National Security Entrepreneurship: Arun Gupta

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Arun Gupta is a venture capitalist, lecturer at Stanford University and and adjunct Entrepreneurship professor at Georgetown. He's also the CEO of the Noble Reach foundation, which focuses on catalyzing and inspiring a renewed spirit of national service through innovation. His expertise spans the worlds of emerging technology, entrepreneurship, public policy, venture and finance. His book Venture Meets Aligning People, Purpose and Profit to Innovate for a Better World delves into the intersection of technology, innovation, venture capital and government. We'll be right back after a quick break. I'm Andy Makridis and this is Intelligence Matters. Gather life saving intelligence while keeping warfighters out of harm's way. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, maker of the Predator and Reaper, is the leading designer and manufacturer of cutting edge unmanned aerial systems and mission solutions. At any hour of any day, their innovative multi mission aircraft are ready to deliver unmatched actionable intelligence over the world's harshest terrains. Industry leading endurance, modular designs and advanced autonomy make General Atomics Aeronautical Systems unmanned Aircraft the perfect partner for every role in every domain. Learn more@generalatomics.com welcome back Arun. Welcome. It's a real pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Thank you Andy. Great to be here with you.

In the introduction I mentioned your book Where Venture Meets Mission and I guess the first and obvious question is what inspired you to write Where Venture Meets Mission? And then maybe how did your background in venture capital lead you to explore this intersection of venture and government?

Well Andy, look for context. My father was in public service or still in public service for 45 years in able C System Command. So public service has been in our family. I spent my professional capital, as you pointed out, the bulk of that being at Columbia Capital, and the latter half of that time was investing at this intersection of mission, tech and entrepreneurship. In 0809 we started looking at dual purpose technology cybersecurity, specifically in the early days and primarily around the thesis that the velocity of our adversarial threats was outpacing the procurement cycle and so there would be a need for dual purpose. And in investing in that period you saw both the magic when you could make it work and bring that entrepreneurial innovation to government, but you also saw the challenges with it. And then as I started thinking about my second chapter and other things to do, I was starting to teach at Georgetown Entrepreneurial Finance and I started teaching a class at Stanford And Washington called Valley Meets Mission. And the class Valley meets Mission was really around the notion of how do we take the entrepreneurial spirit of the Valley and tie that to build mission oriented problems, target that around mission oriented problems here in D.C. and specifically I would riff a little bit about I didn't want these students taking their talent and energy around and building the next Candy Crush 3.0. But how do we think about inspiring them to build for profit companies that solved real societal and mission oriented problems? And I bring in your colleague Mike Morell was generous enough to always come in and speak to the class. He would say, what I love about your class, Roon, is 45% of the students have a negative perception of government. The other 45 have a negative perception of entrepreneurial capitalism. And you're trying to land the plane by the end of the course. That we need both if we're going to solve big problems. Sure enough, we would. And we would because we would bring in speakers like Michael to talk about their experience and really unpack what may be ill informed biases that students had. And in doing that, we would see students kind of rescind banking consulting offers and kind of go into this world. And you also realize we didn't really have a language around it. We would say public sector, private sector, we would say not for profit, for profit. These are very binary ways that we talk about like your choices and this idea of there's something being in between that was mission and venture and could be for profit didn't quite have a language and wasn't visible to them. It was obvious to those of us that were investing in it. But these opportunities didn't present themselves on campus. And while teaching that class, I would see Covid hit the Ukraine, war was initiated and you just saw the palpable desire of students to do more mission oriented work. And to answer your question of what inspired us to write the book then was it dean of Georgetown had said, rune, given what you're seeing and what you're talking about, have you thought about writing a book to amplify the message for more students? And I didn't know really what that would entail, but that set us down a journey and having close colleagues and friends supporting like Mike Morrell and Chris Darby at Inkutel and others and Steve Boucher really meant a lot. And so we went down a path of trying to collect the stories of folks coming into our class and then others that we got to know through the journey. And that was really the essence of writing the book. And it was really, how do we harness that entrepreneurial energy from the vent ecosystem, along with the optimism of students, and try to rebuild that infrastructure to have them go build solutions with societal value led by government.

