Rich Shakespeare
Founder & Technical Lead at Movement
I'm an engineer. I look after engineering at Movement and still write code most days. I've spent my career building software for unions, charities and campaigns — ChangeLab, the Labour Party and 38 Degrees before this, and now a platform that fifty of them use.
Writing
- Trust from the outside: shipping an app AI wrote3 June 2026
- Stop and breathe8 April 2026
What I'm up to
- Engineering at Movement — the organising platform used by the NEU, UNISON, GMB, the Labour Party, Greenpeace and Amnesty.
On the side
- Tally — fitness leagues you run with friends.
- Current Context — AI-moderated focus groups.
- BestXI — a football lineup game.
What I've enjoyed
- Being a Partner at ChangeLab, and making the bet to pivot the agency into a product company — which became Movement.
- Being the Labour Party's first Head of Development, and building Doorstep — the door-knocking app. Ten years on it's still going, past 10 million doors.
- Building Identity and Speakout at 38 Degrees, the CRM behind 3 million members.
- Helping CrowdJustice scale their operations to become the UK's leading crowdfunding platform for legal issues.
- Keeping campaign infrastructure standing up to nation-state attackers.
- Working out what actually changes for a team when it adopts AI.
- Interviewing for (and failing to get) YC investment in a new polling tech company.