James “Hondo” Geurts, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:
- What kept Hondo up at night was that there was a good idea out there that wasn’t passed on to him and thus wasn’t used on the battlefield.
- A society can’t be secure without prosperity and can’t have prosperity without security.
- The challenge for startups working with government is that the public is a fickle venture capitalist. They don’t like to fund things that don’t go anywhere.
- It tends to be small and large companies (but mostly large) supplying the Department of Defense. The “middle has been lost.”
- The DoD overvalues standardization.
- Often in government, the user of the product is not the same as the buyer. Commonly startups make a mistake by not having buyer fit even if there is user fit for a product.
- Government values past performance to a fault.
- The United States, both via government and private enterprise, needs to build the industrial network of the future.
- Commercial technology companies will be on the front lines of the next conflict and need to adapt features to make them resilient.
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