Pentagon’s Former Top Hacker Wants His Startup to Inject Some Silicon Valley into the Defense Industry

Pentagon’s Former Top Hacker Wants His Startup to Inject Some Silicon Valley into the Defense Industry

Chris Lynch arrived at the Pentagon as an exotic outsider — the department’s resident hoodie-wearer, as Ash Carter put it. Now he and two co-founders have a defense-software startup with its own exotic aims. 


Then-SecDef Carter hired Lynch in 2015 to start up the Defense Digital Service and infuse the Pentagon with some Silicon Valley-style agility and innovation. At DDS, Lynch attacked longstanding bottlenecks with a “SWAT team of hackers” who ran successful bug bounty programs and helped reshape IT policies — including helping DOD leaders to launch the gigantic Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, cloud program. 


Now Lynch, who left DDS in April, has launched Rebellion Defense, a D.C.-based firm that seeks to sell software for defense and national security applications. It has financial backing from an array of Silicon Valley stars, including former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Founders Fund, the venture capital outfit of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Facebook co-founder Sean Parker.


We talked to Lynch and co-founders Oliver Lewis and Nicole Camarillo about Rebellion’s efforts to make working on Pentagon projects appealing to the Stanford sneaker set. 


D1: There are lots of defense contracting companies, many that sell software. How is Rebellion different?


Lynch: We really wanted to build a place that's a strategic partner for software and technology, that just simply works, in defense. And we want to work on things that are very important to where we see the Department heading. 


We self-fund all of our own products. We have capitalized and built Rebellion in such a way that we can choose what we work on and w ..

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