Building Long-Range Hypersonic Missiles | Bryon Hargis, Castelion

49:45Certainly that's what I spend a lot of part of my time thinking about, but I can't, you know, I don't see everything. Just making sure that other people feel like they're empowered to like bring up what the possible issues are is important. Are you trying to basically just share the information or like the necessary information to help people understand like how you guys are moving as an organization down to like the finest thing so that they can make the right calls individually i think the most important thing is to like share why like here's what we are doing here's why we are doing it here's what the decision process was so that they see the example of that and the way that they will improve and be able to lead one day is through that iterative experience.

50:33And so they have to be trusted to start somewhere. You have to give somebody a chance and you have to expose them to it. So making sure that they know why the business is making certain decisions. I actually think we're a very open company in terms of talking about everything that's happening in the business, talking about our finances, talking about what's happening on the business front, talking about what I think is the most important at our all hands meetings. I I you know I hope people value it They do or else they probably wouldn't be here You know, it's kind of funny like so as you you become like I'm like I'm a very affable Person till I'm not I've only seen one side of what Brian has I haven't seen you haven't seen killer Brian I feel like I'm very easy to approach and I'll find people that are scared to tell me something or I said something in passing at a meeting and they took it as gospel like they're just like doing something that makes no sense because they didn't want to come back to me and tell me hey boss like that's dumb because of x um it's like like one of the strangest experiences of like running a company is like making sure I don't say something that has unintended consequences with people like going off and doing something stupid because they didn't want to tell me like I was being an idiot um so having like healthy feedback loops through the company um that don't always just like come directly back to me I think it's like truly important but that that that's like been um it's been been interesting at times um how have you kind of like fostered that because I know it's I know it's very difficult, especially as like companies scale and you start to have like many, many employees and people aren't just interacting with you on a, you know, every single day.

52:31People probably become a little bit more of a naturally because you're this authority figure. They kind of even if you don't mean to live a little bit in fear of like you don't want to piss off the boss kind of thing. How do you help keep that information cycle and flow going? I mean, I think there's a couple of ways. So like there's talking to folks like in an unofficial capacity, like, Hey, I'm not here to like interview you or, you know, like have an official sit down meeting, but it looks like catching people like, you know, eating, eating, taking a break, eating a snack, just talking to them.

53:05I used to try to actually go out and have like happy hours with the team and lunches and it is freaking impossible to have enough happy hours and lunches. Like I'm also on the road a lot. So it's like very hard to, to, to, to make that work. But, um, and then like having like direct, um, you know, like my co-founders, Sean and Andrew, um, like one of the things that I truly value in Sean is that he lets me know when I'm screwing up immediately. In no uncertain terms. In no uncertain terms, how much I have disappointed him. and I value that I truly do I truly do it is brutal at times but I know that I'm disappointed him and he will let me know how you know usually immediately I like to pay it forward and do any way I can to like embarrass him or make him feel uncomfortable I also I just relish those moments but it's all it's all honestly healthy like you got to make sure like like people talk about do you want to be a solo founder or have co-founders like i can't honestly imagine trying to do like this um alone and that like goes beyond just like the three of co-founders but like just having like a great a great team at all levels like it's just so freaking tough and like i'm not the best at everything i know that I really like, we made a very conscious choice of, let's make sure we have the right mix of skills and like the initial team to make sure that like, my gaps are covered, my blind spots are filled.

54:54And that the folks that are in those positions aren't gonna be too shy to tell me like, hey boss, you're doing like all the wrong things. Like we have to be able to talk really honestly to each other that's you know it's it's it's it's like a marriage but you can't get out of it so it's more it's it's like a marriage but any breakup is like a lot of money and a lot of terrible so if you need to like pick who surrounds you extremely carefully and they but communication is like and trust there's nothing more important to that it just i can't stress that enough and I just can't imagine like there's like a lot of solo founders out there and like good lord like I'm chewing the glass you chew the glass you're chewing that glass alone yeah so some days I just like you know I throw my serving a glass to someone else and I go home so when when you were starting out the company how did you think about like deciding to have you know even if you are gonna have co-founders you have to trust them on a very deep level or else you wouldn't be giving up a big chunk of the thing that you're gonna start it's basically like again the whole vectors alignment thing how did you find two people that were similarly aligned to you I think it's super helpful to like know them beforehand in my case like I had worked with, with them for a long time beforehand, you know, they had plans to go do other things.

56:35Um, one of the things that happens at like any place with like regular vesting is like every vest date, everybody who's potentially leaving, like we'll suss other people out who are potentially leaving and be like, Hey, what are you doing? Here's what I'm doing. And so, um, you know, through that process of, of, you know, sussing other people out, uh, you know, it became very apparent to me that, you know, it wasn't like a plan to like form the business with these specific people, but it became very apparent to me, like the value of who could, we could potentially like start the business with.

57:15And, you know, you don't know if they're going to join you or not. Um, So, you know, in those guys' cases, like they were planning to do other stuff, but shared the vision with what I was planning to do, you know, and it spoke to them. And, but I knew who they were as, as people. And I think that, um, I had, I knew like Sean would tell it how it is. And so like for me personally, that's like who you want, like right by your side is someone who can tell it like it is. Like I can't think of anything more important than being kneecapped if you're riding too high and telling you when you're screwing something up because they're.

