The gauntlet has been thrown
FIRST POST!
Foreword
Dear friends, I started thinking about starting a newsletter, but then I procrastinated on it. But now I’m finally doing it! This is an experiment, so we’ll see what happens.
One thing I wanted to do with this newsletter was just share more with my friends better, especially since we are all in such distant places. So I hope that this will at least bridge some of that gap.
One thing that made me hesitant to start this newsletter: I have lots of different kinds of friends, some that are interested in hearing me talk about startup things, others interested in random BS, others like Jeff who will unsubscribe if he doesn’t see any memes, and of course the random people I don’t know who signed up (via @Harnidh haha. Welcome!). So how do I satisfy all of you people????
Here’s an answer: I won’t.
I’m just going to write what I want, and if you aren’t interested, you can unsubscribe, ez. No hard feelings at all ❤️. This is just a space for me to write and share a little, and if you want, you can look into these waters.
The bigger hesitation, though, was what if, after I open my life up to you all and hype up something I’m doing, I then fail at some point? Well, yeah this might happen, but it was actually kind of dumb for me to think like this. Why? The world is my stage. If I never fail, then what kind of unoriginal story is that? So here’s what I’ll say instead: If it seems like the story is going well, but then I suddenly fail, then don’t worry - I better get back up again, and again, and again. Otherwise, I don’t deserve you all.
Let’s get on with the show now ~
I came back to the US from China a week ago! I was going to mention some China things in this newsletter post, but I have a better adventure to tell today:
I lived as a politician for a day
Tues Jan 28, 2020 was a very interesting day, one in which I was suddenly supplanted from my life and put into a day in the life of a New Jersey local politician. My day was one full of bureaucracy, inefficiency, nice people, corrupt people, and impressive people (all of these overlap in some way).
How did I get here? Well, my friend Mussab (a fellow Schwarzman Scholar!) and I had been talking about problems with government procurement in the US (basically how governments order services and goods). US local governments spend over $1 Trillion per year on procurement, so inefficiencies here mean wastage of a lot of taxpayer money. Mussab is an elected official on the Jersey City school board (elected at age 20!), which is why he had some experience here.
How procurement works is that a government at any level puts out a request for something, and then they wait until companies submit bids to fulfill the service. The government then chooses a winner.
There were two seeds of ideas we had been thinking about that we wanted to get more perspective on: 1) helping governments source more minority and local-owned businesses for their contracts, and 2) streamlining the entire procurement process from both the company submission side and the government bid review side (both of which are slow right now).
Although Mussab had some experience himself dealing with procurement, he felt that it wasn’t enough. So we decided to go meet with people in government who would have more insight.
First up was a breakfast meeting at a diner with a Hudson County NJ freeholder.
Btw, it was a *real* diner, from the old days real
I arrived first, and Mussab then walked in a few minutes later, but before he could sit down with me though, he went to go say hi to three older-looking men at another table, and talked with them for a while
Apparently, "you gotta pay dues to the union, man"
They were union leaders for various unions in the city, and so of course, any politician here in America will want to be on their nice side
Bill, the Hudson County freeholder then walked in, and after shaking our hands, immediately went to talk to the three union leaders, because, of course, "you gotta pay dues to the union, man"
In Bill's case though, he was pretty well known, and he said hi to multiple people other than just the union leaders
Bill was a super awesome guy. I really liked him. He would ask a question about how we would do something about our business, and then would proceed to answer it himself while interspersing "I'll connect you to this person who would be useful for this" :)
He was also helpful in giving us more insight into how he advocates for contracts to be given to minority owned businesses, and what the challenges there are.
We then went to meet with a person working in the Jersey City school district's procurement office so we could learn about the whole procurement process from her perspective.
Also, check out the sign Mussab put on his car that we drove around in all day haha
During the meeting, the procurement person explained her process to us, and we asked her a ton of questions.
Some highlights
In order to be put on the state contractor list (fast-tracks you to avoid having to go through the bidding process on certain things) you have to open up your company's financials for the past few years to the state - Some small businesses probably won't want to do this.
Their office finally got google docs!!! (wtffff century are they living in). And they're using google docs to now manually make a spreadsheet of vendors that they will send emails to, since up till now, they had only been advertising their procurement requests in newspapers.
