Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2026 – Lessons Learned Presentations

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups.

Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix.

We just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than the previous classes.

For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event – the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography systems most of the internet runs on. It’s possible that the first cybersecurity apocalypse may have come early.

This is the 16th year we’ve been teaching the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. This year, from the first hour of the first class, we realized we were seeing something extraordinary happen. It was both the end and beginning of a new era.

Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that 2) undefended high value fixed civilian infrastructure – oil tankers, data centers, desalination plants, oil refineries, energy nodes, factories, et al -are all at risk.

The Department of War is in the midst of the most ambitious acquisition reform in 60 years. It’s just in time as drone and missile warfare lessons (autonomy, Counter UAS, etc.) from Ukraine and the War in Iran are top of mind and reshaping what the DoW is buying. Reorganizing the DoW into Portfolio Acquisition Executives is reforming how the DoW is buying. The new Warfighting Acquisition System is working to reward speed to delivery.

If you started a company more than two years ago, it’s likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruiting, fund raising, etc., and take stock of what changed around you. Or your company will die.

A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.) Recently my wife and I had something happen that made us reevaluate a 25-year-old relationship. These two bookends made me realize something larger: reevaluating all types of relationships – romantic, friendship, founders, business partnerships/ventures, and even countries – is a healthy and normal part of growing, getting older and, at times, wiser.

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still apply even though AI Agents will upend all of this and PR will end up being one of the many businesses that will no longer exist in its current form. Here’s why.