From Open Source to Open Skies: Why Sapphire Ventures Backed Defense Unicorns | The Pair Program Ep84

Speaker A: Welcome to the PEAR program from Hatchpad, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to candid conversations with tech leaders from the startup world. I'm your host, Tim Winkler, the creator of Hatchpad.

Speaker B: And I'm your other host, Mike Gruen.

Speaker A: Join us each episode as we bring together two guests to dissect topics at the intersection of technology, startups and career growth. Welcome back to the PEAR program. I'm your host, Tim Winkler, joined once again by my co host, Sean Leahy. Sean, how's it going man?

Speaker C: Tim's uh, going great. Awesome to be here again and super, uh, pumped about today's episode. Our guests, this is uh, some things I have personal deep experience with and I, uh, can tell you this for sure that these guys are doing some yeoman's work, uh, towards solving a really tedious and serious problem with government, uh, software.

Speaker A: Oh, for sure, yeah, they're, they're uh, climbing some pretty, some pretty large mountains here with uh, some of the problems they're solving. Actually, a part of today's episode is about a venture firm that's stepping outside of their comfort zone and kind of making a bet in a space that it's typically not known for, uh, which is the defense space, kind of spoiler alert. Uh, but it got me thinking, you know, when's a time in your life where you stepped way outside of your comfort zone and it, and it paid off?

Speaker C: Well, I don't know if that's uh, if I can think of a one off the top of my head. I mean, in the past year I've retreated towards the mountains of western Virginia to, to get more into my comfort zone, you know. So, um, I, that's a, that's a hard one to uh, to, to think of on the spot, Tim. But, um, I am very happy that we are seeing folks like one of our guests today jump, uh, into defense tech. And not having been, let's say a native defense tech kind of investor. Right. This is a very promising thing I think from a full national interest, national mission perspective. Um, and uh, they're tackling hard problems too. So sorry for the non answer. Sorry. But, uh, yeah, we're just going to

Speaker A: come up that out and put in something really cool. Um, yeah, I'd say any entrepreneur, right? I mean, you went, you've gone out on your own, you started something, I mean any, any sort of entrepreneur is kind of, yeah, jumping out of that comfort zone. For me, it was, uh, I moved to Indonesia, started uh, my first business when I was 25 and probably about as Far outside of my comfort zone as I could get. New country, new culture, uh, trying to build something, you know, from scratch and uh, failed, uh, after a couple of years. But it gave me a ton of confidence as an entrepreneur and also, I'd say a much deeper appreciation for the comforts of living in the States for sure.

Speaker C: Uh, so let me, let me redeem myself here, Tim, and ask a follow up question. What's the key to getting out of your comfort zone? What was your just do it moment?

Speaker A: For me, I had a mentor that pushed me. Um, it was somebody that had kind of gone and done it previously and we were colleagues, we were co workers and he uh, would just kind of have me over to his place every day after work and eventually was like, what do you have to lose? You're young, you got nothing. Yeah, not nothing, uh, nothing to really, you know, take you away. I wasn't, you know, wasn't married, didn't have kids and uh, uh, so he was a big influence for me. So yeah, I'd have to say like, yeah, having a good mentor, having folks around you that kind of push you to, to go outside those boundaries was, was key for me because I.

Speaker C: There you go. If you can't take the leap, have somebody push you off the cliff. Sounds like a great plan.

Speaker A: Yeah, just get pushed. Uh, cool. Let's give our listeners a quick preview of um, today's episode. So today we're going to be exploring how uh, the open source software company Defense Unicorns is rebuilding the software backbone of the US military and why Sapphire Ventures, best known for commercial success stories like investments in Mulesoft, Box docusign, uh, made Defense Unicorns their first ever defense investment. Which I just think is one of the reasons we wanted to bring these two guests specifically on because it's such a unique uh, scenario there. But we'll dive into how Defense Unicorns grew to nearly 30 million in revenue before raising a dime of outside capital, uh, why Sapphire moved unusually quick on their investment and uh, what this partnership will signal, um, you know, for the next era of national security innovation. Uh, so join us to break it all down. We've got two great guests. We've got Rob Slaughter, co founder and CEO of Defense Unicorns and ah, an Air Force veteran who helped launch the DoD's pioneering Platform One initiative before founding Defense Unicorns. Uh, and alongside him, uh, we've got Jay Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures, longtime venture capitalist, two decades of experience, uh, backing category defining enterprise companies, uh, now adds defense tech to that list. Uh, with, uh, Sapphire's investment and Defense unicorns. And so, Rob J, welcome both to the PEAR program.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for, thanks for having us, Tim.

Speaker D: Yeah, thanks, Tim. And Sean, thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Excellent. All right, let's, uh, let's, uh, uh, dive into the first segment here. It's a fun little icebreaker we call Pair me Up, go around the room, rattle off two things that go together. Sean, you lead us off. What do you got?

Speaker C: Well, Tim, I've tried to stay topical once again. This has been a pretty, ah, good strategy for me for the past couple episodes. But my pair today is government software, uh, approval processes, ATO processes, and headache medication. So, um, you know, if you find, if you're a new defense tech founder and you're getting your, your software product approved the first time, go out to Costco and get yourself the extra strength Excedrin, because it's going to be, it's going to be painful, but maybe not so much in the future because of the efforts of folks like Defense Unicorns. But that's my pair for today.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love it. And we're gonna add Excedrin as one of our sponsors. Uh, this episode is brought to you by now. Extreme Pain Relief. But, uh, yeah, man, I mean, it's, it's a common theme. You know, it, it takes somebody with some super thick skin to get into this space. Um, you know, we talk to founders all the time, uh, on this app, on this podcast. And so it's always intriguing to hear everyone's kind of why, uh, you know, they're jumping into that space. And I'm excited to hear it from a, from a VC perspective too. Uh, but yeah, man, I think everybody on this episode will agree with you and a lot of as well. Uh, I'll go next. Um, very off topic, uh, pairing for me. I've got, um, deep conversations and total discomfort. Uh, and so I'll explain. I just joined a new gym, uh, and one of my main motivations was that it has a sauna. Uh, and it's, you know, it's only been a week, but I've quickly realized that the sauna is kind of like this modern day barbershop. Uh, you know, a bunch of guys chatting, you know, sports could be politics, life advice, but the difference is everyone's half naked, dripping in sweat, and it's the only place that you'll, you'll find that you'll get kind of like unsolicited life advice from a stranger in a towel. I think it's, it's so odd uh, but you know, that's the pairing that I'm going with. It's, it's these deep conversations and just totally discomfortable. Um, but, uh, that will be my pairing for today. Again, nothing to do with today's topic. Just uh, very top of mind because, um, uh, just joined this gym but uh, let's pass it around. Rob, uh, again, welcome to the show and uh, your pairing for today.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, Sean, uh, stole mine so, so I'm going to have to go with my number two pick, uh, here. So, so, so honestly for me, you know, I got four kids. Uh, the youngest one is 18 months. Uh, and starting a company, you're always put in long hours. And years ago I used to be one of those people that started my second shift around 9pm and then worked m my way to 3 and 4am mornings. Now I do the opposite. Uh, and I try to wake up at 4am in the morning. And so for me it's just coffee. Uh, keep it simple. Coffee and mornings go uh, in together. It's the only time I get, you know, clear headspace. Try to wake up before anyone else try, you know, gets up. Try uh, to start the day before anyone else does. So you can kind of start off fresh, uh, you know, close out anything before the day starts. Um, and honestly do my best thinking, you know, just right there, you know. You know, normally typically between, you know, four and five, Amy, you got to

Speaker A: have some rocket fuel coffee. Uh, at 4:00am I'd say, uh, what time are you going to bed? That's, that's my, my, my follow up question to you.

