Minimizing Red Tape Fatigue (Bonnie’s Interview on All Quiet on the Second Front)

Bonnie Evangelista:
All right, ladies and gents, Bonnie here from the chief digital and artificial intelligence office. Got another bonus episode this week of an interview I did on the all quiet on the second front podcast with Tyler Sweat, the CEO of Secondfront. We talked about how we're transforming conventional procurement models, new ways to streamline the deal making process, and how to minimize the quote unquote red tape fatigue. I hope you enjoy it.

Tyler Sweatt:
Welcome to another episode of All Quiet on the second front podcast, where boring defense shit goes to die. I am your host, Tyler sweat, and really happy to be joined with Bonie Evangelista today, coming from CdAO with a procurement background. So, interesting opportunity for a conversation I don't think a lot of folks get to have. Or maybe sometimes they're scared to.

Bonnie Evangelista:
So it's one of those things. They don't want to understand it, because it's just not the thing that they get. And I feel the same way about tech. I don't want to get into your zeros and ones or whatever. I'll stay over here in my contracting name in my lane, but I am fluent in federal contracting and acquisition, for sure.

Tyler Sweatt:
Heck, yeah. So we were just talking a little bit about what Bonnie's up to, sort of in her day job with CDAO and Tradewin, and so share it a little bit, just so I don't think a lot of folks necessarily hear. I think they know what Tradewind is, or they've seen maybe a page about it, sure. But sort of the two minute over the moon.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Okay, I don't know if it's two minutes. I'll do my best.

Tyler Sweatt:
Picked a random time. So 30 seconds, whatever.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Tradewind was more of a vision, and if I were being honest, it's been a vision in the making for over five years, and it's had multiple iterations, and it has culminated to what is called tradewind. And the vision was, how do we buy faster? And the mission started at the Jake, the joint artificial intelligence center, where we were trying to just honestly deliver AI capabilities faster, get it into the hands of soldiers, or as someone else put it, into basically unskilled labor across the department, which I love that term. And so part of our job was to figure out, how do we buy faster? How do we do that in this emerging technology day and age? We're in so tradewind is more of a suite of services, if you can call it that, focused on novel contracting pathways, and we're honestly experimenting with all of them. So we have multiple contracting lanes. Couple, you may have heard Triai, that's like a low cost, no cost commercial solutions opening competition that we have going on. Our premier offering, though, we were just talking about the tradewind solutions marketplace. So this is where we're asking for vendors to provide solutions to strategic focus areas. So we're not going out with a requirement and saying we want to buy a thing.

Bonnie Evangelista:
We're saying we're interested in solutions to some problem areas that we have. We're asking for five minute video solutions, and we are assessing those solutions on the basis of do they have merit to enter into a DoD marketplace? So we have a competition. We're using multiple authorities to meet competition and we have a process to assess those. So what that means for a government buyer is I can point at vendor a and say, hey, that solution in the marketplace meets a mission gap or operational need. I have, and I can buy or engage directly with that vendor on the basis of competition, which is game changing.

Tyler Sweatt:
Yeah. And I just want to put a fine point on that for folks who are listening, who are in a private company and thinking about, hey, it's such a pain in the ass to work with the government. I've got to go through all this process. What you're saying is if you're on the trade winds marketplace, someone from the government can just come and buy your solution.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Correct. So it's not a contract. We're providing the contract mechanism. So I call it an accelerated competition and assessment process. So we're front loading that part and we're getting that part out of the way so the government buyer can just get right to the business deal. That also is different. I don't know if the government is prepared for that.

Tyler Sweatt:
That's going to be my next question. It's absolutely going to be my next question. It's got to be just exploding in the Pentagon.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah. This is what I call unstructured contracting. So traditional contracting is very structured, compliance oriented. This is your far based contracting, and it has its place, but it's not working for emerging technology. So the marketplace is our attempt to do something different.

