Soar Just Acquired Half a Billion Data Points on What Americans Really Think

Some people spend seventeen years quietly building something remarkable, without ever making a lot of noise about it.

That’s Tony Bacos.

I first crossed paths with Tony’s work over a decade ago, back when I was at Gallup. He had built a mobile polling app called Show of Hands, and I remember thinking it was one of the most interesting tools I’d seen. I even brought Tony out to Omaha to meet the team. At the time, it didn’t quite fit what Gallup was building — their brand is built around being the gold standard of scientific polling, and Show of Hands was something different: faster, more open, more conversational. It just wasn’t the right home for it then.

It turns out it’s the right home now.

Soar is acquiring Show of Hands. And Tony Bacos is joining us.

Since 2009, Tony has run Show of Hands as a side project — just a couple hours a day, quietly building something extraordinary. Over that time, he’s asked more than 300,000 questions and collected over half a billion responses from everyday Americans, across all 50 states, sliced into 20 different psychographic categories.

That’s not a survey. That’s a living, breathing map of what this country actually believes, worries about, and wants — built patiently, one question at a time, by one person who cared enough to keep asking.

And it’s not just answers. Every poll has comments. Every comment can be upvoted. It’s part Gallup, part Reddit — a real-time conversation between millions of Americans that Tony has kept running for 17 years straight.

We’re honored to become the home for that dataset, that user base, and that app.

Tony’s résumé speaks for itself, even though he’d probably never lead with it.

He ran Amazon’s homepage — reporting directly to Jeff Bezos every month on what showed up on the front door of the world’s biggest store. He ran tech and customer experience for Amazon Fashion, the countries largest clothing retailer. He just retired as Chief Product and Technology Officer of Stitch Fix, a publicly traded company.

Thirty years of building products people actually use. And through all of it, Show of Hands stayed in the background — a quiet, personal project born out of genuine curiosity about people.

That’s what stands out most to me. Tony isn’t just a builder. He’s endlessly curious — about what people think, what they need, what keeps them up at night. He’s spent nearly two decades simply asking, and listening. That kind of patient curiosity is exactly what’s going to help Soar see and meet real human needs as we build with AI.

Show of Hands will live under Soar, with deep integration into CitizenPortal. Imagine every poll question turning into a news cycle. Imagine city leaders and everyday citizens seeing, in real time, what their neighbors actually think about the economy, education, travel, local government — everything.

And imagine what this does for AI. All those responses, all those comments, all that human nuance — that’s training data money can’t easily buy. It’s the kind of thing I’ve long believed in myself, in a much smaller way — back at MyFamily, and at FamilyLink, we asked our own customers over 1,000 questions and gathered more than 300 million responses over the years, just trying to understand the people we served. So I recognize what Tony has built, and I have real respect for the patience it took to build it.

Tony spent 17 years doing that work, quietly, at a scale most companies would kill for.

Tony is joining the CitizenPortal board. He’s trading a quiet side project for a much bigger stage — and we’re grateful he’s chosen to build the next chapter with us.

We’re glad to have you, Tony. Excited to see what we build together.

Paul Allen is the co-founder of Ancestry.com and CEO of Soar, an AI Studio building agent fleets that uplift individuals, organizations, and communities. Create a personalized AI fleet for your company today.