Speaker B: I mean, uh, late night, late nights for me is typically getting uh, close to 11 now. So. But I'd say, you know, earlier, uh, and earlier, uh, the older I get, certainly not uh, unusual for me to be in bed by 10.

Speaker A: And you, how many kids do you have? Uh, four. Wow.

Speaker D: Yeah, unless the Suns are playing, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I stay up especially if they play, you know, the warriors on Pacific time and then I got to stay up late.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, priorities. That's right. You're, you're out in Phoenix, right? Is that right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, out in Phoenix, which is as of a couple days ago, back on mountain time.

Speaker A: Uh, very nice, very nice. Well, yeah, kudos to you for, for you know, being able to set that alarm and get up at 4:00am I, I was proud of myself for doing like 5, 35, 45. But man, that's, that's early. It's an early start. But you're right though. I mean it's the only time you're going to get that kind of mental clarity that, that silence before, you know, the house is just full of chatter and kids romping around. So good on you, uh, Jay, quick, uh, quick pairing from you.

Speaker D: Yeah. So, you know, I'll go with one tried and true and then one around Venture. So of course the tried and true is pizza and beer, right? You can't have pizza without.

Speaker A: Classic.

Speaker C: Nice.

Speaker D: Classic. Uh, but from my experience in Venture, I think, uh, the things that go together is if you have consensus, like everybody voting one on a deal, that deal is not going to do well. Uh, it's, uh, you know, it's a very interesting phenomena like in our business that when everybody thinks it's a great deal for whatever reason, statistically we have seen that invariably it actually becomes a terrible deal over time.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker D: Deals, actually, the ones that you have the most amount of discussion and most amount of debate, uh, are the ones actually that turn out to be, to be great ones, including defensive guards.

Speaker A: That's fascinating. You know, I, I'm trying to, to, to think about some other things that I relate this to is, um, you know, I, I'm a big fan of NFL. Uh, so, you know, anytime in the pregame, right, Every. All of the analysts are giving their picks, right? And whenever it's a, uh, all across the board, everybody's going the same team. It's usually the other team that wins it. It's like one of those spoilers. Um, um.

Speaker D: And it just means that in Venture you kind of have to be contrarian a little bit, uh, and step out of the normal bounds of what people are talking about. Because when people are all talking about the same investment, it's typically means that there is no alpha left in that company. Right. Really outperform the uh, you know, the mean and you know, be a really big company. Uh, so that's kind of in our, uh, what we have seen, um, from our experience and you know, when we track all the records of the voting for all our deals.

Speaker A: That's cool. Yeah, it's great perspective. And then I got to ask, you know, favorite pizza topping, what are you going with on the pizza?

Speaker D: Ace Pepperoni.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: Uh, that's the best.

Speaker A: It's, I mean, it's a just a staple classic.

Speaker D: That's right.

Speaker C: Awesome.

Speaker A: Uh, all right, well, thanks again for joining us guys. Good parents all around. Let's, uh, let's get into it. So, you know, the way that I kind of see this conversation flowing is to one I Want to make sure that we define the problem set. Kind um, of talk through how defense unicorns is approaching, you know, that's their solution. Spend, uh, some time talking through the, uh, investment that Sapphire made in defense unicorns, um, you know, kind of given that, the uniqueness that it was the first defense investment that the firm made. And then we'll kind of close. Just kind of riffing a little bit about open source and the future of national security. Rob, I'm sure you're gonna have some great, great, uh, insights on that. So I'll start with you, Rob. Um, let's, let's kind of start at that problem set. You know, what, what did you see was this big challenge across defense it. Yeah.

Speaker B: So, uh, the way I like to explain it is actually, you know, to take like a super step back. Um, and so, uh, you know, for folks that are, uh, you know, around my age, which I, which I just turned about 40, uh, you know, there was a time when, when you just managed your own software. If you wanted to buy a game, you know, you wanted to install something on your machine, you quite literally went to the store, uh, and you got a cd, you know, or a DVD or something, and you put it on your device and you installed it yourself. Um, and over the course of years, uh, that became obviously logistically complex and over complex and very restrictive. And so people really moved to this more centralized, dynamic, centralized infrastructure. And then they started to run into, uh, these strong desires to optimize because they didn't want the users to have to even worry about it. They wanted to be able to just update their systems when they felt that it was required. They wanted to just patch and fix bugs in the background so nobody would notice it. And, and in these systems and these solutions just grew bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, and ultimately they came to this point to where, uh, orchestration and things like cloud costs and availability became their dominant concern. Um, and so really, you know, talking about these, you know, tech giants, so, you know, it's Google, it's Amazon, you know, it's companies like Netflix that are, that are doing with these millions upon millions of, of users that are running on this centralized infrastructure. And behind that came this entire wave of technology, um, really baselined off of Kubernetes and what people refer to as the cloud native space. And like I said, these systems were designed for, uh, a centralized mentality around infrastructure optimization. Um, and now obviously it changed the world. And there are so many amazing things that technology and that entire community brought to life. That we as Americans enjoy today. It was a huge breakthrough. Um, and it was all the right decisions to some degree, um, many or most of the right decisions, uh, for the tech community, especially at the time. Um, but the issue is that for the Department of War it wasn't and isn't that great of a solution. Um, and the reason is because complexity itself was never part of the dynamic. Uh, they never thought for a second, what if this is too complex, um, what level of engineering talent do you need to staff to make this successful? Because they had all the engineering talent in the world. And so here you had these tech giants developing this amazing world changing technology. Um, and, and, and, and it moved. And over the course of the last decade it completely changed how we think about software. Um, meanwhile, uh, the Department of War is still thinking like CDs, um, because that is their world. Um, they are still thinking in that mentality. And so there's this huge, uh, issue, there's this huge tension, uh, around how the Department of War wants to support software and the realities of war and where the rest of the world kind of went. Um, and so defense unicorns, what's the big idea? Uh, we saw, uh, you know, the Department of War was going to be faced with this crossroad, um, they were going to have to decide do we effectively fork and run our own baseline different from basically the entire rest of the world, or do we find a way to make kubernetes work for us and find a way to make this cloud native technology ours and fully in line with how we want to run operations. And so, so my background, you know, I was 13 years in the Air Force and probably the number one thing they really beat into you from a mission operations perspective is centralized control and decentralized execution. Um, and so really defense unicorns, what's the big idea is we wanted to build technology that allowed for this decentralization of software because it was at the edge. In these deployed environments, on these edge sensors and edge systems, think fighters and tanks and submarines, that you were going to have this issue to where you had to consistently update and maintain your software. You were going to be compute limited, so you're going to have mission specific payloads, software specific missions capabilities that you're going to have to load and you're going to actually have to get these operators, the actual active duty airmen and soldiers and sailors and marines to actually maintain these systems. And so where the rest of the world was saying, hey, we're going to hire some Google SRE and some amazing SRE and pay them 600, 700, $800,000 a year and they'll be worth it because we can afford that. The military had to figure out and has to figure out how do we take that technology and get this young 20 year old to actually maintain it? And oh, by the way, they can't actually get lost in the details and ideally they don't even have to learn what kubernetes is. Um, and so over the last five years we developed a technology called UDS to literally do exactly that, which abstracts all of these complexities away and actually allows the airman and sailor and soldier and marine to actually focus way more on war fighting than struggling with it and software.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean that, that is a uh, fantastic kind of like uh, description analogy. Right. I think everybody can relate to back in the day you're just kind of burning CDs, everything's kind of, you know, very simple. It got so complex. And so how do you kind of keep up? Sean, I think you had a, um, you had a lead off with that.

