Lessons Learned From My Time at DARPA
DARPA experiences — Valuable for venture investing and really all of life.
I’m thrilled to have recently joined Prime Movers Lab as a Partner. I’ve truly found a home here, and it’s an exciting time to be investing in biology, breakthrough science and the tools to create an ever expanding human experience. Any time one joins a new organization, there is always the hope that your experiences, skills and abilities will be brought to bear on your new adventure. While I have had a lot of adventures in my career, the one that seems most relevant to venture investing is my time at DARPA as a government Program Manager. Many books have been written about DARPA and some of them are fascinating historical stories. It’s an incredible agency. The excellent book, Loonshots, by Safi Bahcall is, I think, the best description of why being a Program Manager at DARPA “works,” meaning why it can be a satisfying career choice for some. I would encourage you to check it out. My colleague Anton Brevde did a great review of the book last year on this blog.
But my goal here is to share with you some lessons I learned while at DARPA that I think are applicable in venture investing and perhaps in the larger context of life as well.
My first lesson was the value of interdisciplinary interactions. I was lucky enough to be a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office at DARPA. The Office just celebrated its 40th Anniversary! DSO, as we call it, is the most multidisciplinary office at DARPA. When I was there, my closest friends and colleagues included a topological mathematician, an atomic physicist, a mechanical engineer, a game designer and a materials scientist. Now that’s an interesting bunch to have lunch with! These interdisciplinary connections were vital to the functioning of the office and the success of our individual programs. If you can explain your neuroscience program pitch to a physicist AND and mathematician and they understand you, that’s progress! But seriously, the feedback, questions, and perspectives that each fellow program manager brought to the table made ALL of our programs better. Domain expertise is good, but technical diversity is even better. I am lucky that at Prime Movers Lab I am joined by such a diverse group of scientists, engineers and advisors. I know that this intellectual range makes our diligence and investments better.
My second lesson is the value of surprise. DARPA’s tagline is, “preventing and creating technological surprise.” Of course, if you read the history of DARPA it was started in response to the launch of Sputnik. The US was caught off guard, and DARPA was created to prevent that type of technological surprise from ever happening again. Here I’m talking about a different kind of surprise, the kind where all of your own thoughts, biases and expectations lead you to think something can’t be done. And then, lo and behold, the breakthrough happens. This occurs all of the time in science. The ever present, “oh I’ve already seen that and it didn’t work last time.” If we truly want breakthrough science to occur, we have to leave a little room to be surprised. I would often tell other new program managers, it’s OK to specify in your solicitations what you absolutely don’t want to see, but for heaven’s sake, don’t over constrain the proposers. Leave them some room to surprise you, to solve the problem in a way that YOU didn’t consider. None of us has all of the answers or solutions. Make space for the WOW. It’s actually the main reason that DARPA program management positions are term-limited. It’s a built-in mechanism to eliminate the “I’ve already seen that” bias. If there’s no one there to remember, a fresh perspective and attempt at the solution always has a chance. We have to remind ourselves of this tendency and guard against it.
No discussion of lessons learned at DARPA would be complete without a mention of failure. Yes, that’s right, failure. It certainly has a negative connotation, and whether it’s in life or in investing, it’s something many of us seek to avoid. And yet, DARPA can’t be DARPA without the chance of failure. You can’t do deep tech without risks. It’s a matter of understanding the risks and balancing and mitigating for them. I’ll make two points here. First is the value of metrics and milestones. For each of my programs at DARPA we had audacious goals. Those goals were known, reviewed, tracked and understood by everyone funded by the program. If they ignored the goals, their funding was cut. It wasn’t just crazy science for science’s sake. It had a vision, trajectory, the means to track it and accountability. Audacious goals WITH milestones and metrics, that’s the way to chart success. And sometimes those goals were missed. This is the second point — WHY were they missed? Were they missed for scientific and technical reasons — the protein didn’t behave as we expected, the signal wasn’t stable, the device couldn’t be manufactured, etc? Or did they fail for execution reasons? In my book, failure for a technical reason is a known risk and an acceptable failure. You went to the edge of something and you found the boundaries, you learned. Execution failure is to be avoided. That’s not the “good” kind of failure. Those are failures of leadership, commitment and accountability. All failures can be learned from, but the technical failures can teach us where to go next. That’s how to build new science and technology.
The last observation isn’t a lesson learned in the classic sense, it’s actually something that I learned about my own motivations. At DARPA, I enjoyed every moment of being part of the mission. Serving my country in that way, as a scientist, was something that moved me forward every single day. I found out how important it was to me to have the opportunity to contribute to something much bigger than myself. It was life changing. I’m fortunate now to have found a mission I can dedicate my energies to at Prime Movers Lab. The chance to find, fund, and support breakthrough science to impact the world. That’s why I’m here.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
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