The Startup Defense
The Startup Defense explores the intersection of commercial technology and defense innovation. Callye Keen (Kform) talks with expert guests about the latest needs and trends in the defense industry and how startup companies are driving innovation and change. From concept to field, The Startup Defense covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, mission computing, autonomous systems, and the manufacturing necessary to make technology real.
The Startup Defense
Silicon Valley Meets Defense, Strategic Collaboration, and Dual-Use with Andrew Glenn
What happens when Silicon Valley intersects with the defense industry? Host Callye Keen and guest Andrew Glenn set out to answer this question. Andrew's unique perspective on the evolving relationship between tech startups and the defense industry provides valuable insight into a sector that's paving the way for exciting collaborations and potential disruptors. The conversation blends robust experience with actionable insights, shedding light on the intricate landscape of defense innovation.
Topic Highlights:
00:00 - Introduction to Defense Startups
Callye and Andrew set the stage by discussing the defense startup landscape. They underline its importance and the role it plays in contemporary geopolitics.
08:12 - Defense's Unique Hurdles
The duo addresses the major obstacles that are unique to defense startups, emphasizing the importance of perseverance and strategic planning.
14:33 - The Dual-Use Dilemma
Andrew Glenn elaborates on the "dual use" approach, explaining the intertwined sales cycle, dedicated marketing channels, and crucial compliance factors.
18:05 - Crossing the Valley of Death
The notorious 'valley of death' is dissected by Callye, who portrays the strategies defense startups can utilize to traverse this perilous phase.
22:07 - The Illusion of Dual-Use Popularity
The appeal of dual use within the VC community is juxtaposed against the real-world complexities of its execution, underscoring the gap between perception and reality.
25:32 - Defense Department Dynamics
Callye delves into the potential of the Department of Defense as an inaugural customer, highlighting the opportunities startups can exploit within this vast establishment.
29:45 - The Aesop's Fable Analogy
Andrew's comparison to Aesop's Fable accentuates the risks of over-diversification. He suggests a deliberate approach when targeting multiple markets.
32:58 - Commercialization & Expansion
The dialogue revolves around the importance of broadening horizons. Defense startups are encouraged to look beyond the D.O.D.'s budget and seek wider commercial opportunities.
34:50 - Partnering Wisely
Choosing the right collaborators is pivotal. Callye emphasizes the benefits of allying with partners well-versed in emerging industries.
36:04 - Parting Thought:
"Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out alive. Yes, we do a really, really important and serious business, but it's crucial that we remain human too." - Andrew Glenn
Callye Keen - Kform
https://www.linkedin.com/in/callyekeen/
https://twitter.com/CallyeKeen
Andrew Glenn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewglenn161
https://andrewglenn.substack.com
Andrew Glenn is an operator, advisor, and consultant in the aerospace, defense, and venture capital industries, a retiring career military officer, and has previously served as the CEO of a privately-held company. Andrew helps set strategic guidance, build executable plans, secure financing, generate strategic partnerships, and provides steady, integrity-focused leadership. He has help a company go from $0 to $100M in revenue in a year and built defense-focused investment programs (thesis, playbook, et al) for two top-tier venture capital firms.
that we're seeing massive developments in technology, ai, the XR that you were talking about, all of these things that we've advanced so dramatically, so quickly in the past decade, and we overlay these things on top of each other and we realize that, as a country, that there are bad actors in the world that want to do bad things to us.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Startup Defense. My name is Callie Keen. Today I have Andrew Glenn. Andrew is a man of many talents, really robust background, leading innovation and energy Engineering on the military side and moving over into private capital and working with Futures Command. There's a lot of territory to cover here. Andrew, before we get started, I have so many questions for you. What are you passionate about right now?
