Mark Pincus speaks in San Francisco in 2012. REUTERS/Stephen Lam The day after President Donald Trump took the oath of office in January, while crowds were gathering across the country to protest his rhetoric, Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, joined a private group of the Democratic Party's top donors at a Florida retreat billed at examining where the party went wrong.

But Pincus said that after a weekend of listening to some of the organizers and party leaders affirm that Democrats should "stay the course," he felt reinvigorated to strike out on his own.

"The whole energy of that conference was disheartening, and I wouldn't say discouraging, but it just reconfirmed to me that we better do something different," Pincus told Business Insider in an interview.

And different, according to Pincus, was a new digital platform for disenchanted Americans to — within a relatively strict set of guidelines — promote ideas and messages to send to politicians, called Win the Future, shortened to "WTF."

'Pro-business, pro-planet'

Launched on Tuesday, Pincus' relatively simple site promotes itself as a digital hub where users can create and then fund political-messaging campaigns with a pro-business, environmentally friendly slant, and can sign up to be volunteers on their college campuses or in their ZIP codes.

The site's first action is a promotional campaign in which participants will tweet their ideas for messages for a series of billboards in highly trafficked parts of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area.

The messages that get the most "upvotes" and meet the site's vision — "pro-business, pro-planet" — will be on a billboard partially funded by small-dollar donors, the site says, and it promises that each $5,000 donation will fund a billboard.

"It's like collective bargaining," Pincus said, adding that WTF could eventually become a "political e-commerce" platform aimed at millennials.

"What I really want to build is something that is very much like Product Hunt, whether it's on their website or the app or the emails they'll send you," he said, referring to the product launch and discovery site. "They have a mechanism to both give people a way to — in real time — vote up products they think are cool, and they want other people to pay attention to."

WTF is it?

WTF is starting with a fairly small budget and operating staff.

Pincus and Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, invested $500,000, with additional backing by Jeffrey Katzenberg and the venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Sunil Paul, and have six employees, including engineers and product developers. The aim is that a handful of ideas will resonate and help shape the site's future.

But Pincus hopes the initial effort will spark something much larger.

He said he initially pitched Hoffman on the idea of a site for a "Green Tea Party" over a decade ago but seriously began working on the current iteration of WTF with Hoffman and Adam Werbach, the occasionally controversial former Sierra Club president and corporate-sustainability guru, after Trump's election.

Pincus, who has spent millions backing Democratic campaigns and organizations up and down the ticket for over a decade, said a major part of WTF came from his dissatisfaction with the way the Democratic Party was spending its energy and his money, noting that he was obsessively reading "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" to better understand why her campaign lost.

"I just don't feel respected in the political process as a large donor or as a citizen voter," Pincus said. "I just feel patronized. Everything I get is like, 'Hey, you couldn't possibly — it's too complex and sophisticated what really goes on,' and, 'Hey, leave it to us, and we will go and represent you and fight the good fight, and just give us money.'"

I just don't feel respected in the political process as a large donor or as a citizen voter.

The founders envision that the millions of users they hope to draw to WTF could countermessage the Democratic Party and rival the Democratic National Committee, citing the frequency of emails from such groups asking for cash but ignoring chances for small-dollar donors to have a say in messaging or policy.

For them, WTF could be a way to make political action less "like homework" and force Democratic politicians to adopt messages and policies that have been upvoted on the site, a form of social-media pressure that would act as a bulwark against poll-tested or staid ideas.

"Now I have something else to talk about when the next candidate comes and asks me for money," Pincus said. "I can say, 'Are you going to be a WTF Democrat? Are you going to publicly endorse this agenda? Because if you are, I'm happy to talk.' I'm not just going to accept that any Democrat winning is a win.

I'm not just going to accept that any Democrat winning is a win.

"We're not just trying to be an arm of the Democratic Party. We're trying to say that the Democratic Party needs to change if it wants our votes and our money and our time."

But WTF has its work cut out.

Pincus has publicly expressed skepticism about the leftward tug of many of the vocal activists in the Democratic Party. He applauded the DNC on hiring Uber's engineering lead, Raffi Krikorian, a hiring decision that frustrated vocal progressive activists. And he told Business Insider that although he believed Sen. Elizabeth Warren was smart, he felt her recent book highlighted the economic problems in America while not suggesting any solutions.

Tuesday's launch exposed the fault lines that have become familiar to voices in the party who have ceaselessly debated whether it should pull further left after the results of the 2016 election and years of down-ballot losses.

Critics on Twitter mocked the ethos, while HuffPost took advantage of the slow holiday news day to dedicate over 1,000 words to the case that the populist left would most likely reject technocratic ideas generated on a site backed by Silicon Valley billionaires.

WTF also seemed hesitant to take any real risks out of the gate.

While the group initially planned to have a "Primary Pelosi" billboard — citing the intense desire among some California Democrats to primary House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, the state's longtime US senator — WTF pulled the idea at the last second, saying it was "looking to get more feedback from members."

Further, when confronted by Recode's Kara Swisher about the vapidity of the name and branding, Hoffman said, "We can pull it."

Pincus did not respond to a request for comment about the site's reception after the launch, but a source familiar with the planning said the group expected some pushback from the left.

The group also ensured that it had brought on several figures active in the progressive community, asking James Rucker, the cofounder of Color of Change, and Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, to serve on its advisory board.

Leading the Trump resistance in Silicon Valley

Reid Hoffman. Steve Jennings/Getty

The billionaire's efforts come at a time when many Bay Area tech leaders and employees see themselves as potential leaders of the resistance to Trump.

Google founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai came out forcefully against Trump's travel ban. And Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has begun to publicly reckon with the social network's so-called fake-news problem while embarking on a highly documented quest to visit Americans in all 50 states that has many of the trappings of a presidential-campaign exploration.

Sites have popped up to connect candidates with tech-industry volunteers, while some higher-ups have started private Facebook groups to bat around ideas, leading The New York Times to declare Silicon Valley a "center of anti-Trump resistance."

While Pincus' vision for the group may be grander than most plans, the political landscape is littered with the remains of Silicon Valley-backed tech startups that were set in motion to activate young voters and Democrats.

Zuckerberg's pro-immigration-reform group, FWD.us, has chugged along for years while the country's political leadership has shifted to the right on the issue.

The Groundwork, a technology startup contracted by the Clinton campaign and backed by Google's Eric Schmidt, was plagued by problems and seen early on by the campaign as disorganized to the point of irrelevance.

And while Sean Parker's data startup, Brigade, claims it predicted Trump's victory, it's difficult to say it boosted young voter turnout and "reimagined civic engagement," as it planned during its 2015 launch.

This also isn't Pincus' first attempt to reshape the Democratic Party after the 2016 election.

Last year, Werbach, Pincus, and several other tech leaders funded research to better understand how areas in the Midwest and South could be better served by the tech industry.

Pincus has been actively meeting and encouraging business leaders and nonpoliticians to run for office. Recode reported that he had met with Stephan Jenkins, the singer of the ubiquitous late-1990s radio-rock band Third Eye Blind, about a potential run for office.

But Pincus said WTF represented the fullest representation of his political action that would allow him to recruit candidates that better align with his political interest and test messages that better resonate with broad groups of people.

"We can't just start up and be like, 'Hi, we're a new party, and we're going to run all these people for office,'" he said. "I think we need to introduce people to the idea that we need to get people engaged in small ways that have visible impact and feedback loops, and then iterate."

He added: "They should all be competing to prove to us that they are giving us voice and choice, that they are the true representatives of us. And so far, I, unfortunately, have no competition."