How To Sell to the Dept of War – The 2025 PEO Directory by Steve Blank

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.

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 pitch you weren’t getting funded.

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.

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 building a series of minimal viable products and developing a path to deployment.

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.

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.

The U.S. has spent the last 70 years making massive investments in basic and applied research. Government funding of research started in World War II driven by the needs of the military for weapon systems to defeat Germany and Japan. Post WWII the responsibility for investing in research split between agencies focused on weapons development and space exploration (being completely customer-driven) and other agencies charted to fund basic and applied research in science and medicine (being driven by peer-review.)

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.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is not always a smaller/cheaper version of your final product. Defining the goal for a MVP can save you tons of time, money and grief.