If you aren’t yet utilizing GenAI to the maximum extent possible to grow your business's output, I can guarantee you your competitors currently are. The one place above all there is a ton of impact, both in amount and quality of output with GenAI, is in marketing and business development. Rather you need to create marketing materials, write a proposal, or just increase the efficiency of basic analytical support tasks, there is a GenAI tool out there to help you accomplish it. You can argue the effectiveness or the quality of the current state of these tools, but two simple facts remain. First, that the tools do and will continue to get better over a surprisingly short amount of time. Second, rather your company chooses to utilize them or not, some other company (or many) will, and that will give them an ever-growing edge in operational efficiency and business growth. The question for you then becomes, when and what GenAI tools should you use to grow your own company’s edge in the market?

The short answer is one is requested by a Gov/Mil sponsor, and the other is just your company pitching it to a potential Gov/Mil Sponsor for consideration…but there’s a deeper issue. Anyone can go and read the government’s legal description for an unsolicited proposal (https://lnkd.in/gRvCDsFu), but the real question with these proposals is not the format or contents, but the purpose behind it. The only real value in an unsolicited proposal is in the pursuit of a potential sole-source contract. Similar to most sole-source contracts, it is a high bar to clear, with many hurdles along the way. The fundamental question is, for your potential sell, is there a better way?

The simple answer is LLMs are a foundational technology to allowing and enabling the advanced training and operation of robotics. Rather you want to point to any number of the forms of human workload offset or replacement, robotics will make a major impact in the years to come. This video of a recent presentation done by Nvidia researchers should hopefully open people’s eyes to what’s coming, and what’s possible even now.

For the defense sector, GenAI has been a bit of a waiting game on multiple fronts, but one of the biggest issues just got addressed. What Grok-1 represents is a golden opportunity for defense products and projects to utilize an open-source model for virtually any use case that it wants/needs. The model was released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the current gold standards for open-source use within the defense sector today. Also, the model itself was not fine-tuned in any way, which again for defense purposes is very advantageous, as many use cases would or might require outputs from the model that would bump up against guardrails imposed by the originating commercial or civilian developer. Combine all that with an overall performance quality level exceeding GPT3.5, and you have something truly special.

In the pursuit of defense sales, it is often the case that when talking to Government or Military personnel for the first time, it can be very ambiguous if that person is articulating a want, need, or requirement. Your understanding of the important difference between each of these concepts is critical to your identification of sales leads towards product or service sustainment. A want is simply something any person can express, but ultimately is not or at least not yet vetted through their chain of command with an associated priority for their unit or organization. In short, it’s an idea that has yet to be fleshed out and approved. A need is vetted and approved want that has been assigned a level of support and priority within that unit or organization. This generally comes with either some level of current year direct funding or level of leadership support to find external funding, but the point is the need is owned by that unit or organization alone. A requirement is a vetted, approved, and integrated need that is part of a capability plan of a higher echelon Headquarters. These requirements are racked and stacked for implementation and sustainment by Commands, Centers, or PEO’s over multiple years.

It might sound a bit odd, but truly the fastest way to get products in the hands of the government or military end user is via their existing Prime contractor purchasing them directly from you. It’s not always the most monetarily efficient acquisition maneuver for the Gov/Mil, but it is the simplest and quickest. You as the third party product provider can work a standard commercial B-to-B contract with the Prime, or the Prime can purchase direct from your commercial purchasing endpoint. It also helps to have an agreeable Prime contractor when the Gov/Mil requests this kind of action, as it is often easy or more difficult depending on the willingness of the Prime to execute quickly.

Your usual first move in the SBIR/STTR program, is to simply focus on winning early phase awards, but the real pro move is to utilize later funding to help achieve earlier funding. This has everything to do with the lesser-known fact that Phase 1 & 2 funding awards have very restrictive regulatory limits on the type (“color” in military parlance) of money used, versus the types of funding that can be used in Phase 3. Phase 1 & 2 are developmental phases, therefore by regulation, require the use of RDT&E funding. Phase 3 is a commercialization/acquisition phase so other types (“colors”) of money can be used like O&M or procurement. All military organizations have access to O&M, and it is the primary type (“color”) of money they will try to utilize for most things in yearly spending. Very few units outside of Headquarters, Labs, or Centers have access to RDT&E money, so paying for anything developmental is always a perpetual challenge for regular units.

If you want a reliable way to grab a chunk of money larger than $1 million, you go to the service headquarters and find an GO or SES to get it. The “budget dust” at scale can and is found at the Services’ and Agencies’ Headquarters. Everyone loves to talk about the defense budget being almost a trillion dollars, but the only quick, reliable, and moderately simple way to get a decent piece of that is to go talk a powerful person into giving it to you. Yes I know that sounds gross, counter to the acquisition processes, etc…but it’s also true.

