Developing the National Talent and Innovation Pipeline with Alex Gallo

Episode Summary:
Host Callye Keen welcomes Alex Gallo, Co-Founder of the Common Mission Project, in an insightful conversation that elucidates the connections between national security and societal progress. They discuss a novel, community-based approach to cybersecurity, and how this method can be leveraged to solve complex challenges faced by the Department of Defense.

Topic Highlights:
02:27 - Harnessing Community Power for National Security
Alex Gallo and Callye Keen explore the 'Hacking for Defense' approach and its potential to pool diverse talents, perspectives, and resources for creative problem-solving, particularly concerning national security.

18:15 - Redefining Risk in Defense Innovation
'Hacking for Defense' reduces risk by providing evidence-based decision confidence for leaders, thereby enhancing strategic innovation capabilities.

21:10 - The Red Queen Problem and the China Challenge
Keen and Gallo delve into the Red Queen problem, drawing parallels with the current US-China strategic competition. They underscore the necessity of rethinking traditional strategies to stay ahead of global rivals.

21:36 - Building a Bridge between Society and National Security
Bridging the gap between society and national security is of vital importance. Such connections can foster a robust economy and a vibrant civil society, helping to protect the freedoms enjoyed by citizens.

21:57 - Investment Disparity in Innovation
The vast difference between China's approach to funding innovation and that of the U.S. is of concern. China's strategic deployment of funds into innovation centers, exceeded the complete DoD budget and total U.S. venture capital investment. The urgency for the U.S. to rethink its investment strategies in order to keep pace with global adversaries in the realm of technology and innovation is highlighted.

23:27 - Local Empowerment through Constructive Problem-Solving
Gallo advocates for the 'Hacking for Defense' approach, pointing out its potential to empower local communities and rejuvenate economies. This entrepreneurial spirit is crucial for rebuilding society at a hyper-local level.

Callye Keen - Kform
https://kform.com/
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YouTube
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Alex Gallo - Executive Director of the Common Mission Project (CMP)
https://www.commonmission.us
https://www.h4d.us
LinkedIn

Transcript

Alex Gallo: 0:00

Steve Blank and Pete Newell, they refer to this as the Red Queen problem. This is a reference to through the looking glass in the Alice Wonderland series where Alice says to the Red Queen."You know my world, when I run, I get somewhere", I'm paraphrasing, and the red queen says, "well, here it takes all the running you can to just stay in the same place." In a lot of ways the government, and this is true, I think with folks who work, and are affiliated with the National Security Institute as well, feel like we're just doing all the running we can just the same place.

Callye Keen: 0:26

Welcome to the Startup Defense. Today I have Alex Gallo of the Common Mission Project and Hacking for Defense and B M N T and many other things. Alex, you're a busy, fascinating person. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you're really passionate about right now?

Alex Gallo: 0:45

Let me start with the second thing first. What I'm very passionate about is trying to connect more talent in our country to national service and trying to get them to work on problems in what we call mission driven entrepreneurial ways. That is definitely the central goal and objective of the Common Mission Project and definitely the central goal and objective of all the hacking floor programs. My background is consistent with that description. I attended West Point as an undergrad and the lore at West Point is if it rains under graduation day, that means your class is going to war. And not only did it rain, it absolutely poured down on my graduation day. I graduated on the 2nd of June, 2001, and then three and a half months later, nine 11 happened. And so that definitely has shaped my career trajectory. I did all the usual things that you do in the military, but it was after being at that implementation end of national security policy and strategy. Seeing the consequential outcomes of the decisions that are made at that level, that I wanted to be part of shaping policy strategy. And that took me on a trajectory to study the problem sets around national security more closely, in grad school and then onwards, at the combating tourism center at West Point. And then I had the opportunity to be part of the policymaking process as a professional staff member on the House Armed Services Committee on the hill. Through that experience, I also saw that we need to connect more of our nation to solving these problems. And fortuitously, I met, Pete Newell along the way, who I know you've spoken with before. He's the founder and CEO of B M N T and founder of the Common Mission Project. And the Hacking 4 programs, our way of connecting more of the talent, air country to national service, as I said.

Callye Keen: 2:27

I was gonna ask how you came across Hacking 4 Defense. I came across it through a collaboration with James Madison University, a professor, down there was doing fantastic work. Pulling students in to solve industry and then solving DoD problems. People are so creative, and I think maybe the world beats a little bit of that out of us. But to get a 19 year old who's obsessed with engineering and obsessed with cybersecurity and just pouring themselves into that and then turn them onto what the Navy or the Air Force or the Army is looking for is such an untapped pool of talent or pool of interest because I think we both share this, we need best and brightest people applying commercial grade, cutting edge technology to solve these big civilization size issues, including DoD issues, and how do we get it?

