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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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?

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.

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]).

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.

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).

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.