Hacking for Defense Stanford 2026 – Lessons Learned Presentations
steveblank.comPeople surprised by this don’t know that the expertise that incubated silicon chips at Stanford and around the valley was based on electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology, among other things.
Stanford and SV have always had deep defense ties. Palmer Luckey and Palantir etc are just the latest iteration of this.
That's about as culturally relevant to Stanford as talking of people who lived through the great depression.
The DoD doesn't get to neglect relationships with a community for decades and then talk of how much in common they have with each other. It's nonsense and transparently manipulative.
Huh? The DoD has maintained relationships with many area startups and tech companies for decades. Have you not been paying attention?
I question what specifically you're referring to.
Yes, Hack for Defense is a decade old now. But the DoD famously had not done much business with area startups for many decades outside of very specific success stories like the CIA's In-Q-Tel.
Turns out that start-ups can't wait several years for a contract award. They tend to die in that time if they have no funding.
Additionally - talk of electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology has been a oft-repeated tagline by members of military leadership as well as Palantir representatives when talking amongst themselves about Silicon Valley or in their appeals to SV itself.
"We have so much in common! Here, why don't you open your history book and I'll show you!" - that's what the appeal comes off like.
I maintain that primarily relying on those examples is a poor choice in trying to establish cultural similarities.
> Turns out that start-ups can't wait several years for a contract award.
This isn’t true. They literally do this all the time. They just need funding. This is also true for biotech.
> They tend to die in that time if they have no funding.
Right. So they raise funding.
Your argument boils down to “the DoD won’t work with startups that don’t have funding,” which is both true and, frankly, as it should be, in my opinion.
> This isn’t true. They literally do this all the time. They just need funding. This is also true for biotech.
Thus the sentence I immediately followed the one this was made in response to where I said "They tend to die in that time if they have no funding."
> Right. So they raise funding.
In many, many cases when it comes to the DoD, their wants aren't seen as dual-purpose and start-ups struggle to find funding that isn't from some DoD-aligned and defense-focused investment firm - which haven't historically invested in large numbers of startups. At least not when I last checked several years ago.
And just to get ahead of this - a DoD want not being seen as dual purpose and the tech later being used for a dual purpose are two very different things.
> Your argument boils down to “the DoD won’t work with startups that don’t have funding,” which is both true and, frankly, as it should be, in my opinion.
My argument is that DoD contract law is poorly suited for funding meaningful sums of money to start-ups that do not have significant non-DoD sources of funding. I'm to understand relatively small sums of money can be awarded on a short time scale, but those sums of money are tiny compared to what's needed to execute on most contracts.
I would agree that it used to be more of a challenge than it is today. For what it’s worth, I worked at a defense contractor and have advised / invested in defense startups.
The government is much more open to it today than ever before. Is it still hard? Yes. Does it require funding? Yes.
But unlike before, it’s much easier today.
I'm aware of a relative lessening of cultural aversion in the bay area of having anything to do with the DoD, but what of substance has changed on the gov side, really?
I'm aware of DIU and of greater outreach efforts to the bay area. I'm aware of a greater rhetorical focus within DoD leadership on taking advantage of Silicon Valley's tech expertise.
But I'm not aware of any substantive change to DoD acquisition law to address the fundamental incompatibility in funding models between DoD's traditional contractor base and bay area startups. The significant lag time to award contracts. The risk-aversion for the DoD where civil servants face political and, in some cases, legal liability for granting funding for projects that don't pan out.
Has the DoD's risk tolerance for investments changed recently? As in - accepting the possibility that some investments may not pan out if it means there's a good chance that other investments bear fruit.
Last I checked a few years ago, outreach to the bay area startups has been primarily using the DoD's equivalent of change found in the couch. A rounding error of DoD's overall available funding.
It’s the other side that’s changed. Venture investors have both a much greater appetite for large amounts of funding for defense and IC startups, and a lot more experience navigating the defense/IC procurement process, at least in part due to success with Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, and others.
