The DoW has a very different objective compared to Silicon Valey. Failure is not really an option with the DoW while it is celebrated in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley companies are also tiny compared to the trillion-dollar budget of the DoW. Due to the large amount of money, complicated rules need to be followed to ensure you get what you want to acquire. Hence the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations). The problem is not really the FAR. The acquisition regulations are designed to produce exactly what you ask for.

The real problem is that we don't really know what to acquire. It is the same problem that startups face. You have alluded to the problem in the sidebar. I know you are intimately familiar with the issue given your involvement with the startup community. The way you wrote the article suggests that you have not fully understood the real issue with the DoW and acquisitions.

The other issue that I see with the DoW's focus on commercial off-the-shelf technology is that a large component of what the DoW does has no real commercial equivalent. There certainly are a lot of commercial technologies that can be used to improve the DoW. There tends to be a large need to blow things up and kill people, which has little commercial overlap. How do you see issues like this be addressed with the new acquisition system?

If I ever do, I certainly will.

I was a listener at your panel. I thought it was thought-provoking but also have become more conscious about the limitation of _fast_ prototyping in the age of AI. Speed and efficiency on one side with entry and building costs dropping, *purposeful* experimentation (with some hypothesized theory of how this world/market demand evolves) might be worthy of a second thought.

I broadly agree with the "collapsing" distance between exploration and exploitation, but entrepreneur still has to figure out an optimal starting/ stopping point - who are they building for and what are they learning? Search without learning can be random and chaotic but biased learning might also lead to failure to cross the chasm if starting with a "wrong" beachhead.

How to reduce false starts and search strategically without missing the chance to be disruptive? Or are we indeed collapsing to a world where higher average becomes the new norm at the costs of fewer extreme right tails?