Full Transcript:
Welcome to this segment from the OrangeSlices AI Executive Forum, which was recorded on November 7th, 2025. This series dives into how GovCon leaders, investors and advisors are positioning to win in one of the most competitive markets we've ever seen. You'll hear from incredible CEOs who are building and leading some of the top performing companies in GovCon, sharing real insight into what they're doing differently, how they're finding efficiency, and how they're creating value while others are still trying to find their footing.
Alongside them, industry partners from JP Morgan, the Porter Point, Baldwin, and Rose Financial bring unique perspective from across the ecosystem. We hope you enjoy the conversation and we invite you to explore the full series and every executive perspective now on the OrangeSlices AI podcast page which is linked below. We're going to move on and dive into our first CEO fireside chat.
Adam McNair is going to be leading that conversation with a rapidly emerging CEO leader, Bryon Kroger. Over the past 25 years, Adam has served as both a federal employee and an industry partner. Drawing in that experience, Adam has led every facet of delivery, operations, growth for organizations ranging from Fortune 1000 companies to PE-backed firms and early stage startups.
He's been on nearly every side of the transaction. I mean, you name it, big company, small company, buy side, sell side, and as an advisor guiding numerous GovCon leaders through growth and exit. Adam is also a familiar voice to many as a podcast run OrangeSlices where his six-part series on GovCon growth and exits has become a must-listen.
If you haven't listened to it, it's well worth the time. I look forward to have him leading our first fireside chat. Welcome Adam and welcome Bryon.
Thank you so much, David. It's a real privilege to be here to talk to Bryon as a matter of introduction. So, Bryon, CEO and founder of Rise, a co-founder of Kessel Run, the first DoD software factory.
If anybody isn't familiar with it, a real operationally excellent technical pioneer in my estimation and somebody that I really respect a lot because of a commitment to doing this business the right way and giving tools and resources to people whose lives depend on it. And it's that focus that I've always, you know, really respected. And, Bryon, it's great to get a chance to talk to you this morning, man.
And my first question for you is, you know, you've been a founder at Kessel Run, you're a founder at Rise 8, and you're a great follow on LinkedIn. And a lot of your conversation and your posts about bureaucracy hacking and in delivering outcomes, did that evolve? Did that develop at some point along the line?
Was there some role or perspective that you had or some point in time where you decided that that's really going to be your emphasis? Or did you just kind of wake up that way when you were 10 or something? Well, how did that develop?
Yeah. Bureaucracy hacking as a term is kind of catchy. Maybe if I just back it up to what we're really talking about, it's something I've always had.
I think this whole group shares is systems thinking. Maybe to reframe it, as system thinkers, we really care about the system working, and that's evidenced by outcomes and impact. Those are the things I'm always looking for.
Now in a bureaucracy, there are things that work to achieve outcomes and impact, and you should execute those violently. So one thing that I hate in the innovation community right now in particular is how many people are counterculture or hackers for the sake of it, rather than to achieve an impact. So whenever I come across something, even in the bureaucracy that works, just execute that violently.
But when it doesn't, I think one thing that's really important that I learned over time is you can't hack a system you don't understand. And so step one is going in and really deeply understanding that system and figuring out how to retool it for the outcomes and the impact that you're trying to achieve. And I would say where I got very passionate about that is my first seven years in the Air Force were as a targeteer.
And so I did mostly counterterrorism drone operations. And I did not have good software. And I saw missions fail and people die because of bad software.
I mean, like literally, I can point to missions that I still think about today where horrible things happen because of terrible software that had been delivered. And in this industry, talk about doing things the right way. It's really easy to make a lot of money doing the wrong thing, the wrong way, not shipping outcomes.
And unfortunately, that happens all too often. And the people paying the price are the war fighters and sometimes even innocent civilians and all manner of other missions that can go awry. So became really passionate about it and found success in just really having a system thinking approach to how do we achieve outcome and impact in every situation.
So focusing on impact, right? Something that has always frustrated me is mediocrity, right? It's mind numbing to be involved in a program that just kind of does things.
Now, I'm sure you have run into various levels of friction from teams where you're trying to push harder, go faster, deliver violently in a technical sense. How do you find the people? You know, what I would draw back to is, you know, Jedi had a test for force sensitivity, right?
How do I find people that are people that I want to, that I believe can do what I'm trying to do that's not ordinaries? How do you find people that are aligned with the way that you want to build your business now?
I mean, you definitely have to screen for that. I would say, you know, I'm still very involved in our interview process. We're just north, I think we're like at 165 people as of this week.
And even where I've had to hand off interviewing, I don't hand off the training of interviewers. I think a CEO's number one job is talent, is people, and setting the culture for them once they're on board. And so there's a few things that I think about here.
Any time you're trying to buck these trends, like I said before, you're going to have to find people that are fairly entrepreneurial. And so really screening for like the same things you would if you're hiring on your leadership team. I feel like a lot of times we don't do that for individual contributors.
When I'm looking for agency and ambition. And then there's maybe like two behaviors that I care a lot about, which is strategic patience and tactical urgency, like my military coming out, right? But I think anytime you're trying to create change, there's an aspect of what we do.
