US space innovation, defense tech challenges, and more with True Anomaly’s Even Rogers | E1982

0:00Really the innovation engine that exists between private capital allocators and government buyers is the source of US competitiveness in a lot of ways. Just the relationship between financial leverage and operational leverage that positive feedback loop can provide is pretty astounding. The source of that thesis as a credible thesis for venture investors to engage in started with Palantir and then really picked up a lot of momentum with companies like Andruil that showed that these are worthwhile investments to make. And as soon as you can make that argument that there is a financial return and that's a meaningful financial return with the venture scale, then a lot of investors come out of the woodworks.

0:41This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. dot tech domains don't miss our jam with jcal contest to apply and get more details go to jam with jcal dot tech brought to you by dot tech domains and dev squad dev squad helps startups design better products if you need ui and ux expertise and don't want to hire an entire design team head to dev squad dot com slash startups and book a call mention that you're coming from twist to get 10 % off.

1:30All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of fundraising go to AI. Obviously, you're seeing that everywhere. And of course, since SpaceX has become such a huge hit, we're seeing a ton of people investing in space-related startups in the venture community. Finally, in a multipolar world with advanced technology, dare I say, guerrilla tactics affecting the battlefield, we're seeing a lot of defense tech here in silicon valley evan rogers is the ceo and co-founder of true anomaly and he's joining us today on the podcast and he's working in all three welcome to the program evan thanks for having me so just briefly if you could who are you and what are you building so my name is evan rogers i'm the ceo and one of the co-founders of true anomaly and And Trudon Lee is a defense tech company focused on protecting and defending the space domain.

2:29So we build the technologies, the software and the hardware that's required the United States and its allies to build the defensive infrastructure and the space domain awareness infrastructure that's necessary to defend the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets that we've put in space over the last few decades. You're building defensive systems, I would say like Iron Dome, for space to protect our satellites from adversaries. Am I correct in my description there? Well, right now we're pretty focused on making sure we understand what's happening in the space domain. So no, we're not building active defense systems today.

3:04What we're focused on is really closing the knowledge gap that the United States has relative to adversaries like Russia and China. The number of assets on orbit have increased almost exponentially since 2015, a little bit before that. Russia and China are using the space domain in ways that they have never before. And they've studied the Western way of conflict and our dependence on space. And so they're incentivized to deploy their own capabilities to exploit the space domain, but also hold US and allied capabilities at risk at scale. And we really don't have a strong understanding as a nation of the kinds of technologies they're deploying and what risk and threat that poses to the U.S.

3:47So we need to understand that first. Got it. So this is a two phased approach is what I'm hearing. Step one, we need to know what the heck they're doing. And step two, eventually we're going to need, after we figure out what they're doing up there, our adversaries, how to defend against countermeasures. Do I have that correct? That's exactly right. Right. And I would actually add another phase to that, which is we need to be able to train our operators to orient themselves to the complexity of space conflict and defense, and then to be able to take action at scale. And then we need to be able to understand what our capabilities are relative to the adversary's capabilities.

4:25So these are processes that are mature in other domains, but we've never had a really real need for it in the space domain until Russia and China started weaponizing the domain. So it's really threefold. It's understand what's happening, build the capabilities necessary to defend infrastructure, and train to use those systems in a contested operating environment. All right. You've raised over$150 million. You just hit$100 million Series B, led by Riot Ventures. And so you are well funded to do this. The startup, though, is only a year old. You got about close to 100 people there, I understand?

5:00We're about two years old. So we started, first day of engineering was in June of 2022, and we've been 120 folks today. Yeah, and growing fast. Wow. So about two-year-old company, got 120 people, raised 150, over 150 million. Have you put any satellites in space or devices in space yet? And when does that happen? Yeah, we have. We just initiated our flight test campaign for our first set of space vehicles that we call Jackal. We can talk more about that later. That's a heck of a name. That's Jackal. That's right. You came up with that? Yeah, we did. I can't tell you the full reasons, but it comes from my military background and a couple of programs that I worked on.

