In April 2022, the CIA decided to swipe right on Nand Mulchandani, appointing him as its first-ever Chief Technology Officer. It was a good look for the CIA. Mulchandani, who previously served as the CTO and acting director of the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, is something of a rare breed in Washington. Before becoming a government employee, he co-founded and was CEO at a string of Bay Area outfits with almost comically Silicon Valley-esque names: Oblix, Determina, OpenDNS, and ScaleXtreme, each of them snapped up by a tech titan (Oracle, VMWare, Cisco, and Citrix, respectively).
Mulchandani could soon be encircled by fellow founders and technologists as the Trump Administration sweeps into Washington with powerful advisors like Elon Musk in tow.
We talked recently with Mulchandani about that shift and its possible impacts – and whether he hopes to be a part of it. It’s a lingering question given that Mulchandani was not hand-selected by the president and that his boss, CIA Director William Burns, will be stepping down, replaced by John Ratcliffe, a former congressman from Texas who was President-elect Trump’s director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term.
The following has been edited for length.
What are the conversations happening right now before the Trump administration comes in?
The big picture is that nobody is thinking there’s a huge change coming in terms of technology and China. When Director Burns joined, his focus and redirection and emphasis for this agency was basically on great power competition. The way we like talking about it is that obviously, kinetic wars [i.e. conventional combat] and things happen in the world all the time. But the next generation of competition is an economic competition and at the heart of it is technology competition. So the way he set out the strategic priorities for the agency were basically a focus on China and, again, this pivot towards technology. So launching [two new mission centers in 2021, one focused on China and another dedicated to transnational and technological threats] and then the creation of the CTO role were the big organizational changes that he made. And in all honesty … those will probably remain priorities for any administration coming in ….
Obviously, we’re hearing a lot about DOGE and the plans of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to shrink – or at least offer their suggestions for how to shrink – the size of government. Has anyone from Musk’s camp talked with anyone at the CIA? Jared Birchall, the head of Musk’s family office, was reportedly talking, for example, to State Department candidates.
I can’t talk about specific presidential transitions going on governmentwide. What I can talk about – while it’s not quite a comment on DOGE itself but one of the key themes that we have been pushing – is the technology enablement of government and government processes . . . and using AI and other pieces to bring precision and scale to our activities. So I can’t comment specifically on what they’re trying to achieve. Is it cost? Is it deployment of tech at scale? Our focus is kind of all of the above. . . . I mean, it’d be crazy not to actually focus on that in a big way, and we are focusing on that, as well.
In any transition, you’ve got people coming in who are trying to assess what they should be prioritizing. At the CIA, what would you say these priorities should be?
There are evergreen problems that will be there in perpetuity. One is our focus on data insights, and I know it sounds like buzzword bingo, but AI in particular – getting that deployed [the right way should be a priority]. If we had a whiteboard, what I would draw for you is the funnel of data that is out there in the world and growing. As an intelligence agency, we’re very, very data hungry, whether it be human intelligence collection, electronic, geo . . . That’s the core of an intelligence service. The problem is that the funnel and the scope and size and scale of data out there is growing every day, and you can always find more data to vacuum up and bring in – some of it good, some of it garbage. With that funnel just infinitely growing, we need to continuously retool our infrastructure and systems and applications . . .
Number two [ties to] the growing side of defense tech and the idea of disruptive Silicon Valley companies now leaning into military technology and leaning into national security and serving us with products and services. That trend is an important one for us to keep supporting.
Another of the big [related] initiatives that we’ve been running and that has been scaled up is: how do we dramatically lower the bar to onboarding commercial tech? That’s what we call the inbound arc. The other side of it is, how do we actually project our requirements out? So as a spy agency, as an intelligence agency, we are culturally not tuned into talking to the outside about our problems and problem sets and initiatives and strategic things; we traditionally have been very quiet or very cagey about this type of stuff. Obviously we have to keep our work classified, but we have now another initiative that we’re going to be kicking off in the next month or so where we’re going to be having very direct conversations with investors, VCs and startups [about these needs] . . . as opposed to a tactical focus on just procurement or acquisition or other pieces.
Speaking of VCs, what do you think on a personal level about people like Marc Andreessen advising President-elect Trump on hiring? Obviously, he’s a very smart guy, but sometimes skill sets aren’t transferable to other industries.
I’d say that’s out of my pay grade. I mean, I know a lot of these folks, and obviously they’re insanely smart. I’ll give you my personal experience – and obviously I don’t get to advise the President directly on non-technology things. But what ends up happening is that as a former CEO, as a businessperson, the thing that I often talk about in the agency at our leadership level is business models. My CS degree hopefully qualifies me to speak on [technology]. The other part of the experience that I bring to the table is having run these businesses and having made business decisions, and my feeling is that that experience and that viewpoint is incredibly valuable in Washington. I sometimes feel that in government, we don’t talk often enough about business models and how to actually run things efficiently, how to scale them, how technology is wrecking business models, how it can enable new business models. Many of the projects that I’ve brought inside or been involved with, I always try to open with: how is our business model changing at the CIA? As a human intelligence organization in the world of tech, in the world of AI, in the world of great power competition, in the world of hard target areas for us to continue running our business, what does the CIA’s business model look like in five, 10, 20 years from now, and how is it changing?
You are not a political appointee. Would you want to stay on if that’s an option or are you ready to come back to Silicon Valley? I know you’ve been traveling between coasts the last five years.
That’s a discussion I’m having with my wife and kids almost every day. I’m actually in the East Bay [of San Francisco] right now, where we live. My wife has got her career. Our kids are well settled. We have relatives close by. So I’ve been commuting almost every week to Washington or other places that the agency, and the DOD [before this], sent me or needed me. And I’ve got to be honest with you, the mileage is now showing. . .
The broader issue that I think is still a concern is there just are not enough Valley folks out in DC, and that is something that I’m personally very worried about. When I look around in DC, I can literally on one hand count the number of folks who have been in positions like myself, meaning [they have] deep roots in the Valley. It’s a big commitment, especially for people with kids and families.
Could you see a day when the CIA creates a second hub on the West Coast?
For now, we’re well-settled at our headquarters [in Langley, Virginia]. But if they’re essentially bringing some fresh thinking into this administration, and they want more tech people involved, who knows?
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