Glass: The Path To New Governance Models

The beginning: Searching for the future of political systems

At the age of 24, I was in Washington, D.C., the political capital of the world, trying to discover what the future of political systems and governments could be. I received a Fulbright scholarship, went after answers to my question, and I ran into a wall.

Looking back, today I can reflect more thoroughly on the systems in which I was developing my career and using in my pursuit of finding these answers.

Law and politics, as systems with rules designed and established a long time ago, generally support the status quo and the way things have been done in the past. This allows us to study and understand how and from where some social and economic rules and mechanisms that govern our society emerge. However, they do not necessarily trace a path for where we are going, or where we want to go, together.

When a government decides to not build a hospital needed in a community, to not address corruption in its public administration, or to not pay attention to what is important because it does not have an economic incentive to do so, or because those affected — us — only have a voice once every 4 or 5 years during election processes— what do we do about it? When a system does not serve its sole purpose, why should it continue to exist?

These questions led me to think that politics may not be the right system to bring massive change that could reach the whole world. Perhaps it would be another system the one to allow that change to become a reality.

First discovery

I embarked on an exhaustive search to find out if technology, as a system and set of tools and methodologies, was better and faster than politics to create these much-needed global changes.

I wanted to know if technology could create more opportunities, avoid the political, religious, and ideological structures inherited from other societies and other times, and create a shortcut. If technology could work for what I call "the rest of us", for the many and not only for the few.

It’s at this moment of my search that I discover the power of exponential technologies in Silicon Valley, and I set out to co-found Matternet, the pioneering startup behind the development and manufacture of autonomous drones for transportation.

With Matternet, the possibilities were endless. We were building what many political systems, governments, and public policies had tried to build. We were creating positive change, on an unimaginable scale, and for everyone.

For the first time in my life, I discovered my power to create. I did not have to ask for permission, wait for congressional approval, or protest against the government so it could take action on something as critical as building land infrastructure to connect their neighborhoods and isolated areas with economic and health hubs. This changed me forever! Not only did I want to "leapfrog" roads with Matternet, but I also wanted more projects and opportunities that would reach everyone, that would reach the "rest of us."

This feeling led me to connect back with my first passion and to discover my latest moonshot, the one that I’ve been working on since the end of 2017.

New moonshot

My new moonshot aims to create governance systems and structures that are innovative and work for our 21st-century societies, because the best that we have today (representative democracies, reactive decision-making processes, and mechanisms to hold our governments accountable at the end of each year), is not delivering the results we need to progress.

We need short-term solutions, powerful enough to help governments see what they are doing right or wrong today, and allow them to take immediate measures to self-correct whenever necessary, in real-time.

Scaling these short-term solutions, across different government agencies of different countries and political systems will allow us to see and reveal what I call "government hard data," encompassing high-fidelity information and objective metrics to understand patterns, trends, and cycles in public management.

In response to these short-term needs, Glass is born, a startup in the GovTech sector that seeks to create a software ecosystem powered by Artificial Intelligence to digitize, streamline and scale good government processes and decision-making, and help them transform into high-performing entities.

We are building an ecosystem for governments because, as in any real or simulated context, institutional structures, laws, their mechanisms, their execution plans, and the people in charge of implementing them, work best when they are interconnected in a fluid and continuous way. Our software ecosystems allow government users to connect with the tools and information they need in a constant, optimized, and friendly way.

By focusing on developing a unique and secure ecosystem, we are creating a flexible, scalable, and simple environment for government decision-makers to do their work with greater impact. The agility that we promote in making complex decisions and the continuous internal experimentation that we enable, allow public management systems that adopt us to become anti-fragile and to show better performance.

Boosting the GovTech industry

The inefficiency of some government systems in managing the public sector means that we cannot reliably, timely and affordably access the basic services that we depend on daily.

In about 80% of the world, these services do not work, work intermittently, or do not reach all the people who need them.

From a point of view that encompasses the maturity of an industry, and therefore the public policies, incentives, and tools that have been developed to promote it, the enterprise software industry is well established and profitable, compared to other industries, and most especially, with the GovTech industry.

It has a solid and expanding market, with actors who articulate what they need quickly and pay for those solutions (companies), and with other actors who are willing to build those solutions (startups) because they know these are necessary, that they will be consumed in a scalable way, and that they will have access to capital (venture capital investors) to buy the time and resources required to launch and refine these tools, until they manage to “crack the market” (or “nail it”, as we say in Silicon Valley).

Here in the Valley, we know that solutions are not obvious until someone sets out to find answers and put the pieces together. Industries don't exist until a critical mass of people, organizations, and capital converge to bring them to market. And that a market will not be profitable or scalable until there are organizations that have a high sense of urgency to find sustainable business models that allow them to execute on a broader vision (what we call “Moonshots”) in the long term.

All this is necessary so that, after much trial and error, and a lot of investment capital, a few organizations finally“nail it”, achieving what every startup aspires to: Creating a product or solution that defines or re-defines an entire category.

For instance, there’s the iPhone, which was not the first smartphone ever created, but defined how mass-adoption smartphones look, feel, and operate. This wasn't Apple's first product, and it wasn't their first experiment, either. The first iPhone was launched in 2007, after two years of design and development, and when the company had already been in business for 36 years.

To “crack the market” by creating comprehensive and scalable GovTech solutions, we need to launch the government technology industry properly, and provide it with all the resources, time, and elements that we know are essential for any industry to take root and grow exponentially.

Today's governments use many individual software tools, whose interfaces and user experiences were not intended for government customers, and that were rather designed for the private sector and then repackaged for a more complex and volatile customer. These software solutions do not “talk” or integrate with each other, and operate as standalone products that require high levels of training to be used.

This explains why government employees do not want to adopt new technological tools in an organic way, since the learning and training curve is overwhelming. Thus, they cannot take advantage of the immense amounts of data generated by their departments, inhibiting their ability to make complex, data-driven, and real-time decisions.

Why Glass and why starting with Glass Commerce?

At Glass, we believe that the way to improve government structures is to provide public employees with powerful and simple tools that allow them to execute their tasks in an accelerated manner, and to generate a greater impact with the work they do.

By creating an ecosystem with software tools that help in the execution and integration of critical government functions, we can analyze current government operations, recommend optimization opportunities in real-time, and replicate those recommendations in each department or public institution where similar operations are carried out. We maximize individual efforts to transform them into scalable practices with better collective results.

When it comes to governments, the use of public funds is decisive. How and where this money is spent leads to tangible results or negligible efforts.

Public funds are our public power, and allow us to demand the execution of projects considered fundamental for our communities. For this reason, the first tool of the Glass ecosystem, Glass Commerce, is focused on helping government officials invest public funds in a better way, and to spend this money strategically in local, national, and international organizations that can advance specific objectives for each government administration in a reliable way.

We have a grand vision to transform governments, and you are a key piece in this puzzle. Governments impact our lives daily, and while you may currently enjoy some public services, you might feel frustrated by others.

Perhaps you are a government employee who has a good idea to improve a process in your department, or you are a businesswoman whose organization provides technological tools that could be used by the public sector.

Perhaps you are a nonprofit executive, eager to better serve your community and willing to share good practices on how to address local challenges that may be of benefit to governments.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, I want to hear your ideas on using technology to improve our governments. Contact me and let's talk!

Let's keep dreaming together,
Paola