Mak, who is co-director of Stanford Frontier Technology Lab and an investor in national security startups at Brave Capital, explains the importance of fostering these kinds of connections and bringing students into the conversation.

“The future of national security depends on collaboration, and this seminar is our effort to help forge those connections,” she says. “It’s been exciting to watch it evolve—and continue to grow—into a platform that bridges communities that rarely share the same room: students, technologists, policymakers, investors, and public-sector innovators.”

In its early years, the series featured government leaders like former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, founders of pioneering companies in satellite imagery and robotics, and leaders from organizations such as the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. More recently, CEOs like Hidden Level's Jeff Cole, whose company develops stealth and radar technology, and Baiju Bhatt of Aetherflux, a space solar power venture, have joined the discussion series.

Strengthening this flow of expertise between government and innovation hubs like Silicon Valley is key to the future and success of both sectors, and the students of today will be the leaders and policymakers of tomorrow driving those ventures, observes Eric Volmar, the teaching lead at the Gordian Knot Center.

"In modern entrepreneurship, every founder needs to be thinking about the policy aspects of their technologies. In modern government, every leader needs to be thinking about how emerging technologies affect national priorities,” says Volmer. “Tech and policy are fusing together, and our whole purpose is to prepare students for this new era.”

By giving students the opportunity to hear the personal accounts of innovators who have paved the way in addressing national issues and societal challenges through entrepreneurship, the co-leaders of “Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government” hope to encourage students to do the same.

“Students are looking to be inspired—to be mission-driven. Service to the country is one of those missions. Hearing how others have answered the call is what these seminars are all about," says Steve Blank, a lecturer and founding member of the Gordian Knot Center.

“Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government” meets once per week each fall and spring quarter. It can be found in the Stanford Courses catalogue as CEE 252, and is cross-listed for students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program as INTLPOL 300V. Recent sessions of the course are posted online every two weeks.

Assigned into teams of three or four, students were given an area of strategic competition to focus on for the duration of the class, such as computing power, semiconductors, AI/machine learning, autonomy, space, and cyber security. In addition to readings, each group was required to conduct interviews with key stakeholders, with the end goal of producing a memo outlining specific policy-relevant insights about their area of focus.

But the final project was only part of the grade. The instructors also evaluated each group based on how they had used AI to form their analysis, organize information, and generate insights.

“This is not about replacing true expertise in policymaking, but it’s changing the nature of how you do it,” Volmar emphasized.
 

Expanding Students’ Capabilities

For the students, finding a balance between familiar habits and using a novel technology took some practice. 

“Before being in this class, I barely used ChatGPT. I was definitely someone who preferred writing in my own style,” said Helen Philips, an MA student in International Policy and course assistant for the class.

“This completely expanded my understanding of what AI is possible,” Philips continued. “It really opened up my mind to how beneficial AI can be for a broad spectrum of work products.”

After some initial coaching on how to develop effective prompts for the AI tools, students started iterating on their own. Using the models to summarize and synthesize large volumes of content was a first step. Then groups started getting creative. Some used AI to create maps of the many stakeholders involved in their project, then identify areas of overlap and connection between key players. Others used the tools to create simulated interviews with experts, then use the results to better prepare for actual interviews.
 

For Jackson Painter, the class provided valuable practice combining more traditional techniques for developing policy with new technology.

“I really came to see how irreplaceable the interviewing process is and the value of talking to actual people,” said Jackson. “People know the little nuances that the AI misses. But then when you can combine those nuances with all the information the AI can synthesize, that’s where it has its greatest value. It’s about augmenting, not replacing, your work.”

That kind of synthesis is what the course instructors hope students take away from the class. The aim, explained Volmar, is that they will put it into practice as future leaders facing complex challenges that touch multiple sectors of government, security, and society.

“This is a new type of policy work,” he said. “It's accelerated, and it increases the depth and breadth students can take in. They can move across many different areas and combine technical research with Senate and House Floor hearings. They can take something from Silicon Valley and combine it with something from Washington. It's an extraordinary thing.”

Real-time Innovation

For instructors Blank, Felter, and Volmar, classes like “Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition” — or sister classes like the highly popular “Hacking for Defense,” and the recently launched “Entrepreneurship Inside Government” — are an integral part of preparing students to navigate ever more complex technological and policy landscapes.

“We want America to continue to be a force for good in the world. And we're going to need to be competitive across all these domains to do that. And to be competitive, we have to bring our A-game and empower creative thinking as much as possible. If we don't take advantage of these technologies, we’re going to lose that advantage,” Felter stressed.

Applying real-time innovation to the challenges of national security and defense is the driving force behind the Gordian Knot Center. Founded in fall of 2021 by Joe Felter and Steve Blank with support from  principal investigators Michael McFaul and Riita Katila, the center brings together Stanford's cutting-edge resources, Silicon Valley's dynamic innovation ecosystem, and a network of national security experts to prepare the next generation of leaders.

To achieve that, Blank leveraged his background as a successful entrepreneur and creator of the lean startup movement, a methodology for launching companies that emphasizes experimentation, customer feedback, and iterative design over more traditional methods based on complex planning, intuition, and “big design up front” development.

