Scott Kupor launches US Techforce — recruiting 1,000 engineers into federal government for 2-year tours

Rough. Uh, fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized at8 asleep.com. Um, well, we have our next guest in the reream waiting room, Scott Kapor. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, Scott. How are you doing? Great to see you again. Thanks so much for hopping back on the show.

I I did not wear my elf outfit for today, but uh

No. Uh we we were we were this just to do a little inside baseball. We were this close to putting on full Santa suits and then the team said, you know, we're we're we're talking to a you know, US government official.

You guys say I thought I thought I was being aggressive. I went sand's jacket today. I'm like I took my

Very very casual. Very casual. But you're a serious guy. You're a serious guy. So

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So So So you're bridging the gap. Uh anyway, give us uh give us an update on what's new in your world.

Yeah. So, we just announced a really exciting new program today that I'd love to tell you and your listeners about course. Uh it's called US Tech Force. Yes. Uh so, this is

All right. This is a two two-year program where we are recruiting a thousand engineers, product managers, data scientists, AI specialists into government. You'll work in government for two years. Uh literally every agency in the government basically is participating in this. So if you want to work at department of war or health and human services or state department or IRS whatever you want to do like we've got opportunities and the whole idea is how do we modernize the entire you know federal government infrastructure. So we've got a real challenge in government number one is just obviously we need more smart people who've got like modern software development modern AI expertise and then we're also really have not done a good job of recruiting early career people. So uh if you look at kind of people earlier in their career only about 7% of the federal workforce is early career

and at all the companies all the companies that you guys you know talk to on a daily basis I bet you that number is like 25 or 30%. So we are by at least a factor of 3 to one in a real world of hurt in terms of being able to recruit and retain uh early career people.

So this is a two-year program. We're doing this in partnership with about 25 of the tech companies that you all know and love. So, you know, Coinbase, Robin Hood, uh, Data Brick, Snowflake, uh, Nvidia, XAI, Open AAI, and what those companies are doing is they're going to help us kind of create a program around this. So, in addition to working in your day job in government, we will have a speaker series uh, with, you know, we'll get Sam Alman to come, you know, talk to you and tell you about what it's like to work at OpenAI. We're going to do career development, and then at the end of the two years, uh, these private companies have all agreed to kind of participate in a job fair where we're going to showcase all the work that these guys are done. And you know what? If you want to go in the private sector, God bless you. Go do that. If you want to stay in government, we'll find a job for you. But we're not asking you to make a 40-year commitment. We're asking people to do, you know, do good for their country for two years, solve some of the world's biggest and toughest problems, and then uh we will gladly help you in terms of your private sector career opportunities.

Uh a thousand people, how uh assuming this goes well, it feels, you know, extremely critical in this moment. Is this something you want to like 10x, you know, for the next uh two-year period? Where where does this go?

Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. So, I think there's two big opportunities here. One is just look, there's way more demand than uh for a thousand engineers and government. So, yes, if this is 5,000 10,000, I think we'll still be barely scratching the surface of what the needs are. And then more importantly, what we're trying to do is we're trying to do a more efficient way of hiring by centralizing a lot of the hiring. So, at at my department, OPM, we're going to do all the outbound recruitment. We're going to do all the initial screening. We're going to do all the initial assessments for people. And then we're going to hand the agencies a list of, you know, here's a thousand people who have passed like the technical qualifications you told us were necessary for the job. Now, you all quite frankly compete against one another and convince these people why they should work at HHS versus Department of War or others. And if this works, I think this is going to be a model for how we do kind of centralized hiring going forward in the government. So, we hire a ton of program managers, HR people, financial analysts. Like there's no reason why an applicant should have to know that 40 different agencies are hiring for a program manager. All that person should need to know is like my skills are in demand by the US government. I'm going to centrally apply to this uh to OPM and then my resume is going to basically get circulated to all the interested agencies and then you know I basically kind of have my pick of the litter of figuring out which one is best aligned with my career objectives.

Okay. um walk me through how um how someone in one of these roles in part of the tech force could actually have an impact. I

uh I worked at the Census Bureau maybe 15 years ago.

Uh yeah. And and I would I I would have been like a tech force person like I came in and they gave me a like a stack of papers and a pencil and they were like we do stuff on pen and paper here. And I was clear, John worked his way to managing a team of like a hundred people very quickly as a college student. So it was very it was a very funny story. He made the most of it.

But but but we but our job was to go around on a map and and and interview people in different houses. I was like, we should use Google Maps. Google just put all of the put all the addresses that you need to go to into Google Maps and then you know exactly where you need to go that day. Uh and of course they were like, no, no, no. We don't have a deal.

That's her child.

Exactly. Exactly. So like I didn't necessarily have the authority to just tell the entire you know organization to say hey we're using Google now also there's probably some sort of privacy thing there's a whole bunch of reasons why you know you can't just fire it up but how how do you how do you empower like the tech force folks to actually have like a positive impact that like reverberates throughout the organization.

