Transformative Tech, Surviving the Valley of Death, and Army Applications Lab with Tony Williams

Callye Keen interviews Tony Williams from the Army Applications Lab (AAL) about the innovation and disruption happening within the defense industry. They discuss the necessity of the defense sector to move faster by collaborating with startups, the importance of funding and contracts for startups, the rising interest in defense innovation, and the challenges faced in measuring the impact of emerging technology startups. 

Topic Highlights:

00:00 - Introducing Tony Williams
Callye Keen introduces Tony Williams, representing the Army Applications Lab (AAL), a pivotal entity that plays a major role in defense innovation. 

04:09 - Change in VC Interest
Silicon Valley has a growing interest in the Defense Industry. Tony provides insights on how the VC community is looking into funding more defense startups.

10:02 - Highlighting Start-ups and Solving Real Problems
Tony highlights start-ups he’s currently working with. Emphasizing the value of solving real world problems. He shares the story of equipping a private with VR goggles to make his job more efficient.

15:24 - Startups Involved in Big Problems
Callye shares how in the past, it was difficult for startups to get involved. Now, smaller firms can get their foot in the door and participate. 

21:03 - Even Transformative Tech Start-ups Need a Business Plan
Tony shares his thoughts on why having a plan for funding is critical for start-ups. Knowing where investment capital is coming from will help you avoid the valley of death.

30:58 - Changing Defense with Silicon Valley Approach
Tony Williams shares insights from his past working with Ash Carter, former Secretary of Defense, on how the Silicon Valley startup model can revolutionize the defense sector by accelerating technology deployment.

Callye Keen - Kform

https://kform.com/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/callyekeen/ 

https://youtube.com/@kforminc  

https://twitter.com/CallyeKeen 

Tony Williams - Army Applications Lab (AAL)

Army Applications Laboratory https://aal.army/ 

LinkedIN https://www.linkedin.com/company/army-applications-laboratory/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonycarrollwilliams/ 

Twitter https://twitter.com/aal_innovation 

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/aal_innovation/ 

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtVIvsxTjCk5n_VBbN89fXQ 

Mr. Williams is currently a Sr. Program Manager at Jacobs Engineering after formerly serving as a GS-15 federal program officer with the United States Postal Service as the Director of the Western US for Design and Construction managing a project portfolio of over $200M and staff of 100+ personnel. Learn more about Tony through his LinkedIn profile.

Transcript

Tony Williams: 0:00

This is how fast the army wants to move here and how serious we are about disrupting some of the old acquisition problems that we've had. We all want to be in the cool startup situation and come up with a great idea. I think that also feeds into what the DOD is trying to say they want to do right now. We know that the big guys have lobbyists and they're constantly banging on their congressman to get this contract.

Callye Keen: 0:26

Welcome to the startup defense. My name is Callie Keene. Today I have Tony Williams. Tony has a long career as an army officer, in the private sector, as an engineer, and then moving into intelligence and in innovation and many other things. Tony, can you tell us a little bit about your background, who you are and what are you passionate about right now?

Tony Williams: 0:51

Yeah, Thanks, kelly. I am pretty passionate about disrupting the way the Pentagon buys stuff. That's it, having been around it for so many years. I was a startup guy initially. I had an engineering firm in the 90s before we all got busy at 9-11. But just noticing that we don't get the right technology out to troops fast enough and we're stuck in this Eisenhower predicted military industrial complex and no one's really trying to get at it.

Tony Williams: 1:21

So when the army created futures command, I knew about it a little bit. Then. I'm from Texas but I've lived in Colorado for a long time. So I came home to check on my parents and some guys here said you need to talk to those guys. They're doing what you guys were talking about 15 years ago, before you got busy in Iran and Afghanistan.

Tony Williams: 1:39

So I just heard about it and they asked me to come over and meet the group and some of the folks that have already PCS out and figure out a way to keep the momentum going that general Rainey's here to leverage, as well as our director. So I thought, well, that sounds like a good idea If I, if I understand what you're asking me. You want me to help you understand what the VC and the private equity community needs in order to invest and get excited about our requirements. And then you also need me to help you for the army, maybe begin to solve some of this valley of death problem we have between grants and VC funding and that kind of thing, and that's what got me going.

