Investors behind disastrous Iowa Dem caucus app rush to scrub their ties: report

Officials at ACRONYM, a firm that invested in the company behind the disastrous mobile application used to report vote totals in the Iowa Democratic caucus, have been trying to scrub their ties ever since the app led to a system-wide reporting meltdown on Monday night.

The Daily Beast reports that ACRONYM has deleted a blog post from January, 2019 in which Gerard Neimera, the CEO of app developer Shadow, Inc., said that his company's data collection and reporting product "will exist under the ACRONYM umbrella."

The publication also reports that Tara McGowan, who serves as ACRONYM's CEO, previously "said that ACRONYM had 'acquired' the company GroundBase, which Neimera had used to develop Shadow’s underlying technology."

What's more, reports the Daily Beast, "as of Sunday, ACRONYM’s website boasted that it had 'launched Shadow,'" although "by Tuesday, that language had been changed to say it had simply “invested” in the company."

One Democratic operative tells the Daily Beast that ACRONYM helped sell the Democratic Party on Shadow's technology by using a tried-and-true Silicon Valley tactic of promising more than you can reasonably deliver.

"It is a pattern of fake it till you make it,” the operative claims. “You talk a big game and then sort of hope it becomes true.”