Tyler Sweatt:
Yeah. And I'm not going to try to lead you into a place where you're. That will get somebody offended or in trouble. But I'd be really curious if you're thinking about. We were riffing a little bit on sort of like the great bureaucracy that is the department. If you're riffing on finding ways to remove friction and you're saying, hey, a way to accelerate sort of time to value from a procurement standpoint or just remove a barrier, what are you seeing as sort of the major, either like rocks you've got to move, or sort of sticking points that folks in the department have to get their head around. In my experience, there's been, I always refer to them as barracks lawyers. Somebody once told them, you're not allowed to do that.

Tyler Sweatt:
And it's been like, etched into their brain.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, I like to say all roads lead to contracts, but the two biggest rocks people need to be thinking about are their contracts and atos. And I know you know this very well, but in general, on the contracting front, we're focused on, can you identify funding and identify the solution as fast as possible and then create the business deal as fast as possible? So those three elements combined, there's nuance and intricacies involved in all three of those. So we've tried to get to the find a solution fast. With the marketplace part, you've got a competition. No sole source is necessary. That term does not belong in this environment because we're using commercial solutions opening as part of our competition environment. I call it our competitive playground. We're also leveraging other transaction authority as well as bar part 35, broad agency announcement.

Bonnie Evangelista:
So all three of those authorities or mechanisms combined gives the government buyer maximum flexibility.

Tyler Sweatt:
So the Ko, does that flexibility scare them, or are you seeing an increase with the pushes DIU has been making and others around otas and stuff? Are you seeing more comfort? Are you still seeing this like, hey, I'm scared to kind of get out of this little narrow sort of far box? I know.

Bonnie Evangelista:
I don't think it's fear. I think they don't know.

Tyler Sweatt:
Okay.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Most of us are education challenge. Most of us are trained to do traditional competition in accordance with the Competition and Contracting Act. Sika, which is full and open competition. Everything's baked in on the front in terms of the requirement, all of the pricing. So you don't even enter into negotiations usually because right after you've selected and during source selection, you roll right into contract of work because you have price competition. So you might get something called discussions or clarifications, but no one's actually negotiating. So we don't get a ton of training on that. So most people I talk to are willing and open.

Bonnie Evangelista:
They just don't know what that next step is. So giving them a space or a container to have these conversations and understand that no one's breaking the law. We're just doing something different. We're approaching the problem differently so that we can streamline and make the deal faster.

Tyler Sweatt:
So we're talking a little bit earlier too. How are you working with organizations to get them comfortable of, hey, the only way to buy software, know on a PowerPoint slide or in a Microsoft Word document? There are other ways. It's crazy concept. There are other ways to think about buying software at scale.

Bonnie Evangelista:
That's a really hard one, because to enable competitive playgrounds where we're asking industry to show us something meaningful before we make an investment decision requires a lot of knowing and understanding on the government's part, and in a lot of cases maybe lacking that, and you can translate that to something basic like technical standards. Can we tell industry and speak in their language, like what Os are we running and how is our data structured or not structured, and what assets do we own, and where do we even want data to flow? And these are all things I don't think we have good answers for a lot of times. And it's not a knock on anybody. That's just where we are. So I love environments where you get rid of downselects, you get rid of paper, because there's too much subjectiveness to those types of processes, where we're making decisions based on a confidence rating and.

Tyler Sweatt:
That this one looks prettier. I like that graphic.

Bonnie Evangelista:
And it's also, yeah, and there's maybe a bias, a personal bias in that, on how we're making decisions. So I like the types of environments we can create where there's an actual physical lab or environment where a vendor can bring their software in and show us something a little bit more meaningful. I did this once in a former life where we actually had them, the industry put their software and show us that it worked on the infrastructure for the mission partner at the time. And if you can create environments, that is a way more sophisticated approach than just saying, like on paper, my stuff's going to work for you.

Tyler Sweatt:
Yeah, no, I preach. Yeah, I agree. I think it's been one of the many things that has befuddled me, probably my whole career, is the level of confidence with which leaders in the department will speak about the state of information technology, knowing that they have procured all of their information technology out of word documents and never thought about the infrastructure or the complexity of the networks. To your point about data flow and all of that.

Bonnie Evangelista:
I can appreciate though, if you're not there because there's a lot. Like I said, to be able to speak in this way with industry. And when I say speak in code, speak in technical standards. If you can't do that because you're just not there, but you realize you need to do something different. You can do something different if you're going to rely on paper. Understand though, that's what you're getting. So don't put too much money in up front. So I am okay with putting in some seed money, run some small pilots experimentation that low cost risk type buys are wonderful to learn.