Speaker 1:Oh, great question to start off with. I am really, really passionate about helping companies that want to do great things that improve our national security and the security global security really. So that is where my number one passion is at the moment is trying to help these startups that are doing great things in defense, in aerospace.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I always say that we have the best problems of any industry, so they're the best problems to solve, they're the biggest problems, they're the most critical version of that problem, whether it's AI or drones or now AR VR, whatever you want to call it, xr now, whatever that flavor that thing is, if you're working in gaming or you're working in social media or you're working with large language models, whatever that flavor of it is, come over to our side. The water's warm. We've got a lot of things happening Very interesting. I appreciate that you're working on that intersection. How have you seen that change in the recent, say, six months or six years?
Speaker 1:So let's rewind the clock by about five years. Let's use Google as an example. Five years ago, 2018, google was part of Project Mead, and after this, employees inside of Google essentially revolted. They had thousands that came out and said we don't want to be a part of Project Mead. Now, for those that might not be aware, project Mead was a program to take computer vision and apply it to the processing, exploitation and dissemination of drone footage, and these employees were concerned that, by being involved, their work would contribute to kinetic effects and the killing of people, and so they wanted nothing to do with it. So five years ago not very long we were in a position where nobody in tech wanted to touch defense.
Speaker 1:Fast forward to today and it is polar opposite, and I think that there's been a few things that have come about to cause that shift, and a lot of it. We can look at 2020 as being one of those critical years. So, historically, you have these once in a generation events that happen World War II, landing somebody on the moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9-11. Now, fast forward to 2020, you've got COVID. That's the first thing that hits, and we realize that we have massive issues in terms of the ability of the government and industry to meet demands that protect our people.
Speaker 1:The next year we have another once in a generation event with the January 6 riots at the Capitol.
Speaker 1:Last time somebody had really tried to disrupt the Capitol was, I think, in the 50s, with some Puerto Rican secessionists.
Speaker 1:But now we've got a major legitimized political group in America that is so dissatisfied that they are willing to take weapons into the Capitol.
Speaker 1:And then the next year we have yet another once in a generation event, which is the Russian War in Ukraine.
Speaker 1:And so we have all of these events that are happening in rapid succession at the same time that we're seeing massive developments in technology, ai, the XR that you were talking about, all of these things that we've advanced so dramatically, so quickly in the past decade. And we overlay these things on top of each other and we realize that as a country, that there are bad actors in the world that want to do bad things to us and we have certain tools that we can use to protect ourselves better. And for the first time since probably Fairchild Semiconductor, again in the 50s, 60s we see this alignment between industry and the Defense Department and it's fantastic to see and witness, like we were talking before the show. Suddenly defense is cool and it's a great space to be in, but these are, like you said, really really hard problems that need very thoughtful work to solve in the long term and not just today, not just chasing the bright, shiny object that is defense today, but making sure that we lay the groundwork over time to be successful in 5, 10, 20 years.
Speaker 2:It's interesting to see the narrative shift where there is this concern. I work with the US government there's going to be these kinetic effects, there's going to be people that will die as a result of my innovation. So I want to pull back. I don't want to touch anything that might be even related to the military. My argument that entire time was that by default, you are then providing that innovation to adversarial groups. That seemed like a very outlandish thing to say. It proved to be fairly accurate with the theft of intellectual property and its utilization by adversarial states, and so it kind of was like as much of an advocate for peace as I could possibly be, I realized that it doesn't actually have the end effect that I want. So I can talk about it as much as I'd like and say this is how I want the world to work, but the world doesn't work like that, didn't really play out like that, and so I might as well be on the side of controlling the use of my innovation and intellectual property versus giving it away. That has to be somewhere in that contributory mix, but really strange. I mean, I love Google and I have deep roots in Silicon Valley, tech and just tech in general and to talk to the same people that they're like yeah, that policy didn't really play out the way we thought it was going to play out. I love the example of the Fairchild Semiconductor because that's really what built Silicon Valley, and that whole desire of the government to jump in with industry, jump in with university and create that triple helix of innovation made it so. America is the number one center for innovation and particularly Silicon Valley is the locus of innovation for the entire world. I feel like it's time to loop back to that. I'm tracking what BMNT for hacking, for diplomacy, hacking for defenses doing to get students involved and some of the other programs to get universities involved, because I feel like that's the third pillar of that mix.
