Meet Decisive Point’s Newest Defense Venture Fellow
Q&A with Major Patterson Hill and Debi Jantzen of Decisive Point
Background: Patterson aka “Packy” is an Air Force Reserve pilot, intrapreneur, and the former Chief Innovation Officer at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. In 2018 he founded Bedrock, Dover’s multi-use innovation incubator, makerspace, coworking and event venue. As Decisive Point’s Defense Ventures Fellow, Patterson is embedded with the Decisive Point team over the next two months to learn about how we invest in great founders addressing challenges facing the country and our communities.
- At Decisive Point, we work on a daily basis with a lot of entrepreneurs. What exactly is an intrapreneur?
An intrapreneur is someone who pushes for change — innovation, culture, and/or process — within a bureaucracy. The Defense Department is as bureaucratic as you can get! I’ve always been one to challenge the Air Force’s status quo, which is why I was so excited to work for two years inside of the Air Force’s innovation ecosystem as Dover’s Chief Innovation Officer. Our vision at Bedrock was to create a culture where every Airman — Air Force Member — feels empowered to make a difference. We tried to do that by connecting Air Force pain points to innovative solutions, both home-grown and dual-use commercial technology.
2. How did you get involved in the Air Force innovation effort?
Before I moved to Dover, I was stationed at Travis Air Force Base, California, flying the C-5. While I was there, a few of my fellow pilots created Phoenix Spark — the first base-level innovation office in the Air Force. Travis’ proximity to Silicon Valley made it the perfect place to connect defense with industry. In the five or six years since, more than 80 similar labs have been created throughout the Air Force. Dover’s Bedrock, which we chartered in 2018, was number 20 or so.
3. How did you hear about the Shift Defense Ventures Fellowship?
I was introduced to Shift a year ago when, all of a sudden, a few of my friends’ LinkedIn feeds blew up with daily posts about this awesome program they were participating in. Just as their fellowship was ending, COVID sent them (and the rest of the world) home. In response, the Defense Department (DoD) stood up a COVID-19 task force charged with vetting thousands of companies who were mobilizing to help the DoD mitigate the pandemic’s effect on national security. I volunteered to join the task force and quickly observed my friends — the fellowship veterans — leading several of the task force’s acquisition and research efforts.
4. What made you want to participate in the fellowship?
The DoD has so many leaders — program managers, commanders, innovation officers like myself — who are charged with making informed contracting decisions. For the nearly two years I led innovation at Dover Air Force Base, I hosted countless pitches from founders and startups eager to partner with the DoD. At the time, I felt like I was pretty good at evaluating which companies were worth investing our time and capital in. It wasn’t until I participated in the COVID task force that I realized how inexperienced I was. The fellowship offers me, individually, a chance to build my own expertise. Much more importantly, the fellowship is creating a network of people with similar experiences across all the DoD’s service agencies who will be ready to serve when the next crisis hits. The new Air Force Chief of Staff has commanded us to “Accelerate Change, or Lose” while prioritizing collaboration with industry. Defense Ventures is giving its fellows — and myself — the tools to do it.
5. THE GUTS TO TRY: Entrepreneurs and founders take on calculated risks when starting their business. In 2019, the failure rate of startups was a staggering 90%. What has been the biggest risk you have taken in your professional career, and what have you learned from it?
Founding an organization in the DoD is admittedly much less risky than starting a business from scratch! While I experienced some of the highs of being a startup during my time at Bedrock, I never really had to worry about our financial runway…it simply didn’t exist. My biggest risk was leaving Active Duty a year ago during a pandemic and record unemployment.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the day after I landed a job as a pilot at the airline I’ve wanted to fly for since I was a kid…needless to say, that airline is still in recovery from the pandemic and I haven’t shown up for my first day of work.
As COVID progressed, most of my peers who’d decided to get out quickly changed those plans and stayed on Active Duty. If I had followed their lead, I never would have had the opportunity to lead an awesome group of Reserve Airmen, provide stability for my family, nor participate in this fellowship.