Speaker C: One of the, one of the keys I think there that I really kind of had a light bulb moment on was when Rob said, uh, centralized control and decentralized execution. Um, that's for me a, ah, perfect, like use case or theme for kubernetes. Right. And for a lot of these cloud based toolings. But I wonder if you could share any insights or experience on uh, working with the War Department, Department of War and relating that idea of um, centralized orchestration and decentralized execution. Uh, do you find positive responses to that or is that still kind of a mindset or paradigm shift? What have you experienced there?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think operationally it clicks, people get it, but they're really not used to thinking about that from a software perspective. And you know, I'll give you an example. Uh, you know, one of our, one of our customers, and I'm not going to name the asset, but one of our customers, uh, is uh, some form of a stealth fighter. Uh, and this particular fighter does these software updates typically, uh, once or you know, once a year, maybe once every other year. And every time it does the update, it actually has to go into depot maintenance. Um, and so here it is an asset that you have to basically take out of the fight um, for weeks to sometimes even months at a time to basically do this quote update to then return it back out to the field for operations. Um, and the other thing that you realize being active duty again is those assets, when they actually go on a mission, they go through mission planning phases and they decide really what munitions they load. Uh, and so to give you the example, you know, if you're, you know, you know, if you're say at F22, um, your air to air munitions M is going to be for an air to air mission. And so if you're flying an air to air mission, you're going to have air to air missiles. If you're flying an air to ground mission, you're going to have air to ground munitions. And if you're flying an intelligence mission, you're going to be outfitted with sensors because people understand that you can't load everything at once. So you may have this like centralized plan of, oh, by the way, the F22 can load these missiles and it can load these bombs and it can load these sensors, but it's actually the decentralized squadrons that are making the decisions of what to load per mission. Okay. And so, but people don't think about that about uh, at the software layer, they think, oh, you just load the software, you load it once every other year and then you forget about it and you just hope it runs and it's fine. You know, with the advances of AI, I think people are realizing like, oh my gosh, like, I don't want to go to war with AI from four years ago. Uh, we're going to get our butts kicked. Uh, and even more so, you know, AI is compute and memory hogs. You know, my gosh, they're just gigantic. And so if you actually think about it, if you're actually conducting a mission with these assets, that air to air mission probably has an air to air AI assistant that is going to be way more capable for that air to air engagement than it would an air to ground engagement. And it's probably totally different for an intelligence mission. Um, and so from a software perspective, you have to actually convey that, oh my gosh, these operators need the ability to install the software they need on demand. And it's not going to be this like one and done type approach. You're going to have to quite literally load the software permission that they get once they, you know, once they understand what you're actually trying to do, they may not understand what, you know, decentralized, decentralization, uh, of software is actually providing for them. But if you could actually tell them, hey, your pilots, your mission planners, your actual airmen have the ability to load software specific capabilities, um, that clicks.

Speaker C: I think that's such an interesting way to look at it. Um, and unifying, um, software deployment orchestration all the way down to that mission tactical level. Uh, I'm going to hold on to that for something that we'll probably uh, circle back to later on, uh, in this conversation. But I want to pivot it back to Tim to make sure that we're staying on task here. But a really interesting stuff there when you're thinking about um, software as an asset and not just the stuff that kind of runs in the background of these more traditional assets, like you said, fighters, ah, submarines, tanks, what have you. So, thank you, Rob.

Speaker A: Yeah, we're going to pull on those threads, uh, for sure, but I want to make sure that we loop in uh, Jay's perspective on all of this. So Jay, when you kind of first saw this unique approach and kind of heard Rob's description of uds, you know, what, what kind of clicked for you. I'm curious if it, you know, if it felt familiar from stuff that you'd seen with Enterprise DevOps or, you know, something entirely different.

Speaker D: Yeah, no, uh, look, I've been involved with Open source for the longest time. Like when I started out as a developer, I spent a lot of time, you know, with all the GNU compilers. Like I worked on gcc, which was done by Free Software foundation by Richard Stallman, which was a precursor to Open Source. And then our firm actually invested all the way from the beginning in Open Source, in Red Hat. And then of course MySQL, uh, there used to be the stack called red hat, Apache, MySQL and the uh, Python, like uh, Zen. Right. And we didn't invest in Apache, but we were investor in all the other three. Uh, and we have been very successful in uh, investing in Open source. So we had Musoft, we had JFrog, all of these in Red Hat and MySQL of course. So we were always fundamentally really believers, big believers in Open source software. Right. And the way that you look at the community, the way that, how you can leverage the community to build great software and make it more secure, more reliable, all of that stuff, uh, made a lot of sense. Uh, and then I actually met uh, Rob and Jeff when they were part of Platform One, because one of my other open source company, uh, was part of the Platform 1 stack. And you know, when Platform 1 kind of, they talked about it, I was like, wow, you know, like I think that makes a lot of sense for the, you know, the Department of War and the, and the Air Force. I think Platform One was focused really on the Air Force at that time to building something based on Open Source. And you know, um, the thought did come to me, why isn't there a company doing that? Because I know enough about Red Hat to know that they're not really an open source company anymore. Right. They kind of have become much more of an aggregator of open source software. To the point with, you know, with Kubernetes, what they have done with OpenShift, it's a great business but they kind of have, are uh, not an open source company anymore. So yeah, uh, as soon as I heard that, you know, that they had left and you know, people of course in the venture community talk about it, you know, like, what's going on? What are the, huh, hot companies? And Defense Unicorn started coming up saying, hey, in the infrastructure space there's this company that's doing well. And you know, we had to break in. Like, you know, even though I had known Rob, he did not respond to our first few emails to kind of say connect. So it's Rob

Speaker A: playing hard to get.

Speaker B: Rob, in my defense, Jay had the wrong email. Luckily Jeff, who also uh, serves as our IT function sometimes was like, hey, this keeps showing up to the junk folder. I think we know Jay. And then he was like, oh. I was like, oh Jay, this is great. Yeah, let's talk.

Speaker D: But then, you know, as you kind of talk to Rob and what you needed, you know, all of the stuff that they had built especially for all of uh, the assets on the edge, it made perfect sense. And I was like, why hasn't this been done before? Uh, and what you always realize when entrepreneurs start companies, they usually are working in something that they realize needs to be solved and is not getting solved by outside vendors or whoever is kind of tasked with doing that. And so it was like classic Entrepreneurship 101 that you know, Rob and Jeff saw this happening and saw the need for this and realized that they would, you know, and Rob can go on about how he would, you know, hire all these great, great, uh, developers and programmers into platform one and all of a sudden they would be recruited or gone, go, go somewhere else. So you really couldn't actually build a company within the Dow because, you know, the incentives are not aligned. And the way uh, the DOW works, it's very much focused on the military's kind of what their main objective is and that's not building software. So yeah, so as soon as we started chatting, uh, I was like, yeah, we gotta invest in this company because we realize that we have a lot of experience in open source software. We didn't have a lot of experience in companies selling into, uh, dow. But on the other hand, uh, you know, we could help them in figuring out how to build an open source company.

