SBIRs, PORs, and Lobbyists with Peter Newell

Village Global's Solarpunk

Peter Newell (@PeterANewell), CEO of BMNT, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:
- Peter was “handed the Ferrari of skunkworks” when he came to be in charge of the Rapid Equipping Force. It was a program that handled over a billion dollars to deploy new technologies.
- He became more of an entrepreneur after his time at the REF and that led to starting BMNT.
- Often times procurement in the US military is HQ-centric and product-centric and does not take into account the needs of the people on the ground.
- The acquisition system that was built in the 1950s in the US presumes that the military can perfectly understand the problem and build a perfect solution for it. However, this takes much too long to deploy and isn’t suited for modern times.
- A founder can’t go all-in on selling to government — they have to be able to build for both government and commercial.
- Often times companies will receive indefinite delivery contracts where it is unclear how much money they will actually receive. You might land a budget with SOCOM but it’s hard to actually get the dollars out of Congress.
- Hiring a lobbyist to educate you on the processes and people within the US government is a good idea but hiring a lobbyist to do business development for you is often not the right approach.
- It’s best to invest in building networks in VC and at DoD before hiring consultants.
- Not having enough people to do the advanced manufacturing that the US needs keeps Peter up at night.
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