You Should Want To Work For The Government (ft. Scott Kupor)

We have a serious demographic age challenge in government today. So about 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30 today. And if you look outside the federal workforce at the broad US workforce, that number is about 22-23%. So you factor that in, you're like, okay, by a factor of three to one, basically, we are under-indexed in terms of early career people, is the euphemism at least we're using instead of saying under 30. On the other end, we have a lot of people who are kind of close to retirement age. So almost about 44% of our workforce is over the age of 50. And so you can imagine if we do nothing else just over the next 5, 10, 15 years, you've got an enormous bolus of people who will be retiring, understandably, from the federal government, and we're doing nothing to kind of replace that pipeline on the front end. Now, you and I are probably both sympatico in the sense that we both would like smaller government, but I think we need something other than no government. And so we are potentially at risk of being in a situation where we actually may not even have the right number of people to even service the American people on the things that we all think are important to be part of government.

Thanks for having me here. I'm glad to be here.

I ended up here actually, the simple answer is I ended up here because I made one smart decision in my life about 30 years ago. So let me see if I can unpack that for you and your listeners. So, my background is I grew up in Texas. I went out west for school. I went to school at Stanford and thought I was going to be a lawyer. So, I actually went to law school and about halfway through law school, I realized I didn't want to practice law, which did not make my parents very happy, as you can imagine.

It does happen to a lot of people. But, you know, I come from a generation, I'm a little bit older than you are, so I come from a generation where for my parents, if you weren't a doctor, an accountant, or a lawyer, basically, you didn't have a real job. And so, I had a little explaining to do when I decided I didn't want to do that. And for me, like first luck of the draw in my life was I happened to graduate law school in 1996 and your listeners may or may not remember this but this was right at the start of what turned out to be the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley. So a company that nobody knows about anymore called Netscape goes public in 1995 and it's the first time where tech is really in the public zeitgeist. It's kind of a very exciting moment and from '95 to 2000 it's just boomtown in Silicon Valley. So I was lucky enough to kind of be able to be an investment banker at that time period which was a crazy job but the kind of job where you just kind of drink from a fire hose and learn all kinds of stuff.

And the one smart decision I made, which to get back to that point, was in 1999 I got introduced to a guy named Marc Andreessen.

Yeah. Good guy to know. Yeah. And many, many, some of your listeners probably know Marc now, but many people probably didn't know Marc maybe until he entered the political sphere a little bit. But Marc was the founder or one of the co-founders of Netscape, which was the first internet browser company. And he and another guy, Ben Horowitz, were starting a company called LoudCloud in 1999. And again, all you need to know about LoudCloud was we were basically trying to build what is now Amazon Web Services before there was such a thing as Amazon Web Services. We like to say we were cloud before cloud was cool. And we were probably, like a lot of things in business, timing matters. And we were probably a couple, three to four years too early for the business to ultimately be successful in its first incarnation. We ultimately changed course and created a nice business that we sold later on. But that one meeting that I took in September of '99, quite frankly, is what got me in this seat today, you know, now almost 30 years later, because what happened was I got hired at the company that the two of them started. I did a good enough job where at least they felt like, hey, this is a good, trustworthy and reputable person. And then as a result, they asked me to join them when they started a venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz in 2009, otherwise known as a16z for those of you who are following along on the podcast. And then for the last 16 and a half years, I had the chance to build alongside them kind of what has now become, I think, one of the preeminent venture capital firms. And the long arc of the story is in about June of '24, Marc and Ben got involved, you know, much more. We'd always been involved politically because we had been doing a bunch of investing in kind of regulated stuff. So we were one of the first crypto investors and back in like 2014 and '15 when we first started doing that, there was nobody in DC talking about crypto basically. And so, you know, I kind of raised my hand. I said, hey, I'll go start going to DC and do this kind of stuff. And so I was kind of our de facto government affairs office when we didn't have a government affairs office for the first couple years. As a result of that, I got involved more in DC and ultimately was the chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, which is basically the lobbying organization for the venture capital industry. So I got kind of my taste of DC at that point in time. And then luckily for us in the firm, we actually then ultimately hired real government affairs people. We now have like a 25-person office here. And, you know, from my perspective, they're some of the best people in the business. But that kind of got me a little bit of the taste of being in DC. And then in summer of '24, when Marc and Ben were kind of figuring out who they were going to endorse for president, they ultimately, you know, spent time with the current president, Donald Trump, and really decided that his policies and what he stood for was kind of really, you know, kind of in the best interest of their interest, which was how do we advance the broad entrepreneurship and tech ecosystem in the country. And so I wrote Marc a note after they went to see the president. He was obviously not yet president at the time. He was former president. And I said, "Hey, like if this thing turns out to go in the direction, you know, that we think it might, if there's an opportunity, I'd love to throw my hat into the ring, basically, and see if there's something to do." And so I kind of forgot about that email. And then in September, Marc sent me a note. He's like, "Hey, remember that email you sent me back in June?" He's like, "You got to go meet this guy, Howard Lutnick." And Howard, obviously, you know, the current commerce secretary, but at the time in September of '24, Howard was running the pre-election transition team for the president alongside, I think there were a couple, there was a couple other people, but he was certainly the primary person at least that I was introduced to. And he's like, look, you got to go to New York, you got to go talk to this guy.