Speaker A: I want to ask what the timeline was from, you know, from when you left Platform one and started Defense Unicorns. You know, because, you know, from, from the research that I had done is that you had, you had bootstrapped, um, to, to nearly 30 million in revenue. So one, curious how, how quickly were you able to do that? Because that's, that's phenomenal. And then two, I have to imagine, Jay, like, I mean that gave you extra conviction of like, all right, there's something happening here. So like. Yeah. How much time did it take you to get to that, uh, to that point in revenue?

Speaker B: Yeah, it took us, it took us three years. Uh, and for context, you know, uh, you know, this will mean nothing to the defense folks, but the software folks will understand this, that the 30 million in revenue was $20 million of what's known as quote ARR. So it's like 20 million of what I'll call like, you know, really, really great software revenue and then 10 million of like addition. Because to Bootstrap we had to do services work. Um, and the reason we had to bootstrap was because, you know, uh, I left the Air Force. I was a major. Jeff, uh, left, he was a master sergeant. We actually tried to raise a seed round and pretty much everyone kind of just laughed at us. Like, you know, we weren't from Google. Uh, you know, we didn't have like, in my opinion, very fancy resumes. Everyone was kind of like, who are these two? What the heck are they doing? And like, honestly, you know, we took a couple calls and you know, you know, not a ton, but probably about a dozen or so calls with, with firms that do like pre seeds and seeds and you know, kind of just got laughed out of the room. Uh, and, and you know, at a certain point I remember talking to Jeff and I was like, I, I would rather talk to like our mission heroes and our customers and find a way like it is, it is so much easier to solve their problems that they have certainly enough money and along the way we can build what we're trying to build and so we can both give them value, take those contracts and in the entire time build up to what we ultimately want to build together. Um, and so we, we started, you know, totally bootstrapped and, and you know, we, we took a lot of services contracts. Uh, we worked across not just the Department of War, but we also worked with Medicaid uh, Medicare. We worked with fdic. We worked. It was really important for us to also take commercial deals because uh, you know, I thought at the time I was like, I want really good perspective. I don't want to be, you know, is, is quote defense, you know, is that a lower bar? Um, and so it was really important for us to work commercial as well, to just kind of prove it. And after about a year or two we were kind of like, hey, we, I think we can do it. Like I, you know, I saw the talent we were bringing in. Like, you know, we're, you know, for context, like, like Today we're top 15 worldwide in terms of kubernetes contributions, um, next to folks like Apple and Nvidia. And why does that matter? It's because if we had to build this product in the background, you had to actually go and start recruiting elite talent. And so we started doing that over the course of years. And after a year or two you kind of, like I said, you look around and say, I would take this company and defense unicorns and put them head to head to any company on the planet, in the cloud, native space. And not only would we hold our own, but I would say from a quote density perspective, talent density, not only are we best in the world, not only are we best in defense, but I actually think we're best in the world. Um, and it took that level of talent to really just build the things that we're constantly building. And of course, what did our customers see? Well, they saw that when they gave us a dollar, they got $10 of value. So they then, you know, then they gave us $10 to see if they could get $100 of value. And then, and then the revenue started growing. And then fast forward to the Series A. You know, we obviously had great revenue, great growth and I think most importantly, even though we were open source, we were turning profit and that's huge because most of the time open source companies, uh, they start off, you know, quote free and open and then five years later they have to figure out how to make money. And then they start changing the rules on people and they start rug pulling. Um, and it is really hard to run an open source company. It's like, is so challenging. But because we were bootstrapped, we never had the option of not making money. We had to figure out how to make money first. And then in the background we built this amazing open source product that we truly do believe will be 100% distributed and running on every defense system in the US military.

Speaker A: So go ahead.

Speaker C: Can I jump in here, Tim?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: So Rob, um, you kind of gave me another um, light bulb moment there. Uh, when you're talking about folks who work in um, you know, defense or intelligence or anything sort of national mission oriented, um, they're obviously not just doing it for a salary and a paycheck. They have kind of a mission motivation behind it. But now there's this new dimension I think, um, that you probably have some great insight into on what makes an open source, what makes an engineer or a data scientist or a platform engineer, um, what makes them gravitate towards doing open source work. Because that's definitely a non traditional way of thinking about a career in software engineering. So what have you found? What kind of motivates these folks, um, uh, that you've seen?

Speaker B: I think most engineers love open source because most of the time they're using open source stuff. So I'd say 90% of engineers love to and want to work on open source projects. And then you have kind of a spectrum of purists. Meaning, uh, like how, how committed are you to a hundred open source versus say 90%? You know, because for us, for, as a company, you know, we, we started out at a hundred percent, right now we have more of an open core model where it's like 90 to 95% of it is fully open source. And then there's this 5% that, that's still behind like a premium license. And that was, you know, that was a big decision for us. That was, that was hard because we had a lot of, in a very, well, you know, very good way, ah, open source purists, which both myself and my co founder Jeff consider ourselves to be this open source purist. So, so it's really hard to get there. But, but, but you have to really understand why. And, and for me, you know, to me I think there's a ton of similarities between what makes me love, uh, the U.S. and what makes me love open source. And it's, at the end of the day it's about independence. Um, you know, independence from a country perspective, that's what makes me love America. And then you have data independence, um, from a software perspective. Why do people love open source? It's because they love freedom and independence. And so to me those, these two things, I should have started with this, this is a better two things that go together.

Speaker C: It's America and open source.

Speaker B: You have open source connected to US military and like I said, the same reason that I love America is the same reason why I love open source. It's because I don't want someone telling me what to do. I don't want somebody to lock me in. I want to always maintain a choice. I want to make sure that I have freedom and independence to choose my own path ahead of me. The same things that I, you know, like I said, I think uh, uh, one of the reasons I really wanted to work with Jay and Sapphire and the number one thing I was worried about in our series A was hey, we're going to have someone else other than us at the table, another investor. And what was so important to us is that this open source nature of the company was part of the business model, it was part of our core ethos, it was part of our value proposition and you could never separate it. And so what, what really made it like we were, I would say our number one concern was that we're going to bring an investor to the table and after six or 18 months or something they were going to say, hey, we think you should closed source your product. Jay is like a legend in the VC community. And oh by the way, all of his like most successful startups were mostly open source. So it was like a very natural fit for us because we knew if Jay was going to give us advice it wasn't going to be based off like made up nonsense. It was going to be structured on just his experience in working with open source companies and there wasn't going to be this like uh, you know, force kind of uh, change from what the company wanted to do from an open source perspective.

Speaker C: So Jay, same question, but different version which is, as Rob just said, you know, you're a legend for your open source investments and very successful ones. Uh, how do you find an open source company potential investment, uh, that you know, or you have, you know, high confidence is, is going to work out. What are those key elements? Because I'm sure now you probably get pitched on a lot of open source deals or potential deals that you pass on because they don't have the right ingredients. So what, what makes something like Defense Unicorn stand out?