Speaker 2:We need all of our smart people in one bucket, understanding the problems, walking it towards. It's a long road to getting back there. You have a lot of perspective working in future command, working as an engineer and a director of engineering on the customer side, on the user side and then now on the capital side. So you have that overarching experience Kind of odd question about progression or like knowledge and understanding of needs.
Speaker 2:It doesn't seem to be that we lack smart people or that we lack the ability to execute on smart ideas. We don't Very easy to argue that we don't have an innovation problem. We have lots of innovation. I would agree that we actually have too many ideas, and even in the market, even in the defense market, we're probably developing the same idea multiple times, if anything. So I do think we should have kind of just said zero, because the different things that's been coming to us during the pandemic, it seems like we have an implementation issue. I can go to an event and speak right to a command, show what you can do with open source product or like what teenagers are doing, and with arduino, and show somebody and it's like wow, wish I had that wish. You know, there's a company that's already doing this is really cool, but there's a huge golf between hey, this thing exists and we need, of course, a better version of this, more application focus, but like, how can I use this next year? That might not even be possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, you're hitting on something really, really important there, which is how do we expedite this whole process? Because the government works on multi-year Programs through the fight at the future years defense program to plan and budget against what we think we're gonna need in the future. But that isn't realistic with the speed that innovation happens and that the advancements in the technology Are going through. And so how do we then reconciling and I think we've made some progress with the application of cybers and sitters through other transaction authorities and some of these other non farm contracting Based methods that we have? But is it sufficient? In the answers, no, of course it's not. We need to do a better job in terms of defining the requirements quickly, developing the capabilities rapidly and then going out and using commercial off the shelf solutions to then prototype or to iterate off of to come up with the actual solutions that we need long term. And we can do it.
Speaker 1:But again, I think on the government side that we can do a better job of accelerating the process that we go through for defining requirements, right. So? So, right now, the the jayce's, the joy capability integration development system, jayce's is, I think, scheduled to take 180 days, so we say that it's only gonna take us 180 days to get a validated requirement. That's actually garbage, because there's a lot of front end work that's happening before the clock starts taking. The clock starts when the first general officer takes a look at it and says, yeah, I think this is interesting In an entry gate for me, and then it goes into the mid at 180 days. And no, by the way, we're still not hitting that hundred eighty days. More often than not it's taking up to a year, plus all of that front end work.
Speaker 1:So how do we accelerate all of that? And that requirements process is Deliver it for a reason. But there are some efficiencies that I think we should be looking for, an identifying try to find, so that we can accelerate that up to better match with the speed of innovation. That would go a long way. And then we're still not seeing maximum use of OTA's, those other transactional authorities, and I think we could, we could see some improvement there. I'm not a contracting guide by background or acquisitions guy. I don't want to get too deep into that conversation cuz I'll get out of my death very quickly but I do believe that we have some room for improvement there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just see it from the startup side working with somebody, and course it's SBIR season right now, so I spent all morning reading people's submissions, connecting them with pay. Here's an advisor. You know that's what we've been doing for the past couple weeks. Right, it's great. They're gonna get 180 or 250, depends on who they're working with.
Speaker 2:We talk about this valley of death over and over again in capital and whether we should go bootstrap or we should get venture funding venture back, and you look at the SBIR process and it looks like a bootstrapping process. But what people don't realize is there might be a year between their face on their face to, and if they're a small team, they spend a lot of time managing that 250k that they've gotten or they built something so they've actually spent the money. There's not like they get free money and it's that gap in between. It just kills a lot of the commercialization process because between phase two and phase three or even building, getting paid with an OTA to build a prototype and then going to program of record, that could take three years. If you're a small company, it's kinda hard to float that space.
