Daniel Hendrix didn't know it growing up, but law enforcement was the family business.
His grandmother was one of the first two female police officers in Brentwood, California, back when the Bay Area department had only a handful of cops. His great-great-grandfather was a sheriff. There was a photograph in his aunt's house that Hendrix always assumed was decorative, the kind of old cowboy portrait that comes pre-loaded in a frame you buy at a store. It turned out to be his ancestor.
"I thought it was a picture they bought that came in a frame," Hendrix says. "Come to find out, it's in my family's pretty long line."
He grew up with a single mother and two brothers. When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were picking up, he was ready to enlist. He wanted the Marine Corps. His grandparents wanted anything else.
"My grandparents were pretty concerned," he says. "They were like, 'Please, please, think of something else.'"
A friend who had joined the Coast Guard a couple of years earlier came home on leave and told him the answer was obvious. If he wanted to do law enforcement, the Coast Guard was the place. Hendrix called a recruiter.
He served 21 years. He started as a gunner's mate, back when law enforcement was a collateral duty in the Coast Guard, not yet its own dedicated rating. Hendrix built boarding teams, picking operators for specific missions the way a coach assembles a roster. If he was going onto a tanker, he'd bring a marine science technician who knew how to sound tanks and identify pollution risks. If he needed a mechanic, he'd pull one.
"I would look for people that really could help me out," he says. "The team you could pick from was diverse. It was very cool."
Hendrix completed more than 200 operational missions and 700 vessel boardings across counter-narcotics, maritime security, humanitarian response, and interagency enforcement. He was part of the Coast Guard's deployable specialized forces, where his unit guarded Army war equipment during Iraqi Freedom. That assignment earned him an Army Achievement Medal for the volume of ammunition and materiel his team moved.
The Coast Guard later sent him to Fort Leonard Wood for the Department of Army Civilian Police Academy, a three-month live-in program tied to a deputy chief of police assignment. He had already been through more law enforcement academies than he could count and asked if the school was really necessary. It was. He went, and he won the leadership award.
"They weren't too happy about a coastie taking the leadership award," Hendrix says. "But the general was giving us a little crap here and there, and then he'd whisper it in my ear. He goes, 'You ever want a job in the Army, come talk to me.'"
As recruiter in charge in Los Angeles, a position normally held by an E7, Hendrix was fleeted up as an E6. In 2018, his office completed its annual recruiting mission in three months, putting 136 people into the Coast Guard from a single office. He closed out his career attached to the pre-commissioning unit for the Coast Guard Cutter Argus, one of the Heritage-class offshore patrol cutters, helping stand up its law enforcement division. The ship has still not been built. Hendrix retired from the boarding team in LA, back where his career had started.
After the Coast Guard, he went through The Honor Foundation, a nonprofit that helps special operators find post-service careers. He was the first Coast Guard veteran the organization accepted. He enrolled at the University of Southern California's Master of Business for Veterans program, and in the middle of that transition, he opened D. Hendrix Consulting to do government contracting and consulting work.
It wasn't enough. Consulting alone felt isolated, and grouping friends together into something more structured wasn't sticking. He launched a nonprofit and started organizing events that brought veterans together around shared problems.
One of those events, held at Stanford University with a neurologist named Jin Lee, focused on operator syndrome. The keynote speaker was a Green Beret named Graeme who had spent 14 years in Army Special Forces before being medically retired. Before leaving the Army, Graeme had been assigned to an innovation unit where he scouted and reviewed roughly 300 different technologies. That experience showed him how often founders were losing control of their intellectual property because they didn't know how to protect it. He went to law school.
Hendrix and Graeme connected at Stanford and never lost touch. They talked every day. Both were doing overlapping work, scouting technology and helping startups prepare for government markets. Graeme had already linked up with a co-founder from the Air Force who held a doctorate in cybersecurity. Hendrix recruited Greg, a 22-year Navy SEAL he knew from The Honor Foundation, who was looking for work that felt like giving back.
"We all put the uniform on for a reason," Hendrix says, "and I think we all still have that reason deep down."
On June 1st, the team decided to launch. They called it Six One Sol. Six branches, one mission, solving real-world deployment issues for defense technology companies. The name carries the founding date.
Six One Sol scouts promising dual-use technologies and identifies the adoption gaps that prevent startups from reaching the defense market. Once a technology clears their assessment, the team builds a go-to-market roadmap. The pathways go beyond the traditional federal acquisition route and include commercial sales, government contracts, and public-private partnerships down to the city level. The founders between them hold three USC MBAs, two law degrees, and a doctorate in cybersecurity.
"We wanna take care of the little things so you can focus on building your product," Hendrix says.
The company's first client was a 19-year-old named Chandler. Graeme found him presenting at the Oregon AI Accelerator. Chandler had built a blockchain-based validation system for contracts, and he was ready to give up. He couldn't find anyone to talk to about scaling it. He was planning to sell his patents and go to work because his family needed the income.
Graeme told him not to sell. He introduced Chandler to Hendrix, and Six One Sol took the company, LedgerScope, on as their first client. They helped reposition the technology for a drone verification use case and applied with Chandler to the Oregon UAS Accelerator. They were accepted. The accelerator, in turn, reached out to Six One Sol about working together.
The second company Six One Sol signed was founded by an 18-year-old who had left NASA's Artemis program. Word of mouth did the rest. Young founders started introducing Six One Sol to their peers from MIT and Harvard, and the pipeline filled.
"We didn't really even know what we had at the time," Hendrix says. "We just kinda gathered around in a special operations type of team. We took the mission, the capabilities, and then, what's next?"
Hendrix runs Six One Sol the way he ran his boarding teams in the Coast Guard. Family comes first.
"If you don't have a stable family life, you're not gonna produce at work," he says.
Every Monday, before the team gets to business, they check in on each other personally. Hendrix asks about their lives because he wants the organization to actually care about its people, not perform caring as a management tactic.
"I don't want it to look like that," he says. "I want that to be the sentiment."
Outside of Six One Sol, Hendrix coaches high school baseball. Two of his players have made it to the major leagues. He holds a brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, earned at Carlson Gracie in Anaheim over years of training that sometimes meant three sessions in a single day. He would go in the morning before work, train again with the boarding team during the day, then show up at the gym at night.
"I take everything 100 percent," he says, "and sometimes I get in trouble for it from the people I love."
He lives in Long Beach, California, with his girlfriend, not far from the beach where they watch the tide come in. He retired from the Coast Guard in the same city where he once swore his niece into the delayed entry program. He didn't know until years later that the tradition ran back generations, or that the old cowboy in his aunt's photograph was family.
Daniel Hendrix is the Co-Founder and CEO of Six One Sol, a defense technology convergence platform that scouts promising dual-use technologies and develops go-to-market roadmaps for startups entering the defense sector. A 21-year Coast Guard veteran, Hendrix served as a maritime law enforcement officer across counter-narcotics, maritime security, and interagency operations, completing more than 200 missions and 700 vessel boardings. He holds an MBA from the University of Southern California's Master of Business for Veterans program and is a fellow of The Honor Foundation.