6 ms·

GovCo

61 points by lazerwalker 12y ago

thebiglebrewski 12y ago
Have you heard of https://18f.gsa.gov https://18f.gsa.gov ?
deviyer 12y ago
Have you heard of Palantir?
- ethanbond 12y ago
  Yeah, this is Palantir. Of course, recognizing that would take 20 minutes of wading through conspiracy theories and vague press releases :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wheaties 12y ago
Have you heard that many of these contracts come with preselected tech stacks or have to integrate with legacy systems that violate the standard your contracts have to adhere to? Your requirements will change every few quarters and those requirements may dictate a completely different tech stack? One lovely contract I worked on required C#, C++, and then Java. All within the span of 2 years. The actual project goals were so removed from the original stated goal that it would not have been even remotely recognized by the original project lead. That's good because the project lead changed three times.
vonklaus 12y ago
I think this is an awesome idea on paper, but could fail to translate into a successful venture. Maybe it is because I am too cynical, however, there is so much friction in the market. It is the way enterprise was in the 80s. No one ever got fired for buying BigGov'tContractor. Quality may take a back seat (in terms of contract procurement) to political affiliation, personal network, and relationship. Conversely, it would be great to see someone try this. The space industry (ine of the nost monolithic and change resistant industries) seems to be favouring privatization, cost, and reliability. Prove the cynics wrong!
doomspork 12y ago
Speaking from first hand experience I can tell you it would take a lot more than start-up culture to change the way the software is built for the government. For one, a lot of agencies are regulated by DHS or DoD on what is allowed, prohibited, and open for discussion. Another big, and I'd argue bigger issue, is that many of the people in positions to make these decision are nearing retirement and for them it is advantageous to award lucrative contracts to those companies that are likely to employ them or their friends later.
tolmasky 12y ago
> Start it as a non-profit or an intentionally unprofitable corporation. > Hire better people. You’ll be able to compete with top startups for talent, because your startup work environment combined with the mission of making this country a better place will be a powerful call. Not sure the "startup work environment" of macbook pros and free lunch will really help you compete against startups that offer stock options in a profitable company. Selling people on taking a worse deal in order to make the world a "better place" always seems disingenuous to me whether the goals are altruistic (help the American people!) or commercial (re-invent the tablet!) If I put on my employee hat for a second, this is what the deal sounds like: 1. Work on uninteresting or incredibly regulation-encumbered projects that can't or won't be measured on customer satisfaction. Where do complaints about healthcare.gov go? How are you as an employee of the contractor that made it able to respond to those complaints? At least when its a product 1) people can go to a competing product (show failure), or 2) people can use it because they genuinely want to (show success) and not because its the only game in town. 2. No potential massive IPO (per the description here). 3. Very unlikely you'll get the actual cool perks of adding quirky features you guys come up with together from analyzing customers. Its probably going to be a super refined spec, decided by a bunch of politicians, and since you're working at the lowest bid anyways even if you could afford to work on cool genuine ideas you have, you probably can't afford it. 4. Huge potential for the project to fail for political reasons anyways. (or you'll have to work with other gov contractors on a different part of the project) 5. The reality that some component of the company will have to become good at the "gov contracting game".
- ethanbond 12y ago
  www.palantir.com Seriously, a point-by-point real world counterargument of your comment.
  - tolmasky 12y ago
    I'm relatively certain that despite not seeking an IPO, Palantir is not a nonprofit organization (a key part of the proposal in this article). Maybe I missed that memo though, can you point to their page so I can make a tax-deductible donation?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- gkanapathy 12y ago
  I don't know how you define "startup", but if you mean a Bay Area-based venture-backed software company with less than, say, a couple of hundred employees that's been around less may, say, five years, then they most certainly do. I have worked for two such companies that made a fair bit of money. One of them even had their own direct GSA schedule, if you think that going via a reseller doesn't count. (For the purposes of this thought experiment, of course it should.)
- oostevo 12y ago
