YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin McCoy

lines on the record: 60
first: 2025-04-02
most recent: 2025-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And we are teammates, and we are working together on these problems, and we're going to start using that buying power to make more effective purchases. Because when the president calls for the carriers before they call brag, that we need to be fully integrated and teamed. We fight joint.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm proud of the army. I make a joke all the time. The Navy and the Army are the only two services in the Constitution. We've been doing this since 1775 and everyone knows what the Army brings. I say this just unemotionally. When the world dials 911, the phone rings at Fort Bragg. It doesn't ring at Naval Station San Diego. It doesn't ring at Anderson Air Force Base. And I love my Navy and Air Force brothers. The phone rings at Fort Bragg, North Carolina when the world does 911. So the biggest misconception that I would tell people is We haven't missed this. We're in the fight still. We're in the fight globally and we're going to transform in contact and continue to transform in contact because we've been doing this since 1775.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not your granddaddy's DoD anymore. We will be more flexible. We will be more open-minded. And if you bring data to us, then we will work our butts off to make sure that if the policy is the problem, then that policy will get accepted. We've gotten 12 exceptions to policy because we brought data and said this is hurting us. And so these suboptimizations that we've always had, we can do better than that and we will.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And keep imagining a safer world. We want the brightest minds to help every aspect of this. The goal here is to just be so effective that we are getting as much return on investment as possible. And that translates to protecting those who are protecting all of us every day. Technology is the advantage. And if we have the best of America's talent working on these types of problems, our hardest problems like we've fixed the alignment problem.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stop trying to use the Department of Defense as your only means of revenue. And I mean that because if you get complacent with the Department of Defense, then you are no longer actually on the quest that you were on. And it's just not good. We want to make sure that we have the best war-winning dual-use technology. And if we become the only provider to your technology, it's neither dual use nor are we going to actually maintain the goal of partner with industry. You are just a part of us at that point.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Green flag, keep building the product that you started on the path to build. Have your North Star and then work with us to figure out how to do roof shots as you're on your way to your moonshot rather than trying to tailor it to us. The DoD, we are going to be a better customer, I wholeheartedly believe that. But if you had a vision, like go after your vision and then get it in the hands of our warfighters to help tailor it.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say at this point, don't work with bad requirements, these long requirements documents. There are enough capability needs statements out through software acquisition pathways and commercial solution offerings. Don't bang your head against the wall. Find a top-level requirement or something easier to work with. And people who get outcomes.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This fortunate son all day long, but I was sitting there with that tank commander and he showed me because we have taken a 20 year old tablet that's mounted in that Abram's that's really hard to move. And we've given him everything on his tack device, which is an Android app on an Android phone, and now he can command and control his tank company. So we're going to take that next generation command and control into get that on contract and start moving forward and get that fielded to one of our divisions this year in Europe. We're doing this thing called Project Flytrap. I welcome anybody to come try it. It's countering unmanned systems. So we are learning from Ukraine and what's happening over there. And we're actually going to, with Fifth Corps and with use of your raft, we're actually going to work on how we scale up adding non-conventional sensors, non-conventional compute. How do we do automation so that if you are driving, and it doesn't matter what part of the world you're in, if you're an American warfighter and there is a drone threat, there is a bunch of automated decision mechanisms that are just going, hey, I sent something in the electromagnetic spectrum. I hear something in acoustics. Here's what you need to do. And you don't have to worry about it. In the IED fight, they taught us something when you're going to combat readiness. They said down out up.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hillia, I'm actually really excited about a lot of things. This year, we are going to put the consortium for the Army's Next Generation Command and Control into its program phase. So right now it's been in software pathways, Army Futures Command has been piloting this. We have a consortium, and I keep using that term deliberately, of just great companies who are going, here's what technology can bear. And I was at the National Training Center out in the middle of the Mojave Desert last week, and I crawled into an M182 set V3 tank, the coolest eight-year-old Alex was very excited because I was in a tank. But that tank commander.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm excited about the idea of we don't have to prove that these things work anymore. So if we scale half of what's working well right now, I mean, the software acquisition pathways, we have gotten more permission, like significant permission to do the right thing. Now, how many people do it? And what does that look like and what wins do we get out of that? And so ultimately, I am excited about participating in the race to have the best technology solutions and the companies that are offering the best breakthroughs to be fielded into that operations and maintenance pot and getting that to the production, to our warfighters hands sooner. So I'm excited about the best chance I've ever seen in the next six to 12 months to get capability that wasn't under government contract into full scale production.