Tyler Sweatt:
So as we look forward and you're sitting at CDAO, the trade winds market was going on. What sort of success look like in twelve months? What are you guys most hopeful about?

Bonnie Evangelista:
If we can do distributed or federated contracting using the marketplace, and it doesn't even have to be the marketplace, but something like it, where you are accelerating these lead times to buy, and if you're using something like the marketplace, I would love it to be the marketplace. But if other services are leveraging it in that way and doing their own contracting using this approach, that to me is a win, because this was not built for us, this was built for the department, and hopefully we can prove out the strong demand signal is there and that this is worthwhile and should be enduring.

Tyler Sweatt:
Yeah, I love that answer. I'm going to spin it a little bit through a curveball. Right. So we've talked kind of about, hey, these sort of earlier tech providers, some of the AI providers, data analytics providers, the value of the marketplace, how do the primes kind of fit in? Right. As we're changing how we contract, how we look at engaging with private capital, with a broader array of, I guess what DoD would call a nontraditional, what could a role of a prime be? And fewers, think about, how would you think about your role sort of as a prime?

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, I want to speak to the nontraditional first. So it was designed with them in mind. The marketplace was designed to be a low barrier to entry because we recognize that we need a better front door. Some people in the government are grabbing onto the term entry point. How do we make these more friendlier, easier entry points? We believe the marketplace is a place to do that simply because all we're asking for is a five minute video. You have to address in the video because some might think, well, it's the same problem with paper, right? Like how can you assess anything in a five minute video like you could with paper? Again, what are you asking for? I'm not asking to write a contract with you for $100 million based on a five minute video. I'm asking you to tell me, do you have a solution to a department problem? So identify what problem are you solving? What is your solution? How are you different in your market? Why does your tech win? And what's the impact if you solve my problem? And I am assessing your solution based on solely that. I'm not assessing whether you have the best thing out there that's going to be great for.

Tyler Sweatt:
Should I bring, make it available if somebody else wants to grab it, apply.

Bonnie Evangelista:
That's not what we're doing. Exactly. And the army, though, or any service they get to choose, because I get this question a lot. If there's five or ten of the same thing on the marketplace, how did they choose? I'm like, you choose. Evaluate, engage with, engage, have a discussion, and no matter which one you choose, you are still compliant with competition standards. That's the key. So with that regard, I do believe that for those out there who have had the red tape, fatigue maybe, or the fear of joining some element of supporting the government because of that, this is maybe an opportunity for them to get involved because we're not doing that. And then for primes, this is not exclusive to nontraditionals.

Bonnie Evangelista:
They too can start to market their offerings and capabilities in the marketplace that they choose. I would also offer, like, from a prime perspective, is assessing, are the things that they're offering supporting the way of doing business over the last 10, 15, 20 years, or are they also pivoting to support emerging technologies? That would be a question I would ask primes. I don't know the answer to it. But this is just one area where we have to learn and understand how to do this better and faster.

Tyler Sweatt:
Yeah, no, it's interesting. And then ripping on sort of that point about, are the primes sort of preserving the kind of legacy, or are they pivoting to sort of do this, the new emerging tech? I would be curious. And you can answer this in a way that doesn't sort of, again, get you in any dod hot water. Are the peos pivoting, too? And are those program office signaling to the primes, or is it still the like, hey, I want 6% small businesses. So, like, Lockheed's lawn mower and caterer is a small business, and the peo slaps itself a big high five. Prime slaps itself a big high five. And Gao is like, oh, you're compliant. Yeah, I don't know the answer.

Bonnie Evangelista:
I can't speak for peos. What I will say is I'm seeing pockets of teams or individuals who are trying to break whatever glass ceiling is there. What you can do is be aware. So anyone who is still asking for, if the title on the document says statement of objectives, but it's still telling you how to do the job, that's kind of a red flag for me. They're not really interested in changing the way of doing business.

