Bringing startups and government together with Andrea Garrity

Acquisition Talk

Andrea Garrity joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss how the government can build relationships with nontraditional companies. She is the Chief Growth Officer at goTenna, a company that offers mesh networking for off-grid devices and decentralized communications. Before that she was vice president at In-Q-Tel and client executive at IBM. In the episode, we discuss an article Andrea recently wrote about bringing startups and government together. She argues that the procurement maze and multi-year timelines creates a capital requirement that is difficult for companies to burden in advance of contract awards. "I think it's hard to ask these companies to take on that burden right away," Andrea says. "Startups are beholden to their board, and the board wants to see market fit and revenue. They're not willing to invest in a contract specialist or a GSA person without first seeing that fit." As a result, many startups focus on the commercial sector first before deciding whether they have the resources to start expanding into the government market. Even then, many new technologies are cross-cutting and delivered "as a service." Andrea describes the difficulty of selling a mesh networking capability to the DoD, where money and attention are inwardly focused on platform stovepipes like bombers, submarines, combat vehicles, and satellites. "How many people can I talk to? How many people can I demo for? And then. When we do those demos, we see people get excited and then they say, Hey, we've got to pull in this other group, figuring out how to engage at a level where we're able to do the demonstration once, instead of 250 times would be great. And I say that as somebody who feels like I'm a veteran at engaging with the government." There is no single "program of record" for many commercial technologies, meaning companies have to try to get a foothold anywhere they can. Selling a product "as a service" is another challenge, where pricing is based on usage rates, like cloud computing or uber rides. These pricing models are entirely different from anything government has used in the past. "The government looks at it and says, 'we cant budget for that.'" Luckily for goTenna, their mesh networking offering is based on a small hardware device and can be sold by the unit. Each unit can send short-burst data like position, text, sensor data, etc., between 8 and 15 miles -- up to 145 miles from an air asset -- and relay that information up to six devices away in a daisy-chain fashion. Yet all this capability, and much of the value, is enabled by software. Here's Andrea: "On the one hand I always say we need to talk about ourselves as a software company. On the other hand, I'm so glad that we get to price it by device because you're absolutely right, software pricing and enterprise software pricing is really challenging." This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com.