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it actually gives us more leverage to do more of this. And so ultimately, send your success stories if you are doing this really well and you're already in and you've made it because we want to double down on this flywheel of this can happen. We don't want two successes a month. We want to overwhelm the system with how much better it can be. If you're not ready when the window of opportunity opens, sometimes you're waiting a really long time. And so we put CAPE mobile virtual network operator company startup in Guam and then we needed them. So like, hey, the pilot was ready for actual use. If we are out hands-on testing with the best stuff, then we have an opportunity to scale in a significant way, much shorter than any of these timelines you hear about whenever you read about the government.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to keep solved problems solved, get higher up the stack in general. I think it's academically interesting to resolve the same problem. That's for school. And so we have renewation unit that is a way to keep really talented Marines in the reserves who have venture jobs as their full-time job. We're using them to scout technologies. We have folks in Europe right now working with some of the startup founders to say, hey, here is a breakthrough. What would scaling this look like? Well, it would mess up our program of record plan. That's not what we're optimizing for. We have contracting officers sometimes say, well, I want to do fewer contracts. Well, I want to win. So then there are really good contracting officers who get that and short of changing the way that we fuel incentives, measuring how much better 25 times better the get after it folks are in different organizations. That K-curve fuels up.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just want people to understand who's listening how ridiculous this is because cross domain as a service is an API for binary XML between two networks. That's all we're talking about. Now, there's national security implications, but that is a solved problem and that we are fighting over.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solution right now through a bunch of different program offices. The Army is doing that as a service. Can we jump on cross domain even if it'll affect or make some people that created something in-house upset? Yes. For the sailor and for the Marine, yes.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a quarterback was measured on not making mistakes versus throwing touchdowns or winning games, the performances would be 100% different, right? And so if your goal is to hedge against anything happening, then you're fighting against inflation as opposed to against disruptive technology. We used to have something called cost as an independent variable. We make anything an acronym, so CAV. And so this was to say like, how do you back in and make sure that you're spending the budget and then optimizing for that? If we had speed as an independent variable save and we measured based on outcomes, then I think that looks pretty different. That looks more like executing. And so when we say, hey, unleashed folks, what do you have? They're not bringing 20% better capability. They're saying, hey, we're doing cross-domain.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businesses that are available? How do they get us the best war winning capabilities right now? Maybe it sounds cheesy, but I mean it. The risk calculus, we're not comparing the same things. And what would help is of those venture folks talk to our leadership, continuing to engage because we're going to work up. They need to work laterally to go, hey, the way you measure risk is fundamentally incoherent with where technology is going.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to work through, and Justin said it really elementally earlier the people who take risk, their job, and I don't want to disparage anybody because they are hardworking Americans trying to do the right thing. Their job is to minimize the risk to the government and the way that they measure risk is the potential for waste, fraud, or abuse of dollars. So what they're trying to say is, hey, if I give you a dollar, do I get a dollar of value out of it? That's a good metric. What they don't do is if I give you a dollar and I take 10 years to spend that dollar, is it still worth a dollar? So what we are trying to do is figure out, hey, I'd rather lose a dollar right now. I'd rather try it on a company and they go, it just didn't work out than spend that 10 years because that is also super valuable time that we could be trying to figure out what all of the players in the startup landscape and all of the players in the venture landscape. And frankly, all of the, because once you sell your first product, you're not a startup, your business and all the...”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assessing risk on different things, and it's at a necessity. I'm using big weed. There's a lot of folks in the department who actually understand venture whether or not they came from that or they've just been working with the venture ecosystem for a long time. And I mentioned Inquitel earlier, that's a really good, very public.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want that to be 90% of the portfolio, you know, like really a big percent of the, like they're eaches, right? We still talk about DIU is like less than 1% of the budget. Like these innovation activities are still very small. So it is a good signal that we're doing them. Impact of scaling what's working again once in a lifetime opportunity. And imagine how much more secure that our country and the world would be if we were making the exact ruthless highest impact decisions across the board.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until all the workarounds are turned into scale and solutions that Alex is talking about, we can still pull that through. But if you can make the A to B not close, blow it away, that's what we want to see. And so we use world-class alignment metrics to show how a divestment is possible through a game-changing investment.