Tyler Sweatt:
Just want a body and a seat doing a thing.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah. And I think most people can feel it or sniff it out when they see it. In terms of if you're seeing solicitations or rfps or announcements or any kind of call to industry out there, and it looks like something it's not. They're not actually changing anything. I would even offer change, title, cut.

Tyler Sweatt:
And paste, old RFP.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Maybe it's a check the box kind of thing. I'm also thinking, pay attention to who's showing up in the places that do matter. So whether it's, where are offices engaging with industry, if you're at an event, I was just at south by southwest with you. Who was there? Those are the people who are probably interested in change.

Tyler Sweatt:
Great way.

Bonnie Evangelista:
If you're at an industry day, how is the industry day run? Is it receive mode for industry? Is it a conversation? These are the types of things you can be looking for in terms of.

Tyler Sweatt:
Stop going to industry days. After, like the 50th time, please look at my quad chart and let me tell you about my five year requirement. And you're like, okay, what are you going to do with this information?

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, and industry days are an example. Again, it depends on how they're run, but in general or at large, are they getting us different answers? That's what I think about when I sit in the seat, when I look at traditional processes. Is it giving us the outcome we actually want or not? And that could be capability. It could be more engagement with nontraditionals, faster apos like whatever. That's really what we think about at tradewind. That's where the marketplace came to be. We really thought hard about this. We didn't do some things right in the first year, and we took a hard pivot.

Tyler Sweatt:
You're learning and adapting.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah.

Tyler Sweatt:
All right, so I asked you the positive question. Give me the negative. What scares you the most over the next twelve to 24? What are the challenges you're worried about? What are the pivots you're worried about? What's that look like contracting or anything anywhere unstructured intentionally?

Bonnie Evangelista:
I'm a little fearful of the adoption and the contracting community in particular. Negotiating in an unstructured environment is different to me. It's freeing. I love it. The box is much bigger. There's still a box, but I don't feel like we are constrained and we have more creative agency to really get a better deal or make it better, make sure there's wins on all front. I heard somebody say that the best negotiation means things are on shark tank. I think one of the sharks said that means both people have to feel a little pain.

Tyler Sweatt:
Yeah. Both people feel like they lost something. You're like, okay, cool. We probably got to the equilibrium we needed to get to.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah. So you feel that in this environment, and that's different, and it can be uncomfortable for people. It also requires a lot of thinking.

Tyler Sweatt:
Yeah. It's a little more finesse and no ods.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah. So I'm a little fearful that if this gets adopted and does become an enduring pathway is in jeopardy because of that challenge. I don't know if that's a training or a policy challenge, but that's a little worrisome for me.

Tyler Sweatt:
Probably both. Right. Because if done right, that could sort of be the behavior and sort of that change you're looking for that would transform critical pillar, how the department does its business.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, I mean, we're focused on points on the board. So as much as that is looming in my mind a little bit, I believe we're going to prove out this concept, and we're just going to keep working with some of the strategic partners you're aware of and finding those use cases where we buy something really quickly, or nobody had a mechanism, and we provided the mechanism. We get that a lot.

Tyler Sweatt:
Awesome.

Bonnie Evangelista:
I'm very hopeful.

Tyler Sweatt:
Awesome. I love that. All right, last question. Same last question every time. So when you're done, when you're like, hey, I've achieved what I want to achieve. It's time for me to go retire, to go sort of live. What does that look like for you? I always tell folks, I want to be on a river. I want a big outdoor kitchen.

Tyler Sweatt:
I want a bunch of space. Where do you want to be? Is it the winery? I know that. I know. You own or what does that look like? What's success?

Bonnie Evangelista:
So I'm a hippie at heart.

Tyler Sweatt:
Heck, yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista:
I don't know. I want to be free, connected with nature, have my dogs surrounded by my dogs and my spirit guides, and I want to have abundance in myself and in my heart, like in some kind of peaceful, I don't know what vista yet. It'll be I don't know if it's like a mountain vista or are we talking field pastures and green pastures kind of thing, but I just want to have that peace in my heart.

Tyler Sweatt:
I love that answer. Bonnie, thanks so much for joining us today, and thanks, everybody, for tuning in. This is awesome.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Thank you.