I agree the overtures to attract the Bay Area are small potatoes, even if DIUx does help.
Have many defense investments in startups proven profitable enough for VCs and other investors to continue pouring money into the sector? Or is the sector primarily banking on moonshots?
VC, by definition, primarily banks on moonshots. That’s not unique to defense.
Fair.
I don't have a good frame of reference to know when VCs consider the industry worth pouring more money into or if it's a black hole for investment.
Surely there's gotta be some point where the industry has to prove itself worth additional investment $ rather than banking on finding another company where over 80% its valuation is based on memes and dreams (see: SpaceX) or has cartoonishly inflated expectation of future profitability (see: Palantir).
Wow, I thought this was satire for a second. This is a level of shamelessness that I'm really surprised Stanford (or anyone involved) can tolerate being associated with.
> Department of War Directory – This year the students had access to a Department of War Directory – essentially a phonebook of ~5,700 names of “Who buys in the Dept of War?” The directory includes a tutorial on how the DoW buys and the various acquisition and funding processes and programs that exist for startups. It provides details on how to sell to the DoW and where the Program Acquistion Officers (PAEs) fit into that process.
Literally teaching people how to make money selling misery and violence. No mention of how the tech involved can be used to constrain states, stop wars, establish justice, identify war crimes and restore victims, nothing. I thought we were beyond this in 2026.
"I thought we were beyond this by 2026."
Have you been asleep for the last 4–8 years? We aren't even 'beyond this' compared to where we were 15 years ago. In case you haven't noticed, the US has been going backward for years: Americans fundamentally don't give a shit about anything except maximizing GDP, regardless of cost - and in fact, some sectors thrive on that externalized 'cost.' I've noticed your sentiment a few times on HN lately and I'm befuddled every time, like what in your life makes you think we are beyond this kind of thing?
> I've noticed your sentiment a few times on HN lately and I'm befuddled every time, like what in your life makes you think we are beyond this kind of thing?
I've been thinking about this question for a couple of days.
I think that, for the purposes of your analysis - that "the US has been going backward for years", it's important to make two observations:
a) This sentiment is precisely what has fueled Trumpism in the first place. If we just change which things we long for in the good old days, but keep the same timeline pessimism about what we've lost and why, it seems to me that we're likely to cycle around the fear/greed/predation we see, objection to which enjoys consensus (albeit with tribal labels perhaps). I don't have a strong sense of whether the US has been going backward, because I'm not sure it's possible for it to have (or to have had) a particular discrete direction in the first place. I don't long for what we've lost.
b) Let's look at POTUS approval. Of the single simple (perhaps oversimple, I don't know) metrics we might use to assess the narrative that "Americans fundamentally don't give a shit", it's a pretty good one. At some future point, the US government will wash away into history as they all eventually do, and the POTUS approval rating will be (and likely will already have been approximately) zero. The historic lows we're seeing in this area now are, to me, cause for enormous optimism. We have more and more inroads toward consensus regarding the illegitimacy of this institution. We are finding ourselves in agreement that the power vested in this office is invested poorly.
None of this is to deny that I'm nonplussed about the status quo. The murder of over a hundred children with a single tomahawk missile is probably the most horrific of any crime committed by an American in my lifetime, and it's not at all obvious how even to stand in the service of justice in its regard.
But what I do see, and what I do observe that everyone around me seems to see, is that we are accelerating toward novelty, leaving the lifeboats that brought us from the great ships of the industry and agriculture to these shores, and figuring out who we are.
In the past six months or so, I have begun to feel, for the first time since our fiddler Kuba Hejhal - one of the best on earth IMO, and I know some HNers had the privilege to see him on stage and perhaps have their lives changed in some small way for it - left this world by his own hand, that I can write and play optimistically about the evolution I see.
So I can't say that I have a single answer that can satisfy your critique, let alone convert your position to mine, but I thank you for noticing my sentiment, and I hope that we are all open to our minds changing as the records and shows and codebases flow.