58:02you know if you listen to everybody you're screwing something up 100 % of the time that's not healthy you need somebody that you trust to tell you when you're screwing something up that needs to probably be corrected that you can't see that's a blind spot like i don't think anybody comes in thinking like you know i'm screwing this up and i don't care but it's really just like having somebody that can that can point it out to you and i think that that ability to like find the right set of people that you're gonna go through you know trials and tribulations yeah you're gonna go a decade of like digging the worst ditch in the world with um as well as like the best highs it needs to be like a set of people that you can depend on and if you screw that up at the beginning it's bad i mean same with like your investors honestly like when you get a board member it's like you know you you're getting like you're getting hitched in a way that's very hard to unhitch and so you have to be very careful with like who you work with um it's really important that it's not just about the money it's about how am i like do we share visions how are we going to do like when disagreements like how do we handle disagreements because it's like they're a different person you're going to disagree with them at times how how are you at getting you know through something with them do you you know do you trust them um i think that that's critically important as well um sometimes like in an act of desperation like you just have to do what you have to do and just do something for the money um have you ever felt that throughout the company's history no not not at not at castellan um past past life at another small business like we got forced into a very suboptimal situation to kind of avoid a hostile takeover of sorts and very much driven by bad investor behavior.

1:00:09And that's never happened here, but I've also specifically aligned things to make sure that couldn't happen. It gave me certainly something to like be cautious about um including like be very judicious about who you take on board the company and like are you aligned with the vision how do you handle disagreements do you think they would stab you in the back if it suited them if interests weren't aligned yeah it's just like it's not it's not a reasonable expectation to think that your business is just going to like monotonically go well um so it's not enough to know like how are they going to respond in a good time it's really like Like if things totally shit hits the fan.

1:00:52Yeah. How are they going to be then? Because that's what really matters. And same for the like your co-founders and the other folks that you work with. Like how's it going to be when things are going terribly? And that's the best way to frame the decision because like you need to think like it's going to suck, but we're going to do it together. what's been the biggest moment where you were going to make a decision but because you had uh sean kind of like watching over your shoulder and making you know helping you make better decisions you decided to go in a different direction i don't know if i have a good example of like where we like pivoted the business to something because he said something but i um i i have like a tendency and a trait to get riled up and and vent as my way honestly it's like my way of like managing stress is just like let it out instead of eating it all the time and you know he'll pull me aside and be like get your shit together tell me like be a man has that has that had like uh kind of negative impacts on the team that you didn't even mean to have happen well yeah that's like that's what he's saying like he's pointing out like you shouldn't have said that in front of everybody basically virtually slapped me around and he's right he's right you know but like it's it's it's at least it's tough to always remember like everybody's looking to you in like some like let's say like unfair situation um and whatever feelings you have towards being treated unfairly like they're then amplified for the team if you if you like let it out in the wrong way even though they're totally justified um and so uh he's he's got a like a very high eq so he like points that out and tells me i'm being an idiot which is totally fair so i love him for it but you know i think like having that role and it doesn't have to be i it doesn't have to be met by like a co-founder like just but like you need somebody like in a company who can kind of you can bounce ideas off of like let you know you're being stupid don't do that and like listen to take the feedback i think like you know um taking feedback and and like analyzing like new information and like acting on it that it's it can be very tough especially like when it's like about your own like tendencies um it can be very uncomfortable um but it it's great when it works uh it's tough of course but it's it's really good to have somebody that can point that out and you can get better and i think like one of sean's defining traits is like it doesn't matter however good thing just happened he's like it could have been better he's not wrong he's not wrong could have been better somehow we could have performed better but um like that level of um never being happy with the outcome like you can always do better and just continue to push yeah yeah and i think that's like one of his defining characteristics that particularly really awesome.

1:04:13Brian Chesky had this line where as he was scaling Airbnb with Joe Gabbia and Nate, he would go to, he was very comfortable and willing to go to other high power people that were like maybe a few stages ahead of him or in slightly different industries to kind of learn how to do things and how to grow as like a leader. And he's constantly thinking to himself, how do I kind of grow ahead of the curve of my company? Because if you're not, you're basically failing um how have you kind of evolved from starting out as a leader to now um i think that's one of the coolest things about being a founder of a business is like you're in the network of other founders and you don't when you start like you don't know how to do this you don't know how to do that um you go to people that are like a stage or two ahead of you and you talk to them and like the unwritten rule being a founder is you're going to pay it forward with somebody who's behind you because you got a lot of help to get to where you are.

1:05:17And so like we're starting to get to the phase where I can help pay it forward. And it's difficult because it's like the most limited thing I have is like my time. But I always try to take a call with somebody else, especially if it's like they just want to ask some questions about how do I do this? How do I do that? Or what to look for? You know, how do I shape my round, et cetera, et cetera. There's just, it could be organizational. It could be any number of things. All I can say is like, I wouldn't be here without some help. And I think like the thing I can get back is like helping someone else on like on their journey.

1:05:51And so, you know, trying to, trying to remember that even when you're stressed, cause there's like, there is no more hours in the day and I have no more time to take another meeting and God help me I don't want to do another dinner um it I remember that pay it forward so I think like the founder community is incredibly cool um in that regard in that everybody knows what it's like to just go eat glass uh and they're willing to help other people who are about to eat a lot of glass so it in that regard it's just like a really cool experience um to be to be part of that and just know that um and and some folks have horrific founding stories like i like honestly like we had it like i thought we had it hard and i have heard from some other founders and i'm like I take back everything I said.

