Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

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I think you've left out the most important problems in this space: the graft, turf building/protectionism, and corruption. Tech isn't going to solve those. That aside, this seems like a pretty decent idea for a company.

Also, this is a gem: " Most people don’t realize, but the vast majority of government opportunities are only released to a subset of organizations called “prime contractors”. We have built a network of these prime contractors who are uploading their “private” opportunities into our application. "

A lot of people truly aren't aware of it! Nor are they aware of the fact that often the Primes' contract vehicles have requirements/constraints on the subs the primes select to farm work out to (e.g. some minimal fraction of the subs must be minority or women owned, subs cannot be foreign entities, etc.). What your feature here looks like to me is something that may be prone to abuse: primes post a set of (sub)contracts and cherry-pick the subs that they can shoe-horn into their checkboxes at minimal cost. Alternatively, this just seems to relabel links in the chain: instead of a would-be contractor bidding on a government vendor portal, they're bidding on your portal, and the bids are submitted to Primes instead of the government. I'm not sure this solves a problem so much as adds a middle-man. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it. Any thoughts about that?

"I'm not sure this solves a problem so much as adds a middleman."

The default "business plan" of any so-called "tech" company.

At some point the novelty of the internet and ever-smaller computers ("tech") may wear off and these companies will just be seen for what they are: "middlemen" (with silly, infantile company names).

The problem to solve in this space is arguably one of transparency ("Most people don't realise...") Allowing citizens, i.e., taxpayers, to see what kind of deals their government is making could add accountability.

To the parent's point about malfeasance in government contracting, perhaps more transparency would better allow the exising laws to be enforced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act

The default "business plan" of any so-called "tech" company

Leaving aside this example, sometimes a middleman is useful, aggregating what is otherwise disaggregated into a single location.

But if its primary function is to act as a portal into some other single system, then the problem is that other system. It also means that your business model is predicated on not fixing that system-- sort of like how H&R block and TurboTax lobby against simpler tax returns because they act as a portal to a complex system, and if that system is simplified then they are no longer necessary.

Govly may end up being useful, but I expect that if it really catches on then in a decade they would find themselves arguing against meaningful procurement reform designed to streamline the process. Maybe I'm too cynical though.

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'.

> it'll be a few generations from now.

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.

You're not cynical.

The problem isn't middlemen per se - often, they're very useful. For example, almost every service provider you use in your private life, like a barber shop or an accounting company, is by definition a middleman - they stand between you and the person actually performing the service. It's clear such intermediary tends to benefit both the service giver and the service receiver.

The problem starts when the middleman tries to lock you in. All kind of pathological, abusive behavior grows from there. In the relatively rare case of being a portal to a single system, they'll try to prevent you from going behind them and interacting with the system directly (TurboTax is a master example of that). In a more common case with tech companies, which is "aggregating what is otherwise disaggregated into a single location" (aka. bundling), they'll frequently attempt to decommodify the resource they're bundling. E.g. media streaming platforms making exclusive deals for content, or chat/collaboration and social media platforms working hard to prevent interoperability between services.

It's not cynical to be on the guard, because lock-in is the default business plan of many tech companies, including most of the well-known ones.

I disagree with this sweeping assessment, and I prefer to calling a service like this an "agent", "assistant", or "delegate". This is because technology cannot solve most human and social problems, but they can help as a delegate in dealing with complexity so you can focus on other things worth your time and interest.

With that mindset, everything becomes a middleman. Baker? Middleman for your bread. Farmer? Middleman for your milk. Hardware store? Middleman for your metal. Metal smelter? Middleman for your ore. Oxygen? Middleman for your survival.

Citizens (taxpayers as you apparently like to refer to them) already have access to this information, along with access to a vast amount of other information. When given the choice to read up on government contracts and watching cat videos on GoogleTube they will choose the latter, not the former. Education would be a way to teach people how the world around them works, but that would cost money and it appears that some governments rather spend that money on other things (guns, oil, banks or whatever top spending your local government tends to have).

Disagree. A baker makes bread. Milkman does some physical work to produce and provide a real product. What does Govly do? Get in the middle of a transaction you can complete without them and take a fee for filing some forms for you. Theyre maybe a secretary or something less at the very most.

Disagree. A baker gets in the middle of mixing some ingredients you can get yourself without them and take a fee for mixing that stuff for you.

I think you might simply not have a clue what a value proposition is, what a product is or what optimisation is.

Well that's the product. Yeah, I can sit in $place all day and complete $tasks I need done. However, if there is someone that I can pay to do it for me, then it's a simple comparison: my time vs their cost.

Like in healthcare. Hospital reimbursement in the US is set by negotiated contracts between hospital and insurer in dark smoky back rooms. The actual deal is unknown. Yet prices vary enormously so that middleware companies are popping up touting transparency. Something that should be mandated by law.

If google is the middleman between me and all of the internet then I suppose a farmer is the middleman between me and dirt? Like what is even the point??

This seems marginally worse than saying every data pipeline is just a bunch of materialized views materializing slowly.

What a hilariously broad take

Why? Is there something different in your mind that startups like these tend to do?

It seems to me that in the freemarket you can either create a "need", broadly construed, or facilitate access to a need that already exists. What else is there?

Efficiency, specialisation, scale. You doing one thing on your own vs. a collection of many of those 'things' you used to do solo, guess which one has more potential?

This does or course not mean that this applies all the time, everywhere, forever. But in this case, the 'startup' merely has a model of economy of scale, and then probably making sure the benefits are big enough that they can scrape a bit of a provision off of it. That way they can make money while still delivering something that has a higher value to a customer than the customer doing it themselves.

There is significant growth in what are call GWAC and IDIQ contacts (these are basically avenues to sell to any agency in the government under the guise that the government doesn’t know what it wants to buy [yet] but that it is going to buy a lot of it) and we agree with you that they lend themselves to a protectionism mentality because they are generally 10 year contracts with only a small subset of companies that are allowed in (they are awarded the contract- a kind of ‘hunting license’). We are trying to combat this protectionism mentality with our tool Today by bringing transparency and visibility to an arena that is previously unseen.

For the foreseeable future, there is no way of getting around primes. They are the ones on the hook with the government should anything go wrong with delivery of the goods and service. Govly provides network effect of being able to find new subcontractors or more importantly, for would-be contractors to find prime that can submit bids to opportunities they are working on with government customers (they just need an avenue to actually sell to the government). Govly doesn’t submit bids nor will it - We just facilitate the conversation and development of a bid between prime and sub in a singular place and provide both sides of the transaction a place to clearly see, find, track and analyze the massive amount of opportunities that exist (both the public and private ones [that primes grant access to]).

> "...the most important problems in this space: the graft, turf building/protectionism, and corruption. Tech isn't going to solve those."

rather than the byzantine prescriptive requirements we have now, the simple, straightforward solution to all of these is to disallow consolidation in procurement, making the contract sizes much smaller in most cases. it's much easier to hide significant graft in a billion dollar contract vs. a multi-thousand dollar one. the federal government tries to use size as its leverage over price, but we should be using competition instead. make contractors compete each time for smaller bites of the apple, rather than giving them the whole orchard in a single go, which often leads to complacency and corruption.

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.

IDK, it probably comes out the same. Feels like the "one horse sized duck, or a hundred duck sized horses" argument.

You hit the nail on the head. Even if there is a "fair bid" it never ends up being truly fair, and the taxpayer is the one footing the bill for all the nepotism.

Agreed 100%, I've only ever had my companies win ~$5m while bidding on 50m+ over 10 years most losses ended up in program failure due to likely graft... It's just the way it is.

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