Alex Gallo: 3:20

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And to your point, a lot of these students, as you said, they're super smart, super motivated. They're computer science, they're engineering, they're business school students, and the most well worn pathways are for them to go and make apps to make our life easier. And that's great. We do need that. But I think when offered the opportunity and what we have found, we've confirmed this experiment through our Hacking 4 programs, that when they're presented with the opportunity to work on problems that are for the public good, they prefer that. And through the process and the program of applying the Lean Startup method and actually getting to interact with, over the course of these courses, they interview a hundred people across the semester and they get to really know these people who are serving in government. They find that they're interesting people. They work on interesting problems, and they're actually really cool. I could have a beer with this person, maybe I should go and work with this person too. It's a cool opportunity. And then others say, I wanna be an entrepreneur. Wanna form a startup, and we've formed 53 Startups out of Hacking 4 Defense. I wanna form a startup, that's not only has a commercial product, but it also is dual use in nature and can serve government problems.

Callye Keen: 4:26

The dual use initiatives that you're seeing really popping up in the last couple years are exciting. It's difficult from a sales perspective, programmatically to serve both markets, I find that more and more people are drawn to the DoD side or the federal side of this, cuz they realize they can solve big problems. And also in the commercial space. I love that you mentioned apps because you're right, everyone is enamored with apps. I think that was the mid part of my technical career. The iPhone came out and as a product developer, I had the same ideas. Oh, I'll build apps. I'll build apps. But that same level of effort when applied to the public space is incredibly impactful. And there's so much less competition there because everyone worldwide is trying to solve the app problem as they want the next Facebook. But then just sharing data securely in the federal world is such a massive, multi-billion dollar problem that realistically, a small team can solve. It's do you wanna solve a one X very difficult competition saturated market, need the best and brightest, need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for engineers? Or do you want to go over to a space where you have mission focused people? Interesting problems. Very little competition proportionally,

Alex Gallo: 5:44

Proportionally.

Callye Keen: 5:45

Yeah. And, when people see that, but they have to see it first. And that's what I really like. What you all have been doing is once somebody's exposed to that, they say, this is pretty cool.

Alex Gallo: 5:54

So well said. And to your point, one other way, this is Steve Blank, who's also one of the founders of Hacking 4 Defense. So he uses this term, he calls it the R O T C of the 21st century, is that I think there are different ways that we can find, you don't have to go to West Point like I did for undergrad, like I told you, or joined R O T C, but there are different ways to get more of our population engaged with our country. And these critical problems, and as you said, there's good practical reasons to do that. It might be a less saturated, competitive space and so on as well. That's what we've been doing is trying to connect more folks to these type of problems. And in doing so, we've not only. Stayed within the Department of Defense bucket. We've also moved to the Department of Homeland Security. So we have something called Hacking for, Homeland Security. Now we've also done with the Department of State Hacking for Diplomacy. And then after those three programs have scaled now to 60 universities around the United States. As you and I were discussing at the top, we've now decided why not solve problems beyond defense and national security? So we've focused in on climate and sustainability problems. We also have a program called Hacking for Local that works on state, local, and city problems. And then we also said, what about partners and allies? Particularly as we conceptualize ourself, and Western values and stuff. And so we're doing this in the United Kingdom, so I have a common mission project in the UK with an executive director there that's running this type of program with their Ministry of Defense. And then we've also expanded in Australia doing the same thing with their defense department and a vision to move beyond. There's no shortage and interest in bringing together this kind of 21st century problem solving approach to more people around the globe too.

Callye Keen: 7:34

I wanna learn a little bit more about common mission projects. Is that what it is? Is taking those successes that you've had with Hacking 4 Defense and then moving it laterally across industry and then partners?

Alex Gallo: 7:46

Great question. By the way, background, common Mission project is a 501c3 nonprofit. Our mission conceptually is to create more mission driven entrepreneurs for the country and society. And yes, our mandate is to scale these programs inside the United States, but also beyond the United States and to other partner and Allied Nations. Like I said, we've set up common mission projects now just in the UK and Australia, but. There's a lot of interest in trying to move beyond that in other countries as well.

