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Good morning Launch Key 🚀 community!

We’ve all seen it - status quo digs in and sometimes it’s impossible to change. I joked while trying to sell a blockchain-based solution that I needed a generation of executives to retire or die before we would ever gain traction.

I was only half wrong.

Let's get into it.

Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Saving 4 billion dollars every day

• Modern Tools

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Put simply: change is hard for humans.

And the status quo is a helluva hard thing to uproot. I’ve learned that the hard way selling new technology ideas to established companies.

Was the internet just a fad in 1996? Why would a bank need a small outside agency to develop their internet site? They already had branch banking and a growing legion of ATM’s. Who would ever trust the internet for banking?

I got help breaking that status quo from an unexpected source when American Banker published an article detailing the cost of simple transactions.

Moving money between accounts at a typical bank branch cost the bank $2. The ATM transaction cost for the same was .50. And this newfangled internet transaction fee was about 2 pennies. Every banker I knew read that article.

We had one of the first web development firms in Charlotte at the time.

And the bank clients found us.

Decades later another company I led built an innovative solution for the Energy industry. Specifically transaction management for natural gas contracts: buying, selling and transporting.

That business takes months to reconcile accounts. We built a better mousetrap. With corporate partner insight, we created an innovative blockchain-based transaction management system. Pre-approved clients could have accurate reconciliation in days.

I wasn’t successful selling the concept. The company never gained commercial traction. There were entrenched industry and regulatory methods. But more importantly - the IT departments who built the existing systems and executives in charge had no reason to change.

The status quo worked fine.

Saving 4 billion dollars every day

As we’ve recently learned, the status quo is entrenched in government to a degree that none of us understood.

30 years ago Bill Clinton’s "Reinventing Government" program, reduced the federal workforce by over 377,000 employees. And that was hailed as a success - not a constitutional crisis.

In the past 2 months, Elon Musk and the DOGE team have averaged finding $4 billion dollars a day in waste. And the media is acting like he stole their dog.

Unimaginable entrenched waste is being questioned and the ‘news’ is targeting the messengers.

Last week Elon Musk and the DOGE leadership did what should have been done weeks ago - they matter-of-factly explained what they’re finding. And it was a masterclass.

I’m no Bret Baier fan, but it was funny watching him interview tech leaders. A journalist confronted with competence so compelling that he couldn’t understand it. News people inside of the beltway believe narratives that they create out of whole cloth and Baier was asking narrative questions - and flummoxed by the answers.

Forgive me if you’ve seen this, but it should be mandatory viewing for all taxpayers.

The DOGE team is applying public company standards required of the private sector. And the public servants don’t like it.

Private sector business titans are finding 70 year-old policies and procedures as the public sector status quo. And have uncovered a staggering amount of fraud and waste:

• Billions of dollars are routinely ‘lost’ and unaccounted for

• Software programs that have far exceeded their useful life are still being run for daily operation

• Treasury sends out checks with no verification required

• 400,000,000 pieces of government HR paper are literally stored in mountain

• $830,000,000 was spent for a 10 question survey on national parks

• 4.6 million credit cards have been handed out for 2.3 million government employees

• More than 40% of all calls to Social Security are from fraudsters trying to change direct deposit information of legitimate recipients

• NIH has 700 different IT systems and 27 different CIO’s

Anyone with a bank account knows that accountability is not the problem.

If you’re starting your next venture, are you going to mimic the government?

Of course you’re not.

Now go launch something 🚀 

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Free Knowledge

There are simple things needed to create accountability in your business. Udemy has a great free course.

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Visual Crapshoot