One CEO’s push to speed up how the Pentagon adopts technology

Meagan Metzger founded Dcode, a tech accelerator, in 2015. Courtesy: Dcode Early in her career, Meagan Metzger walked into a program office with a simple question: Why was the government building software it could just buy?Again and again, she saw the same pattern: the government spending time and money building technology that already existed in the commercial market — often ending up with something slower, more expensive and less effective.She saw it as a systems integrator building software for the Army, scaling a company and working with commercial tech firms that wouldn’t touch the federal market. And she saw it inside government, where the challenge wasn’t the technology.“The tech’s easy,” she said. “It’s all the unsexy stuff that gets in the way.”So she started figuring out how to work around it. Where others saw barriers — requirements, contracting, incentives — Metzger saw problems to solve. If there was a path forward, she was going to find it.In 2015, she founded Dcode, a tech accelerator, to help startups break into the federal market. But over time, she realized the bigger problem wasn’t companies, it was the system. Today, Dcode works with government leaders to help them become better customers of technology.A