1:06:47Like we were just, we were walking in on easy. Uh, uh, some of the, some of the things I have heard, which I won't repeat are like, Oh my God, like that sounds awful. And they pulled it off doing great, happy for them. Like, and, and that's where you get back to like relentless because good Lord, like the world will wake up and punch you in the face and you just need to get back up, keep going. and I think that that that's like the hallmark of like what's going to make somebody successful is like yeah you need a bunch of other skills as well but how often are you just willing to take a punch take a straight right to the face and just get back up and do it again what's your uh what's your process like I know for everyone that I've met that does get punched there's some kind of way that you just cope with it and then get over it and then get back up to you know get back on the horse the next day uh what's your kind of like solution for that comedy comedy i love turning it into a joke yeah we get whenever we get punched i try to think of something uh funny to say about it even though like i'm like it on the inside hurting bad oh yeah well i'm like it's my way of venting but like say something funny yeah i think like there's a lot of ways the personalities like handle like adversity it's gonna happen regardless i like making it into a joke some people don't see that and they take it as like i'm not a serious person because i'm turning it into a joke but it's it's really it's really my way of uh well i think even elon does that right uh he like he goes from he goes from like ultra serious to like laughing and cracking jokes in a very short period of time i don't know that he's doing it though to like turn like some terrible situation into it versus like he doesn't think it's that big of a deal um but he is um uh yeah most of my interactions with elon are were him laughing or telling you know telling some story but like most of the engineering meetings were uh you know joke telling of some degree at some point yeah which i i appreciate it i think it's horrible if you basically spend your entire life building something and then you like wake up one day and you realize that you don't really enjoy the environment that you've created yeah i agree like i mean if you're gonna come in and grind you may as well enjoy it so and i think like um yeah again like you got to surround yourself with the people that you just want to like dig that ditch with because my god the ditch is never gonna not need digging so it's uh it's i wouldn't believe anybody who just like had like came in and said something was super easy i'm like what planet do you come from they probably exist because i got like again i always i do think that one of the things that's never accounted for there is a degree of luck in everything like no matter what's happened in your life there's probably some element of luck to it like you're in the right place the right time to meet somebody but the thing that you can control for is making sure that you're willing to do it again um to make your own luck so just keep trying um but i certainly recognize like there's a lot of things that have gone right in my life that too yeah did i work hard absolutely but there is a degree of luck um in success and close calls that would have been like, you know, game over in some regard.

1:10:30In Castilian's case, like what have been the key, like luck moments where things went your way or they didn't necessarily have to? You know, we've had a lot of success with the Navy. And yes, I knew some of the folks at the office we were talking about in a different capacity um but we came in and like the way i described what we were doing there was like one of the things i said and one of our customers told me this like just a couple nights ago after like eight really intense drinks um Um, but they, they basically said, uh, one of the things that I said to them that made them like believe in us as a company, uh, they were, somebody was telling us like how hard it is to like design a weapon and what it has to go through and how it's damn near impossible to get it qualified, yada, yada, yada, so on and so forth.

1:11:44And I came back in the meeting and I like wasn't thinking about this time, but I said like, well, the pilot survives it. So clearly it's doable. And it was like at that moment, it connected with that person who's like that basic statement, like, well, it doesn't kill the pilot. So clearly it's doable. That was apparently like for them, like a defining moment in our relationship or customer vendor relationship of like, Hey, this guy, you know, I mean, it's like a very pithy answer, but I do believe it's true. Like it can't be impossible if you're not killing the pilot every time, like, you know, the aircraft lands.

1:12:21So it's very much like why I think it's impossible. It's not. So you just have to be willing to try. I'm totally willing to say that I don't know exactly how the design will shake out and what exactly will be done. But I do believe it's doable. It's not impossible. For the iteration process, what's it been like going from just having almost no money in your bank account to now having like a lot more cash to work with? How have you like shifted the way that you operate? I didn't find it hard because I've personally been down on my luck several points in life where I've had no cash. And so it's just like this is the thing you work through.

1:13:00um i you know i think like obviously you have to be very strategic with how you're going to spend that money because you're like trying to optimize like how how do i get to the next hurdle where i could get some more cash how can i make it but like operating with nothing is honestly sometimes it's it's freeing it like constrains you and to what you what you can do yeah i mean it's it constrains like exactly like it takes some things completely off the table they're not possible you can't possibly for that uh so i think like operating in a resource constrained environment which we still do even though like you know we have we have a bankroll now but like we're we still operate everybody resource constrained um because you can start to make dumb decisions if you forget the basics like money still matters and that's why we go through like that the whole ordeal every month of reminding people like it's not the company's money it's our money.

1:13:53And if it runs out, that's our paycheck. Like there isn't like a magical different fund for, for salary. Um, you know, it comes down to a little bit of luck, a lot of, uh, strategic thinking about what's the right thing to do and how to like deploy your capital. Um, for us, you know, investors tend to, to think about things as like technical risk, market risk, team risk how do you with the the war chest you have whatever size it is what could i do in each of those boxes that they care about to just take that down a notch to prove like you know from like the purposes of making it to the next round and raising some more to keep going on your journey what do i need to show them same with the customer though but the customer's risk are going to be different than like what the investors view like your overall risk posture is so what am i going to do for them to knock down like the walls and to get them convinced about what we're you know what we're doing what we're building so in our case you know our whole portion of like the vision was iterating our way to a new missile design with capabilities that are going to be very exciting for the country at a price point that's much lower than what's traditionally possible so how are we going to prove that because it's going to take a lot of capital to get to that end state how do we prove that over you know without that much and so it very much became like well what what demonstrations can we do with the money that we have and the team that we have because like obviously when you're starting out you're like missing some significant gaps of skill sets for being a resource constraint on both capital and people and people yeah um and you can't like in my opinion you can't like go away for two years it just work on like that two-year goal so like what are we going to be able to show in like a few months and so picking picking those targets and for us it was like a series of flight tests that allowed us to unlock the customer in the sense that they could see like oh you now have more than powerpoint you're building hardware so you could get the next contract and that next contract helps reduce the market risk for the investors.

