#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Max Tendero, Co-Founder & CEO, Civil
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Changing the Way Students Learn About Politics
Civil is a virtual resource library that provides educators with vetted, researched, and summarized political topics and lesson plans that help safely foster discussion around current events in the classroom. We spoke with Founder and CEO Max Tendero about what experiences led him to create Civil, how potential changes to current copyright regulations could present challenges to startups like his, and why alterations to current Internet frameworks could impact Civil’s growth in the future.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Civil?
I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2020 and was a political science major. In intro to American politics, I wrote a paper examining why Trump won and some of the factors that led into that. And it was really fascinating for me to dig into these macro narratives that you read about briefly in the news. So he won—why did that happen? That was the precursor to really exploring politics and how it is the engine of our country in many ways.
Fast forward to the end of college. I started outlining a newsletter that summer, and that was the first version of Civil. We launched our alpha to family and friends in August of 2020 and officially launched in October of 2020.
Instead of positioning ourselves like an Axios—objective brevity—we tried to split down the center. So we ran with that and grew to a few thousand readers, which was great. In February of 2021, I started to notice that our readership stats were not what they once were in the wake of the election. Allegations of voter fraud, January 6th, Joe Biden being sworn in—for people, including myself, it was a lot to take in. People were tuning out from all kinds of news sources, including outlets like CNN and Fox. It seemed like the writing was on the wall; I didn’t know if I wanted to build the future of our company on political media. Around the same time, we got emails from three high school teachers, who said, “we love using your product in class each week, we talk about it with our students.” That was our lightbulb moment, causing us to pivot to where we are now. We started building our platform and content in May, and the beta that we have out now launched in October.
What is the work you all are doing at Civil?
Our mission is to make current events easier and safer to talk about in high school classrooms. Before, with our newsletter, our vision and driving force was to produce unbiased and balanced media for people who were already pretty biased. Our mindset started to shift to, could we change the way that people think? Could we make them more civil? Could we push them to investigate the news that they're hearing? High school seemed like the perfect space to do that, where students are starting to think about politics but aren’t entrenched in their beliefs quite yet.
Then, when they go off to college and beyond, they'll have this foundation of learning where they won’t blindly accept things because their favorite commentator or news outlet said so.
Our product is a resource library organized by modules, with each module relating to a specific kind of current event. There are narratives, history, classroom content, lessons, and all of the tools that the teachers need with our end goal being to make social studies classes more relevant and make them easier for teachers. Right now we've got modules on gun control, the Southern border, and voting that teachers can use. Social media regulation and climate change will be uploaded in the next week or two.
How is Civil’s content shared and organized?
Almost all of our content is written in, and then made available through, Google Docs. This works well for us. We’ve found that as a team it’s easier for us to draft, comment, and finish content. So that’s how we work on the back end, and it takes a lot of time just to offer that to teachers. How the website works is that a teacher logs in, they get access to all of our content, and it's hosted on our site. Then, if they want, they can create copies of the Google documents we also provide.
What aspects of facilitating or hosting civil conversations among students are important to Civil’s work? How might potential changes in the law that enables companies to host user generated content impact Civil or steer the direction of your company in the future?
As we try to make social studies classes more relevant, a community aspect is definitely something that we're going to work through and think about. We want to give educators the ability to access a discussion section under a lesson or module where they can leave feedback or share how they use this lesson and what was successful in getting students fired up about this topic. Currently, the law is in a good spot for companies like us, such that the only thing that restricts our ability to do this are time and financial resources. It’s definitely something that we want to be able to do in the future.
Policymakers are studying whether we should change U.S. law to make companies pay licensing fees or face potential copyright infringement litigation when they or their users hyperlink to, or quote from, news articles. You spoke with the Engine policy team about those ideas; could you summarize what those policy proposals might mean for companies like Civil?
Civil aside, it would pretty severely limit the amount of information that could be disseminated, shared, and consumed. It would make it harder to research things, and in my opinion, make it harder to reach an objective truth. To get close to the truth, you need a variety of sources and a diversity of voices. So the effectiveness of our platform is predicated upon aggregating different sources around a single or a bunch of different topics.
But our core value proposition for teachers, students, school boards, and whoever else, is that we are a bipartisan team that researches and goes into different corners of the web and pulls all of this information together for them. And then we package it in a way where teachers and students can work their way through it. We do the research, writing, and vetting for bias. So if we weren't able to aggregate articles and links that way, or we had to pay licensing fees to do so, I don't think it's a hyperbole to say that it would pretty severely undermine the core structure of the way that we operate. I have no idea how much that would cost but I would assume it wouldn't be cheap. And we use a ton of sources—that's one of our big things as a company is, if we use too many sources, we're probably doing something right. So if we can't aggregate it, it makes it a lot harder for students and teachers to explore in their classroom. It would make it really hard to operate, not just for us, but for any other startup that relies on making connections to other parts of the Internet.
What are your goals for Civil moving forward?
We want to build a product for schools that not only focuses on current events classes, but also has different verticals. For different social studies classes, and potentially beyond that, how do you make them relevant to what is happening today, and how do we do that in a way that's really intuitive and seamless? Longer term, if we can build an audience, then we can build a media company to use that audience as a jumping off point, or could we build a nonprofit arm. We have big goals. But first, we're just trying to focus on making this thing work, because we've gotten some really good feedback.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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