Callye Keen: 2:18

Fantastic your background. You have all of these pieces that really can help educate those startups to maneuver or navigate through that valley of death, as you have the actual experience in the army. You have experience at the Pentagon and the acquisition side, seeing what the internal looks like. But you also have private experience. You're also an adjunct professor, so I suppose you're really good at presenting that information to innovative startups and saying, hey, here's the problems that need to get solved and here's a better way to approach it. Have you seen that confluence really help you bring those startup innovation or those new technologies to bear?

Tony Williams: 3:02

for DoD, yeah, starting to, I'm jumping back in at the Army applications lab I was looking at the connections that Andy Euclis helped develop, and so several of those companies I'm able to pick up and say, well, let's move you into the face to let me show you how to do that. And then on the VC side, I can jump in and say, hey, we just had about 30 of these guys in that were touring futures command actually, and they thought that's where the innovation was. But futures command brought them down to us and said will you talk to us about how you fund companies? So that's where I'm at what type of corporate ventures? And then I run our technology vetting team too that we need to look at, and so we've got, probably right, around 80 companies in our portfolio. Now. There's hundreds of VCs that we have a pretty good connection with, and then about 10 or 20 of them that we talked to consistently, and I think you know if I can continue to let them know what we're doing, I think we can keep their interest there.

Tony Williams: 4:07

You know, like you said, it's just a real change right now for Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, for instance, to be thinking about what's going on in defense.

Tony Williams: 4:17

But they are.

Tony Williams: 4:18

You see, like I think Close to a billion dollars a couple years ago came out of the VC community, just found a lot of startups and then it jumped to eight billion last year.

Tony Williams: 4:29

So clearly there's an interest. And now Doug Beck has taken over at DIU, so he's an Apple guy that clearly Tim Cook and those guys are making the statement and they have come out publicly and said yes, we're interested in defense. So Apple guy reports directly to the sec def and then all of us innovation unit folks are closely aligned with them, and so there's a lot of energy and passion and inertia around, really disrupting the way we've done business in the past with the fence contractors and the. You know, when I talk to them I I usually just say, hey, I've been on your side of fence and corporate development. I'm sure you guys already have your little VC shop put together and your little do DX program. Then you're trying to buy some of these small companies that we funded and I think that's the right answer. I mean, don't lobby to push back against the Pentagon's efforts right now, because we're just trying to get technology out faster.

Callye Keen: 5:26

I Start up in VC friends yeah, giving me a hard time because it's saying you know, suddenly after 20 years, what I'm doing is cool, working with innovative companies in the DOD and IC. It's like that was very frowned on and now it's, I guess, accidentally, the hot ticket. But inside of that space I've put a lot of effort towards clean tech, or, say, different solutions and renewables. I found that there's a strong correlation between anything that we could do whether there's better battery technology, where it's cooler components, really anything in that chain of value there's direct correlation and application in the military. So it's been very easy to foster dual use startups in that space. I know that you've done some work in clean tech as well. It is that a key area of focus for you currently? Oh yeah.

Tony Williams: 6:21

That's what I talk about with a lot of our investors, and especially when we're just looking at simple requirements that our CG rainy woods, which are you know figures figure out a way to do Minds field clearing or figure out a way to take down UAN. Then the second thing I say is do it with batteries. They're having to develop EVs that will support that type of Lethality, which is new for a lot of them and some of them don't want to hear it, just because they're misinformed. And I always say well, I don't know if you guys been paying attention, but that's the way the DOD's been moving for years, is moving that way.

Tony Williams: 6:56

When I was at and you got 25 years ago, man, we're all about figuring out ways to island all of our bases. For instance, you know, we want to microgrid all our bases, we want to put batteries on everything you do, and you can make the argument that all the lithium battery is just as an environment and environmental catastrophe as as fossil fuels are. Not maybe true, but I can tell you this because I talked to battery guys all the time. We're moving beyond that chemistry and so we'll figure that out way before. We'll figure out a way, you know, to manage greenhouse gases. So let's slow down with fossil fuels and let's move towards clean energy and, in our case, you guys can look at battery power, at everything you do, because that's what we're interested.