5:41Oh. Yeah, so Jackal, we launched the first two Jackals in March and we're executing an iterative flight test campaign. So we're launching spacecraft, we're testing them, and then we're learning and iterating on their design so that we can maximize the performance over time. Great political thriller. Day of the Jackal. I'll just give it a shout out right there. This is before most people's time. All right. so that's the jackal i assume that's um figuring out what's going on up there let's pause for a second you in that third part of the three-step phase we need to train people up evan we heard trump talk about space force and he was going to uh you know start this i guess fifth branch of our military um is that who's going to coordinate all this and who you're going to work with as we you You know, as you said, the third part of this is to kind of train our people up, our soldiers.

6:33Are there going to be soldiers or are we just going to have people in front of, you know, like sort of drone style equipment flying it through space? What's this going to look like in the coming years? Yes, the Space Force is a really interesting branch of the service and it's pretty misunderstood. The Space Force actually really was initiated by Congressman Rogers in the Obama administration. And the service wouldn't exist certainly without sort of Trump's force of personality and executing, really implementing the plans to stand it up. But it really started in the Obama administration after pretty significant observations about Russian and Chinese counter space capability buildup.

7:16And the reason that a force like the Space Force is required is that protecting the domain and protecting the joint force from space-enabled attack requires a set of capabilities and a specialized set of skills that necessitates a force that lives and breathes that every single day. And so you really needed an organization that wasn't trying to battle other organizations internally for budget and to be able to have kind of chart its own destiny relative to the joint forces requirements. So the force is responsible for organizing, training, and equipping military forces so that they can provide these capabilities to the rest of the combatant commands who then provide these capabilities to the rest of the joint force in combat.

8:01Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt. And you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2. What is SOC 2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC 2 compliant. If you don't have your SOC 2 tight, your sales team can't close major deals. It's that simple. But thankfully, Vanta makes it really easy to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. Without Vanta, it takes three to five months. Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 % on compliance costs.

8:37And Vanta does more than just SOC 2. They also automate up to 90 % compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. So let's be candid here. uh have there been any military-like activities in space in the last year or two by our adversaries what's the latest reporting on that there's been a lot of reporting about this recently it's really picked up in the last three to four years as classification reform has allowed folks in positions of power in the pentagon but also the hill and the executive branch to kind of talk more openly about this, China and Russia have flat out begun weaponizing the space domain.

9:26And they've also built a set of capabilities that allow them to use the space domain to target terrestrial forces with missiles and electronic warfare systems that really hold human life at risk, particularly in the maritime and aerial domain. And so the body of intelligence, and all of this is open source and unclassified now, is really pointing to a pretty significant buildup of kinetic capabilities so satellites that are designed to attack other satellites with with kinetic means are those cool asats is that the category yeah that's right asats are a class of system that are designed to target satellites right but it also includes electronic warfare capabilities it just recently there's been some some reporting around the the massive amount of investment that china's really made in electronic warfare it's going to be very tough um to operate in the Indo-PACOM region in an EM-contested environment.

10:21And then I think what's hit the press really most recently is this plan for a Russian nuclear anti-satellite weapon. So a system that detonates a nuclear weapon on orbit and then dumps a bunch of charged particles into the ionosphere, which ends up having a cascading effect on other low earth orbit satellites. Whoa. So let's unpack that last one. it's a dirty bomb for space you get to orbit you blow this up it interferes with all the low earth orbit satellites that are out there in other words starlink etc yeah i wouldn't say it's a it's a dirty bomb that there the a dirty bomb has sort of a different engagement mechanism that requires it to be in the atmosphere but it's a small tactical nuclear weapon that's detonated um in the space domain and that energy ends up propagating through the electromagnetic field that surrounds the earth and that charges up other spacecraft and ultimately can affect electronics uh destructively not just sort of momentary disruption but can end the life of spacecraft that's right wow um and now um what weapons work in space we're talking about kinetic uh just things things that go boom uh things that blow up and then you have nuclear what what else is working in space we hear a lot about hypersonics you know things that fly very low but very fast off the surface of you know the land or the sea what what are the military uh paradigms in terms of weaponry in space what works what's going to be effective yeah so there's a couple of classifications of of weapons um and phenomenologies of weapons the first way to parse this is really to think about it in terms of space to ground weapons round to space weapons and space-to-space weapons.