1:16:11So now they are willing to put in some more money and you did it in the timeframe that you said with the team that you had. And so figuring out your path, it's, I think it's going to look, it's going to look similar for every company, but it's also going to like, the specifics are going to be very different and, and figuring out how you like lay that in, um, is really important because regardless of the company you have you probably only have a couple maybe you know you don't have many major missteps in there that you can do and then get back on the path so you're very easily like out if you if you screw that up but not having like unlimited resources was not like an unnatural position um for me personally so like I was like comfortable operating there uh and i think that that's very helpful um uh as as a founder because you you can't expect that it's just going to be easy sailing and raining cash uh it's going to be it's going to be a grind um of some form or another on the uh customer side like how did you think through getting to a point where people would actually like want to give you some contract or pilot or whatever i mean you know for for working with the government it's always going to come back to you know credibility and like the perceived risk that they're taking and betting on you um even minute amounts of money in comparison to like what some of these things what some of these programs are sized at and the key the key with working with the with the dod in my mind is actually getting to that hardware stage this is like demonstrations and and and going out and launching and and proving like some aspect of your technology works this is like why it is so difficult if you're doing software for the dod it's like a uphill battle because like what do you demonstrate it can be like incredibly hard um because quite frankly like that's not how their brains are wired as a customer for most for most folks they really respond well to like seeing hardware demonstrations and so you know our roadmap was very hardware heavy which was natural because like we are we're building a physical thing um but there's actually a ton of software in our system and quite frankly like we i'd say we underplay our hand um both on the investor or customer front on the software side but it is a huge part of our strategy for how that's going to enable us in the future and like what type of capabilities that's going to have but we don't spend a lot of time talking about it and but from a customer perspective i don't spend a lot of time talking about it because i don't it's not worth the return of investment of time and energy because they're not ready to hear how i'm gonna you know you know employ this new you know concept of of like deploying weapons they're just trying to understand like can these yahoos actually build a missile that works and so talking through our software strategy isn't going to help that it's just going to fall on deaf ears and so we focus all of our time and attention of just showing like hardware progression but the software will be a huge component of the future yeah was Was there any moment like with the Daimler deal on Tesla, I think in like 2008, 2009-ish, where I think in order to basically keep Tesla afloat, Elon had to go build a sporty electric go-kart in effect.

1:19:49But because, you know, the Daimler people come in and they're expecting some PowerPoint presentation and then he's like, well, actually, do you want to just go try it? And the car is like out in the parking lot and they start zipping around and that ends up, you know, like$40 million or whatever it was for Tesla. Has there been any moment like that where you could just show something and that like let you leapfrog? When you're doing business with the government, it's never like quite as simple as like, I came to you, I showed you this thing. And then we went in the room, we signed the paper and we're done.

1:20:17It's always like so much more involved and drawn out that it never feels like that quick of a kind of response process. But I would say that absolutely like back to like my point like the best business development activity you can do for the government is just doing what you said we just continue to do what we said you just keep going back and you're like the last time i was here i said i would do this no we did and we did this is what i'm doing next the first time it'll be thought of as like that's a fluke but you do that enough and people do start to believe you and then they start to put trust in you to like give you you know more leash more leash bigger slices to go do more um and certainly um so it hasn't been it would be very refreshing like the commercial world's really nice and the fact that you can do something convince somebody and it could be like a big deal it happens all at once it feels like so much slower and drawn out but um it certainly is still like tracing back to like i demonstrated the thing and now i get to do the next thing um even if we are already working like two steps further down um you know on the on like two steps further in the future you still have to like nail the basics and then go back and show how you how you did that um and just prove that you're doing what you say that's like the most important thing is there any issue with uh i know i've talked with a few other like defense companies and it seems pretty consistent that at least the like current players uh underestimate the timeline that things can happen in and then if you actually estimate your timeline as you think it can actually happen you might under or overbid them but because they say that they can do it in less and then they can't you basically lose a contract short term because of that has that been an issue i i have a lot of experience in, you know, government sales.

1:22:13And so I had a pretty healthy feel for like, what's going to happen, um, this year or last fiscal year that just ended in September. Like we even exceeded my own expectations. Like we've got, we've got multiple contracts in the last like week. That's not what I envisioned. Yeah. I didn't envision it starting on week one of the fiscal year, like that would have been naive, especially with how things have been going. But getting basically everything in at the last week of the fiscal year is that exceeded even my expectations. So I think but I think like if you do government, a lot of government business, or in our case, like it's all government business, you have to have contingency plans for things don't go at the speed because there's a lot of parties involved that can stop it at any time.

1:23:02like you do have to convince like the pentagon like your your direct customer but then there's like multiple offices on the executive branch that can change things or slow things down and then of course you have you know congress is going to you know authorize and appropriate the funds and that things could get held up there for completely you know they might think your project's great but it doesn't matter some part of a bill and it's like the bill doesn't It has nothing to do with you. It has nothing to do with you, but you're caught up in it. And I think that you have to have like those plans of like, here's what we expect to happen, but here's our plan.

