The Department of War (DoW) is one of the world’s largest organizations. If you’re a startup trying to figure out who to call on and how to navigate the system, it can be – to put it politely – challenging.Those inside the DoW have little perspective of how hard it is to understand what to an outsider looks like in an impenetrable, incredibly complex system.
Insiders know who to call, and prime contractors have teams of people following broad area announcements and contracts, but if you’re startup, you have none of those relationships. (And with the advent of Social Media even our adversaries have better knowledge.)
If we’re serious about building a next generation defense ecosystem (not just buying the next shiny object), then this is the directory the Department of War should be publishing.
Until then, here’s the second update to the Department of War PEO Directory. 500 new names/organizations in this DoW phonebook and startup Go-to-Market Strategy playbook.
Announcing the 2025 edition of the DoW PEO Directory. Online here.
Think of this PEO Directory as a “Who buys in the government?” phone book.
Finding a customer for your product in the Department of War is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention? What is the right Go-To-Market Strategy? What is a PEO and why should I care?
Ever since I co-founded Hacking for Defense, my students would ask, “Who should we call in the DoW to let them know what problem we solved? How can we show them the solution we built?” In the last few years that question kept coming, from new defense startups and their investors.
At the same time, I’d get questions from the new wave of Defense Investors asking, “What’s the best “Go-To-Market (GTM)” strategy for our startups?
PEOs, PMs, PIAs, PoRs, Consortia, SBIRs, OTAs, CSOs, FAR, CUI, SAM, CRADAs, Primes, Mid-tier Integrators, Tribal/ANC Firms, Direct-to-Operator, Direct-to-Field Units, Labs, DD-254… For a startup it’s an entirely new language, new buzzwords, new partners, new rules and it requires a new “Go-To-Market (GTM)” strategy.
How to Work With the DoW Below are simplified diagrams of two of the many paths for how a startup can get funding and revenue from the Department of War. The first example, the Patient Capital Path, illustrates a startup without a working product. They travel the traditional new company journey through the DoW processes.
The second example, the Impatient Capital Path, illustrates a startup with an MVP and/or working product. They ignore the traditional journey through the DoW process and go directly to the warfighter in the field. With the rise of Defense Venture Capital, this “swing-for-the fences” full-speed ahead approach is a Lean Startup approach to become a next generation Prime.
(Note that in 2025 selling to the DoW is likely to change – for the better.)
Selling to the DoW takes time, but a well-executed defense strategy can lead to billion-dollar contracts, sustained revenue, and technological impact at a national scale. Existing defense contractors know who these DoW organizations are and have teams of people tracking budgets and contracts. They know the path to getting an order from the Department of War. But startups?
Why Write the PEO Directory? Most startups don’t have a clue where to start. And selling to the Department of War is unlike any enterprise or B-to-B sales process founders and their investors may be familiar with. Compared to the commercial world, the language is different, the organizations are different, the culture of risk taking (in acquisition) is different, and most importantly the go-to-market strategy is completely different.
Amazingly, until last year’s first edition of the PEO directory there wasn’t a DoW-wide phone book available to startups to identify who to call in the War Department. This lack of information made sense in a world where the DoW and its suppliers were a closely knit group who knew each other and technology innovation was happening at a sedate decades-long pace. (And assumed our adversaries didn’t have access to our DoW web pages, LinkedIn and ChatGPT.)
That’s no longer true. Given the rapid pace of innovation outside the DoW, and new vendors in UAS, counter UAS, autonomy, AI, quantum, biotech, et al, this lack of transparency is now an obstacle to a whole-of-nation approach to delivering innovation to the warfighter.
(This lack of information even extends internally to the DoW. I’ve started receiving requests from staff at multiple Combatant Commands for access to the PEO Directory. Why? Because “…it would be powerful to include a database of PEOs to link to our database of Requirements, Gaps, and Tracked Technologies to specific PEOs to call.”)
This is a classic case of information asymmetry, and it’s not healthy for either the increasingly urgent needs of the Department of War or the nascent startup defense ecosystem.
Our adversaries have had a whole-of-nation approach to delivering innovation to the warfighter in place for decades. This is our contribution to help the DoW compete.
2025 PEO Directory Edition Notes The first edition of this document started solely as a PEO directory. Its emphasis was (and is) the value of a startup talking to PEOs early is to get signals on what warfighter problems to solve and whether the DoW will buy their product now or in the future. Those early conversations answer the questions of “Is there a need?” and “Is there a market?”
This 2025 edition of the PEO Directoryattempts to capture the major changes that are occurring in the DoW – in organizations, in processes and in people. (For example, the PEO offices of the three largest new defense acquisition programs — Golden Dome, Sentinel and Columbia – will report directly to the Deputy Secretary of War, rather than to their respective Services. And the SecWar killed the cumbersome JCIDIS requirements process.)
What this means is that in 2025 the DoW will develop a new requirements and acquisition process that will identify the most urgent operational problems facing the U.S. military, work with industry earlier in the process, then rapidly turn those into fielded solutions. (That also means the Go-to-market description, people and organizations in this document will be out of date, and why we plan to update it regularly.)
What’s New? This 2025 edition now includes as an introduction, a 30-page tutorial for startups on how the DoW buys and the various acquisition and funding processes and programs that exist for startups. It provides details on how to sell to the DoW and where the Program Executive Offices (PEOs) fit into that process.
The Directory now also includes information about the parts of the government and the regulations that influence how the DoW buys – the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). It added new offices such as Golden Dome Direct Reporting Program, DIU, AFRL, DARPA, MDA, CDAO, OSC, IQT, Army Transformation and Training Command, SOCOM, and others.
To help startups understand the DoW, for each service we added links to the organization, structure, and language, as well as a list of each Service’s General Officers/Flag Officers.
Appendix B has a linked spreadsheet with the names in this document.
Appendix C has a list of Venture Capital firms, Corporate Investors, Private Equity firms and Government agencies who invest in Defense. In addition, the Appendix includes details about the various DoW SBIR programs, a list of OTA Consortia, Partnership Intermediary Agreement (PIA) Organizations, and Tribal/Alaska Native Corporation (ANC) Companies.
Appendix D now lists and links to the military and state FFRDC test centers where startups can conduct demos and test equipment.
Appendix E added a list and links of Defense Publications and Defense Trade Shows.
Appendix F has a list of all Army system contractors.
A few reminders:
This is not an official publication of the U.S. government
Do not depend on this document for accuracy, completeness or business advice.
All data is from DoW websites and publicly available information.
Hacking for Defense, now in 70 universities, has teams of students working to understand and help solve national security problems. At Stanford this quarter the 8 teams of 41 students collectively interviewed 1106 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, industry partners, etc. – while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products and developing a path to deployment.
This year’s problems came from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, CENTCOM, Space Force/Defense Innovation Unit, the FBI, IQT, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
We opened this year’s final presentations session with inspiring remarks by Joe Lonsdale on the state of defense technology innovation and a call to action for our students. During the quarter guest speakers in the class included former National Security advisor H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis ex Secretary of Defense, John Cogbill Deputy Commander 18th Airborne Corps, Michael Sulmeyer former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy, and John Gallagher Managing Director of Cerberus Capital.
“Lessons Learned” Presentations At the end of the quarter, each of the eight teams gave a final “Lessons Learned” presentation along with a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” the Lessons Learned presentations tell the story of each team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery. For all of them it’s a roller coaster narrative describing what happens when you discover that everything you thought you knew on day one was wrong and how they eventually got it right.
