SPEED AND URGENCY IN SILICON VALLEY


PROBLEM, MEET SOLUTION BMNT co-founder Peter Newell and Jackie Space, a partner in the company, confer dur- ing a Hacking for Defense class at Stanford University. The class, said Space, “is not necessarily geared toward startups.” A solu- tion could also come from a big company or academia, for example. “It’s geared toward finding the best solution. Almost always, it’s a combination of all of them working together.” (Photo by Rod Searcey, Stanford News Service)


for Defense thing?” My response to them was that they were talking about how they all wanted to expand their portfolio in some way—to have more diversifica- tion—and that the government problems might provide a means to do so. Up to that point, the only mechanism they had was to basically canvass FedBizOpps and then send people to conferences and trade shows and try to get meetings with government people to try to have a con- versation. None of which they were really interested in doing. Silicon Valley’s busi- ness model just isn’t tuned that way.


I’ve been on both sides of equation; responding to RFIs [requests for informa- tion] and RFPs [requests for proposals] takes a lot of time. For a fast-paced com- pany, especially one in the startup stage, there’s no way they could spend the time doing this.


Army AL&T: Tey could spend a day looking up acronyms.


Space: Oh, it’s terrible. We spend a lot of time just translating that aspect of it. It’s maddening for a company to get in one government place and get it all worked


124 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2017


out, then have to start over again with every new organization they approach. No small company or tech company focused on building a commercial prod- uct will waste its assets doing this.


Newell: We came to understand most from our work with startups and inves- tors: Te minute a startup takes money from an investor, they are on a three- to five-year timeline to sell that company. And their focus is to get a product into the market as fast as they can. Tere is no wiggle room for them to divert assets to exploring side deals with the government. I’ve had this conversation more times than I’d like to count. At one point, the CEO of a startup looked at me and said,


“Listen, I would love to do this. As an American, I would love to do this. But if I touch that thing, this company will have a new CEO here the next day. Because it has nothing to do with meeting the immediate objectives of the investors of this company.”


Tat’s the hard part. If government folks in programs aren’t taught to figure out how to get in sync with potential early- stage companies sooner and with a


better value proposition, they just won’t get much from them. It’s unfortunate, because instead of showing up with a solid market analysis of why the com- pany should work on the government project, they simply show up and ask to look at what technology they have to fill the government requirement. Ten they are surprised when they get, “Tanks for your interest, but we aren’t going to have a $1,500-an-hour engineer write a white paper for you. No thanks.”


Space: A caveat to what Pete was saying about startups: Te talk about DIUx and the dialogue from D.C. tends to focus on


“startups.” Te term startup applies to a wide range of companies: everything from the girl working out of a garage to a com- pany that is fresh off a multimillion-dollar seed raise. Tere’s a big difference among them, and even other small companies that are on solid footing but have never done business with the government before.


When I look at the problems that we’re sourcing in Hacking for Defense, what I love about the model is that it’s not tar- geted necessarily to startups. It can bring in any type of solution provider. It could


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