SPEED AND URGENCY IN SILICON VALLEY
we called them highly fragile programs. Tese programs needed somebody’s per- sonal presence to give us early warning that something was amiss so we could take remedial action on them, or some- thing was going very well that we could take advantage of.
I shared our problem on the West Coast with an office in D.C. that did similar work and asked them how they were doing it, only to find the No. 2 guy in the office actually lived on the West Coast. Tey managed an intro to Jackie Space, who turned out to be the ideal candidate for filling a PM role out there.
SEEKING FITNESS Finding the right fit—matching government problems to tech company solutions—is BMNT Part- ners’ stock in trade, “to provide responsive capabilities in a rapidly changing national security environment.” It builds on what managing partner Peter Newell did as chief of the REF: matching military problems with largely military solutions and the lessons he learned about what worked and what didn’t to get things done. (Image by erhui1979/iStock)
Silicon Valley. What I learned over the course of my visits there was that folks in Silicon Valley would respond to big problems. In fact, that was the currency that we actually traded in.
In the Valley, it wasn’t so much that I was looking to spend money to buy tech that was valuable as it was that I had really good, hard problems that people loved to play with. Over time, Joe and I worked out a rhythm where I would send him a one- page document that had my top three or four issues on it. Joe would translate the government-speak into something that made sense in the Valley and use that to find the right people to talk to. I’d show up a month later and he’d have rooms packed full of people. Rather than waste my time talking to 1,000 people to get to the two I really needed, at Stanford, we’d
122 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2017
knock that down to 40 and I’d get 10 of the right people from the group.
Te time savings alone was huge, but more importantly the quality of dialogue we were having was even more improved. I couldn’t get to Silicon Valley as often as I wanted to, because of the demands for other things. So REF hired Joe and another guy to actually be our scouts. Essentially, they did for REF then what DIUx is doing for [Secretary of Defense Carter] now.
Not long after that, we found ourselves doing close to $100 million worth of work on the West Coast, and we had a hard time getting our program manag- ers out there to pay close attention to the more challenging programs—some call them high-risk programs. In our case,
A few months later, I was at Stanford and let folks know that I planned to retire soon. Joe, being well-trained at influenc- ing peoples’ behaviors, grabbed me and said, “Listen, I don’t know how it would work, I don’t know what it would look like, but why don’t you come out here? And we’ll figure out how to do this, you know, facing the other way, by pulling government problems into the Valley and building coalitions of folks around them.”
It took us almost three years to actually put the puzzle together and do what we first drafted on our own napkin sketch. We ended up forming a new company so that it was a fresh start for everybody.
I was driving across the country on my move to Palo Alto when serendipity struck twice. Te first
time happened
as I was heading into Kansas City, Mis- souri, when some folks I had briefed on REF’s operating model some six months earlier called me and said, “Will you stop in Kansas City? We want you to talk to the director of our facility [the National Secure Manufacturing Center (NSMC)],” which is a DOE [U.S. Department of Energy] facility that does all the classified manufacturing for the government.
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