That's exactly right. Linda McMahon was also part of it and some, I don't know exactly how they were dividing up their job, but the two of them, you're right, were the two people who were focused on it.

And so I'll never forget, I went to Howard's office and he takes out this massive piece of paper, which if people are watching the video, like probably about as big as the size of this table, and it's got these 4,000 roles on it. And he's like, this is what I have to do. Like these are the 4,000 jobs that, you know, the president has asked me to go fill. And he's like, you know, doing this with his hand. He like puts his finger down this way. He's like, and you should do this one or this one or this one. And he rattled off like three or four ones for me. Most of them I didn't know what they were, to be completely blunt. Certainly I didn't know what OPM was at the time. But we had a good meeting and, you know, kind of way led on to way. And at some point in, you know, post-election, I find myself in West Palm Beach. I'm not sure if you and I actually ran into each other there, but...

It was not awesome.

Well, it's so funny because...

Well, it's so funny because you'll appreciate this, because I don't know much about Florida real estate, but, you know, I would go on these trips and, you know, my wife or my friends are like, "Oh my gosh, you're going to Mar-a-Lago, right? It's got to be amazing." I was like, "No, I'm not going to Mar-a-Lago." Like, we're literally going to this like West Palm Beach. And even the best part about it was one time Sergio called and he's like, "Can you be here tomorrow or something for some meeting?" And so I had no hotel. I ended up getting a hotel. I didn't even know what it was called, but it was one of these like family vacation hotels basically where it was really awful. And but it turned out the week I was there was some like senior week or something. So every single person there was over the age of 80. And so it was like I called my wife that night. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing here. But she's like thinking I'm sitting in Mar-a-Lago having this great thing. I'm like, no, I've been in this like horrible office building all day long. And then I come back at the end of the day and I go by the pool and there's 80-year-old women doing like water yoga in the pool. Like that's not quite the glamorous life I thought it would be.

Exactly. Right. Exactly right. I was like, you know, I was by far the best looking guy there because like I didn't need a walker to get around basically. But anyways, that's how it all kind of came to pass. And look, I was just, I've been super lucky and super privileged that I had the opportunity finally to kind of meet the president. I did get to go to Mar-a-Lago the one time I got a chance to interview with the president and we could talk about that story because that was a fun day also for me. But...

So here's the quick story. So I go to Mar-a-Lago and so the start of the story is Sergio Gore, our friend who you know well, calls me. I live in California is where I've kind of lived until I moved to DC. So he calls me on a Sunday afternoon, DC time, and it's like midday or something in California. He's like, "Hey, can you get to Mar-a-Lago like at 9:00 tomorrow morning?" I was like, "I guess I can." So I'm like, you know, I scrambled to go get on a red-eye. So I get there. It turns out I'm there the day that Masayoshi from SoftBank is doing a press conference with the president to announce... Yeah, you may have been there. He was announcing what was initially, I think, you know, a billion-dollar investment. The president talked him into making a $2 billion investment on the day basically in the middle of the press conference. So I just literally, you know, I literally, you know, get through security. I walk in and I'm at the back of the room and they're like doing this press conference and I think actually Howard Lutnick I think was also there at that time. I can't remember. Anyway, so the press conference breaks and, you know, I'm just kind of standing in this room waiting for someone to greet me and say, "Okay, like here's your time to go meet with the president." And in the meantime, you know, Masayoshi Son and his team were hanging out there and like taking pictures of himself at the dais. He's, as you may know, I'm a little bit of a vertically challenged guy myself and he's even shorter than I am. So it was like you and I are the same height. It was actually kind of humorous to me to see this happening. So anyways, long story short is like, you know, about an hour or two later, you know, somebody from his office comes out and says, "Hey, apologies. The president is, you know, delayed. Can you wait?" I was like, "Of course I can wait. You know, I'm not here to do anything else other than..."

