Digital Twin, DoD Legacy Systems, and Beast Code with Matt Zimmermann and John McCrea

Callye Keen sits down with Matt Zimmermann and John McCrea from Beast Code to dive into the evolving landscape of defense technology. They explore the integration and interoperability of systems, and opportunities for startups entering defense. Their discussion touches on the power of digital twins, the challenge of siloed data, and the possibilities opened up by breaking down informational barriers. The trio reflects on the present and future impacts of Beast Code's innovations.

Topic Highlights:

00:00 - The Unseen Challenges of Legacy Systems

John highlights the ongoing reliance on outdated software systems and the challenges they pose for modern operations.

02:45 - Bridging the Gap between Industry and Defense

Keen pinpoints the challenges in defense with respect to data aggregation and how industries are often a step ahead in dealing with massive data influxes.

09:40 - Clarifying 'Digital Twin'

Callye underscores the need to define and explore use cases for the term 'Digital Twin'. Matt addresses the multifaceted nature of the term, discussing its range from a mere digital model to more complex manifestations.

18:39 - Integrating Old with New Tech

Keen brings up the challenges and excitement of integrating old and new tech within the DoD. He also explores the difficulties of modern system interoperability, especially when it has to work with old equipment.

24:12 - Emerging Mega Trends in Defense

Matt and John discuss the transformation in defense, emphasizing the integration of new tech like digital twin and sensor technology. They share the importance of adopting emerging trends to stay ahead.

29:18 - Tech Evolution and Vendor Diversity 

They discuss avoiding vendor lock and embracing vendor diversity to combat complacency and stimulate continual innovation, ensuring that organizations remain on the cutting edge of technology development.

Callye Keen - Kform

https://kform.com/ 

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

Matt Zimmermann - CEO, Beast Code

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-zimmermann-83196921/

Matt Zimmermann is the CEO at Beast Code. As a cofounder, Matt has helped grow the company to over 200 employees focused on digital transformation in DoD and commercial markets. Matt has a background in software engineering and began his career as a C++ developer. He has helped build tech used across the DoD and continues to grow Beast Code’s world class workforce.

John McCrea - Account Manager, Beast Code

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

John McCrea is Account Manager, Air Force and Space Force, for Beast Code. John’s experience spans acquisitions and sustainment, but has a consistent theme of digital transformation. While active duty Air Force and Space Force, John supported numerous system program offices and also helped co-found SpaceWERX and the DAF Digital Transformation Office.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

the one computer that you have in the corner of the office that's running whatever version of Windows from like the early 90s, because that is what this critical piece of infrastructure was coded on. That's the only thing that can run it, and so you got to keep that thing alive.

Speaker 2: 0:15

Welcome to the Startup Defense. My name is Kali Keen. Today I have Matt and John from Beast Code. My understanding of Beast Code and we'll get into this is that we're going to talk about digital twin, we're going to talk about data visualization, but honestly, I'm more curious than knowledgeable about this, so I don't want to ruin what you do and who you are before we jump in. Matt, john, I don't know who wants to go first, but can you tell us a little bit about yourself and, most importantly, what are you passionate about?

Speaker 3: 0:46

right now. Yeah, absolutely, I'll start. My name is Matt Zermann. I'm the CEO of Beast Code, but pretty much just a giant nerd. Got a software engineering background and helped co-found the company in 2014. Passion about software. Passion about data Beast Code. We're focused on data aggregation and making it really easy for people to understand the data they have and use that in their day-to-day lives, and we're really focused on the scaling piece right now being able to integrate that with other technologies that people are using, just like you super curious about, like all the technologies that are being used and how we can integrate that into what our platform is.