One of the craziest things she told us is that Amazon recently made a change to their payments model. They used to not be able to deliver first, and receive payment later, which is what governments require. So governments couldn't really use them. BUT, Amazon can now do this delayed payment model, so they can now actually function pretty much as a state contractor!!! This could possibly make enormous changes in procurement of consumables and other items, and would mean Amazon would dominate another category of the market.
We had to cut our meeting with her a bit short in order to head to our next meeting which was with possibly the youngest Business Administrator in NJ history! Intashan Chowdhury
If the Mayor is the CEO, then think of a Business Administrator (BA) as pretty much the COO/CFO. He/she is the one who deals with the budget and making sure everything in the town is working.
Mussab said, if you want to do good, honest work for people, then you should be in a civil service role like a BA or the many positions under a BA, instead of running for elected office. Elected office sounds nice, but it's a lot of politics and dealing with unnecessary things.
He then immediately said that he would never be able to work in a normal civil service role though 😛.
Meeting with Intashan was nice because we got to hear the perspective of someone running a very small town (I had never heard of Prospect Park before). Their entire yearly municipal budget ($6.5 Million) is the size of some of Jersey City's contracts!
For a small town like theirs, they didn't have the free budget to really spend extra effort on purposefully giving out minority contracts. It would just be a nice thing for them if it happened.
One thing he said that was interesting though was that he wished it was easier for him to make Requests for Proposals himself rather than always having to ask his attorney to write one up for him.
Random note: this guy drinks coffee with 6 cream and 6 sugar 0.o
We then lastly visited a local biomedical testing lab that has gone through state certification for being a vendor. So we talked to the CEO about his experienced submitting bids. He said the bid submission process was pretty easy for him, but that it was hard to actually win bids since there are hundreds to thousands of other bio testing labs in NJ.
While Mussab was driving us around in his car the entire time though, I think the biggest glance I got into the life of a politician was just hearing all the calls that Mussab had randomly to deal with various issues (he put all the calls on speakerphone so I could hear as well).
The funniest and most significant one was when his former school board president called him, and started off the call by saying "Mussab, when will you get your head out of your ***". So I thought it would be super serious, since the guy seemed pretty mad at Mussab. And indeed most of the call was this guy yelling at Mussab for being dumb about this thing or another. Mussab said he didn't really care what he thought though since that guy was accused of corruption charges, and people are now trying to take him to court, so…
There were a few other minor calls throughout the day that I won't go into that, but which also gave me some more visibility into some of the inner workings.
At the end of the day, we reframed some of what we were thinking, and these were our new ideas:
Still try to validate helping minority businesses by calling some minority-owned businesses and talking to them about their interest in government contracts.
Put together a giant database of past RFPs (requests for proposals) and the winning bids from across many cities so that when a government wants to put an RFP together for something, they can 1) easily use a previous RFP from another city and 2) see how much something cost in another town.
#2 is especially interesting because the whole reason for why the bidding process with a minimum of 3 bids was created in the first place was so that the government could get a fair price for goods/services through competitive pricing
If you only got 1 bid, then you can't really know for sure if that company is over-charging you.
If you get at least 3 though, then you can see the spread of quoted costs. And of course more would be even better (up to a point).
If we put together this database though, then government officials could get a ballpark number of what something should cost, which could reduce the need for needing a lot of bids.
We're going to think about these some more and try to validate some of the hypotheses!
Back 2 Beijing? sike
My return flight to Beijing was supposed to be in 2 weeks, but due to some small virus going around, they pushed back the Tsinghua and other universities in Beijing’s spring semester start date, to an unannounced date…
So it looks like I have a bit more time here in New Jersey
(not from my mother btw haha)
Interesting links
I was thinking about building a better GoodReads, but I found this site that launched recently. It seems like they’re doing well so far, so hopefully they can continue to execute well on it https://bookself.app/
A cool company performing real-time traffic monitoring from video feeds http://www.trafficvision.com/ (possible allusion to a future newsletter post)
“Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through Mean Girls” https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/raft-is-so-fetch/
See ya next time (the next newsletter posts will probably be shorter), and I hope you enjoy your day 😀 - Hima