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is all the more reason if someone does have a capability that is so much better than what we have in the field right now. Like we have stocked up the pipeline, but the data and the stories associated with that, we want it to be undeniably good so that we can then make the case. And people come to me and they say, isn't zero touch AI better than how you're doing unified endpoints right now? Yes, of course it is. And we are trying to make the case that this will save us money. We need a little bit of CapEx so that we can get the OpEx right, but the total cost of ownership and the impact of this from a mission perspective is best. for those who are protecting us, right? Here are ways that we can lower the tail on ineffective things, but we have to aim at the exact solution that we have, even if it's a manual process. And if we can find several things, we can find enough room.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really means for us we have to predict the future three to five years out, hope for the best, and then work in the year of execution to move money around the edges to try to do advanced technology. Otherwise, what happens is we give money to our labs and they try to do the right thing and they try to pull advanced technology in and they try to like land this transition, this magical transition where it goes from something that works in a lab to something that works in the field in one go. And we know that that's not real because technology evolves so fast where you could go from something that is a concept to someone writing it up and doing it in software space in days to weeks. And our entire system, the entire way we think is predict the future three to five years out, land the perfect shot, get a trick shot, and go. And it just doesn't work. It does not work.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portfolio, yeah, absolutely. And then in 1968, bam, Minuteman 3 is in there. And I get it from a national security perspective. You want to make sure that money goes into a long-term project and you want to make sure that it's successful because we were the only people who were going to do that. We, the government, were the only people who were going to do that. Now, today, the army is only 21% of the defense budget. We are everywhere. We the army are everywhere. And again, this is going to sound a little parochial, but we're on the border. We're the global response force. We're the immediate response force. We're the homeland defense brigade. We're in Haiti. We're in Africa. We're in CINCOM. We're in PACOM. We are everywhere. 21% of the budget and less than 50% of that do we have any flexibility to spend to change how we're spending even less than that there are thousands of budget line items that are directed to us in the National Defense Authorization Act everywhere that tell us exactly how we're going to spend that money so as just we were talking about earlier that three-year spin cycle”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know Justin and I could sit here and talk really deep tech all day long, and we can go into the nuts and bolts. And we will. Don't be real. There's two things, the silos, and they just put something in my brain. I want everyone who listens or see this to understand we haven't missed the signal. The department hasn't missed the signal. In 1968, something fundamentally changed the way that we do buying in the government and it has not stopped changing since then. In 1968, there was a program put directly in the United States budget, and it was the Minuteman 3 program. That was the first time that a program by name was put into the budget that we had to spend money against.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some things in common with VC. Sure, from a funnel perspective, that would be the ideal state. One of the tricky parts for us because we are such a big organization is finding people who think that way and fanning the flames and empowering them. And so every organization has latent risk takers, even if they're conditioned to not take risks. I mean, the acquisition community teaches us that lowering risk, reducing risk is the goal. So essentially like playing not to lose. doesn't really keep pace in many, many cases with the current trajectory of technological advancement. And so we have unleashed people mavericks who are willing to work against their self-interest to bring breakthrough capabilities through.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And similar than dissimilar from industry. In some cases, we're not making the tough decisions to scale what's working fast enough. And so if we have more shared services at the department level, how can we do autonomy together as services? How can we make sure that that is well integrated from the ground up and we're not like looking at this as an integration problem because we made separate decisions three years later? From an artificial intelligence perspective, right now we're leveraging an Air Force and Army and Navy solution. Can we single up for common enterprise problems in one place? And then in other places, can we have narrow models where we share and all of them feed into some of the more unique problems like command and control? And so we're starting to architect in that way and make decisions based on what's available, not based on what we've done. Now, one kind of an older comment you made was we have.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why it's really important to be close to the Warfighter If you are a startup CEO, don't hire salespeople before you understand the ecosystem. Move to San Diego, spend nine months near the group that you are trying to positively enable and empower to do their job 10 or 100 times better than they are right now. So that proximity piece is real, especially for unique or specific problems. And then more often than not, there is some aspect that should be evaluated as dual use. From a shared services perspective, Alex already said it. We're doing more common.