Callye Keen: 8:15

The premise of this show and a lot of what I do professionally is to take something that works commercially and then show it over to the space is interesting cuz Common Mission project is starting to do the opposite as well. And we see that too, is that once something works and we flesh out a lot of the highest value application of that whether that's a methodology like Lean Startup or that is a technology like AI or even clean tech. Then we can just bring it back and say, what can this do for our society versus our, federal government or what can it do on the local level? It's so interesting to look at that whole ecosystem. Can you pull some examples for us, that looks like? Let's say some big wins that you really remember from the past programs.

Alex Gallo: 9:04

Absolutely. So there are two types of outcomes, if you will, that are coming outta the courses. One is talent. As I said, I've been focusing in on the talent development and I've alluded to the second one, which are startups. These are startups that are focused on, department defense or other governmental problem, and that are dual use. of our best examples on the startup side is a company called Capella Space. They were a hacking for defense team at Stanford in 2016. Every team names themselves, they were called Team Capella. They were working on an air force intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance problem. And over the course of the semester, they had some technology and of course of the semester through the customer discovery process, further developed synthetic AP radar satellites that are size of the chair that you're sitting on. And to, solve for the ISR problem that the Air Force was facing, they have a lot of remotely piloted aircraft that are looking with the so-called I'm blinking eye over, let's say, Kim Jong-UN's nuclear sites, to understand change over time. But that kind of exquisite platform could be repurposed for other missions around the world. So why not have a low earth or orbit system that can see through any weather pattern. And that's in a way almost disposable in relation to the cost. And they developed this and the Air Force recognized there wasn't an entity in the defense base, actually services solution. And so they formed this company now known as Capella's Space that's worked with the Navy and NGA and other agencies in the government. And what's cool about this is, if you remember in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, bridge Colby who wrote that document, talked about the national security innovation base. It was this conceptual idea. In many ways, Capella and the Hacking for Defense program is starting to build out what does an actual national security innovation base look like? And what's interesting too, going back to Capella, is that, they're truly dual use. They can look at Kim Jong UN's NU sites, but they can also look at change over time when it comes to climate change and so on. Extreme relevance and it all started with a student team at Stanford in this course. And then another example is, there was a student who was a Master's in engineering student. And because he took Hacking for Defense, He decided to go to Army OCS. Officer candidate school. Now I'm a former army officer. I could say that's quite an amazing, transformative process to make that kind of decision. But, he decided to do that. And he was first generation here in the United States, was never exposed to, national service and the type of problems that the Army and other military services are facing. And it changed his life truly. And those are like the two types of things. We want people to think about, the opportunities to serve the country and society. And we want people to think about how can we, build our economy further, but in ways that, as we discussed before, better overall society and there are many other examples beyond that.

Callye Keen: 11:51

I think there's a growing trend, and we see this with Defense works. So Soft Works, F Works and, DIU. Hopefully a lot of those programs get better budgets and more funding, more wins under their belts. But even in the contracting side, things like Being able to have an OTA versus a FAR contract or a CSO, or even using CRTAs, different contracting vehicles to get money in innovator's hands to quickly solve these problems. Because coming from the academic or commercial environment, I can get an NSF grant, I can go through an S B I R process and pretty quickly get research funded, I could go to an innovation challenge, or I could even go to a corporate partner who wants this thing so badly that they'll just cut you a check for it to even exist. And then when we go to the D o D world, there's a lot of compliance and it's very slow. moving. So Do you see that? I think there's some real headway that's being made where, say a need knower, someone who owns that problem can go and fund someone to do the research and provide a solution within months instead of the 30 month, FAR process.

