Big Aerospace, Countering Drones with EMP, and Spartan Radar with Nathan Mintz

Callye Keen engages with tech entrepreneur Nathan Mintz, known for his excellent ability to attract and develop talent. A discussion on successful team building, understanding one's strengths and weaknesses, and identifying individuals with a shared vision is explored. Mintz's journey from aerospace to start-ups, and even his political run, serves as a backdrop for this deep dive into leadership dynamics.

Topic Highlights:

00:00 - Radar Innovations: Insights from Spartan
Nathan Mintz discusses the founding of Spartan, its products, and the unique value proposition they bring to the automotive sector.

03:15 - Technological Evolution: From Military to Civilian Use
Mintz talks about the challenges and opportunities of transitioning technologies from the defense sector to civilian uses, such as automated vehicles.

06:42 - Navigating a Start-Up: Spartan’s Growth Strategy
Mintz discusses Spartan's approach to developing its product, growing the team, and the key elements to their success.

09:30 - Competition and Innovation: Radar Technology's Future
The discussion touches on how competition fuels innovation in the radar technology industry. A competitive landscape can stimulate innovation, pushing companies to continually evolve their products. In a field that is advancing rapidly, staying ahead necessitates constant exploration of new possibilities.

15:04 - AI and Radar: Unlocking New Potential
Mintz provides insights on the use of AI and machine learning in radar systems and its potential to revolutionize the field.

19:17 - Attracting Top Talent: Transition at Spartan
Nathan Mintz details his decision to step back from the operational role at Spartan, making way for Dr. Matt Markle. He underlines the importance of understanding one's role in the company and picking the right successor for each stage of development.

20:00 - Insightful Leadership: Choosing The Right Role
Mintz talks about the self-awareness and humility required in leadership roles. He describes his aspiration to always be the 'dumbest person in the room,' illustrating the significance of surrounding oneself with talented individuals.

23:02 - The Start-up Experience: Finding the Right Fit
According to Mintz, individuals who are content with monotony may struggle in the chaos and unstructured environment of a start-up. He stresses the importance of the pioneering spirit and curiosity in thriving amidst the uncertainties of a start-up.

24:15 - The Political Drive: An Engineer in the Assembly
Mintz’s political aspirations show a through-line of dissatisfaction and a desire to change things for the better. His experiences, including running for state assembly and co-founding the non-profit, California Common Sense, are highlighted.

26:05 - Entrepreneurship: Overcoming Self-Doubt
Mintz encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to take the first step towards their entrepreneurial journey, emphasizing that the fear of not realizing one's full potential should never hold one back.

Callye Keen - Kform
https://kform.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/callyekeen/
https://youtube.com/@kforminc 
https://twitter.com/CallyeKeen

Nathan Mintz
https://spartanradar.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmintz/
https://twitter.com/mintz4assembly 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

They offered us $3 million on the spot to basically start a company. And it goes, excuse me, and he says yeah, you heard me. Go call Judy it's my wife and tell her that you're quitting your job and you're going to be CEO of the startup.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to the startup defense Today. I have Nathan Mince. You have an incredible background, so I don't want to ruin this, but can you tell us what your story is and what are you really passionate about right now?

Speaker 1: 0:24

You know I've spent about 20 years in aerospace and defense and electronics. I have a particular spell on time and radar and electronic warfare. After about 13, 14 years at Raytheon and Boeing, I finally answered some of the calls from some of the friends of mine in Silicon Valley who said hey, when are you going to start a defense company? We want to throw money at it and form a company called Epirus, which is now a defense unicorn. They do high power microwave. They kill drones. We did that for a couple of years it was founding CEOs and then handed off the reins to a professional operator and started another company called Spartan, which most of the time we talk about dual use technologies from a commercial sector to defense and aerospace. This was actually the opposite, where we were taking advanced signal processing techniques and ways of building and operating sensors that were dominant in defense and trying to transition them over to commercial applications for automotive radar. That's what Spartan's about. I've just recently handed the reins of that one off as well.

Speaker 2: 1:24

I do want to get into the tech of Spartan because it is interesting bringing radar where normally we'd see LiDAR applications, so the ruggedness and flexibility of radar. You somehow made that palatable to the commercial market. So that's an interesting conversation. But more broadly, I'd like to explore and I have so many questions about this, because I think that there are thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that are in your position, where you are at Raytheon or at the Primes, and they're thinking man, I'd like to go start a business.