Speaker 1: 1:22

Yeah, and then John McCrae also. I'll describe myself as a nerd, but I just joined Beast Code back in February, so a little bit more fresh. I am the account manager for Air Force and Space Force and prior to joining Beast Code I did five years Air Force, two years Space Force. So I am coming from that side of the fence and spending my time as an engineer on the Air Force and Space Force side. So really my goal coming over is to take the technology that the Beast Code has been building and bring it to the Air Force and Space Force, because I think it is desperately needed and just so valuable in the context of what I had to live through in my years of active duty and I'm still on the reserve side, so I get to experience that day in and day out as well it is really transformative technology that I'm thrilled to be a part of.

Speaker 2: 2:15

It's wildly appropriate for the time right now, because the just absolute proliferation of Internet, of Military things and data sensors and traditionally acquiring data meant very sophisticated sensors and very expensive systems, but now it's this mass proliferation from very simple off-the-shelf things to complete an ecosystem of IoT data and radio data and health data, and it is an interesting time to work with data and I think what I've seen in industry is a little bit ahead of what I've seen in defense. So to see somebody playing on what we've done in like honestly, in manufacturing IoT, physio, cyber stuff, in just regular infrastructure and even gaming and kind of creating that over, I'm excited for you. But can you explain a little bit more? How did you come up with this as?

Speaker 3: 3:17

you're in niche Like this is what we're going to build, and why, honestly it's just a lot of iteration and hanging out with the warfighter to understand what their needs were and developing products for that.

Speaker 3: 3:27

We originally started doing a live fire test and evaluation app for the Navy, where they were building a new destroyer and we were aggregating their data together and had a simple 3D model of that platform to be able to visualize it and help them make design decisions with it.

Speaker 3: 3:41

And as part of that, we got to hang out with the warfighter that was going to be taking control of that platform and learning more about their day to day lives learning about how they train, how they get qualifications and how can we make that better and how do they actually sustain and do the maintenance. What are those processes like? What are the problems that they run into on the day to day? And we really, coming out of that, ended up with a lifecycle tool everything from I'm designing something and I want to understand it better and make it better too. Now I've got to train people and qualify them to actually operate it, and then, when we get into the day to day maintenance, they need the same tools and being able to mature their data over the lifecycle and be able to reuse it across all of those activities.

Speaker 1: 4:21

Yeah, I just wanted to add on to that. The reuse across all those different activities is really such a pivotal point. Anyone that has worked in and around a fence. This is not a defense only problem, but I would say, both by necessity as well as by habit. Defense tends to silo its information and, at least historically, has done so, and some of that is goodness You're protecting your data from whatever threats might be out there. But as a result of that, the amount of clarity and decision making that you are able to then make is drastically diminished, because you aren't able to draw those tangents between disparate pieces of information because they are existing in their silos. So then now being able to break down those walls and being able to connect different communities together that previously weren't able to talk the same language is hugely valuable across any of the services.

Speaker 3: 5:21

And helping people understand, like, what that information is Like. Callie, you were talking about all the sensor data, documentation and things that exist out there. Step one of us working with organization is just helping them understand what's there and bringing it together. We talked about digital twins and for us it has so many different definitions, but it's a interactive 3d representation of a platform where I can click on a valve, open and close it and see what the down through effects are. I can click on that same component, access all the data that's behind it that John was talking about. It's typically siloed in a bunch of different places that are hard to access and then, once you have that, all the ideas that you're talking about they start happening. Like, oh my God, I could use this to help me do this, or I have this other job that normally takes me so long to do, but now that my data is together, now it's a lot simpler.

Speaker 2: 6:12

Pulling that together as a platform is really powerful. I've seen other initiatives where someone has deployed a solution for training or for their own sensor network, but then that contractor or that program hasn't then replicated that so it can be used as a platform. It just became a silo of itself and, because of my position, working with a lot of different organizations, it's funny to see the same project over and over. So you talk about siloed data. We also see like whole tech being siloed as well. So you see two teams that work together what they've contracted and then spent a lot of time and money to develop essentially parallel system, neither one of them actually does the whole thing that they need. And so when you create the system of systems or now With using a product like these, code and you're able to create an ecosystem of those systems or systems and systems like Wait, you made that, we made that and you have these teams are a. We've just made the same innovation three times, but collectively we have the right data together.

