SPEED AND URGENCY IN SILICON VALLEY


SHOW OF HANDS


BMNT co-founder and managing partner Peter Newell, right, interacts with students in Stanford University’s Hacking for Defense (H4D) class. Like BMNT, the class leverages a problem-solving mentality and a diverse set of viewpoints to focus on finding rapidly deployable solutions. (Photo by Rod Searcey, Stanford News Service)


Iraq, including leading an infantry task force in the second Battle of Fallujah, in 2004, for which he was awarded a Silver Star, and later commanding a brigade combat team in the southern Iraq border region, responsible for halting the inflow of weapons and fighters from Iran.


During Newell’s many trips as REF chief to Silicon Valley, Felter organized


“garage crawls” to expose Newell to poten- tial tech solutions for REF’s problems. BMNT’s website notes one particularly important trip, when a senior Google executive was blunt:


“ ‘We don’t want your money; we want your problems.’ Tis reinforced to Pete what he already suspected—that


the key to


engaging Silicon Valley was not through government money, which is limited and difficult to access, but by challenging these entrepreneurs and visionaries with DOD and other government agencies’ problems.”


Although many believed Newell was in line to get a star and remain in the Army, instead he retired and later joined Felter and William Treseder, a Marine veteran


118 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2017


and Stanford alumnus, to form a new company called BMNT Partners LLC. Today they simply refer to the company as BMNT.


As Newell was driving across the coun- try to take the reins at BMNT, he got a phone call from Jackie Space, a former U.S. Air Force officer who had worked with Newell when he headed REF, coor- dinating his West Coast operations. “I called him up and said, ‘Hey, can I come help you out in whatever it is that you’re doing with the startup?’ And that’s when I became the first employee at BMNT,” Space said in an October interview she and Newell did with Army AL&T.


While Newell was getting started with BMNT, he met Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley legend and serial entrepreneur. (See sidebar, Page 126.) After either founding or working for eight startups during a 21-year career, Blank had begun teaching his “Lean LaunchPad” meth- ods at the business schools at Stanford and the University of California, Berke- ley. Newell and Blank realized that what Blank was teaching was precisely what


Newell had been doing with REF: find- ing a battlefield problem and assembling a team to validate the problem, test pos- sible answers and develop technologically informed solutions. BMNT dubbed the process Hacking for Defense, or H4D. Later, BMNT and Blank combined to teach a class at Stanford also called Hacking for Defense, in which students formed teams to find solutions to prob- lems provided by government defense and intelligence agencies. (See “Hacking for Defense,” Page 99.)


BMNT’s work has gotten the Pentagon’s attention, and Forbes magazine recently included BMNT in its list of the top 25 veteran startups. One of the com- pany’s clients is the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s outreach to the tech community. (See “Speed Contracting,” Page 108.) Other clients include the Joint Improvised-Treat Defeat Organization, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the MD5 National Security Tech- nology Accelerator, which is part of the Manufacturing


and Industrial Base


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