From a venture capitalist, a volume on how government can use innovation out there in the economy

A venture capitalist turned professor and business manager outlines the case for a new approach to how a fast moving sector of the economy can help the government. Arun Gupta is CEO of the nonprofit Noble Reach, and he joins me now. Mr. Gupta, good to have you with us.

Thanks for having me, Tom.

And you've outlined these ideas in a book, Venture Meets Mission. Tell us why this is just not another recitation of the kind of old idea of, yeah, we need public private partnerships.

You know, in Venture Meet's Mission, we're really trying to take our theory on the cases twofold. One, in great power competition, we need to attract better innovation around government. And the second, we need to get better talent around government. And in venture meat tuition, we lay out how we do that primarily in addressing where we think the innovation really resides, which is our entrepreneurial community. If you look at our tech entrepreneurial community specifically, it's probably our greatest superpower in our democracy. And we lay out that if we are going to, as we move forward, maintain our global leadership, we need to really think about how we harness that venture community around government missions. Traditionally, public private partnerships have been around big government with big companies. And so really what we pose here is the notion of focusing on those nimble, innovative companies and how they collaborate with our larger government.

Now, the one thing about nimble companies, and sometimes companies are forced into nimbleness because as they age, they have to change and morph. I mean, look at the old Hewlett Packard. There's still a company by that name, but it's been atomized and scattered to the winds and pieces have grown up into new companies of their own. Total transformation of what, you know, those of us who were around 40 years ago, remember as Hewlett Packard. But then look at a other ancient program like say, Social Security, which is not fiscally sustainable. Everybody knows it, everybody in Congress knows it, everybody in the Congressional Budget Office, all the actuaries know it. And yet somehow you need a venture style way of not getting rid of the benefits, but looking at the whole program from the ground up and see how can we do this better. Is that the kind of thing that we can help with here?

You know, I think more what we're looking at trying to help with is not on the policy side itself, but is bringing that the enabling innovation to support whatever policy decisions are made. The Social Security example is obviously much more of a policymakers innovation issue. Having said that, once a policy is laid out, we still need access to the innovation that is the superpower of our country to be able to Go, execute. And what we're laying out there is that we need to create the pathways and scaffolding to support how government can interact with the entrepreneurial community in a more meaningful way. And that includes the entrepreneurs, the organizations, but also the VCs or financial backers that are supporting them.

So maybe a better example is the couple of weeks ago announcement from the Defense Department of the need for a program they're calling replication, which is the devising of swarms or squadrons or clouds of small, inexpensive, yet interconnected and lethal drones or aerial vehicles that could somehow be used in conflict situation. A capability that the military simply doesn't have now, and it's not something they can wait to develop.

That's exactly right, Tom. There's a lot of these capabilities and it's not only on the military side. This is on the health and side. You look at economic security, you look at climate security right now across the board, a lot of the innovation is really happening again in the entrepreneurial community. And, you know, laying out those ambitions to how you connect those ventures in a seamless way, in a timely way, and understanding most importantly, that, look, there will be some level of risk that needs to be taken on. Nothing is 100% guaranteed, but that the risk, reward, trade off is better to be getting the velocity of innovation into government so that we can begin addressing these larger societal challenges.

We're speaking with Arun Gupta. He is a CEO of the nonprofit Noble Reach and a longtime venture capitalist. And I think in your book there's a page that is a chart of the different organizing principles between public sector organizations and private companies. And that's really the crux here because the motivations, the organizing principles, what is rewarded and what is punished in the private sector and in government are almost at diametric opposites sometimes. That seems to be the crux of the issue that you're trying to bridge here.

That is the crux of the issue. If you look at what we have, that creates the difficulty in collaboration starts with a cultural difference. Obviously, Amy Zegart writes about how, you know, you've got the hoodie versus suits culture, but we need to create kind of a shared language of how do we collaborate. In addition, you know, the notion of risk is very different in the private sector. We are encouraged to take risk, fail, fail quickly so you can learn and innovate. That's harder to do in government. Good friend Dan Tangolini has a notion of like, in government, we have an ig, which is an inspector general. So every agency is worried about making a mistake because they're going to have to go in front of a congressional hearing. What if we had a second ig, which is an innovation general, which is if the agency isn't innovating fast enough, you could also be put in front of a congressional hearing. You know, so creating the right incentives so that there are reasons to be innovating and taking risks are what we need. In absence of that, understanding what that collaboration could look like and how you can shift that risk into the private sector and the entrepreneurial community is what we talk about in the book. And so how we collaborate across this innovation, national innovation stack is, you know, some of the thoughts that we lay out.