I wasn't, right. I wasn't like looking at my clock like, you know, if the president can't meet me by this time, I'm out of here. But, you know, it turned into, 9:00 turned into about like almost 5:00 in the afternoon basically. And it turned out what I learned as I was walking into the president's office was he was trying to negotiate the TikTok deal at that time because remember this was when this was the first deadline or either the first re-up of the deadline of when TikTok was actually going to shut down and the president was, you know, kind of trying to, you know, spend time with his team and with the TikTok team to figure out was there some path forward where they could obviously be true to what the legislative priorities are in the TikTok ban but also like, you know, not have the service go away for many people. And so it was one of these things where, you know, the day kept going by and by and by and I finally like, you know, rebooked my flight for the next day and everything. I was like, this is definitely, you know, going to get delayed. But it was a great meeting. It was, Sergio came. Sergey was there with me and then it was the first time I met Susie while she was in the meeting as well. And we had a lot of fun. It was great. It was a great meeting. Obviously people, you probably know the president. People who've asked me what the president's like has always, you know, to me the easiest description I have of the president, he's exactly what you see basically, which is like, right? Yeah. The person I met that day in Mar-a-Lago is exactly the same person you see when he does press conferences. And the same person is like he says what's on his mind. He's a very great communicator. He likes to jump from different topic to different topic, right? And talk about all kinds of, he's kind of, you know, a man of, you know, kind of, you know, many, many, you know, words in terms of like bridging lots of different really interesting topics. But we had a fun day and he was kind enough to actually offer me the job at that point in time so I didn't have to go do one of these agonizing things where I sit on a plane for six hours and wonder, you know, how many times did I screw up that interview and like would I actually get this job. But anyways, it was fun. So that's the long, long intro to your initial question, which is I made one or two smart decisions along my way and that's why I'm sitting here talking to you today.

Yeah. What was interesting to me? So when I started, look, my background is, you know, I've been an investor. I've been in the technology industry for a long time. And so at least when I thought about the stuff that I knew, like, you know, I understand organizational stuff, at least I believe I understand organizations very well having, you know, invested and sat on boards and kind of been part of operating companies for a long time. And then I also just from a domain perspective because I had been in the banking industry, I know, you know, a decent amount about capital markets and stuff like that. So I was thinking, okay, like maybe I should do something on the SEC side or, you know, Howard was like, gee, you know, OPM would be a good place for you kind of given those skills. And actually the formative conversation I had was actually not with Howard, it was actually with Katie Miller. So among the many times I went to West Palm, one of my first formal interview rounds that I did actually was a lot of fun. It was literally Katie Miller and Peter Navarro in the same room, neither of whom I had met before.

Just a big personality.

Well, it's funny because obviously, you know, I've subsequently come to know both of them who are both incredibly amazing people, but...

