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This article previously appeared in Defense Scoop The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.) Deputy Secretary of War Steven Feinberg ran Cerebus Capital Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll was a former VC and investment banker Secretary of the Navy John Phelan ran MSD capital. Deputy Secretary of the Army Michael Obadal was a...

TL;DR DoW Directory revision 3 is Online here , Order a print copy here. In November 2025 the Department of War (DoW) unveiled the biggest changes in 60 years of how they will buy weapons and services. This month Congress, with bipartisan support, rapidly made them into law in the National Defense Authorization Act (the NDAA) – 3,096 pages of legislative text and 636-page Joint Explanatory Statement . This is a top-to-bottom transformation of how the DoW plans and buys weapons, moving from...

Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). The DoW has pivoted from optimizing cost and performance to delivering advanced weapons at speed. Taking decades to deliver weapons is no longer an option. The DoW has joined the 21 st century and adopted Lean Methodology. Two organizations ought to be very concerned – China and the defense prime contractors. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth unveiled the big...

I’ve always thought of myself as a practitioner. In the startups I was part of, the only “strategy” were my marketing tactics on how to make the VP of Sales the richest person in the company. After I retired, I created Customer Development and co-created the Lean Startup as a simple methodology which codified founders best practices – in a language and process that was easy to understand and implement. All from a practitioner’s point of view. So you can imagine my surprise when I received ...

The October 2025 PEO Directory – Update 2. 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 anno...

Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What do they do? And more importantly, why should anyone (outside of universities) care? (Unfortunately, you won’t see answers to these questions in the general press – it’s not clickbait enough. Nor will you read about it in the science journals– it’s not technical enough. You won’t hear a succinct de...

Great founders shine in a crisis. Ordinary ones watch their companies burn down. I just had coffee with two co-founders of an e-bike company who were mentoring one of our student teams. In short order I realized they were great founders – creative, agile and still having fun building their company. Unlike other e-bike rental companies, their business model was unique, offering riders free rental time in exchange for looking at ads. We had a great conversation, and they talked about everything &#...

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...

How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt or die. This post tells the story of what happened when 4,000 companies faced a disruptive technology and why only one survived. In the early 20th century, the United States was home to more than 4,000 carriage and wagon manufacturers . They were the backbone of mobility and the precursors of automobiles, u...

Founders with great businesses are often frustrated that they can’t raise money. Here’s why. I’ve been having coffee with lots of frustrated founders (my students and others) bemoaning most VCs won’t even meet with them unless they have AI in their fundraising pitch. And the AI startups they see are getting valuations that appear nonsensical. These conversations brought back a sense of Déjà vu from the Dot Com bubble (at the turn of this century), when if you didn’t have internet as part of your...

The PowerPoints embedded in this post are best viewed on steveblank.com We just finished the 15th<>annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. The class had gotten so popular that in 2021 we started teaching it in both the winter and spring sessions. During the 2025 spring quarter the eight teams spoke to 935 potential customers, beneficiaries and regulators. Most students spent 15-20 hours a week on the class, about double that of a normal class. This Class Launched a Revolution in Teaching ...

The videos and PowerPoints embedded in this post are best viewed on steveblank.com We just finished our 10th annual Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. What a year. 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 bu...

The videos embedded in this post are best viewed on steveblank.com International Policy students will be spending their careers in an AI-enabled world. We wanted our students to be prepared for it. This is why we’ve adopted and integrated AI in our Stanford national security policy class – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition . Here’s what we did, how the students used it, and what they (and we) learned. Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition is an international policy ...

This article previously appeared in Nature . US global dominance in science was no accident, but a product of a far-seeing partnership between public and private sectors to boost innovation and economic growth. Since 20 January, US science has been upended by severe cutbacks from the administration of US President Donald Trump. A series of dramatic reductions in grants and budgets — including the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) slashing reimbursements of indirect research costs to univers...

Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. It happened because two very different people were the science advisors to their nation’s leaders. Each had radically different views on how to use their country’s resources to build advanced weapon systems. Post war, it meant Britain’s early lead was ephemeral while the U.S. built the foundation for a scienc...

In March 2022 I wrote a description of the Quantum Technology Ecosystem . I thought this would be a good time to check in on the progress of building a quantum computer and explain more of the basics. Just as a reminder, Quantum technologies are used in three very different and distinct markets: Quantum Computing , Quantum Communications and Quantum Sensing and Metrology . If you don’t know the difference between a qubit and cueball, (I didn’t) read the tutorial here. Summary – There’s been incr...

This article first appeared in First Round Review . “Only the Paranoid Survive” Andy Grove – Intel CEO 1987-1998 I just had an urgent “can we meet today?” coffee with Rohan, an ex-student. His three-year-old startup had been slapped with a notice of patent infringement from a Fortune 500 company. “My lawyers said defending this suit could cost $500,000 just for discovery, and potentially millions of dollars if it goes to trial. Do you have any ideas?” The same day, I got a text from Jared, a fri...

I got a call from an ex-student asking me “how do you know when you found product market fit?” There’s been lots of words written about it, but no actual recordings of the moment. I remembered I had saved this 90 second, 26 year-old audio file because this is when I knew we had found it at Epiphany. The speaker was the the Chief Financial Officer of a company called Visio, subsequently acquired by Microsoft I played it for her and I think it provided some clarity. https://steve...

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 ...

Imagine you got a job offer from a company but weren’t allowed to start work – or get paid – for almost a year. And if you can’t pass a security clearance your offer is rescinded. Or you get offered an internship but can’t work on the most interesting part of the project. Sounds like a nonstarter. Well that’s the current process if you want to work for companies or government agencies that work on classified programs. One Silicon Valley company, Palantir , is trying to change that and shor...