Not Your Typical Silicon Valley Story

Usul co-founders Jarren Reid and Oliver Gomez are not your average Silicon Valley founders.

Oliver grew up in rural Oklahoma with no computers in high school. Jarren grew up in Virginia and worked for government contractors since 15 years old. Neither grew up in tech. Both grew up around the military.

They were the first from their respective high schools to get into Stanford, and got randomly assigned to the same dorm freshman year.

For two years they built projects together that went nowhere. Polished, fundable, and ultimately pointless. Class A problems for people who already had everything. It felt like soulless work, and they knew it.

Finding the Mission

Then they found Hacking for Defense, Steve Blank's program that applies lean startup methodology to the hardest problems in national security. For the first time, the problems actually meant something. They were serving the industry they grew up in.

What they found when they started talking to companies and governments was a system held together with spreadsheets and institutional memory. Contract opportunities scattered across hundreds of portals. Trillions of dollars managed in PDFs. The largest buyer pool on earth, and it had no operating system.

They pulled an all-nighter and submitted their Y Combinator application the day it was due.

Building the Operating System for Government Procurement

Jarren and Oliver came in from outside the industry, which meant they weren't anchored to how it had always been done. They saw a foundational problem that had been traditionally supplemented with government consultants. Companies needed to find and win government contracts in one place. Governments needed to buy the best technology quickly. Nobody had built the layer connecting them.

Today, Usul monitors $8 trillion in annual government spending across 60+ nations, matching companies to contracts across defense, IT, energy, healthcare, and more.

The mission hasn't changed since that first all-nighter: build the global marketplace for governments to buy products and services quickly. Usul solve real problems for real taxpayers around the world.