Over 8 years ago, on October 9, 2014, I was honored to have President Barack Obama spend an afternoon with our team & members at Cross Campus. It was a helluva experience to host a sitting U.S. President at my former business, and one I will never forget. I’d say the same is probably true for anyone else that was in attendance at Cross Campus that day.
I’ve probably told the story of that day, and of the week leading up to that day, a thousand times, but I’ve never put it down in writing. Something happened recently that had me reliving that week (more on that later), so I figured I’d take the opportunity to document the entire experience and share it with you.
Grab a beer and get comfy though, it's about a 20-minute read. Enjoy!
DD
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Thursday October 2, 2014
It was a day like any other at Cross Campus Santa Monica. We had been in business for a little over 2 years and we and our members were doing our thing. For our hundreds of members, that meant the daily hustle of growing their startups, meeting with investors to raise capital, and doing whatever it took to survive and thrive. For the Cross Campus team it meant doing whatever we could to help our startup community grow & succeed.
At the time, we had become ground zero for the LA startup community. Cross Campus was home to some of LA’s most exciting startups, including Headspace and Enervee among others. We were in the midst of opening our second location, which would connect the historic tech hub of CalTech and NASA JPL in Pasadena to the new tech hub of Silicon Beach in Santa Monica. And yet, the thing we had become most known for was building community through our events. We had already played host to famous entrepreneurs and investors such as Elon Musk, Brad Feld and Mark Suster, and it seemed like not a week went by where we didn’t have someone on our stage that would make us just say “wow!”.
As such, we were not unaccustomed to getting inbound phone calls with ideas for blow-your-mind events. However, the understated voicemail that we received that Thursday was different…
“Hi, this is so-and-so from the White House. We are interested in doing an event at Cross Campus next week. Please call me back at your earliest convenience. My number is (202) 456-xxxx.”
Wait, what? Is it really *the* White House? Area code 202?… That's Washington DC. 456 extension?… That's the White House. This looks legit.
I immediately started cyber sleuthing… Who is this person? What’s her job? How senior is she? (Did you know you can Google the salaries of anyone that works for the White House?) I found out that she’s a junior staffer in the White House communications department making $57k/year. I think to myself “maybe this isn’t a big deal, so let me have my head of events, Becky Feldman, call her back and see what’s going on”. But, I’m going to listen in the background to see if it really is a big deal.
The call with this person was unlike any other event call we had. Normally folks would ask a few questions but be very open about the type of event they wanted to do. This person was extremely guarded about sharing info and was only interested in asking questions. It became a tennis match… back & forth with one question by her, then one question by Becky. It went something like this…
WH: How big is your venue?
Becky: We can fit between 200-400 people. What type of event are you thinking about?
WH: A speaking event. Do you have lighting & A/V?
Becky: Yes, we have a full stage with lighting, A/V, and the works. Is it going to be a single speaker, a panel, both?
WH: A single speaker. Is the venue available next Thursday October 9th?
Becky: Yes, we’re available. Who is the speaker going to be?
WH: (long pause) It’s a high-ranking official. (another long pause) Ok, I think I have enough. Are you available to meet with one of my colleagues, Tim So-and-so, tomorrow afternoon at 5pm?
Dan: (mouthing to Becky)… That’s enough, get off the phone!
Becky: Sure. Thanks. We look forward to meeting with Tim.
A high-ranking official… hmmm? I’ve never had anyone utter that phrase to me, but my mind starts racing… Maybe it’s Megan Smith, Obama’s new CTO. That would be a fit for our tech-centric community. But maybe it’s someone who’s even higher ranking? Could it be VP Biden? Could it even be President Obama himself? Oooh, this certainly might be a big deal.
I started cyber sleuthing again. And get this, I find that all of them… Megan Smith, VP Biden, and President Obama… they are all scheduled to be in the LA area for other events that next week!