Navigating the defense industry as a new business can be tricky, so the key is knowing who to talk to at each stage of the sales process. Here's a basic plan to get you started:

I was asked to expand and explain a strategy for utilizing the cheat code of business development I provided in a previous article you can access here (https://lnkd.in/gfaRqt_W). In the expanded article linked below, I go into detail of how to employ the range of tactics I previously described for maximum efficiency. There are already some companies out there utilizing these methods to great effect in both defense and commercial markets (Chris Hughes 💭🔐 is a great example!). This strategy is what should really form the foundation of your business development strategy, then all the additional (more traditional) tactics are executed on top for added effect. Far too often, business development is a large sunk cost exercise in money and time that has low percentage returns. This strategy is designed to effectively reverse that paradigm, to make your foundational business development actions as cheap and easy as possible to drive interactions that can build to more traditional leads for sales.

An interesting question on yesterday’s post got me thinking, what would my ideal defense business look like? Now there are many ways to interpret that question, so let me be specific to caveat my answer. This is a business I think would be the easiest, fastest, and most likely to be make sales or be awarded contracts to the DoD over a multi-year span. This isn’t what would make the most money, garner the most customers, or be the next “big thing”. It’s simply my opinion of a business with the best chance of success at a given scale within the defense industry.

Success is defined by growth, and growth needs to lead to rapid and large scaling to achieve the goals of the VC-backing, and this just doesn’t happen often in the defense industry. It is not that it is impossible to do, just unlikely and not regularly accomplished. The reasons for this are the disparate ways that users, funding, and programmatics are separated within the DoD. The short version is to achieve that kind of success, you require the combination of three things: many users from all/most commands, a platform sponsorship from service level headquarters, and a transition path to for that new service level capability to a PEO. None of those three things are easy to come by, but many try to compile the recipe out of order, but here's the correct method.

“It depends” is a crappy answer no one likes hearing, so let me just give you some general rules of thumb to guide you on your way, while avoiding the traps of useless conversations around every corner.

The best way to identify military customers is to have conversations around problems, vs trying to demo your product. Your money is precious and limited, so stretching every dollar and minute of time for maximum impact is of utmost importance. Here’s the fastest and most efficient way to do that for any product or service.

The regulatory isolation of the “colors of money” by which designated funding is controlled and utilized is what ultimately limits the opportunities for many products in the defense industry. The large regulatory walls between Personnel, Facilities, O&M, Procurement, and RDT&E funding types drives competition to isolate solely within each funding type. Offering a product that saves 2x time/manpower, but costs 25% more than the existing capability, is not a monetary savings that can be realized in any tangible way by the funding organization.

The best just keep getting better, and though I do really like the multi-modality of ChatGPT with Dalle3, Claude just keeps setting the standard for pure textual content generation with their new version 3 models. The link below highlights Anthropic's published metrics on the performance of their new model versions, and as expected they are damn impressive. Of note, Claude is the competitive tool of choice for AWS in the ongoing market battle with Microsoft and their offerings from OpenAI. If I had to choose just one, at this point I might go with Claude, just for the amount of textual based usage I do. Also might be an interesting safety play given the uncertain implications and outcomes of the current lawsuit that Elon Musk filed against OpenAI.

It’s been a long time coming, but after 23 and half years, my final day has arrived. No long speech, just a heart felt thanks to everyone I had the opportunity to work for and with. I don’t have the words to express my appreciation for all the opportunities I was given by so many.

Smart people doing hard things for the benefit of others, that’s the military innovation job. It’s not a social club for misfits, people bored with their career field, or folks just wanting to not wear their uniform. It’s being so good at your regular job, you have cycles to spare to help others. It’s knowing all the processes and procedures so well you can help guide others to efficient success. It’s having your job start at the definition of others job done.

I had a chat yesterday about what advice I would give to the defense industry, and if I had to distill all my thoughts down to just one piece of advice it would be this metaphor. You must be prepared for the marathon, that is what beats the competition, but then you must deliver on the hunt of the game. It’s all about the ability to go the distance while also executing at skill. Those tasks are supremely difficult to execute in parity, and have multiple ways of finding your failures of preparation and determination.

Reputation over function is a common struggle rather it’s software, hardware, or any widget in the defense industry. With one primary customer reputation matters, and often shapes the interactions between military and industry. Better function and lower price don’t always drive the customer, especially in the face of brand preference and legacy utilization.