While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.
Team Omnyra – improving visibility into AI-generated bioengineering threats.
If you can’t see the team Omnyra summary video click here
If you can’t see the Omnyra presentation click here
These are “Wicked” Problems Wicked problems refer to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious and lacks a definitive formula. The types of problems our Hacking For Defense students work on fall into this category. They are often ambiguous. They start with a problem from a sponsor, and not only is the solution unclear but figuring out how to acquire and deploy it is also complex. Most often students find that in hindsight the problem was a symptom of a more interesting and complex problem – and that Acquisition of solutions in the Dept of Defense is unlike anything in the commercial world. And the stakeholders and institutions often have different relationships with each other – some are collaborative, some have pieces of the problem or solution, and others might have conflicting values and interests.
The figure shows the types of problems Hacking for Defense students encounter, with the most common ones shaded.
Team HydraStrike – bringing swarm technology to the maritime domain.
If you can’t see the HydraStrike summary video click here.
If you can’t see the HydraStrike presentation click here
Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship This class is part of a bigger idea – Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship. Instead of students or faculty coming in with their own ideas, we ask them to work on societal problems, whether they’re problems for the State Department or the Department of Defense or non-profits/NGOs or the Oceans and Climate or for anything the students are passionate about. The trick is we use the same Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum — and the same class structure – experiential, hands-on– driven this time by a mission-model not a business model. (The National Science Foundation and the Common Mission Project have helped promote the expansion of the methodology worldwide.)
Mission-driven entrepreneurship is the answer to students who say, “I want to give back. I want to make my community, country or world a better place, while being challenged to solve some of the toughest problems.”
If you can’t see the HyperWatch presentation click here
It Started With An Idea Hacking for Defense has its origins in the Lean LaunchPad class I first taught at Stanford in 2011. I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup. Furthermore, there was no entrepreneurship class that combined experiential learning with the Lean methodology. Our goal was to teach both theory and practice. The same year we started the class, it was adopted by the National Science Foundation to train Principal Investigators who wanted to get a federal grant for commercializing their science (an SBIR grant.) The NSF observed, “The class is the scientific method for entrepreneurship. Scientists understand hypothesis testing” and relabeled the class as the NSF I-Corps (Innovation Corps). I-Corps became the standard for science commercialization for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, to date training 3,051 teams and launching 1,300+ startups.
Team ChipForce – Securing U.S. dominance in critical minerals.
If you can’t see the ChipForce presentation click here
Note: After briefing the Department of Commerce, the Chipforce was offered jobs with the department.
Origins Of Hacking For Defense In 2016, brainstorming with Pete Newell of BMNT and Joe Felter at Stanford, we observed that students in our research universities had little connection to the problems their government was trying to solve or the larger issues civil society was grappling with. As we thought about how we could get students engaged, we realized the same Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class would provide a framework to do so. That year we launched both Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy (with Professor Jeremy Weinstein and the State Department) at Stanford. The Department of Defense adopted and scaled Hacking for Defense across 60 universities while Hacking for Diplomacy has been taught at Georgetown, James Madison University, Rochester Institute for Technology, University of Connecticut and now Indiana University, sponsored by the Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security (see here).
Team ArgusNet – instant geospatial data for search and rescue.
If you can’t see the ArgusNet presentation click here
Goals for Hacking for Defense Our primary goal for the class was to teach students Lean Innovation methods while they engaged in national public service.
In the class we saw that students could learn about the nation’s threats and security challenges while working with innovators inside the DoD and Intelligence Community. At the same time the experience would introduce to the sponsors, who are innovators inside the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC), a methodology that could help them understand and better respond to rapidly evolving threats. We wanted to show that if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, defense acquisition programs could operate at speed and urgency and deliver timelyand needed solutions.
Finally, we wanted to familiarize students with the military as a profession and help them better understand its expertise, and its proper role in society. We hoped it would also show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.
Team NeoLens – AI-powered troubleshooting for military mechanics.
If you can’t see the NeoLens presentation click here
Go-to-Market/Deployment Strategies The initial goal of the teams is to ensure they understand the problem. The next step is to see if they can find mission/solution fit (the DoD equivalent of commercial product/market fit.) But most importantly, the class teaches the teams about the difficult and complex path of getting a solution in the hands of a warfighter/beneficiary. Who writes the requirement? What’s an OTA? What’s color of money? What’s a Program Manager? Who owns the current contract? …
Team Omnicomm – improving the quality, security and resiliency of communications for special operations units.
If you can’t see the Omnicomm presentation click here
Mission-Driven in 70 Universities and Continuing to Expand in Scope and Reach What started as a class is now a movement.
From its beginning with our Stanford class, Hacking for Defense is now offered in over 70 universities in the U.S., as well as in the UK as Hacking for the MOD and in Australia. In the U.S., the course is a program of record and supported by Congress, H4D is sponsored by the Common Mission Project, Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Corporate partners include Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
Steve Weinstein started Hacking for Impact (Non-Profits) and Hacking for Local (Oakland) at U.C. Berkeley, and Hacking for Oceans at bot Scripps and UC Santa Cruz, as well as Hacking for Climate and Sustainability at Stanford. Jennifer Carolan started Hacking for Education at Stanford.
If you can’t see the Strom presentation click here
What’s Next For These Teams? .When they graduate, the Stanford students on these teams have the pick of jobs in startups, companies, and consulting firms .This year, seven of our teams applied to the Defense Innovation Unit accelerator – the DIU Defense Innovation Summer Fellows Program – Commercialization Pathway. Seven were accepted. This further reinforced our thinking that Hacking for Defense has turned into a pre-accelerator – preparing students to transition their learning from the classroom to deployment
It Takes A Village While I authored this blog post, this class is a team project. The secret sauce of the success of Hacking for Defense at Stanford is the extraordinary group of dedicated volunteers supporting our students in so many critical ways.
The teaching team consisted of myself and:
Pete Newell, retired Army Colonel and ex Director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, now CEO of BMNT.
Joe Felter, retired Army Special Forces Colonel; and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania; and currently the Director of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford which we co-founded in 2021.
Steve Weinstein, partner at America’s Frontier Fund, 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs, the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios.
Chris Moran, Executive Director and General Manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures; the venture capital investment arm of Lockheed Martin.
Jeff Decker, a Stanford researcher focusing on dual-use research. Jeff served in the U.S. Army as a special operations light infantry squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our teaching assistants this year were Joel Johnson, Rachel Wu, Evan Twarog, Faith Zehfuss, and Ethan Hellman.
31 Sponsors, Business and National Security Mentors The teams were assisted by the originators of their problems – the sponsors.
Sponsors gave us their toughest national security problems: Josh Pavluk, Kari Montoya, Nelson Layfield, Mark Breier, Jason Horton, Stephen J. Plunkett, Chris O’Connor, David Grande, Daniel Owins, Nathaniel Huston, Joy Shanaberger, and David Ryan.
National Security Mentors helped students who came into the class with no knowledge of the Department of Defense, and the FBI understand the complexity, intricacies and nuances of those organizations: Katie Tobin, Doug Seich, Salvadore Badillo-Rios, Marco Romani, Matt Croce, Donnie Hasseltine, Mark McVay, David Vernal, Brad Boyd, Marquay Edmonson.