12:09So in the domain and then crossing boundaries of domains. And there's analogies for this in other domains. You have air-to-ground weapons, you have air-to-air weapons, and surface-to-air weapons, right? So all the same sort of phenomenologies apply in the space domain. The next way to parse this is really destructive and non-destructive means, or reversible and non-reversible means. And there's a lot of different weapons that kind of apply across that spectrum. Everything from missiles that target satellites that are launched from the surface of the earth called direct descent ASATs or surface-to-orbit missiles.

12:40Those tend to be destructive or non-reversible. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have ground-based jammers, right? So just dishes that can pump out electromagnetic energy and disrupt the signals that are coming through the space environment or from the space environment. And any of those capabilities can be launched or leveraged from the surface of the earth to space in the space domain or from the space domain to the ground so there's a lot at stake here doesn't take a genius to figure out that the treaties that have been signed i think the the major one was that outer space treaty in 1967 that i researched a bit before coming on the program you know a bunch of people sign these things but uh it wouldn't be the first time that uh a dictatorship of authoritarian country signed a document and maybe didn't follow it to the letter of the law so we can assume some amount of these measures are already up in space, yeah?

13:38By some actors? Well, one of the common misconceptions of the Outer Space Treaty is actually that it doesn't govern or prevent the employment and deployment of conventional weapons in space. It only talks, it only speaks to nuclear weapons. You can't base nuclear weapons in space. Certainly if Russia executes what they might, that would be a violation of that treaty. However, the Outer Space Treaty allows for the deployment of missiles and electronic warfare systems, and directed energy systems in space got it so that's fair game which means it's up there and it's it's in all likelihood we have stuff up there and i'm sure they have stuff up there already you would agree with that general thesis russian china certainly do yeah that's right got it and if we were to look at different satellites would you describe these as fragile or resilient uh you know on the spectrum in terms of how easy they would be to knock out you know you have thousands of let's say starlings up there if somebody sends up you know some sort of device uh to destroy all of them or the majority of them would this be de minimis and easy for somebody like russia china or the u.s to do is it easy to go up there send a fleet of satellites and have them go find all the other satellites knock them off course and just essentially push them back down to earth in theory yes and no conventional space weapons you need to have some ability to track satellites in orbit and you need to generally have a space launch capability there's only a few countries that have the ability to do that right okay so first of all you have to be able to get stuff to space that's a limited cohort of people and it looks like the u.s has has you know run the run the table on that with spacex i guess in terms of carriage to space and then you have to get those weapons once you get the weapons up there you have to have the capability you have to be able to operate them that's right so you have to be able to send instructions to those satellites and then you have to be able to if you're employing a weapon you have to be able to to select a target out of the the many satellites that are in space and then you have to be able to do something send instructions to engage that target there's all sorts of complications to that and and challenges that the domain presents um clutter and vast distances and latency and the thermal environment, the vacuum environment can make all of that quite challenging.

16:00In general, the United States has used the space domain largely for collection of information about what's happening on the surface of the earth, either for intelligence purposes, intelligence purposes supporting the military, providing communications to the military, or sending information and signals back down to the surface of the earth. But that dependency has really created a vulnerability right and part of the vulnerability speaks to the first part of your question which is satellites are very sensitive they're not built for a contested environment they're not really warfighting systems they're not tanks they're not humvees they don't have they're floating computers right they're sensitive electronics yeah these are like if you had no shell around the innards of a humvee or tank like if it literally had no protection that's what you're putting up into space because every ounce every kilogram matters right it's expensive to put stuff up there so we put up raw naked equipment essentially that's right and there was no threat until really 2007 and even in 2007 the threats that were posed by china were were still in this kind of research and development science technology development type phase it only is until recently that we've hit that inflection point of growth of what are called again space weapons or in more polite company called counter space capabilities.