Next up… Who is Tim So-and-so that we are meeting with? I can’t find anything on this guy… he’s a ghost… he’s a spook. But wait, after another hour of sleuthing I find a PDF from an event in Denver that lists him as part of the presidential advance team for an event that includes President Obama. Uh oh, I think we really are talking about a big deal here.
My co-founder, Ronen, was returning from a business trip, so I remember sending him a cryptic text message to the effect of “You need to be back here tomorrow for a 5pm meeting with someone from the White House. I’m not sure what’s happening, but I think President Obama wants to come visit us next week”.
Friday October 3, 2014
On Friday, Tim shows up promptly at 5pm. He asks for a tour of the venue. After about 2 minutes he says “is there somewhere private we can talk?”. Ronen, Becky and I take him to our boardroom. He cuts right to the chase…
“President Obama is considering a visit to Cross Campus next week. He wants to hold a town hall meeting with you, your members and other leaders of the LA startup community. We’re considering a few other venues for the town hall, so we’re not sure if it’s going to be here or somewhere else. And before you say “yes” know that it will not be easy to host the President. It will seriously disrupt your business for the next week.”
Ronen and I look at each other and just say “yes, we’re ok with that… we’d be honored”.
Tim stands up and says something like “ok, we’ll let you know tomorrow or Sunday if we are going to move forward… no promises yet.” “Yep, sure, no problem” I say… with no clue of what is about to ensue.
Saturday October 4, 2014
And then the waiting begins.
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| My text with Becky starting at 1am (I’m in blue) |
Shortly after this exchange at 3pm Becky gets a call from Tim… can we be at Cross Campus at 5pm to show a few people from his team around the building so they can assess us versus the other venues. When I show up at 4:45pm there are already a dozen people waiting at the front door. They all look the same… Blue polo shirts, tan khaki pants, and all the size of NFL linebackers.
By the time 5pm rolls around there are about 25 guys behind Tim, all fitting the above description (except one… who’s similarly dressed and equally as fit, but much smaller… more on him in a bit). As the introductions are made it’s a blur. Most are with the Secret Service, but all with differing responsibilities. One is in charge of coordinating with local law enforcement. One is in charge of cyber security. One will be in charge on site. One will be responsible for the area outside the building for arrival & exit.
I couldn’t tell you then what they were all doing, and I certainly can’t remember now 8+ years on, but I do recall some of the most bizarre questions and requests that I’ve ever had…
“Do you have a bomb evacuation plan”… Uh, no.
“Oh I see you have security cameras… that’s a no-no… we can’t have them here when the big man is here… take them down or we can shoot them out”… Uh, no.
“We need to put a trap & trace on all your phones in the event that any threats are called in”… What’s a trap & trace?… “We will trace all calls placed to your business from now until the big man leaves, just sign this document and we’ll take care of everything”… Uh, ok.
Then the small guy comes up to ask a question… “Can I get on the roof?”… Why? He hands me his business card (they all have business cards with crazy titles) that says he’s the “Director, Anti-sniper Team” and explains that his team are snipers that are placed strategically around the venue to spot and take out terrorist snipers. Another Secret Service agent chimes in… “just point him in the direction of roof access and he’ll get there… he and his team are ninjas, they are spider monkeys, and they’ll find a way to climb up onto the roof”…. Uh, ok.
It was a blitz of crazy introductions and questions for 3 hours or so. As they departed around 8pm, Tim says “Thanks, we’ll call you tomorrow to let you know what the decision is. It’s not ours to make, but rather a team back in DC.” Ugh, more waiting.
Sunday October 5, 2014
I can’t remember when exactly, but the call came in that afternoon that we were good to go… Cross Campus got the nod… and we had one final chance to say “no” if we wanted to avoid the business disruption. There was no way we were going to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity… Yes, we’re in!
At this point, we started a logistical process that was both impressive and daunting… and I was about to embark on a few 16-hour days until it was all over. And I was about to learn a lot about the security involved when the world’s most powerful person decides he want to visit you (and tell the world where’s he’s going to be and when).
There were a few “wrinkles” to the visit that added complications to the logistics.