Speaker 1: 7:22

So if you've experienced some of that while you know, working with these different teams and pulling it together into one actual solution, probably for the first time and I can tell you that from my time on active duty that is such a common problem is you spend months working on something only to find out that someone else was going through the same struggles that you were. Maybe they had an answer, or maybe you had the answer and you preach all of this time savings, but when everyone is doing their own innovative silo busting independently, then you're still spending all that time in multiple places. So I think we're there are a number of different efforts that are out there to get better at that, but, like I said, from my time on active duty, as well as just my short time with with these code, I have definitely seen that.

Speaker 3: 8:10

Matt, I was going to echo that even since February Johnson account manager. So he gets to work with a lot of our partners and Sometimes our competitors, just talking to them and, yeah, you see the same kind of solutions blooming and we try to talk to him about, like well, this is commercially available. It does very similar to what you guys do, except that it's being used by several different organizations. You know they're kind of crowdsourcing the funding of it by one, licensing it and then paying for some customizations and it's going to continue to be maintained. We're not focused on, like, rebuilding that same solution. We're going to be focused on adding enhancements to that.

Speaker 3: 8:44

We always tell that we're friendly neighborhood spider man, like we don't want to compete people. I don't. I don't want to have another competing product out there that we're just one for one Building the same thing over and over again. So we try to integrate with those people because they have really cool capabilities as well that can be leveraged inside of our platform or vice versa. Maybe they can use our stuff in their platform. Our latest release has a plug in architecture, which is fancy way of saying it's reusable. You could take it and use all the out of the box. Capabilities are there, but then, if you needed a certain widget or a certain capability, you could program a specific piece and layer it on.

Speaker 2: 9:17

I think a second order consequence of building this platform is, you'll see that positions you as an architecture expert when people are bringing additional problems to you. You've solved similar problems in the past. You know Different solutions that are easier to plug in or get the types of information that you want. The promise of digital twin is huge. If we could just take a second and like step back and maybe Describe a couple of use cases. So if somebody's listening, they're like what are these guys talking about? Digital twin, why would I want that? What are some problems that that would actually solve?

Speaker 3: 9:53

Yeah, there's so many different levels of digital twin, like it's such a buzzword right, I mean so many things that people the lowest level of a digital twin is really just like a digital model, just having the 3D representation. Maybe it's tagged to metadata. But I think about like a shipyard use case where they're building a ship and you have office buildings as well and the new construction guys call up to the office and say, hey, we got a problem. So the engineers come down, they come figure out what it is and they got to go back to their office to pull the right documentation and spend time doing that and go back to the platform to actually go fix whatever that problem is and you just spent half your day, maybe the whole day.

Speaker 3: 10:29

If you just had that digital model with the information in it on a tablet, you could have solved it the first time you're out there, or the people that were finding those issues would have had the information they needed to actually do the solving. And then, like the other like extreme use case side of that is, I have a full physics based representation of that platform. I might have the exact hardware that it's running. I may have the task will stop for running on it as well and think about this like the design analysis of that, you could inject faults, you could try hacking it. You do all kinds of cool stuff and come up with all kinds of different design changes. Or if, like, the real life platform is having some issues, you could replicate all those things in a lab that's running the exact same hardware, and then you can imagine there's a million different use cases in between those.

Speaker 1: 11:10

I'll just add one more example.

Speaker 1: 11:12

It's that of a lot of training solutions that I see out there, and training has really become a really hot area for innovation and novel digital technologies augmented reality, virtual reality, you name it.

Speaker 1: 11:26

A lot of them are back to silos, building something that looks like the real thing, behaves like the real thing, so we're kind of calling that a digital twin of the system.

