About GovTron

Let's start with the punch: how are we different from any other software contractor?

 

The short version is that we’re part of a cresting wave. The relationship between Silicon Valley and the public sector is entering a new era, and we founded GovTron to make it easier for governments to access elite technical talent that's newly interested in working with them.
 

We believe that leveraging this talent should always result in substantial cost savings. Because it's not just about skills, but approach. There's a fundamentally new model available now for buying, building, and integrating software—based on different economics.

 

To understand this model, we have to look at the two shifts that made it possible.

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Shift 1: Rethinking Requirements

 

In the quite recent past, many of the world’s best software builders didn't consider government work as a real option. While they wanted to help improve public services, they weren't willing to trade a culture that prized innovative thinking for one more known for its rigidity. Pay differentials aside, they simply didn't want to ship software they weren't proud of. 

 

We get to exist today because some determined folks went into the public sector anyway—not just to work, but to make government rethink software at a root level. Their efforts helped move the norm from “let's get legacy contractors to bid on fulfulling arcane requirements” to “let's work with top talent to understand what should be built, and how”. 

 

This approach is now embodied in internal government powerhouses like the USDS. And the fruit of this isn't just that we're now seeing the deployment of unprecedentedly successful government software projects; it's that more top talent has taken notice and now wants in. 
 

Shift 2: Embracing Reusability

 

We’re not a nonprofit. While we’re genuinely patriotic about digital excellence in government, we want to pay our talent partners what they're worth. And now we can, in a win-win way, thanks to a second shift: a new embrace of open source and reusable components.

 

The public sector is now increasingly receptive to reconsidering what legacy contractors once sold them on. Fully bespoke software is rarely the best solution, even when cost isn’t a factor. Artfully stitching together battle-tested components isn’t just vastly more cost-effective, it also makes the resulting systems far more reliable, secure, and future-proof.

 

Here’s the rub: the more that core software components are reused, the less expensive and more robust they become. Lots of what worked for the agency or school board down the block will work for yours too. This means a lot less of your budget going to things that don’t improve end outcomes, and far more on things that do (like training and user feedback loops). 

 

The Team

 

GovTron is run by two principal software engineers: Suren Nihalani and Kunal Patel. But you aren’t just hiring us. You’re hiring our entire networks—ie. the developers, designers, PMs, and user researchers that built the software that makes American tech the envy of the world.

 

Lots of our brightest peers want to see the public sector thrive. They want to see their kids attend schools that employ the best software. They want navigating government services to be so painless that it genuinely shocks users. And they want this all done in a way that leaves the government with budget space to spend more tax dollars on other important priorities.
 

They just didn’t have a clear path to doing so before. And now they do.