Courageous Leadership & Public Service | Dreamforce 2026

Please welcome Kendall Collins and Secretary Dan Driscoll.

Good morning, everybody.

Wow. Happy Dreamforce to everyone. Did everybody have fun at Usher and Gwen Stefani last night? It's incredible. We had a great time, right? It was awesome. It was awesome. Well, welcome to Dreamforce.

Thank you for having me. First time.

Dan Driscoll, first time at Dreamforce. Thank you. It is an honor, sir, to have you here, and I'm really, really excited for this conversation. You know, you've had such an amazing career, and let me just run down a few things for maybe a few of the audience here in Silicon Valley that don't know you as well. You served in the Army as a Ranger. You were deployed to Baghdad. You're a highly decorated officer. You went to Yale Law School. You're the COO of a venture capital firm at one point, which is incredible, and so many investors and technologists here. And then you were the youngest Secretary of the Army, confirmed at 38 years old in a bipartisan vote. And I guess my first question is, what am I doing wrong with my life at 51 years old?

I'll trade lives if you want, so I'm happy to make this trade.

You've accomplished so much, and I— I just want to start a little bit and talk about your journey, you know, because you've had this journey from North Carolina to the Pentagon. And as University of Virginia alumni, I'm going to keep the jokes brief on the Tar Heels. But tell us about that journey. You know, you started in North Carolina. Like, what was most transformative on that path for you personally?

So growing up in the mountains of North Carolina was this incredible experience. where if you think about things like the SAT as an example, as far as I recall, not a single friend that I knew of studied for the SAT. You just kind of went to the public high school. There was one public high school for the entire county. People drove from an hour in all directions. A lot of the kids there were going to go back and work on the family farm, and it just was never an expectation to go to school. And so it was truly just this community experience. While I was at that school, a rising 9th grader— I was a rising 11th grader, 18 months older— I asked her out on a date. She couldn't date till she was 16. We started dating when she turned 16, and my then-girlfriend, now wife, and I have been together consistently for 23 years, straight through for 23 years.

Congratulations. That's amazing.

Yeah.

You know, you go through these different chapters of your life, you know, as a soldier, as a lawyer, As an investor, Secretary of the Army, maybe tell us what's different about Dan Driscoll today than maybe Dan Driscoll 1.0 or 2.0 in that journey. Where do you think you've changed the most?

I think the most amazing— so my Army story, you go in as a 2nd lieutenant, you spend a couple of years in the Army, and then you get out, and then you go do all these things that people perceive as fancy. You go to a fancy law school, you work at fancy jobs, you work with all the kinds of younger people that people say are the most talented, and they pay them the most. And then 15 years goes by, and you go back to the Army. And so I had this kind of rich set of experiences to compare soldiers that I got to work with starting about 2 years ago to everybody I had worked with in the previous 15, 16 years. And I think my biggest takeaway has been, and I mean this very sincerely, and not to be sycophantically, or not to be sycophantic, they are the most talented set of human beings I've ever spent time with. I would take the average American soldier over anyone I met at any super fancy job 100% of the time to solve a difficult task, because they just have this thing where failure's not an option. They dedicate themselves to the purpose of the mission and the nation in this way.

Yes.

That they take very small things, seriously that they're just— it was like the honor of a lifetime to be around. That's just— that's like the average soldier. Then what's crazy about my job is, by the time you work with— so we have 950,000 soldiers, about 250,000 civilians. By the time you're interacting with me, you are the best of the best of the best. I got to live on an Army base, and my neighbors to the left and right were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or General George, who was our Army Chief of Staff. Staff, or our Sergeant Major of the Army, Mike Weimer. And these men and women had deployed on behalf of our nation, sometimes for 10 total years, 10 years deployed in really difficult mission sets. And so getting to expose my 8- and 10-year-old to these kind of men and women of character was something that, uh, it was truly like the gift of a lifetime.

It's kind of this amazing sorting mechanism. Like, to your point, it's millions of people, You know, they have all this grit, you know, and courage and moments that define them. And it's really interesting, like, you get to, you know, the most senior level, and to your point, like, these people are incredible. They're like 160 IQ people, you know. They're incredibly high integrity. They're family people. They're religious people. And then they're incredibly deep on AI. And I think that's the thing that's really surprised me with Mission Force. talking with all of them. You know, it's a very different organization, though, and maybe let's talk about this for a minute, because I think in Silicon Valley, you know, a lot of people talk about bottoms-up radical candor. You know, everybody's got a very strong voice. The military can feel very hierarchical, right? It's certainly got a chain of command. The chain of command is critical. But how do you sort of engender a community, an environment where there's trust? Where people can disagree, where people can voice, you know, their very strong opinions, knowing still that there's a chain of command, and, you know, there could be repercussions maybe for disagreement?

