Hangar Team Spotlight - Jennifer Miller

Hangar Team Spotlight:

Jennifer Miller on Transitioning from the Public to Private Sector

With decades of experience across technology, business and policy, the Hangar team is made up of a diverse group of experts who have worked on some of the most impactful technologies and policies that touch our lives each day. Now at Hangar, together, we are on a mission to build and launch high-growth technology companies tackling some of society's toughest problems that governments can’t solve alone. This new series will shed light on the unique perspectives and backgrounds within the team, and provide insight into how Hangar and its portfolio companies navigate their work at the intersection of technology and government. 

In our first spotlight, we spoke with Jennifer Miller, partner and resident expert in appropriations, procurement and congressional decision-making processes, who joined Hangar in 2020 after three decades in the public sector working at the nexus of government funding. Her previous roles have included Staff Director of both the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and the U.S.House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations Division. She’s also held positions within the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, among others.

What is your role at Hangar?

I’m a partner with the fund and part of the investment team. I bring a strategic lens across federal government, funding and policy to help the portfolio companies vector into where the opportunities are and understand how the government customer will think. 

One of the challenges with government customers is that there’s not just one customer. You have the agency and you have Capitol Hill at times, and you really need to understand how to navigate the intricacies of each to act on new opportunities as they’re coming forward. If you know the processes, you can be successful.

Can you share more about your background and what led you to Hangar?

I worked the full gamut of federal agencies. And there aren’t a lot of folks, even from the appropriations committee perspective, that have worked in or had exposure to the diversity of the whole federal portfolio. I got to know both the defense and non-defense sectors, how the various agencies operate, their different perspectives and the ways they fund initiatives. That’s one of the unique skill sets I bring to Hangar. 

In my public sector roles, I learned something new every day and it was always about trying to figure out how to make things better. Afterwards, I wanted to go to something that gave me that same experience of doing something new, while applying all of the knowledge that I had gained and still making a difference. Hangar really provided that. It’s a group of folks who are very much committed to bringing the power of tech to government to solve government’s big problems. 

What lessons from your public sector work are you bringing to your work at Hangar?

Across all of my years in government, I saw numerous programs -- and wasted money -- when the government tried to harness tech without actually understanding it. To make the public sector work better, the government really needs to understand how to work with innovative startups and tech-focused firms. It’s difficult because the government and the private sector are not the same, and for a lot of very important reasons, they can’t act the same. 

What’s really exciting, though, is figuring out how to make two very different cultures and two very different sectors come together. Trying to bridge that gap to help startups and innovative companies figure out how to work with the government is a nice new challenge after 30 years. There are a lot of people in government now who understand the power of tech and the need for innovation, they just don't quite know how to get there. Hangar very much understands how to innovate and what the possibilities are. 

What are the key things for technology companies to understand in order to work with or alongside the government?

There are opportunities. But you really have to play the whole field. This means understanding everything the major government contractors are doing and whether you can vector in to taking advantage of the ideas coming from the innovators inside the federal government, and building tech that addresses their needs. And to do it quickly. That’s the advantage of being small and of being a startup: you can build quickly and you can adjust quickly. 

A big challenge has been the procurement process. It’s so cumbersome, but the good news is that the laws are changing to try to allow more innovation. The government wants something immediate but now they're starting to focus on smaller, more user-focused solutions that can adapt and have meaning to decision makers. Show your benefit upfront and build from there. 

Building relationships with some of the medium and bigger sized contractors is also important, because if you’ve got something good, they’re going to want to integrate it as well. 

What are the biggest areas for growth in the next five years? 

The biggest challenge and opportunity for government has to do with data. Government has been trying to figure out a way to turn the data and information that they have into actionable decision making. The big gap, though, is not that we don’t have enough information or data, it’s that we probably have too much and don't know how to use it. 

The power of artificial intelligence and harnessing data to be able to predict and make better decisions going forward is going to be a game changer. This is true both on the defense side, and probably more so on the domestic side with areas like public health, transportation and urban planning. For companies that can provide that value to decision makers early and upfront, that’s the direction that the government’s trying to go right now and that’s where the real change is going to be.