And I wonder if some of this type of innovation can happen in a heartbeat to save programs where the policy has been determined. I'm thinking of the various spending fountains that really opened up in the advent of the pandemic and we were trying to help individuals and the nation was trying to help companies and so forth. And now we're learning that pretty much at least a third of all that money, and we're talking trillions of appropriations, are all debt went to fraudulent claims or with was misspent in one form or another. Sometimes just, you know, what they call improper payments, which can be fraud, is a big part of it. Yet if their industry is really good at detecting that kind of thing, maybe some overlay of industrial know how of fraud prevention and spending controls and so forth, it's very technical how they do that could have overlaid these programs early on, then everyone might have benefited more. That is, the people that were deserving of the help from the pandemic would have gotten it. And those that weren't like foreign people signing up and the money went right out of the country could have been prevented with the right kind of partnership.

No, I think that's right, Tom. I mean, I think and this is where we go into using ventures as enabling technologies to support government actions as opposed to driving policy. The technologies exist to be able to do what you're talking about, but they needed to be rapid on ramps for them to be embedded and included. We don't have that today. It's still, you know, a very slow process. Having said that, it's getting much better. And you're seeing leaders in different agencies wanting to be very proactive with leaning into how do we tap into not only the innovation but also the talent on these universities and thinking about inspiring youth to kind of come in for two, three years and not necessarily selling careers in government, but providing them great experiences. In government knowing that if they even leave that there still can be ambassadors. And that's how we rebuild trust. A lot of where we are today is because the trust is broken down between government and the private sector. But that's primarily because people go into their silos and they stay there. We need more of that cross collaboration and that's what we talk about.

Right. So there needs to be. I guess it sounds like a balance of. I mean career. Civil service is an honorable career and people can do it for 30 years. And I've met dozens, hundreds of people over the past number of years that are career and stay flexible and stay in a contributing mode over that period of time. But there's also a place for people to come in, do some good, help the government, help the public purpose, and then take that knowledge back out.

And I think what it does is it creates more of a civic mindedness in those individuals. There's a greater appreciation of government actually at the end of the day is a group of well intentioned individuals trying to do the right thing. It's easy when you're not part of it to just think of it as one monolithic institution, but it's a collection of people. Once you're inside and you know who those people are, what their motives are, what the intent is, I think you leave with a much more favorable impression of how you can interact and how you can support the mission, whether you're on the inside of government or on the outside.

And do you have a prescription for fixing our politicians?

I don't, I don't. I mean we intentionally in the book stay away from the politics side.

Sure. As we do here.

We actually believe the venture and mission piece is hopefully is viewed and we have found it to be viewed as a very apolitical issue with a lot of bipartisan support in that I think two things that people do across the aisle agree on is that we need to get better innovation around government and we need to get better talent around government. And we serve ourselves well by trying to inspire this next generation, which I think is looking to serve. I see it on the college campuses that I'm on and teaching from pre Covid to where they are now. You know, in their mind they've had multiple existential threats between a health care, you know, pandemic, a democratic scare, a, you know, geopolitical scare in Ukraine. You overlay on top of that an environmental threat and you know, the ongoing great power competition that we have with our adversaries. You know, I think students realize like this is a time for them to be able to serve. And what we are trying to do is rebuild those pathways to enable them to do so, while also having them maintain that it can be a career enhancer for them. They don't have to be signing up for a 30 year career in government, but they can start their career. This should be the place they start their career and then launch and decide if they want to go to a big tech company, a consulting, banking or graduate school program afterwards. And I think that we were overwhelmed just this summer with our internship program where we're looking for five students. We had over 650 applicants. It was all around this notion around mission, tech and entrepreneurship. Students are kind of craving that notion of mission meaning purpose, tech meaning innovation and entrepreneurship around creation and building again.

Well, maybe a good place to close is the resulting virtuous cycle of venture meets mission ecosystem, something you've devised this idea of. Just briefly tell us what that is.

