For years, Paola Santana has stated the problem of working with governments felt like working in two parallel timelines: one outlined by ambition, the different by operational constraints. “The day-to-day and the imaginative and prescient are at all times in battle,” she tells The Latin Instances. “You goal for the second after they join.”
Over the previous 12 months, nonetheless, that connection started to really feel tangible.
Santana is the founder and CEO of Glass, a Silicon Valley startup centered on procurement and funds for the public sector. Her technique has been deliberate specialization: Glass has structured its progress round a premise, which begins by focusing on a single downside: how governments purchase items and companies.
That focus, Santana has discovered, is what permits smaller firms to compete with bigger gamers. Depth, not scale, is the benefit for startups. “By the time you perceive one thing in two weeks, I perceive what I have to do in an hour,” she stated. “As a result of that is what I do each day.”
Santana frames the downside round scale and impression. Governments, she stated, spend about 30% of worldwide GDP via procurement: “$16 trillion.” But she argues that the impression of that spending is commonly troublesome to understand. “I see it on reviews. I do know we spend them,” she says. “And the query is, the place are these $16 trillion?” In her view, the cash is “invested,” however “poorly managed, poorly disbursed.”
Constructing on that analysis, Santana pointed to working with the U.S. federal authorities—what she refers to as “the largest purchaser in the world”—as a crucial take a look at of Glass’s strategy. Observing each complicated and on a regular basis transactions transferring via the platform, she stated, revealed not simply the scale of public spending however the structural challenges behind it. For her, the query was now not whether or not governments spend huge sums, however whether or not the methods managing that spending could make these choices seen, measurable, and significant.
The system was examined during times of disruption, together with a authorities shutdown and interruptions in federal buying exercise. Santana recalled that for greater than a month, some authorities bank card holders had been unable to make use of their playing cards, which meant many customers couldn’t function inside the platform. She initially anticipated the disruption to weaken engagement, however as a substitute it revealed one thing else.
“What ended up taking place was that individuals discovered methods round the system,” she stated. “The second they might get again to the system, they might use it and double and triple the utilization of the system.” When operations resumed, she added, “you noticed the flooding of orders coming again once more.” For Santana, the episode demonstrated that the platform had turn into embedded in a sector she describes as historically risk-averse and resistant to alter.
Santana frames infrastructure as the core downside of presidency expertise. For her, methods should endure no matter political shifts or management modifications. “If we’re a authorities infrastructure firm,” she stated, “when authorities does not know what to do, or needs to shift between A and B, the infrastructure wants to stay there.” In her view, the position of expertise is to not comply with political agendas however to supply continuity throughout them, remaining operational whilst priorities change.
Santana, who’s Latina, hyperlinks her strategy to public methods to her expertise rising up in Latin America. That upbringing meant experiencing firsthand how authorities choices form on a regular basis life. “We develop up seeing dangerous transportation methods, dangerous public training, dangerous public well being care,” she stated. “So that you study to care about these issues, since you dwell the penalties of them.”
When Latinos arrive in the United States, she argues, they carry that sensitivity into environments with larger technological and monetary sources. “You care quite a bit,” she stated, “after which you have got the instruments to do one thing about what you care about.”
That perspective additionally shapes how she identifies issues price fixing. Santana argued that Latino founders typically discover gaps that establishments have discovered to normalize. In her case, she recalled discovering that main organizations didn’t monitor giant parts of presidency spending, notably small purchases made exterior conventional contracts. Fairly than deciphering the absence of information as proof that the concern was marginal, she noticed it in a different way. “If no person is taking a look at it, it does not imply it isn’t vital,” she stated. “It means it has been ignored.”
Wanting forward, Santana stated her precedence is much less about enlargement than about permanence: constructing methods that endure past political cycles and market shifts. After years of testing whether or not Glass might function below strain, she sees the subsequent part as consolidating its position as infrastructure in a sector outlined by volatility. “In the event you surpass the storm,” she stated, “you might be stronger due to it.”
Initially printed on Latin Instances
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