Is the job market ever not difficult to navigate? The experience could be made worse with the influx of IT workers jumping from the federal government, either voluntarily or by reductions in force.
Of the over 50,000 federal workers affected or targeted by the widespread layoffs, a significant portion of them worked in IT–and some could consider the private sector for their next gig.
However, Joe Scheidler, the CEO and co-founder of Helios, a seed stage startup specializing in AI for government and policy, said that it’s unclear if the layoffs from the federal government will lead to people flooding the IT industry.
Helios builds an AI-native operating system for public policy, regulatory, and legal professionals to track changes and augment workflows.
“There’s always going to be a little bit of both. I think the pendulum will always swing one way or the other,” Scheidler said. “We’ve probably seen the majority of the federal government’s slim down effort. I would consider it to be in the rearview at this point.”
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why were you interested in getting Helios off the ground?
I would say that the impetus moment snowballing toward wanting to start Helios came when I was at the State Department, leading legislative affairs and congressional engagement on a G7 initiative.
A big part of my role was working to coordinate the interagency engagement strategy with [Capitol Hill] to ensure that we were appropriated and resourced in a sufficient manner to meet those goals. I was using a lot of the legacy policy research tools on the market and looking around for an AI-native solution as a one-man band that would enable me to spend a lot less time on the research and monitoring and writing processes that are just so intrinsic to day-to-day work and free me up to go grow relationships on the Hill. DC is super relational, and that’s really how you drive progress in a lot of ways, and I just spent a lot of time doing the former.
When I really wanted to build the prototype, [I] teamed up with the two other co-founders. We went out to San Francisco for the first time, full time, as a group in early March and made a ton of progress building…a very robust data corpus, fine-tuning models, and getting a lot of great feedback from folks across the public and private sectors, leading into the seed round raise. Now, today, [we’re] scaling the team and moving quite fast in a number of directions.
Can we flesh out the differences between the government and industry in the IT space?
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The commercial side just moves a lot faster…The Valley is the cradle of innovation, and we saw that when we went out to San Francisco. You can stand up and ship product way faster in a startup environment than you would be able to even in a “startup team” operating within the government. You’re just able to move more freely in getting a prototype working. Obviously, when you start selling to government entities or Fortune 500s, you have to meet the same compliance thresholds that you would if you started out building in government. But I think [speed is] really the main difference.
You can just start building something, get it to a point where you can get early feedback from industry experts and pressure test your hypothesis: Is this really useful? Is this something people want? Then, if it is, buckle down and actually ramp up toward a proper go-to-market industry when you become compliant with…standards. Then move from there. That’s the approach we took. It’s something that you fundamentally aren’t really in a position to do if you’re working within the government.
Do you anticipate that these reductions in staff will affect the tech sector and flood the industry with people looking for a change?
We’re seeing folks start companies, start consultancies, start small businesses, and enter service in other ways, like going back to their home states and trying to bring that efficiency mentality to local county governments. I think that’s helpful. I do think there will be people who left government or were let go who may bring a really helpful perspective to their communities, private industry, some of these government affairs teams. I think a core tenant of American competitiveness, looking more globally at China, Russia, Iran, the [United Arab Emirates], those friendly competitors and adversaries who are leaning into AI adoption and digital transformation probably a little more than we are at the moment. Bringing an inside-government perspective to industry can be helpful in harmonizing public-private interaction. That’s going to be needed to compete and lead on the world stage over the next five to 10 years.
I’m not advocating for state-owned enterprise, which I know is a flash point right now…but I do think there is a real opportunity for the public and private sectors to work more efficiently together in America. AI can be a helpful tool in that effort, but the institutional knowledge and perspective that a lot of folks carried from their service in government will be another driver of that effort.