Business Mentors helped the teams understand if their solutions could be a commercially successful business: Diane Schrader, Marc Clapper, Laura Clapper, Eric Byler, Adam Walters, Jeremey Schoos, Craig Seidel, Rich “Astro” Lawson.
Finding a customer for your product in the Department of Defense is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention?
Looking for DoD customers
How do you know if they have money to spend on your product?
It almost always starts with a Program Executive Office.
The Department of Defense (DoD) no longer owns all the technologies, products and services to deter or win a war – e.g. AI, autonomy, drones, biotech, access to space, cyber, semiconductors, new materials, etc.
Today, a new class of startups are attempting to sell these products to the Defense Department. Amazingly, there is no single DoD-wide phone book available to startups of who to call in the Defense Department.
So I wrote one.
Think of the PEO Directory linked below as a “Who buys in the government?” phone book.
The DoD buys hundreds of billions of dollars of products and services per year, and nearly all of these purchases are managed by Program Executive Offices. A Program Executive Office may be responsible for a specific program (e.g., the Joint Strike Fighter) or for an entire portfolio of similar programs (e.g., the Navy Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services). PEOs define requirements and their Contracting Officers buy things (handling the formal purchasing, issuing requests for proposals (RFPs), and signing contracts with vendors.) Program Managers (PMs) work with the PEO and manage subsets of the larger program.
Existing defense contractors know who these organizations are and have teams of people tracking budgets and contracts. But startups? Most startups don’t have a clue where to start.
This is a classic case of information asymmetry and it’s not healthy for the Department of Defense or the nascent startup defense ecosystem.
This first version of the directory lists 75 Program Executive Offices and their Program Executive Officers and Program/Project Managers.
Each Program Executive Office is headed by a Program Executive Officer who is a high ranking official – either a member of the military or a high ranking civilian – responsible for the cost, schedule, and performance of a major system, or portfolio of systems, some worth billions of dollars.
Below is a summary of 75 Program Executive Offices in the Department of Defense.
You can download the full 64-page document of Program Executive Offices and Officers with all 602 names here.
Caveats Do not depend on this document for accuracy or completeness.
It is likely incomplete and contains errors.
Military officers typically change jobs every few years.
Program Offices get closed and new ones opened as needed.
This means this document was out of date the day it was written. Still it represents an invaluable starting point for startups looking to work with DoD.
How to Use The PEO Directory As Part of A Go-To-Market Strategy While it’s helpful to know what Program Executive Offices exist and who staffs them, it’s even better to know where the money is, what it’s being spent on, and whether the budget is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same.
The best place to start is by looking through an overview of the entire defense budget here. Then search for those programs in the linked PEO Directory. You can get an idea whether that program has $ Billions, or $ Millions.
Next, take a look at the budget documents released by the DoD Comptroller –
particularly the P-1 (Procurement) and R-1 (R&D) budget documents.
Combining the budget document with this PEO directory helps you narrow down which of the 75 Program Executive Offices and 500+ program managers to call on.
With some practice you can translate the topline, account, or Program Element (PE) Line changes into a sales Go-To-Market strategy, or at least a hypothesis of who to call on.
Armed with the program description (it’s full of jargon and 9-12 months out of date) and the Excel download here and the Appendix here –– you can identify targets for sales calls with DoD where your product has the best chance of fitting in.
The people and organizations in this list change more frequently than the money.
Knowing the people is helpful only after you understand their priorities — and money is the best proxy for that.
Future Work Ultimately we want to give startups not only who to call on, and who has the money, but which Program Offices are receptive to new entrants. And which have converted to portfolio management, which have tried OTA contracts, as well as highlighting those who are doing something novel with metrics or outcomes.
In the meantime send updates, corrections and comments to sblank@stanford.edu
Credit Where Credit Is Due Clearly, the U.S. government intends to communicate this information. They have published links to DoD organizations here, even listing DoD social media accounts. But the list is fragmented and irregularly updated. Consequently, this type of directory has not existed in a usable format – until now.
Hacking for Defense, now in 60 universities, has teams of students working to understand and help solve national security problems. At Stanford this quarter the 8 teams of 40 students collectively interviewed 968 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, industry partners, etc. – while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products and developing a path to deployment.
At the end of the quarter, each of the teams gave a final “Lessons Learned” presentation. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” the Lessons Learned presentations tell the story of each team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery. For all of them it’s a roller coaster narrative describing what happens when you discover that everything you thought you knew on day one was wrong and how they eventually got it right.
Here’s how they did it and what they delivered.
New for 2024 This year, in addition to the problems from the Defense Department and Intelligence Community we had two problems from the State Department and one from the FBI.
These are “Wicked” Problems Wicked problems refer to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious and lacks a definitive formula. The types of problems our Hacking For Defense students work on fall into this category. They are often ambiguous. They start with a problem from a sponsor, and not only is the solution unclear but figuring out how to acquire and deploy it is also complex. Most often students find that in hindsight the problem was a symptom of a more interesting and complex problem – and that Acquistion of solutions in the Dept of Defense is unlike anything in the commercial world.
And the stakeholders and institutions often have different relationships with each other – some are collaborative, some have pieces of the problem or solution, and others might have conflicting values and interests.
The figure shows the types of problems Hacking for Defense students encounter, with the most common ones shaded.
Guest Speakers: Doug Beck – Defense Innovation Unit, Radha Plumb – CDAO. H.R. McMaster – former National Security Advisor and Condoleezza Rice – former Secretary of State Our final Lessons Learned presentations started with an introduction by Doug Beck, director of the Defense Innovation Unit and Radha Plumb, DoD’s Chief of the Digital and AI Office– reminding the students of the importance of Hacking for Defense and congratulating them on their contribution to national security.
H.R. McMaster gave an inspiring talk. He reminded our students that 1) war is an extension of politics; 2) war is human; 3) war is uncertain; 4) war is a contest of wills.
If you can’t see the video of H.R. McMaster’s talk, click here.
The week prior to our final presentations the class heard inspirational remarks from Dr. Condoleezza Rice, former United States Secretary of State. Dr. Rice gave a sweeping overview of the prevailing threats to our national security and the importance of getting our best and brightest involved in public service.
As a former Secretary of State, Dr. Rice was especially encouraged to see our two State Department sponsored teams this quarter. She left the students inspired to find ways to serve.
Lessons Learned Presentation Format For the final Lessons Learned presentation many of the eight teams presented a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem. This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, (videos here), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.
By the end the class all the teams realized that the problem as given by the sponsor had morphed into something bigger, deeper and much more interesting.
All the presentations are worth a watch.
Team House of Laws Using LLMs to Simplify Government Decision Making
If you can’t see the Team House of Laws 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Team House of Laws slides, click here
Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship
This class is part of a bigger idea – Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship. Instead of students or faculty coming in with their own ideas, we ask them to work on societal problems, whether they’re problems for the State Department or the Department of Defense or non-profits/NGOs or the Oceans and Climate or for anything the students are passionate about. The trick is we use the same Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum — and the same class structure – experiential, hands-on– driven this time by a mission-model not a business model. (The National Science Foundation and the Common Mission Project have helped promote the expansion of the methodology worldwide.)
Mission-driven entrepreneurship is the answer to students who say, “I want to give back. I want to make my community, country or world a better place, while being challenged to solve some of the toughest problems.”