What we talk about at the end there. This is I think, what gives me the most optimism and excitement. And I think we're at the early stages, so we have a multi decade run here is we're starting to see the first examples of companies really doing well that are venture companies that are serving the mission. When I got into this business 20 years ago, you were always told, don't invest in anything that touches government. But with success stories now, like Palantir, like Anduril, like Ginkgo Bioworks and others across different domains, you know, resilience, that VCs are starting to see real success stories. Once you see real success stories, you know that brings more capital wanting to come into the ecosystem. And so you're starting to see a lot more capital formation to support mission oriented activities. And this isn't just around defense tech. This includes climate, obviously health care, agro, food tech. And as you see more capital coming into that ecosystem, you're seeing better talent come into the ecosystem. And once you start seeing better talent come into the ecosystem, you know, it feeds a the ecosystem partners start to become more sophisticated, which then leads to more success stories. And so I mean at the end of the day, this is the story of Silicon Valley. You know, what people do forget is Silicon Valley started with an investment from our national defense infrastructure and then they had successes and those successes led to more capital and better people and more companies getting formed. And that is the cycle. And I think we're at the early stages of that cycle now with mission and ventures. I do also believe that these larger opportunities can only be solved with for profit ventures. Not for profits can only go so far. But at some point you need to be able to create that muscle memory whereby you become a self sustaining entity and that's where these for profit ventures come in.

Arun Gupta is venture capitalist, CEO of the nonprofit Noble Reach, and author of Venture Meets Mission from Stanford Press. Thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you Tom. Thank you for having me.

And we'll post this interview along with a link to More information@federalnewsnetwork.com FederalDrive subscribe to the Federal Drive wherever you get your podcasts. Leadership today, especially within the federal workforce.

Is being tested more than ever before.

After the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, retired Army Major General Tammy Smith felt for the first time that she could lead her team authentically. Smith, a long time leader and one of the military's highest ranking openly gay officers, joined Shane Canfield, CEO of wepa, to share her perspective on collaborative and genuine leadership.

Hello and welcome to the Lessons in Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Canfield, CEO of wepa. Today I'm joined by retired US Army Major General Tammy Smith. Major General Smith, welcome and thank you for joining me.

Shane, it's great to talk to you this morning.

Your career in the military spans more than 30 years. Was there ever a moment or point in your career that changed your trajectory? And what was that?

I have a very unique one that occurred that did change my trajectory in many ways and that is at my about my 25th year of service. The law known as Don't Ask, don't tell that prohibited people who identified as gay from serving in the military. That was repealed and now you could be open in the military. And soon after that happened, I married Tracy, my wife, and I was also notified I'd been selected for promotion to Brigadier General. At that time there had been no general or admiral who had come out or identified their family in any way that you would know that they were gay. And so just by timing, I ended up being the first openly gay general in the US Military. And what changed for me in that is I still had all the things that I had to do. Of course as a general, which was a lot of hard work that went into that. But for the first time in my life I was able to lead authentically 25 years I had compartmentalized a part of me and I had hidden things and I had not been my full self at work and I had not been my full self with my co workers. And the repeal of that law and the Opportunity then to be the sort of LGBTQ champion in the Department of Defense as a senior leader. What that did is it got me closer to my ethics, authentic leadership style, and my authentic self because I was more comfortable in my own skin. And I wasn't looking over my shoulder at all times, thinking that I might have said something that would reveal what my true life was and then lead to my dismissal from the military. Having that weight off of my shoulders, not having to hide who I was at work, made me such a better leader than I had been in the 25 years that I had served previously.

It's fascinating to hear your story about that, because I was alive during all that and followed it as well. It's a wonderful thing. Your career included a lot of firsts. You were the first female general officer, as you said, to serve in the 8th Army Headquarters Level position. You already talked about being the first LGBTQ general and flag officer. How does being first, how did that influence your leadership style?

I was first in a lot of places, through no fault of my own, by virtue of having joined the military in the 80s when there weren't a lot of women who were choosing that as a career path. So there were many things, even as a young person, where I would show up and I would be the only one woman who was in that particular unit or doing that particular type of training. And what you get as a first is you assume this mantle of being a role model for I don't know if it's your group or yourself. And in these roles of first, I would have to say that complete competence was always expected because you were elevated bit, and people noticed you more because they knew you as the first. And so you just gained extra attention in that. But that attention brought a great deal of responsibility.

And you've said in the past that your interest in leadership dates all the way back to high school, when you first joined Future Farmers of America. And how did that early education, that organization, change your path later in life?

Future Farmers of America? Well, it's certainly to teach people about agriculture, but it's also, it teaches people to be leaders so that in the agricultural world, people entering into that as an industry have the skills to be leaders in that world. And I loved learning about speaking, I loved learning about being on a team. There were many things that I learned about leadership early in high school through FFA that suited me well. They are skills that I used all the way up through two star general. And one of the one that jumps out the most at me is communication. I Mean, we already talked about how it's important to be competent, but sometimes your competence comes from the presence that you project, and a lot of that presence comes from how you are able to communicate. So in times when I had uncertainty, I could convey confidence through my communication skills in a way that would get me through some ambiguity and things would turn out all right. But those skills go back. Those are base skills that I learned way back in high school and through my association with ffa.

