How to (Possibly) Make Money Predicting the Future

On Angel Investments and Assassination Drones

The year was 2015.

I had just gotten off of Active Duty with the US Navy.

My final job had been working for the Chief of Naval Operations, trying to imagine the future, and build technologies to help us win wars in said future.

From 2013-2015 I had conceived of and was leading an augmented reality program, but in the course of it, had taken meetings with many disgruntled Silicon Valley executives, frustrated with DOD "innovation tourism."

"They never ask us for anything!" One big tech exec told me, frustrated. "We're going to stop taking the meetings."

So I came up with a proposal:

... and pitched it to CNO, and eventually to a bunch of other 4-Star Generals and Admirals.

SECDEF finally signed off on the idea in my final week in uniform. I was on terminal leave, and got the call from a friend as I was driving out West.

When I finally got to Palo Alto, Ben Kohlmann (my erstwhile partner in crime and the leader of our band of heretics working for CNO) and I tracked down the team standing up said unit (then known as the "Defense Innovation Unit - Experimental) and – as was our tradition – talked our way in.

We became what is known in the Navy as "plank holders" for what is now the Defense Innovation Unit. The first folks to show up, who help put it all together. It's a rare honor.

My job (I was in the US Navy Reserves now) was to help the DOD interact with the tech sector, and we had rather broad latitude about how to execute.

One of the things I started doing – though it ended up not being something I did on behalf of the Navy – was writing short fiction about the future. Like this:

One such story was about the first swarm-on-swarm engagement where real-time swarm reprogramming enabled victory. The hero of the story (as yet unpublished, as I never finished it) was a junior officer who had, in his spare time, been a drone racing league champion at the U.S. Naval Academy (not sure if this exists rn, but the idea was that it at some point in the future would).

Another was about a coup d'etat kicked off by a precision assassination drone equipped with a small aerosolized toxin. Again, this was 2015.

I forgot about those short stories. Until a few weeks ago.

As someone who has been a tactical and strategic leader at the intersection of technology and asymmetric warfare for over twenty years (where does the time go!), often there are certain types of deals that folks just know to bring to me because I'm one of the few people who can tell them what the company does, who they would sell to, how it might get usefully employed, and so on.

Which is how a drone racing league champion building terrifyingly fast assassination drones ended up in my inbox.

Reader, I invested.

If only because if I'm going to have dreams (or nightmares), I might as well catch some upside.