Selling to the DoW: customer discovery and the 2026 PEO directory
The Department of War is not one customer — it's dozens of Program Executive Offices, each with its own budget and priorities. Here's how to find yours, and the directories that map them all.
Ask a first-time defense founder who their customer is and you'll hear "the DoD" — now the Department of War. That answer has cost startups years. The department doesn't buy as one entity: acquisition authority and budget live in Program Executive Offices, portfolio organizations that each own a family of programs — Army aviation, Navy submarines, Air Force battle management, Space Force sensing. Each PEO is, for practical purposes, a different customer with its own priorities, budget lines, and people.
Steve Blank (co-creator of Hacking for Defense) put the frame most cleanly in his 2025 essay How to sell to the Dept of Defense: the 2025 PEO directory — you can't do customer discovery if you can't find the customer, and the directory is how you find it. Stanford's Gordian Knot Center publishes the reference edition every year; the 2026 PEO Directory is now out with a downloadable PDF and a newsletter subscription for future editions.
There are two other maps you should keep alongside the Stanford directory. The Silicon Valley Defense Group's DoW Directory rounds out the picture with the innovation organizations — AFWERX, DIU, NavalX, the Tech Bridges — that serve as the front doors into those PEOs. And LookLeft's DoW/DoD PEO tracker at sites.google.com/lookleft.com/index/home publishes rolling updates on reorganizations, renames, and new PEOs faster than the annual directories can print — plus a subscribe-for-updates form worth signing up for.
| Source | What it gives you | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Stanford Gordian Knot — 2026 PEO Directory | Every PEO, portfolio, and leadership; the reference for who owns what | Annual, PDF + newsletter |
| SVDG — DoW Directory | Innovation orgs and buying commands (AFWERX, DIU, NavalX, Tech Bridges) | Community-updated |
| LookLeft — DoW/DoD PEO tracker | Reorg + rename updates between annual editions | Rolling, subscribe for updates |
| Steve Blank — 2025 PEO directory essay | The founder's mental model + why this matters | Blog post, canonical |
The discovery motion looks like commercial customer discovery with different nouns. Map your product to the two or three PEOs whose portfolios actually cover it. Find the program offices under them — that's where requirements are written and SBIR topics originate. Trace recent awards out of those offices to see what they really buy. Then find the named humans: the program manager, the technical point of contact on the SBIR topic, the contracting officer on the solicitation. Warm paths beat cold email: a Phase I award, an accelerator cohort, a Hacking-for-Defense connection.
We built this motion into CaptureAgent. The proposal workspace now has a customer card: pick your commercial market (dual-use matters — to investors and to the department), then the government customer — sector, branch, and the PEO straight from the directory structure, plus your TPOC and contracting officer. On DoW solicitations, an AI reads the solicitation and pre-fills the branch, PEO, and TPOC where they can be inferred. A directory-currency check verifies the entry is still valid against LookLeft + the Gordian Knot directory (PEOs get reorganized more often than directories get reprinted).
Read the full field guide in Resources (DoW customer discovery: find your PEO before you write a line), then go find your PEO. The customer exists — the directory is how you find their address.