Founder Spotlight with Brian Derfer

^ LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW ABOVE ^

In today’s Founder Spotlight, I’m talking with Brian Derfer, co-founder and Chief Operations & Technology Officer at Agile Six. From the very start, Brian has believed that strong teams are built on trust, autonomy, and giving people the freedom to play to their strengths.

Today, he reflects on how the culture he and his co-founders established continues to drive innovation, deliver meaningful outcomes, and foster lasting change by putting people first. What began as an idea to build a company grounded in values and a desire to improve government services has evolved into a model demonstrating how culture and purpose can drive real change.

Who is Brian Derfer?

It’s such a big question. I’m a husband and father, a member of communities in Sayulita and Encinitas, a founding member of a company, and a member of a rock band. I enjoy watching NFL football and getting into hockey with some of my friends. I think so much of who you are is the relationships that you build. Those are some of the most important relationships to me.

Tell us about your background and journey to Agile Six.

I've always had an interest in understanding how people think and work. Prior to getting into technology 30 years ago, I studied cognitive science and anthropology at UCSD. I’ve always been drawn to the biggest questions: How does consciousness work? How do people think? How do you create healthy relationships and cultures? How do societies develop? How do you even define a culture? How do you define a society?

One of the things I experienced there was that there were all these people around me in the Anthropology department studying culture, but I didn’t feel like that department itself had that great of a culture. It was kind of ironic to me—there was such a focus on studying the subject as a theory, but not bringing it back to, how do you actually relate to people day-to-day?

I think there’s always been that very pragmatic aspect that I missed in academia, and I think I was always drawn to trying to do something more practical—solving actual problems. When the internet was starting to take off, I became really interested in learning how to develop websites and software engineering.

But I think I’ve always carried that high-level interest in how you create a great culture for people to work in—building trust with each other and genuinely enjoying what we do.

Meeting Robert Rasmussen

I met Robert Rasmussen, the founder and CEO of Agile Six, around 2011 or 2012 at a company called Defense Web. At one point, he moved to another company, but as we got talking, our conversation started focusing more on creating healthy teams and healthy team dynamics.

I think every person on a team can be a leader in some way, and what I don’t want to create is a team where one person is making all the decisions. I want to create teams where people take initiative, step up, and contribute in ways that align with their strengths.

That really resonated with Robert. So, in 2014 he called me and said, “I’m actually starting a company with my cousin, Ernie, and we’re wondering if you’d like to join us on this journey.”

I immediately said yes, having the opportunity to create a really different kind of company that was much more based on trust, wholeness, and work that was intrinsically purposeful. We really aligned on all of that, and it’s just been exciting to have this chance to build something from the ground up.

Challenges and Growth

Agile Six recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in the early days, and how did overcoming them shape the company's growth?

The main focus initially for the company was: how can we serve Veterans? It was surprisingly hard. We went for a few years just striking out. We started winning some contracts and got on the Cedar vehicle, and that was amazing. We started this company in response to the digital services playbook. And here it was, first as USDS at the VA, and now OCTO aligning with the playbook.

Being able to be a company that was able to build things in that way at the VA—it was like, okay, we’re finally doing it. We’re finally living what we set out to do in creating this company.

Then, to see SPRUCE come along, and it’s roughly 10 times the size of CEDAR, I think that’s validating what started 10 years ago as a very small niche of companies saying, "Hey, we can use agile development practices, bring HCD, or build software in the open using open-source software." All that was new, and now that's becoming very mainstream with vehicles like Spruce and the investment the VA is putting into that approach to build software and services. Seeing the investment the VA is putting into vehicles like Spruce is really rewarding for us.

Operating as a Fully Remote Company

Some people may not know this, but Agile Six has been remote from the start, and clearly, it's part of your DNA. How has this remote-first approach shaped the way you work, and what does it mean for the culture you've built?

We started the company from a foundation of trust, and then remote work is just sort of a natural extension of that trust. So, we don’t need to be herding people into an office building and actively managing them to make sure that they’re doing the right thing. We started with trust first, but when you’re in a remote culture, I think it demands a degree of self-management. Trust and self-management are sort of two sides of the same coin.