Caribbean Clean Climate HelpingBarbados Adopt Clean Energy
If you can’t see the Caribbean Clean Climate 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Caribbean Clean Climate slides, click here
It Started With An Idea Hacking for Defense has its origins in the Lean LaunchPad class I first taught at Stanford in 2011. I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup. Furthermore, there was no entrepreneurship class that combined experiential learning with the Lean methodology. Our goal was to teach both theory and practice.
The same year we started the class, it was adopted by the National Science Foundation to train Principal Investigators who wanted to get a federal grant for commercializing their science (an SBIR grant.) The NSF observed, “The class is the scientific method for entrepreneurship. Scientists understand hypothesis testing” and relabeled the class as the NSF I-Corps (Innovation Corps). I-Corps became the standard for science commercialization for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, to date training 3,051 teams and launching 1,300+ startups.
Team Protecting Children Helping the FBI Acquire LLMs for Child Safety
If you can’t see the Team Protecting Children 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Team Protecting Children slides, click here
Origins Of Hacking For Defense In 2016, brainstorming with Pete Newell of BMNT and Joe Felter at Stanford, we observed that students in our research universities had little connection to the problems their government was trying to solve or the larger issues civil society was grappling with. As we thought about how we could get students engaged, we realized the same Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class would provide a framework to do so. That year we launched both Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy (with Professor Jeremy Weinstein and the State Department) at Stanford. The Department of Defense adopted and scaled Hacking for Defense across 60 universities while Hacking for Diplomacy is offered atJMU and RIT –, sponsored by the Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security (see here).
Team L Infinity Improving Satellite Tasking
If you can’t see the Team L∞ 2-minute video, click here
Goals for the Hacking for Defense Class Our primary goal was to teach students Lean Innovation methods while they engaged in national public service. Today if college students want to give back to their country, they think of Teach for America, the Peace Corps, or AmeriCorps or perhaps the US Digital Service or the GSA’s 18F. Few consider opportunities to make the world safer with the Department of Defense, Intelligence community or other government agencies.
In the class we saw that students could learn about the nation’s threats and security challenges while working with innovators inside the DoD and Intelligence Community. At the same time the experience would introduce to the sponsors, who are innovators inside the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC), a methodology that could help them understand and better respond to rapidly evolving threats. We wanted to show that if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, defense acquisition programs could operate at speed and urgency and deliver timelyand needed solutions.
Finally, we wanted to familiarize students with the military as a profession and help them better understand its expertise, and its proper role in society. We hoped it would also show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.
Team Centiment Information Operations Optimized
If you can’t see the Team Centiment 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Team Centiment slides, click here
Mission-Driven in 50 Universities and Continuing to Expand in Scope and Reach What started as a class is now a movement.
From its beginning with our Stanford class, Hacking for Defense is now offered in over 50 universities in the U.S., as well as in the UK and Australia. Steve Weinstein started Hacking for Impact (Non-Profits) and Hacking for Local (Oakland) at U.C. Berkeley, and Hacking for Oceans at both Scripps and UC Santa Cruz, as well as Hacking for Climate and Sustainability at Stanford. Hacking for Education will start this fall at Stanford.
Team Guyana’s Green Growth Water Management for Guyanese Farmers
Screenshot
If you can’t see the Team Guyana’s Green Growth 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Team Guyana’s Green Growthslides, click here
Go-to-Market/Deployment Strategies The initial goal of the teams is to ensure they understand the problem. The next step is to see if they can find mission/solution fit (the DoD equivalent of commercial product/market fit.) But most importantly, the class teaches the teams about the difficult and complex path of getting a solution in the hands of a warfighter/beneficiary. Who writes the requirement? What’s an OTA? What’s color of money? What’s a Program Manager? Who owns the current contract? …
Team Dynamic Space Operations Cubesats for Space Inspection Training
Screenshot
If you can’t see the Team Dynamic Space Operations 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Team Dynamic Space Operations slides, click here
Team Spectra Labs Providingreal-time awareness of ..
This team’s presentation is available upon request.
If you can’t see the Spectra Labs slides, click here
What’s Next For These Teams? When they graduate, the Stanford students on these teams have the pick of jobs in startups, companies, and consulting firms. House of Laws got accepted and has already started at Y-Combinator. L-Infinity, Dynamics Space Operations team (now Juno Astrodynamics,) and Spectra Labs are started work this week at H4X Labs, an accelerator focused on building dual-use companies that sell to both the government and commercial firms. Many of the teams will continue to work with their problem sponsor. Several will join the Stanford Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation which is focused on the intersection of policy, operational concepts, and technology.
In our post class survey 86% of the students said that the class had impact on their immediate next steps in their career. Over 75% said it changed their opinion of working with the Department of Defense and other USG organizations.
It Takes A Village While I authored this blog post, this class is a team project. The secret sauce of the success of Hacking for Defense at Stanford is the extraordinary group of dedicated volunteers supporting our students in so many critical ways.
The teaching team consisted of myself and:
Pete Newell, retired Army Colonel and ex Director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, now CEO of BMNT.
Joe Felter, retired Army Colonel; and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania; and William J. Perry Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Steve Weinstein, partner at America’s Frontier Fund, 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs, the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios. He runs H4X Labs.
Jeff Decker, a Stanford researcher focusing on dual-use research. Jeff served in the U.S. Army as a special operations light infantry squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our teaching assistants this year were Joel Johnson, Malika Aubakirova, Spencer Paul, Ethan Tiao, Evan Szablowski, and Josh Pickering. A special thanks to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and its National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) for supporting the program at Stanford and across the country, as well as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
31 Sponsors, Business and National Security Mentors The teams were assisted by the originators of their problems – the sponsors.
Sponsors: Jackie Tame, Nate Huston, Mark Breier, Dave Wiltse, Katherine Beamer, Jeff Fields, Dave Miller, Shannon Rooney, and David Ryan.
National Security Mentors helped students who came into the class with no knowledge of the Dept of Defense, State and the FBI understand the complexity, intricacies and nuances of those organizations: Brad Boyd, Matt MacGregor, David Vernal, Alphanso “Fonz” Adams, Ray Powell, Sam Townsend, Tom Kulisz, Rich Lawson, Mark McVay, Nick Shenkin, David Arulanantham and Matt Lintker.
Business Mentors helped the teams understand if their solutions could be a commercially successful business: Katie Tobin, Marco Romani, Rafi Holtzman, Rachel Costello, Donnie Hassletine, Craig Seidel, Diane Schrader and Matt Croce.
What a year. With the pandemic winding down it finally feels like the beginning of the end.
This was my sixth time teaching a virtual class during the lockdown – and for our students likely their 15th or more. Hacking for Defense has teams of students working to understand and solve national security problems. Although the class was run completely online, and even though they were suffering from Zoom fatigue, the 10 teams of 42 students collectively interviewed 1,142 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, industry partners, etc. – while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products.
At the end of the quarter, each of the teams gave a final “Lessons Learned” presentation. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells the story of a team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery. For all of them it’s a roller coaster narrative describing what happens when you discover that everything you thought you knew on day one was wrong and how they eventually got it right.
Here’s how they did it and what they delivered.
How Do You Get Out of the Building When You Can’t Get Out of the Building? This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. This would seem to be a fatal stake through the heart of the class. How would customer interviews work via video? After teaching remotely for the last year, we’ve learned that customer discovery is actually more efficient using video conferencing. It increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week.
