How Government Works

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[00:02:56] – (First question) – His career leading up to OpenGov

[00:05:45] – Experience in Afghanistan and lessons from his time there

[00:08:54] – Aligning a large group on a strategy

[00:09:56] – Aligning the team at OpenGov when getting started

[00:11:54] – Levels of government that matter and what their systems looked like when he was getting started

[00:15:24] – Role of budget and how money flows in in government operations

[00:18:55] – How technology can fix the bureaucracy of government

[00:21:40] – Can technology help the public’s relationship to government

[00:24:20] – Defining vertical SaaS products

[00:27:02] – Picking the right products/customers to build your product well

[00:28:33] – Their purpose when building their first product

[00:30:23] – Building a company in a highly regulated space

[00:32:14] – Selling in this space and lessons learned

[00:34:04] – Building a machine to distribute enterprise software

[00:37:03] – Getting the technical, political, and commercial processes aligned

[00:39:40] – Staying up to date on the market and fending off your competition

[00:42:18] – Competency within public governments

[00:44:03] – Metrics that he uses to understand the health of OpenGov

[00:46:07] – The importance of charging the right price for professional services

[00:48:36] – Hardest episode in developing OpenGov

[00:50:17] – Valid early criticisms of the company

[00:52:34] – Advice to new entrepreneurs entering the vertical SaaS space