Venture Stories

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 i