Many of the people the students needed to talk to were sheltering at home, which meant they weren’t surrounded by gatekeepers. While the students missed gaining the context of standing on a navy ship or visiting a drone control station or watching someone try their app or hardware, the teaching team’s assessment was that remote interviews were more than an adequate substitute. When Covid restrictions are over, we plan to add remote customer discovery to the students’ toolkit. (See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.)
We Changed The Class Format While teaching remotely we made two major changes to the class. Previously, each of the teams presented a weekly ten-minute summary consisting of “here’s what we thought, here’s what we did, here’s what we found, here’s what we’re going to do next week.” While we kept that cadence, it was too exhausting for all the other teams to stare at their screen watching every other team present. So we split the weekly student presentations into thirds – three teams presented to the entire class then three teams each went into two Zoom breakout rooms. During the quarter we rotated the teams and instructors through the main room and breakout sessions.
The second change was the addition of alumni guest speakers – students who had taken the class in the past. They offered insights about what they got right and wrong and what they wished they had known.
Lessons Learned Presentation Format For the final Lessons Learned presentation many of the eight teams presented a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem. This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, (videos here), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.
By the end the class all the teams realized that the problem as given by the sponsor had morphed into something bigger, deeper and much more interesting.
All the presentations are worth a watch.
Team Fleetwise – Vehicle Fleet Management
If you can’t see the Fleetwise 2-minute video, click here
Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship
This class is part of a bigger idea – Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship. Instead of students or faculty coming in with their own ideas, we ask them to work on societal problems, whether they’re problems for the State Department or the Department of Defense or non-profits/NGOs or the Oceans and Climate or for anything the students are passionate about. The trick is we use the same Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum — and the same class structure – experiential, hands-on– driven this time by a mission-model not a business model. (The National Science Foundation, National Security Agency and the Common Mission Project have helped promote the expansion of the methodology worldwide.)
Mission-driven entrepreneurship is the answer to students who say, “I want to give back. I want to make my community, country or world a better place, while being challenged to solve some of the toughest problems.”
Project Agrippa – Logistics and Sustainment in IndoPacific
If you can’t see the Project Agrippa 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Project Agrippa slides, click here
It Started With An Idea Hacking for Defense has its origins in the Lean LaunchPad class I first taught at Stanford in 2011. I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup. Furthermore, there was no entrepreneurship class that combined experiential learning with the Lean methodology. Our goal was to teach both theory and practice.
The same year we started the class, it was adopted by the National Science Foundation to train Principal Investigators who wanted to get a federal grant for commercializing their science (an SBIR grant.) The NSF observed, “The class is the scientific method for entrepreneurship. Scientists understand hypothesis testing” and relabeled the class as the NSF I-Corps (Innovation Corps). The class is now taught in 9 regional locations supporting 98 universities and has trained over ~2,500 teams/7,500 scientists in 100 cohorts. It was adopted by the National Institutes of Health as I-Corps at NIH in 2014 and at the National Security Agency in 2015.
Team Silknet – Detecting Ground Base Threats
If you can’t see the Silknet2-minute video, click here
Origins Of Hacking For Defense In 2016, brainstorming with Pete Newell of BMNT and Joe Felter at Stanford, we observed that students in our research universities had little connection to the problems their government was trying to solve or the larger issues civil society was grappling with. As we thought about how we could get students engaged, we realized the same Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class would provide a framework to do so. That year we launched both Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy (with Professor Jeremy Weinstein and the State Department) at Stanford.
Team Flexible Fingerprints – Improve Cybersecurity
If you can’t see the Flexible Fingerprints 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Flexible Fingerprints slides, click here
Goals for the Hacking for Defense Class Our primary goal was to teach students Lean Innovation while they engaged in national public service. Today if college students want to give back to their country, they think of Teach for America, the Peace Corps, or AmeriCorps or perhaps the US Digital Service or the GSA’s 18F. Few consider opportunities to make the world safer with the Department of Defense, Intelligence community or other government agencies.
In the class we saw that students could learn about the nation’s threats and security challenges while working with innovators inside the DoD and Intelligence Community. At the same time the experience would introduce to the sponsors, who are innovators inside the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC), a methodology that could help them understand and better respond to rapidly evolving threats. We wanted to show that if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, defense acquisition programs could operate at speed and urgency and deliver timelyand needed solutions.
Finally, we wanted to familiarize students with the military as a profession and help the better understand its expertise, and its proper role in society. We hoped it would also show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.
Team Neurosmart – Optimizing Performance of Special Operators
If you can’t see the Neurosmart 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the Neurosmart slides, click here
Mission-Driven in 50 Universities and Continuing to Expand in Scope and Reach What started as a class is now a movement.
From its beginning with our Stanford class, Hacking for Defense is now offered in over 50 universities in the U.S., as well as in the UK and Australia. Steve Weinstein started Hacking for Impact (Non-Profits) and Hacking for Local (Oakland) at U.C. Berkeley, and Hacking for Oceans at both Scripps and UC Santa Cruz. Hacking for Homeland Security launched last year at the Colorado School of Mines and Carnegie Mellon University. A version for NASA is coming up next.
And to help businesses recover from the pandemic, the teaching team taught a series of Hacking For Recovery classes last summer.
Our Hacking for Defense team continues to look for opportunities to adapt and apply the course methodology for broader impact and public good. Project Agrippa, for example, piloted a new “Hacking for Strategy” initiative inspired by their experience in Stanford’s “Technology, Innovation and Modern War” class that Raj Shah, Joe Felter and I taught last fall. This all-star team of 4 undergraduates and a JD/MBA developed new ways to provide logistical support to maritime forces in the Indo-Pacific region. Their recommendations drew on insights gleaned from over 242! interviews (a national H4D class record.) After in-person briefings to Marine Corps and Navy commanders and staff across major commands from California to Hawaii, they received interest in establishing a future collaboration, validating our hypothesis that Hacking for Strategy would be a welcome addition to our course offerings. Its premise is that keeping America safe not only requires us maintaining a technological edge but also using these cutting edge technologies to develop new operational concepts and strategies. Stay tuned.
Team AngelComms – Rescuing Downed Pilots
If you can’t see the AngelComms 2-minute video, click here
If you can’t see the AngelComms slides, click here
Team Salus – Patching Operational Systems to Keep them Secure
If you can’t see the Salus 2-minute video, click here
What’s Next For These Teams? When they graduate, the Stanford students on these teams have the pick of jobs in startups, companies, and consulting firms. Most are applying to H4X Labs, an accelerator focused on building dual-use companies that sell to both the government and commercial firms. Many will continue to work with their problem sponsor. Several will join the new Stanford Gordian Knot Center which is focused on the intersection of policy, operational concepts, and technology.
In our post class survey 86% of the students said that the class had impact on their immediate next steps in their career. Over 75% said it changed their opinion of working with the Department of Defense and other USG organizations.
It Takes A Village While I authored this blog post, this class is a team project. The secret sauce of the success of Hacking for Defense at Stanford is the extraordinary group of dedicated volunteers supporting our students in so many critical ways.
The teaching team consisted of myself and:
Pete Newell, retired Army Colonel and ex Director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, now CEO of BMNT.
Joe Felter, retired Army Colonel; and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania; and William J. Perry Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Steve Weinstein, 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs, the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios. He runs H4X Labs.
