Shifting the impossible to the inevitable A Private ARPA user manual Stay in the Loop How can we enable more science fiction to become reality? Looking to successful outliers from history is a good place to start. After digging into why DARPA works, I asked the follow-up question: how could you follow DARPA's narrow path in a world very different from the one that created it? This piece is my answer. It both describes and provides a roadmap to actualize a hybrid for/nonprofit organization that leverages empowered program managers and externalized research to shepherd technology that is too researchy for a startup and too engineering-heavy for academia; taking on work that other organizations can't or won't by precisely mapping out blockers to potentially game-changing technology, creating precise hypotheses about how to mitigate them, and then coordinating programs to execute on those plans.