Team House of Laws
Team House of Laws
Stanford University
From H4D to Startup: Jarren Reid Transforms Policy Chaos into Opportunity
Jarren Reid
Jarren is the CEO and Co-founder of Usul from Stanford's H4D 2024 Cohort. Usul has since gone through H4XLabs (predecessor to DISF-C) and Y-Combinator. Usul raised $3.2 million in a round led by Scout Ventures and recently Usul won the Army xTechIgnite Competition with a private invite for a Direct-to-Phase II SBIR.
Overview
JMRC Hohenfels - U.S. Army
Problem Sponsor
Original Problem Statement
Number of Interviews
Decision makers in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community need to filter through dense and ambiguous documents to understand their authorities
140
Problem
When Jarren Reid joined the Hacking for Defense (H4D) course at Stanford, he and his team, House of Laws, were tasked with a deeply systemic challenge: help Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community decision-makers cut through conflicting and ambiguous data across sectors like policy, budgeting, and contracts.
Their sponsors, Steve Blank and Jacqueline Tame of the Silicon Valley Defense Group, knew that misaligned information in the Pentagon was making strategic decision-making increasingly difficult. They challenged the House of Laws Team to find a way for decision makers in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community to filter through dense and ambiguous documents in order to understand their authorities. Jarren, who had a background in defense contracting in Northern Virginia, was drawn to this opportunity to reimagine how information flows across government systems. “My foundation in life was defense and I grew a hate for DC’s startup ecosystem,” he explained. “That’s why I went to Stanford. I was like, ‘Wait, this is perfect.’ I have this background in defense and now I can fuse it with building something better.”
Innovation
Over the course of the program, Jarren and his team conducted a staggering 140 user interviews, primarily on the government side. Originally, Jarren’s team focused on solving data conflicts within the government, aiming to help DoD policy analysts and people working on Capitol Hill navigate complex internal systems. However, after conducting user interviews in Washington, D.C., they realized that external companies faced similar issues and actually had the funds to pay for a service to solve this problem. So, they shifted their focus to building tools that help businesses win government contracts instead.
By week six, the team traveled to D.C. to show their prototype to Hill staffers, acquisition officers, and defense contractors. Their solution evolved into a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system, a chatbot that helped policy analysts query dense legislative and regulatory language using natural language. “Our MVP was designed to help analysts write complex queries against government policy,” Jarren said.
The team’s problem sponsor, who had previously developed a pre-AI policy tracking tool at Booz Allen with over 20,000 users, was immediately impressed by the team’s prototype. While that legacy tool saw minimal engagement (“Only two seconds of daily use,” as Jarren put it), the new solution clearly resonated. “Our sponsor loved it,” Jarren said. “She saw that what we built could actually get used. That was a huge validation moment for us.” The contrast in usability and engagement between the old system and the team’s retrieval-augmented chatbot underscored the real potential of their innovation.
The team ultimately presented two versions of their solution: one tailored to internal government sourcing, and one aimed at helping companies better navigate and win defense contracts.
Presentation
From MVP to Market: After H4D
Rather than shelve their work after the course ended, Jarren and a few team members pushed forward. After completing H4D, Jarren and his teammates took their class project and applied to Y Combinator, a prestigious startup accelerator in San Francisco. “We got in and did that last summer,” Jarren said, reflecting on the experience that helped transform their concept into a real venture. Their company, USUL, now builds software to help commercial companies identify, pursue, and win government contracts. “We just won our first competition with the DoD, with the Army, for our first government contract,” he shared. “Our goal is to build the Amazon for government, a one-stop shop that allows any company in any allied nation to sell to their government as quickly as possible.” The company builds tools to help commercial companies break into the federal contracting space and has already landed its first DoD contract.
Jarren’s vision extends far beyond one contract. “We’re trying to redefine how companies and governments interact globally,” he said.
Jarren’s H4D Experience
Jarren credits H4D for giving him the hands-on training he needed to bridge the gap between tech and government. “The biggest thing I learned was how to do interviews well; real ones, not polite ones,” he said. “You have to ask the kinds of questions that get to the heart of whether your solution matters. It’s like The Mom Test on steroids.”
Jarren describes H4D as both the most rewarding and most demanding class he took at Stanford, calling it “by far the most ROI of any class” and noting that he worked “60 hours a week; it was a full-time job.” He cautions future students not to take the course solely to launch a startup, but affirms, “If you care about national security and solving real problems, it’s 100% worth it.”