We trust you to self-manage in our remote workplace to do the right things. There’s another piece of it that’s a little bit different. That is, if you put purposeful work in front of people and give them ownership over that work and autonomy to do it –kind of get out of their way – that’s sort of the recipe for solving the most complex challenges. And the work that we do is really deep thought work, solving complex problems for government agencies.

Trusting the people who are closest to the problem is key—they’re going to be the ones who are best equipped to solve it. So I think that approach to solving complex problems has really pushed us toward self-management. The name of the company is Agile Six, and that derives from the phrase, “We’ve got your six,” which really means, I trust you to bring your full self to the problem and work to find a solution—and we have your back on that.

Culture and Values

Agile Six has five core values: Purpose, Wholeness, Trust, Self-management, and Inclusion. Which one resonates the most with you and why?

I think, in order to do truly great transformative things, you need trust. If you can create an environment of trust, it provides a platform for some of our other values, like wholeness, inclusion, and self-management. It’s almost impossible to create a healthy self-managing team, for instance, without trust.

If you can build that foundation of trust between people, then you can do really amazing things. Core values aren’t just something that you say and stick on a refrigerator in an office. They really need to be authentic and define who you are.

What differentiates Agile Six from other companies in this space?

I think we are focused on an intentional culture. We put more focus on culture and values than any company I’ve ever worked for. It literally infuses every decision that we make in a way that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

The fact that we put so much time and intent into thinking about what our values are, what kind of culture we want to build, why we exist as a company, and then making sure that we lean into that in every aspect of our operations—the way we structure the leadership team, how we go after work, who we decide to hire, who we decide to partner with—all of that. Just that clarity around our values, and the extent to which we authentically live those values every day, and they infuse every decision we make, I think it’s truly unique.

Now I'd like to shift the conversation and talk about AI. How do you see AI improving government services and helping better serve citizens?

I've been interested in AI since the 1990s, back when I was a grad student in cognitive science and anthropology. I don’t know if people know this, but AI has really been around since the 1950s. It’s been an area of research for quite a long time. But as computing power grows, transistors and microchips are getting faster, more efficient, and more powerful, and you have cloud computing. So, the capacity to leverage that technology to do things is unleashing incredible power. Plus, you have architectural breakthroughs like the transformer architecture that underlies ChatGPT and a lot of the large language model services you see today.

We’re in a very exciting time where the power of AI is allowing us to do pretty incredible things. Agencies are recognizing this and identifying ways to, for instance, make veterans’ lives easier by streamlining their ability to find and access their benefits, check into appointments, and schedule appointments. The same thing applies to users of Medicare services or Medicare providers; it’s decision support systems—there are all kinds of ways that AI can be put to good use to make government services better, more user-friendly, and more powerful.

Regardless of our agencies' adoption of AI, I think as engineers, UX practitioners, and product owners, there are all kinds of opportunities for us to leverage AI to build things more efficiently with higher quality. A lot of it is just using AI to make work more interesting. AI has the potential to take a lot of the drudgery out of work. As engineers, we can quickly scaffold solutions with the help of AI or use AI to understand the architecture of an existing system so we spend less cognitive effort on the details.

It just frees up more of our capacity to actually think about what needs we are solving and how we are solving them in the big picture, rather than getting caught up in the plumbing of the solutions.

Let’s talk about lessons learned. What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned from your time here at Agile Six that you would like to share with others?

One of the things I’ve learned is to just keep my eye on a target that’s much farther out. As a founder and leader, that’s one of the things I had to learn. When I started, I was probably a bit reactive to short-term successes or failures.

Keeping focus on where you're going is something I learned from both Robert and Dan. I’d encourage anyone starting a company to learn that skill — not just in terms of what you hope for, but being very intentional about the direction you’re going. This is what we’re building. Almost assume success, and that belief and constant reinforcement about where we’re going can be a really powerful motivator to bring people along with a common vision.

I think that ability to unite people under a common vision is something I’ve learned here.

