00:25:18 · Scott Kupor
[00:25:18] S2: your wife is way smarter than I am, and her job is mostly, yes, to question, like, what the hell am I doing? So the historical reason was I had literally done policy stuff starting in... Literally in high school, actually. I worked for a group back in high school that used to do health care policy research, so we were trying to figure out... We were doing breast cancer screening stuff. Right? You know, like, do the economics look like? And then when I went to Stanford, I worked for a professor, this guy named Alan Garber, who's actually now the president of Harvard, doing stuff around prostate cancer. Right? Which is okay. Like, does it make sense to screen large populations of men for prostate cancer? And I won't go into details, but it turns out there's these weird nuances of prostate cancer. The basic answer is most men die with some form of prostate cancer. Very few men die of prostate cancer. And so screening broad populations can be problematic because you will catch a lot of stuff that never would have actually had health outcomes. Anyway, so I've been doing that, and then when I went when I went to Stanford through law school, I actually worked for another guy who... His name is in the news today, a guy named Jay Bhattacharya, who now runs the NIH, if you follow that. Jay was a researcher at Stanford. I was his grunt. I used to do, like, modeling for him for this policy group that worked on. So I always had these, like, interests in policy, and then whatever, life kind of intervened, and I ended up obviously going in a different path and going to the private sector. But at some point in my bucket list, I always thought I'd do policy stuff. The reason now was really a couple of things. One was just from a personal perspective, like, was the right time in my life to do this. So my kids were all out of the house at this point in time. Marc and Ben were incredibly gracious and said, hey. Look. If this is what you want to do, like, we're happy to support it. You know, they were... They enabled me to kind of transition my stuff off and, you know, gave me the freedom to do that. And obviously, I've been very lucky just financially along the way to have the means to be able to kind of take a break from the business.
00:27:03 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
And then the second thing was, look, I really believe that what I learned in venture capital might have some applicability to what I would do in government. So the job I have is this, I run this group called the Office of Personnel Management. Essentially, could think of us as we are the HRtalent agency for the 2,000,000 some million federal employees. So, we are responsible for, like, making sure we have the right people coming into government, and then all the policies that govern talent, essentially, in the government. And why did you [00:27:28] S1: think those... They were skills transferrable from your previous job to this one, though?
00:27:28 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:27:28] S1: think those... They were skills transferrable from your previous job to this one, though? [00:27:32] S2: Because what I learned, and particularly, you know, through all the stuff I've done with working for Marc Andreessen, companies, and managing people, is something very simple, which will sound like so obvious, but I think it's really true, which is, look, organizations are pretty simple. It doesn't matter if you're a government organization, or a private organization, or a not for profit, They're all the same, which is all an organization is, it's a collection of people who are just aligned around a similar set of objectives. Like, it's no more complicated than that. The question is, like, do you have the right set of objectives? Do you have the right people? And then do you have a set of incentives that track to those objectives so that when people do the things you want them to do, they get rewarded and recognized, and you can then kind of do 10 more great objectives? Or when they don't do that, do you have a mechanism to either correct that behavior and or remove them to the organization? And so when I looked at that, was like, okay. I'm gonna come to government, and it's a totally different set of objectives, which I agree. But the fundamental question is, like, do we have the right people, and do we have the right incentive structure to actually enforce the behavior we want? And the short answer, particularly on the latter side, is, like, the incentive structure is completely screwed up from my perspective.
00:27:32 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
[00:27:32] S2: Because what I learned, and particularly, you know, through all the stuff I've done with working for Marc Andreessen, companies, and managing people, is something very simple, which will sound like so obvious, but I think it's really true, which is, look, organizations are pretty simple. It doesn't matter if you're a government organization, or a private organization, or a not for profit, They're all the same, which is all an organization is, it's a collection of people who are just aligned around a similar set of objectives. Like, it's no more complicated than that. The question is, like, do you have the right set of objectives? Do you have the right people? And then do you have a set of incentives that track to those objectives so that when people do the things you want them to do, they get rewarded and recognized, and you can then kind of do 10 more great objectives? Or when they don't do that, do you have a mechanism to either correct that behavior and or remove them to the organization? And so when I looked at that, was like, okay. I'm gonna come to government, and it's a totally different set of objectives, which I agree. But the fundamental question is, like, do we have the right people, and do we have the right incentive structure to actually enforce the behavior we want? And the short answer, particularly on the latter side, is, like, the incentive structure is completely screwed up from my perspective. [00:28:30] S1: Before you move on, let's describe this. Why is the incentive structure completely screwed up from your perspective?
00:28:30 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:28:30] S1: Before you move on, let's describe this. Why is the incentive structure completely screwed up from your perspective? [00:28:36] S2: A couple of things. Number one is it is an incredibly legal regulatory compliance related culture, basically, and so everything that happens basically in government is for fear of doing something wrong. We do the same thing we've been doing all along, so the idea of innovation, any kind of innovation, is very much difficult to do, because the better thing to do is keep doing what you're doing, don't take risks. You know, when I first came in, one of my, you know, reports said, Look, our job is to keep you out of the news, basically. And I was like, Well, okay, well tell me more about that. And they said, Well, we don't want you to get hauled in front of Congress for doing something that they don't want you to do. We don't want you to get a report from the GAO, which is basically like this compliance organization. We don't want the inspector general, you know, doing stuff. [00:29:22] S1: I was like, okay. Like Okay. So then let me just send her and be
00:29:24 · Scott Kupor
[00:29:24] S2: That's easy. Yeah. Like, it's pretty easy how to solve that. Right? Which is okay. Like, we will just do nothing. Right? It's exactly right. That's what I said. Was like, that's not your job. Like, your job is to help us figure out, like, what can we do that's good? And, if we have a good reason for doing something and we screw it up, like, I'm fine getting hold in front of some congressional committee and explaining that to them. Obviously, if we're if we're... Our process was crappy, that sucks. We gotta fix that. But what it means is basically it doesn't allow for any innovation. Right? So, look, I come from, as you know, come we from this crazy world in venture capital where we take like obscene amounts of risk, which is fine because you've got like upside that potentially is uncapped, right? And like that's a good thing to happen, and that can cover a lot of mistakes. We don't have that in government, but instead what they've had is basically the answer is like take zero risk, but that also means therefore no consideration of upside potential for anything. So part of the incentive structure that I think we have to put in place and we're trying to put in place is, I've been using this term permissioned risk, which is deliberately different from the permissionless risk that I think exists in Silicon Valley, which is we gotta have this conversation, and we gotta be willing to let people take some risk, and that risk needs to be appropriately sized for the organization. So if you're in Department of War and the risk is people die, okay. Like, maybe we ought have a really, like, low tolerance for that. But, look, what I do and what most people in government do, it's not life or death. Yes, we want to get people their Social Security checks. We want to get people their IRS refunds. If it happens plus or minus a day or two from when we expect it, most cases nobody's going to die. But if we could actually, like, automate a system and figure out, like, how do you make it dead simple for people to get their Social Security checks or their retirement checks or anything like that, that has masked upside potential, but the incentive system has never allowed that.