Speaker 1: 11:36

But its only use case is for training, and the data used to build that likely isn't the authoritative data, or at least isn't tied back to the authoritative data that is the technical baseline for the system itself, and so our goal is again break down those silos so the data I'm training on is actually tethered back to the authoritative system data that is used to manage back in the program office that is responsible for that system. But then now that enables me to train on the actual data of the system as well, and when you start bringing Internet of Things into the equation and you can understand the live status of a system as well, now you can start to introduce real, timely use cases into your training material to actually train people on what is actually happening right now. How would you solve this? And presenting that use case to a broader audience have been just the maintainers trying to fix it or just the engineers trying to solve whatever problem.

Speaker 3: 12:40

And to your point, john, our first platform that we built, our first digital twin. We were able to pull in the revisions that were happening in real life months before they actually happened. The warfighter could actually train on that capability months before the real life thing was available.

Speaker 2: 12:55

That reminds me of the case study that BMW and NVIDIA are putting out for omniverse for industry. So, looking at the BMW plan of the future, they say, hey, we need to produce X cars. You see their example populate with more or less robotic arms. You see all the meps of the mechanicals then populate across. You see the human interaction studies capable. But they're not just dropping a pretty model of an ABB arm or whatever. That's an actual digital twin device that can be programmed, it can have fixtures loaded to it, it can test. Will this actually produce the result that they want?

Speaker 2: 13:37

And I saw that think about two years ago, an early version of somebody pushing digital twin into industry and I thought, man, this would be so incredible. We do a lot of expeditionary force, let's say data acquisition, data digestion, kind of like variegated, different backhaul data transport systems. It's always a mix of what's there, what is wanted, what needs to be developed. But there was no like what's my BMW plan of the future? I can't just drop this in and say what would it look like to add this Okay, here's the vehicle that you're using. Here's the UAV that you're using.

Speaker 2: 14:18

Can I model out that ecosystem and is this actually the mission capability that you're looking for and what I look at Beastcode, what it makes me think of or imagine is to be able to do that is to say, I want to develop a series of products like here are my partners products, or we can even extend this to DIU had an open solicitation for self sensing, self adjusting ecosystems of platforms right, and you want you to be able to go out. You want your UAV to understand here's the RF network that it's in, here's the sensor network that it's in and to be able to adjust. And that sounds amazing, but from a tool perspective and planning and architecture perspective, extremely complex, right. It's like NP hard, complex problem. I don't know. The more I look at Beastcode, I'm like at least we could all put it together and start seeing how it would interact. Is that a fair assessment?

Speaker 3: 15:13

Yeah, definitely Going back to some of the early use cases working with, like the design analysis on some of the platforms, you could add more pumps or valves or change logic of how the platform operated and then run through a bunch of different scenarios, whether they were scripted and you wanted to see if you got the same outcome or better outcomes, or if you wanted to go manual and have people, like in a multiplayer road, actually run through and see if they could still operate and recover from different situations. You could do those things on the fly and as you start integrating it into the bigger digital ecosystem, it makes it even easier to make those changes, because a lot of times in the early days of Beastcode, a lot of those things are manuals, like, okay, we want to add these valves, so we go and modify it. But if you start using CAD technology that's integrated with things like product life cycle management, then the data can just flow into your digital environment and you can run those scenarios. It makes it more accessible and easier to use.

Speaker 2: 16:08

I think when the first VR consumer products came out my first run at this kind of situation everything was not invented yet, so it was literally from scratch. This isn't what this is supposed to do. So they were doing training for extremely high value industrial architecture, so nuclear power plant, scada, infrastructure, things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to go to. So, hey, we can model this and we can do some type of training. And then, downstream, there was always the promise of augmented reality, but at the time none of these tools really existed. So it was kind of a nightmare. A great idea, obviously, but it's a nightmare.

Speaker 1: 16:53

No, I mean we're finding new industries enabled by new technology. I mean, just the advent of large language models with AI is unlocking entirely new companies and fields people hadn't thought it was possible for. And I think digital twin is kind of a similar space where, until you could actually pull together enough of the right data to really realize the ideal of a digital twin, it was just a concept of pie in the sky. But I will say what is a digital twin? It's a virtual representation of a physical system that has the ability to pull in that live data from that real system, so it is in fact, a twin of the physical system. That's like the ideal state, right? We're actually leveraging Internet of Things, leveraging sensors.