This is kind of the, the quirk of the design of our military-civilian structure. If you think back to the very beginning of the thing, we didn't want our military to do a coup against our government, and so we basically said, hey, professional soldiers, we're going to overlay over top of you a civilian, that will help prevent against that. So, 251 years goes by, or 250 years goes by, and we have our current setup. It's kind of an odd structure where to do any one decision, it's kind of like launching a nuclear missile. You need 2 keys to be turned. You need the civilian key, who has the technical authority, and a lot of times, like, the funding responsibility, but you also need the soldier key, because they're the actual people that do the thing. who have to buy in and get it into the organization and throughout the places that will make it successful or not. I think what you have over time is historically one of the big flaws of our system has been you get people like me who come in and say, I'm in charge, you're going to do what I say, I'm reflecting the will of the president or Secretary of Defense or war, and they jam it down and it just doesn't work. Or you get the civilians or the soldier side who says, hey, I've been doing this for 40 years, Like, what can you possibly contribute to this decision on how we fight wars in the future? I'm just going to go do my own thing. Unless you get both those keys turning, you're not going to get lasting change. What General George and I, the previous Chief of Staff of the Army, committed to each other before I even came into the seat was, we will never publicly disagree. We will always privately align. If either of us say a thing that the other hasn't heard about, we will just quietly let it go and then fix it on the back end. What we tried to model out for everybody is there was actually this physical manifestation of our 2 offices shared a door. So we're in these offices called SCIFs, like, um, where, where you can talk about top secret information, and there's this door. And depending on the relationship between the Secretary of the Army, the civilian, and the soldier, the door will either be closed, or a couple of secretaries ago, they actually moved furniture in front of the door so you physically couldn't open it. Or for us, we tried to just leave the door open all the time and have a rule that you can come into any meeting you want, and I would love to have you, and that was vice versa. Setting the groundwork for change at the top, I think, helped empower people to feel like both they couldn't get around us, they couldn't exploit that one of us wasn't bought in and go try to slow something down. Then secondly, we constantly tried to say, we will underwrite the risk for your decisions. The current state is not sufficient. The current state in a binary world is a 0. We got to get to a 1. So you acting is necessary. Just go do it. If you do it with the right intentions, when something goes wrong, because it will, we will own the risk.

It's incredible, you know, radical alignment. And then I think this concept, I'm very curious in your perspective, because we recently spoke with a number of key commanders in, you know, different theaters, and one said, Leaders eat risk, you know, and I think there's this alignment around a decision, and then as a leader, like, you have to eat risk. And I mean, how do you think about that? Because you've had to obviously have this incredible alignment, but, you know, take some substantial risks in this journey.

I think, like, what risk practically looks like— I, I think, uh, when, when you talk to these soldier leaders who have deployed for 10 years or however long, When they take risk on, it may literally be their life and limb or the life and limb of their buddies. When you can contextualize that my risk is not that, and so that's real, not to diminish what I have to do, but that is the kind of risk that is life-altering. My risk is more, I get embarrassed publicly, I get fired, I have a senator or congressman call and be angry with me, like I just have a bad day. That's practically my risk. I think how I tried to think about it was, my role is, and this caused some friction you may have read about, is to be the heat shield.

We didn't hear anything about it.

Is to be the heat shield for the soldiers. My job is to absorb that friction on their behalf so they can go forth and do it. Everybody defines their responsibility differently, but the way it would manifest most times is a harsh conversation or a harsh call. Which, like, we're all adults, you're going to be fine.

I love that. Being the heat shield is something that I think resonates even in Silicon Valley and in business. You know, we take risks and the team wants to do things, and as leaders, we're trying to empower the team, and we want the team to be aggressive and try to change things. You know, what other lesson, when you think about the military and you think about Silicon Valley, like, people here do not fully understand the Pentagon? I often think about, you know, myself going back and forth to DC, And I feel like I'm this API, you know, like a human API between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. And if you could push something through that API to Silicon Valley and sort of say, like, you know, what is it here people don't understand? You know, they don't quite get along the— along these veins of kind of, Harry, think about risk and this decision-making. What do people not understand about D.C. and the Pentagon?

