South Park Commons

Jason Rathje came by @spc on Friday to meet with our founders, share a bit about his career building within the government as an engineer and researcher, and offer his experience on what needs to get built, how, and how that gets done. This perspective was particularly helpful for our deep tech founders. Unrelatedly, I often think: if the investments he made in the government organizations he’s created were for equity, he probably would have had a track record better than most venture firms. After building two programs in the government that have accelerated investment and innovation in frontier technology, he most recently joined WebAI as president of the public sector and also sits on the board of @elroyair There are very few people, in my mind, who have had as much of an impact on driving U.S. innovation as Jason has. He has one of the most unique perspectives as someone who has worked on the technology, the buying process, the early funding path, the industrial capital behind production, and now the challenge of taking a company’s product to government customers. At SPC, that experience gave him a particularly helpful and insightful answer to the dilemma founders building at the frontier have: build what the government cannot yet imagine, but do not confuse showing it an invention with getting that invention deployed. While doing his PhD at Stanford, he studied how government programs were effective at funding new technology. What he learned was that, at the time, Silicon Valley and the military often had a cultural or political divide. He became obsessed with understanding how the government could actually adapt its programs to accelerate company growth. To him, SBIR’s goal was to grow and strengthen the economy and help companies that start off small become really big. Through his research, he discovered that the program wasn’t doing that. This led him to build two programs in the government that deployed more dollars into innovation and technology over the last nearly decade, via AFWerx and the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital. The Office has the sole focus of investing in industries that were ultimately beneath the national security system, including everything from supply chain and manufacturing—not just military products. He left the government to go back to building, and believes that every American is right to own their own artificial intelligence. In order to be resilient, we should not depend entirely on central infrastructure or closed models. He shared a lot of insight and specific perspectives on what it looks like to successfully sell into the government, and we can't wait to have him back.