Speaker 1: 17:38

When we talk about defense, a lot of these systems are far older than any of us on this call and we're built at a time that that sensor technology did not exist and, despite continued advancements over the years, they have, it has just not had the ROI to put in all of that sensor infrastructure and therefore that is not even a possible scenario, even if you wanted it to be, and so it is. I mean, there's a lot of pushing the boundaries of what is possible on newer systems, but also just realizing for legacy systems that, at least in our eyes, digital twins can be kind of that spectrum from nothing more than a 3D model that has all this integrated metadata and product data associated with it and that can be still hugely valuable, even if it is not the ideal digital twin pie in the sky thing. Just because I can't realize that with what I have today in my organization or my system, DoD as the oldest and the newest tech.

Speaker 2: 18:41

From a technologist perspective, this is very fun, but I'm imagining that digital twin, or the promise of digital twin, allows integrating with those older systems to be a little easier. Because the problem with the older infrastructure systems they're not replaced because they're big, they're complex, but if we're building systems that interact with them, I also don't have access to them in general. So if I want to create a system of systems or an interoperable kind of modern system, but then I'm working with a 60-year-old piece of radar equipment, how do I do that? How?

Speaker 1: 19:18

do I do it. There's a famous example with the Miniman 3iCVM that they upgraded all the computers. I mean we had the huge I don't even remember the size of the floppies, but bigger than a nine-inch floppy, big enough to actually be floppy, and got down to like the micro SD kind of card size. But the computers were not adapted to the large floppy size. So you had to have a floppy adapter to put the little thing inside of the big adapter so that the big adapter could then sit into the computer. And it's just examples like that that kind of make me chuckle of the things we do to interface with what was state-of-the-art two, three decades ago.

Speaker 2: 19:58

In my mind, that is a perfect picture of innovation, right? You're bridging the gap between a floppy and then a micro SD card. That's the jump that we might be making as innovators in the defense space. I just get like that's a great meme picture. It's like a giant floppy adapter into a little USB cable.

Speaker 1: 20:21

I mean you hear Calus examples of the one computer that you have in the corner of the office that's running whatever version of Windows from the early 90s, because that is what this critical piece of infrastructure was coded on and so that's the only thing that can run it, and so you got to keep that thing alive.

Speaker 2: 20:43

Windows NT is the big. That's the big joke, right? How many systems have you seen where the critical piece of infrastructure is running on Windows NT? It's like in the commercial world zero In DoD, amen. And so you have Excel spreadsheets in Windows NT and low orbit satellites and specialty SDR radios and the coolest technology you could possibly see and get your hands on really exciting projects and really important projects and Windows NT and Microsoft Excel with macros and all that fun stuff.

Speaker 3: 21:18

So it is cool to see the evolution, though. We have a project again with the Navy where we're able to take our containerized software that we were talking about and it goes into DoD's Iron Bank, where they have the continuous authority to operate, so we can continually make updates to our software and get it accredited, and then that's going to go into a Navy cloud environment and then that'll be connected to a shipbuilder's product lifecycle management where they're doing all the CAD design, all the metadata, all the documentation, and it gets converted into our software, where people will be able to access all that metadata that John was just talking about. So it's cool. We started in 2014, when clouds were a dirty word and 3D models were definitely not authoritative. It took six years to get your software accredited. To fast forward, we can do real-time updates to our software, put it in the cloud and always have the latest data available. What are you really excited about?

Speaker 2: 22:14

coming up. I know that there's a huge shift towards technology. Right now. You see dual use as being hammered home, and I just had Tony Williams on the show AAL. And I make this joke is I've done the same thing my whole life and all of a sudden now I guess I'm cool. We've always done defense innovation, but now there's dual use technology. So, being somebody that's interested in technology and working in defense, there's a lot more funding behind it. There's a lot more appetite for innovation. There's a lot more investment behind it. I always want to hear what is BeastCoat really excited about? Because there's just a lot more opportunity for non-multibillion dollar companies out there. There's a lot more access to contracts and access to need knowers.