I think what is so hard about the Pentagon decision-making structure is for 40 years, we haven't had an existential threat as a nation of any sort of real scale. What basically occurs is you have a now nearly trillion-dollar budget that over time gets eaten away for all sorts of welfare purposes, and they're perfectly good. Jobs in a given district or jobs in a given state or a pet project at a research university, whatever these things are, are good. I recently heard one of our country's more famous technologists talk about their time working with the Pentagon, They said what they learned was, anything they wanted to do, you can never cancel a project, you must just go add on to a different thing, because if you try to cancel, there's all these headwinds, and the system is designed to break it. If you let that play out for 30 and 40 years, it's not that the system isn't optimizing for some outcome, it's just not optimizing for the right outcome in my mind, which is the lethality of our soldiers to go fight and win our nation's wars if and when we need them to. That's the only thing that matters to me. But the entire system is not structured that way. And so in my first probably 2 months on the job, we had these things called defense primes. So they're these big, massive companies. In the '90s, there were 55 kind of companies of size. We told them on this famous thing called the Last Supper, hey, you got to consolidate, because the spending is going to go down because the world is going to be safer. So now there's about 5-ish. And I said on some podcast, Hey, I think it will be— I will define it as success if one of the primes goes out of business in the next 2 years under my watch, and the remaining 4 get stronger. We let in a lot of new entrants. As you might guess, I then got to spend a lot of time with the prime CEOs. What you learn, though, is they're reacting to our bad incentive structure. Just as an example, when we have these continuing resolutions, which sounds like this esoteric budgets, stuff. What basically happens is any project or thing we want to do can't start. You can't do new starts. It seems to be that we as a nation are heading toward our 19th CR in the last 22 years. The practical problem with that is if you're a small and medium business selling to us, our promises to you of, no, hey, we promise in the next budget we're going to buy it because we really want it, you cannot trust them. What the primes have learned to do is do balance sheet arbitrage, and do regulatory arbitrage to basically survive these very bad systems. And so all of this gets us to a place where what I would say across this API is we desperately, desperately need you to work with your government. It is going to be terrible, and you are going to think it's you, and it's not. It's just the system is so catastrophically broken that all of us must fight through this thing together Because the world is really getting more dangerous right now, and we must have commercial products come save us.

Well said. You know, I've been humbled by just learning more about the missions that, you know, very brave people at every level, from the Pentagon out to the edge, are dealing with. And it's, it's an honor to see it up close. And then this challenge of getting through the system, to like make change is really substantial. Nobody has thought more about modernization, I think, maybe than you in maybe a generation, maybe since Ash Carter, I'm not sure. But tell us, you know, kind of you had this vision for modernization, you know, it's really been your hallmark. We're all very grateful because you really tried to break through, I think, a lot of these problems. What's your take on where we are in modernization and what do we need to do next?

The first thing I would say just to level set and make sure the truth is actually out there is we did this thing called Army Transformation Initiative, ATI, probably 60 or 90 days after I got in the seat. If you know a soldier, you should ask them because I think it's hard to be truthful to yourself because you're anchored to the fact that you did the right thing and were successful. That's just a human problem. But I think most people would say that it reallocated $48 billion over the 5-year period. It redid a lot of our command structures. It pushed A lot of decisions that we had struggled to make. Humvees, for an example, we have 105,000 of them. I think we stopped needing them at about 45,000, and just every single year we got jammed with purchasing more Humvees for all sorts of reasons that, again, have nothing to do with lethality, but are perfectly good reasons. And so we just ripped the Band-Aid off. But all of that, I was 45 days in. I didn't even know where the bathroom is. I didn't come up with that plan. It was the soldiers who had been there before me who had been deeply thinking about this problem and trying to figure out what do we actually do to make a big difference. And so my only role was to be the heat shield and unlock what they thought over 40-plus years of experience each was the right thing to do and just go do the thing. And so we started with that. What I found from doing that was because we went after a lot of sacred cows, what ended up happening is it built this momentum where those in the defense space or those on the Hill kind of believed in most instances we were just going to do the thing we said. So it got less painful to make changes. They just believed that we were going to do it. And as an example, I was in Germany with one of our former best generals, General Donahue, CD, and he invites the Ukrainians out to help us train. And for all the reasons that you might expect, they're very good at drone warfare, and we learned a lot from them. And I was talking to them about their command and control system, and how we have a hard time as a nation because of our siloed platforms, which exist for rational reasons, but are bad for soldiers. We have a problem getting the data out to share into one system. And so I asked the Ukrainians if they had a similar problem, and they just looked at me with this very sad look of like an 18-year-old who knows how to use an iPhone, like looking at their 85-year-old great-grandparent who can't zoom in with their fingers. And so I was just humiliated, and I walked out with CD, and I called all of the prime CEOs in the next 6 hours, and I said, hey, we're going to jailbreak every single piece of equipment we, the United States Army, have. I don't care what the IP law on it is. I don't care what contract we've signed. We have 1,000 lawyers. We will see you in court for the next 10 years. We're going to open everything up, and every piece of equipment is going to be able to share information and receive information and commands. That was a Thursday. That Monday in Colorado, we kicked off with 550 software engineers, I think the largest hackathon in human history, and ended up jailbreaking 150 pieces of equipment for our air and air missile defense. What that practically means, like, what does all of this mean for the American soldier? It meant that instead of looking at 8 different screens, which is previously one week before how they would defend themselves, and if you think of the Middle East, this matters, we got it down to 2 screens in a number of weeks, and we have— the Army has continued to run these exercises, to force transformation. And so what I have learned is that basically, the vast majority of things are not first principle problems. And the vast majority of people, particularly with a mission as sacred as what the United States Army has, they want to help desperately. And you just need a couple of leaders who say, I'm going to do this no matter what, we are not going to fail for lack of trying, and we will deal with all of the consequences, legal, moral, and ethical on the other side. But we are going to do what is right.

