First answer, we agree the headline is a bit contrived. We’ll blame the 80 character limit :)
This is a very complicated industry as you know. We do make it easier to find opportunities, run analytics on buying trends, manufacturers and customers in a single place that aggregates data that is not just in the public domain. This is a benefit for both the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ contractors. Ultimately, the bid must go through the prime and finding the opportunity you're interested in can bring you to becoming a prime or finding one that already exists. This networking enables a level of efficiency for both the user/organization and the government.
Lots of efficiencies to be gained in this arena. The network effect here is crazy strong already, but it's historically all based on working together in person. Now that COVID is keeping everyone at home, maybe that opens you some additional space for online networking.
Not cynical. We agree and to a great extent it would be nice to participate in the reform, though knowing how the gov works, it'll be a few generations from now. It would be nice to aid or even 'be' a platform that the government uses instead of industry using it to make sense of the government 'mess'.
Some challenging but interesting features accompany this property, you have a multi-decade project that can not require less than excessively complete employee turnover simply due to retirement alone, but it's possible to pull ahead technically and stay that way. OTOH, it will never be possible to deploy everything you have to offer. You must be capable of effectively mothballing some technology for future deployment.
You need to allow for this since you are doing some of the most undesirable work that others have run away from for exactly reasons like this. So there is so much left to do.
It's almost like an element of bureaucratic martyrdom can not be avoided.
Governments sure are high-rollers though and continue to throw money around like they didn't work very hard to earn it, of course it's always been spoken for over generations too. Well spoken for at least in the opinion of the spokespersons.
So I wish you good fortune and may you speak loudly but carefully, be well heard, and bring in voices which were too faint to get a share the old way.
If you're successful, the ideal scenario might be that the government acquires you to use your system instead. They couldn't just hire you since the end result would be the end of your business, at least as it pertains to the federal government.
There are other cumbersome procurement "markets" at the state and local level, but each of those would probably be essentially a new product, each designed to the idiosyncracies of each jurisdiction. However, that also could be an opportunity to be an aggregating middleman rather than a 1-to-1 middleman with like with the Feds. Any regional or national company too small to have clout & an insider track would probably kill for the ability to use a single portal as a one-stop-shop for dealing with state, county, and city municipalities.
That's where your value as a true positive middleman is hidden. Because even if they all fixed their cumbersome opaque systems (which is unlikely) there is still enormous value in aggregating them all in one place for contractors.
I know, it might look like your current plan is a "platform" but it's really kind of just middleware. Aggregation makes you a platform.
That also keeps you from trying to compete directly with something like Workday Finance/Procurement and their portals for suppliers and contract fulfillment: this has helped a decent amount in streamlining procurement even in places trying to map unnecessarily cumbersome practices derived from legacy systems onto it. If you're merely aggregating, you don't have to compete with that.
As a caveat to all of this, while I'm a well informed outsider, I'm still an outside observer of the tech startup scene and might be speculating above my pay grade here.
Agreed on all accounts. Slowly but surely we'll start gather the State / Local / Education level opportunities in our long road to be the unifying platform. In the end we do want a more efficient government and if that is selling the platform to them, great, we are in - I definitely don't want to become a government employee...
Best of luck! With a roadmap that builds out your offerings beyond just the Feds if you're successful there, I'll wish you well. And give a final note that, with some limited experience on state-level procurement, I can say that states may be an easier nut to crack in terms of the small companies having a chance without special relationships, IF they can navigate the process. If you find a state balanced nicely between opaque processes and high annual procurement budgets, that could be a good test case: Solid value-add and enough RFPs (or purchases below the RFP threshold) to have sufficient volume. Top 5 states by budget, choose the one with the hardest procurement hurdles.
Also I'll send you an invoice for the consulting and analysis I performed in these comments. I'll call it even at $100k, or a single meaningless internet point. I'd prefer the internet point, but if you feel the need to send cash then I guess that's okay too. But not both! That would be over paying. The internet point can take any form you'd like, but I prefer to receive it in D&D-style "+1" units.
I couldn't agree more. The GWAC / IDIQ referenced above attempts to do both (increase competition with pre-qualified companies and limit the number of primes that have access) but in the end it's still a limiter to competition.
This all said, there some valid reasons to limit. For example, if the Department of Education wants to buy 1000 laptops and there were 5,000 responses to the opp there is a significant lift/cost for reviewing and responding to each of these. What is more cumbersome for the government is when one of the 'losers' protests the award. This halts the delivery of the computers to the customer as it goes through a 3rd party (still gov) review. In the end, the original awardee generally gets the ability to sell the computers but by this time they are now 18-24 months old... This is a complicated system governed by a few thousand pages of rules called the FAR (federal acquisition regulations).
i'd wager you wouldn't have 5000 potential vendors once effective competition and smaller deal sizes squeezes out excess profit/graft. but from my experience with state procurement processes, the initial weed-out phase seems highly automatable, leaving a much more manageable fraction of candidates to consider manually.
also, transparency rules should be rigorous enough to illuminate all ultimate beneficiaries (through shell companies and subcontractors) so that larry, his brother darryl, and his other brother darryl can't artificially muddy competitiveness and undermine fairness.
I bet what you built is still in play with a those companies - The systems haven't changed much (if at all).
We are starting to pull in award data and amassing the database of historical awards, customers, locations, etc. Mix that with requested technologies and OEMs and the data starts showing some really interesting competitive trends.
Ultimately, organizations are going to be able to create their profile and list their certifications/capabilities/security compliances/etc. It will be a place to showcase who you are and what you can bring to the table for other orgs/primes/government customers to see.