17:20So all of the infrastructure that was built and designed before space was really designated a contested environment, before the United States said, space is a warfighting domain. Offensive and defensive things happen there, and it's important that we protect them. All of the systems were basically left undefended, right? And none of the infrastructure to defend those systems, the supporting infrastructure, let alone the capabilities to actually pose an active defense or avoid a threat uh existed either okay so we're starting getting into like imagining star wars up there in space it's like the scene in return of the jedi when luke darth vader and the empire are like looking out from the death star at like this chaos occurring in space because what you just described to me as i think about it is quite just sensitive equipment and the current uh systems are just hit to kill right you just bump into these things you don't need to keep your offensive weapon you just smash into them it's like a kamikaze essentially that's but you do have to travel a large amount of distance to take one of these out so if you're going to take out a hundred satellites and you might have to send up 200 of these hit to kill type kamikaze i'll call them uh devices and then they have to travel some inordinate amount of distance which requires some amount of propulsion locking onto the target and then hitting it is this possible today to send up 200 hit to kill vehicles and wipe out an entire satellite array is that possible probable where do you put that the physics and the technology certainly allow that kind of deployment at scale and that's that is an engagement modality that i think we're concerned about from russia and china in particular but most of china's that's hit to hit to kill is one of them but it's certainly not one of the first and most dangerous courses of action that China could take against on-orbit infrastructure, against satellites.

19:19Really, it's going to start left of kinetics. What you're describing, what class of capabilities we call kinetics. Electronic warfare is one of the earliest threats. We've seen this already, even against commercial operators. I think this is an important part of the conversation too, Jason, is the people's republic of china and russia don't make a very clear distinction between u.s military or intelligence systems and commercial systems supporting the fight and what we saw in the russian-ukrainian conflict i think on day zero of the fight a cyber weapon was used to wipe out about 10 000 viasat terminals and and clear communications across all of europe it wasn't just in ukraine it wasn't just a bias that terminal supporting communications for the military in ukraine it actually had a much broader effect and that's an important aspect of space warfare is very difficult it can be very difficult to have your effects be localized and targeted right and not have a massive amount of collateral damage so nobody wants a fight that extends into space right it's actually quite dangerous you want to prevent that fight from happening in the first list what's the worst case scenario let's say that actor you know really uh dicey situation russia decides hey we're going for it we're going to do a dozen of these tactical nukes we're taking everything out and it's no surprise to me that they don't see a difference between the government and the private sector because it's the same thing in this country the private sector and the government you know tiktok is a rush is a is a chinese government asset a ccp asset as much as it's a publicly or will be a publicly traded asset so there is no line for them worst case scenario they go up there and they start wiping out swaths of stuff what happens here on earth do we lose our gps and it's a bummer because we can't use google maps uh do we lose large swaths of infrastructure and the ability to do zoom calls because of space uh you know internet connectivity or life continues on no problem or a plane's going to fall out of the sky what's that What's the doomsday scenario here?

21:22Yeah, the infrastructure that is at risk here, that is kind of most important to the contemporary way of life, are things like communications and GPS. And really, a lot of systems support all of that. And the timing signal from GPS is used in a variety of different industries. It is the standard for timing, for communications, for the internet, for banking, for a lot of electronic transactions, and for communications. So you lose that timing signal. You don't just lose position. So you can't just navigate, you know, to start difficulty navigating and finding Starbucks. It is also the degradation of that timing signal over time that will result in inability to do banking, inability to do communications will disrupt internet traffic, etc.