Tom Bedecarré, the founder and CEO of AKQA, the leading digital advertising agency.
Jeff Decker, a Stanford researcher focusing on dual-use research. Jeff served in the U.S. Army as a special operations light infantry squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our teaching assistants this year were Nick Mirda, Sally Eagen, Joel Johnson, past graduates of Hacking for Defense, and Valeria Rincon. A special thanks to the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) and Rich Carlin and the Office of Naval Research for supporting the program at Stanford and across the country, as well as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. And our course advisor, Tom Byers, Professor of Engineering and Faculty Director, STVP.
We were lucky to get a team of mentors (VCs and entrepreneurs) as well as an extraordinary force of military liaisons from the Hoover Institution’s National Security Affairs Fellows program, Stanford senior military fellowship program and other accomplished military affiliated volunteers. This diverse group of experienced experts selflessly volunteer their time to help coach the teams. Thanks to Todd Basche, Rafi Holtzman, Kevin Ray, Craig Seidel, Katie Tobin, Jennifer Quarrie, Jason Chen, Matt Fante, Richard Tippitt, Rich Lawson, Commander Jack Sounders, Mike Hoeschele, Donnie Hasseltine, Steve Skipper, LTC Jim Wiese, Col. Denny Davis, Commander Jeff Vanak, Marco Romani, Rachel Costello, LtCol Kenny Del Mazo, Don Peppers, Mark Wilson and LTC Ed Cuevas
And of course a big shout-out to our problem sponsors across the DoD and IC: MSgt Ashley McCarthy, Jason Stack, Col Sean Heidgerken, LTC Richard Barnes, George Huber, Neal Ziring, Shane Williams, Anthony Ries, Russell Hoffing, Javier Garcia, Matt Correa, Shawn Walsh, and Claudia Quigley.
During the Cold War U.S. diplomatic and military alliances existed to defend freedom around the world. Today, these alliances are being reshaped to respond to Russian threats to the Baltics and Eastern Europe and to China’s economic, military, and technological influence worldwide.
Hacking for Allies The U.S. Department of Defense works with our allies to expand their industrial base. We benefit because it helps the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) standardize on equipment and our allies’ industrial capacity, capability and workforce can complement those of the United States. Allied countries benefit under the Global Capabilities Program which offers allies opportunities to partner on research and development, with the goal to build prototypes and eventually co-produce systems.
The goal of Hacking for Allies, (which will launch a second cohort next week,) is to connect dual-use startups (those that sell to companies and government agencies) in allied nations to the U.S. defense ecosystem.
Startup ecosystems in many of the smaller NATO countries don’t enjoy the long-established expertise or funding opportunities we have in Silicon Valley or other innovation clusters. For example, today it takes 7 to 10 years for a company in Norway to sell into the U.S. defense market. To shorten that time, we wanted to teach them the best practices of Hacking for Defense/Lean Startup/I-Corps (customer discovery, MVPs, pivots, business model canvas, etc.) And give them a roadmap for how to play in the U.S. defense market.
Hacking for Allies – Norway Edition Norway is a founding member of the NATO and they are NATO’s bulwark against Russian incursion in the strategically critical “High North” region. Norway has experienced Russian simulated air attacks on Norwegian targets and jamming of GPS signals that threaten civilian aviation. Last fall, Russia conducted a cyberattack on the Norwegian parliament.
The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Innovation Norway, and H4XLabs (BMNT’s early stage tech accelerator) just ran the first Hacking for Allies cohort of Norwegian companies. The teams were guided using the “player-coach” approach. The program conducted weekly deep dives with each company working through their challenges. It combined this with sourcing outside experts for all cohort topics of interest. These topics included: Raising funds as a European company, what it takes to work with the DoD, customer discovery for adjacent markets, and more.
85 startups applied for this first cohort. They were down-selected to a few promising teams. Some of the teams included:
Alva Industries – making 3D printed electric motor stators 20% more efficient. That means more battery life and/or power for unmanned aerial vehicles.
Excitus: a medical device to clear blocked airways in the battlefield. Their device replaces existing suction pumps with the equivalent of a handheld vacuum cleaner with a sterile disposable cup.
Fieldmade: An additive manufacturing microfactory with a library of certified printable 3D parts, which radically reduces parts inventory.
Ubiq Aerospace: started as de-icing for drones but potentially pivoting to sensor data fusion.
The teams launched out of the program talked to tons of people in the U.S. they never would have connected with (“it would have taken us years to make these connections”), made pivots, built new product suites and capabilities around their core services – all of which made them attractive to wider markets — and raised additional funding.
Now a new cohort of the program is getting under way. Innovation offices from NATO countries and other allies who want to teach their dual-use startups how to work with the U.S. government should attend the Hacking for Allies webinar February 23rd at 8 am Pacific, 11 am Eastern.
Remote education in the pandemic has been hard for everyone. Hard for students having to deal with a variety of remote instructional methods. Hard for parents with K through 12 students at home trying to keep up with remote learning, and hard for instructors trying to master new barely functional tools and technology while trying to keep students engaged gazing at them through Hollywood Squares-style boxes.
A subsegment of those instructors – those trying to teach Lean LaunchPad, whether in I-Corps, or Hacking for Defense – have an additional burden of figuring out how to teach a class that depends on students getting out of the building and talking to 10 to 15 customers a week.
400 Lean Educators instructors gathered online for a three-hour session to share what we’ve learned about teaching classes remotely. We got insights from each other about tools, tips, techniques and best practices.
Here’s what we learned.
—
When I designed the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps/Hacking for Defense class, my goal was to replace the traditional method of teaching case studies and instead immerse the students in a hands-on experiential process that modeled what entrepreneurs really did. It would be guided week-to-week by using the Business Model Canvas and testing hypotheses by getting out of the building and building Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). After trial and error, we found that having eight teams presenting in a three-hour block was the maximum without exhausting the instructors and the students. That format, unwieldy as it is, remained the standard for a decade. Over time we started experimenting with breaking up the three-hour block with breakout rooms and other activities so not all students needed to sit through all the presentations.
When the pandemic forced us to shift to online teaching, that experimentation turned into a necessity. Three hours staring at a Zoom screen while listening to team after team present is just untenable and unwatchable. Customer discovery is doable remotely but different. Teams are scattered across the world. And the instructor overhead of managing all this is probably 3X what it is in person.
While we were making changes to our classes at Stanford, Jerry Engel was smart enough to point out that hundreds of instructors in every university were having the same problems in adapting the class to the pandemic. He suggested that as follow-up to our Lean Innovation Educators Summit here in Silicon Valley last December, we should create a mid-year on-line Summit so we could all get together and share what we learned and how we’re adapting. And so it began.
In July, 400 Educators from over 200 universities in 22 countries gathered online for a Lean Innovation Educators Summit to share best practices.
We began the summit with five of us sharing our experience of how we dealt with the online challenges of:
If you can’t see the presentation slides click here
But the core of the summit was gathering the collective wisdom and experience of the 400 attendees as we split into 22 breakout rooms. The one-hour discussion in each of the rooms covered:
What are your biggest challenges under COVID-19?
How is this challenge different now than during “in-person” learning?
What solutions have you tried?
What was most effective?
The output of the breakout sessions provided a firehose of data, a ton of useful suggestions, teaching tips and tools.I’ve summarized the collective notes from the breakout session.
Customer Discovery and Minimal Viable Products The consensus was, yes you can “get out of the building” when you physically can’t. And it’s almost good enough.