Speaker 2: 1:59

I've seen the gaps that are in the market that aren't really something that Boeing wants to pursue, maybe because the TAM is not large enough or that there's too much of a risk profile to pursue that opportunity or that technology. But you, as this specialist, this expert, you get the itch right, you get the entrepreneur itch, the startup itch, and you want to jump over and create something from nothing. So can you tell me a little bit about that story? One from, yeah, why did you do it? Did you see this gap and pursue it? But also just from the human aspect, is, what did that mental process look like of I'm going to take this entrepreneur leap?

Speaker 1: 2:40

I had been in my job at Boeing for about five years and I kind of had worked myself into an ideal position. I was almost an internal consultant. I would go around and look at people's various proposals and win themes and strategies and tell them what the competition was going to do and what they were doing wrong. I had some friends from college that had gone into venture capital and one day one of them, joan, so called me up and said hey, we just had a partner join who's interested in sorry defense vertical. Do have any ideas. And it just happened to be that that morning was when sort of one of the most infamous drone-related disasters I wouldn't say disasters, but kind of shutdowns happened in the Gatwick Airport In London. It was shut down for 25 hours by a drone that nobody could figure out if it was even there or not.

Speaker 1: 3:23

I'd worked a lot on air to air service to air various systems in a EW and weapons and context, and I'm like, well, why is this so hard? Other than it's low, slow and small, what's so hard about finding it? And so I went and did a, looked up, a survey and there were 200 products out there on the market that did counter UAS and 90% of them were some jamber that somebody built in their garage and they all seemed to suck and none of them were very effective against most things. They were sort of point solutions. But there was one solution that kind of stood out to me and it was a family of EMP systems that were being built by Naval Service Warfare, sarac-dalgren, et cetera. They took a very high-power microwave beam, illuminated the drone, was it, and then, you know, overwhelmed, the electronics and the drone would cease operating and die respectively. I go, well, that's cool, but these systems are all $25 million and they, you know, they're the size of my house. Like, they're not very practical, or certainly not for tactical applications. I go do a little bit of research on what kind of field strengths are required and I had kind of a background in EMI, empc a little bit from my previous work and looked at what field strengths would probably be required and I said, okay, well, to keep myself from getting in trouble here, I would need to go basically test empirically what values of energy are going to cause the drones to die. So, hooked up with another co-founder of mine Beaumar Bea was also an expert in electric car warfare and I brought up Ted the dilemma and he said, yeah, I kind of had some of the same thoughts myself.

Speaker 1: 4:53

It dawned on us that with gallium nitride shifts, which were rising in increasing power density, there may be an opportunity here to do this with solid state systems. It could be a lot cheaper. So we go to Walmart, we bought like five different types of drones. We take the rotors off of them and, just like, took a voltage source and went on each chip and saw when it fried, and then, based on that, we were able to back into these kind of power levels will cause the drones to cease operating or disrupt their operation. We were able to back into what it was going to take, power wise, to do it From there. We were able to extrapolate to you know, this is what the system would look like, and turned out that it was something that was closeable, fairly closeable, with sort of maybe next generation parts.

Speaker 1: 5:36

And so I flew up to San Francisco with that, met with Joe at his office and they offered us $3 million on the spot to basically start a company. And it goes, excuse me, and he says yeah, you've heard me. Go call Judy it's my wife and tell her that you're quitting your job and you're going to be CEO of the startup. You kind of look back and say, well, god puts you in certain places for a reason. And sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith and say, well, no matter what happens, this will be a hell of a ride. So let me give it a try.

Speaker 1: 6:02

And so did that. Three months later we had the company put together, quit our jobs at Boeing and Raytheon and started off on three rented desks and El Segundo. From there, you know scale the company to where it is today. I got off the boat somewhere between about halfway between series A and series B after we'd done about three iterations of a prototype and all the initial kind of science to prove that neurobandy and P would work. It's operated pretty well since I left, when it was about 40 people, now it's about 180 people. Massive contracts I think RB Richto gave them a 66 million dollar contract I think that's publicly known and a number of darker contracts and stuff as well. So very compelling technology and really something that can change the whole paradigm.