1:23:40If that does not happen on that timeline, what are we going to do? And so being able to survive a bit longer and, you know, kind of take your foot off the gas a bit if you had to to survive. we've been very lucky that like we haven't had to to make frankly like hard choices of like slowing things down in any way because we've had private capital to back you know backfill any like hole from like government funding customer funding it is painful at times because like if you came through faster I would have had to sell less of the company from all the employees to like to get us there but um there hasn't been like hard choices now in certain cases like there are folks that they always talk about like straddling like the valley of death which really means that you did something with the government you were like in science and technology land developing it and you were getting funded to do that but you didn't work the acquisition side far enough in advance and so it's a multi-year process if you're coming in cold and so what happens is like the snt side says like great you're done and like kind of like stops funding your widget but then it takes three years to get a program or get integrated into a program over here and and and then you're just kind of like stopped for an extended period of time that is at best flatlining and that that kills a lot of companies because of course like they're expecting growth and like the sudden like flatlining is extremely damaging.

1:25:15And so you see a lot of companies that are like heavily dependent on government revenue, having to like back off and do layoffs, etc. Just because of something that they didn't have enough of a contingency for, but maybe wasn't their fault. Do you, has the like way that you plan even 12 months, 24 months, 36 months in the future kind of shifted as things have started to work well like you've built the trust or you're building trust over time and you're able to maybe see a little bit further into the future with every little bit of trust that you build i mean certainly like we have like a like tactical level plan of like what we're rolling out with the customer but like our 24 36 month vision is set and has been set for a long time like i'm 100 focused on how do we give the country back long-range non-nuclear deterrence that's every decision we make internally like we ask that question does this make that better not make it better or can't really tell but we're asking the question and so you know from like an internal perspective the entire company knows what our goals are and what we're pushing towards from an external perspective you can't go in as like this size company and necessarily tell them your grand full vision because they're they don't care well it's not that they don't care but if you go too far they think you're crazy or not credible and that's happened to us actually in some in some cases what happened in that i mean i've been called a liar they think we're lying about what we're doing or what our capabilities are or what have you, or performance, cost, et cetera.

1:27:07The frustrating part of that is, yes, my estimates are estimates, and they're probably not perfect, but they're not also an order of magnitude off. But we'll get dinged for that in the future regardless, but that's okay. But the goal of the company is published far and wide internally, but it doesn't mean that we necessarily roll everything that we're going to be doing out to outside all at once because it can seem too ambitious. Yeah. But I think you have to have that level of ambition to keep everybody making the right long-term choices. So back to like everybody being able to decide like what's the best interest of the company.

1:27:51They need to know where we're heading long-term and why it matters. and I think that we've done a really good job internally at trying to keep messaging that. Like we're growing headcount, honestly. I really wanted to like know everybody's name at the company and now I come in on Monday and I've been gone like the whole last week and I'm like, oh my God, I don't know who that is. So, but it's still a goal. It's still a goal. But we continue to have like, you know, meetings where we will share, We'll continually revisit what is it that we're doing so that the new folks also start to get experience with why did we make choices in the past and why are we here and what are we doing so that they know that process and that flow so that they can see the bigger picture.

1:28:39And I hope that that's coming across. If they're watching this and they don't feel like that's the case, they should tell me. And we'll have a short meeting to help make sure that everybody's on the same page because I do think that that's extremely important. how many people is this now uh we're right around 150 oh wow like even for 150 it feels like you guys are punching way above your weight i i actually think that that is true um one is we're very focused like we everybody's rowing the same way we're only doing a very limited number of things um that are all highly related like it's basically like you know i think like most of the defense industry is like consulting model like cost plus contracting is really like butts in seats and you don't ever turn down new work you do this you do that and it can be very scattered we're very much like a product model in the sense that we're more like andrel yeah i mean i think like now andrel has like i don't know how many products andrel has way more than us um you know we are we are working very selectively on what we're doing because i think like having everybody focus on the same thing you get a lot of efficiency out of that um but that's also like the best way to break in in my mind is just do a damn good job on one thing not a half-assed job on a lot of things um especially when it comes to you know working with um the department of war i think i keep saying dod earlier sorry dow um but i think like that like doing just again doing what you said doing it extremely well and having a reputation for that um but it also lets it's amazing like what the power of a small team can do people think that you must need like to do some like big idea you must need like this like huge team and and quite frankly like a huge team can you know just a bunch of different people going in different directions exactly yeah god help you like if you give any like large group like the ability to make decisions and they can all counter each other like the bigger the team the less likely they can get to consensus and the more likely you're frozen um and so small teams can gel quicker and then move out um especially when given like the authority uh and the accountability to do that and it's incredible what you can do with just a small number of folks and i think that we will obviously like we're growing rapidly and we will get much much larger but that focused approach lets us i think punch above our weight and it's really just focus it's just we get more output per individual because they're not multitasking throughout the day everybody's everybody's growing the same way did you like come to that philosophy of focus like i know um with the first few years of spacex especially it was just one thing and that was just like falcon right and like wasn't there back then but that would have been cool to have been i do think like part of spacex's um success is yes they you know they don't have a ton of products yeah you got you got falcon starship dragon starlink and starshield like it's it's you know it's fairly limited but they're leveraging that into a ton of markets.