So, Arun, one of the interesting things you just said at the beginning was something about procurement. And it does feel like the government, and this is a sweeping generalization, and I guess I don't mean it to be, but it does feel that the government is, is geared in thinking about acquisition hardware. I don't think they're geared for acquisition software. It's a very different approach. And if we're going to go down this path of software defined warfare, as you've seen from the Pentagon, I think that whole acquisition mindset has to begin to change. Again, an overly broad generalization characterization. Do you think the same or do you think we've made that shift?

I would say we're in the process of making the shift, Andy. Look, you know, one of the things we try to point out even in our class is it's hard to just say all of government, you know, because government is ultimately, you know, comprised of a number of organizations and at its most molecular level, it's just made up of people. And so you have to humanize government. And so the reason I say that, Andy, is I think there are pockets of government that are making that shift. And even as we look to engage, people ask, like, how do you decide who do you go after? And I go. Or who to collaborate with? And I go. It's easy. It's all about leadership. There are leaders that think this way. Right. That you're talking about. And those leaders recognize that we're in a different era and we need to think about how we procure differently. You know, I think Space Force is very progressive around how they think about this, you know, and look, they have the benefit of not having as much legacy right in the background.

Right. They don't have the. They don't have baggage.

They don't have baggage. But with that, you know, comes at least people being able to point to a model of something that's working. And it's hard for that not to have a ripple effect on other agencies because when they see them able to do it, you can start to imagine the art of the possible. And that's a lot of what we try to write about in the book really isn't about coming down and kind of putting theory out there, but a lot about is putting a spotlight on storytelling of positive stuff, like, hey, this stuff is happening today. The real question we're posing is, isn't can we do this? It's why don't we do more of it? Right. And what's keeping us from doing more of it? So, you know, I think we're in that period of transition, but I do think organizations like that that are taking, you know, they're more progressive with how they think about this, you know, play an important role.

So, you know, maybe it'd be useful just to reflect back on the past a little. What do you see as the similarities and maybe differences in the partnerships that existed between government and the private sector, let's say beginning of Cold War versus today?

Yeah. So I think, look, I think the, the similarities that existed was always around how do we take our best and brightest to solve big problems in those best and brightest? I think disproportionately, probably during the Cold War, we're sitting in large companies or inside of government. If you look during that period of time, we didn't have the same vibrant entrepreneurial venture ecosystem that we do today. And so I think the ease of collaborating had fewer variables. I think the overarching motive around how do we bring our best and brightest around these problems and our best innovations around these problems. It's a common through line. I think what's radically different today, though, is that that innovation ecosystem is much more dispersed today in our country. And I think that's positive. I think that's great. I think that's why we continue to be a leader globally. But now it's in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, it's in the tech ecosystem. It's in. It could be a venture capital portfolio company, it could be folks that identify a unique problem and go after it that aren't part of a large company. What does that do, though, that changes the way that we need to think about how public private partnerships, and this is what we try to talk about a little bit in the book, is that our models of public private partnerships haven't really been updated. We still talk about it in the context implicit in that is that it's government collaborating with large company, which is very different than government collaborating with ventures. 100% a large company has the resources they have are much more meaningful. They're fully funded, they're profitable, they're spending off cash. A venture, by definition, many times isn't even fully funded. They're milestone funded. They've done their Series A round and now they're waiting to get to the Series B round. How government interacts with them is going to be very different. They may not have the same. And we list out a number of uncertainties and show examples of how companies are overcoming that. But how those ventures interact with government are incredibly different. So I think that's what we pose in the book. I think the second piece of it, honestly, is the talent level. Andy. I think back during the Cold War, there was still a deep prestige of your best and brightest tech talent going into government or starting a career there because you got to work and do the, you know, the most innovative things and around innovative projects. And I think while that still holds true, I still think the mo, you know, so many, so much of the most interesting problems to go solve are inside. I think we've gone through decades now where we've kind of said like, oh, we don't, you know, you don't want to be going into government. And that's had an impact on how we draw our top talent going in. And we can talk about this later, but that's a little bit of what we're trying to do with the foundation, which was an outcome of the book, where we have a half a billion dollar endowment. It's like, how do we inspire this next generation to think about starting their career again in government and go tackle some of the most difficult and toughest problems and add a level of prestige to that in a meaningful way? I think those are the similarities. I think the overarching objective of why we're collaborating and the need for collabor collaboration is very similar. I think the how of collaboration is very different, primarily because the structural piece of the power innovation ecosystem has evolved over the last three, four decades.