Yeah. So you are 100% right and this is why a lot of these programs traditionally have not accomplished what we'd hope they'd accomplish because what happens is

someone like you a smart guy let's assume that for a second right a smart guy a smart guy gets dropped into the blob that is the US government basically right and so you're right like you will just you basically have no authority you have no ability to get things done so what we're doing here is there's two critical differences we're doing here number one is

if you are one of these thousand folks you are going to go over as a team to an agency so I can just I'll give you an example uh you know for example at IRS, you know, they probably could hire several hundred of these people. I don't know, you know, uh, so there going to be several hundred people who will be part of this team. So, number one, you're going to be part of that group. Number two, as I mentioned, we're going to create a programmatic piece around this. So, your buddies who are at HHS or your buddies who are at State Department, you're going to see them, you know, once a month, twice a month at a speaker series, at dinners and stuff like that. So, you're going to get real good networking across colonization. And then thirdly, to avoid the problem you're talking about is we're not going to drop you into the blob. We're basically going to have you as a full unit at uh basically reporting into kind of you know senior political leadership in those organizations and they're going to decide what you do. So you're not going to come in here and like manage a contractor which is unfortunately you know a lot of what does happen inside these organizations but we're going to create basically a separate team that can do a lot of the bespoke development that has cover from the most senior political people in the organization. So you're totally right and your experience is not unusual by the way. That's that's a lot of what I've heard from people as we try to figure out what to do. And so our hope is that by combination of those things we can avoid that problem cuz look for this to work like what I'm trying to test is two things. One is like you know can we actually solve the modernization problem in government which I'm quite convinced with smart people we can. And then two is we demonstrate that the work you do here is valuable not just to the government but valuable to the private sector such that if you want to go get a private sector job the private sector looks at what you did and says wow like those skills are generalizable uh to whatever Google Facebook you know Coinbase you name your favorite company uh and so we've got to make sure that the people here are successful. What do what do you think are the most uh overlooked agencies, interesting kind of corners of the government that are uh going to be hiring through tech force? I think we've I I think uh uh uh the guy from Gumroad, I saw him, he's at the IRS.

Uh we've seen Doge people over at the Treasury.

Uh but but what are some kind of overlooked opportunities? Yeah. So there's real I mean so like there are really good people quite frankly across the board but yes look the obvious ones of course are department of war. You know it's really cool to do drone stuff and that's awesome and some people want to do that but you know like Interior is doing a bunch of actually very cool stuff. Um

uh energy. So if you're interested in energy u you know they're doing a bunch of like supercomputer like stuff to basically you know make sure that uh they can have you know like quantum computing work and stuff like that. They've got to solve like the broad energy grid problems. That's pretty cool. um you know CMS so Dr. Oz over at CMS is trying to redesign kind of how consumers interact with CMS. So uh you know something like for example an integrated position directory which I know sounds like very common place these days but like that doesn't exist. So there's kind of a combination of what I would call like backend infrastructure stuff and then the other part of this that's going to be really cool is you know uh my friend and yours I think you guys know Joe Jebia who's one of the co-founders of Airbnb

who's been sitting literally just behind me in the office here at OPM helping us redesign our retirement services application he's now starting this whole thing called uh design for America right which is basically this very broad uh like uh you know designoriented relook at all the applications that are customerf facing in government so you can think of this also as an opport opportunity to take the work he's doing on the front end coupled with a lot of the modernization stuff that has to happen on the back end uh and uh you know collectively I think we can really transform kind of the way government services are delivered and you know quite frankly provide a much better service to the American people.

Fantastic.

Very very cool.

Where can people go to get started? Is there just a a web form to apply?

Yes, there is. Yes. It turns out we have a web form. So

you you can go designed by Joe himself.

By Gabia.

Exactly. Actually, that's exactly

There we go.

By the way, it's I've just learned it's Jebia, not Jebia. So, unless he's pulling unless he's pulling a fast one on me, we

we have to correct our pronunciation.

Joe, where So, you go to uh Techforce uh you can go to either US Techforce, which is our exhandle, or you can go to techforce.gov. Cool.

Or you can go to my Twitter, skupo. All those places will point you to the right one. Uh apply Tell your friends, tell your family. This will be a great like uh dinner conversation over the Christmas table to say that, you know, you're now coming out of the closet uh in terms of working in the basement and you're ready to ready to kind of uh get a real job.

I love it.

Uh I'm very I'm very excited about this. I mean, I I can see I'm I'm excited for people like all over the career kind of spectrum, people that have done 20 years in in industry and see an opportunity to come back and serve the country in this way.

And in the future, young people coming out of college that are highly motivated, have a skill set and and can apply it in a and you know, across uh all these different touch points. So, very exciting.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you guys so much. Yeah. Have a great holiday season.

Yeah, great to get merry Christmas. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

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