For years, Paola Santana has said the challenge of working with governments felt like operating in two parallel timelines: one defined by ambition, the other by operational constraints. “The day-to-day and the vision are always in conflict,” she tells The Latin Times. “You aim for the moment when they connect.”
Over the past year, however, that connection began to feel tangible.
Santana is the founder and CEO of Glass, a Silicon Valley startup focused on procurement and payments for the public sector. Her strategy has been deliberate specialization: Glass has structured its growth around a premise, which starts by focusing on a single problem: how governments buy goods and services.
That focus, Santana has learned, is what allows smaller companies to compete with larger players. Depth, not scale, is the advantage for startups. “By the time you understand something in two weeks, I understand what I need to do in an hour,” she said. “Because that’s what I do every day.”
Santana frames the problem around scale and impact. Governments, she said, spend about 30% of global GDP through procurement: “$16 trillion.” Yet she argues that the impact of that spending is often difficult to perceive. “I see it on reports. I know we spend them,” she says. “And the question is, where are these $16 trillion?” In her view, the money is “invested,” but “poorly managed, poorly disbursed.”
Building on that diagnosis, Santana pointed to working with the U.S. federal government—what she refers to as “the largest buyer in the world”—as a critical test of Glass’s approach. Observing both complex and everyday transactions moving through the platform, she said, revealed not just the scale of public spending but the structural challenges behind it. For her, the question was no longer whether governments spend vast sums, but whether the systems managing that spending can make those decisions visible, measurable, and meaningful.
The system was tested during periods of disruption, including a government shutdown and interruptions in federal purchasing activity. Santana recalled that for more than a month, some government credit card holders were unable to use their cards, which meant many users could not operate within the platform. She initially expected the disruption to weaken engagement, but instead it revealed something else.
“What ended up happening was that people found ways around the system,” she said. “The moment they could get back to the system, they would use it and double and triple the usage of the system.” When operations resumed, she added, “you saw the flooding of orders coming back again.” For Santana, the episode demonstrated that the platform had become embedded in a sector she describes as traditionally risk-averse and resistant to change.
Santana frames infrastructure as the core problem of government technology. For her, systems must endure regardless of political shifts or leadership changes. “If we are a government infrastructure company,” she said, “when government doesn’t know what to do, or wants to shift between A and B, the infrastructure needs to remain there.” In her view, the role of technology is not to follow political agendas but to provide continuity across them, remaining operational even as priorities change.
Santana, who is Latina, links her approach to public systems to her experience growing up in Latin America. That upbringing meant experiencing firsthand how government decisions shape everyday life. “We grow up seeing bad transportation systems, bad public education, bad public health care,” she said. “So you learn to care about those things, because you live the consequences of them.”
When Latinos arrive in the United States, she argues, they bring that sensitivity into environments with greater technological and financial resources. “You care a lot,” she said, “and then you have the tools to do something about what you care about.”
That perspective also shapes how she identifies problems worth solving. Santana argued that Latino founders often notice gaps that institutions have learned to normalize. In her case, she recalled discovering that major organizations did not track large portions of government spending, particularly small purchases made outside traditional contracts. Rather than interpreting the absence of data as proof that the issue was marginal, she saw it differently. “If nobody is looking at it, it doesn’t mean it’s not important,” she said. “It means it has been ignored.”
Looking ahead, Santana said her priority is less about expansion than about permanence: building systems that endure beyond political cycles and market shifts. After years of testing whether Glass could operate under pressure, she sees the next phase as consolidating its role as infrastructure in a sector defined by volatility. “If you surpass the storm,” she said, “you are stronger because of it.”
Originally published on Latin Times