22:07So all navigation communications, you know, just become chaotic on planetor and we're all pulling out maps and trying to figure out what our bank balances are. It could get pretty hairy. It could get pretty ugly. Yeah. Founders, these jam sessions with JCal we've been doing are a huge success so far. We've seen so many great submissions. We picked two winners so far, and we interviewed them on the show, and we're still looking for three more amazing founders. Here's all you need. If you want to come on this program this week in startups and jam with JCal, where you pitch me your company and I give you a bunch of feedback.

22:43Just two qualifiers. We want you to have less than$2 million in funding, so we want it to be a new startup. you know, one that needs help. And we want you to have an awesome dot tech domain name. So head to jam with jcal.tech jam j a m with jcal.tech. It's so much fun. The winners come on the podcast. I have to tell you, this is the greatest editorial segment on the pod for me. I love doing it because you pitch me what you're working on. I give you some unfiltered feedback. We do it in real time. We ping pong back and forth. We pickleball. I ask you a question, you give me a response, you ask me another question.

23:12And you know what, we both get smarter and we understand your vision for your startup. And hey, it never hurts to get your company on the number one startup podcast in the world. And we're working with our friends at dot tech domains because it's super cool to have a dot tech rabbit dot tech, Aurora dot tech, one x dot tech, everybody's using them. Heck, I use it for founder Fridays dot tech. So here's your call to action. Tell me about your awesome dot tech domain and startup and apply for the jam session with jacal contest today at jam with jacal dot tech. We're picking those last three winners soon.

23:41All right, so let's let's talk about running a startup getting government contracts where are you at with that because you know it does seem like we are in a renaissance right now and that the united states has a unique infrastructure plus capitalistic advantage and i know there's a lot of uh you know trying to use a delicate word here uh there's a lot of hippie dippies who you know in silicon valley don't want to back the military or back you know weapon systems but the fact is some percentage 20 30 have chosen to do this over the last decade and now we're seeing the fruits of that labor how big is our advantage right now because venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are able to get stuff in space shout out to elon and spacex team um are we running the table on space or you know and is and is our china is there a podcast going on in china or a discussion going on in russia of oh my god the americans have run away with this i think there have been some really interesting um companies come out of china that are focused on space that are trying to keep uh prc's competitiveness with the united states particularly with respect to space launch because that really is the infrastructure that has to exist for a burgeoning space economy Really, the innovation engine that exists between private capital allocators and government buyers is the source of U.S.

25:11competitiveness in a lot of ways. Just the relationship between financial leverage and operational leverage that positive feedback loop can provide is pretty astounding. And Trunomi is one of several companies in this ecosystem, but really the source of that thesis as a credible thesis for venture investors to engage in started with Palantir and then really picked up a lot of momentum with companies like Andruil that showed that these are worthwhile investments to make. And as soon as you can make that argument that there is a financial return and that's a meaningful financial return with the venture scale, then a lot of investors come out of the woodworks.

25:50And what we're starting to see is a lot of interest in the defense space, not just from early stage venture investors, but from crossover investors. And that capacity for capital allocation is really what's required for long-term competitiveness and the viability of these companies. And that has been the inflection point in the last, I would say probably two to three years in particular, is the understanding by growth stage investors and crossover investors of the importance and viability of this kind of, not only this market, but this thesis. And we've certainly benefited from that. Although when we were fundraising, there were, when we fundraised, we've fundraised several times, obviously, as you know, it's very clear that only a few venture teams really have a strong thesis and many are trying to play catch up.