The first was that this was going to be an “announced visit”. That meant that several days prior to the visit, they were going to announce to the press that he was coming to Cross Campus on Thursday afternoon. From a security perspective, that’s like painting a huge target on the place for nut jobs and terrorists. The result was that the security requirements were much higher than an unannounced visit (such as when the President decides he wants to stop at that famous burger joint).
There is always an advance team that plans for every possible eventuality (and we learned that the advance team was scoping out Cross Campus for weeks before they contacted us), but they need much less security on the ground when no one knows he’s coming. For our event, it was a maximum security risk. Add to that the fact that the week prior the Secret Service had allowed a crazy person to just walk across the White House lawn and approach the west wing, and everyone was on edge. We were told that we couldn’t discuss the visit with anyone outside of our staff until the public announcement was made.
The second wrinkle was that the President wanted the town hall to be “among” our members… he wanted nothing between him and us. At many Presidential visits, there are a handful of people who are around the President (sometimes on a dais with him or a riser behind him), but the audience is separated by a rope (and some distance). The security requirements for those events mean that the people around the President are subjected to deep background checks by the Secret Service, while the audience is less vetted. For our town hall, we were going to be in a semi-circle around the President and he was going to walk up to and through the audience. For this the Secret Service would require the legal name and social security number for all those in attendance so they could go deep.
The plan was to have 150 people in attendance for the town hall on Thursday. As hosts, we got 100 invites, with 25 going to the folks who lost out in the effort to host, and 25 going to local government dignitaries (such as LA Mayor Garcetti). The Secret Service needed the social security numbers of the attendees by end of day on Monday to run the background checks. But the event wasn’t going to be publicly announced until Tuesday or Wednesday, so we’d have to invite our 100 people, obtain their social security numbers, but we weren’t allowed to tell them what it was for other than to say “We’re having a special visitor, you’re invited to join us, but we need your social security number”.
That was uncomfortable to request, but it did kick off quite a guessing game of who was coming to visit. Some people thought we were hosting Queen Elizabeth. Some thought Bill Gates (does he have security like the President?). Some guessed VP Biden. Very few guessed that it was President Obama.
The other uncomfortable and unfortunate thing was that we only had 100 invites for our hundreds of members. As such, my Sunday night was spent figuring out a fair way to dole out invites, perform a lottery for some of them, and then a system for capturing everyone’s social security numbers.
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| Our cryptic invite... You only got one shot! |
Monday October 6, 2014 through Wednesday October 8, 2014
Invites were sent and there was a buzz around Cross Campus that Monday morning… lots of questions, not many clear answers other than “trust me, you’ll want to be there”.
After the blitz on Saturday night, the team got a lot easier to work with on Monday morning. There was a lead agent from the Secret Service and 3 people from the advance and communications teams that would be my primary contacts for the rest of the week. These were basically the only 4 people I had to deal with, but the work started at 8am and went through midnight every day.
And, boy was I glad that that’s all I had to deal with because the number of security & advance people to come through Cross Campus that week made my head spin. Each of the 25 people who were there on Saturday were team leads, and their entire teams came through on Monday. Then their supervisors came through on Tuesday. Then all of them were back on Wednesday. I never had a really good grasp on how many people were involved in the security preparations until Thursday, when all of them (and more) were on hand.
Some of the more notable preparations:
Several blocks around Cross Campus in each direction were going to be completely blocked off to car or foot traffic, and a secure “green zone” was going to be created.
They rolled in several city buses to park in front of the building to act as a barrier to a car bomber.
Every window was covered so a sniper couldn’t see in.
They took complete control of our network, internet and telecommunications so there could be no communications in or out during the event (and that took care of our security cameras so they didn’t have to shoot them out).
On Wednesday night, we closed at 6pm so a team of contractors could come in and completely reconfigure our space to make room for press, add lighting, and prepare for the live broadcast on wh.gov.
We paid several thousand dollars to have a special banner made that would hang behind the President during his talk… and it went in the trash afterward as it was just for this event… but well worth the cost.