I believe the quip associated with this is "don't hate the player, hate the game."
War is where the money is. The government of this country has decided that you make money by going to war and you don't make money by not going to war. It's also decided that having money is mandatory. So if you want to succeed you'll go to war.
This is extremely well put and precisely accurate
you may not even appreciate how accurate this is because it seems so simple but it’s exactly true
The moment you say “I’m not going to spend my time doing war” (in my case anymore) you are persona non grata to capitalism
> “I’m not going to spend my time doing war” (in my case anymore)
It's less convenient to indulge that opinion without the protection of the most powerful military in the world.
Ah yes this old chestnut
Come back to me after you serve in combat. The dod doesn’t protect anything but investors’ returns.
I’ll have two time Medal of Honor winner explain it to you:
I don't need a 13 page pamphlet to convince me that people are motivated by making money. But that's orthogonal to wanting a powerful military under whose umbrella you are pontificating.
The DOW (the dow right now, is it over 50 thou?) only protects capital interests as the other user said. You can't expect it to protect you unless your interests align with capital.
Are Iranians feeling protected? No, are Americans protected from Iran? Also no. Are gas companies protected from low prices? Hell yeah they are!
HN continues to slouch towards emotional outrage, even at the expense of the point.
You don't think the US military should have the best technology?
I don't mind it having the latest technology; I just don't want it to exist. How long do we think the US military will persist in the universe? 5,000 years? 1,000? 500? 100? Surely it's closer to the last among these answers than the first.
What we need is peaceful, sober deprecation of this institution, and in particular, decommissioning of the nuclear arsenal. And there's no good reason that can't start today.
How do you reconcile that aspiration with lunatics and their regimes that would like to do harm to other countries?
Lesson learned: California, and all the universities within, are liberal on the surface, but deeply right-wing in the halls of power. Once you understand this, the whole state and its lack of progress on progressive issues makes sense.
Even though progressives control nearly every state and local office, it’s the right-wing’s fault California has so many problems? Shirley, you can’t be serious.
There's more to power than political position. This is why Elon Musk and George Soros, both of whom have zero political office as of right now, are still considered the shadowy bogeymen by the right/left. If you're willing to accept that these figures have some power at the national level, wouldn't that also apply to the centi-millionaires living in San Francisco and LA?
Original H4D comments from 2015 when steve blank started this:
Please, it’s War now, now defense.
War is the event. Defence and offence are the actions. Starting a war implies taking offensive actions while the target will undertake defensive actions. The target will then undertake offensive actions against the other country which will undertake defensive actions in turn. Offence and defence are both tasked to the department handling all things military.
Knowing this it is rather hypocritical to call the department which is tasked with undertaking offensive actions the 'Department of Defen[cs]e'. It actually seems to come straight out of 1984 where the propaganda department is called the Ministry of Truth. Better call it for what it is - and what it used to be called - which is the Department of War.
Most of the problems seem defense oriented
That's how they try to frame them to make you feel less ethically dissonant.
It is absolutely true that there are people out in the world who would love it if we had no defense. You can argue (validly) that we have made a lot of poor choices, but it’s definitely defense.
It's both.
Completely agreed.
Sure, and I’ll totally switch to calling it “X” instead of Twitter and the Gulf of America instead of Mexico.
Nope, hard pass. I’ll use the real names and people can understand me just fine.
If they insist, I have little desire to continue the conversation.
I do the same:
sex instead of 'gender'
illegal instead of 'undocumented'
mother instead of 'gestating person' or 'birthing person'
homeless instead of 'unhoused person'
criminal instead of 'justice-involved person'
paedophile instead of 'minor-attracted person'
prostitute instead of 'sex worker'
...and whatever other neologisms happen to be pushed by activists, politicos and the media. If there is a good existing term which is replaced for no valid reason I use the existing term. If there is a good reason to replace it - which is rare - I use the new term.
