Nicole Camarillo was touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland in early 2017 when a young captain—I’ll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position—crossed her path.
I’ve got to talk to that kid, Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she’d seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he explained, was being developed on a “shoestring budget.”
That caught Camarillo’s attention. As executive director of talent strategy at the US Army Cyber Command, a relatively new branch of the Army, Camarillo’s job is to convince top employees in Silicon Valley that they should sacrifice their stock options and six-figure salaries and apply their technological know-how in the Army instead. The idea that someone with Matt’s skills was scrounging to develop tools that could mean life or death for soldiers hardly boded well for her program.
Camarillo approached Matt and offered to help. She asked him to tell her about the hurdles he encountered trying to develop technology for the Army. Matt decided to show her instead. He led Camarillo to a converted barracks where he and his team had created a makeshift workshop. In an old shower, they’d set up a battery fire, which they used to solder metal for hardware parts. Because the security restrictions on government-issued computers prevented them from coding, they’d purchased replacement parts and were building their own computers. These hacks helped them circumvent the costly, time-consuming military acquisitions process that would have slowed their progress down for months or even years.
The whole scene reminded Camarillo of the storied garages where Apple and Hewlett-Packard began, and there was a certain romance to it all. But Camarillo walked away as inspired as she was concerned. The