A DARPA debrief | Ep 90

Intro Voices

Coming to DARPA is like grabbing the nose cone of a rocket and holding on for dear life.

DARPA is a place where if you don't invent the internet, you only get a “B.”

A DARPA program manager quite literally invents tomorrow.

Coming to work every day and being humbled by that.

DARPA is not one person or one place. It's a collection of people that are excited about moving technology forward.

Tom Shortridge
Hello and welcome to voices from DARPA. I'm your host, Tom Shortridge.

This is it. Your last day as a program manager at DARPA. You've signed the final piece of paperwork and the badge that got you through some of the most secure doors in the country is now 

Your phone buzzed at all hours with updates from labs and field tests. Your mind was a constant swirl of ideas, data, devices, and breakthroughs that might just change the world. But now, silence. No more buzzing phone. No more signals, sensors or systems. No more drumbeat of deadlines. At DARPA. We're hard wired to reject nostalgia. We're always focused on the future and the next breakthrough.

But today, we're breaking that rule. We're exploring the agency's most enduring and arguably most important asset its people. What happens after they walk out the door and move on to the next chapter? To answer that question about the after, we have to first understand the before. What kind of person signs up for a temporary, all consuming tour of duty designed to burn you out and send you on your way?

On day one, coming in those doors and getting to work. What's that really like?

Anne Fischer
I was really nervous. I was probably shaking.

Tom Shortridge
Long time listeners might recognize Anne Fischer from episodes 22 and 25 of this series. She's currently the chief technologist for the Deep Science and Innovation funds at Intellectual Ventures. But right now, she's talking about the first time she had to pitch a program idea at DARPA.

Anne Fischer
When you go and you work at DARPA, you build your program. You have it all in your mind. You dry run it. You talk to your leadership about it, you talk to the community, and then you have to go and convince the DARPA director that it's worth putting many millions of dollars down on that idea to go fund the research community.

You're not managing a program. You're really kind of leading an entire effort about how you might think about changing a field or changing a technology. It can be everything that you make it to be. I would say to anybody who thinks, oh, I'm not good enough. This is not the right time. I wouldn't know what I'm doing. There's sort of a surrounding support system at DARPA to help teach and train and understand, and if you want to do it, you should.

Tom Shortridge
The pitch is just the first hurdle. The next is overcoming the myth of what a program manager even is. There's a common perception that you need a wall of degrees from top universities to even be considered. Artie Mabbett, who was a PM from 2010 to 2016, says he hears that misconception all the time.

Artie Mabbett
Probably one of the most common things I see from folks that I've mentored that are like, hey, have you ever thought of DARPA? And they're like, no, like, I would never go to DARPA. And it's like, well, why? And they're like, well, because I'm not a PhD in this, or I haven't done all this research. And it's like, well, that's not all DARPA's about, right?

And so I think some of it is people don't realize that there's different roles for people across the board. Frankly, sometimes just being a better program manager is the most important thing. You almost have to be a jack of all trades, because if you're only into one tech space but you're trying to do a major integrated system, you need to be able to understand the system, not just the one piece of a widget.

People that just have that curious nature and want to make a change and want to make a difference. Don't sell yourself short just because you think DARPA is one way. There's all kinds of different ways to really address the DARPA mission.

Tom Shortridge
So you're fortunate enough to be offered an opportunity at DARPA. But very quickly, you're hit with a terrifying realization. You might be the foremost expert in your field, but DARPA doesn't necessarily want you to run programs on what you already know. Anne Fischer found herself staring down the challenge of stepping outside the comfort zone.

Anne Fischer
I ran an AI program before it was cool, and I don't have a background in space. That's one of the really great things about DARPA is that you can come in, have a dream, have a vision, and find a way to manage, bring people together and execute that dream and vision. You don't have to be the expert. I'm a chemist by training, and I ran programs in automation and AI for chemical synthesis, molecular computing, all sorts of things, but all around really the same of small molecules.

None of those programs were perfect, and some of them did really amazing things, and some of them did. And that's the best part about DARPA is this sort of tolerance for failure. You have to be creative. You have to be visionary, but you have to be realistic.

Tom Shortridge
Now, while you might not need to be the world's foremost authority on a topic, a foundation of intellectual rigor is still critical. Amber Walker, who served as a PM from 2017 to 2021, suggests that an appetite for complex problems is a common character trait for all who joined DARPA.