Callye Keen: 7:39

You can see things like the lithium extraction prize that was put out by DOE and the innovation coming out of that to make it More clean across the supply chain.

Callye Keen: 7:49

You can see the battery recycling challenges that have been pushed out by a lot of different organizations to try to solve it the other end of that equation. But you know, realistically, we're putting batteries in everything and we're making them, you know, as modular as possible. I mean you've even seen core batteries like to your standard radio batteries, right, like stand your radio batteries, your standard Manpack batteries, 2590s all switch over a long time ago. But now custom form factor, wearable batteries and it's like that's really great. But yeah, the chemistry is changing, the manufacturing process are changing, your cycling is changing, but that's all around the additional capacity and capability of that, just down to that battery. It's really interesting to reach into the startup market or, in that sense, the academic market, right going in and looking at licensing university intellectual property, research that's being done at national labs, and Turning that IP into a product, into a business, and think like, who has the scale that I need? Well, if I can make a better battery for big army, I'm gonna be doing okay.

Tony Williams: 9:04

I'm gonna do okay for myself hundred percent and that's the batteries or or whatever little piece of technology we're trying to move. That that's the thought. Right, if I can get my product into the army and maybe instead of some of the other agencies or even branches of government, you know, not only am I gonna be able to make some money here, but I can get good test data back because we're gonna we're gonna be a scale. That's what I want to see start happening when we move, we move these companies forward. I want to see their, their product get out there by the hundreds, especially some of these UAS or swarm drone Technology programs that we're looking at.

Callye Keen: 9:41

I know you've jumped into a al and there's a large portfolio that a al's working with on all sides of that partnership, including just the startups themselves, and maybe this is a question for a future time. But if you have some case studies or some technologies that you're really excited about, that's always a fun question for people working with startups. I know it's hard to pick favorites, and we really shouldn't pick favorites, because we want to see everyone win and flourish, but is there anything that you're really, really excited about that you'd like to highlight?

Tony Williams: 10:13

today. One of my favorite ones is just a story we have on a private up here at Fort Cabosos. Now that said, hey, I could really use some help maybe with some you know Technology that makes it, so I don't have to go back and look at the manual every time we're doing maintenance on this team or whatever. And they said, yeah, man, well, we get some BR goggles and you can be looking at in those goggles what you should be doing Right then and if you have a question you can just hit that and go to the next page and that kind of thing. And that company came to us and said is that what you want to do? We said, yeah, that's cool. And so now that's a success story. So a company called tactile and they are into the phase three now I think they're in their first or second series, so they're doing well. It's just one of the great success stories we have and I just love that because that gets at the Kind of the non lethality projects, that that I'm interested in. And then we've got some clean energy one too, where some some folks are proposing some different ways of messing with ionization between Hydro batteries and tanks and that kind of thing and they want to make a little power plant for us. So that looks pretty promising to the nurse.

Tony Williams: 11:32

I don't know if general rainy Well, it's just a concentration on this, but there's five or six of them with your just pure human performance improvement wearables, and even female mannequins for combat medics to Work with, because apparently we've never had female mannequins. We always just train everyone on male part mannequins, which is not what they'll be doing all the time. And now, granted, it's the lesser percentage there's. That that I really like too, because that that shows, you know, some interest in projects across the army. But our budget's not as big as as af works, certainly not di, you and and Some of the others. So we got to be careful where we place our bets and if I'm talking to a startup or someone who has something we're interested in, like we just Advertised and picked a few firms to help us.

Tony Williams: 12:24

In the age of each tall, you know, the heavily vertical takeoff and landing Project can be a helicopter or a drone or something else that allows us to move 800 to 1400 pounds Presently, and we just try to define the problem and let the companies come up with the solution and the technology. We're not gonna go. There's no old-school Specifications and we you know I'll give you that and that's not how it works. So we just went through that one. We got some pretty good responses. I'm pretty excited about that helping us because we can move product and people with that.