Even if your job is just to build the software, the software won't get adopted unless you can overcome all kinds of change management problems. And so even if you're a software developer, especially if you're like an anchor on a team, you have to be pretty well versed in change management. And then even more so for like a UX designer and a product manager.
And so really looking for people who can have that tactical urgency, but still the strategic patience to do change management and more like consulting like things even if you're involved in delivery. Those would be a couple of big ones. Delayed gratification or impulse controls is another one.
And then I would say this thing that I mentioned earlier about the way that I framed it is do the right thing, do what works, always be kind. I think that do the right thing. When I showed up at Hanscom, for instance, one of the first things that I wanted to tackle was the ATO process, Authorization to Operate.
I'm sure many of you have fought battles around ATOs. And I had just come from a scenario where I had seen a mission fail because of software. I traced it back.
We had identified the issue five years prior. The contractor had actually delivered the fix. It had gone through testing and it was sitting on the shelf waiting to go through the ATO process, had been for like 12 months.
Ended up taking 24 months to get that ATO by the way. And so for me, looking at that scenario, there was a feature that I could trace directly to a mission failure. And so I went around Hanscom and told people like, hey, your ATO process is getting people killed.
Like it's not risk reduction. Maybe risk reduction for you on the staff, but it's just passing risk on to operators. And so getting that level of urgency about doing the right thing and doing what works, right?
Cause the other side of that coin is it's also not reducing cybersecurity risk. We can measure that, I can prove that. And once you can get people aligned on that kind of impact outcomes and the vision, it's a lot easier to get them to move.
I think everybody is generally good Americans and want to do good things in this space. It's just that they think they're doing the right thing and you just have to show them a better way.
And that, the expectations that I think people set for themselves, where they, like you're talking about, they delivered some code and so they believed it to be successful. And if it's not tied to the absolute outcome of a program and tying it to something that is very, very powerful and delivers a capability that really advances a mission, that they need to re-prioritize what they're, kind of how they look at their day. Not every program that you ever undertake as a consultant or a contractor necessarily always has that level of impact.
Those are the programs that I've always gotten really excited about, right? When I sit down and tell, you know, this program was amazing, it's because it impacted something that, you know, sometimes lives are on the line, sometimes just big mission, something that really impact, benefited the nation, right? Not every program is that way.
And so as you sit as a business owner and you're looking at the trajectory of your company and how do I continue to grow my business, that appealing, but maybe winnable, but maybe low impact program always is out there. How do you walk the line of continuing to advance your business, knowing that, you know, there's, you know, it requires programs and it requires revenue to operate a business with the compromise of how do we decide that we're only focused on these really mission-critical outcomes versus we're just going to do some stuff?
Yeah. You know, the goal is wrong. So like the goal isn't to grow the business.
I said this when I was at Kessel Run too, and unfortunately, I feel like after I left, and this isn't a criticism of that. I think almost all government programs become missions unto themselves. Like the mission is to grow the program versus to serve the warfighter or the veterans or the clinicians.
And so you have to reorient your entire growth model around impact. Like if that's what you actually care about, your business metrics, the way that you think about your business and your team should all revolve around mission impact. And, you know, in the case of us, we deliver software and the bridge between output, features, code and mission impact is outcomes.
That would be changes in human behavior, changes in user behavior. That's the direct thing that I can focus on. And so we have a maniacal focus on outcomes in production.
And in production is an important part of that too, because it can't just be shelf wear. It has to be adopted and actually in use in operations. And we have an outcomes in production tracker and people's incentives, short-term and long-term incentives.
Everything is all built around these outcomes in production. And so, yeah, we have to grow our business to grow our impact, but that's the order of operations. Why is Rise 8 growing?
Well, because we're crushing it and shipping outcomes and I want to ship more. That's why I want to grow. If we ever got to a point where, you know, maybe I hit some scale and I start running into problems, operational problems, can't deliver the way that we used to, I'm going to hit the pause button and fix that before I move on.
But if your goal is just to grow your business, I mean, you can grow incredibly large in this space building bridges to nowhere. And unfortunately, a lot of people are willing to do that. I'm just not.
So I say no, you know, when I, especially when I first got out and I still had that Kessel Run shine, everybody wanted to work with us. And I just said no to a ton of those bridges to nowhere because that's not my mission. I'm not here to make money.
I'm here to make a difference.
Which is tremendous. So from my experience, I've been in this a long time, that's tremendously powerful is what I, you know, the way that I feel. And so when you have a team that you are incentivizing, based, you know, purely on outcomes, and you've had to weave outcomes through the whole fabric of the company, does that really, is everybody's job description really focused around those kinds of outcomes?
And when you have conversations, do you have to introduce people to that mindset? Are you running into technology folks in this industry that you're having to explain the why and explain that their job is not exactly incented the way it might have been the last place they worked?
Definitely. There's a lot of big changes there. I would say you see it most in the support functions.
I think when we hire delivery people, maybe the one new thing is you don't get credit for your work until it's in prod and in use. Whereas in a lot of GovCon companies, you deliver a disk, probably, unfortunately, to the government and you're like, ah, delivered. That's not software delivery to us.