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or ChatGPT, or even DeepSeek, they're all available. What makes them unique and good and competitive is the unique data sets that their customers have and the unique ways that they're going to use them. That's us. That's my job to be able to go, hey, here's the unique mission for my soldiers, and here's how we're going to do that.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unique, like can only be done by them and should only be done by them, that's where we want to focus on because that's the niche. But I will keep hampering on this. There's option for startups and small companies and all of that because Palantir was an Inkytel investment. Like we found them as a very small company and now it's driving a lot of the way we do warfare. So even those big companies will go, I'm not good at this, but that company, that really small company, they're really good at that. I want them on my team. We want to unlock all of that and we want to enable it. And I'm trying not to be super, super technical just because this is not a technology problem. This is a culture and a process problem that we can apply technology to. I had a chance last week to sit with all of the big LLM providers. And I loved the conversation because they were ruthlessly honest with me and with each other in that, hey, all of these things are available, whether it's llama or claw.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and one of the things that I've been really big on is we need the enterprise to do enterprise things and get us out of the business of doing things that are common to all in the intelligence community. We had this concept of services, of common concern and what that means is it is something that everyone should be able to use. Therefore, don't let every individual agency or organization do it themselves. It's sort of a common sense on the face of it thing. However, in the combat side of the department, we've had a really hard time adopting. I'll give a couple examples. So the CDAO and DIU and some of these other organizations have said, hey, we're going to pull capabilities up and deliver it in a common way for everyone. That's great for things that are common so that when Justin and I go back to our offices, if we need to share data, we can do it in a common way. For things that are unique to me or unique to him or unique to the Air Force or unique to the Space Force or the Coast Guard and Marines, whoever, if it's really, really, really...”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zambonying out the legacy capabilities so we can unplug them for the first time in a long time. These work together within the Valley of Death. Like this is actually happening within our budget cycle if we do it well.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the unlocks there is they're acknowledging the Secretary of Defense is acknowledging that the software defined warfare is here. And if you can use one component that is higher performing than others, should we have a fully different artificial intelligence stack for edge compute for sensor integration than we do with no leverage as an enterprise use case? No, of course not, right? What does the governance look like versus what does the compute look like? We need economies of scale. And so we're working together more with our vendor partners and even like signaling to some of the investors to say here is our hard problem, but can we land the plane on buying them? Can we land the plane in sustainable cost, whether it's in a program executive office or not? Everyone should have to sing for their dinner every year, but the idea of bringing those breakthroughs in then again.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly, your engineers are focused and excited on doing the things you're good at. And I can put all these things together. And that's what we expect in our everyday lives. It is shocking to me how much stuff we buy for soldiers that no one would accept if I handed to you in your everyday life. And that is a mindset that we are changing. And I love the secretary is on board, the chief is on board, all of these senior leaders within the army are just really going, hey common sense. Like what's the value and what's the opportunity cost of making really dumb decisions and how do we stop doing that?”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not. And what I appreciate is I've learned what Venture looks at and how you grade and how you assess risk is you do not expect every company to be good at everything. And that is a failure that we as a Department of Defense and really anybody who's done federal acquisition falls into the trap of where if you came up and you won a program, I expect you to deliver every part of that top to bottom, even the stuff you're not good at. Well, what that does is it creates an amalgamation of things that people aren't good at and you can actually multiply those tolerances across lots of systems until you get something that looks like, oh, there's a lot of not good stuff here. Well, what we're trying to do now is just figure out I'm a Lego person. Like, how do you find the right Lego pieces and how do you put them together so that if Justin Corporate is really, really good at serving data, I get him serving data. Layla Corp is really, really good at UI, you're doing UI. I don't make you do the things you're not good at.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting because I'd never thought about it from this angle, but it's not unlike venture capital where we're making bets on companies. It's not about can this company move the needle by 10x? Because to your point, there's this switching cost. So we're investing in 100x solutions. And then you all need to be able to validate that this new solution is going to provide 100x outcome. And you also need to be able to replace and sunset capabilities as well. So it sounds like our organizations are not that dissimilar.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Own with their own vestigial architecture, and we had to do a bunch of architecture archaeology, and we had a bunch of people who were protecting their rice bowls in terms of those programs. And it's only just now, in 2025, are we actually trying to hack and slash and kill some of these systems to go, no, if you want to look at the map, just look at the map. If you've got some weird, unique data like we do fires, like we do artillery, like all those unique things that are unique to us as a military, we'll figure out a way to get those on the map, but we, the Department of Defense, are certainly not in 2025 who is building the best maps. We're not building the best data platforms. We're not building the best API gateways. So let's not pretend it. Let's just get all those pieces together and collapse all of these other vestigial organs. I cannot describe how excited I am because we're doing it. We're doing it live and I love it.