  Several pieces of evidence point to this not being true: There's a fairly large government program specifically designed to award technology and R&D contracts to small businesses. http://www.sbir.gov/ http://www.sbir.gov/ There's even a good bit of hand-holding through the process to make sure the business knows how to sell the resulting product. I've also seen many, many dozens of sole proprietorships awarded non-SBIR contracts.
chime 12y ago
> The hardest part will be understanding the world of contractors This point cannot be emphasized enough. I've dealt with Medicaid bids and the amount of regulation one must adhere to is unfathomable. This unfortunately makes his next point just as difficult: > Hire the best computer scientists and data nerds to improve the government from the outside. Data nerds want to play with data. Comp Sci folks love algorithms and novel implementations. Neither of them like reading 300 page annotated Word documents with multiple revisions about every little thing a system should do, especially when the requirements are not always rational. So the missing requirement in this list is to first hire a bunch of experienced analysts, project managers, and people who can do the paperwork and make them the bridge between the client and the coders. I would love to work on pure tech. for complex Govt. problems but I do not want the headache of HL7 and MITA 3.0 requirements. The moment you have a good business team, you will find willing developers. Without a business team with experience, connections, and negotiation skills, you will have a hard time building the product, let alone sell it.
- altoz 12y ago
  I cannot emphasize this enough. To bid for a government contract is a MASSIVE undertaking. Just to win the bid is very, very difficult. The RFP, RFQ, ITB are just a small part of the process and the evaluation process of each bid is not merely the lowest price, but also a combination of responsiveness, history of responsibility and the politics of a selection committee.
  - rankam 12y ago
    > the politics of a selection committee. Working in government and having to deal with these things on a day to day basis, you couldn't be more right. Also, it doesn't help that people hate when they have to be a part of a selection committee.
    - mgkimsal 12y ago
      I'm in the process of looking at this space, and the approach we're thinking of taking is starting with smaller/local municipalities first, vs larger orgs (and larger contracts). We're in the learning process right now, to see if there's any interest/demand. One of the things that's come up is the RFP review process - even at county levels, I've been surprised at how... paper-based it still is, and even more surprised that people seem willing to change to e-processes. Anyone that has any more info/insight on local gov bid processes and willing to share insight, please hit me up. tia :)
brandonb 12y ago
(I worked on healthcare.gov) Some of my colleagues are doing just this. Stay tuned.
- eddietejeda 12y ago
  As a former CfA fellow and civic-tech startup founder, this is a very intriguing comment. Would you like to say more?
rabble 12y ago
This won't work in the US. The problem is the way government contracting works. Government Digital Service in the UK has managed to reform things there because they demanded and got to control the way the UK contracts for software. The whole nice 18F folks in the US are great people but they lack the power to fix anything. FUNDAMENTAL CONTRACTING AND BIDDING REFORM IS NEEDED.
mapmeld 12y ago
It's a good idea. The existence of other groups trying it underlines that it IS a good idea, and you might be able to start working on it today. Others have mentioned Palantir (for-profit) and 18F and USDS (within the federal government). Other groups to check out: Code for America (non-profit) and Department of Better Technology (for-profit)
pmorici 12y ago
I'm not getting the impression that the OP understands the nature of government contracts and the underlying incentives that have shaped things to be the way they are. Lack of free lunch and Mac book pros has nothing to do with the problem. I'm also skeptical of any company who's sole customer is government. A better idea would be to start a service to help existing reputable companies break into government contracts to offer more competition.
marianov 12y ago
Don't you have clauses requiring X years of existence, Y number of previous projects of a given size or Z income per year in government RFPs? They exist in my country. You could think they are thought to avoid two guys in a garage to win a contract where you ( the government) want to hire a reliable company that can deliver and support the product. Or you can think it's just another way to tailor the RFP to that same big companies every time. T
olympus 12y ago
