5 things you didn’t know about NGA’s new director of Plans, Programs
By Samuel Wilson, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Five months into his new job, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s director of Plans and Programs is busy doing all the typical new employee activities — learning the rhythms of the agency, getting to know his colleagues, figuring out the floor numbering taxonomy of the agency’s Springfield, Virginia, headquarters.
But Anthony Vinci, Ph.D., is not your typical government executive.
With experiences starting multiple companies — some successful, some not — a passion for computational thinking and problem solving, and a sense of duty that ultimately attracted him not once, but twice, to government service, the agency’s new director of plans and programs brings unique perspectives to the agency tasked with providing support to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.
NGA’s Office of Corporate Communications sat down with Vinci during the agency’s latest hackathon in Los Angeles to learn more about his vision.
1) He’s an entrepreneur … and a failure?
Vinci was the founder and CEO of Findyr, a New York-based data and information collection company, before he came NGA.
“At that time, around 2012, smart phones were spreading, cloud computing was coming online, so there were a lot of these enablers,” said Vinci. “That was sort of the beginning of Findyr, which essentially crowdsourced data collection.”
Vinci doesn’t hide from the fact that Findyr wasn’t his first attempt to start a company, having tried — and failed — three times prior. As a self-proclaimed “failure,” Vinci emphasizes the importance of those less-than-successful experiences in cultivating a willingness to take risks.
“Failure should be incentivized. It’s easy not to fail. That’s the secret of Silicon Valley, it embraces failure.”
In the startup world, venture capitalists won’t even consider your business case unless they know you’ve failed trying to launch a company, said Vinci. They want to know a person has the tenacity and ingenuity required to bounce back from a failure and continue pushing forward.
“Past failure doesn’t mean that you don’t try again, just that the one particular approach didn’t work,” he said.
2) This isn’t his first time in national security.
“I started out in the tech industry, during the last dot.com boom,” said Vinci. “I kind of retooled and ended up doing a Ph.D. in International Relations, which had always been a passion for me. I spent a lot of time in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East doing field work.”
It was his experience in Africa, interviewing people and experiencing life through their eyes, combined with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that altered Vinci’s career path, he said.
“Post 9/11, I really thought to myself, ‘I want to get in the game, I want to go out there and do what I considered duty,’” said Vinci. “My father was a Marine, my brother was a Marine, my grandfather was in the Army — I kind of came from one of those families.”
Vinci joined the Defense Department as a civilian, spending time in Iraq and other parts of the world, he said.
“It was really gratifying, really interesting,” he said. “I got to do lots of things that you don’t normally get to do in any of those worlds that I’d been in.”
After his time in government, Vinci returned to the startup world and saw success with Findyr. But, it was that sense of duty he experienced as a public servant that drew Vinci from the tech world to NGA, he said.
“There’s a feeling, a sense of duty and a sense of mission that you miss when you’re not doing that for a living, so that’s kind of what I wanted back,” said Vinci. “I really saw a lot of opportunity for NGA because of the direction that Robert (Cardillo) and Sue (Gordon) had already been taking it.”
3) He made his own dress code.
When NGA Director Robert Cardillo offered Vinci the DP job, Vinci says he “gave Robert an out and said I’d wear a suit if that’s what the mission demands.”
Cardillo’s response? “No, we want you here for who you are and that includes how you dress.”
So Vinci tends to be a little more casual, preferring jeans and blazers, similar to how he dressed when he ran a start-up company, which wasn’t by accident.
“I feel like sometimes I’m a translator between these two worlds, the government and the start-up community, and I really embrace that.”
“Innovation really is the way that we’re going to solve problems. We can’t continue to go back to these old solutions in the U.S. government and just use traditional contractors. We have to reach out to the interesting, passionate, intelligent startups that are out there,” said Vinci.
Vinci credits leadership and industry outreach — like opening NGA’s Silicon Valley outpost and initiatives to succeed in the open, put in place by Cardillo and NGA Deputy Director Sue Gordon — for taking NGA in an exciting direction and inspiring him to join the team.
He felt he could make an impact to accelerate that outreach and leadership initiative, he said. He hopes to expand that thinking, bring the agency closer to the startup community and bring technology and talent into the agency.
4) He’s a writer and a reader.
Vinci’s a writer with a couple of books and screenplays under his belt.
“I have a young son and a job that takes up all my time, so I no longer have free time,” said Vinci. “But, if I did, I’d probably spend my time writing.”
One of Vinci’s favorite books is “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson, which details more than 100 years of history of the software and computing industries.
“’The Innovators’ gives you an idea of the history of ideas, and when you’re an entrepreneur, that’s what it’s all about — it’s a cheat sheet,” said Vinci. “It’s just like, ‘Oh, these problems are similar to this other type of problem, and I can probably find a similar solution set.’”
These lessons from the past can help inform where NGA goes in the future using new technologies like machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, remote sensing and small satellites, said Vinci.
“We’re about to be in a place where we can do things that were unimaginable, inconceivable,” said Vinci. ”We just have to prepare the agency for that.”
5) He thinks coding is the future.
Part of that preparation for the future involves developing the agency’s technical muscles.
Vinci considers a basic understanding of coding and data science an advantage — and he thinks it’s a necessity, he said.
“We’re going to hit a point where the only way to handle the massive amount of data becoming available to us — to even comprehend it — is to use some form of a computational method,” he said. “That might be developing software programs, that might be doing data science, that might be doing data engineering.”
It’s not the technical capability that’s most important, it’s the ability to think computationally, said Vinci.
“Computational thinking is about a different way of solving problems, it’s abstracting away a problem into a solution that is repeatable and scalable,” he said.
Learning how to do things in a different way to out-pace and out-compete adversaries, may mean encouraging the agency — and himself — to move outside of traditional comfort zones toward bold experimentation, said Vinci.
But one aspect will never change, and it’s the same thing that attracted him back to public service.
“Start with mission, not change. It’s not innovation for innovation’s sake. This is literally, I think, how wars will be won in the future, and it’s real, hard competition. You have to out-innovate to succeed now. You have to have better technology. You have to have the more talented machine learning experts. Those are the ways that we as an agency are going to succeed. That’s how we protect national security.”
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About NGA: The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency delivers world-class geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, that provides a decisive advantage to warfighters, policymakers, intelligence professionals and first responders. Both an intelligence agency and a combat support agency, NGA fulfills the president’s national security priorities in partnership with the intelligence community and Department of Defense.
