Chris Lynch
‘We’re Showing Up Because We Must Show Up’: Chris Lynch on What Made the U.S. Digital Service Successful
| Chris Lynch was a Digital Service Expert at the U.S. Digital Service and head of the Defense Digital Service for nearly four years, beginning in August 2015. Prior, he co-founded and led several technology start-ups in the Seattle area, and also worked at tech companies. |
Chris Lynch came to the U.S. Digital Service as a skeptic: He didn’t believe a technologist like himself could have an impact within the federal government.
During his time at USDS within the Department of Defense, however, Chris learned he could have an impact, and often an outsized one — if he and the team followed a certain set of rules. Among them: Only seek projects where you can change things at an order-of-magnitude scale; request support from the highest levels of government leadership; and stay in your lane (that is, stick to software if that’s your expertise). Below, Chris discusses the importance of USDS not blending in; creating one of the largest-ever bug bounty programs; and making bold requests of a four-star general.
August 6, 2019
Emily Tavoulareas:
Chris, tell us about your journey to the U.S. Digital Service. How did you end up doing this crazy thing?
Chris Lynch:
I was in Seattle and had no background in either government or military. I was adopting my dog — who is one small part of the whole story — at the Humane Society. Eric Maland called me and said, “Hey, I’m going to move to Washington, D.C. and help with HealthCare.gov,” which had obviously been all over the news. I said, “That’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard. You can’t do anything in government. Government doesn’t care about people like you, it doesn’t care about people like me. It’s a waste of your time.”
I actively tried to get him to not go. And he said, “Well, I have a couple friends out there, I’m going to try it.” He went, and a couple of months later, he sent me a message in a very Eric Maland way: “Hey, are you around on Friday this week? There’s somebody I’d like you to meet.” He gave me no other details. On Wednesday, I got an email that said, “Hey, you’re going to be meeting with Todd Park.” I didn’t know Todd Park was the advisor to the President. And I was like, “Oh, shit, I guess I should look to see who Todd is.”
I showed up where I was told to go, and Kim was there, Brian Lefler was there, the Bensons were there.
We watched this talk and you know how Todd is: “What if it was like The Avengers and we could bring people from around the country together to attack these problems?” I thought, “Sounds interesting for maybe 45 days.” And that’s what I did, 45 days. Before that, I literally just started with T.A. McCann, who’s now over at Pioneer Square Labs, which is a VC firm in Seattle. T.A., myself, and a few other people had started a new personal health record startup and we were literally closing our series A with Foundry while I was in D.C.
Emily:
Do you remember your first day?
Chris:
Mine was a little bit weird. There were a bunch of people who were not sold on the idea. Myself, the Bensons, and a few others. We all flew out from Seattle for a visit in March. It snowed that day, and the government shut down. Todd took us to the bowling alley, took us to the Navy mess, and then took us to the White House to talk to some of the people who were in to try to convince us to come out. I got to meet Ellen Ratajak, who was running a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) team at the time. Megan Smith and Mikey Dickerson came down, too.
That happened before my first day. Two days after I showed up was the first off-site. And I was like, “Well, this sucks. I came out for 45 days and I’m going to this fucking off-site.”
I sat next to David Nesting on the bus ride out, and I felt really sorry for him because I probably talked the whole time. At the off-site, I looked at three different projects that were kicking off and picked which one I was going to work on: The service treatment records.
Kathy:
That story of you coming out and being unsure: It was something several people experienced, right?
Chris:
Yeah, if I hadn’t done that trip, I probably wouldn’t have shown up. That trip was really cool. Even though it snowed, it was still this frenetic, electric thing. It felt different, it felt real. It felt like maybe it would work. It felt like this was a moment in time that was precious and unique.
Kathy:
There was something very special in 2015.
Chris:
It felt like The Avengers coming together. That feeling, as long as you can maintain it, is the most powerful thing in the world. The administration recognized the importance of that: Obama personally convinced people to come. It felt very tangible. Just like when Ash Carter went to a tech conference with me and sat at a recruiting table for the Defense Digital Service. Those moments are one in a million, and that is the precious thing that can never be commoditized. What I actually think a lot of digital service misses is that it is special. We’re not showing up because we have to — we’re showing up because we must show up. I believe that really deeply in my heart.