Tony Williams: 12:57

A street toll unit that we're looking at right now and it's pretty easily deployable so we can, you know, get to scale. And that's the other thing about what we do is we need to have the Prototype within three years is very important. So this is not gonna be some 8, 10, 20 year program like old DoD acquisition standards. This is to be fast. In fact, the requirements that we get from general rainy and that's who's kind of driving some of where we're focused right now, which is an evolution at ALL.

Tony Williams: 13:30

In the past the Commanding generals that they weren't really sure. They just said look at what big army needs and see if you can figure out what the troops need, and so we would go do that ourselves. Now it's even rainy says no specifically, we're having this, this and this problem in Ukraine need to support better. We need this type of technology, whether it's mine, clary or or whenever we do improve. You know the mid-click from 30 years ago. So that's the kind of stuff that gets thrown at me and the insights and analysis group is alright, go do market research or what's available, and then let's start getting some proposals in here and we'll vet them and see. You know, it's, the physics even works on some, on some of the proposals. So it's very much more think of it this way. So it's very much for kind of battle still focused right now with general rainy at ALL.

Tony Williams: 14:19

So we just had our quarterly briefing with him yesterday and you know I was telling him you know how it works in the BC world, because none of these guys know that I'm well, I'm telling them all the time a BC is not gonna be interested in our deal unless we can move fast. So I'm putting out that we want this, sir, and you want to buy it and it's gonna happen. And then that gets them excited because just like Incutel and some of our other Innovation unit kind of government BC shops, they know that if we can do a lot of the vetting they don't have to pay to do that and as a VC that's a pretty good deal. So that's kind of what I was letting him know. So I said that's exciting. You can give us good kind of guidance on what you really need and what you're seeing. Then we can move forward on that and I can get the VCs and the private equities interested in doing that first series for these guys once we get them the grants from Sibir.

Callye Keen: 15:15

That's how it's got to rolling right now. Absolutely Thank you for detailing that process, because it really shows how this has evolved from the past. Something interesting that I've seen as well is that now there's these more open solicitations, even innovation challenges, very open prize competitions. You see, if you go to AAL, there's not an open one right now on the website, but you can regularly go and they'll say we're asking for submissions for X. Same thing with half works or other organizations.

Callye Keen: 15:48

I know as a product developer or startups that we work with, they know that, hey, this is a strong market signal from a great potential customer and partner that this is important. Because we've seen in the past now 5G on the move I'll pick on that right now is that that's a big push and, to be fair, there is a lot of activity, acquisition activity, investment and actual innovations going behind 5G on the move right now. But in the past there would be an item that everyone was talking about and was perceived as very important, but there was no really way for smaller firms to get involved in pursuing that directive. We want activity in the space, but how do I get involved in that? And now there is. So even if I don't put a submission out.

Callye Keen: 16:40

If I'm running an accelerator or a friend is running an accelerator, I can say, hey, I know that the Army is looking for this thing because they keep running open opportunities for this or they keep funding people through SBIRs around this topic, and so this is sending pretty strong market signals across people that wanna start businesses, people that wanna launch startups, or even, I would say, down to commercial and university research, because it's an area that's being funded. There's a first customer in the DoD in that space, so it's very interesting to see that situation evolve. And so, from a research on the other side, you're researching for what exists and like what can we get into this program? There's people like me that are researching, who cares about things that I know how to do. If I keep seeing those market signals, I'm gonna develop a product, whether I participate in that program or not.

Tony Williams: 17:34

That's it actually. I was happy to see that, when I came over, is Casey and the rest of the team is, you know, the PhDs we have have come out of the last four years since starting this up and they figured out that let's still do anything in our BAAs or our cyber announcements and requests except vaguely define the problem. Let's let the market respond and let's see what we get. And if it looks like there's four or five companies that do things already good together, we can create a cohort, which we've done, and we can build this product that way. So that's kind of the exciting part. That's really the disruptive part, for the government for sure, because you know the government and I fight it still now. So the acquisition folks who've been around for years are so afraid that and they should, especially if they're risk averse they're so afraid that you know the government is gonna get some type of protest because one company said, well, you guys didn't define your requirements. You know, specifically in this other company one, I think that it took, you know, some pretty good leadership to say, well, yeah, that might happen, but we're still just gonna go with a vaguely defined problem and see what the market brings to us and some of them.