Speaker 2:I do like that there's more acquisition vehicles or other strategies, but I just see it like this. Ideally, we want to bootstrap. I think if we have a really great opportunity, people should look at funding. It is rocket fuel, right if you need to move faster and eat, to buy things and hire and it's really the only method that you're gonna have. But if I have to compete against lock e and I mentioned them a lot on the show because they're the big dog not- because I hate Lockheed.
Speaker 2:We've done lots of great projects. I have friends at Lockheed right and it's like everybody knows what I'm talking about. They can afford to wait the three years to get a program of record. We can't, and so we've got to figure out a different strategy to go. And I was reading on your sub-stack about roll-ups so I kind of wanted to just get your take on teaming consortia roll-ups. It's kind of a more collaborative approach to getting that program of record or going after business. How does that relate to maybe staying alive?
Speaker 1:Awesome question, and my thoughts on how to stay alive for a small business in defense have matured a lot in the past year, and the outlook for long-term exits and how they can disrupt the industry overall has matured as well.
Speaker 1:So a year ago I thought we will see some new primes coming out of tech, and maybe we will.
Speaker 1:I hope we do. Then I started thinking well, how do we actually get to that point? And that's where this idea of the roll-ups came is well, you need something that's large enough to actually start pulling some of the business away from the existing primes, start funneling off and chilling off some of that cash so that their relative strength to these other companies kind of gets a little bit more equal. And once we start equalizing the play and field that way, well now the bar to entry gets a little bit lower for everybody else too, all these subsequent companies that would come along. And I said well, what if we did a roll-up in the aerospace and defense industry that, through acquisition as a strategy, is able to grow strong enough that they can then survive? And I think there's still something to that, and there are plenty of private equity firms out there that are executing that. You see it, with some of these private companies and public companies, raytheon has grown through acquisition, l3 has as well, so we're seeing these companies doing that.
Speaker 2:It seems like Andrewle is pursuing a flavor of that strategy at their size to try to grow as rapidly as possible because they have in the investment capital. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, let's remember, andrewle raised their series less than a year ago and now we're seeing the deployment of that capital through some of these acquisitions. They cranked it up. I think they've done three in the past six months, which is great for them, and I think that Andrewle stands a really good chance of being one of those disruptive primes in the future. But the other thing that has really gotten me thinking is this idea of strategic partnerships that we kind of hit on too of.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe what we're really seeing is the outsourcing of innovation from the primes, who are unwilling or unable to invest in innovative concepts because they have to answer to their shareholders in a way that a private company doesn't, and so it's a lot harder for them to justify R&D money when the government isn't asking for specific R&D. So now you've got these small startups that are executing R&D essentially and then they can create a strategic partnership with the prime or, at some point in time, get acquired by the prime. And while it doesn't scratch my itch for disrupting the primes and creating this really new ecosystem of having a lot more companies doing an equal amount, but it is still a way that we can get innovation from these great companies that are doing a lot through the primes to the government. So I think you're right that the strategic partnerships and roll-ups are part of that solution long term for these private companies.
Speaker 2:And the primes. The disproportion advantage that they offer is that they understand how to provide all the support and the training and the deep flow and all the extras that are around delivering innovation and supporting it long term. So that's why they're able to get the programs, whereas, like me, I make secure compute, you know, secure data, transport products Like it's like. Here's the thing, you know, that's it. I'm never going to be able to compete against them. Yeah, if we look at it from a teaming approach and say, what am I actually trying to do? Trying to make a C2 system for XYZ. So I need what? Do I need? Software? I need some. I need to be able to pull in this. I need to be able to visualize this like this who does this well? And start to look and map it out.