1:32:10And so if you think like your cash outlay is going to scale with like the number of different products, but if you can just make them more versatile and capture more with what you have, like obviously that has tremendous payback. I mean, your most limited resources, the engineering time that you have as a, like a company to put into something. And so that kind of like caps out like the complexity of what you can do. and the worst possible case in my opinion is to go after something that is just such a difficult problem that you're going to need to be like a medium to large business just to have the resources to tackle it well um you have to set yourself up with like what's a meaningful thing i can bite off with like the size of the team that i'm realistically going to be able to make and i think that you can then scale that into much bigger problems in the future.

1:33:02You know, I think the venture community is always like, just go big or go home and but they don't care if you die. In our case, like I really want to see Castellan make a difference. I can't make a difference if the company dies on the way. So I do want to see us tackle like even even tougher challenges in the future but like the way to do that in my mind it's not necessarily the go directly to that hardest thing because i think the probability that that goes smoothly or the customer does it is close to zero yeah so the optimal path is to you know do the medium hard thing scale and then do do the the hardest of hard thing and that's you know how we'll get there eventually at what point does it make sense like you're focusing on one thing right now and it's actually only like two and a half years into the company that's ridiculously short period of time to be doing anything um at least in defense i think um yeah yeah at what point does it make sense to go branch off and after you've really nailed one product go into another product the cycle time with like doing anything with the government is usually like a couple years from like concept to like even doing a prototype.

1:34:21So we are certainly looking at like, what do we do next? And like, we're in that like early, early prototyping and concept development phase, knowing that it's going to take some time to get there. But we have to have our eye on like, you know, product one and doing a really good job on that. Now, in our case, like obviously we're taking like, you know, It's not like we're going off to something totally different for what we're doing for product two. We're trying to stay focused, but we can leverage the engineering effort that went into product one and try to bring that over in a way that allows us to leverage a lot of the learning without spending the same time reengineering it.

1:35:04so i like to think that our first missile is the slowest missile that we'll ever build not by like its actual speed but by like time of development we should be able to do like our second weapon faster than our first not only because built the muscle we built the muscle we've got some things designed maybe it's not the exact design but we're not starting from zero we're currently building, you know, production facilities from scratch. It would be nice if those were already done. There's a lot, there's a lot of things. It's like, you know, I think running a startups, like, you know, you're like assembling the car and like bolting on the wheels while you're trying to drive on one wheel down the road.

1:35:46And that, you know, ideally, once you built the car, like it can now go faster. So that's, I think we can do even better in the future. Even though I do think that you know two and a half years in the aerospace is super fast it is frustratingly slow being in it because it's like i want to get there even quicker um but there's a lot you have to do as you build the business that uh is not easy and so i sometimes um i'm sometimes jealous that like you know if you just did if you just did like a pure software play you potentially could move out quicker because you know you don't have to go build like a thousand plus acre like production site in another state like that would be easier how are you thinking about um like scaling and getting production ramp going so that you can actually just build these things uh like have you reach production hell yet or is this no no no i fully expect to get to live um like on the floor of some ungodly place and fluorescent light yeah hopefully they're blinking like joe versus the volcano that would be ideal um some strobe music in the background just to wake you up as soon as you fall asleep hopefully loud banging from like a forklift but um yeah no i'm we have not hit that point yet I fully expect to hit that point I think a large fraction the company is gonna end up like living at a production site in the near future and it's going to both be truly awesome and suck do you think it was helpful to live through like the Starlink ramp yes yes it is now to be fair like I wasn't working like the manufacturing now I would go out there a lot in indirect with the team and the engineers, but I wasn't personally on the line or moving like, you know, refactoring the line and doing anything.

1:37:50So it would be more helpful had I done that as my job, but that wasn't my role. Now, I will say that we have like an extremely talented team that has done that directly in the past. But I do think that it's not necessarily like getting it perfectly right on the first try. Like we're already factoring into our schedule that we're going to get the factory up and running and like a low rate initial production. And we are planning that there is something broken about what we are designed that we are going to have to go change. So it's already in the schedule to basically. Unfuck things. Yeah, exactly.

1:38:27And I think it won't just be once we have it in our schedule to do it. But that'll be an ongoing thing of like you do it, you learn, you get better at it and you decide that, you know, past past me was an idiot. Why was I ever why did I ever think that was a good idea? But it'll come through like pain and suffering as with anything good in life. So, you know, I'm like I'm I'm actually looking forward to it. It's going to suck. Yeah. I gotta imagine, but by the time you're actually experiencing the pain of trying to get this thing running in an efficient manner, you've kind of hit a milestone where you're like, finally, finally we get to do this.