Discovery can be done via Zoom or similar remote platforms and in some ways is more effective – see here
During Covid most people no longer have gatekeepers around them
Sending lots of cold emails works (at least in COVID times)
You could find the best mentors and the best sponsor for a given project
Building and demonstrating hardware MVPs is a challenge
One solution is to send a design file to a fab lab to be printed
If you would normally have your potential customer hold, feel or use the product, make sure you video a demo someone doing that
For software MVPs create video demo snippets of less <1 minute to illustrate each of your features
It’s critical to offer a “How to do customer discovery remotely” and “how to build remote MVPs” workshop
Class Structure 3-hour long classes are challenging in person and require a redesign to be taught online.
Keep students engaged by having no more than four teams in a presentation room at one time
Have other teams in breakout rooms and/or with other instructors
Breakout rooms must be well thought out and organized
They should have a task and a deliverable
Break up lectures so that they are no longer then 15 minutes
Intersperse them with interactive exercises (Alex Osterwalder is a genius here, providing great suggestions for keeping students engaged)
Work on an exercise in class and then talk more to it in office hours
Avoid canned video lectures
Be more prescriptive on “what is required” in the team presentations
What’s the goal for the class?
Do you want them to test the entire Canvas or …
Do you want them to work on product market fit?
Teams will naturally gravitate to work on product/market fit
Vary the voices at the “front” of the room
Guest speakers – previously extraneous but needed now to break up the monotony
But if you use guests have the student’s whiteboard summaries of what they learned
And have the guests be relevant to the business model topic of the week
Understand that while students attend your class they actually pay attention to their mentors
Recruit mentors whose first passion are helping students, not recruiting or investing in them
Ensure that you train and onboard mentors to the syllabus
Have the mentors sit in on the office hours and classroom
Invite lurkers, advisors, and others “invited” to show up and chime in
Be prepared for the intensity of the preparation required as compared to pre-COVID times
Recruiting students and forming teams is especially hard remotely
Double or triple down on the email and other outreach
Hold on-line info sessions and mixers
Teaching Assistant Having a Teaching Assistant is critical
If your school won’t pay for one, get some unofficial “co-instructors”
They don’t have to be a teacher–use an admin or a student intern
They are critical to managing the admin side of marketing, recruiting, team formation, communications and overall support for the teaching team.
Team formation requires TA heavy lifting of emails/team mixers/team
as well as match-making by TA’s and instructors
During class TA’S need to be focused on chat, breakout room and presentation logistics
Don’t assume (or let your TA assume) that prior practices will work in a virtual environment.
Be prepared to try different approaches to keep class moving and engaged
Pre-class write up a “How to TA in a Remote Class” handbook
Go through it with your TA’s before class
Use security in advance; avoid open entry (Zoom Bombing)
Student Engagement Zoom fatigue came up in almost every breakout session. Some of the solutions included:
Play music as students arrive and leave
Recognize that some may be in different time zones – take a poll in the first class session
Start each class session with an activity
Summarize key insights/lessons learned from their office hours and customer discovery
For those using Zoom – use the Whiteboard feature for these summaries
Summary When the National Science Foundation stopped holding their annual conference of I-Corps instructors, it offered us the opportunity to embrace a larger community beyond the NSF – now to include the Hacking for Defense, NSIN, and Lean LaunchPad educators.
When we decided to hold the online summit, we had three hypotheses:
Educators would not only want to attend, but to volunteer and help and learn from each other – validated
Instructors would care most about effective communication with students (not tools, or frameworks but quality of the engagement with students) – validated
Our educator community valued ongoing, recurring opportunities to collaborate and open source ideas and tools – validated
The Common Mission Project is coordinating the group’s efforts to create an open forum where these instructors can share best practices and to curate the best content and solutions.
A big thanks to Jerry Engel of U.C. Berkeley, the dean of this program. And thanks to the Common Mission Project which provided all the seamless logistical support, and every one of the breakout room leaders: Tom Bedecarré – Stanford University, John Blaho – City College of New York, Philip Bouchard – TrustedPeer, Dave Chapman – University College London, James Chung – George Washington University, Bob Dorf – Columbia University, Jeff Epstein – Stanford University, Paul Fox – LaSalle University Barcelona, Ali Hawks – Common Mission Project UK, Jim Hornthal – U.C. Berkeley, Victoria Larke – University of Toronto, Radhika Malpani – Google, Michael Marasco – Northwestern University, Stephanie Marrus – University of California, San Francisco, Pete Newell – BMNT/ Common Mission Project US, Thomas O’Neal – University of Central Florida, Alexander Osterwalder – Strategyzer, Kim Polese – U.C. Berkeley, Jeff Reid – Georgetown University, Sid Saleh – Colorado School of Mines, Chris Taylor – Georgetown University, Grant Warner – Howard University, Todd Warren – Northwestern University, Phil Weilerstein – VentureWell, Steve Weinstein – Stanford University, Naeem Zafar – U.C. Berkeley, and the 400 of you who attended.
At the end of the quarter each of the eight teams give a final “Lessons Learned” presentation. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “here’s how smart I am, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells the teams’ stories of a 10-week journey of hard-won learning and discovery. For all the teams in a normal year it’s a roller coaster narrative of what happens when you discover that everything you thought you knew on day one was wrong and how they eventually got it right.
But this year? This year was something different. 32 students were scattered across the globe and given a seemingly impossible assignment- they had 10 weeks to understand and then solve a real Dept of Defense problem – by interviewing 100 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, et al while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products – all while never leaving their room.
Watching each of the teams present I was left with wonder and awe about what they accomplished
Here’s how they did it and what they delivered.
Our keynote speaker for this last class was ex Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis who gave an inspiring talk about service to the nation.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
If you can’t see the four videos of General Mattis click here for the entire talk.
How Do You Get Out of the Building When You Can’t Get Out of the Building? This year the teams had to overcome two extraordinary pandemic-created hurdles. First, most of the students were sequestering off campus and were scattered across 24 time zones. Each team of four students who would have spent the quarter working collaboratively in-person, instead were never once physically in the same room or location. Second, this class – which is built on the idea of interviewing customers/beneficiaries and stakeholders in person – now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. At first this seemed to be a fatal stake through the heart of the class. How on earth would customer interviews work via video?
But we were in for two surprises. First, the students rose to the occasion, and in spite of time and physical distance, every one of them came together and acted as a unified team. Second, doing customer discovery via video actually increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week. The eight teams spoke to over 945 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, warfighters, legal, security, customers, etc.
A good number of the people the students needed to talk to were sheltering at home, and they weren’t surrounded by gatekeepers. While the students missed the context of standing on a navy ship or visiting a drone control station, or watching someone try their app or hardware, the teaching teams’ assessment was that remote interviews were more than an adequate substitute.
We Changed The Class Format Going remotely we made two major changes to the class. Previously, each of the eight teams presented a weekly ten-minute summary of; here’s what we thought, here’s what we did, here’s what we found, here’s what we’re going to do next week. While we kept that cadence it was too exhausting for all the other teams to stare at their screen watching every other team present. So we split the class in half – four teams went into Zoom breakout rooms where they met with a peer-team to discuss common issues. The remaining four were in the main Zoom classroom; one presenting as three watched and listened to the instructor comments, critiques and suggestions. We rotated the teams through the main room and breakout sessions.