Emily:
Chris, what do you remember about the team at that time?
Chris:
The off-site seemed like a huge distraction, but it ended up being incredibly useful. It forced me to get to know everybody in a very compressed period of time, because I was stuck with all you out in the middle of nowhere. It also had a bunch of experiences that were unique. The facilitator that was running it up and left. She literally couldn’t take us. And that’s the rebel alliance. It’s a bunch of people who are not going to be told how to do it; they’re going to do it their way and they’re choosing to be there and they’re not able to be corralled. And those are the types of people you can set loose in the middle of the jungle and they will change the world. That is what I remember about that team — everybody felt exceptional. Everybody was special, but yet none of them felt special as an individual. It felt special as this whole unit.
There are a couple things that make digital service successful. The type of person who is willing to navigate hell until they reach a solution. They’re willing to push boundaries to the edge to get there, but they are selfless in their commitment to that mission and they work well as a team. Those are very unique individuals, there’s not a lot of them.
However, it’s easy to believe that you yourself are the most amazing person — but you’re actually not. I can’t think of anybody in all of digital service at any team where you’re like, “Oh, it was just this person.” It’s always as a whole that we did amazing things.
Emily:
Chris, how would you describe USDS to someone who doesn’t know anything about it?
Chris:
What if you brought the most amazing product managers, engineers, technologists, and designers from around the country into a place where people like them are so desperately needed, but rarely called to serve? And you let them work on the most amazing problems — things that matter. They can change the world, they can change government. I used to believe that you can’t change government. But that’s wrong. We have to try.
Emily:
Chris, what’s required for people to succeed in this environment?
Chris:
It helps to recognize a couple things about the Department of Defense (DoD) and why we did things the way that we did. The DoD has 3 million employees, and it has about 10 or 15 million additional contractors. So anytime anybody’s like, “Why don’t you just give everyone an iPhone?” It’s like, “Why don’t you go to a small country, snap your fingers, and the next day everybody has an iPhone?” DoD is really, really big. It’s also one of the most hierarchical organizations in the world. And it is an organization that is filled with people who are hard to break through to. You have to earn their respect. And some on the military side have a natural distrust of civilians.
So what do I think is needed? You need to have an order of magnitude impact. It has to be big. In the early days, I would walk the hallways at the Pentagon called the E-Ring, where the secretary’s office is. When people say “on the E-Ring,” they’re talking about the most powerful decision makers in the Pentagon. I would say, “Hey, here’s who we are, here’s what we do. I think you should work with us.”
We ultimately ended up doing multiple projects for the Defense Digital Service (DDS). We did Hack the Pentagon. We did GPS OCX, which is the ground control system for next generation GPS, which ended up being hugely impactful. And we worked on sexual assault reporting and transparency.
Three of those ended up being incredibly successful changes. Pretty much the entire department has reorganized itself around the work we did on GPS. It created things that are in the news now called Kessel Run. They’ve changed how they do contracting and acquisition and how they work on the software side. They’re training people to do what they think of as DevOps. And then of course, Hack the Pentagon became very successful. It’s the official bug bounty program and one of the largest bug bounty programs in the U.S. Congress has now written it by name into other federal agencies. Singapore visited, and they now use it as their basis for their bug bounty program, too.
Most of the companies we worked with when we started the program were lightly venture-funded, and they’re all now deeply-venture funded. HackerOne, Bugcrowd, and then Synack. Venture investment in that area went up multiples after we started the program.
The other thing that you need for digital service teams to be successful — at least at the DoD — is to be iconoclastic. It’s really important. They need to be visually different; somebody should see one of us in a hall be like, “Oh, that’s a DDS person.” When you don’t have that, every idea at the table looks the same. People would turn to us and they could just visually recognize who the technical person was in the room. I think that we do ourselves a huge disservice by blending in. I fundamentally believe that we need to be a little bit different.
Kathy:
What are the strategies for doing that beyond the hoodie?