I'll throw my hat in with all the other people who aren't being negative, they are speaking truth. Even if it is equipped to produce a better product, a startup is unlikely to win any government contracts for a few reasons. First, one of the things that contract selections are based off of are a history of performance. A startup has no history, so they better get some civilian projects under their belt before they start competing for government work. Second, the government is accountable to its people, and the way that government acquisitions proves that it is being good stewards of the people's money is by hiring companies that can "prove" they aren't going to waste it. That means that your company has to meet several ISO XXXX standards, your company must be certified lean, you must be at least level 3 in the capability maturity model (CMM, which again requires a history of performance), you have to have six sigma black belts on hand, and a whole host of other crappy certifications that you have no choice to go out and get. Plus, you have to employ a certain percentage of minority races, women, and handicapped people, or you won't get the contract -- while this sounds like it isn't a big deal, look around the startup space and you'll see that it is made up overwhelmingly of white males. By the time you meet all these requirements (and there are a whole host of nitpicky other things to think about like the contracting process and myriad laws) and still have enough talent on hand to actually make a product, you are no longer a startup. Competing for government contracts is not the way to go for a startup. It is not a system set up to give the little guys a shot. Source: I am a mid-level certified government (military) acquisitions professional (if you want details I am lvl I in program management and science and technology management, and lvl II in test and evaluation-- certified by the "Defense Acquisition University" which isn't a real university and required by DAWIA -- a congressional act that regulates a lot of this stuff). I am 26 and have taken over 400 hours of acquisitions training in addition to my master's degree. And I'm just the one doing the math/stats work when we test new stuff. The program managers have to navigate a minefield of bureaucracy every day, trying to prove to the taxpayer that we aren't wasting their money. Ironically we end up wasting a lot of money trying to prove that we aren't wasting it.
subway 12y ago
based in San Francisco Nope. SF is not the center of the universe.
greggersh 12y ago
We're about 1 year into a experiment to do just this. A year ago we founded Ad Hoc LLC, after working on HealthCare.gov; our idea was to bring the very best in private-sector engineering to government projects. Based on what we've learned over the past year, I do think creating a top-notch engineering organization is incredibly important. But, the problem of getting work is not to be ignored. The procurement process is absolutely the biggest problem we face. The idea that the government puts bids out to an open market and therefore gets the best quality and price is a fable. Most contracts go out to a pre-selected group of companies, are are shaped to fit into the models these companies provide. There are some positive changes happening both at individual agencies and at the broader federal level as to procurement reform that look positive, but by and large this is still the biggest obstacle to getting in the game. Subcontracting is a better option to start. We absolutely need more companies in this space, both in the product and services arena. The more companies, the more agencies will feel comfortable adopting contracting practices that are geared towards these companies rather than classic contractors. If you're a senior level developer or UI/UX designer interested in helping people get health care and Veterans get benefits, please be in touch with me; we're hiring and have a lot of really interesting work. Experience with Go, Rails and AWS are a plus, but any significant experience in web development or design/UX will do.
rbhobe 12y ago
Wow. I could have sworn you were writing about us... I'm part of a small team of expats from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix healthcare.gov. (Mostly Stanford, Google, YCombinator folks) We started our company, Nava, to bring the best of SV startups to DC and create software that radically improves how our government serves its people. Our trajectory is very similar to what you've described, with some tweaks that I won't go into here. In the last 6 months, we've launched 2 major projects: - App 2.0, the new insurance application for healthcare.gov. It's processing 70% of apps coming through the marketplace, and: converts 35% more people than the old app, gets them through in half the time, is mobile-friendly (20% of apps), sits on robust, scalable infrastructure, etc etc. It was the first system that CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) ever hosted on Amazon AWS. - Scalable Login System (SLS), the new identity management system for healthcare.gov. Sadly, the main achievement here is that the system is actually up and available, unlike its predecessor. It's now saving the taxpayer $70M in annual maintenance costs. Here's a Wired article from last summer about us: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/ http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/ Our momentum is strong, the problem is important, and we're looking for good people. If you're the type that would get fired up about reimagining broken government experiences and technology, please drop us a line at jobs@navahq.com, we'd love to hear from you!

