Insight Partners’ Nick Sinai on People Flow, Procurement, and What Real Change Requires

Defense Disrupted · Mar 4, 2026 · 42m

Nick Sinai, Managing Director at Insight Partners, spent nearly 6 years inside the Obama administration, helping stand up the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, and keeping notes on why high-profile tech talent from major firms kept failing to change government from the inside. His core observation from that period is that people consistently treated things as fixed constraints that were not actually fixed, and that misread is where most reform efforts die.

Nick works through what change at scale inside defense institutions actually requires, including the old line that says if you are…