The second change was the addition of guest speakers. In the past, I viewed guest speakers as time filler/entertainment that detracted from the limited in-class time we needed to listen to and coach our students. But this year we realized that our students had been staring at their screens all day and it was going to fry their heads. They deserved some entertainment/distraction. But in true Hacking for Defense practice we were going to deliver it in the form of edification and inspiration. Joe Felter and I got out our rolodex’s and invited ten distinguished guest speakers. Their talks to this year’s Hacking for Defense class can be seen here.
Lessons Learned Presentation Format Each of the eight teams presented a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem. This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, (videos here) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique.
By the end the class all of the teams realized that the problem as given by the sponsor had morphed into something bigger, deeper and much more interesting.
All the presentations are worth a watch.
Team Omniscient – An Unclassified Imaging Analyst Workbench
If you can’t see the Omniscient 2-minute video click here
If you can’t see the video of the Omniscient team presenting click here
Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship This class is part of a bigger idea – Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship. Instead of students or faculty coming in with their own ideas — we now have them working on societal problems, whether they’re problems for the State Department or the Department of Defense, or non-profits/NGOs, or for the City of Oakland or for energy or the environment, or for anything they’re passionate about. And the trick is we use the same Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum — and kept the same class structure – experiential, hands-on, driven this time by a mission-model not a business model. (The National Science Foundation, National Security Agency and the Common Mission Project have helped promote the expansion of the methodology worldwide.)
Mission-driven entrepreneurship is the answer to students who say, “I want to give back. I want to make my community, country or world a better place, while solving some of the toughest problems.”
Team Protocol One – Ensuring JTAC to Pilot Communication
If you can’t see the Protocol One 2-minute video click here
If you can’t see the video of the Protocol One team presenting click here
If you can’t see the Protocol One slides click here
It Started with an Idea Hacking for Defense has its origins in the Lean LaunchPad class I first taught at Stanford in 2011. I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup. And that there was no entrepreneurship class that combined experiential learning with the Lean methodology. Our goal was to teach both theory and practice.
The same year we started the class, it was adopted by the National Science Foundation to train Principal Investigators who wanted to get a federal grant for commercializing their science (an SBIR grant.) The NSF observed, “The class is the scientific method for entrepreneurship. Scientists understand hypothesis testing” and relabeled the class as the NSF I-Corps (Innovation Corps). The class is now taught in 9 regional locations supporting 98 universities and has trained over 1500 science teams. It was adopted by the National Institutes of Health as I-Corps at NIH in 2014 and at the National Security Agency in 2015.
Team SeaWatch – Maritime Security in the South China Sea
If you can’t see the SeaWatch 2-minute video click here
If you can’t see the video of the SeaWatch team presenting click here
Origins of Hacking For Defense In 2016, brainstorming with Pete Newell of BMNT and Joe Felter at Stanford we observed that students in our research universities had little connection to the problems their government was trying to solve or the larger issues civil society were grappling with. Wondering how we could get students engaged, we realized the same Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class would provide a framework to do so. That year we launched both Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy (with Professor Jeremy Weinstein and the State Department) at Stanford.
Team TimeFlies – Automating Air Force aircrew scheduling
If you can’t see the TimeFlies 2-minute video click here
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Goals for the Hacking for Defense Class Our primary goal was to teach students Lean Innovation while they engaged in a national public service. Today if college students want to give back to their country they think of Teach for America, the Peace Corps, or Americorps or perhaps the US Digital Service or the GSA’s 18F. Few consider opportunities to make the world safer with the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community or other government agencies.
Next, we wanted the students to learn about the nation’s threats and security challenges while working with innovators inside the DoD and Intelligence Community. And while doing so, teach our sponsors (the innovators inside the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC)) that there is a methodology that can help them understand and better respond to rapidly evolving asymmetric threats. That if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, could defense acquisition programs operate at speed and urgency and deliver timelyand needed solutions.
Finally, we wanted to familiarize students about the military as a profession, its expertise, and its proper role in society. And conversely show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.
Team AV Combinator – Autonomous Vehicle Safety Standards
If you can’t see the AV Combinator 2-minute video click here
If you can’t see the video of the AV Combinator team presenting click here
If you can’t see the AV Combinator slides click here
Mission-driven in 35 Universities What started as a class is now a movement.
Team Election Watch – Open Source Tool to Track Political Influence Campaigns
If you can’t see the Election Watch 2-minute video click here
If you can’t see the Election Watch slides click here
What’s Next for These Teams? When they graduate, the Stanford students on these teams have the pick of jobs in startups, companies and consulting firms. Recognizing the ability of these teams to produce real results, 38 members of the venture and private equity community dialed in to these presentations. Every year they fund several teams as they launch companies. This year a record 6 of the 8 teams (Anthro Energy, AV Combinator, Election Watch, Helmsman, Omniscient and Seawatch) have decided to continue with their projects to build them into dual-use companies – selling both to the Dept of Defense and commercial businesses.) Most are applying to H4X Labs, an accelerator focused on building dual-use companies.
Student Feedback While Stanford does a formal survey of student reviews of the class, this year we wanted more granular data on how remote learning affected their class experience.
While we had heard anecdotal stories about how the class affected the students perceptions of the Department of Defense we now had first hand evidence. The same was true for the life-changing experience of actually doing customer discovery with 100 people. The results reinforced our belief that the class, scaling across the county was helping to bridge the civilian/military divide while teaching students a set of skills that will last a lifetime.
It Takes a Village While I authored this blog post, this class is a team project. The teaching team consisted of myself and:
Pete Newell retired Army Colonel and ex Director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force and CEO of BMNT.
Joe Felter retired Army Colonel and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania
Steve Weinstein 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios. He runs H4X Labs.
Tom Bedecarré the founder and CEO of AKQA, the leading digital advertising agency.
Jeff Decker a Stanford social science researcher. Jeff served in the U.S. Army as a special operations light infantry squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We were lucky to get a team of mentors (VC’s and entrepreneurs) who selflessly volunteered their time to help coach the teams. Thanks to Todd Basche, Teresa Briggs, Rachel Costello, Gus Hernandez, Rafi Holtzman, Katie Tobin, Robert Locke, Kevin Ray, Eric Schrader, Mark Rosekind, Don Peppers, Nini Moorhead, Daniel Bardenstein.
We were privileged to have the support of an extraordinary all volunteer team of professional senior military officers representing all branches of service attending fellowship programs at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) as well as from the Defense Innovation Unit. These included COL Smith-Heys, COL Liebreich and LTC Campbell – Army, CAPT Sharman, CAPT Romani – Navy, CDR Malzone – Coast Guard, LT COL Lawson, LT COL Hasseltine and LT COL Cook – USMC, LT COL Waters and LT COL Tuzel – Air Force and Mr. Smyth -State Dept.
And of course a big shout-out to our problem sponsors. At In-Q-Tel – Mark Breier/Zig Hampel, U.S. Army – LTC Leo Liebreich, U.S. Air Force – LTC Doug Snead/ MAJ Mike Rose, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center – Joe Murray/MAJ Dan Tadross, Special Operations Command Pacific – MAJ Paul Morton, United States Africa Command – Matt Moore, and from the Office of Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff – MAJ Jeff Budis.
Those inside the DoW have little perspective of how hard it is to understand what to an outsider looks like in an impenetrable, incredibly complex system.
