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When thinking of innovation, the first things that usually come to mind are tech startups. It’s not often you think of examples from the US Government or, more specifically, the Department of Defense. Our guest today has unprecedented insight, not only into what it takes to build a startup but how to create a startup-like culture in massive organizations like the US Department of Defense.

Nic Chaillan, has had tremendous success as an entrepreneur and, in 2016, decided to pursue public service when he took a job with the US government. Over the past 20 years, Nic has built hundreds of products that were sold to dozens of Fortune 500 companies. After taking a break from entrepreneurship, Nicolas served as the Chief Software Officer for the US Air Force and Space Force and introduced game-changing innovations to the government’s software operations.

In our conversation with Nic, we discuss agile practices and how he used DevSecOps to elevate the Department of Defense’s software security. We unpack how his experience as an entrepreneur motivated him and why it was a commonsense decision to apply those lessons when he started in government.

Tweetables:
“When you look at the desired outcomes, you realize pretty quickly that DevSecOps is the main enabler to get all of these things done fast while not creating more risk. In fact, I would argue, it reduces both cyber and operational testing risk as well.” — @NicolasChaillan [0:06:30]

“That’s also something to think about: what kind of access control do you want to have in place when it comes to these kinds of tools and how do you mitigate the blast radius?” — @NicolasChaillan [0:16:39]

“I am also a big believer that education and continuous learning has to drastically change and improve.” — @NicolasChaillan [0:33:59]

Nicolas M. Chaillan on LinkedIn