The author
I've focused my entire career on why things work — or don't.
My work has always come down to a single question: why do some systems thrive while others quietly (or sometimes spectacularly) come apart? The answer is rarely the people involved — it's the system around them: the incentives they pursue, the structure they operate in, and the way power and information move through it.Read moreShow less ›
For three decades I've explored that question — building and selling three companies in data and analytics, backing more than a hundred startups as an angel and venture investor, and working on both for- and non-profit boards where I observe governance succeed and fail up close. I've also failed often enough to keep a healthy respect for luck, timing, and the limits of any one person's judgment. I certainly don't have all the answers, just an eye for seeing past symptoms and finding root causes to design better solutions. Right the Republic is what emerged when I turned that same lens on American democracy.
I live and work in Montana, where I put a lot of that energy to use close to home. I chair Frontier Angels, our state's angel investor network; I co-founded and led Early Stage Montana to help local founders get off the ground; and I serve on the board of Lighthouse Ranch, which works on teen mental health and suicide prevention. None of it is political. All of it is about helping people build things that last.
Years ago I wrote a book called Marketing by the Dashboard Light, which aggregated the science and best practices around measuring the financial impact of marketing investments. It was a new approach at the time, launched into a world where marketers and finance execs couldn't agree on much and were just talking past one another. The book found a wide audience in boardrooms and university classrooms for its ability to identify the true nature of the problems and prescribe practical solutions that weren't easy to implement, but very obtainable and ultimately very effective. Right the Republic is a harder, higher-stakes subject, but the instinct is the same: define the problem clearly, measure it, and propose a fix specific enough to be worth arguing about.
So here it is, put into the world to be argued with, improved, and hopefully acted on. I hope you find value in reading it.
Why I wrote this book.
I'm not a constitutional scholar. I'm a citizen who spent a career building things — and who has grown steadily more concerned about the state of American democracy.Read moreShow less ›
This isn't about any single administration, party, or incident. It's about the trendlines I've watched over sixty-plus years, and how clear the historical patterns have become: the machinery of our government is slowly seizing up — not over what we argue about, but in its basic capacity to function at all.
I have no agenda here beyond that concern. I'm not running for office, I'm not after power or influence, and I'm donating 100% of this book's profits to a nonpartisan educational nonprofit. It names no villains and takes no side in the fights that divide us. I wrote it because someone should put a serious, specific proposal on the table — and because staying silent felt like the one choice guaranteed to change nothing.
I've spent enough time inside complex systems to know that first drafts rarely survive contact with reality. A good deal of what follows is probably wrong in its particulars — and that's fine. What I'm hoping for isn't agreement; it's a better argument. I want Right the Republic in the hands of people who care enough about the republic to engage with these ideas, push back on them, and improve on what I've started.
— Pat LaPointe