26:40I think at this point, here's a video that will play of the Jackal deployment. This is your Jackal X one hour, one and two being deployed. i'm assuming you went up with spacex or was it another uh that's right that's the transporter 10 uh falcon 9 upper stage right there there goes jackal 2 and uh what does that cost to make a jackal 2 what did it cost you to get that first one out there oh one and oh two cost yeah less than five million a piece less than five million a piece when you make a hundred of these or you get to you know jackal 100 what's the cost going to be on these i think we can get the cost down between one and two million got it and these are studying what's going on in space these aren't offensive weapons they're not defensive weapons these are your study try to figure out what's going on in space correct yeah the way to think about jackal is that it's really a platform for a variety of different mission sets what it's really good at and what we designed it for is to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations against very agile objects and rendezvous and proximity operations isn't new we've been doing it since the gemini program it's how we we demonstrated that we could do um uh docking post a lunar mission um but also post a saturn 5 launch it's what happens every single time a dragon spacecraft docks at the international space station but it has some really important military applications and the gap has been to be able to do rendezvous and proximity operations to take a picture of an object that is actively trying to prevent you from doing that and to do that with a low cost system is very very difficult that's really the breakthrough that we've achieved with jackal okay so these are recognizance droids that you're sending out into the universe to go back to star wars like when they sent them to haw to go find the rebellion you're sending these things out they can i assume quickly get to a location in space figure out what's going on over there take a couple of pictures this is eyes in the sky right this is like a drone for a bunch of uh green berets you know navy seals pick your elite force this is their eyes in the skies your eyes in the skies now to figure out what's going on if you see if the military see something odd up there they can send you the jackal and go take a peek that's exactly right and they're inexpensive enough that the dod can buy dozens or hundreds of them instead of just buying one or two all right so you've made the probe droid the next piece is hey this thing is going to need some countermeasures i would assume because once uh bad guys see that you got the jackal out there with eyes on them they're going to want to take the jackal out so what are you thinking in terms of countermeasures or how to protect these assets when they're up there or do you just think of them as hey they're probe droids you want to knock them out have at it we got two or three hundred of them up here we'll send another one there's three more coming to your location i would say they probably look a little bit more like tie fighters they're really designed to be a treatable so certainly we can evade an adversary or we'll we will demonstrate that uh over the next year in particular um but warfare is worth the one of the dominant trends in warfare is moving towards low cost heterogeneous or dislike systems and what we're trying to achieve with jackal is the ability to maneuver and operate without regret, which means if I lose one of these, either because of some system failure or because of adversary action, it doesn't affect my overall ability to accomplish my mission.

30:17And so I think the more cost-effective approach is actually just to drive the cost, the per unit cost down as low as possible without putting a bunch of defensive capabilities on board that might increase the cost significantly and then cause regret if you do lose it. But we'll see i mean we'll we'll we'll conduct those studies over the next uh over the next year here and reminds me of like a swarm right you can swarm these things and yeah you have at it you want to take a couple out you know it's it's better we put an incremental 10 more of these up there and you're going to be have a heck of a time getting them all out of the sky than us putting you know three times the armament on it or countermeasures on it yeah yeah that's exactly Right.

31:00And by building in that way, you have the ability to iterate very quickly. So you're not, you don't have the capital requirement to be able to iterate a very, very large system that's very, very expensive. If you have low cost systems, and you're using commercial off the shelf components and focusing on hardening the systems that really matter, like avionics, that means that you can, the pace of your iteration is economically viable. And it also allows you to set the pace for iterating vis-a-vis another another uh an adversary right so or we should expect our adversaries to change the way they operate in the environment the kinds of systems that they're building and we want to at the very least keep pace with that if not accelerate past it so one of the things uh palmer lucky a friend of the pod and other folks have talked about a bunch is cost plus uh the government does some sort of contract you do an overrun you take more time you race up the price they're going to give you plus whatever i don't know if it's 10 or 20 on average whatever you do and that's kind of the counter of everything we do in silicon valley or in just capitalism in general if you can make the car the phone whatever it is the the monitor the laptop cheaper that's what you want to do you want to drive the cost down while increasing the feature set and and the capabilities of the device cost plus kind of goes wise in the face of that so what's happening in the industry in private discussions between the government and this new cohort of companies and drill and yours and spacex about this weird non-capitalistic bizarre pricing schema it doesn't make sense to anybody who's in capitalism to do cost plus it's just like it feels like a soviet communist approach to you know building products and companies it's very inefficient it's an important approach it's a tool like any other you actually do want that type of approach if you're building one-off very very exquisite systems where you have uncertainty about um the when you're trying to do something very very different right um you have to you have some new set of technologies to to develop that that have never been built before but it's inefficient in a world in which most electronic components autonomy and software is relatively commodified and you can generate a lot of capability with what already exists.

