How Mariel Reed applied abundance principles to help 3,500 agencies convert resources into outcomes

Before founding Pavilion, Mariel Reed served in the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, where she watched a single foster care application take more than 300 days to move through the system. She worked with a talented, dedicated team. But it wasn’t enough to speed up this process. Government procurement is a $2 trillion industry at the state and local level, and by Reed’s own description, it’s “a pretty anemic marketplace relative to its size.”

A conversation with a friend at Stripe was the moment it clicked for her. Stripe was already a mature company at the time, but its only government win was a single contract with the City of Boston to process death certificate payments. The best companies had solutions that could address key pain points in government, but they were avoiding a process that was too slow and convoluted to be worth it.

Reed founded Pavilion just before COVID to close that gap. It works as a two-sided marketplace: public agencies access vendors already pre-qualified against their own compliance rules, so purchasing decisions don’t require every department to become a procurement expert first. Reed calls it “bowling with bumpers,” a way for agencies to move purchases forward without getting caught in rules built to prevent corruption but that often just prevent action. On the other side, vendors get visibility into which agencies are actively buying, instead of guessing where to spend their time. Pavilion makes its revenue from suppliers, which keeps the public agency side free.

Pavilion now works with more than 3,500 public agencies nationwide, and the number of government buyers on the platform has grown sixfold since it launched. Some of that shows up in specific, local terms: San Francisco’s Parks and Rec department has used cooperative purchasing through the platform to lower both the cost and the timeline for building new playgrounds. Reed’s team tracks wins like this in an internal channel they only half-jokingly call their hall of fame, evidence that the small, specific problems they help solve are the ones that matter most to them.

Reed joined Abundance Network’s community in 2022, looking to connect with fellow reformers both inside and outside of government.