Amber Walker
There's a lot of paths to becoming a DARPA PM, right? But a lot of it starts with academic excellence. Seek out interesting and unique research opportunities. I think understanding how to pose a research question, how to design a course of research, how to scope it properly so that it has a beginning and an end, which is very important in research, will all help you.

And then, you know, the network doesn't matter. You know, we don't like to say that. And it's hard to admit, but I think everywhere in business who you know, the network matters. And so finding the right forums, going to the DARPA hosted events in local communities, getting involved in the young faculty competitions that DARPA hosted. Put yourself out there.

Be willing to learn. Have some faith in the process and the system of DARPA. I've not seen many people come in and just be fed to the wolves. Everybody here has been supportive, and the whole process is to make you successful and to make your ideas into reality, which is pretty powerful. I mean, nowhere else have I been able to take something from a piece of paper all the way through to a missile flying through the air in three years.

Tom Shortridge
So there's a powerful internal culture of support to get your ideas off the ground. Stacie Williams, PM from 2019 to 2021, recalls how the agency's institutional focus on speed and mission readiness was apparent from day one.

Stacie Williams
One thing that I really appreciated when I came to DARPA was just the sense of urgency and the sense people are focused on the mission. As soon as I got to DARPA, I got my computer. The first day, I got everything up to speed. I got business cards, like everything was just laid out for me, so I didn't have to worry about that.

I could really concentrate and focus on executing my program. At DARPA, you were enabled to be able to do that, to move quickly, to work with amazing people, to generate ideas and then turn those into a reality.

Artie Mabbett
The neat thing about DARPA is if you have a cool idea, you run with it. If you are passionate about an area or a thing or a technology, it's one of the few places that has access to dollars that can be applied almost immediately. It's the only place I've ever been where we went to Tech council, like a day after we heard about an idea and had money.

By the end of the week. And in no other place you can do that if you have a really great idea. There's money here to be used. You're not waiting two years for a process.

Tom Shortridge
That ability to get money by the end of the week is the engine that drives everything. But where does that money go?

When you hear the phrase DARPA program - what do you picture? You're probably imagining a secret laboratory deep in the basement, scientists in white coats huddled around strange, glowing devices. Something straight out of a movie.

It's a great image, but it's almost completely wrong.

Amber Walker
The first thing that surprised me, and maybe surprises everyone, is how little actually happens inside of the DARPA building. You know, I think you get in your head as a sci fi geek or, you know, somebody that subscribes to Futurism, that you're going to walk into DARPA and see all these cool toys on display or these laboratories. We mostly just have office buildings here. All of the real work is done out with our industry partners. And so a lot of what makes us successful at DARPA is the ability to move money through the department. We can't build anything if we can't pay for it and let contracts. And really, most of my contracting expertise and experience came from on the job training, going through the egis of contract strategy and the legal fees of it.

Tom Shortridge
So if the real work happens outside the building and the primary tool is funding, what does a program manager actually do? All day? Todd Master, PM from 2016 to 2021, explains that the simple label of Program Manager hides a multitude of roles. It's less scientist and more conductor of a complex orchestra.

Todd Master
Most people who come here to DARPA are technical people. The job is a program manager at DARPA. But there is a lot of real like program management and a lot of mechanics under the hood that, like, you really get a lot of exposure to hear that in most other jobs, even as a government employee like you, just wouldn't do all of that.

You have a contractor team, in many cases, multiple contractor teams that you're sort of overseeing, and then you have your own team of consultants, people here who help you actually execute your programs. You kind of have to pull together this team of like, really great people and then really rely on them. That was a big part of it was like, you really had a lot of time and experience thinking about, how do I manage a team, how do I identify a team that is high performing?

How do I rotate through the right people for the right jobs at the right time? That experience really is super important because you're going to need to do that if you're going to be in a leadership role in an organization later.

Tom Shortridge
So let's continue the metaphor of the PM as a conductor. But this isn't the New York Philharmonic. This is an orchestra built from scratch for singular, seemingly impossible performance. And not only have your star players never played together, they might not even know each other exists. Your lead violinist is a sculpture of the invisible, creating microscopic machines smaller than a human hair.

Your master percussionist is an armorer from the aerospace industry, an engineer whose job it is to keep delicate payloads from turning to dust in extreme environments. How do you get them to play together in perfect harmony?

Thomas Kenny, a PM from 2006 to 2010, might call it engineered serendipity.