“When I first taught at Stanford in 2011, I observed that the teaching being done about how to write a business plan in capstone entrepreneurship classes didn’t match the hands-on chaos of an actual startup. There were no entrepreneurship classes that combined experiential learning with methodology. But the goal was to teach both theory and practice.”
 

That goal of combining theory and practice is a throughline that continues in today’s Gordian Knot Center. After the success of Blank’s entrepreneurship classes, he — alongside Pete Newell of BMNT and Joe Felter, a veteran, former senior Department of Defense official, and the current center director of the GKC — turned the principles of entrepreneurship and iteration toward government.

“We realized that university students had little connection or exposure to the problems that government was trying to solve, or the larger issues civil society was grappling with,” says Blank. “But with the right framework, students could learn directly about the nation's threats and security challenges, while innovators inside the government could see how students can rapidly iterate and deliver timely solutions to defense challenges.”

That thought led directly to the development of the “Hacking for Defense” class, now in its tenth year, and eventually to the organization of the Gordian Knot Center and its affiliate programs like the Stanford DEFCON Student Network. Based at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the center today is a growing hub of students, veterans, alumni, industry experts, and government officials from a multiplicity of backgrounds and areas of expertise working across campus and across government to solve real problems and enact change.

Prepared for Diverse Challenges

In the classroom, the feedback cycle between real policy issues and iterative entrepreneurship remains central to the student experience. And it’s an approach that resonates with students.  

“I love the fact that we’re addressing real issues in real time,” says Nuri Capanoglu, a masters student in Management Science and Engineering who took “Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition” in fall 2024.

He continues, “Being able to use ChatGPT in a class like this was like having a fifth teammate we could bounce ideas off, double check things, and assign to do complex literature reviews that wouldn't have been possible on our own. It's like we went from being a team of four to a team of fifty.”

Other students agree. Feedback on the class has praised the “fusion of practical hand-on learning and AI-enabled research” and deemed it a “must-take for anyone, regardless of background.”

Like many of his peers, Capanoglu is eager for more. “As I’ve been planning my future schedule, I’ve tried to find more classes like this,” he says.

For instructors like Felter and Volmar, they are equally ready to welcome more students into their courses.

“Policy is so complex now, and the stakes are so high,” acknowledged Felter. “But what we’re seeing in these classes is a passion for addressing real challenges from students who may not have otherwise thought they have a place at the table of national security or policy. That’s what we want. The best and brightest future policymakers are going to have diverse skill sets and understand how to leverage every possible tool and capability available to meet those challenges. So if you want to get involved and make a difference, come take a policy class.”

The following commentary appeared in the journal Issues in Science and Technology (Vol. XLI, No. 3, Spring 2025). It is part of a multi-author discussion of the article Reconsidering Research Security, by John C. Gannon, Richard A. Meserve, and Maria T. Zuber, published by the journal in its Winter 2025 issue.

Congress mandated the creation of the National Academies Roundtable on Science, Technology, and Security to address concern that untoward and illicit actions by China and other countries posed serious risks to American security and economic preeminence. John C. Gannon, Richard A. Meserve, and Maria T. Zuber, who cochaired the roundtable, correctly conclude that zealous measures to defend against foreign exploitation of university-based research would be inadequate to preserve US preeminence in science and technology (S&T) without much greater effort to strengthen US capabilities.

I was privileged to serve as a member of the roundtable and am both heartened and deeply disturbed by what we learned. As their article’s summary of key observations makes clear, the magnitude and efficacy of untoward foreign government actions to exploit American university-based research are less than feared, awareness and understanding of the problem in academic institutions and federal funding agencies have improved greatly, and steps underway to ameliorate the problem without seriously damaging the efficacy of open research appear promising. But as the authors also make clear, illicit foreign actions to exploit American S&T are neither the only nor most serious threats to sustained US preeminence and the security and competitive advantages it provides. We have a “Pogo problem.”

The comic strip character Pogo once famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The roundtable pulled together findings from multiple studies that revealed serious and worsening internal threats to US S&T capacity and preeminence. They also demonstrated that some of the adopted and proposed measures to prevent foreign exploitation will make the internal weaknesses greater and accelerate the relative and absolute decline of US capacity.

For example, as the authors correctly emphasized, the nation needs to give immediate and serious attention to factors that limit the ability of secondary schools to interest and educate young people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We do not now graduate enough seniors interested in STEM fields to fill university classes or existing corporate demand for scientists and technicians. Our broken immigration system compounds the problem in ways that reduce domestic capacity and shift commercial application of discoveries to other countries with better-prepared workforces. The already serious problems are further compounded by research security demands that effectively drive smaller research universities out of the game by making it too costly to utilize available talent or compete for federal grants.

As a member of the roundtable, I fully endorse the conclusions of our cochairs and their call for approaches that emphasize maintaining and improving US STEM capacity more than limited utility efforts to build perfect defenses against exaggerated foreign threats. We must revitalize and adapt the policies that made the United States preeminent if we are to regain and retain that status.