Actually, we spent tens of thousands of dollars to fully take advantage of the opportunity. We hired Manuel Umo as our videographer to capture the event and make a short movie. We hired Kevin Mazur, a top-tier photographer who has several Rolling Stone covers and other impressive credits on his résumé, to take pictures. It was all worth it.
As Secret Service agents were constantly milling about, our members started to get a clue about what was going down. The visit wasn’t publicly announced until Wednesday (with a neat Medium post by President Obama), but by that point the majority of speculation had moved on from Queen Elizabeth and were split between Biden and Obama. It was a trip when we could finally confirm for everyone that indeed, President Obama was coming to Cross Campus.
When all was said and done on Wednesday night at 3pm, we had filled all 100 of our slots with no security issues, the place was ready to go, and I needed to get a few hours sleep before the news crews started arriving at 6am to do their remote broadcasts for the morning news shows.
Thursday October 9, 2014 - Before the Arrival
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| The official instructions... no sharp objects please! |
The lead Secret Service agent pulls me aside to tell me a few things before things get started. First, he mentions that during the final security sweep they removed any object that could be used to stab the President. That meant that, in an office environment, all the scissors and pens we had available for members were now trashed. Next, he pulls me into the men’s bathroom and shows me that they’ve built it into a bomb shelter with 3-inch thick pieces of steel on the exterior walls. He then opens his suit jacket to show me he’s carrying a Kevlar blanket. He says to me, “if things go sideways, I grab the big man, cover him in the blanket, and drag him in here until my agents take of it.” Finally, he asks me “do you think we’ll have any hecklers in the audience today?” When we were prepping, to my surprise, the advance team didn’t want to review audience questions before the event. The town hall structure was completely unscripted other than the fact that they said “the big man will go boy-girl, boy-girl… other than that, no prep is required.” Well, the Secret Service agent had his own concerns about what the audience might do. He says, “if someone gets out of line and we want to stop it, you have to act first… I’ll tap you on the shoulder and then just go up to the person and say “I uninvite you to this event”… at that point my agents will take care of everything and remove the person.” Fun stuff. Luckily, this wasn’t required. Just the opposite, as the questions from the audience were superb.
Thursday October 9, 2014 - The Arrival & Meeting
Thursday October 9, 2014 - The Town Hall
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| The Cross Campus team with President Obama |
We also had the President take a goofy picture with us… one where no one was looking at the camera. That’s one I really wanted to see, but we never received.
And then he was whooshed away to have dinner upstairs before departing to see Gwyneth and the other glitterati. We cleaned up the space, got everything back to normal, and reopened for our members that night. The advance team said they would send up pictures from the event when they got back to DC.
The Pictures & Videos
Over the course of the next week we started to get all the pictures and video taken at the event by our guys. Kevin Mazur put the highlights up on GettyImages.com. Manuel Umo turned his video into a short movie. The White House wrote a recap and posted a video of the event. The LA Times, and many other news outlets, wrote an article about the visit. And, I emailed my contact with the advance team to get the pictures that Pete Souza had taken.
I was assuming that we’d get all, or at least a lot, of the pictures that Pete had taken that day. After months of back and forth via email with various ways to reply that the pictures were in process, in December I got an envelope in the mail from the White House. In it were several 8x10 glossy photos… one picture for each of the greeters in the formal pose together with the President, and one picture for each of the members in our team from our formal pose after the event. Each of the photos had a sticker on the back reminding us that, pursuant to the Hatch Act, they couldn’t be used for commercial purposes while President Obama was in office. That was it. There were no pictures from our private time talking to the President. There was no goofy team picture. I emailed one more time and was told that was all we would get while Obama was in office.
I knew that every picture that the White House photographer took was supposed to end up in the National Archives. I knew that he wasn’t allowed to delete anything. But I had no idea how or when I could get access to them. While Obama was in office they would occasionally publish pictures to their website, but no pictures from the visit were published. I tried searching the National Archives website, but nothing. I decided to wait until President Obama left office in January 2017. I added an entry to my calendar for two years in the future and forgot about it.