Thomas Kenny
You can bring communities together that wouldn't normally work together. I think that's where DARPA has had its biggest wins. By creating a program and announcing, you know, a funding opportunity. You're basically putting a giant pile of fate into a place in the technology domain. And so people will come at it from different angles, and you end up with groups of people working together on the technology under a DARPA program that you would never find self-assembling under a more traditional agency program.

Tom Shortridge
Dr. Kenny's work, both at Stanford and at DARPA, has focused heavily on MEMS technology, microelectromechanical systems.

Thomas Kenny
MEMS technology and packaging technology had to be merged somehow to make the next generation of stable time. References. And because of the DARPA funding Lord mEMS people and packaging people together, we saw some things and recognized opportunities that no one would have spotted in our own separate spaces. And now there's a huge result from all that. A 4 or $5 million DARPA investment at the start triggered maybe 100 X similar investments from other agencies and other organizations.

It spun out a venture backed startup here in Silicon Valley, lived on venture funds for a long time. Then it was acquired and spun back out. And it's currently on the Nasdaq trading at about $7 billion market cap. It's on aircraft. It's in missiles and weapons systems. It's in telecommunication systems. And so it all really kind of spun all the way back into being useful for DARPA, as well as an engine of, of economic success.

It's just one of the many seeds DARPA planted. There wasn't anticipation that this all could happen when we started. And there was luck. And, you know, we stumbled into the right people in some other key moments. But a lot of it is just, you know, technologies that build careers and build an economy that has been good for, you know, for the country in a very broad sense.

Tom Shortridge
DARPA's core mission revolves around national security. But the definition of that phrase and the nature of the battlefield is constantly in flux. It's being able to sense and establish ground truth across all domains, from deep sea to deep space. It's the software that underpins our critical infrastructure. It's a resilient, trustable supply chain. It's the health of our warfighters in unknown environments.

Even for someone with a deep military background, like Amber Walker, who retired from the Army Reserves as a lieutenant colonel in late 2025, it opens a whole new meaning of protecting the nation.

Amber Walker
The amount of things I had exposure to, the amount of awareness I had, both of my own program, but then just broadly of the rest of the agency's priorities really opened my eyes to the connective tissue within the department. Everything from space to undersea to ground, which is what I knew best when I came in. I left with a much broader appreciation of the entire gamut, and it's made me just a little bit more credible in more places because you have that awareness, you see those things, you understand the big picture and the context for why and how they were built.

And DARPA is very good at kind of seeding that in you. It's not just about how you're going to build something, but the why is exceptionally important. Always most important to me is if you're successful, who cares? And are we building the right thing at the right time for the right reasons?

Tom Shortridge
You start your tour at DARPA looking through a microscope, obsessed with the how the intricate, beautiful complexity of the technology is your world. But quickly, the agency swaps your microscope for a wide angle lens. You're forced to zoom out and see how your single project connects to a vast, interconnected landscape. That new perspective recalibrate your purpose as a PM. For an officer, seeing that wide angle view forged a powerful connection between her work as a scientist and the sense of public service she hadn't anticipated.

Anne Fischer
The ability to spend time with wicked, smart, creative people for public service was a really amazing experience. When I thought about public service before, I didn't think about the creation of a pharmaceutical pipeline for stability of medications. I didn't think about the national security implications of chemistry writ large. I was sort of thinking about, hey, that science is really cool.

And then along the way, I grew to appreciate the culture that sits within that organization and the meaning that it has to people and the importance of the mission.

Tom Shortridge
The people are the mission. It isn't an abstract concept in an office in Virginia. It's a soldier on patrol in a frozen forest. It's a pilot in the cockpit, thousands of feet in the air. It's a sailor steadying himself against the of stormy seas. For Stacie Williams, it's a foundational duty.

Stacie Williams
I'm in the government and working in defense because I really believe in this country, and I believe in our warfighter. And I feel it's my responsibility to work with my colleagues to make sure they have the kit they need in the field.

Tom Shortridge
But how do you know what it is they need? You won't find the answer in PowerPoint slides or spreadsheets. There's a dangerous gap between the pristine theory of a conference room and the mud caked reality of the field. To close that gap, you have to step out of the office and into their world, as Todd Master discovered.