So, you know, Arun, Amy Ziggurt, who, you know well for a number of years now, has been talking about the, what she calls the suit hoodie divide, reference to the often divergent views of Washington and, and Silicon Valley when it comes to national security matters. Do you think we've made progress in the last few years in closing that gap? She talked about this back in 2017 originally and then maybe as a second part to that. How do we recover the common ground that maybe used to exist before?

Yes, it's a great question. And look, Amy's a good friend, highly respected, and we even talk about that in the book of her comments. And look, I think she's spot on. I think the notion of the hoodie and suit divide is real. But to your question of how do we get here, I think part of the issue is what we need are more dual citizens. I was on a panel with a gentleman, Nan Mulchandani, who's the CTO at the CIA, and we were on a panel together, and he identified himself as being a dual citizen. And I think most people thought he meant Indian American, when in truth, what he really meant is, I'm a citizen of the Valley, I built four companies in the Valley, and I'm a citizen of D.C. i've been at the Jake and now I'm at the CIA. And I feel like I'm part of both communities. And I think that's a really powerful way of thinking about it because we need more people like him. And I say dual citizens because I think typically when we bring in private sector folks in the government, we bring them in as expats, as opposed to dual citizens. There's a meaningful difference because I think dual citizens actually come in and have a shared belonging in both communities, whereas expats are kind of knowing that they're there for two years. They're not going to learn the language, they're not going to learn the traditions, the people, the processes. And there's a little bit of a hierarchy, right? The expats kind of come in and say, this is what you should be doing. And where a dual citizen is like, hey, let me show, come, let me, let me take you on a tour and go meet my family back, wherever that may be. And that's more powerful. And implicit in the dual citizenship is that you're rebuilding trust. Because, you know, I think the power of that is that you can take your team from D.C. and take them to the Valley, right, Like you would if you were going back to your. Your homeland and have them meet your local friends. And your local friends will be much more open to them than they would someone typically coming and visiting for no other reason that, you know, they trust you. And so I think where we're starting to make progress, Andy, is we're starting to see more folks that would maybe in leadership roles that would look at themselves as maybe being viewed as dual citizens. You look at Doug Beck at DIU is a great example of that. Here's someone that really is entrenched in the Valley, respected with folks in the Valley and likewise in Washington. I think we need more of that in positions of authority coming in, and we need to give them authority. I think the second piece, though, is we need to do this at scale. We also need to be not only looking at just bringing in senior folks, but we need to be cultivating a pipeline, a dynamic system of folks that are coming into government this way. And again, this is a lot of what we're trying to hope catalyze with the work we're doing at noblereach but is bringing early career scholars mindset of your top AI, cyber bio materials, even finance students coming in to government for one or two years early on learn the language of government, learn the problem sets of government, learn the opportunities of how to collaborate. Much like you would like a Teach for America program, right? And some may stay and some may move on and go back into the private sector but hopefully they're all going to be, you know, a disproportionate of them will be change makers into public service and gain an appreciation and also a desire to stay engaged. And so I think, you know, at the core we need to take a two pronged approach of having more people that are identifying themselves as dual citizens coming in at senior levels and helping build trust across those middle layers. But we need to, and this is the part I think we have not done a really good job of over decades, is really foster a community of young folks coming in. Look, I think in a lot of the technological advances and through lines that we're seeing, specifically AI, I would argue that someone young, a master student coming out of a top college campus probably is 80 to 90% there somewhere that has 10 years of experience. Yet we always go recruit for 10 years of experience when we're looking in government. I'd give these kids the opportunities to come in and learn how to apply what they know within this context.

Arun, early in the book you have a great phrase and it's the optimism of entrepreneurs and the scale of government. Is that the magic recipe here for the future? Is that, is that the thing we should just grab onto?

