Before defense software became fashionable, Eric Gillespie made a career of finding commercial signals in public records. His path from patent scorecards to Pentagon data also ended in a stark break with the company he founded.
The Vannevar CEO spent months polishing an Arabic OCR tool nobody wanted. Forty or fifty quiet sales meetings later, a weekend Mandarin model taught him the lesson that now organizes his company: begin with the mission problem, then earn the technology.