Speaker D: First of all, thanks for the kind words. And the other thing I, I will say is that you know, you did it the classic way that software companies used to be built. If you go back in history, Oracle was built on services, Informatica was built on services. Even Microsoft was actually built on services. They built dos, uh, DOS for IBM. Right, so you actually uh, created these software, these new entrepreneurs don't understand how to build software companies. Um, right. Uh, but from our Perspective when people pitch open Source, uh, I think there are a lot more tools nowadays to understand open source companies, right? And uh, you know, you look at, you know, the number of forks, the number of stars, all of that stuff and what has uh, happened unfortunately is that now people have figured out how to game the system, right? Because there is a lot of activity people investing in open source software. We are not the only one, right? A bunch of firms invest in open source software and the people trying to raise money know how to game the system. So for me to this day, first and foremost, uh, I will go and talk to uh, the customers, right? Like even if they're not paying customers, you really have to. And you know, so you have to figure out either through LinkedIn or you know, through some of the expert networks is who's using the open source product, why do they use it, what do they like about it? And so, you know, we spend a lot of time talking to developers, uh, and that's the way that we figure out uh, whether that open source software actually has product market fit and there's customer pull. And then I also spend a lot of time talking to the entrepreneur and the people behind these projects, right? Because there are some people who are behind these projects and uh, they have, I wouldn't say a cushy job, but they have a job that is paying them well enough that they don't have the desire to go in and kind of create a company around open source. Right? Uh, and they don't all sometimes even have the vision, right? Because that's the other thing, right? You can have a project that may be useful, but if you start a company you also have to realize how are you going to actually build a business around it, you know, and some of it can be just support, it can be services that they're different business models. So we are not really hung up on the business model. But you really need that entrepreneur to have the drive to say that, hey, I built something that seems to have a lot of traction and I want to scale it up and to scale it up and get more adoption, you know, you have to create revenue, you have to get some investment maybe to help you scale up. If the entrepreneur or uh, the person behind the project doesn't have that drive, that for me is the single biggest criteria, right? Because then I'm not going to be able to make that person stay up late at night and work like crazy like Rob and Jeff does and get these things done or make the hard decisions. Right? There's in the journey of being an entrepreneur, there are lots and lots of hard decisions you have to make, and you don't know whether these, uh, entrepreneurs or these people behind these projects are willing to do that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's kudos to, uh, the pair program for finding the perfect pairing of folks. I can't say kudos to us. Rob, you're the one that's like, you got to bring Jay on, um, so I got to give you the credit there. But, um, yeah, I just think it's like this perfect marriage between, um, a venture partner that you trust and a company that's trying to break through and making sure. I think it's so key that you honed in on making sure, you know, they. They weren't going to alter the direction of, like, where this company wanted to go. And having, having that trust is so key between investor and founder. But I want to quickly kind of lean a little bit deeper into, uh, the defense deal that was made because it was unique and it was the first j. So, you know. Yeah, I imagine you had been pitched previously by some other defense companies, and you were maybe just kind of waiting for that Right. One to hit you. But so why this company? And then, you know, talk about the timing of it. Why, why now? You know, what were these things that made, you know, gave you that conviction, like, this is. This is the first one that we need to make.

Speaker D: Yeah, I think it started with platform one, because once I started looking into, uh, you know, the spend that the DAW has, uh, you know, it's like trillion dollars in software spend. Right? Uh, and. And you look around it and then you go and say that, oh, my God, the people who are selling this stuff, you know, these primes they have, like, it's all about body shopping almost, right? Like, they're building custom software over and over again, and they charge by the number of seats, by the number of hours. And this didn't make any sense. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about this problem. And then, you know, defense unicorn kind of popped up. And then I think, um, some of the customers that Rob introduced me to, some of their early adopters, I think the way they were raving about the product and how good it was and how much it solved a lot of their problems. That's when you know that when there is so much customer love, you gotta invest in those companies. Right? Because over and over again, if you build something and nobody wants to buy it, you know, there's no point in investing or, you know, and putting a lot of resources behind that, behind that company. But I think that's what uh, kind of swayed me, uh, for sure, you know. And then I had to kind of convince my partnership to kind of focus on the recommendations and the feedback and the review that was coming back for what defense unicorns had built. And look, there are some uh, fundamental issues when you sell to uh, the US Military where the way they buy, they procure is very different than enterprises. And I think that is a fundamental challenge that I had to overcome. Uh, I'm sure Raul attested that he probably had to work out with a lot of investors that ah, hey, this is a repeatable business. This is a uh, business that once you get in especially uh, you know, with, with, with the type of sellers that uh, Rob has recruited, which are uh, mission heroes, which actually have worked within the military, who knows how to get these procurement done, all of these um, you know, contracts done, uh, any of that that banner got me to convince, you know, and it was still not a uh, consensus decision. So it was, there's definitely a lot of debate, a lot of, you know, uh, going back and forth and it was like a two hour discussion

Speaker B: for

Speaker D: us to get through the whole debate.

Speaker A: I think that's uh, that's such a great perspective to hear from a commercial first, uh, investor. And Rob, you know I, and also keep in mind, right, what was the year that this investment went down?

Speaker B: It was at the end of 2023. I think it officially closed in 2024 though. But it was like, you know, the time period was.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And just, you know, to be clear here, like things have just progressed so much quicker too in the last couple of years to where defense tech is having a moment. Right. You're seeing this kind of conversion of a lot more investment getting dumped in, you know, and for a lot of unfortunate reasons. Right. There is ah, a lot of uh, unrest in the world. Uh, you know, there's a lot of uh, war happening right now. And so I think um, you know, from a timing perspective you're seeing a huge surge. But Rob, I do want to also kind of like get your flip side perspective on that from you know, your probably.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: How many pitches you've made, you know, before, you know, it was a fit here with Sapphire. And you know, how did that kind of maybe change your perspective on how commercial VCs approach defense tech?

