I want to say something uncomfortable about how innovation gets sold to governments, universities, and institutions — and the dishonesty I have in mind is not the one you would guess. It is not the inflated promises, or the glossy decks, or the case studies that quietly omit the failures. It is the pricing.
Pricing is where a vendor tells you what they believe
Pricing is the most honest document a vendor ever produces, because it is where they reveal what they actually believe about their own product. If you truly believe the thing works, you will bet on the outcome. If you do not, you will structure the deal so you are paid whether it works or not. And almost everyone in this industry — I say this having sat on both sides of these tables for thirty years — structures the deal so they are paid either way. There are three dominant ways the work gets priced, and each is honest about one thing while being quietly dishonest about another. The dishonesty is always in the same place: who carries the risk.
Model one: pay for seats, pray for outcomes
The first is the seat model. You pay per user, per licence, per training hour, per head enrolled. It is the default for most software and most so-called platforms. Its honesty is that it is transparent about cost — you know exactly what you are paying. Its dishonesty is that the vendor is paid in full whether or not a single venture is ever built. You are buying inputs and praying for outcomes, and the entire risk that the inputs produce nothing sits with you, the buyer. The vendor has been paid, and has moved on to the next institution.
Model two: the gift you can't hold accountable
The second is the grant model — the program funded by a foundation or a development agency and delivered to the institution at little or no cost. It looks like the most generous of the three, and the people who run these programs are very often genuinely mission-driven. But follow the accountability, not the intention. A program funded by a donor is accountable to the donor, not to your outcomes. It runs as long as the grant runs and ends when the grant ends, regardless of whether it built anything durable in your ecosystem. And here is the quiet part: when something is given to you, you have no leverage to insist that it works. You cannot hold a gift to a KPI. Its honesty is the generosity. Its dishonesty is the absence of durable accountability to you.
Model three: built for the capital, not the ecosystem
The third is the capital model — the accelerator or hub that takes equity in the ventures, or that runs on sovereign or fund capital which itself needs to be deployed. This one is often the most sophisticated and the best-resourced in the room. Its honesty is that it is straightforwardly an investor, and a good investor is a powerful ally. Its dishonesty is subtler: a model optimised for the returns of the capital is not the same as a model optimised for how many of your founders actually succeed. The incentive is portfolio mark-ups and deal flow — a handful of winners large enough to return the fund. The other ninety percent of founders, the ones a national mandate actually cares about, are not what the model is built to serve. It is honest about being capital. It is quietly dishonest about being an ecosystem-builder.
The only model that shares the risk
Now the fourth way, the one I believe is the only honest one: outcome-priced contracting. You agree, up front, on the outcome that matters — ventures launched, jobs created, founders funded, sustainability-mapped startups aligned to real targets — and the vendor is paid against that outcome. If the outcome does not land, the vendor does not get paid in full. The vendor shares the risk.
That is the whole of it, and it is uncomfortable for vendors precisely because we can lose. Which is exactly why it is the honest model. When a vendor is willing to be paid on the outcome, they are telling you, with their own money, that they believe their system produces it. And when a vendor insists on being paid by the seat regardless of what happens, they are telling you something too. You should simply listen to it.
Why almost no one offers it
So why does almost no one offer it? Because outcome-pricing only works if you genuinely have a system that reliably produces the outcome. You cannot agree to be paid on ventures launched if what you are selling is, underneath, a services treadmill or a content library and a hope. The grant model cannot price on outcomes, because it is a gift with no mechanism to. The capital model will not, because its incentive points elsewhere. The seat vendor dare not, because there is no system beneath the seats to back the bet. Outcome-pricing is downstream of having a real operating system. It is the one claim that cannot be faked — which is precisely why it is the one worth making.
How we contract — and why we can
This is why we contract the way we do. Our agreements with institutions are priced against the outcomes their mandate actually measures, not the seats they happen to fill. And because asking an institution to bet large on an unfamiliar model is its own kind of dishonesty, we offer a small, fixed-price way to test the claim first — a wedge engagement, cheap enough to be a low-risk yes, structured so you can see whether the system produces before you ever commit to scale. We can offer all of this for one reason only: there is an operating system underneath it that we are willing to put our own revenue behind.
For the procurement teams who will rightly ask how an outcome contract stays auditable rather than merely aspirational: the methodology underneath is independently accredited to the standard institutional buyers already accept, which is what lets an outcome be measured, verified, and contracted against instead of just promised. That auditability is the thing that turns "we share the risk" from a slogan into a clause.
The startups of the future aren't destined to fail — and the institutions betting on them deserve partners willing to be paid on whether they succeed, not merely on whether they showed up. Outcome-pricing is the only model honest enough to offer that. Everything else asks you to carry the risk alone and then calls it a partnership.
If your mandate is measured in outcomes, your contracts should be too. Write to us at ecosystem@simsy.ai.
— Satish Kumar N · Founder & CEO, Simsy AI · Dubai · Bengaluru · New York
Build. Launch. Scale.