Todd Park, the ex-CTO of the United States, started to process of pulling in Silicon Valley talent. We were called "Todd's kids" for the longest time :)
Todd reached out to the CEO of Civis Analytis (Dan Wagner I believe?), who had pitched in with the Obama campaign. Through him Todd reached Mikey Dickerson, who was at Google at the time (Mikey is now the head of USDS). Mikey looped in a few other googlers...and so it spread.
I found the MPL team through friends in the startup world, many of whom were ex YC founders
It's pretty wild to think they had to go to the opposite coast to source a node/mysql/nginx solution. I know people who were doing such things much closer to DC. Granted, we are lower profile and maybe less pre-certified as "sure things". I wonder if borrowing Googlers is the government tech fire fighting equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"?
Todd reached out to the CEO of Civis Analytis (Dan Wagner I believe?), who had pitched in with the Obama campaign. Through him Todd reached Mikey Dickerson, who was at Google at the time (Mikey is now the head of USDS). Mikey looped in a few other googlers...and so it spread.
I found the MPL team through friends in the startup world, many of whom were ex YC founders