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SK Scott Kupor Scott Kupor Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management since July 2025, working on federal workforce size, merit-based hiring and the U.S. Tech Force.

“Historically in government, 99.7% of people are a three or above, meaning literally 0.3% fall below expectations. Now, in a population of 2 million people, is that even mathematically possible? It's not. … How do I attract and retain great people when I'm sitting here busting my ass and you're dialing it in? Everyone knows you suck, but nobody actually wants to do anything about it.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Historically in government, 99.7% of people are a three or above, meaning literally 0.3% fall below expectations. Now, in a population of 2 million people, is that even mathematically possible? It's not. … How do I attract and retain great people when I'm sitting here busting my ass and you're dialing it in? Everyone knows you suck, but nobody actually wants to do anything about it.” — Scott Kupor, a16z Podcast

Context

Kupor, who now runs the federal Office of Personnel Management, explains the one-to-five performance rating system used across government. He argues near-universal good ratings make accountability impossible and push out high performers.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 27:47 into the episode
Scott Kupor

…that. So that's part of number one. Like that's part of the reason why the system screwed up is like there is zero, zero opportunity for innovation. As a result, therefore you have slow and plotting and not great customer service from a lot of these organizations. Well, not that. If there's zero

David Senra

possibility for any kind of innovation, like what kind of talent are you going to attract?

Scott Kupor

…their employee rating. Some organizations have a four-point rating, but say one through five. One is the worst. Like you definitely like should not be here. Five is like you're knocking the cover off the ball. And three means, hey, like, you know what? Like you're good. You're doing what we asked you to do. That's all fine. And every organization, quite frankly, needs a lot of people like that. Historically in government, 99.7% of people are a three or above, meaning literally 0.3% fall below expectations. Now, in a population of 2 million people, is that even mathematically possible? It's not. So you have one problem, which is we don't do anything on low-end accountability in the government. I'll tell you about how we're going to change this in a minute. But so that's a serious problem to your point, which is, look, how do I attract and retain great people when I'm sitting here busting my ass and you're like dialing it in? Everyone knows you suck, but like nobody actually wants to do…

David Senra

organization of 7,000 people. Yeah, it's

Scott Kupor

not, again, it's just not possible, right? What it means is like we've gained the system. And as a result, again, if I'm a high performer, like, you know, I want to be a high performer and there ought to be smaller numbers of people who are high performers. And by the way, I ought to just…

David Senra

essentially stuck in purgatory for six months.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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