Todd Master
There will be no roadmap for what you're going to do when you get here. If you had told me before I came in, you're going to come up with this idea for this launch challenge, where we're going to try to launch rockets from random, unprepared places, but then you have to figure out how to do it. Where it might take you when you get here is really the most interesting part. There's a lot of engagement with military users here to go understand their operational challenges and what is the equipment and the situation that they operate with today so that you can go better understand. I mean, we got to go on the deck of an aircraft carrier, get a tour inside a nuclear submarine. Like, I got to fly in the back of an F-16. There were some pretty incredible experiences here.

Tom Shortridge
Before you have those types of experiences, the term warfighter can be an abstraction, a word on a slide, a requirement in a document. But after? After you’ve shared a conversation in the belly of a submarine or felt the G-forces in a fighter jet, the abstraction shatters. It's replaced by faces, names and stories.

It's a connection forged not with technology, but with the human beings who trust their lives to it. Thomas Kenny speaks to that powerful shift from the abstract to the deeply personal.

Thomas Kenny
The real experience I had was getting to talk to the troops, young men and women early in their lives, making really giant sacrifices to serve a lot of uncertainty, long deployments, you know, big disruptions in their personal life. These people deserve the best the country can provide to them in terms of resources and protection. DARPA is a place where we try to give a technological advantage to the troops, and the best technology we can provide is a factor in helping them do their job and come home safe.

Tom Shortridge
Baked into the DNA of DARPA is a paradox. The clock is already ticking on your time to execute, even before you fully grasp the mission.

The role is better understood as a tour of duty rather than a long term career. It's a short, intense sprint supported by mission driven civilian employees and contractor staff with a broad range of expertise.

DARPA brings you in, harnesses your unique perspective, and then intentionally, strategically pushes you back out. That process can feel like a leap of faith, especially for someone from the academic world. Thomas Kenny recalls wrestling with that very question.

Thomas Kenny
I've been at Stanford for the last 31 years, give or take, as a professor of mechanical engineering. When the question arose about actually spending up to four years at DARPA. There is a job security question here. When people go work in agencies, sometimes it's unclear what happens next. And for the academics that are considering employment at DARPA. This is truly a fantastic arrangement, seamless, coming and going.

There was a day on a Friday where I was at Stanford, and then Monday I flew to Washington and showed up and got oriented, and they gave me a badge and I got right to work. And then on the last day at DARPA was kind of the exact opposite. I dropped off all that stuff and went back to Stanford and just checked back in.

I spent four years as a program manager. I can go on and on about all the things I learned. And it was fabulous. I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity.

Tom Shortridge
So we're back to handing in your badge. What now? For some, the path leads back to a world they knew before. Now seen through a completely new lens. But for others, the DARPA experience isn't a detour. It's a launchpad. That was the case for Artie Mabbett.

Artie Mabbett
DARPA is such a unique place and such a unique opportunity that doesn't come around very often. It's the coolest job you'll ever have. Like, I've seen people do multiple tours. There's been individuals that I saw, like, come in in uniform and then then come back as a civilian and then come back as an office director, and things change all the time here.

And so just because it might not be a right fit today doesn't mean it's not the right fit in five years from now. I've always been interested in someday down the road, coming back and serving in senior leadership roles in the department. And, you know, I had some great mentors as I was wrapping up my time at DARPA and sort of talking about what the next steps were, and there were a number of government opportunities I could go back into.

But really, the big push my mentors really gave me was, you know, if you really want to be an effective leader back in the department down the road, really understanding the industry side. The defense industrial complex is much broader than government, government, it's academia, it's big industry, small industry, etc. and really help you establish strategies and vision on how to best work in that environment.

And after the experience of really trying to deliver an urgent need for the warfighter and changing the paradigm of how we do business, really kind of got me on the path I'm on now. So one of the things I've really been focused on is ultimately how to drive those changes on the industry side.

Tom Shortridge
Artie spent years learning the ropes at large companies like Raytheon and Leidos. And today, as the CEO of North Wind, he is in a position to change the system.

Artie Mabbett
About half of the business is very much focused on ground testing and ground test facilities. The other half of the business, we have a core group of folks that have been doing air breathing hypersonics for, you know, 30 years or that does a lot of the flight test experiments for various government programs, DARPA programs, things of that nature.

My goal, and the job that I've really been chartered to, to go do is how do we bring those two groups together in a synergistic way to really bring capability that changes the paradigm of how we go from concepts through ground tests, through flight tests, through prototype delivery, and much more accelerated time frames.