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Army example. So we have this concept of mission command We had seventeen programs a record in this mission command enterprise, and each one did similar things in the fact that each one of them had a map. Humans like pixels were really good at seeing pixels. They make us happy. So we looked at maps. Each one of those came with its own mapping server and its own way to do tiles and its own way to deliver the maps. And it's a way to store the maps. about 2015, 16, everybody went, hey, this Google Earth thing is pretty legit. We should probably just try to use that. And it took five years for people to go, oh, we can just start sharing KMLs and KMZs with each other and start sharing it. By then, you had really, really good software companies that had said, cool, we're going to give you these enterprise services. I don't care what map you use. I don't care who provides it. You just tell it. You point us to it and we'll serve it to you. And all of us kind of went, yeah, I want that, but we couldn't because we had 17 programs of rec.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've said naval identity service is the enterprise system. That service is what's moving forward. That opens the door to repurposing some of that money, repurposing some of that attention to harder problems. And so to this point, we are looking for A-B testing that shows that A is no longer a viable option and there's much more value from B. If a company comes in, like Serana comes in and they said, we have tests, we use rescale, we use the cloud, and we show that based on running this for 100,000 reps that would have taken 10 years, we can fast forward this. And that is proven. It was proven on paper. We didn't have to put that into an exercise. We can now with a lot less risk reduction. But that is an easier AB decision because they've translated it into our language, which is outcomes.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very hard to make a change for a 15% improvement unless it's something that you're doing a lot. We want to make the case that there are orders of magnitude leaps, right? Like power law leaps. And so most recently, we have a thousand different identity management solutions.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the period about scaling what actually works. And so I'm excited about what Alex is doing that transforming in contact in execution is a big deal because it's tech informed. If you read Origins of Victory, they say it's not about who necessarily just has the best tech. It's how they're adapting to that tech and using that as an advantage. And so the way that we're measuring outcomes is we're now using outcome driven metrics to figure out do you move the needle? Not is this the best tech or how does this fit into our current operating model? How does this transform us? And so we are more open and listening to and working with and pulling through more of those Horizon 3 capabilities than we were, but we need outcomes over match. We need it to kick the ass of whatever's there right now so we can show that difference. It's defensible and we can move off of the old and onto the new.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of some of the aircraft, the capital assets, those are fixed. Would I have the luxury in the Army is we can modify our organizations, we can modify our kit, we can tailor it to missions. So that's what we've been doing with some of our brigades that have been in Europe and in the Pacific and frankly going in and out of the Middle East still. And this is an open invite for all of the founders and all of the companies. If you have things that work, we have a front door. We want to try to get you in here. We want you to be able to engage with Army Futures Command. We want you to be able to engage with our units directly because only the soldiers will actually be able to tell you, yes, this works at a time of crisis. So I'm super excited because I remember during the Global War on Terror, we had quick reaction capabilities. And as a customer, I could go, I need this right now. And somebody would go, cool, I will get you that. In 30 days, I had kit in Afghanistan that was working for me, which told me it was legal, it was moral, it was ethical, we could do it, but we never actually went back and fixed the system.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Justin said it, it's treating the value as the actual goal. So everyone has heard this PMs level of this concept of cost schedule and performance, right? They want to make sure they hit their timelines at the cost that they were given. And performance, to me, is like, hey, it meets my warfighting needs, but performance is actually what's written in this requirements document, which they might not have actually had any hand in doing, or a soldier might not have had any actual hand in informing. What we were trying to do is flip that and say, no, your value in time to delivery is your actual need. Everyone has permission to do the right thing. So as you think about venture funding all the way up through series X, Y, or Z, where a lot of the companies that we work with actually still live in those spaces, they need to have a front door, but what we're doing in the Army is going, hey, if you're ready, let's go to the field right now. And I say this a little bit parochially. The Army is the service that can do that because you can move around the edges of some of your ships. The Air Force can move around the edge.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Afloat in a case that we didn't need to go down to different procurement paths. There was another example actually recently where we had an electronic warfare solution and we heard that the army was going to go out and do a request for proposal on something that was really similar with the same long requirements document that we had. We said, can you just paint this brown and throw it on a Humvee? And that's exactly what they did. They did it in three months for 300K. And then that went to scaled fielding. And so these things are happening. It's just a matter of can you make the best thing the normal thing?”