Government Tech with Rachel Yee
What most people miss about gov tech, Building tech to prevent operational slippage, Creating frameworks to find conviction, finding a supportive network of aunties and uncles in every city
Hi, I’m Rachel Yee and I am currently the Head of Operations at Polimorphic. Prior to joining the Poli team, I helped to launch True Equity, a VC fund based in Philly and was Chief of Staff at Cowboy Ventures. I love all things sociology and Sixers and am excited to put down roots in SF in 2022!
We would love to hear about your journey. How did you initially get into government and policy? How has the journey been since?
I originally had no intention of getting involved in government. I grew up wanting to be a pediatrician and loved tinkering with and taking apart things, so I had always assumed I would do something STEM related until I was in late high school. My introduction to government was actually through advocacy through student government. I served as State President of the New Jersey Association of Student Councils for New Jersey and spent a significant portion of my time researching education policy. My first exposure to the State Board of Education deeply affected my belief in the efficacy of good policy to make things more equitable, especially for the least well off and most underserved. Since then, my belief in creating empathetic policy that understands and reflects the lived experience of the people it serves has grown. Interacting with government and policy is in many ways unavoidable. Since it touches everyone, I figure we might as well make it as effective and efficient as it possibly can be. I see a lot of clear potential to improve upon the current systems we have.
What do you spend your time on these days? What’s top of mind?
Professionally, I finally feel like I am back on track working towards goals that both satisfy my drive to want to solve big, audacious problems and also work towards optimizing for growth and learning. I spend my Poli endorsed “half day learning Fridays” split between going deep into operational best practices and better understanding local legislation.
I spent the last 2.5 years exploring and trying to evaluate the entire startup universe to figure out the tiny part where I would best fit in, bring a unique perspective, and be able to add real value. After multiple self reflection exercises and collecting over 50 data points on how I show up for others, I put together this framework for how I wanted to develop in my next role. This clarity and focus helped me to put together this another more comprehensive framework on how to evaluate and get to conviction on my current team.
Personally I am working on becoming a fuller, more authentic version of myself. I felt like I was reduced to a very one-dimensional version of myself in college and felt like I only was able to express very few prominent and pointy traits that I spent the greater part of the past 2 years trying to distance myself from.
I am currently training to try out for the Golden State Warriors cheer team with a coach and am filling in the rest of my free time with playing the saxophone, tutoring, and learning how to shoot a three in basketball consistently. I think I’m going to give training for a triathlon a rest in 2022.
Also, one of the most meaningful and life giving communities I have been a part of over the past 2 years has been the Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton (A4P). While I felt burnt out from all other Princeton related things, A4P helped me to make great strides in healing from identity issues which stemmed from growing up in very homogenous South Jersey. It has also provided incredible mentorship. The mentors and sponsors I have met have walked with me through some of my most difficult career decisions and have opened up doors in unexpected ways. Now it feels like I have a supportive network of aunties and uncles in every city—which gives my parents a piece of mind that I will be well taken care of, no matter where I choose to move to.
Additionally, in undergrad I felt like my personal relationships suffered as a result of my hyperfocus on trying to problem solve for big systemic institutional issues, so I am prioritizing investing deeply into fewer, but more intimate friendships and relationships.
I am also working on private vulnerability in the context of romantic relationships. I tried to open my aperture and went on 50 First Dates (of which I need to update with another year of big learnings in 2021), but now I’m ready to invest in being a really good romantic partner and learn through that process.
What is gov tech and what made you choose it as a focus?
Gov tech just felt like a very natural marriage of my two passions of making government systems more efficient to better serve people and bringing innovative solutions to old problems. I have only recently come to accept that I have always been a problem solver and naturally gravitate towards changing the status quo to provide better solutions. That label has always felt trite to me, but after reflecting on when I felt the most authentically myself growing up, special projects like the Invention Convention made me feel like I was the at most full expression of myself— and I want to further develop that now. This is just another application of that, inventing and innovating for government.
What are the main ways the gov tech is changing? How has the government adapted to new technologies and what is considered the most cutting edge today?
Old legacy ERP players are not keeping pace with the rapid change in technology needed to service constituents as well as meet the needs of town and city operators. There is a changing of the guard as the key decision makers in municipalities are also getting more tech savvy, which is a trend accelerated by the exodus of older township managers during COVID. It is clear that the pandemic accelerated and accentuated the need for better technology solutions to communicate remotely over a wider breadth of use cases.
Fringe cases, where operational slippage can be the difference between massive life outcomes (such as legal status)--- when these cases fall through the cracks due to bad technology/ lack of technology, that is a massive risk and opportunity for improvement.
After talking with many township managers, it is clear that they acknowledge that they have a need for better solutions. Although government operations typically lag behind private sector adoption and may not know what exact solutions they need yet, it is apparent that they are looking for A solution, the right solution to meet their operational needs. That openness feels new and provides an opportunity to build the right solution to meet that need. What is most cutting edge, is bringing proven-out Silicon Valley models of SaaS solutions to a new application via gov tech.
How has leading Princeton’s student body changed your view of the field and your career?
It showed me that I definitively don’t like politics. It cut me personally in a way that I have had to very intentionally work to unpack. If I were to ever re-enter public service as a public servant, I would have to be incredibly solid in my motivations, goals, and convictions for what I wanted to help accomplish. I would also have to be really sure about my identity— it is super easy to conflate your public identity with your personal one. My experience helped to elucidate personalities that are drawn to politics vs. policy and helped me to identify the differences.
