Page 41 - FCW, September/October 2019

TheLectern
Oddball and Fearless
take on the federal
marketplace
Nontraditional contractors are changing the federal IT community in ways that go far beyond their unusual names
BY STEVE KELMAN
If I told you that two charter mem- bers of a small support group for nontraditional federal IT contrac- tors are named Oddball and Fearless, what would your reaction be? If you are like me, you are thinking: This isn’t your father’s IT market. These contrac- tors are nontraditional in more ways than one.
Travis Sorensen co-founded Oddball after graduating from business school in 2014. The company entered the fed- eral market in 2017 after someone from 18F told him the government needed companies that did great agile work and that Oddball would qualify as a veteran-owned small business. The company recently won its first prime contract with the Department of Vet- erans Affairs.
“We chose the name Oddball because we felt it helped us stand out from the crowd and because we do things differently,” Sorensen told me. “We take the time to understand the business case for the applications we’re building. We think this is a little odd in the federal market. “
Delali Dzirasa, founder of Fearless Solutions, has a background with small
but traditional government contrac- tors. “When I jumped out full time, I saw a lot of acronym soup in the fed contracting space — ABC Corp. or DEF LLC, etc.,” he told me. “I wanted something that would stand out and compel people to take notice and want to learn more.”
“Fearless did just that,” he contin- ued. “Also, I had prepped and dreamed forever of running a company, \[but\] when it came time to do it, I was terri- fied to jump. Figured I couldn’t see the name Fearless every day and be afraid to be different, to make an impact.”
Digital Services Coalition: An exclusive club
Oddball and Fearless are charter mem- bers of the Digital Services Coalition, which I first wrote about in a blog post in early 2018 and revisited in an article in the August issue of FCW about a blanket purchase agreement that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded to six non- traditional IT contractors — five of whom, including Fearless, are in the coalition.
Perhaps it should not be surprising
that an organization with members named Oddball and Fearless has cre- ated a nontraditional industry associa- tion. For starters, the coalition’s guid- ing principles don’t track with those of traditional IT industry associations. They are:
• Purpose over profit
• Users over stakeholders
• Outcomes over activities
• Community over credit
• Innovation over risk management • Delivery over deliberation
Second, the coalition isn’t out to recruit as many members as possible. The organization was started about 18 months ago by Robert Rasmussen, a Navy veteran who founded a small IT firm called Agile Six. The first eight members were people Rasmussen knew and then some people those peo- ple knew. Eight more “kind of showed up when the idea started spreading,” he said. When the group reached 16 companies, it was closed to new mem- bers. The 16 charter members “were the ones who really showed a com- mitment to the community,” he added.
The members see their role as pro- viding support for one another in the
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