Yes. I say this because when I look at the, when I think about what our superpowers are in this country, I think of them in two ecosystems. One is our ability to create talent. I think of our higher ed ecosystem and I think of our entrepreneurial ecosystem, our ability to innovate. Both are deeply cultural, both are deeply difficult to just replicate by our adversaries. Both have a common through line, which is optimism. I say if you're a 22 year old on a college campus, you should be optimistic and if you're an entrepreneur, you have to be optimistic. I think if we can start to rebuild the infrastructure to connect both of those to the scale and reach of government and recognize that the only way we solve the largest of problems, whether it be climate or national security or cybersecurity or food or health, it's going to require a Renewed partnership between entrepreneurs and government that I do think is our secret sauce. And that's what we should be doubling down on as a country. And as we go into this next wave of great power competition, I think that's where those strategic superpowers of ours, you know, can really help us differentiate in a way that no other, you know, I think autocratic adversary can compete with.

So that's a, It's a great point and one that I wanted to raise next. So we've talked about all this, and I guess, you know, if you're listening, you're like, well, why should I be worried about all this? And I think many of us agree with the sentiment expressed by Jordan Blaisek of America's Frontier Fund that we're at the dawn of a new great power technology race waged between democracies and autocracies. So Arun, you know, we hold high ground to technological high ground at the moment. How do we keep it?

Yeah, look, I think, I think the way we do keep it is thinking about how we create this renewed partnership, right? If we don't, you know, have government, have the infrastructure connected to bringing in our best talent, and if we don't have the on ramps to connect them to what I think is our latent army of sorts, which is our entrepreneurs, we're missing an opportunity because then we're going to play the how many. The quantity game of how many people can we put at the problem. And I don't think that's how we innovate. I think that for us, it's around the creativity that we can put around the problem, and that comes from the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Look, entrepreneurs are trained. It's a mindset. This isn't about outcomes. Entrepreneurs are about training to build the plane while you're flying it. In a world that's moving so quickly with technological change, geopolitical change, societal change, environmental change, we can't predict what five years looks like from now, right? So the planning models don't work. The models that work are kind of. We got to constantly be testing and learning and we have to accept a level of, you know, that there'll be failure in that process. We just need to contain those and then double down on what's working. But that's, that's the way we're, you know, I think that's the magic spirit for this country. And I think, look, it's deeply what this country is about. Like what, what makes, you know, the US So special is the entrepreneurial spirit. And, you know, to me, it feels that that's sitting right there in front of us. And now how we harness that's going to be up to us. And that's going to be a collective societal thing. There's not just government's responsibilities, entrepreneurs responsibilities, but also academia plays an important role. Like how we talk about this and educate our students to be thinking about having these cross disciplinary careers is important.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with Arun Gupta.

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So run. One of the wonderful facts in your book, and something that I'd never really thought about before is you said the US Government is one of the biggest venture investors in the world and responsible for nearly all the radical innovations of the past century, which is sort of an amazing thing to think about. So in the spirit of what you just sort of said about partnership and drawing government and entrepreneurs closer together, let me ask you for some specifics for each group. And I guess what I want to get at is maybe what are the three things that each should know about the other? Maybe start with what entrepreneurs should know about the government and then we'll do the reverse.

Yeah, it's a great question, Andy. Look, what entrepreneurs should know about the government. One, they should approach the government with a level of humility. The folks that you're talking to on the other side probably actually know more than you give them credit for. Especially when you're talking about deep research, you're talking about key areas around national security. I do think there's many times a sense of arrogance that many times entrepreneurs will approach talking to government about. Right. And so I think that would be one, two is really understanding a shared language, right? Like going back to dual citizen model, you know, many times it's being able to understand that, you know, government is doing some of the same things. They may just be using a different language with how they talk about it. And it's, you know, it's important for you to be able to understand their language as much as it is them understanding yours. And look, I think third is really Putting yourself in their shoes and really understanding how do you make them, you know, how do you fulfill their mission? Right. I think most, most entrepreneurs many times approach it about here's what you can do for me and, or also build their companies where they're. The government is a, is a hobby, not, not the main. And I think entrepreneurs need to be thinking more deeply about this, about building their business model so that, you know, government's at the center of it, right. In the applications that there's. Because that comes through overall.