It has also helped to provide clarity on the fact that I know I want to bring new solutions to old problems. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” really resonates with me. I want to bring a different perspective, different frameworks for problem solving, different networks that may be traditionally overlooked/ apathetic about a subset of issues because the incentives are not aligned properly. I also learned a lot about stakeholder management which was an invaluable lesson.
What are the main trends in gov today and what is still on the periphery that you think holds a lot of promise?
Right now solutions in gov tech are fragmented into solutions that target federal agencies, Congressional legislative bodies, local municipalities, and states. There hasn’t been a clear pathway to service all of these bodies. What I think is most exciting about Polimorphic is the greenfield opportunity to create one system to connect all the gov tech applications and make everything talk to each other, which is what we are trying to do.
What do most people get wrong about gov tech?
A lot. People have bad priors on both the sales cycle of gov tech and where to put the blame for inefficiencies. At least for selling to local municipalities, you get the benefits of SMB sales cycles with the upside of locking in enterprise contract values (with very little churn), which is the best of both worlds.
The other huge misconception is that most people blame individual actors for holding up processes, when in reality it’s the systems that are failing and the people holding up the processes are just victims to a bad system that doesn’t serve them. When I was working in local government, I was so much less efficient (30-40%) in comparison to when I was working in environments that had the right systems to foster/cultivate productivity and solutions that solved the actual root problems.
Can you tell us about your process of understanding government pain points and selling technology to the government?
I’ve lived the pain points. I worked for mayors offices and for social services at various points from high school throughout college. I am also close to friends who have parents who were township managers. In tandem, those two experiences have informed my understanding of the pain points and sales process.
You “love government, not politics.” Why?
Government is the system through which stuff gets done. I view politics as the necessary evil, the mechanism in which government actors need to participate in order to agree upon what kind of stuff gets done.
Politics are not isolated to policy or government. Politics are everywhere, in schools, the workforce, basically wherever people are making decisions. Politics is about knowing how to navigate and broker power within groups in order to achieve an outcome. You need to understand how to navigate politics in order to accomplish the things you care about (which can be executed by the government). Knowing how to navigate politics is merely a useful tool that you need to have in order to succeed in a government system. If we lived in a true meritocracy, we wouldn’t have to navigate shadow people systems “aka politics”, with no clearly articulated rules, which makes it inherently unequal. I am not interested in immersive learning about the tool, I am more interested in learning about the outcomes and how to circumnavigate them without the tool of politics.
If you had a magic wand and could change anything about gov tech, what would it be?
Less bad priors. I keep going back to the SMB sales cycle with enterprise AVC and low churn as the best of both worlds for local government. Gov tech is such a greenfield space, there truly aren’t a ton of comparables, the market is definitely not crowded (yet) and there’s a lot of whitespace for creativity and innovative solutions. Would love to see more creative teams go after this space if they understand the business case and the societal impact for building in this space.
10 years from now, what do you want to see happen in gov tech?
I would love to see Polimorphic become the app store / universal API for all gov tech applications and for other awesome solutions to be able to build on us.
I would love to see more interest in bringing private innovation to public applications. I would love to see more interest, less apathy about working towards shared public good. And finally, I would love for people to have better priors on what selling to and working with government clients can be.
What is something you have always wanted to try but haven’t had the chance to get around to?
Be on an NFL or NBA cheer team for a season, that’s why I’m working with a coach. I’m giving myself until I am 30 to make a team, before realistically giving up on the dream. The great thing is that I likely will not be geographically constrained wherever I end up living. Since I grew up classically trained in ballet—which I then quit in order to focus on fencing—this feels like a fresh start to get back to my dance roots.
If you were not currently working on gov tech, what would you be doing?
I would be teaching 7th or 8th grade civics. Teaching middle schoolers at such a formative period in their lives is the kind of outsized impact I care about. I had some really positive role models that really helped me through that tough period of my life, and I would like to be able to do the same for others. Also I would be able to educate students and hopefully help to proactively combat bad priors about how government systems work.
Obviously one cannot predict the twists and turns of the future, but 10 years from now from the perspective of today - what do you want to be doing?
I would love to be a practitioner and teacher. I would have liked to have completed my PhD in organizational sociology and would love to be ideally teaching middle school civics while running my own venture fund with a trusted cohort of operators and investors. I would also like to be able to stay involved with providing access to mental health services and advocacy for immigrant communities.
Do you have any advice for your younger self?
I would say my advice is two-fold. I would tell myself to be less afraid of failing and to be less concerned about what others think I “should do.” There have been points in my life where I have been paralyzed by the prospect of failing + being unable to recover from it. I recognize that I sit in a very privileged position where my “failures” will not define me if I learn from them and course correct quickly. The best reframing and reclaiming of failure I have heard, has come from my father, who has repeatedly reminded me that I have grown far more from my failures than from my successes. I have found that historically, that remains true for me. My failures have been humbling, but necessary inflection points that forced me to define and reprioritize my values. The second piece of advice, which is interconnected to the first, is that I would highly encourage myself to ask myself “what do I want to do/ what am I interested in?” instead of “what should I do that everyone else may expect me to do?” I spent a lot of time being embarrassed by my interest in making the government more efficient, because it seemed so earnest, and not at all “cool.” I have come to reluctantly accept that this is what I actually care about and it shouldn’t matter whether others are bought into the same mission. It has been a long journey to overcome not letting comparisons steal my joy in pursuing what I am passionate about. I grew up pragmatic to a fault believing that the world was fixed and that systems were unchangeable. I now have proof and hope that systems and life can get better, and do get better.
