"The Contracts Are In There!"

Please watch this video. The left seat is a new Defense Tech Founder, possibly a Stanford grad, with no uniform, civilian, or contractor experience in DOD, and the right seat is reality. This preface alone will make the left seat persona roll their eyes and not read—that proves my point.

Nine times out of ten. This video, and I hope you watched it, is what I get from young men entering the defense market. Especially, if they've read an article somewhere - visited a PEO website, spoke to an "operator", secretly look at the Staccato website every day, and daydream of range heroism. Maybe they contemplate ordering an expensive carbine. Perhaps they sleep in VR goggles. But, for whatever reason, they think they have plopped into an alternate reality where they know exactly what's going on with simplistic and naive plans. When reality asserts itself, they have no idea what to do and seek help in places that cede their responsibility to grow. Instead, some choose to hide behind others, sometimes now known as founder mode, as they ride them hard towards outcomes they do not understand how to achieve. Because the "contracts are in there!" This is tough to avoid when you enter defense with a mercenary, not a missionary mindset.

It disrespects the technology and its opportunity to impact, succeed, and elevate national security.

Even if you think it's a canned scenario. And for sure, the problem-purse-parched lips for your hydrating solution are in "there," be it a command, unit, wing, office, whatever. You have no excuse to abdicate yourself from understanding the world, your customer, their ecology, their missions, and how they accomplish them. Because the military and the national security apparatuses around the world are formulaic. Yes, in combat, things change like they do in a football game. But they're based on principles hammered in through training. A great question: If your technology is practical, how will they train with it? Suppose you let the oversubscribed and understaffed customer figure that out. In that case, they'll default to the core priorities and training of their job, and it's unlikely that the new technology that they can't imagine because they've never trained with it, if you cannot or do not train with something you are not using in combat.

If your OB/GYN said "fuck it! we're going live!" just as your wife is giving birth helpless in the dichotomy position at peak discomfort you'd not be filled with confidence when he brings out long copper salad tongs and a jeweler's magnifying-monocole. If we were in combat and someone just handed someone something that's not a steak, and said 'use this' - what do you think will happen? If it's a drone, whatever - and the MOSA sticker on it won't help, or a sticker that says "gots" or "open-source inside". But, unfortunately, that's where the rubber meets the road in some circumstances.

Like I've mentioned before, software-only, whether on a smartphone, desktop, or whatever, while not exempt from this, is not as burdened by the dynamic. You have to understand the workstreams, flows, and the circumstances in that your technology is employed. Its concept of employment.

You're a technologist, have a vision, and believe your product or idea can impact whatever constituency in the Military/Intelligence realm. Go find out. I know that's tough, and it's getting more difficult because the users and best folks are retreating to their communication highways. The general population has become filled with people seeking DOD traction like zombies. Worse yet, they all cite the same buzzwords. So, how do you stand out? Well, what they aren't doing is their homework. The average person enters the DOD arena in a version of founder mode. They 1) think it's a game to play because they lack perspective to take it serious, 2) lack maturity to talk to users in a way that's productive versus conjovial, 3) expect outcomes from the customer/pentagon side of the equation and believe their raising of the hand to enter DOD markets is enough and is service, 4) they think working in defense in service on a sliding scale that is connected to Eric Bana, 5) they lack conviction

#5 is the only issue that no third party can address in the founder-technologist. If you lack conviction, you won't do your homework. You can't have conviction for your technology when your pitch is about SBIRs, contracts, and other events - moments in time - without reflection on mission and your performance. But, bones you can catch would be variables in an equation that makes you uplevel to mage or something. If you care for your problem space, develop conviction through focus, commit, as your customers are committed to their problem space, and commitment, as it is their mission. Make their mission your mission. Embrace their mission, be unhinged, and be obsessed. Share the objective. Be Samwise Gamgee.

You will study their units, the DOTMLPF, their hierarchy, and dichotomy with overseas command structures, intelligence community overlaps, committee oversight, acquisition command, dynamics between them, and the threats and external geopolitical factors that drive everything. A handful of champions in the Pentagon and elsewhere are drivers of research to help you get past the reef will become apparent. And it will make you sh*t yourself - because you will then realize it's a small group of principles (who are likely on a signal chat) that can make a significant impact to you.

It's not the other way around. Whatever your idea, I promise you APL pitched it. You need to meet them where they are - busy, entrenched, and committed to the topic - and in receive mode from industry nonstop and many meetings as favors, network reinforcement of former senior leader-colleagues. But the homework, isolating and understanding the grand vision and where your technology is employed in a piece of their puzzle for whatever operations, is everything. I have seen and done this myself in the Pentagon, taking meetings from a total unknown vendor because their content and vision were aligned. And, I immediately thought - "who the hell are these guys?" "I want to meet them." When it's a connection from the "front office" because so and so served within such and such place: We, I take the meeting - never alone for witnesses - am polite, listen, maybe toss out a challenge that will serve as the rejection criteria, and when the meeting ends, send the no thanks back to the front office with that criteria, and never think about it again.

Step one: Create an operational view—show your technology employed in something, even if you think it's stupid. The customer won't.