New Jersey man turns campaign stint into software success

Aharon Wasserman was frustrated by the sheaves of papers he received every night.

As deputy field director in the Georgia office of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, the Cumberland County, N.J., native's job was to collate daily canvassing reports, crunching data on issues such as who got registered and who was likely to vote.

One evening, the 21-year-old Rutgers University junior, who had taken a leave to join the campaign, grabbed another young staff member, Justin Lewis, "who wasn't so good at knocking on doors, but was pretty good at programming," Wasserman recalled recently.

Together they spent 20-hour days devising a social-media tool - a "game-changer," the nonpartisan New Organizing Institute has called it - that maximized efforts by the campaign's field offices and led to the prodigious get-out-the-vote initiative that proved key to Obama's success.

After the election, Wasserman, Lewis, and several other former Obama workers repaired to the Bridgeton home of Wasserman's parents to refine the networking software into a commercial product, NationalField, whose clients now include Kaiser Permanente, the United Kingdom's National Health Service, the Sierra Club, and the AFL-CIO.

For their achievement, Wasserman, Lewis, and another NationalField partner, Edward Saatchi, last month were named to Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30" list of technology leaders, on a par with Lady Gaga and LeBron James in their respective categories.

When Wasserman was a student at Friends schools in Mullica Hill and Philadelphia, his strength was not in technology or business, but in acting and writing, say his former teachers.

"Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, and Fagin, and the most sophisticated Tom Stoppard stuff, it was always Aharon in the lead," said Doug Brophy, his principal at Friends Select in Center City, from which Wasserman graduated.

"What really resonated about him was his empathy, his self-awareness, and how to approach people in the right way. He had the gift of being the best listener to his peers and the best voice from his peers to the administration," Brophy said.

At Rutgers, Wasserman - who also spent time growing up in Woodbury and Greenwich - thought he would learn to write sitcoms. He managed to get a comedy-sketch show, 30 on the Banks, on the campus TV station.