Speaker 2: 6:43

What's great about this story is you see the company now and, like you mentioned, it's a unicorn. The technology was absorbed or brought on contract with Northrop. I've seen it in every magazine and trade that I subscribe to. I saw the company at Softweek, so it's tempting to see it now. But I was listening to Joe Lonsdale's podcast and you're talking about building this technology in a co-working space and people being a little confused why there's a defense tech startup. You know where everyone shares desks and how. You know that is To your point. You went to the store and bought off-the-shelf drones and then took them apart and started testing. It wasn't at national labs or using a multi-million dollar facility. You didn't start at this place and I think that's beguiling for a lot of people. They see where the company was instead of how they can get there themselves. So interesting that you had that approach even coming out of Boeing and Raytheon.

Speaker 1: 7:49

So I worked a lot of early programs when I was at Boeing and Raytheon and kind of like sheet of paper stuff, and what the mindset you have to get used to is what is the absolute minimum I need to do to prove the wow factor of this technology or this proposal, the critical technology elements. I think that, along with a little bit of encouragement at one point I did walk into the APC with a five-year plan for five years we can have this and they said you don't have five years, you have five months. What can you do? Just tell me, and being forced to kind of change your mindset like that to a minimum, viable, product, agile mindset where you're constantly iterating what's the next thing I can prove it allows you to burn down a lot of risk a lot faster. I think that's completely different from the traditional waterfall approach, which is really meant for mature systems, and I think that's where a lot of people get hung up is that. I mean, don't get me wrong I think it has its uses for certain things, and by that I'm talking about the systems engineering B, the waterfall approach to engineering. I think that a lot of people get stuck in thinking that that's how you do early development innovation? You don't.

Speaker 1: 8:54

I was a requirements lead on a DARPA program where we had 5,000 requirements and it was the same boring stuff over and over, repeat over and over again. But the salient technology that was there was okay, make the lightest radar that you possibly can that can operate at high altitude. This was called the ISIS program. Something I worked on, it Raytheon early in my career. Integrated sensor is structure. You know, having that mindset of how do I get down to just the essence of the problem and try and prove that as quickly as possible and then iterate, we took that to heart and so we said, okay, well, let's start with what can we do on a tabletop to prove that this works? What can we do at 30 feet, like in a slightly free fly test? And we said, okay, well, what's the soonest? We can shoot a drone out of the air. It doesn't have to be at 1,000 feet, it doesn't have to be at long distances, just prove that, like you know, it can be hovering there in the air and you're shooting it down under something close to real-world conditions, and then you can scale from there. And we were able to do that about six to nine months, depending on where I start the clock, about six months actually. From there, it was okay. Well, now how do we scale it? How do we? We did this at you know this many feet. How do we do this at 90 feet? How do we do this at you know 900 feet? Yada, yada, yada. Right and I'm intentionally being obtuse with the numbers because they get a little sensitive it's proven that you can scale the concept over time.

Speaker 1: 10:11

That's something that Silicon Valley has been able to do taking minimum viable products, turning them into minimum marketable products and then turning them into developed products that we use every day through agile development, and that's that's an area where I think aerospace and defense can learn Companies like SpaceX. They do it every day. I think it's just embracing that same mentality and not being afraid to fail. I think the big companies, even if they say they embrace people taking risks and failures, they really don't. There's asymmetric benefit at the big companies to if you lose them $50 million on a boondoggle, you all will certainly will get fired, but if you use it to create a new technology or something you know, maybe you get a pat on the head. I know a lot of engineering fellows and stuff that made their careers out in crazy ideas. It ties. It can feel that way, feel a little stifling.

Speaker 2: 11:00

There's a lot of talk about dual use innovation, so taking things from commercial and we talk about it on the show pretty frequently taking something that's proven commercially and then bringing it over to DoD. What your explanation made me think of is the concept of dual use frameworks. So what is the commercial world doing? How do they get talent? How do they approach clean sheet design? How do they go and find customers or funding? What are they doing that's enabling innovation to happen in months, not years, and then transporting that over into the defense industry?

