The Army has spent millions of dollars with goTenna, but the service cannot give the company one of the most important things for a small business ― the certainty of recurring revenue.
“Now the funding is out, and even the program officer for that program doesn’t know where we go next within the Army,” goTenna founder and CEO Daniela Perdomo said at a Defense News-hosted roundtable in December. “That’s in part why we’ve been spending more time, frankly, on civilian public safety. Because even though DHS is consistently [under funding restrictions], they seem to be moving. They seem to move faster.”
That was from an interesting Defense News article, Tech startups still face the Pentagon’s ‘valley of death’. Even though DHS acquisition used to have a not so awesome reputation, it seems to have turned around nicely. Chief Procurement Officer Soraya Correa, a former Acquisition Talk guest, has really done a great job in her tenure.
The article was primarily talking about the oh-so dreaded valley of death in the Pentagon. I really need to look at DHS a little harder because if they are doing a better job dealing with new entrants — and they still deal with the same 2-3 year funding cycle time as DoD — then I want to know what’s going on.
Michele Flournoy argued what is needed is (1) more tech talent in government to make smart decisions; and (2) a bridge fund that is readily available in the year of execution.
No doubt (1) must be addressed. DoD needs to own the technical baseline. As for (2) — the bridge fund — this scheme has been attempted numerous times before and always fails. The first problem is getting Congress to agree to make the bridge fund sizable enough to matter. The second problem is letting these projects be “undocumented” in the sense that they don’t have the full rigmarole of an acquisition plan.
The third problem is the hardest. What would stop the fund from becoming a bridge to no where? Certainly, not every project that gets bridge funding will turn into a program of record. So you can’t line all the funding up until you know the results and then justify an acquisition plan — creating another valley of death. The most likely outcome is programs that are “addicted” to bridge funding, like some companies had been with SBIR.
In order to make bridge funding work, there’d need to be all these new business processes to make sure it goes somewhere. The services might essentially have to “pre-commit” to whatever they use bridge funding for to make it relevant. But that would destroy the very purpose of the bridge fund, which is to create options and be experimental. Options are not options when the path is committed to prematurely.
In any case, after the bridge phase is over, will the government really offer up all these sole source follow-ons? Or will the whole program get competed out again, with a good deal of the company’s IP offered up through the RFI/RFP?
Good read and links.
Good read and interesting links.