trained as a lawyer at Yale, earned a public administration degree at Harvard, clerked on a federal appeals court, and handled litigation in San Francisco. Each stop offered a different view of institutions: how rules are written, how disputes expose weaknesses, how money moves, and how trust can erode through ordinary transactions.
OpenGov’s opening thesis was less theatrical. California’s financial crisis had revealed cities relying on aging accounting systems, isolated data, and laborious reporting. A budget director once asked the founding group how to send them his budget data. The awkward answer was embedded in the question. Even the person responsible for the budget could struggle to reach the information in a usable form.
The market hidden inside the spreadsheet
Government software was an unfashionable place to begin. Procurement moved slowly. Buyers needed evidence that a young vendor would endure. Systems had to match specialized workflows, survive scrutiny, and integrate with technology installed before cloud computing had a name. The customer could not simply swipe a card and try something new on Monday.
But slowness cut both ways. It discouraged entrants while preserving a large field of unresolved problems. Budgets were assembled in spreadsheets. Financial reports required manual work. Permit applications moved through disconnected offices. Public works departments tracked assets with tools that did not speak to one another. Residents experienced the resulting friction as government itself.
Bookman called the category “B2G,” business to government, and said it carried the dynamics of enterprise software plus “about 20% more pain.” The joke contains his operating insight. Selling to government was not a clever variation on consumer software. It required more patience, deeper implementation, and an unusual respect for the people who understood municipal work from the inside.
The first product turned government financial data into interactive visualizations. It made numbers easier to explore and explain, and Palo Alto used it for an interactive digital budget. Yet transparency alone did not command enough daily attention. OpenGov moved inward, first toward reporting and then toward budgeting, where errors and version control could stall an entire process.
That evolution created an organizational problem. People had joined a transparency company. Bookman needed them to see a budgeting company and eventually a broader government cloud. The strategic logic was solid, but logic does not automatically align a team. In a 2018 leadership meeting, he drew a hard line around the budgeting identity. The message was forceful because the company had missed a target and needed a common answer to the basic question of what it sold.
Focus did not mean standing still. It meant choosing the next layer of the same problem. Transparency helped explain what had happened. Reporting helped officials understand it. Budgeting moved the product into planning. Later acquisitions added public engagement, permitting, bank reconciliation, procurement, and asset management. Each step increased the number of everyday government tasks the company could touch, while demanding more integration and more fluency from the team.
“It’s all about people.”Zac Bookman on the hardest part of building OpenGov
Learning to lower the temperature
Bookman has been candid about the founder learning curve. He entered software without pretending the job came naturally. He read, sought advice, and spoke openly about how unqualified many new founders feel. Early OpenGov had leadership changes, no revenue, a prototype, and no settled product-market fit. He wondered whether the responsible decision was to return investors’ money.
The reset was deliberately small: “Hire one engineer, sign one customer, build one feature.” Bookman spent a holiday reading a three-inch-thick government-finance manual. The company recruited former municipal finance officials, including Mike McCann, who had been close to retirement. McCann helped land the first paid engagement in Bishop, California, ran early deployments, and brought practitioners into the company.
The approach mattered because implementation was part of the product. A contract did not improve a budget. The system had to be configured, data had to move, staff needed training, and the promised workflow had to survive contact with a real finance office. Bookman later argued that enterprise software companies often undervalue professional services. In public-sector software, the work after the sale could decide whether the mission ever reached the customer.
He was also learning how his own intensity affected the organization. Former Cisco chief John Chambers became a mentor and coached him to react more slowly, become more predictable, and bring a calmer influence to the company. The lesson was not to care less. It was to stop turning every new idea or setback into organizational weather.
Bookman’s preferred measure for a CEO became the energy available to give employees, the company, and the mission. It is a useful inversion. Founder mythology celebrates the energy a leader consumes. Operating maturity asks whether the leader leaves the room clearer than they found it.
Customer discovery at bicycle speed
In September 2021, Bookman set out from the San Francisco Bay on a cross-country bicycle trip. The plan was to meet city, town, and county leaders and hear how local governments had adapted through the pandemic. He crossed nine states and finished 3,400 miles later in Yorktown, Virginia, on November 3.
nine states
The ride translated a market segment into places. There were government employees keeping services running, residents expecting help, and communities held together by what Bookman described as a help-thy-neighbor spirit. A founder who had spent years asking teams to get close to customers made the instruction physical.
There is an appealing incongruity in the image: a cloud-software CEO learning through hills, smoke, rain, heat, and small-town conversations. Yet it fits the company. OpenGov’s products sit behind budgets and permits, but those workflows eventually touch streets, parks, businesses, and homes. The software is abstract. Its consequences are local.
A deal, then a handoff
By 2024, OpenGov had expanded through product development and acquisitions into budgeting, accounting, procurement, asset management, and permitting. Cox Enterprises, already an investor, acquired majority ownership in a transaction valuing the company at $1.8 billion. Nearly 1,900 public agencies were customers at the time.
The price supplied a clean headline for a messy company-building story. It compressed more than a decade of sales calls, implementations, missed targets, acquisitions, integrations, and changes in positioning into one number. Bookman framed the partnership as a way to make long-term decisions and accelerate the mission, not as an ending.
The more consequential ending arrived two years later. On April 1, 2026, Bookman stepped down as chief executive. Thiago Sá Freire, OpenGov’s president and chief operating officer, became CEO. Bookman moved into the role of co-founder and chairman emeritus, with plans to support the company’s long-term strategy and mission.
The timing made the transition feel like a completed sentence. The founder had taken the company through its private, venture-backed years and into majority ownership by a company that described the investment as a long-term industry commitment. The successor was not an outsider asked to invent a new direction. Sá Freire had joined in 2022, served as president and operating chief, and helped scale the organization before receiving the title.
Founder transitions test what has actually been built. If every decision still requires the founder, the institution remains smaller than its valuation. If a successor can inherit a clear mission, an operating system, customer trust, and room to lead, the company begins to separate durability from personality.
The valuation made the company legible to the market. The handoff may reveal whether Bookman made it durable.
The civic value of working software
Bookman’s career has kept returning to transparency, but his understanding of the word grew more operational over time. Transparency is not only a chart published after decisions are made. It depends on whether the underlying numbers can be found, reconciled, explained, and connected to action. A public data portal cannot repair a broken process by itself.
That is why OpenGov moved deeper into the machinery. A reliable budget process can help officials allocate resources with fewer blind spots. A clear procurement system can make competition and approvals easier to follow. A usable permit workflow can reduce the uncertainty a resident or business faces. Trust arrives partly through speeches and laws. It also arrives when ordinary interactions work.
Bookman began with anti-corruption work, legal institutions, and an ambitious idea about accountability. He spent the next fourteen years learning that institutional change is often a sequence of mundane improvements. One engineer. One customer. One feature. One implementation that holds. The boring work was the mission all along.