Luke Hillier and the art of the handoff

At the Oceana Navy Exchange in December 2018, Luke Hillier had to keep swiping his credit card. Each holiday layaway needed its own transaction. There were about 120 of them. By the time he finished, he had paid nearly $30,000 toward military families’ purchases and spent several hours in the store. Generosity, on this occasion, required an unusual tolerance for the checkout process.

“Each one they have to do separately. It’s exciting!” he said. People arriving to make their payments discovered that someone else was taking care of the bill. For a businessman whose work had involved getting equipment and software into government hands, the exchange offered a considerably shorter route between paying for something and seeing who benefited.

The scene provides an entry into a career usually described through company names. Hillier co-founded Mythics, the Oracle technology business, and helped turn his father’s Virginia Beach dive-shop operation into Atlantic Diving Supply, now ADS. He later established Hillier Ignite. Across these undertakings, the practical business of connecting a need with the means to meet it keeps appearing.

A finance degree meets a purchase order

A Virginia Beach native, Hillier graduated from Old Dominion University in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in finance, summa cum laude. His first professional stop was the federal government’s Outstanding Scholars program in acquisition management at Naval Air Systems Command. Before selling to public institutions, he worked inside the machinery that bought for them.

That sequence matters. Procurement sits between an organization’s intentions and the goods it eventually receives. Learning that process meant beginning with the buyer’s side of the transaction: the institution, its requirements and the route a purchase had to follow. It was a practical starting point for someone who would spend much of his working life serving government customers.

Oracle came next. Hillier became a lead sales representative in its state and local government division and earned a government-sales award. The move placed him on the other side of the desk, selling technology to institutions whose purchasing processes were already familiar territory. His career was acquiring a theme before his companies acquired their scale.

The garage and the dive shop

Mythics brought that experience into an entrepreneurial setting. Hillier co-founded the business around the turn of the millennium with fellow Oracle alumnus R. Scott LaRose. Hillier served as its early chief executive through 2004. The proposition was grounded in Oracle-based information systems and the work of helping organizations acquire and use them.

Its beginnings were modest: a garage startup. The customers included federal, state and local agencies and higher education institutions. A technology reseller earns its place by making a manufacturer’s products useful and obtainable for a particular customer. In Hillier’s case, the familiarity with institutional purchasing was part of the relevant experience he brought to the business.

LaRose had been a regional manager in Oracle’s state and local government division. Their connection helps explain why this particular partnership made sense. Both had worked where enterprise technology met public-sector demand. Mythics gave that shared experience a company of its own, based in the same Virginia Beach business community that would remain central to Hillier’s work.

Another enterprise was taking shape alongside it. In 1997, Hillier returned to the family business, Lynnhaven Dive Center. His father’s shop already served military divers. Hillier helped establish an offshoot devoted to government customers: Atlantic Diving Supply. The initial opportunity was close enough to walk through the family shop’s door.

ADS began with five people working from a trailer. Over time its offering expanded beyond diving equipment into a broader range of military supplies. The origin helps make the later company intelligible: customers already had specialized requirements, and the business grew by taking on more of the work of fulfilling them. The trailer was a starting address, rather than a business model.

When the catalogue outgrows the counter

By its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2022, ADS described a network of 3,000 supplier relationships and more than 50,000 products. Those figures belong to the company at that milestone. They illustrate how far the operation had travelled from a local diving business without requiring every step of that journey to be attributed to one person.

Hillier’s jobs changed as well. He became ADS chief executive in 2004, after serving as board chairman from 2000. In a January 2025 leadership announcement, the company identified him as founder and chairman while Ryan Angold served as CEO. The business that emerged from a family shop had developed a management structure extending well beyond the founding circle.

Mythics also continued into a later chapter. In January 2023, One Equity Partners announced that it had purchased a controlling interest in Mythics and its subsidiary Emergent. By then, the business included software distribution, implementation, maintenance and support. Hillier’s place in that story is as a co-founder and early CEO; the later company has its own leadership and history.

A cheque is only the beginning

Hillier publicly launched Hillier Ignite in July 2013. Its stated purpose linked economic opportunity with democracy and freedom. Entrepreneurs, young people and military families were its initial focus. The language was expansive; the early activities gave it more tangible form through grants, scholarships and support for people trying to establish a foothold.

One early award went to the Travis Manion Foundation, accompanied by $25,000. In 2015, Hillier presented the Warrior for Warriors award and another $25,000 cheque to the All In, All The Time Foundation at the ADS Warriors East Expo in Virginia Beach. Recognition and funding arrived together, giving the recipient something more useful than a photograph of an award ceremony.

His support also crossed national borders. In early 2014, Hillier Ignite announced that ORPHANetwork had received its inaugural youth award. A $25,000 unrestricted grant came with an additional $75,000 commitment. The work in Nicaragua included an emphasis on education and job skills, extending the organization’s opportunity argument beyond the community where Hillier had built his businesses.

He had visited Nicaragua with ADS employees, relatives and friends. That involvement gave the grants a connection to people he had actually met. The ambition he described was for young people to gain skills that would help them enter working life and become independent. Employment ran through the philanthropic work as persistently as purchasing ran through the commercial work.

The fire starter in the Lion’s Lair

Back at Old Dominion, Hillier helped support the next generation of founders. In April 2014, the university recorded a $90,000 commitment from him and Hillier Ignite toward a business-plan competition over three years. It was a return to his alma mater with money directed toward other people’s prospective companies.

The first Lion’s Lair competition brought ten finalists before a panel of local business leaders, including Hillier. A fire starter product won the top prize. There is a pleasing literalness to a fire starter winning a contest supported by an organization called Ignite. The more consequential detail is that students had to bring an idea into a room and make a case for it.

Hillier’s advice concentrated on that passage from thinking to doing. He spoke about the passion, dedication and focus required to turn an idea into something real. Coming from a garage startup and a dive-shop offshoot, the interest in getting a venture underway had a concrete connection to his own working history.

“The magic is having the passion, dedication, excitement and focus to turn an idea into something real.”Luke Hillier, at Old Dominion’s Lion’s Lair competition

The cost of a disputed classification

His business history also contains a substantial federal settlement. In August 2019, Hillier agreed to pay $20 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations concerning ADS’s receipt of contracts reserved for small businesses. The government alleged that he caused ADS to misrepresent its eligibility, including because of alleged affiliations with other entities.

The distinction between an allegation and an established finding is essential here. The settlement resolved allegations, and there was no determination of liability. Related claims against ADS had previously been settled for $16 million. Hillier’s individual agreement was separate from the company’s settlement.

The dispute belongs in any account of a career so closely connected with public procurement. Eligibility was central to the allegations: which businesses could receive work specifically reserved for smaller concerns. The settlement adds a consequential chapter to the story of a founder whose early professional education began inside government acquisition.

Opportunity, one transaction at a time

The university connection has endured. The Old Dominion University Educational Foundation lists Hillier, class of 1994, among its trustees and identifies him as ADS chairman. His public work has ranged across companies, an industry coalition, university service and grant-making. Virginia Beach remains a recurring setting rather than merely a line in an early biography.

That range makes the Navy Exchange afternoon especially revealing as a scene. There, a transaction had a named beneficiary, a bill and an immediate result. Across the larger career, the distances grew: between software makers and agencies, equipment manufacturers and military customers, donors and aspiring founders. At the checkout, the distance was only a counter wide.