Even mid-sprint to a secret flight, the Navy’s tech chief has a pitch for investors

Justin Fanelli, the Department of Navy’s chief technology officer, has spent the last three and a half years trying to make the U.S. Navy easier to do business with. When we first talked to him last year , he described a shift away from what he called “your granddaddy’s government” — a “spaghetti chart” of entry points for startups — into something closer to a funnel, where companies that show strong results get pulled into the Navy’s technology base as enterprise services.

This week, we caught up with him again on a video call, and this time, he wasn’t just looking again to further streamline the procurement process, he was sprinting, literally, to catch a flight he’d just been ordered onto with no destination shared.