Request for proposal

We've tried to do various forms of acquisition reform and it makes a really good PowerPoint slide.

But the young man or woman that's writing the contract or putting out the RFP, doesn't really change his or her behavior.

So you've got to change that piece, I think, in order for some of these startups to be more viable in the long run.

I'm worried about infant mortality here because of the viability of these startups with respect to what happens when they run headlong into the defense acquisition system, right? I think that's part of it.

Pete, I agree with all those things that you just said.

I want to give a little bit more nuance on the RFP process when you're in it, specifically something you should be looking at because if you really want to start getting great results, it's about who you're bringing into that RFP process.

This can't just be executives.

You need to have a mix of end users as well as clinical governance as a key part of that because they're the ones that are going to point out where the work workflows breaking down and they're going to be some of the best assessments right during the RFP.

So you're going to be able to identify, I mean, you already have the people within your organization that can probably figure out real quick, will this actually drive efficiency? Will it not? Will it actually help reduce the amount of coding burden that we have? Or will it not? They're sitting in your organization, but many times we're not pulling them in soon enough and having a comprehensive enough approach to our RFP.

Because when you do that, bring in those right people and and then you do that second thing Pete said and said, you've identified your problem, plus you've identified the outcomes you're looking for, then you can start sussing out these AI solutions very quickly.

One last thing I'll say is we just did a recent study on what explicitly are providers looking for ROI-wise when they evaluate an AI solution.

One of the scariest things about that is 41 percent of respondents said we do not have a definitive ROI requirement.

bring opportunity to them.

And at the same time, from a somewhat selfish point of view, there were a lot of RFPs out there for PPE during COVID.

And it was, in a lot of cases, it was a race to the bottom.

People had either acquired big inventories of masks and then weren't finding the avenues to sell them that they thought they could.

And so we're dumping stock.

Some more so, I would say some were bidding on RFPs, but didn't even have landed product in North America.

So that also gave us...

Because we had about, I think at one point, 50, 60 million masks in a warehouse in Canada with my partner that I was working with.

So we pulled that back to about 12.

And then we sent them an RFP, so a request for proposals, and that we included the building brief.

We had articulated what our future should look like and how they would be the best firm for us.

From that 12, we then chose five.

They had a really extraordinary preview with the staff, as I mentioned, in the Kimbell Art Center.

And that was something that we were surprised about.

Like, you know, you could write an RFP and you could say, this is who we are.

We are a marriage between educational programs and exhibition programs with this incredible arts festival.

Okay.

Well, there was a big concern about how the Pinnacles would respond, and the National Park Service put out an RFP.

And Frank had since then moved on from Climax and Olympium and was working for Engineers International.

And I was in Chicago, and that's where Engineers International was.

I'd always been interested in construction instrumentation.

It was given my background in terms of construction vibrations.

And, um, the, uh, The US Bureau of Mines came out with an RFP looking for somebody to look at dynamic responsive structures.

This was back in 1976 when Carter shut down the coal industry.

Well, this is a cool one because, you know, I see the use case in their environment because someone's manually going in, doing this research, creating that spreadsheet manually.

But this could apply not just to resale.

This could apply to anything that should go on out to, you know, if you're someone that bids on projects or RFPs and you get a list of equipment, you need to research multiple sites or whatever.

I could see this being useful on even in those type of scenarios where someone is manually going out, doing the research, compiling that data into a report and doing some type of an analysis on that.

You know,

Okay.

Remember, we know there were three RFPs, and so I'm assuming that all three of them will have this same experience.

And then there is a timeline that we described to you

yesterday

And we really had a magical board.

And I remember we did an RFP to get a new advisor for the endowment and the operating assets.

And we end up hiring this local firm called Angelus Investment Advisors.

And so the light bulb moment for me was, sitting in those committee meetings, which were once a quarter, and I couldn't wait to get there.

and be submerged six feet in the ground.

But we could not deploy like every RFP out there was like, do you have minimum of 3000 deployments and you're eligible to apply? Go figure.

So how does a startup even have kind of that breaking point to make it in? I mean, this is why water entrepreneurs is being a water entrepreneur is one of the hardest, hardest thing to do.

compared to any other entrepreneur in the world.