Yeah. For somebody who again like was kind of, you know, as I said, I've been in the private sector my whole life. I was new to this thing. I mean, I certainly knew when I saw Peter, I knew who he was, you know, just because obviously he's been in the news more. I did not know Katie and obviously, you know, kind of obviously have come to know her and appreciate all the things that, you know, she brings. But the two of them, it was a very funny interview because like within a half a second of starting the interview, Peter goes after me and he's like, how many Chinese nationals are in your companies? And I said, well, I don't know the answer, but I'm sure it's nonzero. And he, you know, kind of was talking to me about, you know, like, doesn't that create security risk? We had this whole like interesting conversation. Then of course we went to tariffs, which was a fun conversation. And then, you know, and then Katie's like, you know, you know, I've seen a million of you Silicon Valley people. Like, why are you all here? Like, are you really like excited about what the president's doing? And so it's one of these interviews where about halfway through, I was saying this to someone the other day, about halfway through, I was like, it was one of those moments where I'm in the middle of the interview, I'm like, this doesn't seem to be going very well. Like, I, you know, I may as well just like go for broke basically because, you know, again, as I said, I didn't know the two of them at all. So I had no idea if this was like their normal personalities or they were like really pissed off at me or something. So I decided just to kind of be as transparent as possible and, you know, push back where I wanted to push back. And luckily I must have done something right because at the end of the interview, at least, you know, they both gave me, you know, what you know, what modicum of positive feedback you can give somebody while they're at the very beginning of an interview cycle. But the reason I bring this up is so since I had met Katie and then, you know, a bunch of people are like, you know, you should really kind of pick her brain as to like what would be an interesting thing to do because she was so intimately involved obviously with Sergio and team and everybody else on, you know, how to think about putting the administration roles together. And so she's the first one who told me about OPM and she's like, you know, you could go do OMB stuff and you could go do SEC stuff. She's like, and those are like really cool, interesting jobs, but she's like, this OPM thing you should really think about. And I was like, I said, it's kind of weird because I had talked, once she said it to me and then I tried to do some diligence and I talked to a bunch of people who I had known who'd been in government, you know, you know, I'm a prior generation, so people who had been in government in the last like 10 years or so. And to a T, they all told me, "Do not go to OPM. It's kind of like, you know, the place where like, you know, they kind of put people out to pasture basically. It's not an exciting place. There's not a lot going on." And so I went back to Katie and I was like, "Are you like messing with me here or are you like, are you trying to, you trying to like put me somewhere like not good?" And she's like, "No, you're talking to the wrong people." She's like, the people you need to talk to are the current people who are going to be in this administration and you need to understand the centrality of where talent and human capital and efficiency and all these things are going to be in the administration. And she's like, this is why you should do OPM because if you want to actually make a difference like in terms of priorities that are really, really important to this administration, like this is the place where you should go. And the honest answer is like I took a flyer on it like not knowing any better. But like she's been, you know, I'm incredibly grateful to her to this day because she was 100% right, which is like my experience so far has been, you know, there's a lot of things obviously that are critical, critical for the president. But like one of the big things we're trying to do is how do we make sure we have the right talent in the right seats so we can do the work of the American people. And then also how do we think about making efficiency and kind of, you know, being good stewards of financial, you know, taxpayer dollars a real first-class citizen government. And, you know, the president has been nothing but, you know, kind of gracious in terms of allowing us to kind of advance those initiatives on his behalf.

Yeah, so look, I'm super excited about Tech Force and I'm very, very confident that we're going to make a difference with it. So let me give you a little bit of why first of all, like why are we even doing this? So there's really kind of a couple things we're trying to solve with Tech Force. Number one, you and I were talking about this before we went on air. We have a serious demographic age challenge in government today. So, you know, just to refresh your listeners' memories, about 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30 today. And if you look outside the federal workforce at the broad US workforce, that number is about 22-23%. So you factor that in, you're like, okay, by a factor of three to one, basically, we are under-indexed in terms of early career people, is the euphemism at least we're using instead of saying under 30. On the other end, we have a lot of people who are kind of close to retirement age. So almost about 44% of our workforce is over the age of 50. And so you can imagine if we do nothing else just over the next 5, 10, 15 years, you've got an enormous bolus of people who will be retiring, understandably, from the federal government, and we're doing nothing to kind of replace that pipeline on the front end. Now, you and I are probably both sympatico in the sense that we both would like smaller government, but I think we need something other than no government. And so we are potentially at risk of being in a situation where we actually may not even have the right number of people to even service the American people on the things that we all think are important to be part of government. So that's kind of thing number one we're trying to solve is can we balance out this age demographic problem. Number two is if you think about one of the other big priorities of this administration is how do we modernize the IT infrastructure in government to better serve the American people but also quite frankly not bankrupt all of our kids and grandkids in the process. And, you know, my personal view is like a huge part of that will be how do we use technology in a smart way that allows us to not think of the solution to every problem is just hire more headcount but the solution is, okay, can we work smarter? Can we work more efficiently? And technology is not going to, you know, displace everyone's jobs but can technology be an accelerant, be a productivity enhancement so that as the needs of the government grow we don't find every time the needs grow like we linearly have to add more headcount, that we can get more scale and more efficiency in the organization, right? And so when you put those two together, like what we're missing then from a skills gap perspective, which is we're missing people who have modern software development, modern data science, modern product management, modern cybersecurity, all the new stuff that's happening in the technology industry that could dramatically increase the productivity and efficiency in our ability to deliver for the American people. So Tech Force is trying to basically solve both those problems. The third thing I would say Tech Force is trying to solve, which to me is probably the most exciting thing that I'm trying to do, is how do we change the culture of what it means to work for the government. So my guess is if you go to any random college campus today, and you probably do this in your day job, so you could probably tell me if I'm wrong, like I think we have a messaging problem in government is what I would describe, marketing and a messaging problem, which is I don't think government is top of mind for people who are graduating from, you know, universities, community colleges, trade schools as a place to start and have a really interesting career. And I think that's because the messaging is wrong from my perspective. So I'll give you a quick story. When I first did my first all-hands meeting when I started at OPM, one of the managers came up to me afterwards and she's like, you guys are ruining things for us. I was like, wow, that's an interesting way to meet somebody. I said, well, tell me more. What do you mean by that? And she said, I said, first of all, what do you mean by you guys? And she's like, well, you DOGE guys. I was like, okay, look, I'm not a DOGE guy, but okay. Like, I understand what you mean by that. And I said, well, what do you mean we're ruining things? And she said, well, our value proposition to people coming to government has been come to government because you have permanent lifetime employment. And I said, okay, I don't think you're going to like me anymore after I give you my response to your comment.

