Rick Garvin

I'll share some thoughts on this as there is some confusion. "The federal government has spent $22 billion in recent years on technology from the top 100 national-security startups, a paltry portion of overall contract spending and less than half of what venture capitalists have invested in those same companies." While VCs are obviously concerned about revenue, the reporter ignores the most important issue. Valuations in young private companies are something like one part guesswork, one part aspiration, two parts salesmanship, and three parts milestones, with a fair amount of fraud mixed in particularly in bubbles, but even in more mature growth companies a 10x multiple is conservative. That $22 billion in DOD contracts probably represents something like $300-400 billion in valuations claimed by the ventures and VCs, if not more. Even if the realized valuation is less than that for DOD contractor ventures, it would still represent an attractive ROI over a decade. If total invested is $50 billion and the realized value for VCs is $150 billion over 10 years, it's still 3x, and within that there would be likely be several 10X ++. That's not much different than the rest of the markets VCs invest in. My guess is it's more on track to be 5x or more for the entire portfolio, which is much better than most investments, though needs to be due to the risk involved. The more troubling statistic is that only 1% of total DOD contracts are going to VC-backed startups. That is a terrible failing grade for the DOD with regard to favoritism for incumbents, and explains most of the problem about unhealthy relationships and insufficient innovation. Given the size of the DOD budget, it may not be quite as bad as it seems as they can and should act as their own investors as a proactive customer, and they do some of that, but the reality is that the bureaucracy is so expensive to navigate that it usually requires significant capital. In fact, the most successful DOD startups in recent years were founded or co-founded by billionaires, which pretty well tells the entire story. Quote: “Startups are either purposely being kept out, or the DOD has just not figured out how to take advantage of them,” said Tara Murphy Dougherty, chief executive of defense software company Govini. Venture-backed companies have consistently received around 1% of total Defense Department award spending annually going back through 2018, despite throngs of new companies joining the defense-tech field, according to Govini data. https://lnkd.in/gK7emEqT

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The USPTO team integrated Sonatype solutions and revolutionized their approach to software development. By automating the critical aspects of the #softwaredevelopmentlifecycle, they’re not just keeping pace with technology—but leading the charge in IT innovation. Curious about their journey and how we're tackling challenges with #opensource dependencies head-on? Dive into our story 👉 https://bit.ly/4aSrCz2

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One of the coolest things we've been building at Truewind is our document parsing and extraction engine.   A lot of accountants deal with scanned or photographed documents like receipts, contracts, invoices, and bills.   For us, the goal is to make sifting through and classifying that information a lot easier.   Matthew Duong has been leading the charge on this project, and recently wrote about the experience on our engineering blog. In particular, he explains why ditching schemas and using PostgreSQL’s JSONB has made such a big difference for our platform.   If you’re interested in the technical side of how we’re refining accuracy and speed in document processing, definitely give it a read.   Here’s the link: https://lnkd.in/gN3Sgext

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I wanted to write about HashiCorp and Redis, and a common theme between the two companies of changing their licensing of important software projects from open-source licenses to proprietary licenses. Several news sites have featured articles related to the topic. Here is one opinion piece by Steven Vaughan-Nichols for Computerworld. I understand his critique of venture capitalism. In these cases, startups opt for rapid growth through venture capital. They leverage open source to gain attention and followers, only to shift gears when investors prioritize profitability over idealism. It is an abuse of open-source, and our community's defense is forking. OpenTofu, Terraform's fork, was quickly moved under the hood of the Linux Foundation, which was also directly involved in creating the Valkey fork of Redis. Building open-source projects connected to a commercial entity that pays the developers' salaries and is a reliable support provider for customers requires careful right-sizing of the entity. For me, organic growth works best for that. https://bit.ly/4bgJbJh

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Big news today... FOSSA free plan just got a major upgrade! We want to make it ridiculously easy for development teams to start securing their software and drive comprehensive Open Source Compliance, Security and Quality -- for FREE. That's why we have now launched a new free forever plan -- built for complete workflows around the lifecycle of managing open source such as: - Open source security - SBOM management - License compliance - Quality / Obsolescence No vendor evals, no sales convos, no zoom meetings. Just sign up, start doing -- and come back if you need to scale. Let's get folks off the dev team's back and ship compliant, secure and high quality software with OSS. Check out the link to the full announcement in the comments.

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