One, thank you for the courage, I think, to really to break through. What— how do we keep going? Like, how do we get more courage? How do we accelerate modernization? Because it's really like what you're saying, I think, resonates with a lot of people here. Recognize there's different systems. We recognize there's different ways to control data, but getting that into one place, and we'll start talking about AI here in a moment, but, you know, what's the most important thing culturally, maybe, that just still needs to keep happening in the military?

So the Army is these 2 very distinct and discrete functions. One is a large enterprise business that moves people and things around the country and the world, and the other is a killing machine on behalf of the nation. And they're different functions, and they're very important to me. I think most people, or many people at least on the East Coast, want to participate. If they want to come out, they want to get in the mud, get out with our soldiers, build their drone product, and function on the killing machine side. The portion that actually impacts soldiers and their families even more is the enterprise side. And so as an example, and this is because we're here, I'll say it and I'll do a very quick disclaimer. I had nothing to do with the Army transitioning over to Salesforce for a CRM. I don't even know that I knew it was in process, but I happened to be there after it occurred. What I found was that's more on the Army as a business side. The Army had a custom CRM that we managed every single year, and it was terrible. The way that it manifested in soldiers' lives was it was hard to manage their workflow, they had to stay late, and then for these new recruits that were trying to get into the Army, after they signed on, we had a pretty meaningful drop-off during the period where they signed on and before they went. And as long as it's 7+ days out, we can deal with it and slot in somebody else. But if it's within the 7-day window of basic training, we lose an American soldier. That's just— we can't fill the slot in time. And so after transitioning to Salesforce, and we should check that my numbers are right, but I believe it was a couple of months with just a good process, and we cut that down by like 40%. That matters. I mean, that you play that forward a couple of years, that's more soldiers who want to be in the military, who just kind of got cold feet or didn't get the right information, or we, we let them down in that period. And so I'd say the answer, in my opinion, is anything we can do to get the commercial sector partnering with our soldiers to show them what the rest of the world is doing is all it takes. So the American soldier knows when they go into work, they have an iPhone, but they step back 30 years in tech time and everything is broken and everything is— I'm the Secretary of the Army, I have 2 full-time tech people 30 feet from my desk all the time, and it would take 10 minutes to get into my unclassified email and it would constantly crash. It was just every experience is like that for every soldier. My encouragement is keep pushing through and just show them what's possible. My hope is, and I'm pretty sure what you will see, is a very receptive audience on the other side who really does think now is the moment where the, the military is going to change, and we're going to leap forward 2 decades.

We feel it. We feel the change. And I think for a lot of people, they don't know that the military is this industry of industries. You know, you're moving equipment, you're moving people, you're moving families, you're, you know, standing up hospitals, you're standing up schools. And it's kind of incredible when you step back and see the modernization effort that you led. And we're all just so grateful for that. I mean, it has really been incredible. So thank you for your energy on it. I'd love to, you know, talk about AI because we're here at Dreamforce. It feels like it's been the epicenter for the discussion on AI. What a week it's been from my Saturday morning and this essay that Dario wrote to it seemed like Elon and, you know, a number of folks agreed with Dario. Then we had Dario here. We had Jensen here. They gave very different perspectives on the need for innovation and how to go fast, but also how to keep people safe. What's your take on this debate?