1:39:13It's going to be exciting to see it come together in a probably haphazard, terrifying, brute force manner, as with anything good. But it is an exciting phase to get to and start to build out. because you know it's one of those things like uh i think it's always kind of funny like whatever no matter what you've done you get through the end of it and and you think the hard part's over oh yeah well i actually know i never think the hard part's over this is that this is what comes with age it's the hard part is never over but it's it's kind of like you just battled through that and it you almost never celebrate because you're like wow that was a complete shit show um we could have done that better knowing what we know now and so you don't take the time to celebrate because you're like i give that like a five out of ten uh and then you're like okay we're gonna go do this new thing that's gonna be good at least some people think that i'm like we're gonna go do this new thing and it's gonna be a five out of ten too but it will get better but like it's kind of like that iterative process the like the downside of that is it never feels like you've did a great job doing the thing it's like you battled through it and you just kind of like you know collapsed on the other side of the line like it like like it was like running a marathon I've know you clearly I've never run a marathon but I can only imagine I did do 100k once but I didn't run in the whole thing and I basically collapsed on the other side of the line yeah but I mean I imagine that the way it works is you're doing the five out of ten but by the time you're actually you've gotten to a point where you're doing like an eight or at least a seven out of 10 you're basically moving on to the next problem where you're going to be doing a five out of 10 so the operation background is doing a much better job you just don't necessarily get to experience it because you're like putting out the last fire you're always putting out a fire yeah but you do get you know with anything you do get better like the more times you you fumble your way through something you're going to get better at it but you should expect that you're going to fumble your way through it um if someone were to tell me like a plan that didn't involve fumbling i was like i don't believe that plan like this is probably going to be miserable um just bake the misery into it yeah just bake the misery into it like just be honest expected outcome yeah so if it doesn't happen you're probably missing something correct yeah you just don't know what it is yet but the misery will find you don't worry the uh i think like you have to just bake in time like every schedule that we have internally like has some either second or third iteration of time baked into it and people like well what are you doing there i have no idea something is going to be wrong i expect that we need to do it again but i don't know what the thing wrong is yet because clearly if i knew that i wouldn't design it wrong in the first place so all i know is that like the gremlins are there and they're coming just plan for them just yeah plan for the unknown unknowns plan for the unknown unknowns because they're they're there and they're out there they're gonna find you but it you know I just take that that's just life so and honestly it's like keeps things fun you just come in you're like what happened to us today what broke what broke how are we screwed what what crisis are we having you know you may as well enjoy it because like that's the ride you're getting but you knew that when you signed up for the roller coaster yeah I don't think you started most people don't start a company expecting it to be a smooth ride like people are excited to i would hope not even even the downs like at least when when you're down you know that if you just keep on going you're gonna eventually get the upswing and start honestly i my personal experience is like the upswing is almost not noticeable it's just this you're just going down and you're like the five five five five this is an odd feeling and then someone's like oh no one's beating us at the moment you're like oh is that what that feels like I can't hardly tell I'm so numb to it it's honestly uh remembering to take the time to like pause and be like I think we did something good it's almost hard because it's just like because there's usually like it still wasn't perfect so there's something that didn't go quite right but you're like you're like every everybody everything but one objective was met during that test like that's pretty good but instead you can choose to focus on like the one thing that didn't go right uh i think it's like it's important to remind yourself what is going well because i do think like again with the spirit of like being relentless like you're just going to be continuing to go through that for do you try to juggle that a little bit because i know even though you may be able to kind of experience that ever downward but always upward sort of situation um do you have to kind of remind yourself to give the people or you know celebrate with the people on your team?

1:44:11Yes, I think as a company culture, like one of the bigger failings that we have is like taking a little time to like celebrate the wins. Like usually the win was delayed. And so now we're onto the next thing to keep to the schedule. And there's like no time to take a break and everybody's exhausted. You forget to order the pizza. Yeah, no one orders the pizza. There's no one around to order the pizza because everybody's doing something else. Uh, and yeah, so now, um, I've assigned, uh, I've assigned one of our employees to like, can we please do something nice for the company once a quarter? Cause we just seem to not ever do anything fun.

1:44:55At least plan to be fun at the beginning. Don't you feel it though? Don't you feel the fun? Oh, I feel it. Yeah. Final question. What's the hardest thing you've overcome? Oh man.

1:45:11god everything there's a lot of things that are hard so i i

1:45:18like early on raising money was brutal like just brutal um huge focus on like what we didn't have you know who on the team was missing uh so many conversations with like the no as the outcome uh you know since since 23 like in like in defense like raising money has obviously been much easier um that's when all the vc funds kind of rewrote that into their lp agreements right yeah Yeah, exactly. So they're like, and I mean, which they did because they want to invest in as a category. They thought that there was going to be big companies and they could make a lot of money. I mean, I think they're right.

1:46:10I don't think it's going to be like an unlimited number of companies, but I do think there's going to be some like real winners out of this batch. I think, you know, since then, so like that got easier, but, you know, you go from like from like a customer side there's like going from sibbers to much larger contracts there's a lot of more people that you have to convince to get to a yes um and that has been um frankly like it's been a very exceptionally painful process and this kind of goes back to where you know, I thought it would be a bit easier to get around that. And I was completely wrong.

1:46:58There's still just healthy fear of, you know, new entrants and venture backed startups. You know, technically, like we're doing much more complicated tests now. Some of those are, you know, they're not necessarily easy. And there's been some like some challenges there. that's the kind of challenge that i think is actually a lot of fun to work through though because it doesn't it involves something you can control maybe you don't understand or know what the problem is but like you know at least the path to tackle it how to how am i going to go about figuring it out sometimes like with these other problems like it's almost like a bureaucracy problem or like how do i convince that bureaucracy to trust me and like what am i doing wrong is it a little bit like you look out and it's just a bunch of fog and you don't really know even what the right person to go to right i mean like yeah or like happen you know some somebody is uh obviously not pleased with us and you don't even know who it is like um but there's clearly like you know you've upset somebody for some reason but so i like those kind of problems we don't fully control it like and like an example of like not being in control is we're trying to do increasingly more complex, longer range testing.

1:48:11And it's very difficult to, to get, um, to get range access, uh, for, for the types of testing that we're doing. Um, given that if you're not prioritized as like a national level priority, right? Like they're making the time in the room for somebody else. Um, now we have had like tremendous support, uh, recently from the government, but that was like a barrier that we had to go knock down. That was not easy. and there are still challenges with it in the sense that, you know, one of the things that like you go through the process and everybody has to do this, like if you're launching anything anywhere, is you've got to submit all your paperwork for all the safety documentation.