GovCo

61 points by lazerwalker 12y ago

thebiglebrewski 12y ago

Have you heard of https://18f.gsa.gov https://18f.gsa.gov ?

deviyer 12y ago

Have you heard of Palantir?

ethanbond 12y ago
Yeah, this is Palantir. Of course, recognizing that would take 20 minutes of wading through conspiracy theories and vague press releases :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

wheaties 12y ago

Have you heard that many of these contracts come with preselected tech stacks or have to integrate with legacy systems that violate the standard your contracts have to adhere to? Your requirements will change every few quarters and those requirements may dictate a completely different tech stack? One lovely contract I worked on required C#, C++, and then Java. All within the span of 2 years. The actual project goals were so removed from the original stated goal that it would not have been even remotely recognized by the original project lead. That's good because the project lead changed three times.

vonklaus 12y ago

I think this is an awesome idea on paper, but could fail to translate into a successful venture. Maybe it is because I am too cynical, however, there is so much friction in the market. It is the way enterprise was in the 80s. No one ever got fired for buying BigGov'tContractor. Quality may take a back seat (in terms of contract procurement) to political affiliation, personal network, and relationship. Conversely, it would be great to see someone try this. The space industry (ine of the nost monolithic and change resistant industries) seems to be favouring privatization, cost, and reliability. Prove the cynics wrong!

doomspork 12y ago

Speaking from first hand experience I can tell you it would take a lot more than start-up culture to change the way the software is built for the government. For one, a lot of agencies are regulated by DHS or DoD on what is allowed, prohibited, and open for discussion. Another big, and I'd argue bigger issue, is that many of the people in positions to make these decision are nearing retirement and for them it is advantageous to award lucrative contracts to those companies that are likely to employ them or their friends later.

tolmasky 12y ago

> Start it as a non-profit or an intentionally unprofitable corporation. > Hire better people. You’ll be able to compete with top startups for talent, because your startup work environment combined with the mission of making this country a better place will be a powerful call. Not sure the "startup work environment" of macbook pros and free lunch will really help you compete against startups that offer stock options in a profitable company. Selling people on taking a worse deal in order to make the world a "better place" always seems disingenuous to me whether the goals are altruistic (help the American people!) or commercial (re-invent the tablet!) If I put on my employee hat for a second, this is what the deal sounds like: 1. Work on uninteresting or incredibly regulation-encumbered projects that can't or won't be measured on customer satisfaction. Where do complaints about healthcare.gov go? How are you as an employee of the contractor that made it able to respond to those complaints? At least when its a product 1) people can go to a competing product (show failure), or 2) people can use it because they genuinely want to (show success) and not because its the only game in town. 2. No potential massive IPO (per the description here). 3. Very unlikely you'll get the actual cool perks of adding quirky features you guys come up with together from analyzing customers. Its probably going to be a super refined spec, decided by a bunch of politicians, and since you're working at the lowest bid anyways even if you could afford to work on cool genuine ideas you have, you probably can't afford it. 4. Huge potential for the project to fail for political reasons anyways. (or you'll have to work with other gov contractors on a different part of the project) 5. The reality that some component of the company will have to become good at the "gov contracting game".

ethanbond 12y ago
www.palantir.com Seriously, a point-by-point real world counterargument of your comment.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  I'm relatively certain that despite not seeking an IPO, Palantir is not a nonprofit organization (a key part of the proposal in this article). Maybe I missed that memo though, can you point to their page so I can make a tax-deductible donation?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gkanapathy 12y ago
I don't know how you define "startup", but if you mean a Bay Area-based venture-backed software company with less than, say, a couple of hundred employees that's been around less may, say, five years, then they most certainly do. I have worked for two such companies that made a fair bit of money. One of them even had their own direct GSA schedule, if you think that going via a reseller doesn't count. (For the purposes of this thought experiment, of course it should.)
oostevo 12y ago
Several pieces of evidence point to this not being true: There's a fairly large government program specifically designed to award technology and R&D contracts to small businesses. http://www.sbir.gov/ http://www.sbir.gov/ There's even a good bit of hand-holding through the process to make sure the business knows how to sell the resulting product. I've also seen many, many dozens of sole proprietorships awarded non-SBIR contracts.

