Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

Quick note before we get into today's episode. Sog and I are back with exclusive

supercast, subscriber content. Yesterday we posted the first Q&A,

asked me anything episode of the entire year. Big Govus year is going to be increasing the

amount of exclusive content. So if you'd like to get access to the full question and answer session

and of course submit your own questions. You can go to realignment.supercast.com. Once again

that's realignment.supercast.com. On to today's episode. It's all about technology and great power

competition. In many ways this is a follow up to last December's episode of Anderos co-founder

Tray Stevens, but how technology can reimagine how the Pentagon does business. Today's guest,

Steve Blank, is a former startup founder whose career extends all across the history of

Silicon Valley and he actually created the lean startup methodology that's a real dominant model

for how companies are built. He's a co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security

Innovation and teaches a course at Stanford Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition.

Plus he's a former member of the Pentagon's Defense Business Board. So has a bit of perspective

on the issues we're discussing today. In his telling, the DOD has world class people and a world

class organization for world that no longer exists. We're in a crisis, a very different world.

We need to move with speed, urgency and alacrity. In the South China Sea, we don't have years or

even months to act. Steve also has an excellent blog on those topics and more so be sure to check

out the show notes and this week's substacts for the most value-add contributions, especially the

ones that are focused on select conductors, batteries, other technologies we're going to spend a lot

of time discussing on the show moving forward. While I said, huge thank you to Link in Network

and if you are going to be in town in Washington DC on the 25th, sorry I would love to see you at

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