Chris:
You have to hire people who are exceptional, but who don’t have the ego. If people don’t have that credibility and cannot confidently speak to what they are, you’ll see digital service look more and more like every other innovation program.
The last thing is: We have to give digital service teams support at the highest possible level. At DoD, you saw Ash Carter go and recruit with me. You saw Jim Mattis, Obama, and Todd Park jump in. We had three criteria for every project that we chose at DDS that evolved over time, including order of magnitude impact and support from the highest level. I would always show up at the beginning and sit down with whoever ran the thing.
I went out to Korea and met with a four-star General… a really big personality. He started the meeting like, “Look, I’m a really busy guy, so I wasn’t going to meet with you while you were out here. But a good friend of mine who’s another four-star General told me that I should meet with you and I respect that person. So I’m meeting with you.”
So I go through the whole thing of what we do, and at the end I’m like, “Here’s the deal. I’m not going to waste your time, I’m not going to reach out to you, I’m not going to bother you. But when I do, I expect that you’re going to actually lay down the hammer. When I tell you that’s the thing that I need, I need you to do it because otherwise we’re going to fail. So if you’re willing to do that, then I’m in.” And he was like, “This guy just told me what the fuck he needs and I actually respect that.” Having that buy-in is incredibly important.
And the last thing that makes us so unique? Most of us come from software companies. So let’s not buy our own Kool-Aid and believe that we’re going to save everything. Let’s find things that matter, get buy-in and support, and then work on something that we are uniquely suited to have that order of magnitude impact on. Those are my three project criteria.
Emily:
Chris, as you were building the team at DoD and keeping these criteria in mind, what was gaining momentum?
Chris:
That’s an interesting question. When we started gaining momentum, I would say, “Hey, I’m Chris. I’m a nerd. My team is really smart, you should work with us. We’ll do cool shit.” And over time, it completely flipped. People would start showing up at the office: “I heard that you did this, I read about this, I saw that.”
We did almost all of our own comms. We did the evening news about Hack the Pentagon and showed up on some late night talk show. That also helped with recruiting. We’d be like, “Oh, we did a thing called Hack the Pentagon,” and they’re like, “Oh, I saw that on the news.” We made a point of only doing press around things that we completed and had results on.
Hack the Pentagon was a huge deal. It was so successful that people started showing up and saying, “We would like to learn about what you’re working on, and could you help us?” We were very focused on things that either made people really happy and made their jobs better and their lives better, or would save people. We decided that that was the criteria. I don’t care if we saved five people, but we were going to do something; it was going to matter.
Kathy:
There were a lot of things that DDS did differently, and they’re arguably one of the teams that has had the most staying power. They’ve been able to continue delivering high value at the highest levels. What do you think it is about the way DDS grew and was set up that allowed them to do that?
Chris:
Mattis and Ash Carter were both helpful at the beginning in saying, “Hey, these people are representing me.” I really worked to cultivate those relationships.
I gave this advice to somebody: “Find the heart of things that are really important for the DoD. You should work on those things because when you do, people will say, Oh my God, this team showed up and they did something that was really important. It changed somebody’s life.“
With Hack the Pentagon, we grew it from three projects to 14 projects by the time I left. So don’t waste time and talent. People have such a short lifespan in digital service, so put them on something that’s incredibly impactful.
I didn’t think having just one long-running project was a good model. I felt a portfolio strategy was going to be more successful. Two out of our three things hit and one did not. If we had invested everything in one, we possibly would’ve gotten crushed and disbanded at the end of it. So I’m glad that we didn’t do that.
Also, we started with no headcount and we had no budget. We decided early on to do all of our own purchasing. We bought our own computers and eventually we bought our own software. USDS made a decision not to get super heavy into that stuff, but we had Slack from the very beginning. We were like, “You guys want us to use this Stone Age tech? We’re not going to do that.”
And I wanted engineers that could actually sit down and write code. Then we completely decided to bypass everything around legislative affairs and work directly with Congress, which was a huge no-no. We built out our relationships with senators and representatives, and that helped a lot. But it was a slow build in figuring out what moves the needle.
Kathy:
Thank you, Chris.
Chris:
This has been fun.