Speaker B: Uh, well, what's really interesting is uh, you know, as I mentioned, when, when we started the, the company which was right out of the military and, and, and, and you know, just to give you context on that, um, really started defension accordance to solve that exact problem that we've been discussing, which is just like software sucks on these weapon systems and every weapon system is going to be a software intensive system. So the fact that you have IT and these IT issues and I don't know if you guys remember the whole Air Force campaign around quote, fix our computers. That was super popular like one or two years ago. Myself and Jeff and the defense Unicorns team, we saw it as like, it's very soon going to be like fix our submarines. Um, because those submarines are IT systems and those next generation stealth aircraft RIT systems. So you know, we really, uh, you know, as you mentioned, you know, my background before this was Platform one. Before that I did Space Camp. Before that I did something else. You know, Jeff was the original engineer on Kessel Run. So like we had been trying to solve this problem for about a decade, jumping PCs cycle to PCs cycle, just starting new things. And so we felt like all of it was, was good ROI to start. And then they all failed to scale. And they all failed to scale because the technology wasn't there. Um, and so when we were pitching this, as I mentioned, nobody took it seriously. Everyone was like, who are these two? What the heck is going on here? Um, and so it was, no, no, no, fast forward a couple years. There's uh, almost no companies that bootstrapped the revenues. We did, and actually I did a database search and was like, okay, how many companies bootstrapped to 30 million? Um, and then how many companies was able to go from 0 to 30 million without like VC backing? Um, and at the time, AI has I'm sure changed this, but when we raised, there was none. Uh, there was like a couple companies that could go from 0 to 30 and there was a couple companies that went from 0 to 30 as fast as us. But there was no company in the history of the United States other than offense unicorns that did both when we took the investment. So at that point it was, it was easy to raise. Uh, you know, obviously we had to get through due diligence. But like, you know, we had investors calling us. We only took calls when they reached out to us. We had investors tell us that they've been trying to get a hold of us for the last year and you know, they couldn't because I'm not super responsive on email. Uh, and so like, uh, you know, at that point we were kind of a hot commodity. Uh, but it was because we, we had a great business and I think that's why the venture community is really interested in defense, uh, tech in general. Like if you look at Nvidia, the largest company in the world, and you look at how much revenue they're pulling in, and then you compare that to defense systems, what you realize is there's actually several Nvidias in that market. Um, but you don't see that in the defense tech companies. And the reason you don't is because their gross profit margins are out of whack. And so if you look at a, ah, traditional prime, their gross profit margins are about 10%, which is abysmal. It's like almost crazy that any of them make any money. But it's because what's in part of that cost of goods sold is like everything. And so they charge the government for everything, uh, but then they make very small profit. Um, but if you look at the new wave of defense tech technologies, it's like, hey, you need to fix price your work, you need larger gross profit margins. We're going to give you more bang for the dollar, but then you're allowed those gross profit margin increases. That allows those companies to be worth more. And so I think you have two things going on. You see the nature of warfare changing. You see it becoming more software intensive. You see uh, Russia and Ukraine and how advanced those engagements have become. And then on the other side of it it's like, oh, there's a business case here. And if you were to take the, you know, $2.5 trillion of international military spend and, and take the, the large, you know, big chunk of that and make that higher gross profit margin work, all of a sudden, once again you, you have, you know, to give you real numbers, you have five Nvidias in just the existing defense budget. Um, like I said, you don't have five Nvidia's worth of, uh, publicly traded defense companies. And so to me, I, uh, you know, I think people are coming around to this now that they see companies are able to take that same or give $10 of value but somehow still have larger gross profit margins. And I think that like it's a perfect storm of a great mission case, which is what got me involved in this in the first place. But along the way you also realize that, oh my gosh, these are also great businesses.

Speaker D: But I would also add, Rob, um, I do think the people in the military, in the Dow, they are also actually changing. The more I talk to them, they kind of realize is that, hey, why are we giving all of these defense primes all of these existing companies, you know, these uh, seats kind of based a way of just giving, charging the government everything and not providing me larger amount of value for what I'm paying for them, which a, uh, commercial enterprise would do. So I think there is also to do that. You also have to change the way you procure, the way you kind of evaluate companies. I think it's a slow process. Right. It's a huge, huge organization and I don't think it's going to change in a day. But I think there's also inklings within the US Military that hey, we need to improve the way we purchase software, we purchase systems, all of that stuff, and make it more efficient.

Speaker A: Yeah. And on our podcast and our uh, kind of community at large, we're very dialed into the critical infrastructure verticals. So we're just kind of talking about defense and national security here. But we see it as well, bleeding into Department of Energy, you see it, uh, you see a ton of it in space tech too. I mean, with the acceleration of how many more satellites are getting launched into space on a daily basis, the amount of opportunity that then creates on the back end for new startups to come and uh, satellite navigation and refueling this or that, it's really wild on how fast that that area is accelerated. And you see it in defense and you see it in energy and all these other areas where, you know, now we're trying to play catch up because the technology has gotten so, so advanced so quickly.

Speaker D: There's another thing, well, I'll say about the U.S. right, this entrepreneurship, it's freedom. But I think that is the single one biggest kind of advantage that the US has. And you know, and that is where, when you people find a need, you know, the way the US uh system works, that you can have entrepreneurs come in and build these things and you know, and benefit both, uh, the country or, you know, whatever they need to solve the problem that needs to be solved, but also get rewarded for it. Right. And that is very, very unique about the US And I think that's what you're seeing here, right? Like people have identified the need, people have realized that, hey, it can't be solved by the existing providers. And now the entrepreneurs are jumping in. And of course, you know, we see they're also an investor that also kind of following them. And I think it's a win, win, you know, I think all of these things will get developed a lot faster, uh, than people were probably thinking, you know, four or five years ago.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'd love To, to dive deeper into some of this. I want to make sure that we save a little bit of time for this final segment because we have some fun with it, the five second scramble. But before we do that, one last kind of thing that I just wanted to make sure that we, um, got a little clarity on specifically from you, Rob, was, you know, some of these open source projects, um, like Czar, Flula and uh, Pepper, um, can you give uh, like the quick hitters on each of those and like the um, you know, the challenges that those are solving?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the way I'll describe it is, uh, a lot of people, when they think about software problems, they'll sometimes really associate that with an ATO problem. And a lot of people will be just like, you know, and we even had a discussion, uh, just prior to starting here on you know, uh, like ATO acceleration. And honestly Sean, your headache analogy of how big of a headache it is to get an ato, but really that's the tip of the iceberg. That's what people see. And so like that's, you know, they're driving on their boats and they look out and they see that tip of the iceberg. But under the iceberg is all of this other complexity and issues that make it hard to get the ato. And it's, you know, what I'll call the ATO plus. Um, and really those open source projects are us attacking specific challenges both on top of that iceberg and then beneath it under the surface. That makes the entire software delivery lifecycle really challenging. And so the first thing that I'll talk about is the Air Gap Challenge, which we specifically developed Czar for, which has now become the most widely used Air gap tool on the planet. Uh, and so it's open source project now donated to foundation, um, and literally everyone from people who launch rockets to oil rigs to when you go through the TSA gate, all those people are using zarf, including obviously National Security Systems. But it was just us observing that, hey, air gap is challenging and nobody built a tool to just make it easy. Um, and that's really where XARF came from.

Speaker A: Pepper.

Speaker B: The real challenge we tried to solve was complexity in the stack and ease of integration. Oh my gosh, it's so hard to take this solution and that solution and another solution built in with all of this complexity around policy and cybersecurity and get all three of these things to integrate together. And so we developed Pepper to solve that real integration challenge. And then Lula, you know, it was really about saying that, hey, everybody's compliance is stuck in these Excel spreadsheets. Um, it doesn't actually map to the system at all. How do you actually develop this concept of like, compliance as code? So that way people know when they're actually leveraging and making changes to the system. They actually have key insights into that. You know, that thing that ultimately gives your, gives you your ato. Because our observation was, you know, all these systems that have ATOs, whatever's in that ATO document has almost nothing in common with actually what's running in production. Um, and that was our repeat observation is like, everybody keeps talking about the ato, the ato, the ato. When you actually go look up the actual ATO documents yourself, and then once again you look at actually what's running, you're like, these two do not map at all. It's like, this is so outdated. This is so changed. And so like I said, these are three slivers getting after different segments of that iceberg. And we wrap it all together in ultimately what we provide as uds, which uses those three tools as kind of like the basic building blocks of ultimately what we deploy. But it was really important for us not to just make UDs, you know, obviously for ourselves, because UDS Core is also open source, but let's also develop and then open source the tools that we ourselves use to also go build the product. So that way if somebody wants to rebuild their own version of it, you know, once again you have that freedom, you have that independence to do it yourself.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's so, so cool. I mean, my mind keeps going to like, um, you know, it's not freedom of speech, freedom of code, you know, building, building in the States. Um, cool.