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially with horizontal capabilities like artificial intelligence, like how would we pull in artificial intelligence across 75 PEOs? We need to name enterprise services. And so defensive innovation unit actually has a digital on-ramp where they're trying to streamline that so that we can make buys based on impact. The chances that a bunch of horizontal organizations were going to do the same thing was always high. A quick example is we had edge compute ashore. We had a hyper-converged infrastructure, small box that we could divest a billion dollar purchase and just move to this in every way more capable solution. And we said, what about that for a float? And one of the captains of a ship said, let's put it on mine, let's figure out how this works. We put it there. He deployed to the Red Sea. It's on other ships right now. This is Enterprise Moving to Edge specifically.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one read all of it covered a cover. You'd look at, reference it like the dictionary, but it's a little bit longer. In this particular case, we said, hey, we're going to use capability need statements because this isn't going to get us what we want anyway. And so we fast-tracked an 18-month process in three months with a couple pages between CNS's capability need statements and top level requirements. The software acquisition pathway allows us to do that. And so we already have examples where the right thing is working way better than the old thing. It's a K-curve. This is a matter of scaling what's working better. And the only way we do that because there is some risk aversion is emphasize that the outcomes and the trade-offs are for our warfighter. And so when we have the best software developers in the world where we have the best capability coming in, let's not cut it down with a thousand paper cuts, 10,000 paper cuts.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question is, how do we increase yield? We have examples where every good idea the government has piloted. DoD has piloted at some point, right? And so in this particular case on requirements, I worked with a 4,000 page requirements document. I'm fairly certain no one read. Do you read it?”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That only had to work 51% of the time. What person at what company is going to go, yeah, I'm okay with my engineers building something that only works 51% of the time, or if you flip it, I'm okay with wasting 49% of my resources. So as we think about what the process should be, and it's real, this is a with our shielder on type of moment for the Department of Defense, I just want to blow up all of that. Anything that's below law, we should be able to reshape. No startup should ever have to go, I want to be a programmer record because what that really turns into is a 30-year long set where Microsoft might have been thinking Office is going to be around forever, but inside of them, they still had product managers and program managers who were making sure that Excel was really good. Please don't stop making Excel good the entire world runs on Excel. But they're not thinking, oh, if I just get it here, I can slow down. I can take my foot off the pedal, which is what happens in programs of record. As soon as you make it.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What if we just stopped doing that because it is not actually what we have to do? And I'll give you an example of that. For countering unmanned systems, and there's lots of startups in this, and I know that a lot of your founders are not in the threat headspace that I'm in right now. So think about it. You're at an NFL stadium or a soccer stadium, and you see a quadcopter. Like in my world, that's a horrifying prospect because that means that it's intruded into your airspace. You can't do anything about it. It's really hard to bring them down. I think about thousands of those. And that is the real threat that we're under. Well, all of our requirements, writers, they're not operations. They're not the guys getting shot at. They're just trying to do the right thing. And you write these sort of black box requirements. I found one the other day as I was going through them that was coming up through the process because it wanted to go to a program where if you took the combination of statistics that they put in there, like your operational availability, your operational accuracy and your operational reliability, which you ended up with was a system.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what if we didn't do all that? The cool thing is everything that Justin just said is a workaround. It is a workaround to a system that is fundamentally broken. The cool thing is PEOs are not actually in statute anywhere. They don't exist in law. We made them up because the rule is that the sec deaf gets to determine what that looks like. So as we think through what the future is, I don't want to have to know, like that acronym Soup, why would we put that on anybody willingly? The only reason it exists is because the process doesn't work. Just a short story on how this works for us. So Justin talked about these requirements. And forever, they've been super gold-plated. They're this thick. They're every word known to man because people are afraid that if you don't get it in the requirement, you can't move to this program or record.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go, right? It allows some breakthroughs to get pulled all the way through. There's just not enough of those, right? There's just not enough funding and not enough awards. And so point is if you can shrink the valley of death, you're doing this in the Horizon 2 and Horizon 1 space. For three, you probably have to do still like some guerrilla marketing and advertising, pull in DIU, pull in the Hill, pull in the requirements writers to make sure that you're not doing all the translation yourself.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source