33:26And so that lends itself to firm fixed price contracts, where you can actually establish a viable margin that allows you to have the capital necessary to invest as a company to invest in the next set of products. I think the DoD is really starting to understand that at the end of the day, the way that they choose to transact with companies like True Anomaly, Anderil, and others is the primary driver of innovation. and the capacity to innovate i mean in their minds if there's enough companies out there competing for the same dollars what difference does it make if you get your five million dollar satellite to two million and you have an 80 margin on it better for the government than it's staying a five million and you having a 20 margin on it just makes more sense they can buy two or three times as many of these uh probe droids you're making huh that's right even more importantly that profit will drive the next generation of capabilities it will drive investment in competitive systems have you started and at what point is a company like yours go from using venture dollars to make very unique products in the world to looking at the needs of the government and maybe doing an rfp with them or are you saying hey look we made something here we think you're going to love it and you pull the tony stark you know sheet off of the beautiful jackal and say hey look at this might i interest you in a couple hundred of these how is it working now do they tell you they want a faster horse or do you come to them with a car it's both okay it's actually both yeah and that that tends to be very productive and so what we designed and build jackal both jackal and mosaic the operating system that both flies jackal but also does command and control for other systems we looked across the operational problems that the space force and intelligence community would have for space security and space domain awareness and training we said what are the platforms that are going to enable the dood to solve those problems as quickly as possible and where are we going to be able to make the biggest biggest difference and biggest technological uh intervention and and that ultimately is is where jackal and mosaic came from it's a sort of venn diagram of operational requirements and technical competence It's a true anomaly.

35:43And so as we designed and built those, we involved a couple of program offices in that process and the operational community and got their feedback early on in the design process, even informally, that allowed us to prioritize certain features or capabilities over others. And so when the RFPs eventually do come out, we've ideally built a system that's well suited and very competitive for that RFP. Now, we don't have the capacity to do that for every program um so we do we do make some adjustments to the jackal and the mosaic baseline design to meet emerging requirements that maybe we weren't involved in um in helping shape or or that uh are unknown broadly unknown to industry until they come out hey startups does your product need a facelift well a lot of companies get up and running quickly and that's part of the idea here in silicon valley and in startup land but hey the design suffers maybe you got flawed UI, the UX decisions were made in a rush.

36:42And that can be the difference between product market fit and not getting product market fit or weak product market fit, medium product market fit, or strong product market fit. Well, here's the good news. DevSquad's asynchronous design squad is here to help you. Our long-term partner, DevSquad, built this service specifically for startups like ours. That means you don't have to worry about winging it yourself and you don't have to buy a subscription to an unlimited design service and have them under deliver. No, thanks to DevSquad, you can buy hours from expert designers who will handle everything for you from UX audits to very sophisticated UI design.

37:20And the result is going to be an improved user experience and ultimately happier customers and a more successful business. So if you need to map your user flows, maybe you need to craft some interactive prototypes, or maybe you need to conduct a rigorous usability test dev squad has you covered so if you are ready to transform your startups ui without the painful overhead of having to hire an in-house design team just head to dev squad.com slash startups and book a call that's right dev squad.com slash startups mention you heard about the service here on this week in startups you get 10 off what are the rules around you selling this technology to other countries how does that work and are your customers israel france germany and other india other democracies in the world and how does all that work yeah it's it's very important that we sell our capabilities internationally one of the most important aspects of u.s power projection is we tend to do that with our allies and interoperable weapons systems underpin that.

