The Obama political movement had tended to hold itself apart from the corporate world, its members galvanized by what they saw as an opportunity to change the country. But after Election Day in November, huge political success met financial opportunity. The people in their 20s and 30s from the Obama tech team had seen others just like them get incredibly rich on innovations (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that were as transformational as anything they could hope to achieve in government. Now they started to think about what innovations they could bring to the market.

A.M.G. may be the most baldly commercial of the new crop of companies coming out of the cave, but they are all trying to translate what they learned there into future success. A few weeks ago, Wagner announced he was starting a new firm called Civis Analytics with an investment from Eric Schmidt, the Google executive chairman, who was a technology adviser during the campaign. As Wagner described it to me, he would use analytics to help nonprofit and for-profit companies reach out to segments of the population they were struggling to connect with. One of his first clients is the College Board, which runs the national SAT test. Civis will identify “kids who are low-income, high-achieving but not meeting their college potential.” The “commercial applicability is wide,” he said, so the company will not be averse to working with big, for-profit companies of all kinds.

Carol Davidsen was also recruited by A.M.G., but she decided to take the lessons of the Obama campaign in a different direction. If anything, her approach is almost anticorporate, even though she said she was not against getting rich if she could. Her company, called Cir.cl, which she founded with a campaign programmer, Joshua Thayer, endeavors to find people with complementary interests who may have reason to do business with each other, like parents with baby equipment to dispose of and parents-to-be in the market for that equipment. She calls it “recommerce.”

“I have a lot of friends with kids,” she said one recent Friday at her new office, a bouncy-ball and Mac-strewn onetime closet space in an industrial building in Downtown Brooklyn. “There’s this little plastic play house. Does every single one of those need to go into a garbage dump? Why did we give up on doing business with each other? Why is it always to big corporations? It doesn’t have to be.” Explaining her choice to me, she said, “I don’t want to spend my time optimizing for Coke.”

When I talked to Chauncey McLean in Brooklyn in April, he walked me through how the campaign’s technological achievements could translate into services provided to private businesses, like Caesars. The casino had gobs of data on its customers. “We have a giant list of people, and we need to make a model of likely customers,” he said. A.M.G. would break them down along a range of Caesars Scores, à la Wagner’s persuadable scores. Then A.M.G. could work through it and direct advertising toward those whose visits had fallen off: find what they watch via Rentrak in the greatest concentrations and then ply them with TV advertising.

Over several meetings with McLean and his young A.M.G. staff members, I asked them to talk about the switch in mission from getting Obama elected to helping Fortune 500 companies sell stuff. Will St. Clair, who helped write the campaign’s Facebook program, said he saw himself as a programmer first and foremost and only joined A.M.G. after deciding that he didn’t want “to play the Internet start-up billionaire game, which is a lot less fun than it looks on paper.” Gaurav Shirole said he was considering a job in the Treasury Department when McLean approached him. “I’m a Silicon Valley kid, so the start-up bug has been there forever.”

Frommann acknowledged having ventured into politics with a certain idealism. “We’ve all watched ‘The West Wing,’ like, four times, and we want to do our small part to change the world,” he said. Politics, he said, was emotionally satisfying. Corporate clients meant new data sets, “stuff I haven’t worked with before, intellectually that’s interesting to me.”