So that's like a small change, but I think delivery adapts really quickly to it. Where you see the most change required is in the support functions, especially marketing and sales. So look, all the same metrics still matter.
Top of funnel, CAC, LTV, like all these things still matter because they're like, money is the fuel to create impact, right? That's how you build the business. It's just that that's not the end goal.
And the way that you make money is still the same. And so marketing, sales, like they still have to work, but you have to figure out how to tie those KPIs to your outcome and impact goals. And so like our big, hairy, audacious goal is to put 50,000 outcomes in production by the year 2040.
There's like a whole reason behind that that I could get into why I think that matters and why we have to do it so quickly. It requires almost 50% year over year growth, which is in pretty insane growth. And so, you know, in the marketing and sales side of the house, it's like, hey, you still have to hit some of these traditional KPIs.
But if we're not then hitting outcomes, for instance, if you sell into a customer that's building a bridge to nowhere, you're going to get maybe not directly penalized, but like there's like a penalty for that in the long run, in that you're not going to be able to make your STIP bonus next year. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about those things and how to properly cage those KPIs.
Now, it's an interesting point that you raised, right? Because I've sat in a whole bunch of rooms with a whole bunch of people and consultants talking about the evolving landscape of GovCon and what that means for our accounts and our offerings and all of that. And what I hear you saying is, we offer what we offer.
That you don't, you don't, you don't, we're not going to decide that we're going into another line of business next month. And we, so how do you, as you sit here, so, and you know, that parallel of, you know, the Order 66 Jedi, right? They have to go figure out how, as the world changes, how do they, and I think in their case, not really adapt, but how, what do they do?
Where do they go? And so when you look at GovCon Evolves, whether it's that procurement organizations get consolidated, contract vehicles change, all of these things, right? As a laser-focused, really ethos-driven, outcome-driven business, how much or little are you looking at the current landscape and where it's going, and how does that shape, if at all, what you're doing?
I would say that, look, first of all, we all know that when a lot of these changes come down, they take so long to percolate through the organizations, and in some cases, they don't ever actually get implemented by the time the next administration or change rolls in. So I think that for some more traditional GovCons, like there's some concern to be had, but they'll still survive, which unfortunately for me. But I will say, I think for purpose driven organizations, there's never been a better time to be in GovTech.
In fact, for the last six years, for me, it's been really difficult to stay to my guns because usually, most competitive awards, the way to win is to price to win or blank to win. You know, I hop on these calls with all of these teammates whenever we team and they have all of these blank to win strategies and almost none of them involve executing for the war fighter and delivering outcomes and impact. They pick teammates not because it's the best teammate to do the job, but because it's the best teammate to win the contract.
And there's this huge divide between what the government wants and obviously how they run bid and proposal or incentivize it. And so it's been really unfortunate. And I'm seeing this huge ground shift actually where there's never been a better time to do things the way we do.
You know, we're often priced like 30 to 50, sometimes even higher percentage above in terms of price per LCAT. What I'm seeing things change where there's a lot more open bids like, hey, bid to this outcome. And for us, even though on a per person basis, we might look expensive, instead of using 50 FTEs, I can do it with 20.
If that sounds like a shocking number, like that is very real. And at the same time, the 50 person team probably never would have delivered or deliver in like two or three or four or five years. And we're like up and running in production with a full ATO in the first 180 days.
And so for me, I'm like excited, kind of like bring it on. I love seeing these changes. And I would say if you've been looking for an opportunity to operate that way, and you felt like you had to sell out a little bit.
I've talked to tons of founders that are like, hey, I started just like you, Bryon, but in order to scale, I had to do X, Y, Z. It's like, maybe this is your opportunity to go back and do it the way that you wanted to. Because I think we're seeing the right thing become the easy thing.
And I'm excited about that.
I think it's a fantastic perspective. I would wrap this up with this. I would say that I've always believed that if you're excellent, sometimes you don't have to compromise.
And I also had the opportunity to work for a brief time with Kessel Run. And I will say that the kind of the construct of that and the legacy of it, as walking in as somebody that's been in a lot of just very run of the mill technical environments and walking in with people that for maybe one of the first times, I ever got to sit down and talk about just what we were trying to do. And we didn't waste hours talking about just general bureaucratic.
It was just what mattered and how could we get something done. And it was unbelievably refreshing. So from my perspective, I appreciate having had the opportunity to work in an environment that you took part in founding.
So with that, thank you so much. I really respect a lot what you guys are doing down there. And thank you so much.
Thank you, Bryon and Adam. That was really quite different and refreshing. And Bryon, as Han Solo said to what's his name?
How can I forget? To Luke Skywalker, may the force be with you. I mean, you are definitely, as we talked earlier, the Jedi Knight.
And it seems like an appropriate thank you to you for being on this program with us. So stay tuned for questions with Bryon at the end. And we're delighted to have you.
From GovCon Executive Slice: GovCon Exec Forum: Adam McNair and Bryon Kroger, Nov 17, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-exec-forum-adam-mcnair-and-bryon-kroger/id1834430071?i=1000737111845&r=1276.44