chime 12y ago

> The hardest part will be understanding the world of contractors This point cannot be emphasized enough. I've dealt with Medicaid bids and the amount of regulation one must adhere to is unfathomable. This unfortunately makes his next point just as difficult: > Hire the best computer scientists and data nerds to improve the government from the outside. Data nerds want to play with data. Comp Sci folks love algorithms and novel implementations. Neither of them like reading 300 page annotated Word documents with multiple revisions about every little thing a system should do, especially when the requirements are not always rational. So the missing requirement in this list is to first hire a bunch of experienced analysts, project managers, and people who can do the paperwork and make them the bridge between the client and the coders. I would love to work on pure tech. for complex Govt. problems but I do not want the headache of HL7 and MITA 3.0 requirements. The moment you have a good business team, you will find willing developers. Without a business team with experience, connections, and negotiation skills, you will have a hard time building the product, let alone sell it.

altoz 12y ago
I cannot emphasize this enough. To bid for a government contract is a MASSIVE undertaking. Just to win the bid is very, very difficult. The RFP, RFQ, ITB are just a small part of the process and the evaluation process of each bid is not merely the lowest price, but also a combination of responsiveness, history of responsibility and the politics of a selection committee.
- rankam 12y ago
  > the politics of a selection committee. Working in government and having to deal with these things on a day to day basis, you couldn't be more right. Also, it doesn't help that people hate when they have to be a part of a selection committee.
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    I'm in the process of looking at this space, and the approach we're thinking of taking is starting with smaller/local municipalities first, vs larger orgs (and larger contracts). We're in the learning process right now, to see if there's any interest/demand. One of the things that's come up is the RFP review process - even at county levels, I've been surprised at how... paper-based it still is, and even more surprised that people seem willing to change to e-processes. Anyone that has any more info/insight on local gov bid processes and willing to share insight, please hit me up. tia :)

brandonb 12y ago

(I worked on healthcare.gov) Some of my colleagues are doing just this. Stay tuned.

eddietejeda 12y ago
As a former CfA fellow and civic-tech startup founder, this is a very intriguing comment. Would you like to say more?

rabble 12y ago

This won't work in the US. The problem is the way government contracting works. Government Digital Service in the UK has managed to reform things there because they demanded and got to control the way the UK contracts for software. The whole nice 18F folks in the US are great people but they lack the power to fix anything. FUNDAMENTAL CONTRACTING AND BIDDING REFORM IS NEEDED.

mapmeld 12y ago

It's a good idea. The existence of other groups trying it underlines that it IS a good idea, and you might be able to start working on it today. Others have mentioned Palantir (for-profit) and 18F and USDS (within the federal government). Other groups to check out: Code for America (non-profit) and Department of Better Technology (for-profit)

pmorici 12y ago

I'm not getting the impression that the OP understands the nature of government contracts and the underlying incentives that have shaped things to be the way they are. Lack of free lunch and Mac book pros has nothing to do with the problem. I'm also skeptical of any company who's sole customer is government. A better idea would be to start a service to help existing reputable companies break into government contracts to offer more competition.

