Public Partners with Chris Evans is a starting point

• The investment app Public collaborates with the social engagement company A Starting Point.
• A Starting Point was co-founded by Chris Evans, Mark Kassen and Joe Kiani.
• The partnership offers Public’s retail investors educational content produced by A Starting Point.

Fintech Public wants users to be better informed about public policy, and it is collaborating with Captain America for the job.

The investment app announced Tuesday that it is launching a content series in partnership with A Starting Point (ASP), a community engagement website founded by Chris Evans, Mark Kassen and Joe Kiani. The series is aimed at educating retail investors by offering policy newsletters, fiscal and monetary policy explanations and interviews with lawmakers.

Public enables mom-and-pop investors to build diversified portfolios—including stocks, government bonds, cryptos, and ETFs—in one place. The fintech was last valued at $1.2 billion in February 2021 and has backers that include Greycroft and Accel.

Public already offers educational content for investors, such as audio programs, podcasts and reports. The collaboration with ASP is the latest expansion of these editorial offerings.

With this partnership, Public will gain access to ASP’s connections with legislators and elected officials, and A Starting Point will reach a wider audience with its new finance-focused vertical.

“We’re constantly evolving as our members become more sophisticated and look for more information,” Katie Perry, general manager of B2B and editorial at Public, told Insider. “We ran a survey last year and volatility was really a catalyst for people to start digging into fundamentals, research and also monetary and fiscal policy.”

“And from what we’ve seen, there’s been this positive moment where they’re now looking to understand how these systems work, whether it’s market structure or earnings call metrics,” Perry added.

Captain America on Capitol Hill

ASP is a two-pronged civic engagement website and app that helps educate American voters through video-based content featuring elected officials.

It was founded in 2020 by Evans, best known for his role as Captain America in the Marvel series, filmmaker Mark Kassen and tech startup founder Joe Kiani.

Kassen and Evans met while working on a 2011 film called “Puncture,” and met Kiani while doing press for that film.

The idea for the company was born in 2017 when Evans recognized the challenge of finding simple, straightforward answers to common questions regarding government and political issues.

“We came together and said, ‘What if we use our storytelling skills mixed with our forays into the world of elected officials and create a place to make information that lives somewhere between obtuse and opaque a little more accessible?'” Kassen told Insider .

One of the offerings, called “Starting Points,” allows policymakers on both sides of the aisle to briefly explain their stance on the same issue — such as gun control, free speech and labor laws — without hyperbole.

In the latest collaboration between Public and ASP, Evans and Kassen spoke with Congressional Stock Trading Representative Abigail Spanberger, one of the co-authors of the bill that would ban members of Congress and their family members from trading individual stocks.

“What they do is provide more access to the people, the decision makers, the insights that feed into all these systems that people increasingly want to learn about,” Perry said. “And similar to how we saw that the public really wants to understand how things work in volatile times, I think we’re seeing the same politically.”