Project Agrippa
Stanford University
Augmenting Integrated Deterrence
The Team
Kyle Duchynski
• Cofounder, Agrippa
• MS MS&E, Stanford ‘23
• BA Economics and Honors in International Security Studies, Stanford ‘21
William Healzer
• Cofounder, Agrippa
• BAH Political Science and History, Stanford ‘22
Jack Carney
• BA Economics, Stanford ‘21
Jonathan Deemer
• Cofounder, Agrippa
• JD, Stanford Law School ‘23, Knight-Hennessey Scholar
• MA International Policy, Stanford ‘23
• BA International Relations, Union College, NE
• BS Business Administration, Union College, NE
David Hoyt
• Cofounder, Agrippa
• JD, Stanford Law School ‘20
• MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business ‘20
• BA International Relations and Honors in International Security Studies, Stanford ‘13
• AA Liberal Arts, Mercer County Community College ‘10
Problem Sponsor
Rear Admiral Lorin Selby, Chief of Naval Research, and Dr. Jason Stack, Office of Naval Research
Military and Business Mentors
CDR Jeff Vanak, Rachel Costello, Marco Romani
Original Problem Statement
The United States Navy needs new operational concepts to incorporate emerging technologies in order to successfully compete and deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
Beneficiary Discovery Interviews
242 during the course; 700+ post-course
The Innovation
Hacking for Defense (“H4D”) students are helping the U.S. Department of Defense augment integrated deterrence. H4D alumni team Project Agrippa created a concept for an unmanned logistics vessel to better decentralize maritime logistics in the Indo-Pacific theater. Thanks to the promising end user discovery during H4D, the team decided to form a startup to continue their work post-course and are now working to field and scale their solution.
The Project Agrippa team was formed in the Spring 2021 term of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense course. The original H4D team included Kyle Duchynski (B.A. ‘21, M.S.’23), William Healzer (B.A.H. ‘22), Jack Carney (B.A.’21), Jonathan Deemer (JD/MIP ‘23), and David Hoyt (JD/MBA ‘20, BA ‘13),.
The team was paired with ONR’s Dr. Jason Stack as their problem sponsor and were given their initial problem statement: “The United States Navy needs new operational concepts to incorporate emerging technologies in order to successfully compete and deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific.” Selecting the name Agrippa for Octavian’s right-hand strategist who transformed the Roman Navy, the team threw themselves at the problem. However, the team was initially worried that they would not be able to impact such a large problem, one that their professors referred to as a classic “boil the ocean” topic.
However, the team credits the customer discovery interview process as enabling them to get smart on their problem area quickly and begin to narrow its scope. The core driver of H4D’s Lean Methodology is “getting outside the building” by talking to the customer who must confront the problem every day. While the customer might be clearly defined for traditional startups, in the defense world the concept of a customer is much broader—whoever might benefit from the potential solution. For the Agrippa team, this meant leaving their comfort zone at Stanford and interviewing warfighters, strategists, logisticians, and others across the Joint Force, industry, and academia. The H4D class mandates a minimum of ten beneficiary discovery interviews each week of the ten-week course. However, during their ten weeks in the course, Agrippa found such value from the interview process that they ended up conducting a stunning 242 interviews, a national H4D record, in addition to reading over 50 books to better understand security challenges facing the U.S. and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.
Beyond just building a broad base of knowledge, these interviews were an essential way for the team to iteratively test their weekly minimum viable product, or MVP. Another integral part of the H4D Lean Methodology, an MVP is not a demo or even necessarily a product, but whatever allows a hypothesis about the problem, or a potential solution, to be tested. For the Agrippa team, in the early part of the class, their MVPs were generally a slide summarizing a new operational analysis to test a new aspect of their concept solution.
Beyond the value for their team alone, the Agrippa team members were surprised at how much value these beneficiary discovery interviews brought to the beneficiaries themselves, including the Office of Naval Research, by helping to bridge “pockets of excellence” by connecting people from across different organizations all examining a similar problem set. As Agrippa team member William Healzer explained, “You have lots of people who are trying really hard to do amazing things for the country and while they know what they do and what the next person on the acquisition process chain does, sometimes they are on a 15 step bridge. There is not always that same connectivity between someone who is on one side of the bridge and someone on the other side. Students taking H4D have flexibility to map out what these processes look like and talk to everyone on that chain. In doing so, you are able to bring these people together who might not have interfaced with each other in the past, so it has not only been fruitful for the team, but has helped build connections internal to the DoD.”
As they were conducting these interviews, the team gradually refined their problem statement to focus specifically on the need for logistics to support emerging distributed operational concepts. Their final problem statement read: “In order to retain credible conventional deterrence against the PRC in the Indo-Pacific, U.S. joint forces must develop, acquire, and employ a distributed, survivable force to impose increased costs on the PRC. This strategy depends on distributed, discrete, low-cost logistics systems that can survive within the Weapons Engagement Zone (WEZ).”
