The Future Industrial Network with Hondo Geurts

James “Hondo” Geurts, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- What kept Hondo up at night was that there was a good idea out there that wasn’t passed on to him and thus wasn’t used on the battlefield.

- A society can’t be secure without prosperity and can’t have prosperity without security.

- The challenge for startups working with government is that the public is a fickle venture capitalist. They don’t like to fund things that don’t go anywhere.

- It tends to be small and large companies (but mostly large) supplying the Department of Defense. The “middle has been lost.”

- The DoD overvalues standardization.

- Often in government, the user of the product is not the same as the buyer. Commonly startups make a mistake by not having buyer fit even if there is user fit for a product.

- Government values past performance to a fault.

- The United States, both via government and private enterprise, needs to build the industrial network of the future.

- Commercial technology companies will be on the front lines of the next conflict and need to adapt features to make them resilient.

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