Now how about the reverse? What, what, what do you think governments should know and maybe they don't? About entrepreneurs.

Yeah. So you know, government and entrepreneurs. So I think one, I like to say what government should know about entrepreneurs is what entrepreneurs want isn't capital from government. What they're looking for is contracts. And this is a subtle but important distinction. I think many times governments feel like when they're working with small companies, you know, let's give them grants, let's get them, you know, money so it's non dilutive and it's good for them, they can go out there and do something with it and raise capital. The fallacy in that and having been a VC for 20 years is we would see companies come to us all the time saying they got a Ciber grant and et cetera and now we should back them with venture capital funding. And we're like, unfortunately, that's great that you got the grant. But what we're looking for is demand signal and demand signal comes in the form of contracts. Like if government gives you a contract for a service or solution or a product, that's more meaningful to us because now we can start to gauge how can that contract grow, what can it be? How many more of those are there? Like that? What's an addressable market look like? And I think this is really important because I think if you look at where we've seen really positive collaboration between government and entrepreneurs and two big examples would be SpaceX and how we rebuilt our space industry. And then what we did in Operation Warp Speed with Moderna, it came when we established outcomes and let entrepreneurs go after it. So that's one. I think the second with entrepreneurs is with entrepreneurs. Talk outcomes, not inputs, tell entrepreneur, because that's how entrepreneurs think. They're like, what outcome are you looking for? And let me figure out how to go provide you a solution to fulfill that outcome. You know, going to entrepreneurs and saying, hey, we need 10 people with these credentials to do XYZ, you're immediately limiting the Creativity. Right. And especially when you say those 10 people have to have 15 years of experience and have to have a master's and you've reduced your pool dramatically. You know, we had a company that I was involved with called 1901. I was on the board and you know what they were doing, it's basically providing managed services, but was very outcome focused. Their team was based in southwest Virginia and many of them didn't even have college degrees. They were getting upskilled. A lot of the Celtic government was like, focus on the outcomes, tell us what you need managed and we'll take care of managing them at those SLAs. How we do that should be less a concern. In fact, in doing that, they could provide a better delivery at a lower cost. So I think that would be the second thing I would say for government to be thinking about. So the first is contracts, the second is outcomes, and the third I would say is entrepreneurs generally want to help, they care about the mission. I think there's sometimes a sense of like, oh, because you're an entrepreneur and you're out there, you really don't care. And you know, and look, I will say, are there folks out there that don't? Absolutely. But I think the vast majority of them, the reason that they're doing what they're doing is that they're trying to develop solutions for the mission and they're hoping the money follows the mission versus the other way around. And I think that important, it's important to have that trust that their incentives are aligned with yours, because that's how you can then co design solutions that could be mutually beneficial.

So that was great. Arun, the point that you made about the government sort of saying, hey, I want 14 people to do X is so spot on. It's just in the DNA. That's the way sometimes the government thinks they don't think about, well, here's the outcome I'm looking for.

Yeah, they're looking for the inputs that they. And when you start looking at the inputs, what you're also implicitly saying, not explicitly, is that you think you know what the solution is.

Exactly right.

And then you've now kind of like handcuffed the creativity for the private sector to come up with something that could be much more advantageous to all parties.

So along these lines, let's just talk about one thing that seems to be a major difference, and that's, as you and I know, the government often looks for bespoke solutions, customized, if you will, solutions. Venture wants scale. So these two things are sometimes antithetical to each other. So how do we bridge this what appears to be a big gap?