By the end of the course, their final Minimum Viable Product was a complete concept for employing autonomous maritime vessels in the Indo-Pacific, with several supporting analyses. Over the course of a week toward the end of the course, the team led a series of briefings with over 50 officials across 6 bases in 4 different cities with key stakeholders from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), U.S. Pacific Fleet (PACFLT), U.S. Marine Forces Pacific (MARFORPAC), Navy Special Warfare Command (WARCOM), U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC), and the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). In these briefings, they received overwhelming support for their concept and encouragement to continue with the work post-class to continue to refine the concept. PACFLT even requested that Project Agrippa redact parts of their final presentation.
The positive response from their sponsoring organization and these briefings inspired Project Agrippa to continue their work beyond the class. After embarking on another 12 months of customer discovery and surveying the defense industrial base, encouragement and support from key DoD stakeholders and the Stanford H4D team led Agrippa to incorporate and pursue fielding their solution at scale for the DoD as a startup. Already, the work done by Agrippa during H4D has helped informed research both inside government at institutions like the Naval Postgraduate Schoolas well as other outside experts, like at the Special Competitive Studies Project, where the team won an essay contest building off the idea of distributed deterrence they developed in H4D. Recently, Agrippa was awarded a grant from the Common Mission Project Impact Fund, which the team plans to use for further beneficiary discovery, MVP development, and a series of in-person MVP demonstrations and briefs.
Project Agrippa’s
Hacking for Defense Experience
The Agrippa team was fortunate in that many of their members knew each other at Stanford before taking H4D, with a shared interest in national security and defense. For two of the team members, William and Kyle, they were drawn to H4D because of the opportunity to apply high-level concepts they had been taught in the classroom in a real-world setting. Four of the team members had taken Technology, Innovation and Modern War (now Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition) during Fall Quarter of 2020, taught by Professors Joe Felter, Steve Blank, and Raj Shah. This class was a major impetus for applying to H4D.
“The hands-on nature of the course [H4D] allows you to get a layer deeper than what is covered in a traditional academic class. It is also immensely helpful for untangling the national security bureaucracy, as well as developing professional skills, such as finding people to reach out to, cold-calling, conducting an interview, and building a professional network,” said team member Kyle Duchynski.
The experiential nature of the class was similarly attractive for David Hoyt, as well as the fact that it pulled together all of his academic interests - international relations and national security, emerging technology and the DOD, and innovation and entrepreneurship.
During the course, the team gained the knowledge and confidence necessary to be a successful startup. First and foremost, they discovered the power of the Lean methodology, particularly the beneficiary discovery process. Learning the methodology from its creator, Steve Blank, the team was able to learn from a variety of experts from across the DoD, from warfighters to policymakers to technologists.
Team member Hoyt characterizes the beneficiary discovery process as a “superpower.”
“When you combine a targeted reading selection with targeted customer discovery, your ability to hack the growth curve of your knowledge is formative. The ability to go from barely knowing what a boat was at the beginning of the course, to engaging in long conversations with admirals on this topic in a briefing center in the Pacific Fleet headquarters in less than ten weeks is transformative. I now use this methodology in many parts of my professional life now,” said Hoyt.
Through the course, the team also learned to accept uncertainty and become comfortable with ambiguity.
“H4D teaches you that it is okay if you don’t know the answer now. You just need to start with an educated hypothesis and go out and test it, and as a result, you will get a better answer so much faster. In life, it is much more important to get to the right answer faster than to get the right answer right off the bat. You don’t need to wait to add value. You can help out on huge national security issues as a 20-year-old,” said Hoyt.
Although team member Kyle Duchynski was always interested in a career in national security and defense, he was unsure of how to break into the field. H4D helped lay the foundation for him to have that opportunity.
“H4D and the connections and networks I was able to create during it inspired me to pursue a post-class fellowship at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The experiences we had in Hacking for Defense gave me the knowledge and expertise to hit the ground running and make an impact on an incredibly meaningful set of challenges working at INDOPACOM, ” said Duchynski.
For Jonathan Deemer, the course was equally transformative and challenging. As he explained, “without a doubt, [H4D is] the most challenging and best course I have taken at Stanford or anywhere else.”
For Hoyt, taking H4D directly shaped his professional decisions. In addition to being a founding member of the company that was formed out of the course, Hoyt was brought on to be the Assistant Director of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford, which David partially attributes to the success of his team in H4D. The work he does in his capacity as Assistant Director is tied to his H4D experience; he works on questions of national security innovation, dual use technology, and how to use the Lean methodology to solve national security problems. In his role at Gordian Knot Center, he is passionate about creating similar opportunities to H4D to feed a pipeline of students who might be interested in participating in these programs at Stanford.
“This is one of the greatest educational gifts I’ve ever received. I’ve taken about 100 courses at Stanford across three degrees and I would say this course would be tied for first because of this methodology,” said Hoyt.
For William Healzer, H4D was an avenue to synthesize his passion for defense policy with the emerging technology space in Silicon Valley. His H4D experience was so impactful that he postponed pursuing a Ph.D. out of college and now works full-time on the company formed out of the course. “H4D is the most transformative thing I have done at Stanford,” said Healzer.