Before he became the Pentagon’s resident technology scout and venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Raj Shah spent twelve years flying an F-16 around Afghanistan and Iraq. Much of that time he wondered why a $30 million aircraft had worse navigation systems than a Volkswagen. The mapping technology was so ancient that it did not, at a glance, show pilots how close they were to national borders, or the features of cities and towns below them. Worse yet, Shah told me one day as we walked around his Pentagon-created start-up—called DIUx for “Defense Innovation Unit, Experimental”—“I had no way of
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