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V. David Zvenyach

The perils of the inverse pump and dump

One of my not-so-secret goals of this newsletter is to bring phrases like "NAICS arbitrage" and "them's the breaks" into the daily lexicon of #govcon. In an earlier posts, I used a phrase that at the time wasn't really ready for its

Reasonableness isn't realism

Coming of age in the late '90s meant that science-fiction disaster films gave me conflicting messages about the government's sensitivity to price. In 1996's Independence Day, hyping the myth of the $600 hammer, we learned that the government is totally price insensitive: President Thomas Whitmore:

No lease? Maybe you're not so small after all!

We've talked before about the quirks of determining whether a business is a small business for government-contracts purposes. In general, you look to the number of employees a company has, you look at the average revenues of that company, and you use those inputs to determine whether the

Earnings call

A fun dynamic in government contracting is that people treat things that happen before a contract is awarded (pre-award) and things that happen after a contract is awarded (post-award) as if they are two totally different spheres. This dynamic shows up in organization structures. In government, there's a

Taking vendors at face value

A thing about working in government is that everyone's always so damn busy. There's always some fire drill (and occasionally an actual fire), data call or time-consuming process, a suddenly urgent item that sat around for months before it needed to get done ASAP, or it&

Something something about all or nothing?

Of all the acronyms that matter to government contractors' business-development teams, no acronym is more important than IDV, which stands for an "indefinite delivery vehicle". An IDV is a way (a vehicle, if you will) for the government to establish the rules of the road for future

Consolidation and shared win themes

A topic that comes up every now and again in government-contracting-policy circles is the impact of corporate mergers and acquisitions on "the industrial base". Even the White House talks about how "extreme consolidation poses risks to our nation’s national and economic security". It's

Similar in size and scope

We've talked before about the way that bid protests usually work. Typically, there are three ways a protestor can claim that an agency messed up: 1. The agency screwed up some procedural thing. 2. The agency rated the winner too high. 3. The agency rated the protestor too

Almost irrefragable?

Pop quiz: do you have any idea of what the word "irrefragable" means? What about the phrase "almost irrefragable"? How about "well-nigh irrefragable"?[1] I assure you that irrefragable is a real word (even though my spell check doesn't think so), but

No SEWP for you

Where to begin? Last week, I announced that I would be writing about the GAO's decision in C3.ai. When I sat down to start writing, I figured I would write primarily about the government-facilitated cottage industry that is value-added resellers. I thought I might write broadly about