Speaker 2:Then I'm competing on a system of systems level, and that's really where people like Lockheed and Raytheon Shine. You know they are supporting basic acquisition for groups, but really they're doing that as a service. That's not their products, right? They sell an entire system. Turning on it works. It's a radar system, it's a guidance system, it's not like a screen. And that's where it's really hard, because the systems are complex and small businesses are unable to deliver that complex of solutions by themselves. So teaming is really the only way that I know of to come in, you know, as a group, and say I've got five, six companies, look at this best of breed solution, what do you like about this, what do you not like about it?
Speaker 1:And so then, I think one of the challenges for the community in general is to highlight these companies in a way that gets them in front of the primes and the right people at the primes because these are massive organizations, 10,000 people, right, so you can be talking to somebody and it might not be the right person that can actually use that technology but highlighting that and showcasing it in a way that when the prime does go to bid on a contract, it can say oh, by the way, remember X, y company or Z company, let's go to them and submit out to them and have them be part of the solution.
Speaker 2:The industry doesn't put a lot of effort towards like intervendor matchmaking and in tech you see this all the time is, if I'm a hardware provider, I'm looking for the best software to put it on. I'm looking for the best data center to deploy it, the best services company to service it, the best MEPs company to design the architecture. I'm not trying to do all those things myself. I'm trying to offer all of those things together. This is a very common strategy for large businesses in the mortals category, right, the small to medium business category. It's not invented here a lot of times and in defense, we're already siloed enough. So there's a really interesting perspective of that. We actively I mean, obviously I have this podcast, right, so we actually go out and talk to people like yourself or other small businesses startups try to do this.
Speaker 1:but it's not really that common, it's not common and, like I said, my ideas are maturing all the time on this, and so it was only in that conversation that I said well, maybe this is what we need to be doing. It's not common and I think it's affected great. I've seen it with some of the companies that I've been working with that the more that I help make those introductions, the more fruitful they are. And there's kind of that network effect, which is when a company goes out and picks its advisors, it's often looking at these senior general or flag officers who have been around the Beltway, have been around the Pentagon and oh, by the way, they also know a lot of these primes because now they've got the ability to tap into that network to actually get showcased. So I think it is happening, perhaps not deliberately, and maybe that's somewhere somebody listening to the podcast will have a great idea of saying, hey, let me start a company that's going to focus on these connections or start an event to showcase startups.
Speaker 2:And the example that I give people is I might have peanut butter, you might have chocolate. They're both very viable products in and of themselves, but you combine them and then you have a whole candy aisle. Half the candy aisle are just those two ingredients. Right, that's right. Lots of different variations of it, and add one more little ingredient. You've got another hundred set of products. So the peanut butter and chocolate strategy of software hardware or AI plus data or whatever sensor systems plus data ingestion, it's a multiplicative effect versus an additive effect.
Speaker 1:Well, I was going to say that I think the other ingredient that has to be there is trust, and that takes time and effort to build, and part of the reason that the crimes are able to really win a lot of these contracts is because the government knows that they have the ability to actually deliver. And so, while we see a solution that comes along that might be better, the trust matters, and so these partnerships will take time to create and a lot of touch points, but I do think that trust becomes an essential ingredient, along with the chocolate and peanut butter.
Speaker 2:This is interesting. Do you think that expediency of need overrides or lowers the trust barrier? Because I see what's happening in Ukraine and there's a lot of capability being deployed that I don't think that we would deploy a year ago or two years ago, just because there's a new need and it's like here's the thing, we need a drone, slap a sensor on it, let's try it, we'll do a demo, we're going to do it live.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really great point. Was it Edison that said necessity is the mother of invention? Maybe we need a corollary, the Cali corollary, that necessity is also the mother of adoption, because I think you're right. And the other aspect there is that there's a moral hazard. We can apply these systems knowing that the negative if something goes wrong, if the trust isn't there and everything falls apart, it's not going to have as adverse of effect on us as it will on somebody else, and so meaning that that goes into that calculation too.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the looming specter, the budget thing and I'm not talking about not passing a budget. We could talk about that, I'd rather not. What I'd like to talk about is so we hit on trust, and I understand large organizations are. They're sustain missions right. Companies get big because they're stable and that's why you don't see as much innovation. You see outsourcing of innovation from the primes, from military, from any big business. They have to coordinate off, put guardrails around it, purchase it, acquire it, accu-hire it, whatever you want to think.