Speaker C: It's, it's also, yeah, for Rob, it's just such a really excellent illustration of deep understanding of the problem. And back to, back to Jay's point about Entrepreneurship 101 and that, yeah, uh, an ATO report is a bunch of words on a page that may have some bearing on what the software is actually doing, but usually doesn't. And yeah, I'm m getting flashbacks to Poams and Stigs getting managed on Excel spreadsheets and trade it back and forth on SharePoint. Um, but these are the things that make the Dow world go round. And if you can attack it systemically like Defense Unicorns is doing. Yeah, you really are talking about this market that's huge. And then it touches every piece of, uh, military equipment and the systems behind it. Um, so yeah, so all you want to Be defense tech entrepreneurs out there, go and understand the problem deeply, dive in deep, and then come out, uh, with some real insight, uh, just the way Rob did.

Speaker D: And I think that the new entrepreneurs won't have as much of a problem as Rob and Jeff did.

Speaker A: Rob kind of paved the path, you know.

Speaker D: Exactly. I think there's a lot more people looking to do, seed and precede him in these kind of entrepreneurs.

Speaker A: Um, Robbie blazed the trail, man. Thank you for, uh, for your service. It's honestly, it's the next wave. Entrepreneurs need it.

Speaker B: That, that, that is very kind. I, I feel very fortunate and blessed to, to, to feel like I'm on the shoulders of other giants, you know, companies, you know, got to be quite honest, companies like Palantir, companies like Anduril, uh, really set the scene. I don't see how a company like Defense Unicorns could get the same, uh, investment interests that we have historically and even do today without actually having those success stories. So, uh, uh, maybe we were second waves. Uh, hope to be continuing to accelerate, but very much feel very blessed, uh, to be on the shoulders of giants ourselves and, you know, very, very, very fortunate.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I'll throw a shout out to Kessel Run. We've had a couple of alumni from there like Enrique Ot and Brian Kroger on the show before, so, uh, I'm sure Jeff would, would appreciate it. Um, cool. All right, well, let's wrap with the, our final segment, the five second scramble. You know, quick answers, give us your gut reaction. You won't get air horned off if you, if you exceed your 5 seconds, but try to keep it brief. Uh, Sean, why don't you start with Jay and then I'll, I'll close with Rob.

Speaker C: Absolutely. All right, Jay, these are going to start off a little hard, but then they're going to get easier as we go on. So number one, uh, what was your most unexpected. I really enjoyed that moment of your career.

Speaker D: Uh, I think my first ipo, uh, this was exact target. It was exact target. Scott Dorsey took the company public and being there, uh, that was definitely one of those moments where it's like, okay, uh, you know, uh, this is something that one, you know, I've never seen that I never thought I would see it, but, you know, being part of that journey was great.

Speaker C: Outstanding. All right, number two, um, we always do our diligence here on the podcast and we know that you have an electrical engineering degree from Brown for your undergrad days. Uh, what's a lesson from your electrical engineering undergrad days? That you still rely on frequently, uh,

Speaker D: you know, logical thinking. Right. I think, you know, in business and everything in life, you know, you kind of have to be very analytical and very logical about what steps you have to do before the first step, the second step to get to your ultimate goal. And I think that has been a lesson I learned. And realistically, you know, although I was a ee, I spent. I actually could not deal with all the, you know, breadboard and circuit board. So I actually became a CS major because my whole thing was like, hey, I can simulate this whole, you know, circuit board in software. Why do I have to go sit there actually making this work? I actually spend more time in the CS lab than in the. In the wl.

Speaker C: I can. I can see that. Uh, after the tenth time that you mess up a transistor doing some bad soldering, you probably want to move along.

Speaker D: Exactly.

Speaker C: Um, what's the best decision you've made under serious time pressure? That wasn't the defense. Unicorns.

Speaker D: Uh, under time pressure, I think, you know, I'll go personal. I. I think kind of, uh, saying, uh, you know, proposing to my. To my wife, uh, because, you know, um, uh, her. Her mother in law. My mother in law, her mom was on my case and saying that. Are you wasting your time dating her?

Speaker C: Great answer. Great answer.

Speaker A: Said no mother in law ever. Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, all right, so, Jay, we're past the hard ones. These should be a little bit easier. You're crushing them so far. Um, what's something random that you're surprisingly good at that has nothing to do with work?

Speaker D: I think I'm. Well, it kind of helps me with work, but I'm good at, ah, arguing and debating to the point where my colleagues have sometimes said, ah, that I can actually argue with myself.

Speaker C: It's the ultimate chess game against yourself. That's awesome.

Speaker D: That's right.

Speaker C: All right. Uh, one book or a movie or an article, podcast even, uh, that you enjoy, but that you might not recommend, basically, what's a guilty pleasure of yours?

Speaker D: Oh, uh, well, I would not recommend. That's a hard one. I would actually, uh, you know, I've not listened to enough of your podcast, but I do like the acquired podcast. Um, I don't know if you guys know about them. Yeah, you know, uh, not. Not to kind of, uh, give a shout out to another competing podcast. Maybe that is something. I'm sorry about that. And you can. You can cut this out.

Speaker C: Well, now.

Speaker A: Well, now. Now you've got to listen to some more episodes, Jay.

Speaker D: Yes, I will, I will, uh, no.

Speaker C: So this goes back to Jay arguing with himself. What that actually was, was a recommendation

Speaker B: for more of the PIN program.

Speaker D: Exactly, exactly. That's. That's. That's sometimes. Yeah. Saw me work.

Speaker A: I've listened to, acquired. It's. It's a good one. I also used to love how I built this, uh, good one, too.

Speaker C: All right, down to the last two. Jay, um, what's your favorite everyday piece of technology that isn't a smartphone or a laptop?

Speaker D: Ah, that's probably my Kindle. Um, you know. Oh, good one. Yeah. Right. I do read a lot and, you know, so Kindles, you know, has made it really easy to have a huge library and carry it around.

Speaker C: Absolutely, absolutely. That's my go to for, uh, long flights. You can just pop that Kindle open and kind of, you know, get after it. Uh, all right, and our last question is always the same. Um, on the podcast, uh, what is a charity or a philanthropic organization that's near and dear to your heart that you want people to be aware of?

Speaker D: Yeah, I, uh, do support, uh, this. This thing out of India where there's called Pratham that really focuses on education for the people who don't have resources. Um, yeah, so we do work a lot, and they do actually try, you know, they use education and you use a lot of data, uh, actually to collect data to make sure that whatever programs is working or not working, and they actually are spreading to different parts of the world also.

Speaker C: Outstanding, Outstanding.

Speaker A: Yeah, we'll get a link for that, uh, to promote as well in the show notes when we put the episode live.

Speaker D: Okay, thanks.

Speaker A: Awesome. Great answers, Jay. Uh, Rob, you ready to rock and roll? Yeah.

Speaker B: Let's go.

Speaker A: All right, uh, if Defense Unicorns were a band, uh, what genre would you play?

Speaker B: Uh, uh, I'd say edm, um, uh, because it's always entertaining, uh, high tempo, uh, with, uh, you know, sudden changes.

Speaker A: I. I see EDM when I look at the unicorn.

Speaker D: Honestly, I didn't know you were an EDM fan.

Speaker B: I think the younger version of me, uh, was probably, uh, an EDM fan.

Speaker A: That unicorn has an EDM look to it. Little swoop over on the hair.

Speaker B: For sure.

Speaker A: I see it.

Speaker D: That's a new one.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: We got a lot to talk about. Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah, this is a. This is another episode forming. We'll talk about Jay's EDM and Rob's interest. Um, all right, uh, what's the most critical roles that you guys are hiring for in the next three to six months?