Speaker 1: 23:01

Matt and I might be excited about different things, but I know I'm really excited about we've got a phase two SBIR coming up with the space launch delta 45 out of Cape Canaveral. Our goal there is build a digital twin of the Nth base. It's still along the core vein of the spirit of our digital twins, but rather than a weapon system we're talking about a whole base in this structure and building more of that common operating picture that I think will be just really impactful to space operations as they modernize and move towards the spaceport concept. For me at least, that's what's got me excited.

Speaker 3: 23:34

Matt, I'm excited about partnerships because the paradigm is shifting. From 10 years ago, if you had a project, you'd go to whatever prime and they'd build the whole thing. They would get a bunch of suppliers and they put it all together and kind of like you were talking about Callie. Now let's go find the best debris technologies and let's bring them together and everyone kind of has their piece of it. And so we're talking about these code and how we do the visualization.

Speaker 3: 23:57

But somebody else is going to do IP, somebody's going to do analytics, somebody's going to do configuration management, data and CAD and all those other capabilities that are out there and, like you said, it gives opportunities to so many other companies to be a part of something really big. And then us as like a platform where people are building their apps and integrating their data into it. We're starting to partner with other large companies. So we just had a strategic partnership with the Mentum and our chief technology officer just talks about like the impact of that. We as a small business can only do so much, but if we can get large businesses to start using this technology, the impact that that's going to have across the DOE is going to be much wider than if these codes was stealing it by themselves Both of those are really exciting.

Speaker 2: 24:40

The space economy is fascinating to me. I'm holding it at arm's length right now but the idea of playing into that base or port of the future, I think that's going to get distributed across everything. That's going to be the new standard for building infrastructure and building forward operating bases and how people want to look at how you can rapidly deploy and understand what we're supposed to do. So it makes sense with heavy tech to start at space, but in reality this is something I could see people just doing for their offices here in the DC metro area.

Speaker 1: 25:19

I was on the government end buying licenses from a lot of the big vendors for a lot of digital engineering technologies, and, as successful and fantastic as a lot of those capabilities are, it is just part of the nature of those large aggregated tech stacks that they try to make you become all in on that one tech stack versus the broader economy that these partnerships afford, and I do think that it's really exciting to see, because I think it also encourages. It's encouraging from the DoD's perspective as well, because then there is less of a risk of a vendor lock for them in the future as well, because everyone is trying to be collaborative and I think that the rising tide lifts all ships, there's enough opportunity to go around, so I'm excited about that.

Speaker 2: 26:09

Yeah, if I had to look at two megatrends just off the top of my head that are in DoD and IC space. One of them is from the outside and on the inside is just the appetite for innovation or working with industry. So they've done a good job of now attracting venture capital and attracting kind of best market players to work on defense problems. So that's one megatrend. And then, coupled with that, has been the change in risk tolerance, of allowing partnerships and teams, versus just saying, well, we'll have only Lockheed or only Raytheon take the lead integrator role and it's going to be on them, which it's worked out traditionally and it makes sense for large primes to come in there and have a single point of ownership.

Speaker 2: 26:57

But the desire to go and actually find best-of-breed solutions and pull together an aggregate ecosystem that's interoperable. It's how you would do it if you had the money and you were doing it yourself as a business. If you can pick everything from one vendor, that's great, but in reality you couldn't do that with cybersecurity solutions, you couldn't do that with manufacturing solutions or developer tools. So why would we be able to do that with mission systems? Right, it's just no one company can do that one piece and then they're not interoperable because they don't need to be, so they're also not future-proof, and that's been a really interesting mega trend to see. If we can get partners and build a platform, they have to be by nature interoperable versus by retroactive giant floppy to micro SD card interoperable.