Exactly. I said, first of all, I said, like, that's just not true and I'm sorry if people have been telling you that, like, there's no such thing as permanent employment, like, and nobody deserves that and nobody should, like, everybody needs to come to work and obviously earn the right to continue to do their job in the way that's appropriate for the American people. And, you know, look, maybe we have created a perception of, you know, permanency, but that's not, I don't think anyone ever intended that. And I said, by the way, like, the second thing you're not going to like me here is, like, that's a terrible marketing message, right? So if I'm going to go to a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old, 25-year-old, like, they're not interested in joining the government because they have permanency of career. They're interested because they're surrounded by smart people. They're going to learn new things, right? They're going to develop new skills. They're going to be rewarded for the work they're doing. Like, all the things that, you know, that people join organizations for. So it's like, so what, so when I put all this together, like, to me, part of what Tech Force is, is we need to change the narrative and help people understand. We're not asking you to make a lifetime commitment. I'm asking you to, like, say, spend two years of your life, do some awesome work, learn some great things. What's the onus is on us to demonstrate that that work you do and that development you get then is translatable into, if you want to stay in government, great, God bless you, like, let's find you a government job. If you want to go to the private sector, we should do the same thing. And so as you probably know with Tech Force, we've partnered with about 30 of the largest technology companies where in addition to helping us, like, you know, kind of run this program, they will also create a job fair for all these people at the end of those two years so that, you know, if they do great work and they're smart people, like, they should go get a job at OpenAI or a Databricks or a Snowflake or, you know, any of these kind of, you know, companies that are, you know, important companies in the technology space. And so that to me is kind of the seed of what I really want to accomplish here is if we can change the narrative and convince people why government service is not only great but also, like, valuable and additive to their career, I would much rather us see you extend this across all kinds of different jobs, not just tech jobs, but, you know, financial analyst jobs, project management jobs, HR jobs, any cross-section of jobs where the government has massive demand for it and we go try to attract people who are earlier in their career who are, like, super aggressive and learning and developing and growing their own professional aspirations and then quite frankly, let's let the government compete with the private sector for the, you know, smartest and best minds, but, like, do it on an equal footing whereas today, again, I just think we're missing kind of tapping into that part of the, you know, that expertise.

That's correct. Right. So the other thing we want to do that's different, I think, from other programs is when I talk to a bunch of folks about this, they're like, look, there's a bunch of these kind of what I call internship-type programs. The problem with them is we drop onesies, twosies into these massively large organizations and they just get swallowed up basically, right? And so, look, you probably have some experience with this, you know, as you guys are placing people, luckily you're placing them at least into kind of the political realm where there's a smaller number of people and, you know, these offices of directors are, you know, much smaller than dropping them into like a CIO organization. So we're trying to replicate that experience. So yeah. So basically the way it's going to work is, for example, I was just on a panel this morning with the CIO of Department of Transportation and on the panel he's like, I need 60 engineers yesterday basically. And so I was like, great, what I want to do is I want to drop you 60 awesome engineers and then what we're going to do is we're going to ask the private sector to drop us three or five engineering managers who are current employees of these technology companies who are going to take time out from their job and basically manage these teams so that I can give, you know, the Department of Transportation CIO a fully functional team of engineers and engineering managers.

And then have them, they don't necessarily literally need to report into him if he doesn't want to, but like they need to report into someone senior in the organization where we don't then like disintegrate them and like send them out into all these different like facets of the CIO organization, but we keep them together. We work them on projects that are consistent and that, you know, coalesce their skills around some deliverables.