Tony Williams: 18:52

I've looked back at some of the data on some of the projects that we've asked for proposals on through cyber announcements. We didn't really define it well enough, so we didn't give back anything we could use. So there's also, you know, back to the drawing board. Let's start again. And then there's the scale part of it and that kind of thing. If I were a small manufacturer that it was hoping to do business with the DOD, it'd be just like you say well, figure out what they're trying to buy now, what's going on, and maybe we can build something like that later. I don't know what type of equipment we'll need to buy to build that, but maybe we can. Later let's respond to this cyber phase one, where all it is is basically a little R&D opportunity for us to talk about what we could do, and so that gets the conversation going. That's great advice.

Callye Keen: 19:40

Let's walk through this a little bit, because at the beginning of our chat you talked about the Valley of Death. Ooh, it's the shutter. Then. With commercial startups it really is like, hey, I get a little bit of traction, maybe I get some pre-seed or seed funding, but then jumping that scale, it's a big jump. Especially, I mean I make physical products right, so it's not like software where it's just, hey, I can prototype, and then it's more. Organic growth or even geometric style growth is still palatable With physical products. If I have to buy a mold, it might be $100,000 of tooling, so zero to just that one piece right. So there's significant scale costs. How do you see navigating that for innovative startups that are pursuing federal opportunities?

Tony Williams: 20:26

You know I always try to put myself where they are and I'd start up my little environmental engineering for them in the 90s and we just started from nothing and then ended up doing work for the military around bases, around some of their facility a motor pools where they had horrible groundwork contamination. We just kind of fell into that. But it was the same thing. They wanted waste and leaned that up without taking everything to the landfill and we're like, well, great, but I can't afford to wait on a $500,000 receivable from you for 34 months. Back then there wasn't all this VC and private equity money running around, so it was hard back then. We barely made it. Now I think that if I'm putting together a business plan and maybe you see something that you feel like you can do maybe you're coming out of industry like you or out of one of the university labs or something like that you know answer that, that silver one call. See if you can figure out how you're going to find investment while you're waiting on that phase two, after you've got that phase one, maybe when you're successful. So have a plan. Don't just win the little R&D piece and say, oh, we got the silver phase one, let's just go to work and we'll write a big report and we'll tell the army that, yeah, we can do it. Here's how we're going to do it. No, go, start talking to VCs right now. Figure out how you might float through that valley of death if the government can't respond fast enough with that phase two or, hopefully, that phase three.

Tony Williams: 21:57

And I think now's the time that it would be well received in the VC community because they understand it. We had about 30 of them in last week and that's what they talked about. They're like well, you know, that's hoping he did real well with you guys, but I was really worried that you guys were gonna find a minute. Did take you a long time, but it was a good thing they had a BC partner. Yeah, that's what we're talking about here.

Tony Williams: 22:19

That's the risk that you guys have to take, but they hate doing that. They hate, you know, funding with that second or third trunks, rather waiting on the army or the or silver to find the second or third phase. So maybe if you had some type of plan and you felt like that, you had a good one, two or three VC partners waiting with you, you might be able to do it. But some of these companies I've seen get in trouble. They just, you know, they got their first round of funding, they maybe have the silver, and then Everything stops for twelve, fourteen, fifteen months and they're not prepared. They don't have a relationship. They're scrambling, then, and you know, in private equity, in BC, where I, when you're scrambling, is when the BC's like whoa, whoa, wait, wait, what's going on? This is scary me so have a play.

Callye Keen: 23:11

How love that. Certainly after phase one is a good place for seed investment at least, and good for everybody that's listening understand that it can easily take six months, even a pre seat seed investment. So, really, if you're looking at the period of performance on on a phase one, as soon as you have something that's tangible and you can build a pitch deck, I would start Socializing and building those relationships. Having conversation, yeah, and that puts you in a good position to have conversations is a. There's a host of I'd call them seed To write up to series a investors that are in that niche right now, which are they're looking for SBIR, early traction.