Alex Gallo: 13:05

My perspective is, when I was on the House Art Services Committee, I worked for Chairman Mac Thornberry and, he was one of the, chairman who really has pushed acquisition reform, and he's the one who's authorized OTAs in the National Defense Authorization Act. Of course with his counterparts on the center Armed Service Committee side, and I was there during that time period. And I think it's been an important tool to open up other avenues, like you said, for non-traditional companies to be able to get on contract quickly. I think what's missing here still. Is, I think the authorities are there. I think even the best practice is the know-how to both still align with the FAR where it makes sense and to, have adjusted FAR guidelines. When it comes to OTAs, I think it's the human side that's still lagging and in particular it's acquisition officers at the D O D that one are disconnected unfortunately from the war fighter problems and needs. And so often the writing requirements documents that are, and I mean this obviously respectfully, I don't mean this in a bad way, but that are like in an ivory tower or disconnected, in isolation, in a vacuum from what actual war fighter needs are. And in this respect, hacking for defense. I keep coming back to the program that we run, but the deliberate purpose of the course is to connect to end users. And do the discovery of what their actual needs are. And in many ways that's a different kind of requirements writing process. And so I think still one acquisition officers need to be more connected to end users, war fighters, whoever is where the need is. The second thing they need is, I think, more education around, risk tolerance and risk acceptance and understanding from almost like an investor perspective. How do I triage and understand risks associated with acquiring different things? And third and finally, and the final analysis, what the DoD has is buying power. And, again, as someone who worked on the N D A A and my colleagues on the defensive props committees, DOD has a very, expansive budget, to the tune of about 850 billion a year. They have the opportunity to really send market signals, and I think what has not happened is, putting more non-traditional companies on production contracts and. Buying a lot of these things and then using them to figure out, what is the best fit for the war fighter's needs. I think both sending that market signal will help companies both sustain themselves and get other investors behind them. And I think it's a better process towards being more connected to the war fighter needs, not theoretically thinking about what the requirements could be, but actually purchasing something for a time period. And, connecting it to the war fighters. I know that's happening. In different ways. My former colleague from the Hask, Doug Bush, he's now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for acquisition technology and logistics in the US Army. He's pushed that kind of approach and so there are areas that they're doing it, but I still think the human side, and I think that's, with acquisition officers requires training. It might require a different kind of hiring profile, a different kind of person. And going back to my original point is we are generating tons of talent and many of these students, about a thousand a year that are coming out of our courses. They could be great candidates for these type of jobs who could see the nexus points between industry and and government needs.

Callye Keen: 16:26

I see more wins coming from the headline companies like Shield AI and Andrell, and as there's a few unicorns in the space. My hope is that it attracts more people that want to get into it, and with that bolus of talent on the supply side will then be connected because of the media attention or you think of just the content and the talking points that will be more universally connected with the demand side of that. I just came from soft week, two weeks ago, and it's one of the few chances that you have of really just at, in mass talking to hundreds and hundreds of operators, problem owners, and you can see the traditional side of the market and you can see the new side of the market, engaging, collaborating, cooperating, building things on spec to just say, Hey, here's something really cool guys. What do you think about this? What's terrible about this idea? And then the traditional side and it makes sense. The acquisition process is made to be segmented and it's made to be very risk adverse for a lot of good reasons, like very intentional reasons. But I like what you said about risk and my opinion doesn't matter at all. It's just as somebody that has spent the last 20 years in the industry and, works with startups, if we can segment the risk and say, let's go to Hacking for Defense and let's have a small program and let's engage some people that are in the community and the students and bring them some problems to just see what happens. We can put all the risk in a bucket. And we can choose if we want to pull something out of that bucket or just everyone learned. And it developed talent. I think that's what's so appealing to me about what, you've been doing.

Alex Gallo: 18:15

Yeah, I totally agree and what's interesting about Hacking for Defense is it's all evidence based. And the final analysis, like the way we're currently we're writing requirements. Documents are not, and not that it's not evidence-based, but it's not connected to evidence from the end user. All the evidence from the discovery process and the Hacking for Defense program actually provides decision confidence for leaders to actually apply their authority and resources towards it. And I agree with you. I think Hacking for defense, this type of approach is like, if you could think about as a pipeline is like far at the left of the pipeline where you're sourcing early pain points and needs. From the war fighter, if we're using the DoD kind of lingo and validating those problems and validating those points and providing a ton of evidence to actually write a requirements document that is connected to the end user and it provides a lot more decision confidence as a result for leaders. In short, I think the risk goes down using this approach. Not up.

Callye Keen: 19:10

Especially because there's a large group of people that want to participate at low to no cost. Great, really smart students engage people in the industry, local talent, different perspectives. So being able to tap into that is something that you're only gonna get through a community based program like that versus, Maybe a more traditional think tank or research contract. How does all this play into cybersecurity? Because you have a significant role at George Mason University. I've done lots of work with Mason because they're so close. You have a significant role there, and I'm wondering how all this plays into the massive changes in the industrial base. There's just massive changes in what cybersecurity even means now. How does all this play into the other side of what you do?