Speaker 3: 27:53

I think about just analytics, right? Just predictive analytics. I want to analyze trends and come up with different faults. How many hundreds or thousands of different software exists that the DoD is going to buy? They should be able to use it, because each capability is going to be really good at analyzing something specifically. Having a platform like ours to bring all those things together allows them to use all those different technologies, because no one will know what's going on in the back end. I can use all 1,000 pieces of analytics software and I'm still getting all the data in the standard front end.

Speaker 1: 28:28

There was a great conversation I saw on LinkedIn the other day. I know that you had Michael Meyer on a couple weeks ago. The topic was really around just enterprise solutions in general. It made me think of something that I have often said, which is that when you try to solve everyone's problem, you end up solving no one's problem. You find it hard to solve anybody's problem, or take that however you will. Again, I think the ability to have a faster tech refresh when you have a broader ecosystem is really powerful, because everyone is looking to work with everyone else, understanding that my technology, however slightly different than yours it might be, I'm able to solve someone's problem. You're able to solve someone else's problem that I'm not and, at the end of the day, we've all added value to the D&D.

Speaker 3: 29:16

It gets really complacency too. If you go back to the one person does the whole thing and you're vendor locked and you make it almost impossible to change tech stacks, then that organization is going to be complacent. They're not going to be fighting for that contract knowing that they'll probably just continue to get re-upped. When you're doing the one little piece and you know that it's got an API that they could just rip it out and put a different capability in it makes you start thinking I've got to be innovative if I want to continue to survive.

Speaker 2: 29:45

That being said, because of what you just stated, there's a lot of opportunity for startups, for commercial companies, to jump into defense People that are listening. They might want to pursue that path and they want to be where BeastCode is. You have any words of wisdom? Or here's what helped us jump into this market, because the market it's not exactly the most transparent and easy to just jump in. It's not like you're going to run Facebook ads and get the Air Force as a customer. It's probably not going to happen. Do you have any words of wisdom for aspiring technologists and startups to jump in and start participating? You've got to stick with it.

Speaker 3: 30:26

We had the one customer for probably four or five years. That was just one contract, maybe two contracts at a time. It wasn't until the last few years that we've had 30, 40, 50 active projects at any given time With the DoD. It's really steady, as she goes. You have to be able to show when you have to be able to do the things we talked about, like getting your software accredited and showing that you can work in all those different types of environments, and then people will come.

Speaker 3: 30:55

All of our stuff was word of mouth. We did a really good job working with one organization. As new opportunities came up, that program office would go talk to them and say, hey, we use Beastcore to solve these problems. You guys should be doing the same thing. They'd make that introduction for us. We've continued to have that paradigm and that seems to be the most successful for us. It's definitely steady, as she goes. There's going to be ups and downs, there's all kinds of talks about budgets and there'll be a continuing resolution. You've got to keep your head down and keep working, and it's going to work out.

Speaker 1: 31:25

The only thing I'll add to that is, like craft, the narrative of whatever problem you're trying to solve, such that you can port it from one application to another and be able to paint that story, because just something that I have found is not everyone is as capable of imagining one use case applied to a completely different use case. If you find that one win, that can be the catalyst you need for success, but you have to be able to translate it to other areas, to other projects that may not be a direct set, and to be able to still communicate how the win from the first one will further enable me to solve your problem, even though they're not exactly the same thing.

Speaker 2: 32:12

As wildly good advice. You need to be a translator for your customer. Don't make them do the work. You don't know. Your perfect customer might not be as creative or as imaginative as you about shoehorning. I think it could do this. It's really really good advice. Thank you, john. Guys, I really appreciate your time coming on the show. It's been great. Learned a little bit more about Beast Code, learned a little bit more about where the tech is going for digital twin and sensor technology. I'm really excited for the tech coming out this fiscal year the projects that I see friends doing. I hope it goes really well for you as well.

Speaker 3: 32:53

Yeah, it was great being on. It was good talking to you, kelly. It was a fun discussion.

Speaker 2: 32:56

Absolutely, this has been the Startup Defense.