If they insist I do continue the conversation using the correct - existing - terms. The other side often shows little desire to continue the conversation which I find odd given that they generally wouldn't have had any problems using those terms a decade ago.
This is incredibly cringeworthy knowing the ethical and moral issues surrounding artificial intelligence. The problem "Team SwarmShield" is obviously directly related to a problem Israeli defense forces have to deal with. It's a sad state of Stanford if they're hosting this along with allegedly leading what defined guardrails for artificial intelligence.
Also problems Ukrainian defense needs to solve, and that the Canadian military is trying to solve. This is everyone's problem. It's also biased towards defense use.
Sure, I think anyone can appreciate that.
But this program appears to just treat war like it's some perfectly normal thing, rather than the most undesirable aspect of humanity which we're hoping to finally bring to an end so can we enjoy an age of peace amidst the internet.
This page literally presents war as if it's a profit vector rather than a societal ill - something that antiwar activists have been claiming is the actual impetus for most conflicts in the world, only to be called conspiracy theorists in response.
It's just totally nauseating.
So while, in the abstract, preventing people from being killed by drone swarms is a great idea, it's tainted from the get-go if the solution is just to make more money by having bigger killing machines, rather than preventing people from wanting/needing to drone swarm other people from the outset.
It is far ethically superior for Stanford grads to stick to their wheelhouse: optimizing engagement so that their users doomscroll longer.
Someone is going to try and kill you with a drone swarm, so no matter how detestable you find it, I think it’s good that there’s people that are thinking of ways to stop that.
> But this program appears to just treat war like it's some perfectly normal thing, rather than the most undesirable aspect of humanity which we're hoping to finally bring to an end so can we enjoy an age of peace amidst the internet.
War has existed for all of human history.
Why do you think humans today are special and will eliminate war?
The only acceptable answer is: you want hope.
> Why do you think humans today are special and will eliminate war?
Isn't this _the entire point_ of the internet? To evolve beyond states and boundaries and warfare as a way of making decisions about resource allocation?
It strikes me as very short-sighted to decline to act as a generation on this matter. Humans today (or lets say, in these next few centuries) _are_ special; we have arrived at an evolutionary milestone with the birth of a new organism that does seem capable of lasting peace.
No... that sounds an awful lot like revisionist history trying to force a utopian ideal where none exists. If anything, the advent of the Internet and social media in particular has made us more tribal, not less.
The majority of the Internet is geared towards feeding the hedonistic treadmill of porn, cat pictures, selling things, influencer chasing, faking happiness on Instagram and trolling political sides on X or Blue sky.
We aren't better people as a result.
What a thing invented (or at least large parts) by DARPA. An agency of the United States Department of Defense.
You expect that the whole point of something there not to boost the US military?
Two things:
1) Sure, good things do emerge from less good things. That's how improvement happens. That's why we have thumbs thumbs today, even though none of our ancestors in the neoproterozoic era did.
2) On longer time scales (say, measuring from about 5,000 years ago to 5,000 years hence), I'm not sure we can say that DARPAnet was the most important evolutionary milestone in the emergence of the internet. It has been long and steady with several exciting jumps, where DARPAnet is just one.
I'm also wary of being steered too much by the physical models (from vacuum tubes to GPU data centers) and not enough by the founding notions and ideas and songs and treatises.
To me, The Two Sisters -=> Salt Creek -=> Terrapin Station -=> A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace -=> archive.org is a more dispositive lineage than the circuity, especially with regard to the potential for peace that exists in this domain.
I don't see how we could remove states and boundaries and warfare. Boundaries aren't bad things, they're a natural consequence of living in a natural world
If you think suicidal fanatics or megalomaniacal dictators are motivated by sub-optimal resource allocation, you haven't been paying attention.
Couldn't resist dragging Israel in, right?
Israel is America's biggest ally and an active war zone. Of course it's relevant to most war things that are going on right now.