Tom Shortridge
Working in space. Todd Master, now chief operating officer at Umbra, had a front row seat to a revolution underway right as he was figuring out his next move.

Todd Master
DARPA is probably one of the absolute best jobs that you could have as a technical person in the United States government. The autonomy that you have, the budget you have, like it's really pretty much unmatched in the government. But that's the government. There's a lot happening in private industry. There's a lot happening in academia. And so I think when you leave DARPA, there is a world of really interesting jobs out there that really are, you know, world changing that are open to DARPA program manager because of that experience, because of the time that you had here and the sort of breadth of things that you could work on.

So my entire career has been focused on space 25 years now, and I spent my time at DARPA here entirely focused on a space portfolio. When I left DARPA, there had been a massive amount of investment in private space companies, just a huge influx of venture capital and private equity going into space. Space became sort of a new hot development sector.

So I was pretty convinced, like, I'm going to go do something in this commercial industry. I tried to find a place that was doing something I felt like was going to be, you know, world changing today. But even more possibilities for the future. We today, as a company, aren't doing the things that I was working on specifically here at DARPA, but definitely some solid principles that cross over.

The thing that I kind of bring from DARPA, just trying to look at those high payoff opportunities, evaluating, is this the thing that if we spend time or investment or technology development on, will really move the needle going forward because, you know, there's infinite possibilities of things that you could go do, but what are the ones that are going to be the most effective?

Yes, you can change the world when you're here at DARPA, but you can continue to change the world and lots of other opportunities that come right after.

Tom Shortridge
For others, the relationship with the agency doesn't end. It evolves. You move to the other side of the table. You go from being the person pitching the radical new tech to the person who has to decide if it actually solves a problem for the warfighter. That's what happened with Stacie Williams, who's now the chief science officer for the US Space Force, where she's one of the agency's most critical customers.

Stacie Williams
DARPA has so much to provide to the warfighter. I want to make sure that we're tapping into that. And so working with with my team to make sure that we're giving the demand signal to DARPA, like, what are our challenges? I'm working with our operators to identify some of those challenges so that we can bring science and technology to bear on today's problems, and then to make sure that we're prepared for the future.

We also do a lot of foresighting, working with academia, working with industry to identify what's on the horizon so that we can be prepared for technical surprise, and then also that we can spring technical surprise.

Tom Shortridge
The transition out of DARPA certainly isn't always a straight line. Amber Walker
So my whole adult life up to that point, I had been in uniform and served in the military. So not only was this a transition from DARPA, but it was a transition from the service for me. And so finding somewhere that I understood the mission, I knew the people I had familiarity with, the technology was important for me.

It's a very strong network here of both current program managers and alumni that kind of remain around the hoop. I use that network a lot in my transition to kind of pressure test. What do I want to be when I grow up, and how do I keep this DARPA high into my next job? I've taken a interesting set of leaps in my career, so I was at Raytheon BBN for about a year and a half, and then I was actually recruited to stand up a new business unit at Anduril, which at that time was about a 700 person business.

Looking at how they were going to do more Army work. And so kind of through that leap to Angel, I found my way to Parry Labs, moving from applied research and development all the way now to more of a product based business.

Tom Shortridge
Amber is currently the chief growth officer at Perry Labs.

Amber Walker
We were really founded on the mission to open up complex systems and kind of democratize platform access for small businesses, for more agile software addressable solutions. We're a digital systems integrator. We create edge compute and embedded software to support this vision of an open future. We sell on to uncrewed aircraft, uncrewed ground vehicles, and increasingly even into the crewed vehicle space.

A lot of what we do is about making disparate systems work better together, and more rapidly deploy updates to the forward edge. The field, and I think more of my post RPA career has ended up on software than hardware. As a software company, you get to build new things on an almost daily basis. As a hardware company, you get to build new things about once every ten years. So they're both really exciting to me, and I'm happy to be in a place like Perry where we've got a little bit of both and where we have a lot of different ways to combine our technology in solutions for the warfighter.

Tom Shortridge
It's interesting how Amber's work, making disparate systems work better together, sounds a lot like what a DARPA PM does. And it turns out some former PMs take that similarity even more literally. They essentially recreate the DARPA model on the outside. Instead of managing a portfolio of projects, they manage a portfolio of companies. That's the work Dr. Anne Fischer found herself drawn to: seeding brand new companies in the world of deep tech investing.

