I worked with a startup company ~8 years ago that wanted to go after government contracts

> the people that sign off on paying for it. Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors This reads like a lack of democratic influence and even direct corruption. That is, these "stakeholders" are not concerned that the voters would be unhappy with their performance, and would fire them (directly or through an action of a newly elected official). They seem to be conveniently shielded from feedback of the population which they nominally are hired to serve.

> According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using. And owners have never lied about the superiority of their product, or what other people think. Except that is pretty much all they do.

Eons ago I worked for a startup that sold product to the City/County of San Francisco. We had insiders on staff. A product that management and rank+file loved. We had low hanging fruit just there for the picking. We had experience dealing with other large cities. I predicted SF would inflict doom and gloom before I left, and I did leave before a full scale deployment got underway. But I don't think it'd be fair to lay the entire blame on San Francisco. That said, dealing with San Francisco definitely gummed up the works. Lots of legacy crap, changing requirements, slow moving folks, etc. Dealing with Los Angeles was a walk in the park.

> the people who would use it are not the people that sign off on paying for it. Reminds me of a demo I did for some Congresscritters once. The staffer said "It'll take $50k per record to bring this database online" so they refused to look at the live, running demo I had of the database online. I heard, later, that someone else got "$50k per record" as a contract.

> Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors (i.e. those who threw money into lobbying the right folk) That last part isn’t true in my experience, but that makes it harder to solve: every procurement officer I’ve worked with has been very scrupulous about not favoring a vendor but they’re operating under rules for things like fairness and security which are hard to comply with. A huge company can hire a room full of people to document how they’re complying with everything but a startup is going to run into exactly the problem you described. The big guys all support this since it has the effect of limiting options without actually being illegal — who’s going to argue against risk reduction, right?