Speaker 1: 11:34

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:34

So I think one thing that you see in defense that often times, or that you see in commercial that you don't see in defense, rather, is this idea of cross domain architectures and product line architectures and having just sort of one product that you're constantly iterating and instantiating on and like you see it with something like an iPhone, right where there's this common design framework and they swap out the heads so that you can get a 3D camera or a LiDAR or more memory or less memory, and they're sort of extensible and they embody a lot of quality attributes and allow that actually even on the hardware side, is inspired from software. There's something called the Software Engineering Institute that has taught a lot of these principles for a while. I think like getting into the idea that a product can't be all things at all time and satisfy everyone's needs, but you can make something that's focused to pretty well serve the needs of most of the customers and then tailor it a little bit to really well to serve the needs of lots of customers specifically. And like yeah, you look at how they build cars, one thing that we've kind of seen the last few years. Toyota and others do this well, whether it's a Camry or a 4Wetter. They're almost built on almost entirely the same drivetrain. It's just swap in this engine, swap out that engine, swap in this transmission, this infotainment system, do these software options? And Tesla kind of epitomizes that where literally it's almost the same car no matter what you buy, and they just turn on and off the features with software and it's just, it's a software defined vehicle, and I think defense could learn a lot from that.

Speaker 1: 13:10

There were some attempts to do that with things like the F35. That didn't quite work out so well and part of it was that their risk management framework didn't allow much wiggle room. And so I have one friend who worked early on in the F35 program. He tells the story of being walked into a conference room that seemed like it was half a football field long and from wall to wall it's Gantt charts and they literally have a million unique IDs of tasks in there and they're saying they can predict if this task here task 1,025, moves by three days, what it's going to do the schedule on the other side and it's like yeah, right, no, you can't right, like it's an exercise in absurdity and it kind of brings to mind a quote from Juan Luis Borges about when the cartographers make the map so detailed that it starts to cover the terrain that it was meant to depict.

Speaker 1: 14:03

And that's a common problem that we see in defense is that they say, well, the way that we're going to overcome risk is by analyzing the snot out of it, rather than saying, well, we're going to quickly look at what we think our biggest risks are and try and aggressively burn those down as quickly as possible and then iterate.

Speaker 1: 14:20

So that's one difference. The other difference you've seen commercial is, frankly, they iterate a lot more. It's much easier when a new iPhone comes out every two years versus what a new fighter check comes out every 40 years. Right, they just get more thoughts on goal and so they get better at it. And so I think finding ways to make defense programs match those timelines better and being able to embrace new technologies and not have everything caught up in a too big to fail major defense acquisition program where, if a new disruptive technology comes along, you know you're not going to have the hobgoblins coming out of the woodwork to try and kill it because they need to preserve the trillion dollar program they've already thrown money at forever. I think that's the solution.

Speaker 2: 15:02

I'd love to see that develop in just the past few years really with the DIU and then of course, like halfworks and softworks and really pushing a culture of innovation starting to really blossom inside of DoD. I'm very hopeful, I'm very optimistic of where that's going. But it's nice to see you had the success and then you moved over to Spartan.

Speaker 1: 15:26

Can you tell me a little bit about that story, that transition I'd really like to get into Spartan we just had a kid, so I was alone a lot and I was working with a group of other entrepreneurs trying to get a venture studio started called the Dangerous Venture Studio, and we had a few kind of crazy ideas but nothing was really kind of catching fire. Other than you know we're getting some decent consulting jobs out of it, and I had an old mentor of mine who had stayed in touch with Dr Theodosso Botziglu, one of the foremost experts in an area of signal processing called Super Resolution Techniques, and calls me out and says so, Nathan, I've been doing some consulting work since I retired from Raytheon for some automotive radar companies and I think I have a way to build a automotive radar that has five times the resolution with the core of the parts. And I wasn't exactly a subject matter expert in automotive electronics, but what I do know is that when you're building millions of cars, if you can reduce the COGS cost of a radar significantly through software, that's going to be very attractive. And so I started diving into the space and trying to figure out how real his idea is, and it turned out that you know first off radars in ubiquitous to cars, or you know, at least on the high end models, at least the last 10 years, and really starting to take off in the next, in the last five years, as they move into what's called level two and level three, atommace.