Anne Fischer
You can never leave DARPA. I was at DARPA for a long time, and people usually aren’t at DARPA for a long time. And I landed at an amazing organization with great people, Intellectual Ventures, and we're doing really cool stuff. We are an early stage investment organization, so we invest upstream of traditional venture capital, meaning we invest in work, as DARPA does, at universities, small companies.

We look at really challenging technical ideas and how we can take those ideas, reduce them to practice, build the thing, demonstrate the electron does x, y, and z. Demonstrate that we can manipulate a system for some commercial value, and then we formulate startup companies and spin those companies out into the world. It's really about what are the hard problems that can make a significant impact.

We are tied in to the DARPA ecosystem. We don't have formal relationships, but it's really about the innovation ecosystem, and we want to stay a part of that because there are great things coming out of DARPA, and they're great things coming out of our organization and others that we know about. Making those connections is really important. But once at DARPA – you never leave.

Tom Shortridge
So you never really leave. That's the feeling. In practice, that means the DARPA network becomes your go to resource. It answers the question, what now? And as Artie Mabbett explains, once you reach a certain point in your career, that word of mouth connection is how real opportunities actually happen.

Artie Mabbett
By DARPA, because you get mixed into so many different areas, you end up creating a network with active duty folks, with other business partners, with other government contacts, with folks over the Pentagon. It was reaching out to that network. It was finding people that I had worked with in the past that knew me, that could vouch for me, because after a certain point and all of our careers, it's no longer about applying for some job that's on the internet.

More often than not, it's a company or organization has a need, and they're like, hey, I remember this guy that did this great stuff, let's go talk to him. And and so more often than not, it's really through word of mouth and networks that really find those opportunities. But it pays dividends to have that connectivity.

Tom Shortridge
So the network is powerful. It opens doors. But what forges those bonds so tightly in the first place? Amber Walker believes it comes down to the shared experience, the intense focus, the talent and the trust you build with the people working. The mission alongside you.

Ambert Walker
The professionalism of the people I worked with, the talent of the people I worked with, the responsiveness of the support staff. I've never been before or since in a team that had as clear a vision of success and kind of a one team mindset. Some of my best friends still to this day were my office mates at DARPA, and we've stayed close in the industry as we've left.

We've stayed close as friends. The innovation at DARPA and the ability to kind of think freely and throw some crazy ideas out and really do that collaboratively with your peers and your contract staff and your industry partners. I've never been in another position where I could just think of cool things all day long and get paid for it.

Tom Shortridge Thinking of cool things all day sure sounds like the perfect job. But beyond the intellectual thrill, the thing that everyone seems to carry away with them is a profound personal transformation. We'll give the final word to Amber Walker on hpw the experience affected her.

Amber Walker
I just think DARPA changed my life. The confidence it's given me in my own skill set. The network that I left here with way back when, as an undergraduate, would I have seen myself at DARPA? No. And I certainly wouldn't have seen where I went after DARPA. DARPA just helped me come into my own. I was pressured to make a lot of very difficult, multi-million dollar decisions at the age of 35 about technology and adoption and transition.

And I was in rooms that under most circumstances, I never would have been in. Right, with decision makers at levels I never would have been in in my regular career. So just the confidence it granted me to kind of take ownership of those decisions and how we use the data that we have in front of us. I think that's served me well since I've left to be part of something so special. Such a small, tight knit community. What it has set me up for post DARPA, the exposure it has given me to the Department of War is unparalleled.

Tom Shortridge
In the end, that's the true legacy of a tour at DARPA. It's a person: transformed. They arrive with vision and leave with the experience, confidence and connections to continue making an impact wherever they go next. They become a permanent part of an innovation ecosystem that, by design, is always looking forward. And so while the agency itself may be allergic to nostalgia, this look back reminds us that its greatest investment is in people and that investment continues.

For those of you listening who heard these stories and felt a spark, that desire to tackle the impossible, to serve the nation and to work alongside the best. Consider this an invitation. If you have that intellectual curiosity, breakthrough ideas, and a drive to make a difference. The journey starts at DARPA.mil/careers. You'll be joining a community that lasts a lifetime.

For our alumni listening - the very foundation of that community - we encourage you to stay involved as mentors and collaborators who continue to strengthen this unique ecosystem. And if you have stories you'd like to share, feel free to reach out to us at podcast at DARPA mil. That's all for this episode of voices from DARPA. As always, thanks for listening.