Callye Keen: 23:54

Do the potentially dual use startups we had a group and one of my accelerators and that's really where they focus hard tech. Do the applications downstream dual use with additional funding is commercial, require scale, but they only invest after somebody is outside of SBIR or a similar type of award. That might be a large grant opportunity or there's innovation challenges that are fairly large as well, but that's what they look for market traction through those programs, I thought, and that's really interesting. And then I Join some more research talking to other investors and they're like, yeah, this. That's kind of where we are. We want to catch them early, and that's the equivalent of catching people early in this market is to really connect with people like you, tony, and say, hey, we want to position ourselves, we want to see what you've got, we want to invest, you know, before with Incutel or before Lockheed or some of the other bigger investors that are in the dual use space. That's really really good advice.

Tony Williams: 24:58

I appreciate that. No, you're right on it. You can set it more from the startups perspective. It or the VC perspective with the startup. If they can catch them Early, that's good for everybody, and especially if they know that they want to their first cyber. Like I said before, kind of when I was on the other side I thought, wow, if there are government entities that that are doing the technology vetting and then awarding that cyber, I want to know that company before they do anything right.

Callye Keen: 25:28

Yeah, to be fair, a lot of investors. They're very savvy about the business models or potential BD that's in a space, but they're Bitcoin or you don't necessarily have people on the team that can vet the tech itself, and so either they have to hire a nerd like me or they have to go to university and they have to team with somebody to say, hey, tony, walk me through this, is this real, does the physics work, like you said? And a lot of those problems are just alleviated when they know somebody is working with them. There's somebody oh, let's dive in deeper. Oh, they're working with this national lab. So I can be reasonably assured that the output of that research is pretty good if they're working with NREL or etc. And so it's doing a lot of DD work for investors. And I think that's part of the big shift is to realize like I can invest in hard tech and I know that the tech isn't vaporware, because you're working with very credible organizations that are proofing through the tech itself.

Tony Williams: 26:25

That's it, and we're actually we're trying to lead as a small innovation unit among the others. We're trying to put together some metrics around that. So what have we looked at? What have we vetted? What have we brought through phase one or phase two? What companies like some of them I mentioned earlier are mostly dual use firms, what are just DOD focused? And let's put together some type of annual report which says the ROI for the army is based on the following 35 metrics.

Tony Williams: 26:58

We did pretty good. Or we've got 43% that were funded through SIVR and another 32% were funded through VCs, and then another 10% are into prototype or production in phase three, or they have other RTD and E-money. That's outside of our purview anyway, so they're off and running. We are just kind of held to the mission that we need to make all of that happen and be able to measure it within three years, and so that's what we're trying to do, and that's why, when I talk to some of the potential startups we might work with, I try to give them that talk. This is how fast the army wants to move here and how serious we are about disrupting some of the old acquisition problems that we've had.

Callye Keen: 27:46

My big metric and I'll just throw this out there, you throw it right away but my big metric is, the end of the day is contracts, the money the army or whatever envy actually spends with the startups. That's the thing, because I firmly believe there's a really soft outcome. This is a big soft outcome is that people are going to get interested in defense innovation itself and it's already attracted lots of smart people. You can see Andrew and Shield and previously Palantir and some of these other great organizations and that there's more and more of like gravity towards this industry. So that net net is fantastic. But right in the brass tax of things is, at the end of the day, lockheed's the biggest, raytheon's the next biggest, gd's in there, and they're all obviously world-class organizations.

Callye Keen: 28:36

But where is XYZ startup? Are they in the top 1,000? Or are the startups breaking into the top 100 and spend? Or top 1,000, or what's that allocation of spending? Emerging technology startups where they got contracts, and that's going to be really really hard to measure. But that would be very inspiring to see. Like, hey, there's just new market entrants that are on this list and they're literally competing for the same dollars that Boeing is Again, no slight to Boeing. But innovation, competition, those are pretty strong American values.

Tony Williams: 29:09

I know you're right. It is like the main metric when was the spend? Okay, let's see it. Let's see what the Army's doing. That doesn't show. It's all one of the integrators, one of the big contractors. So I think you know I've been, that's why I kind of came back in to do this on the government side for a little while is I think there's enough really leverage behind this disruption idea that it'll probably happen?