Speaker 1: 16:45

So you're also driving automated emergency braking, line keeping assistance, automated driving assistance systems or ADAS systems but what I noticed is that these radars were very much treated as single function devices. You turn them on, they do one thing all the time. If you need them to do something else, it's literally pop the cover and change a jumper, because the intention is to put that radar in a different part of the car or something To the extent where you'd even see like them using the exact same radar, but it just had a different jumper in a different place, right. So it had a different software load that it was automatically loaded with. And we said, well, if you could use what's called electronic phobiation, this idea that the radar could look at different rates in different places based on what's seen dynamically in the scene, that augments its capability. And then you add the super resolution features that we were talking about with the technology that the OGINUS had developed, and suddenly you have radars that they may not be able to get the same resolution as the LiDAR, but a LiDAR costs several thousand dollars. Radars cost 50 to 100 dollars. You can make commercial radar that could do almost as good as LiDAR, which means for 90% of applications you don't need.

Speaker 1: 17:54

What was interesting about Spartan is it was a swords to plowsher's kind of story, in the sense that we're taking these design philosophies and kind of signal processing that was really developed in defense and adapting it for commercial applications. And so I used to joke I build stuff that I hope never gets used missiles, things like that to kind of defend the country. It's the whole CV's Pachampar balum, if you wish for peace or care for war thing. But with Spartan we're expecting what we use to be used every day to save lives. We've developed a radar based on some of that software called Hoplow that we sell for commercial vehicle fleets.

Speaker 1: 18:25

One kind of disturbing fact something like two people are killed every week in this country by trash trucks from them driving through, you know, barreling through alleyways and coming around blind quarters and stuff. It's a very large, cumbersome vehicle and so safety systems are critical to bringing that count down, because the driver simply cannot see everything around him. And if you install cameras, you know the cameras don't really give you alarms. They're not sufficient. So we have our commercial vehicle radar that we use and like 30 pilot customers or something that are out with that, and it's actually available for sale. Today we're doing small scale sales to some fleets. We have our software. We're partnered with a number of different tier one providers in our softwares and meal vehicles being demonstrated OEMs today. So we've managed to really push forward with some pretty remarkable technology very quickly and getting it out there where it can save lives.

Speaker 2: 19:17

I've listened to a number of interviews that you've been on, and our current theme was your ability to attract talent and develop talent, and that's resulted recently in you stepping away from Spartan. Is that correct?

Speaker 1: 19:31

So about three months ago I brought on a friend of mine, dr Matt Markle, as president of the company. He's formerly the head of radar Waymo and was by side of radar at Ghost Autonomy, but before that he was a principal fellow at Raytheon, which there's only like 40 of them in the company, which is when I worked with him. Matt's incredibly talented. He actually wrote a textbook on the space and I think one of the things that happens when you're a founder more than once is that you start to separate. I think there's a real tendency the first time you're shoved into a leadership role to somehow say I am a CEO, this is what I do, rather than I'm the founder of the company and that's you know, and I'm the owner of the company to some extent, and that's much more important than what title I happen to have on it and what I'm doing on a daily basis. So I believe very much in finding the right person to do the job at a particular stage, and for the stage that Spartan was entering in, where we're trying to scale production to thousands of radars and you'll get out to fleets of millions with our software, matt was the perfect fit for that and the timing just worked out well. So I said the best thing to do here is to put him in the seat. We'll try it out for a few months and make sure he's a fit. He's been doing wonderfully, made the decision that you know. Hey, it's time for me to step back. I'm still chairman of the board, I'm still involved strategically, but, you know, let him really take the reins of operating the company and I've been very impressed with the results that he's been able to do.

Speaker 1: 21:05

I think everybody's dream is to sort of be able to pick your own successor and have them kind of share your mindset and vision. And that's exactly what it is. I know really treat these companies like it's one of my children. It's a vehicle for bringing a technology into the world that can make the shareholders excellent returns and create a great culture and team that can continue to innovate and push the envelope. It's not mine, it's you know. We all work for the company, right? We don't. I don't kind of see myself as the company is me and I am the company. It's not my mindset at all.

Speaker 2: 21:39

Yeah, and I think that's because for a lot of founders this is the dream. They just have a very difficult time even finding a co-founder or scaling that initial team to get Rockstar to join and help and mature and idea or mature their, say, their sales strategy or their operations, and you've continued to be able to do that, you know, on a world class level. So just interesting to see.