38:27And so if we're all, if we can't, if our fighters can't talk to each other and we don't have the same communication standards and infrastructure, it can actually create friction in operations that ends up putting the operation at risk. So having Jackal like the F-35, like the F-22, not so much the F-22, the F-35, F-18, et cetera, that have been part of FMS programs more broadly to our allies ends up creating the ability to project power more efficiently and safely and we see this with nato if you join nato you buy the nato collection of standardized products so if nato troops have a tank from germany or france or the u.s they're going to be using the same treads the same equipment generally speaking it makes for a more efficient uh approach there have you started to talk to other governments yet or you just have the u.s as uh you know the customer for the first couple years we have had some really conversations but the focus has largely been on the united states department defense you spent a lot of time in uh our um you were in the air force i believe that's right yeah and you spent a decade or so uh working uh there thank you for your service um there's a lot of talk of the military industrial complex hey are we starting wars in order to move product and here we have capitalism coming in and again back to iron man and tony stark you know the arc there is like are we you know propagating war because we make all these great tools to be in war or are we just trying to take a defensive stance and you know there's been a lot of criticism of uh the ukraine and russia and us arming the world you've been inside um and now you're on the capitalist side When you were inside, you were the customer.

40:14Now you're the seller of these technologies. What do we misunderstand and what do we get right about the military-industrial complex and the concerns we should have about its impact on how we decide to go to war, if we should be going to war, or is this all a hallucination and a conspiracy theory? well everything is just hallucination right yeah apparently at this point it is we're all in a simulation let's just call it what it is that's it you're just playing the video you're just playing the video game at the highest level right now it's like there's a side quest you can go to space i'm just a brain in a vat i think that's clear absolutely yes i think it's deeply naive to believe that conflict is not a part of human existence and the united states is in obviously a privileged global position for a lot of, I think, very good reasons, but also we've had a complicated, in some ways, very dark history.

41:11But I think it's very clear that it is not a rational view to believe that the United States should not have a meaningful, if not dominant position on the geopolitical stage. And in order to do that, you have to have the capability to defend yourself and project power, use all of the instruments of power, not just the military instrument of power. And that requires a very robust defense industrial base that rapidly innovates. And if we don't do it, our adversaries will do it. And they've demonstrated an ability to do that at a scale that puts the United States at risk. The reason that I left the military to start True and Only with my co-founders is that the defense industrial base did not appear to have have the capacity to meet the demands of a contested space environment.

42:01We had just Russia and China had just outpaced the way that we were buying capabilities, the way that we were testing capabilities, and even just the ideas, the baseline ideas that were being considered for the defense of that on-orbit infrastructure. They just were not good ideas and or they were incomplete or they didn't scale. And so if you believe in global competition as a real dynamic of human politics, then you're incentivized, if not responsible for generating that competitiveness and contributing it so that we can maintain our way of life. until dictators uh are gone and stop invading other countries probably a good idea for the free countries to have some weapons available when they decide we're going to take our neighbor uh country sovereignty not a bad idea yeah there are bad people in the world yeah i shocking uh evil exists i mean i don't know the naivete that some people have that they just think evil people don't exist like just watch a serial killer documentary and imagine that person is the president of their country the dictator of their country like evil mindset plus power plus resources not a good not a good situation um how much of the military industrial complexes and and what's going on in your industry is now taiwan and the china conflict the keystone around it seems like this discussion about protecting taiwan and how an invasion might occur has taken you know everybody's uh attention and we're watching the build-up of a lot of small ships you know they don't have the the tonnage uh china that maybe the the west has as a group they got a lot of small ships and they seem like they really are starting to understand what we talked about earlier you you know, hey, here's a fleet of drones.

44:01Here's what it's going to do to an aircraft carrier. You know, here's hypersonics, et cetera. So how much of the industry is now indexing around the potential of that conflict? And is that conflict in your mind inevitable? That is the generation defining conflict or age defining conflict. No question. The objective here is to avoid that conflict is to deter, right? And the United States builds systems for deterrence and effectiveness in combat. right we do we do there's types of operations that are purely to demonstrate combat power freedom of navigation operations etc so that's the important thing is nobody wants to go nobody reasonable wants to go to war with an adversary like the people's republic of china the second thing that's important here is that the people's republic of china has has created a very dangerous arsenal of conventional weapons.