So I'll try to anchor it to more the military perspective, which is we don't, um, we don't get a choice what our adversaries are going to do. This sounds very obvious and kind of, um, almost trite to say, but whatever we decide as a nation has no impact on them. They do not care. If you look at what is occurring in conflict now, you have this confluence of factors where essentially people talk about inflection points far too often in society, and with that disclaimer, we are at an inflection point. Within that inflection point, we're in another inflection point within the inflection point, which is you have these very cheap drones that are mass-producible and creatable and usable by non-state actors, And so you take the, the, what you're seeing in Ukraine and Israel with the drone threat, and then you take compute and this ability to have AI and all of these systems on these drones that can do swarming and facial recognition, and they're, they're nearly unjammable in some ways. And then you basically take all of the geopolitical things occurring in the world and you stir it together. And what this practically means is the world is probably going to be less safe in the coming years, and we must react to maintain our lead. And so when I think about things around safety with AI, I look to the fact that Russia just used its first drone that we know of with an NVIDIA chip on it, and it basically told it, hey, go target a fuel station in Ukraine, and before you land, hit the place that will do the most damage. And so the, the— what we believe is the, the computer, the system told it to hit the propane tank that blew up. That is the very first time this happened, so within the last couple of weeks. If you play it forward to all of the existing tools that exist, when someone combines all of that into a system that we think could be the next 30 to 90 days, we will be reacting to just things that, that human being, that soldier I was telling you with now 2 screens, can only do so much with their human brain to protect the sky around them and protect the sky for different nations and our own nation, our ports, our stadiums, our arenas. Like, this is the threat we are all dealing with. And so when I think about the safety, I think about what is the risk that our adversary, whether a nation-state or a cartel, goes forward faster and uses a Chinese model to do a thing that we have slowed ourselves down artificially to prevent. And I'm not nearly intelligent enough to weight that on behalf of our nation, But I do think we need to counterbalance the idea that, yes, bad things— this seems to me like the autonomous vehicle in some ways. People will die when we transition over to more autonomy, but we have a lot of human beings dying anyways. And so the question is not, does it kill a human? The question is, does it kill less humans, and how do we want to mitigate and balance that risk? And so I think from my side, it is probably a— slowing down is something that I think we should just be very cautious about.

Well said. And I think, you know, leaders like you, as a brilliant person, but also a family person, somebody with great values, I think, you know, that shines through, I think, in what you've advocated for. Let me, let me just transition, and we're kind of coming to the close here, but you've just had this incredible career. Again, I don't know what I'm doing with my life, but what you're doing with your life has been so inspiring. And, you know, Dreamforce, the original name, was really about, like, what are the dreams that people have? What are they dreaming of next? And I guess my question is for Dan Driscoll, like, what are you dreaming of next? Where do you go from here, you know, as a leader, a soldier, a lawyer, a fixer, an innovator? Like, where do you want to go next, and what's your dream?

I think we're at this really interesting place as humanity. I think we're at a place where the divisiveness of the internet, and the divisiveness of social media, and the chaos that is ensuing with a lot of our allies, and the chaos that is ensuing among nations who have historically not liked each other, it all seems to be bubbling up. Many of these bubbles have been occurring for a while, but I think we're— I sincerely believe we are at a place where it is about time where many of us on the inside of government, on the outside of government in the US, many of us in Europe, many— like, we just need to come together and figure out what should humanity be doing, and how do we have these really hard conversations in a way that even if we don't end up agreeing at the end of them, at least we can get a path forward through that disagreement. And so I think, like, this concept of convening or convener, whatever the manifestation of that is, I think not just as an individual, but I think we all have a responsibility to convene as many voices as we can that leads to action. Because, again, if we don't act, our adversaries just have very different systems of government. They do not have to get the collective buy-in that we do. They do not have the problem that NATO or the EU does, where you have to get kind of a lot of different countries and leaders and a preference sets to align. They're going to move very quickly because they can, and we must keep up. And so all of this is to say, I am completely confident we can do it, and I'm completely confident that a lot of people are working on the problem, but we should amplify those voices.

Thank you. Thank you for convening, aligning, driving us forward. Thank you. Please, everyone, thank Dan Driscoll for his service, for your leadership. We're so grateful.

Thanks, Dan. Thank you.

Thank you.