marianov 12y ago

Don't you have clauses requiring X years of existence, Y number of previous projects of a given size or Z income per year in government RFPs? They exist in my country. You could think they are thought to avoid two guys in a garage to win a contract where you ( the government) want to hire a reliable company that can deliver and support the product. Or you can think it's just another way to tailor the RFP to that same big companies every time. T

olympus 12y ago

I'll throw my hat in with all the other people who aren't being negative, they are speaking truth. Even if it is equipped to produce a better product, a startup is unlikely to win any government contracts for a few reasons. First, one of the things that contract selections are based off of are a history of performance. A startup has no history, so they better get some civilian projects under their belt before they start competing for government work. Second, the government is accountable to its people, and the way that government acquisitions proves that it is being good stewards of the people's money is by hiring companies that can "prove" they aren't going to waste it. That means that your company has to meet several ISO XXXX standards, your company must be certified lean, you must be at least level 3 in the capability maturity model (CMM, which again requires a history of performance), you have to have six sigma black belts on hand, and a whole host of other crappy certifications that you have no choice to go out and get. Plus, you have to employ a certain percentage of minority races, women, and handicapped people, or you won't get the contract -- while this sounds like it isn't a big deal, look around the startup space and you'll see that it is made up overwhelmingly of white males. By the time you meet all these requirements (and there are a whole host of nitpicky other things to think about like the contracting process and myriad laws) and still have enough talent on hand to actually make a product, you are no longer a startup. Competing for government contracts is not the way to go for a startup. It is not a system set up to give the little guys a shot. Source: I am a mid-level certified government (military) acquisitions professional (if you want details I am lvl I in program management and science and technology management, and lvl II in test and evaluation-- certified by the "Defense Acquisition University" which isn't a real university and required by DAWIA -- a congressional act that regulates a lot of this stuff). I am 26 and have taken over 400 hours of acquisitions training in addition to my master's degree. And I'm just the one doing the math/stats work when we test new stuff. The program managers have to navigate a minefield of bureaucracy every day, trying to prove to the taxpayer that we aren't wasting their money. Ironically we end up wasting a lot of money trying to prove that we aren't wasting it.

subway 12y ago

based in San Francisco Nope. SF is not the center of the universe.

greggersh 12y ago

We're about 1 year into a experiment to do just this. A year ago we founded Ad Hoc LLC, after working on HealthCare.gov; our idea was to bring the very best in private-sector engineering to government projects. Based on what we've learned over the past year, I do think creating a top-notch engineering organization is incredibly important. But, the problem of getting work is not to be ignored. The procurement process is absolutely the biggest problem we face. The idea that the government puts bids out to an open market and therefore gets the best quality and price is a fable. Most contracts go out to a pre-selected group of companies, are are shaped to fit into the models these companies provide. There are some positive changes happening both at individual agencies and at the broader federal level as to procurement reform that look positive, but by and large this is still the biggest obstacle to getting in the game. Subcontracting is a better option to start. We absolutely need more companies in this space, both in the product and services arena. The more companies, the more agencies will feel comfortable adopting contracting practices that are geared towards these companies rather than classic contractors. If you're a senior level developer or UI/UX designer interested in helping people get health care and Veterans get benefits, please be in touch with me; we're hiring and have a lot of really interesting work. Experience with Go, Rails and AWS are a plus, but any significant experience in web development or design/UX will do.

rbhobe 12y ago

Wow. I could have sworn you were writing about us... I'm part of a small team of expats from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix healthcare.gov. (Mostly Stanford, Google, YCombinator folks) We started our company, Nava, to bring the best of SV startups to DC and create software that radically improves how our government serves its people. Our trajectory is very similar to what you've described, with some tweaks that I won't go into here. In the last 6 months, we've launched 2 major projects: - App 2.0, the new insurance application for healthcare.gov. It's processing 70% of apps coming through the marketplace, and: converts 35% more people than the old app, gets them through in half the time, is mobile-friendly (20% of apps), sits on robust, scalable infrastructure, etc etc. It was the first system that CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) ever hosted on Amazon AWS. - Scalable Login System (SLS), the new identity management system for healthcare.gov. Sadly, the main achievement here is that the system is actually up and available, unlike its predecessor. It's now saving the taxpayer $70M in annual maintenance costs. Here's a Wired article from last summer about us: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/ http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/ Our momentum is strong, the problem is important, and we're looking for good people. If you're the type that would get fired up about reimagining broken government experiences and technology, please drop us a line at jobs@navahq.com, we'd love to hear from you!