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by rayiner
4973 days ago
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I used to work for a smallish company that works on DOD contracts. It's really not that bad. We did most of it in-house. I doubt it's worse appreciably worse than dealing with any big faceless organization (try contracting with Wal-Mart or Boeing). Big organizations have transaction costs associated with them. That's kind of inevitable. But the question is whether eliminating a few billion here and there in transaction costs is worth forgoing potentially huge benefits from public/private partnerships. |
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I'd say overall it is beyond what an early stage startup can do (non-dod-focused), without a great partner. Selling products is a lot easier than selling ongoing services, but the profit is all in services. A lot of the difficulty was due to it being a classified contract (the work itself wasn't, but the work locations and interoperability were). It's probably feasible for a successful small business with a full time person, particularly if the business is set up to go after government from the beginning.
Big companies aren't cost-free as clients, but there's less "if you do X wrong, you could go to jail" (which essentially never happens absent willful fraud, but still). The citizenship requirements also make it really hard for tech companies.