Speaker B: Uh, I would say, uh, always on the the product side, but a lot of new, uh, sales and growth roles as well. Um, it is so hard to sell in this market because you need to understand the mission, you need to understand sales, and then you also need to understand technology. So it is very, very, very hard to find the right people. And then we are always hiring for product and trying to just get the best product engineers in the world. And that is hard. It's getting easier though because, uh, a lot of the best engineers the world, uh, you know, this, this, you know, probably might surprise, but maybe doesn't surprise people. A lot of them don't want to work on defense systems. Uh, they're afraid to write code that supports military systems. But that's changed a lot and like the last couple of years and then especially because, you know, Defense Unicorns has done such a great job in the open source community, it is becoming more and more familiar. So there is, you know, that side of it is actually every single month, every, every single year, uh, that the challenge to recruit, uh, top talent goes, gets easier and easier.

Speaker A: Yeah, that brand recognition has got to help. Um, what, what, uh, what's one of your favorite parts about the culture that you guys are building at Defense Unicorns?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, first and foremost, mission focused. Uh, so, you know, to me, uh, you know, we, we didn't start Defense Unicorns because we, we, you know, we really even wanted to start a company. We, we started Defense Unicorns because you're trying to solve a problem. Uh, you know, we're trying to solve something that pissed us off, quite honestly. It was like, why do we, you know, because I actually got into the platform layer, you know, started, you know, platform one because I was trying to deploy software myself for the units that I supported and we couldn't because of all these platform things. Um, and so, you know, to me, uh, you know, the mission is the mission. Uh, this is not a market to us. Like, sometimes when people are like, hey, we want to get in the defense market, uh, you know, I cringe a little bit because it's like, you know, to the people in this quote, market, it's not a market. It's, it's your way of life, it's what you believe in. Um, and to me, like, you know, you see that every day. Every unicorn we hire knows why they're there, they know why they're working. Um, and you know, I, you know, not only is it preferent or, you know, across the entire company, but my hope is 10, 20, 50 years from now, you know, that same statement is still true.

Speaker A: Yeah. And quick plug on. Is it remote? Fully remote. Um, company. Uh, fully remote.

Speaker C: We.

Speaker B: We do have a couple offices. Uh, you know, Colorado Springs, small office, San Antonio, Phoenix, and D.C. cool.

Speaker A: Um, who's one person that's had a massive influence on your career?

Speaker B: Uh, that is a great, great question. Um, honestly, I would say all of the great entrepreneurs. So, you know, we're talking about podcasts. So I'll, uh, throw out the founder series, which dissects a lot of the, you know, great founders over the years. So, you know, uh, you know, obviously, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, but, you know, you just go and talk to, you know, these companies that have these founders that just sit on the company for, like, four decades. And I would say that what's really interesting is the entrepreneurs and everyone that I admire, they've all built things, like I said, over the course of several decades. Um, and so those are the founders I love hearing from. Uh, my background's physics and military. Yet when I think about companies, I strive to build a company that somebody like Warren Buffett would blush over, reading the Excel documents and the financial statements. And it's because as an entrepreneur, I'm literally just trying to study from and learn from the best, the best of the best of the best. And so I don't think it's any one person, but probably a collection of, like, you know, the. The history is history's greatest 200 founders. And then just trying to go deeper on each and every one of those. Because, you know, I would say that most of the people I admire are already have died, uh, because they created companies 150 years ago. And I'm trying to study their playbooks, uh, back when the latest and greatest technology was like, railroads. Uh, and so, you know, those are the things that, you know, uh, really, really get me excited. Really, uh, really love the concept of, you know, understanding where technology and the direction of technology is going and how do you build a company that can survive generations?

Speaker A: Very cool. Um, favorite place to travel for personal fun.

Speaker B: Uh, uh, I love to go to San Diego. Uh, I live in Phoenix. Uh, my kids love the beach. So I'd say probably two or three times a year, you know, the family me gets, you know, gets out to the beach there. Uh, you know, typically in between, you know, San Diego and la.

Speaker A: Yeah, my San Diego can't perfect weather year, year round. Uh, finish this sentence. The future of defense software runs on blank uds. Well played. Uh, so perfectly teed up for you.

Speaker B: Three years softball. That's that's perfect.

Speaker A: Uh, you're, you're an Air Force vet. Uh, what's, what's a lesson from your service that still applies to you as a founder?

Speaker B: Uh, you know, and I'm going to say one that maybe the Air Force didn't necessarily execute well, but at least tried to, which is, you know, mission first, people always, um, you know, the people or who, what makes the mission successful. And you got to find the right balance. There's, um. And I do think the mission does come first. But, but at the same time, you know, you know, as mentioned earlier in the podcast, you know, I got four kids, uh, I got a balanced life. I gotta, you know, figure out how to make the, you know, defense unicorns in the company and the mission successful while at the same, same time recognizing that everybody who's building this great thing with me also has their own problems, their own family, their own interest. And so you gotta, you gotta find the right balance there and make sure that you're also taking care of people.

Speaker A: Cool. Yeah, it's a great tagline. Uh, what's a totally non tech hobby or skill that you've. You've picked up?

Speaker B: Uh, I, you know, I, I would say four kids in a startup. I don't have hobbies, but one of the things, one of my hidden secrets that only my kids and, and wife know about, that, that I will not impersonate for you, uh, is I am really good with voices. Uh, so I am constantly, uh, pretending to be somebody else in the house and doing different voices. Uh, it gets my kids and wife laughing hysterically, but I refuse to do it outside of the home.

Speaker A: We'll put you on the spot. I think everybody kind of has something like that. We do that with our kid, our dog. We have little voices that we use for them all too. Um, last, uh, one. What's a charity or cause that's near and dear to you?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I am a huge, uh, local church fan. Uh, and so my local church, ccv, uh, is near and dear to my heart. Uh, but I think everyone's local church, your faith has to go in front of every, in front of anything else you do. Um, and so I'm huge community person. I'm a huge, uh, there's a why behind the why type person. Um, and I think if you're well grounded in that and uh, I think it really keeps you aligned, it keeps your ego in check. Uh, and I think it allows you to see the world through, uh, a better lens and better perspective that I think ultimately benefits everyone.

Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah. Well said. Uh, and I personally have to ask one quick bonus question. Does the unicorn have a name?

Speaker B: Uh, the unicorn is called Doug.

Speaker A: Uh, Doug.

Speaker B: You know, we have Doug on, you know, one side of my shoulder. And then with the Department of War, we have War Doug, um, on the other side, which is his alternative ego that. That we are leaning into and, you

Speaker A: know, trying to support, uh, my best friend Doug. I love it. That's great. All right, I. I had to ask because I. I've got. My business is, um, you know, we've got, like, a little, uh, a little egg guy here, and everybody's like, what's it. What's its name? Um, company's name is Hatch, so his. His name's Hatchy, obviously. So.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: That's a wrap, guys. Just wanted to thank you for joining us, uh, on an awesome conversation. You know, it's. It's inspiring to kind of see the story unfold and. And see how both sides kind of were in it together, taking risk on one another, uh, for an end goal to, you know, to modernize the systems that keep our country secure. So thank you guys for joining us. Thanks for the work that you're doing and, uh, appreciate you being on the Pair program.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Speaker D: Thanks, Tim. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thank you so much,

Speaker B: Sam.