HACKING FOR DEFENSE


THE ORIGINAL HACKERS


From left, instructors Peter Newell, Steve Blank and Joe Felter, a former U.S. Army Special Forces colonel and a co-founder of BMNT, observe an H4D class. The three, who together taught the first Hacking for Defense class at Stanford, are writing a book on Hacking for Defense, which publisher John Wiley & Sons is expected to release this fall. (Photos by Rod Searcey, Stanford News Service)


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would provide geolocation to the div- ers while they remained at depth. After interviewing more than 100 SEALs and other underwater experts and design- ing many minimum viable products (MVPs, a tenet of Hacking for Defense founder and instructor Steve Blank’s Lean Startup methodology) to test their hypotheses,


the team ultimately built and successfully tested a GPS buoy.


Te members of Team AquaLink—Hong En Chew, Rachel Olney, Samir Patel and Army Maj. Dave Ahern, a Down- ing Scholar at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center—were taking the pilot class of Hacking for Defense, a new DOD tool for solving problems.


Te class grew out of an encounter in 2015 between a decorated Army colonel and a legendary Silicon Valley entrepre- neur. Peter Newell, the managing partner of BMNT Partners LLC—a consultancy that brings together government and Silicon Valley groups to solve complex, critical problems—had retired in 2013 from a 30-year Army career, spending


100 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2017


his last three years in uniform as head of the Rapid Equipping Force. (For more on BMNT, see “Speed and Urgency in Silicon Valley,” Page 116.) Steve Blank, who retired in 1999 from a 25-year career in Silicon Valley, was teaching his Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship course


at


Stanford, and one of his students, a for- mer Army Special Forces Soldier earning his MBA, advised him to meet Newell.


Newell and Blank were scheduled to meet for 30 minutes but ended up talk- ing for more than three hours. Newell was trying to make Soldiers more lethal and


safe. Blank was trying to help entrepre- neurs build great companies. Each saw the overlaps in the other’s approach. Both understood that the secret to innovation is not brainstorming sessions or whiteboards. Instead,


innovation results from a disci-


plined and strategic approach to solving problems. Teir joint brainchild is now known as Hacking for Defense (H4D).


H4D—the methodology, and the class that teaches it—is on a mission to accel- erate the speed at which national security organizations solve their problems. Te core program is a 90-day process in


“As a student, you accept that only your grade reflects the impact of your hard work. H4D breaks that norm because you see your work making a difference for service members.”


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