Speaker 1: 22:06

Yeah, I mean I think with me, like the co-founders and all that I mean I, I always want to be the dumbest person in the room, kind of how I look at it, which means I need to have you have to have the ability to have intense self awareness about your strengths and weaknesses, and I'm pretty good about figuring out who needs to be on the bus and what roles, and then finding them a seat. The joke is that the difference between an introvert engineer and an extrovert engineer is the extrovert engineer looks at your shoes when he's talking to you. Yes, I was always, you know, in the situation where I would meet a lot of people In these big companies and I was a section manager and stuff. I'm pretty good about identifying, yeah, kind of unique talents in the wine set, kind of a certain I don't know if I would say dissatisfaction or consternation or longing to make things better, where the person's always never quite satisfied with the status quo and has an itch to make things better.

Speaker 1: 22:59

That's, that's a big part of it, and I've been very fortunate to have some good co-founders that have come along along the way, both at Epirus and Spartan. We group two teams now, one one to forty and then this one to fifty, five or so before we handed, before I handed off the reins. So picking the right people to be part of the, especially that core ten or fifteen people that sort of sets the company out right is absolutely critical. How you said dissatisfaction.

Speaker 2: 23:23

So I just want to jump on this point really quickly as just an interesting thing about Nathan. Very good listening you. You've run for state assembly twice, okay, and when loser draw, that's gotta be a very interesting experience that not very many people have. It's something that's on your CV that there's only a handful of people In the whole US that have that. Politics aside, I see that through line of dissatisfaction is like looking out at something and saying, well, well, you said hubris, but it's a little bit of hubris to say you know, maybe I'm not the smartest person in the world or the smartest person in the room, but I feel like I can change something. I can change something about my community or I can start something or I can get this idea going. Do you see that kind of through line between your desire earlier to run and then your desire to run start?

Speaker 1: 24:16

you have to have that pioneer spirit and kind of that, that sense of you know, waterlust, maybe it's the right way to put it. Somebody who's more than happy to sit in the same program for 30 years and, you know, do the exact same thing is probably gonna hate being a startup because everything's chaotic and it's unstructured and you know there's a lot of triage involved in a lot of just accepting that there's going to brush fires you can put out because there's more important Things to deal with. Where somebody like when I was in big aerospace I was changing programs about every year or two is I get to the point where, okay, I kind of maximize my contribution here and either I can wait around for five years to become the program manager, I can go do something else and learn something else. It's that curiosity and will. Once around that corner, what could be different?

Speaker 2: 25:03

why does it have to be that?

Speaker 1: 25:05

And that was kind of one thing that drove me to politics is well, why does the state have to operate this way? Why do we keep electing the same sorts of people that keep passing to smoke shit a lot? Maybe I can change the conversation. And early on in their Joe on sale and I started on profit called California common sense. That was right, exactly that where we were using basically big data tools, unpack and take apart the California state budget and try and find examples of waste or call for reform etc. And I've been involved with a couple of efforts like that sense. I know there's not a lot of money in it, at least not for me. So four kids and I just you know the people always want to pay me to do the engineering. They didn't really want to pay me to Listen to my political hits or right loss, though I kind of hug it up about ten years ago.

Speaker 2: 25:51

Well, maybe we could use a few more engineers in Congress or at the state level, but that's a whole different conversation and I've really appreciated this conversation. Thanks for coming on the show. Do you have some parting words of wisdom for our audience?

Speaker 1: 26:06

I would say that if you feel yourself having that urge To do something entrepreneurial and go create something to try, you take the first steps. What am I? One of my favorite lines from the Bible is is sort of Abraham where God says and go to this place in a distant land that, I'm gonna tell you, is your promised land. And he had nothing to work on. He had never seen it before, he didn't know what it was, he was just going on blind trust that if you put one foot in front of the other, get something special and I think you really have to have that To really get everything that you can add a life. If you're happy sort of sitting there, satisfied, being one place doing one thing all the time you may not be living up your full potential. I think oftentimes our own doubt of our full potential is is what holds us back. So I would just urge everybody to give it a try.

Speaker 1: 26:54

My old boss had the perfect advice on this when I was at Boeing. He said well, you quit and start to start up the CEO, you get fun and everything. Worst case scenario you come back here and they'll give you two promotions because they'll go. We start up experience and if you want to give it a try, you can call me. If you have some crazy idea, I can, I can. You can reach me. It's Nathan at Nathan vencecom or others. I hear a lot of pitches from younger, less experienced entrepreneurs or people that are just being started. I'm happy to be a sounding board.

Speaker 2: 27:22

Nathan, thank you so much for appearing on the show. I really appreciate it. This has been the startup defense.