It's really great and refreshing to hear you meld the those two concepts of confidence and competence, because really both are required for expansion as a professional, but also into leadership roles.

I think so. Because if you're the leader in the role people want to trust, and so your competence certainly informs a bit of that trust. But your ability to communicate that and to speak to your team in a language that your team understands and to be able to adjust for that, I think that that informs that trust a great deal, which is what produces the results, is the trust within the team.

Excellent. Excellent. What's one piece of advice that you would go back and tell yourself if you were starting again in your career?

When I started my career, of course, I certainly had some skills. I wasn't a rounded, informed, wise leader of any sort. And I think that people have a leadership style that suits their personality until they learn more skills. And for me, I was a collaborative leader, and I always have been a collaborative leader, but right from the beginning about what I would tell myself to do differently. Sometimes when you are a young leader with a team with direct responsibility and direct reports, sometimes collaborative leadership feels to the team like you can't make a decision. Sometimes at that level of leadership, what the team needs is for you to just tell them what you want done by what time. And so I'm going to say that I wasn't as effective as a younger leader in those situations where I was in these direct leadership roles because my tendency towards collaboration frustrated the team a bit. But when we jump ahead 25, 30 years, collaboration and the willingness to take a little bit more time with decisions that impact things on a longer timeline, those are exactly the skills that you need. So I would tell my younger self, be a little bit more direct, have a bit more awareness of where you are in the structure of the organization and the timelines that you're working in, and don't be afraid to be a little bit more direct as a young leader, even if your natural style is.

A bit more collaborative, that is excellent. And as somebody who's looked at and studied leadership over the years. There are many different leadership styles, many different formally studied leadership styles and collaboration situational. I love how you put it in context. So it's not that one is good or bad, but depending upon your role and where you are in your career and those who work for and with you, you can change to meet the needs.

You definitely can. And the whole timeline is important when you are choosing your leadership style to get the results that you want. Because it's all, of course, results driven and. And in some cases, and this was true in military leadership, and true in many places, is sometimes the urgency of the decision doesn't allow for the collaboration because a missile is coming in or something is timed in a financial type of way and you have to hit a particular timing point. And so you've got to make these decisions quickly. But sometimes making quick decisions. I talk often that it's easy to make a decision, it's harder to make a good decision. And you have to take into consideration the timeline that your decision is going to impact and that will influence the style of leadership that you choose to come to that decision point. If you can kind of follow my.

Logic there, I think it's fascinating. And maybe what you're also saying is that part of leadership, a never to be forgotten dynamic, is judgment. There's a judgment component to all of this that you just mentioned. You're making decisions using judgment. As far as what's the best leadership role for this moment, for this decision.

Yeah, I think there is a lot of judgment in that. And it goes back to that quest for competence. Because as your skills improve, your judgment will improve. Because you've peeked around the corner a little bit, you've been exposed to more things and you are able to exercise judgment in a way that would have been impossible when I first started. I think that that experience certainly informs judgment, which is why sometimes when you're looking at somebody at the executive level, it looks so easy for them. They see the big pieces earlier. That's because for probably 30 or 40 years they've been looking at all the little pieces. And in some of this, then their judgment becomes almost intuitive to them because of the experience that they had gathered over that time frame.

Perfect. Is there a figure either from your personal life or maybe in history that has been an inspiration that has inspired your leadership style?

It's somebody who no one has probably heard of, and that's my brigade commander, Colonel Pullen, who I was exposed to early in my career as an officer. He was a Vietnam veteran. And in his role as brigade commander, what he wanted to teach all of us was attention to detail for consequential decision making. And so he would ask very specific questions, such as, when you get to the rifle range and you offload the buses, which side of the bus are the soldiers going to come off of? Because then that was whether or not you might need a road guard to cross the road over to the range and that sort of thing. But what he would tell us is that leaders will make life and death decisions based on the information that you provide them. So make sure that your information is correct when you provide it to them. And that stuck with me throughout my career, is that when I was either informing a decision maker or if I was the decision maker, the question from Colonel Pollin always came up as like, is that what you think or is that what you know? Tell me how you know it. Meaning did you see it? Did you touch it? Did you read the same report? And just to understand that, especially in the military, that line of work, that the decisions that are often made are literally life and death types of decisions.

Excellent, excellent advice. General Tammy Smith, it's been an honor and a privilege to meet you and talk with you and listen to you share your leadership journey with us. Thank you very much for your time.

It's great to talk to you. Thanks.

I'm Shane Canfield, CEO of wepa, and we will talk to you next time on Lessons in Leadership podcast.

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