1:48:50Somebody assesses it, give it back to you. They really expect that your configuration is going to be static for that whole time that they're assessing it and that if that time frame is like a long time frame, but that's really not like what we're doing or how we work. and like so you're trying to have tighter iteration yeah they want to have tighter iterations things and i've discovered something is like could be made better but that means changing the configuration for like the next test and so that's like it's not like just a us challenge that is like a national level challenge of like how do we how do we maintain safety standards how do we make sure that we don't put you know public in harm's way but how do we not slowed down testing to only have a few tests of something new per year because that's not enough that's frankly not enough um and at least in hypersonics this is why um china has quite frankly come up and pass the u.s in terms of capability i mean it's not like they have smarter folks it's that they've made it so that they can go test constantly and like that process of testing is learning and so they're learning faster and it's paying off over like multiple decades um and we have to do that as well to get back because frankly when you're dealing with like something like really complex like hypersonic flow you you can model it you can do like numerical methods and you can model everything, but it's so complex that your model at best is probably incomplete.

1:50:28And secondly, it's only as good as like the parameters you feed it, which are probably wrong from an initial guess. And that leads to, and it's like can be highly nonlinear. So it leads to just like terrible answers that you can't trust. And the only way that you can get to an analytical model that you can trust is to go anchor it by actually doing the test. Now, whether that's a flight or spending time in a hypersonic a wind tunnel but you have to do the testing to actually improve the model before you get to the point where perhaps you can make a design change to not use the model or not use the testing like to use the model to do the the output of what you expect it's like a catch-22 if you can't do the thing until you've done the thing yes but of course you can't do the thing yeah yeah and it's difficult yeah um so i think like you know as we're as we're going forward like those are the challenges we're about to enter manufacturing hell that's gonna be awesome yeah i probably put like maybe i'll put in a dirt bike track because like yeah you need to like you need to be able to like uh Burn out the stress somehow.

1:51:37But I think like, you know, what's like really, I think, very positive like right now, like at this moment in time is aerospace is cool. Manufacturing is cool. Like I think people actually want to do these jobs. And there's some people that have been doing manufacturing the whole time. but I think there's like a whole new set of people that want to come in and and work on these challenges and you know put in put in the calories to do that fight because everything is painful like like just building like a large site the permitting and everything else it's like everything is hard nothing is easy you have to really want to do it it's just it's nothing is easy nothing is easy it truly is like i mean like you know we're doing like archaeological surveys and it's just like god help you they find like an endangered i forget what it was like there's some kind of endangered species yeah but it was more something it was like desert shrimp i like i'm not kidding i'm not kidding it's like desert shrimp but the desert shrimp like attracts some like endangered owl that eat the it let whatever it was it left me like just come again like say what and china we can't build here because of the what here you go to the hypersonics for china yeah and like so you have to like and i do think like it's really like those rules are in place for like good reason like we have like i'm a i'm a huge fan of being a good steward of the environment because i'm like i'm big into outdoors um and i want you know my kids and their grandkids and their grandkids grandkids to like be able to enjoy going like and outdoors um so i say that like joking like but it is important like how do we take care of things but how do we not stop progress doing it um but i think at least now like there's a whole like new kind of like generation of folks that want to like take that challenge on and go go build and that's freaking cool um like the winds with the wind is finally in your sails sort of situation yeah well just yeah i think building and looking forward is really like ascendancy for the country um and it's really cool that that's people think that's cool um and so you know like the whole like gundo bro you know kind of party bus movement which i was too old to be on a party bus um grandpa stays home but uh you know i driving his car driving his porsche at 120 well that would be illegal I wouldn't go that fast for sure um keep it up to 70 I uh you know I think though that like that belief of like you can go make change you can't go just you can just go do things and I think um you know like uh Jim right from Sin Cut Sin like hearing hearing his like he had some response uh to someone online after uh the interview the podcast that you did with him and it it was basically like it turns out you can just go do things um super freaking cool um you know it doesn't matter what you're building hypersonic missiles you know mail order parts like it's freaking cool um and i'm just like i'm like proud to be like a little bit part of that um and i think hopefully it sticks and like hopefully this country gets back to building um because we damn we used to be good at it and we we offshored a lot but we can we can get back to it because it's it's solvable at least in aerospace it's it's solvable but maybe not doing the same approach that got us to this problem but it is solvable.

1:55:55And like, I have faith, I have faith in that. Um, and quite frankly, like, yes, I do hope for Castilian success. Like, I mean, I'm obviously all in fully betting on that. Um, there's always an opportunity to be completely broke again, looking forward to that. Um, but even if we have success, you know, the thing that I think like would be great to see is if we are extremely good and we drive others to be extremely good too like capitalism capitalism works and it would be great to see some of the i'd say kind of incumbency which i think has suffered like some cultural rot it would be great to like see them kicking ass and taking names again like the way i thought about them when i was like 10 yeah um and i'd love to see them i'd love to see them get there i'd love to compete um because you know and i think like this new crop of new entrance and like defense tech i like for sure some of i'd say like the incumbents are going to die, but I think that some find their roots and become their best selves again and get back to kicking ass because that's what have made America great is quite frankly, like our military power since World War II kept the world incredibly safe and allowed for a lot of other amazing things to have happened that wouldn't have happened without that strength.

1:57:39And so for my kids especially, if they want to join the military, I'm fully supportive of that. But I'd love to give them a world where they don't have to do that unless they want to. And keep everybody safe. That's what I think we're building here. We're building deterrence.