August - 20208GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKIN MYOPINIONNick Sinai, Senior Advisor, Insight Partners, Adjunct Faculty at Harvard Kennedy School, and former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology OfficerByA s a former senior federal official, I'm guilty of focusing on startups. The allure of the scrappy startup entrepreneur--especially if she is mission-focused--is irresistible.Federal executives and CIOs are right to explicitly focus on including them in new initiatives--to support emerging technologies and inspire fresh thinking. In the Obama Administration, we invited them to White House policy roundtables, showcased them as examples of job-creators, and designed policies to promote high-ambition entrepreneurship. But most venture-capital-backed startups aren't financially successful or capable of supporting enterprise or government customers. Many of them don't return 100 cents on a dollar invested in them when eventually sold. I'd argue that the government needs to shift its focus to those venture-backed software companies that are winning in the commercial marketplace, attracting significant additional capital, and are becoming category leaders--what I'd call a "ScaleUp." Put simply, ScaleUps are startups that have graduated from being just a great idea to being a business that is achieving exponential growth and market success. Put even more bluntly, a ScaleUp is a de-risked startup--bringing the innovation the government needs, with the viability and security our government should expect from its partners. I'd offer three reasons why the government should explicitly focus on ScaleUps:First, ScaleUps are when innovative products and technology become enterprise-ready--i.e., truly scalable and secure. It's often the second or third version of the product, and the additional engineering helps meet the needs of large global enterprises. Second, ScaleUps have the resources to support federal procurement and certifications. FedRAMP typically takes 6 to 12 months and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. I'm all for simplifying and compressing the federal buying process, but as it currently stands, it's an expensive proposition for an enterprise software company to satisfy the compliance needs of the federal government.Third, ScaleUps are committed for the long-haul. Early-stage startups are highly focused on building a product that solves a ScaleUps VSStartups
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