So look, I think a few things are happening. I think one, there's a question of what really needs to be bespoke and what doesn't, right? Does the entire stack need to be bespoke or does the, you know, is there something at the very top? And I think we're starting to see that movement take place. So 90% of an application, a solution, et cetera, can be, you know, scalable across industries. And then, you know, and maybe the, the final 10% can be bespoke. Whereas I think before we were all 100% needed to be bespoke to my needs. I think we're starting to see that shift take place. I think what we're also starting to see is a generational shift on how the folks inside of government are starting to procure. And what I mean by that is you're starting to see folks that probably are, you know, late 30s to late 50s, you know, now in these decision making, procurement processes. And the reason that's relevant is that these folks grew up in the digital age, right? And how they consume and they buy stuff is, they're, they're used to it in a very different context and they're used to things not necessarily all needing to be custom to them. And so I think we're starting to, I think that it's why I'm optimistic and bullish around where we're going, irrespective of, and this isn't a political statement of which party is in power. I think this is more of a generational comment of like, I think this, that generation is going to be thinking about how do you consume technology very differently? And I think that's not turning back for anything. It's going, it's going to be going, it's going to accelerate. So I think, I think that's a big opportunity as well. I think third, I think as we're now developing tech, we're now developing things in a much more modular way so that you can pull building blocks and Lego pieces together to come up with your solution that allows government to feel like they're getting something bespoke, but industry to feel like they're still building something that could be replicated. And I think that's a meaningful change from what we had even 10 years ago. So I think those three things to me are starting to bridge that gap so that the client can still feel like they're seeing a custom solution while a majority of what's being built there can have the essence of being able to scale in a meaningful way.

So, Arun, one of the the bright spots that you mentioned in the book that I think goes along these lines is in Q Tel. And you know, I'll be interviewing Steve Boucher here in a couple of weeks for the podcast, but maybe you could say a few words about what In Q Tel is and why you think that model works.

Yes, look, Steve Boucher and his predecessor, Chris Darby, are close friends and have a lot of respect for what they've built and have watched them change that model into the powerhouse that it is today. When I got into venture capital, In Q Tel was a place that was trying to almost again provide capital to companies and in doing so, in a weird way competed with VCs. If you look at what they were trying to do, really their purpose was how do we get the best venture technologies connected to government? Well, when you're competing with VCs, the VCs aren't opening up their portfolio to have you invest with them in the same way that they were looking for. So they were actually suffering from the adverse selection problem. I think the brilliance of what both Steve and Chris have built over at In Q Tel is they realized early on that what really VCs are looking for are contracts. They want NRE contracts to be able to gauge like, hey, can our companies, is there a role for them in the intelligence community? How do we serve that bridge? Because we're not ready to make the investment necessary unless we have some kind of demand signal that says this is of interest. I think that's the important role that In Q Tel has played is really looking deeply at the intelligence community and being able to bring more contracts to bear to the, to the portfolio companies and leveraging that, that trust. And so now if you look at a number, you know, all of a sudden now with a vc, it flips on its head that I now want to take any of my companies and show them to In Q Tel, because I know they'll know best if it's even worth their time to go to the intelligence community, what the market opportunity is like. And if they're involved in some capacity, it's an important brand. It's an important brand to have and an incredible partner to have. So I think what Steve and Chris have built is really at the core, what they built is a bridge of trust between the venture community and the intelligence community. And that trust is built by the people that they've also been able to recruit and Bring on. And people that are really wanting to be part of the mission, they're not there just to kind of use this as a stepping stone to get into venture capital. This is a destination for them and to be at this intersection.

Thanks, Arun. So, you know, we have a lot of students who listen to the podcast who are thinking about careers. Hopefully some of your students are listening. And in the second last chapter or so of your book, you talk about how to have an impact with your career in the last few minutes. Can you say a few words about that?