Tony Williams: 29:33

It's not just a bunch of talk. All of us have been in DC. We know that the big guys have lobbyists and they're constantly banging on their chrysler to get this contract or that as the way it works, and that's fine, they can keep doing that. But, like I said before, they also need to have their little technology sub that's trying to buy smaller companies and then they need to have their own VC operation because this is the way it's all going to start going. I mean, look at most of us as engineers and we started. We want to be engineers because we want to build stuff. We don't want to go to some big corporation and do that day in, day out. We're not really doing anything yet, but you guys keep, you know, your drudgery of maybe designing one, one thousandths of this project, and so none of us want to do that. We all want to be in the cool startup situation and come up with a great idea. I think that also feeds into what the DoD is trying to say they want to do right now.

Tony Williams: 30:32

I worked for him when I was there, ash Carter, I mean he used to say when he was, when I was at DITRA, he was OSD, alt, I think, deputy secretary, so he acquisition logistics technology secretary so. But he would say back then, and then he became the secretary of defense for Obama. But he would say, hey, silicon Valley will change the way the defense world turns. I remember thinking what that was 20 years ago. What does he mean by that? And what he means by that is right now, it we will get technology out faster with the startup kind of model that's in place already in Silicon Valley for software and other other platforms like that that they've been working on. Let's take that type of approach and put it into fits, and that's that's what I think we do have some good inertia with right now. I agree.

Callye Keen: 31:25

Like I said, I spent my whole life doing this and it's funny that you what you just said, because I say my personal mission is to make cool stuff. That's really all it is. I've designed my whole life so I make cool stuff with as many other people as possible. So just make more, right. But as well, I like this industry because I can come up with an idea, I can pitch it to customers and they have the money to fund that idea and we make things.

Callye Keen: 31:50

Certainly, that is a very startup approach to how it has been in the past, where, yeah, I don't want to work on a piece of a piece of the thing. I want to come up with an idea that I think is really interesting. I want to go show it to some customers and get feedback. Tomorrow, you know, I want to go to a demo with the thing that I just made up and go show it off to somebody and tell me that's horrible, tell me all the reasons why it would be better. Come back a month later and get, you know, get some money to build something interesting. I don't know other industries that you can do that. That's it. That's exactly it, tony. I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. I know you're super busy. Where's a great place where People can follow what you're up to and maybe connect with you?

Tony Williams: 32:37

yeah, just that, the our website, that a l dot bill, I think is the best place. We put pretty much everything we do on there. And then, surprisingly, we use linked in as our main social outreach piece of me right. So we're always on there talking about our people, what we're looking for, we advertise those servers on there, so that's a good place to. And then Are headquarters army future commands a good site to look at to see what we're doing in a larger way.

Tony Williams: 33:08

And then I would say the good news is we have pretty even though he's an infantry guy, art four star general to rain. Here Is a very forward thinking Kind of progressive acquisition guy and he even says he wants to kill the old acquisition chain. That's his idea and he wants us at a l to help me do that. And so right now our leadership is all about doing that. He's not afraid to put that out publicly. He's not afraid to talk to the fence contractors, old school defense contractors that way. So Just look for what he's talking about and look for what we're putting out to on our own linked in and on our site and respond. That's how you get involved with I really appreciate that.

Callye Keen: 33:55

As a side note, I try to drive this home for everyone that we're talking to everyone in the audience is do d federal market not huge, not really crushing it on social media, but on linked in pretty much anybody you want to connect with than any program. They have a excellent presence, is not very hard to keep up to date with what's going on and what opportunities are out there. So thanks for Reforcing what people think, that I'm crazy. I'm just go on there.

Tony Williams: 34:23

You can follow anybody that you want and they're posting excellent information, so it's a great resource post stuff and I respond to stuff as much as I can from the outside, having been on the, you know in startup and in corporate development on. I'm happy to respond because I know, I know how it is and you turn to you start.

Callye Keen: 34:43

thank you so much, tony yeah sure, thanks, gillie, take care, this has been the startup defense.