Alex Gallo: 20:01

Yeah. And so, Thank you for asking about it. So I'm a fellow with the National Security Institute at George Mason University. That's run by Jamil Jaffer who's another great person and part of my former Hill Network. National Security Institute's a great organization and they have A great network. In terms of, my work there and connected to cybersecurity, I think it's just still remains consistent with what I was describing here around Hacking for Defense is, when we say hacking, we're really meaning constructive problem solving. And I think on the National Security Institute at George Mason, they are trying to find again, disruptive or constructive problem solving ways to get ahead of the threat we face from entities like China, for example. The great thing here, and at least in the Washington DC where there's usually hyper-partisanship, I would say we probably haven't had as big of a consensus around the pacing challenge of China, since the Cold War. I think a lot of folks are thinking about not how do we just keep up with China, and I think that's what many of us in the national security space and policy space think that's what we're doing. Maybe keeping up, so to speak, we're ahead, but I mean, just keeping up with that and how do we get around it And Steve Blank and Pete Newell, they refer to this as the Red Queen problem. This is a reference to through the looking glass in the Alice Wonderland series where Alice says to the Red Queen. You know my world, when I run, I get somewhere, I'm paraphrasing, and the red queen says, well, here it takes all the running You can, to just stay in the same place in a lot of ways the government, and this is true, I think with folks who work, and are affiliated with the National Security Institute as well, feel like we're just doing all the running we can just the same place. We need to really think differently. And one way we need to think differently is, a lot of folks have noted, China has its authoritarian, non-democratic version of Civ-Mil Fusion, government directed, Integration of the civilian and military sectors. obviously in our country, and we don't have that exact approach. But I do see Hacking for Defense and a lot of other programs. This is, I think also what National Security Institute tries to do is trying to tie together civilians out there in society that might not be connected to our national security, to our national security. Because in the file analysis, that's how we're able to have a robust economy, a civil society and so on, and the freedoms that we enjoy. And so a lot of it is less about cybersecurity, although that's some of the problems that we're working on. I think it's more of this larger ideas of connecting society, but in a democratic way. Obviously not in a authoritarian way.

Callye Keen: 22:30

if uh, people wanna dive in deeper. Steve Blank wrote a great article explaining really the difference in investment of how China takes their finances and puts it into innovation. And of course, all their innovation is for. primary purpose of it is Fed-Civ if you want to think of it. So they're investing to the tune of a trillion dollars into these innovation centers where that exceeds what our complete DoD budget is. And, it exceeds what our total venture capital investment is. So imagine we're not investing in any commercial startup, we're investing multiple of that, but specifically in innovations that have dual use for the Red Queen problem is something disturbing to read through Steve Blank's thoughts on that, but definitely compelling way to look at it.

Alex Gallo: 23:26

Yeah. And if I could just add on that a little bit. I completely agree. And We're going down this track and we've been discussing this, grand strategy, the geopolitical features of why connecting society with national security challenges is important. The other thing from my perspective, I think this is just good for local environments. So one of the things that I've noticed and I've written about in our country is, and, it's been widely recognized is right the change of our economy and how some places in our country have been left behind, for various different reasons and changes from globalization and so on. And I think one of the problems sometimes is that at the local level in societies, there's a waiting mentality sometimes waiting for solutions to come. And I think a lot of folks actually don't want to wait and actually don't expect to wait. But that's the dissonance that we have within our politics. And I think a dissonance with our government is that folks feel like they're waiting, waiting, waiting, and nothing's coming. And I think what's good about this hacking for approach is that I actually think it empowers people at the local level to take action in an entrepreneurial way and rebuild their environments. Exactly where they're at. You don't have to wait. And that's why one of the things I'd like to do, is do more of that is bring this approach to, the hyper-local level. The grand strategy stuff still fits and it's important and it is part, I think it is a strategic innovation capability for our country and it could be part of supporting a larger strategy, but I think it's also just good for rebuilding our society at the local level. I think it could empower and you know, one of the things I would love to see, I grew up in a, small business, entrepreneurial family. It's very hard at the local level. I know how hard and challenging it is, but I think if people had more agency and felt like they had the tools to have that more agency at the local level, I think it actually would be very transformative for our country as well.

Callye Keen: 25:21

You're opening up a conversation that we could easily have for another couple hours because there's a few topics about sustainability, about rural impact, about community innovation that I'd love to have, but I'm gonna let you go. We'll wrap up for today, but this has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show.

Alex Gallo: 25:43

Great. Thank you so much for having me.

Callye Keen: 25:45

before we go, where's the best place for people to follow what you're doing? Common Mission project, and the other initiatives that we talked about.

Alex Gallo: 25:54

Thank you. Two websites commonmission.us and h4d.us are places where you can find more information on our programs and the organization. And certainly we're on Twitter and LinkedIn and would love for people to engage us there.

Callye Keen: 26:09

Thank you so much, Alex. Really appreciate it.

Alex Gallo: 26:11

Thank you so much.