Sure. I mean, I think what we tried to hit Andy in the last few chapters and look, we profile your colleague Mike Morell in there as well, but Nate Fick, who's now the first cyber ambassador at State and was someone that I worked closely with and when I was in venture at Endgame, he was our CEO at Endgame, a cybersecurity company. And what we tried to profile is that Nate has a great quote where he says, my career never made sense looking forward, it only made sense looking backwards. I think it paraphrasing a Steve Jobs quote. And the point being we want students to embrace having nonlinear careers. You don't have to be just doing one thing for 30 years. I think this is how this generation is thinking. Yet our academic processes still wire them to kind of pick a track and what are you going to, you know, which track are you on? And I think, you know, what I was surprised by was the power of the class I was teaching was really around just showing them that the power is at the intersections. And so I think one is to embrace non linearity and to embrace this notion that you're going to have multiple careers, right? Four or five careers over the course of your career journey. So the reason I start there, Andy, is I think once you can have students embrace that, it becomes more palatable to say and inspire and say, if you're going to have four or five careers, why wouldn't you want one of them to be public service? We're not saying have a career in public service, but have one of your careers be related to public service and find deeply around understand mission, understand what the problems are out there. And when you look at it, we shouldn't be surprised. I think one of the quotes we had in the book or stats is less than 6% of tech workers today are under the age of 30. In government, we have four times as many over the age of 60. Now as a country, we shouldn't be surprised because there's probably, if you look at our engineering schools, very few if any faculty that's ever been in government before, they're not advising students to go there. And there's probably very few agencies that are showing up on campus to recruit. We've kind of created this problem. This is where I say I think academic institutions play an important role about how do we encourage these students to think about doing something. The third I would say, Andy, is that look, I've never having been in venture for 20 years, I've never felt like there's a time like there is today to be able to mobilize capital around people, purpose and profit. And what do I mean by that? I mean 20 years ago, if we were trying to invest at this intersection of government and tech, et cetera, a big round was a two, $3 million Series A round. Today you could go raise 30, 40, $50 million to go solve some of these problems. And that's material, that's meaningful. And it's not just national defense, it's also climate security, it's health tech. And the reason I say that is we need to move away from this notion that to do good it only can be a not for profit. I would argue, and we try to in the book that's really scaled to the size of the problem, it's going to need to be for profits that go after the space. And in that I've got two kids in college, but even with my students I say, look, if you've got a two decade run, why wouldn't you want to put yourself in a sandbox where you could be doing mission oriented work where you feel like you could have real societal value but in the process you can also create financial independence for yourself. That's okay. And that's what this mission venture ecosystem brings too. And I think that we don't talk enough about that at the academic level. We don't talk about it. And what I've realized is so much of this is about we need to model it. We need to show models of people doing it. When I would bring Mike Morell into our class to speak, Andy, I think the most powerful thing was just folks having their own perceptions of what someone in his role would be like. And then after spending an hour, hour and a half with him, realizing that this was someone with humility, thoughtfulness, integrity, he has a great quote that I looked forward to. Mondays, not Fridays. Like you sit there and you see someone that's like, this is what I loved and thrived for, like this is what you want out of your career, right And I think we need to be modeling more of that and getting those stories out there in a meaningful way. And so I think that's what we're trying to hit at with this generation is that there's a real opportunity to change the narrative of what's going on inside a government. But also, you know, that doesn't mean you have to be a, you know, a career. You don't have to have a career in government. And even that needs to be viewed as okay, right? Like that needs to be viewed as acceptable. You know, again, I look at the Teach for America model, I don't know if we're necessarily going in. And those are all folks that are going to be educators for their careers. But what they are is they end up being change makers around education for the rest of their career. You know, and that can be from the outside. And I think that's the same can be true here for government and public service if we have students coming in. And at the long game here, Andy, is this is how we rebuild trust in this country. I mean, look, I think we're at a trust deficit. I think we all recognize that. But I think that's also because people aren't dual citizens. People kind of go into their homeland and just sit there and it's easy to disparage. The other one when we start cross pollinating more is how are we going to rebuild trust in a more meaningful way. And that will, I think, at the core, unleash and harness the entrepreneurial energy which is a real superpower here in this country.

That was great. Thanks, Arun, for a fantastic discussion and thanks for that optimism. Sometimes it's easy, especially when you're dealing with national security stuff, to go to the dark hornet. But it's been a fantastic discussion. Thanks so much, Andy.

Thank you for all that you do. And my with Intelligence Matters, I think it's an incredibly important message that you get out in educating this next generation around, you know, the opportunities that exist. And thank you for having me today.

That was Arun Gupta. I'm Andy macreadis. Please join us next week for another episode of Intelligence Matters. And you can always reach us at intelligence matterspod@gmail.com.

Intelligence Matters is produced by Steve Dorsey with assistance from Ashley Berry and Sophia Rubin. Intelligence Matters is a production of Beacon Global Strategies.