Why Kinetic Exists
Our public sector partners pay obscene amounts of money and get awful digital experiences back. They are left disempowered and forced to accept this situation as the norm. A growing body of evidence shows that frustrating digital experiences directly erode public trust in government.
This happens because the startups are losing. The incumbents will keep painting over the moldy walls if the market keeps rewarding them. They won’t tear down the house and build a better one unless the competition forces them to.
My mission with Kinetic is to shift the balance of power in govtech in favor of startups. If we create an environment where more product-forward govtech startups survive the early stage, they will generate an upward pressure on incumbents that accelerates innovation and improves public trust.
We can only drive this shift by helping startups close deals. The costs of shipping features and blasting email campaigns are trending toward zero, while the costs of building an enduring company continue to increase. I want to find and cheapen the “secret wisdom” of how to build an enterprise-grade go-to-market.
Because that’s quickly becoming the only escape hatch left.
Every government sale is an enterprise sale
Public sector sales requires rigorous process execution. Time up your outreach to budget season. Run it by each department that could plausibly benefit. Talk to IT, who can ensure there are no security or compliance holes. Get three quotes for purchasing. All for the executive to kill it at the last minute because the initiative has been deprioritized.
Every government sale is an enterprise sale - no matter how small.
Every govtech GTM is an enterprise GTM
B2B startups have the luxury of tiptoeing into the enterprise, step by step. They convince their friends to sign up for the first prototype. Then see who’s willing to pay. Then sell to incrementally larger businesses, until they have enough scars and credentials to graduate to the enterprise. But..
If you built a product specifically for government…
and if every government sale is an enterprise sale…
…then every govtech founder’s job is building an enterprise-grade go-to-market from scratch.
They don’t have the luxury of learning as they move upmarket. Or calling into lists of people who have already signed up for the free plan.
Their job is to play NFL caliber football without a playbook.
The actual breaking point
Traditionally, the common trope has been that govtech is unattractive to early-stage VCs because of the long sales cycles.
I propose a new trope: The real killer is the long learning cycles.
A sales cycle lasts from the first meeting to the close.
A learning cycle lasts the length of multiple sales cycles. If you make a mistake that kills a deal, it can take the length of a whole sales cycle to find that out. By then you have to start over, taking the length of an entire sales cycle to fix the problem. You solve it, which means you earned the right to discover yet another problem further down the funnel. It takes the length of another sales cycle to fix that one. And then maybe everything’s fixed, but you still need the length of a whole sales cycle to demonstrate repeatability.
So in theory, a sales cycle of x could mean a learning cycle of 4x. These slow feedback mechanisms are an existential threat to your future. A B2B startup can run three entire pivots with the same amount of runway that can get your govtech company halfway through a learning cycle.
Not to mention, a ”learning cycle” can apply to other dimensions of a business besides the sales process: hiring, marketing, product development, etc. The fewer learning cycles you have to complete, the less your sales cycles define your future. What if you could show >120% NRR? High MoM growth? Evidence of a repeatable motion? A large market that could support revenues north of $100M ARR? How much would your sales cycle matter then?
When VCs balk on early-stage govtech, they’re not saying that these companies can’t grow or aren’t exciting.
The more accurate takeaway is that VCs aren’t Santa Claus.
They have one job: deploy capital into the most promising areas and companies with the highest ROI. Govtech founders ask VCs for the same amount of runway as their B2B counterparts, but have to complete disproportionately longer learning cycles. So even if they succeed, the longer timeframe will mean a lower IRR for the investors.
You may be worth the financial investment, but not the opportunity cost.
It’s an unfair game
Meanwhile, that incumbent you love to hate?
They’re funded by the same people who know the optimal amount of air to put in bags of chips before people stop buying them.
The people who know the precise amount of filler to put in the meatloaf before people question whether it’s meat.
They’re armed with all of the secret wisdom and historical data on how to squeeze every last drop out of the lemon, passed down throughout their portfolio companies.
Secret wisdom like: Mandatory 7% uplift per renewal. 250 clients per CSM. Fire the UX designers and hire channel partner managers. Buy, don’t build.
They know what sales excellence looks like. They throw their weight behind sales enablement managers, RevOps, solutions architects, technical writers, channel partner managers, and a motivational speaker for sales kickoff just for good measure because that’s what works.
When private equity and M&A dominate a space, large companies thrive while everyone else loses
The saying goes, “First-time founders focus on product; second-time founders focus on distribution.”
Private equity firms with dozens of portfolio companies are so focused on distribution, that they let practically everything else bleed except distribution. And boy, do they distribute.
M&A is so popular in govtech because it gives the combined company an outsized distribution advantage. When an incumbent acquires a startup, the startup can leverage the incumbent’s cooperative purchasing contracts. The incumbent can pursue cross-selling opportunities with the startup’s customer base. Since it’s all the same company now, those deals don’t have to go out to bid.
The press release talks about synergies and creating a ‘unified platform’. But after the merger, do they ever actually integrate the products together? Hell no.
Meanwhile, every time one of these incumbents comes up in conversation with one of my potential customers, I hear horror stories:
The implementation took two years longer than they promised.
Each software update made parts of the system literally unusable for weeks.
The mobile app is 1.5 stars on the App Store.
All three are true stories. And all three of those corresponding companies are financially thriving.
I believe there’s a way out…
I believe that we can flip this dynamic on its head. Govtech startups disproportionately struggle in the early stages. Once they get to Series A, many more doors open for them including better access to capital.
But the secret wisdom around building a govtech GTM from zero to one is out there somewhere. It just needs to be more accessible. Every last B2B sales guru is flooding the airwaves with their version of this on LinkedIn. But nothing for govtech. So we need to find it, unlock it, and cheapen it.
If we do so, we can reduce the “learning cycle” for these founders, and increase their survival rate.
If we can get more of the tech-forward startups to Series A, that’s when we build a more competitive environment that pressures the incumbents to step up their game.
...but it won't be easy
But by the laws of nature, it can't involve doing the exact same thing that the incumbents are doing, just on a smaller budget.
It requires being resourceful with limited resources, so every last teeny advantage can compound.
It requires work that feels uncomfortable and unnatural.
Everyone's pupils dilate when they see the line go vertical on someone else's exponential graph.
They skip over what happened during the horizontal part.
How it felt.
What to expect
As of today, Kinetic is just me doing fractional sales leadership for multiple companies. Part closing, part process building. The name came from the belief that GTM building required something resembling kinetic energy. You can’t just sit there in an armchair and bark orders. The pain from making a cringeworthy cold call will make you change your script 100x faster than scanning for dips in someone else’s conversion rates.
I originally reasoned that if I worked for multiple startups at once, it would help me pattern-match even faster, setting off a flywheel of learning and community-building that would turn me into an unstoppable founder in the future. After nearly a year, I am happy where this has taken me.
I definitely haven’t acquired all of the secret wisdom, though; if I did, I’d be sitting on a beach charging $1,000 per hour. But with every lived experience in this space, I get more efficient at crossing out the wrong answers earlier, quicker at separating the great choices from the good ones, and more nimble in executing.
As Kinetic evolves, I will double down on acquiring the ‘secret wisdom’ of govtech and sharing it with the underdogs. Expect more community building, more content, and more product offerings beyond “fractional human battering ram.”
I want to work with the founders who are chasing their dream against all odds. I want to work with the govtech-forward VCs who already believe in the space. I want to work with the non-govtech VCs who are on the fence. But most of all, I want to work with the unsung heroes in local government who stare straight at the public scrutiny and the tightening budgets and do their job anyway. Because they deserve the benefits of a healthier govtech ecosystem more than anyone else.