The Quest - 2017 to 2023
I always had in my mind this picture of me and the President deep in conversation about startups… and I knew that Pete Souza was snapping away when that actually happened on October 9, 2014, so I was determined to get that picture. I figured it would take a few emails and some search queries. I didn’t think I was setting out on a quest.
When January 20, 2017 came around, and President Trump took the reigns, I wasn’t sure where to start. I pushed my to-do off for a few weeks to let the dust settle. Then, in March 2017, I sent an email to Pete Souza, who was posting many of the pictures he’d taken during Obama’s presidency on his Instagram (which is fabulous), to see if he had the pictures. He informed me that he had turned everything over to the National Archives. He directed me to a gentleman at Obama’s Presidential Library that was responsible for the process of digitizing all of the presidential records.
That person was very pleasant and very helpful. He said the digitization and indexing was in progress and the records would be available online at obamalibrary.gov in May. Winner!… I’ll have that picture soon enough!
When June rolls around I check the Obama Library website… nada… zilch. I give it a few more weeks and then send a follow up email, only to receive this dreaded reply…
Unfortunately, due to unforeseen technical difficulties the process is ongoing and we do not have an estimated completion date at this time.
Six months went by, and as things would have it, we were hosting Pete Souza for a book signing event for his picture book Obama: An Intimate Portrait on January 11, 2018. I told him the story of what I was going through and he just shrugged “it takes time, keep following up”. I sent an email the following day to the Obama Library and got an even more dreaded reply…
The audiovisual records you are seeking were not released in the public domain during the Obama Administration, and are currently closed to public requests under the Presidential Records Act.
The Barack Obama presidential records are governed by the Presidential Records Act (PRA). Under the provisions of the PRA, Obama presidential records are not available to public access requests for the first five years after the end of the Administration. While the PRA states that the public cannot request records until five years after the end of the administration, the Library may open records prior to that date. At this time, neither of these terms have been met.
Obama presidential records will become subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on January 20, 2022. You may submit your request at that time.
F*ck!!!! You’ve gotta be kidding me! Why didn’t you tell me that the first time I asked?!?!
Ok, time to put another event in the calendar, but this time for four years in the future! I can’t say I’ve ever booked an appointment that far in advance, but I had one with the National Archives for January 20, 2022.
I knew what a FOIA request was, but I had no idea how to file one or what the process would be like. On January 20, 2022, I started doing my research, and the next day I filed my first FOIA request. It would take a month to get a response that basically said… got it, there are 431 images that meet your requirements, the process is in process.
One interesting thing about a request for records protected under the Presidential Records act is that it wasn’t just Obama’s representatives that needed to review what was being released, but also the Presidents since. So, there were several administrations that needed to sign off that my meeting with Obama was neither embarrassing to them or confidential. And of course, each had 90 days to review. As such, I knew I was in for a wait, but I figured it would only be 3-6 months.
Six months later, and I’ve heard nothing. In October 2022, I sent another follow up, and got a response that the process is in process, and the estimated date of completion is another 7 months. I’m getting closer, but come on… April 2023?!?!
I have to say, by this time, I’m just doing this to get it done. I don’t want to quit, but Cross Campus is so far in my rear view mirror that I don’t really care anymore. Then, on January 31, I got an unexpected surprise. No, I didn’t get the pictures. But I did get something very close.
The National Archives sent me a letter saying that the records are available to be viewed online (as a photo contact sheet PDF), and the actual photos will be downloadable through the National Archive website in a few months.
So, 3,036 days after the event, I finally got to see the photos I was waiting for (and a lot of other great ones as well).
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| The Handshake |
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| The Discussion |
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| Yeah, but... |
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| Don't look now! |
You can review all the pictures that Pete Souza took that day here on the Obama Library website. And, if you want to download the original pictures… well, just put an event in your calendar for a few years in the future and then check the website then to see if they’re ready!