Looking back at your time here, is there a moment that stands out to you that you're especially proud of?

I have two answers to that. The first one is when we started the company, the VA was the agency that we most wanted to serve, but it was really hard to get any work at the VA. We went for a few years just striking out. I think it was 2018 when we put in a bid for the work for the content management system for VA.gov, and we ended up winning. There was pride in the fact that we won, but I think there was even more pride that we had persevered through such adversity for so many years. I remember there were some pretty dark moments for me after losing so many bids in a row.

Robert kept reinforcing that we had the right answer in terms of adopting modern development practices and that we had the right culture we were building. We just needed to keep focusing on what we could control and try not to focus on the fact that we weren’t winning these bids. I was really proud that we persevered through that long drought of not winning any work at the VA and finally winning purposeful work. The ability to persevere through that collectively was something I’m proud of.

The other thing I’m really proud of isn’t so much an event, but it’s something I see almost daily at Agile Six, and that’s our Advice Channel. We spun up this channel because we wanted people in the company not to always look to leaders for answers but to look to each other as self-managing peers.

And I just see that working amazingly every day. People throw questions in there, and fellow Sixers are providing such great advice. Many times, the advice is better than what I think we as leaders might provide. To see people genuinely and authentically relying on each other for good advice, stepping up, and taking the initiative to offer that advice is validating.

Sometimes, as leaders, if you can just step out of the way and create space for people as peers to give each other advice, amazing things can happen.

Rewards, Advice, and Reflections

 Let’s talk about the most rewarding part of your job. What stands out the most to you?

I have the privilege of working with smart, capable, kind people. I think people come here looking for a different kind of work environment, and they bring that energy and alignment already. They want wholeness, they want to build trust-based relationships, they want to make people feel included, they’re interested in self-managing, and they want to work on purposeful work. Being able to work side by side with people who are aligned on those core things is just really powerful and so rewarding.

 What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received, and how has it influenced your work?

I think there's lots of advice I've gotten here. This was probably six or seven years ago now, but Robert advised us, "Don't ever come into a meeting triggered. Get yourself centered, and then come to that meeting in a good, healthy place."

That’s really good advice because when you come into, especially like a leadership meeting, and you're triggered, you're not centered, you're not fully capable of truly listening, truly empathizing, or truly making people feel like they've been heard. So you're not fully engaged in processing information, and you need to be—especially in a company like ours where trust and wholeness are such important values in terms of the decisions that we make.

So I think just that advice – to take the time before meetings, get yourself centered, and put yourself in a state where you can be open to listening to others, fully understanding them, and being open to new possibilities or different ways of thinking about things – that’s really powerful.

Let's dream big. What’s the most ambitious vision you can see for Agile Six or for civic tech in general?

This answer might surprise you, but I think it's more about company culture than about civic tech per se. If I could dream big, it would be to create a model of a different kind of company that puts greater emphasis on local decision-making, autonomy, trust, and wholeness—sort of a flatter, less directive organization.

If we can show that this model can succeed in civic tech, and show that it works, I'd love to see this model be adopted elsewhere. So yeah, that’s kind of my hope.

Final Thoughts

It’s interesting. A lot of the conversation has focused on my experience and the company, but I want to bring this back to what I think is really the most important part of Agile Six: It’s the little things that a company focusing on wholeness and trust can make possible. 

For example, this morning I went surfing with my son, which meant I didn’t start work at the usual time. Luckily, I didn’t have any meetings, but it’s those kinds of little things where you can carve out time for an enjoyable, fulfilling life. Whether it's spending time with family or doing whatever makes you feel whole, Agile Six makes space for that.

The other thing I reflect on a lot is how lucky I am to work with the people I work with every day. We started with the idea of creating an organizational culture based on values—trust-based relationships, rather than transactional ones. I think if you can build that foundation of trust between people, you can do really amazing things.

Life is short, spend time doing things that fulfill you and make you happy.

Sixer Spotlight is an ongoing series to share the stories of our team. If Brian's story piqued your interest in a career with Agile Six, explore our open roles.