Speaker 2:If we look at how much the DOD and IC in general trusts innovation, we can put a metric on it of actual budget, like what do they spend of the actual, say, budget that's not going towards people's pay, their pensions, healthcare, the actual. I can choose what I spend my money on capability, capacity-wise. I can add up all of this small business spend. I can add up all of the startup spend, which is a fraction of the small business spend, and I can say this is what you're spending on this directive. There's a lot of push hey, we want more of this.
Speaker 2:But raw numbers and it has massively increased since 2015, 2016. Massive increase, I think, with DIU and the other programs and the utilization of OTAs and the assistance that everyone provides. We're like 100X, where we were 10 years ago, but from a raw number standpoint, the trust isn't there. The trust in innovation from that sector to me is it's not quantifiably there. The qualitative metrics have gone up significantly, but the quantitative metrics of, like how many billions of dollars are spent on startup and small business innovation, what's the budget? A lot of the cases, up until just now, the budget was $0.
Speaker 1:That's really an interesting way of looking at that. I guess I'm a little floored here trying to think of how I would even respond to that. Interestingly, though, I think one of the things that we can look at as we try to quantify that is what is being spent on procurement or P1 dollars versus what's going into the R1 dollars, the RDT&E. Is that difference growing or contracting?
Speaker 1:I know a couple of guys, not even sure, who kind of looked at it earlier this year and said, hey, look, it's been contracting, we're spending more on RDT&E than we used to relative to procurement.
Speaker 1:But I've also seen projections that show, well, yeah, we did that for a while as we were coming out of some of these wars and we were ramping up, saying, hey, we need to get focused on 2030 or beyond. We invested more on the RDT&E, and now it's kind of opening back up because now we are saying, hey, me, do we? Either A, we have the solutions, we know what we need, so we don't need to keep iterating on the research and development, or we're outsourcing that R&D to somebody else and hopefully it's more of a second. But I do see a lot of documents still coming through for new requirements, so I know that we're still looking for solutions. We don't have all the solutions we need for 2030, at least on the Army side, that gap growing could be a positive indicator of, hey, we are starting to trust industry a little bit more to develop and test some of these solutions for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just a big question that I get pushed back from startups is portion of what we're doing is saying, hey, do you sell to the US government right now or do you sell to DoD? I see almost every startup says no. It's like no, I can help you do that. What is that going to look like? Let's walk down this road, have this conversation about becoming a dual use company. Usually, it's a very easy conversation to have. There's a question of like okay, well, what's the spend look like? How do we get and what does this market look like? Is it worth for a startup that's gotten $200 million of investment and they're working in the automotive industry? Is it worth my time to then just jump in and work with the Army or work with the Air Force? For me as a tech geek, I think using that technology and bringing it to our customers and our partners is awesome. So I'm like oh, I'm really excited about this thing.
Speaker 2:Even with the list of startups that have recently obtained investment that are dual use, it's really hard.
Speaker 2:There's no policy or chart or anything that I can give to people that are in commercial tech and say like, look, here's all this spending that's going right to companies like you, and this is increasing and there's a lot of cut and paste activity that has to happen to attract people and it's not quite as clear. I like what the Army has with 2030 and other programs to go out and be able to demo solutions. So if I'm a company, I can just go to a demo and show everybody hey, you said this is what you want, is this what you want? It's pretty porous now and to have the need statements out there, but when they want to take this and go to their board, there's not the government coming out and saying, hey, we're in AI, sensor data, fusion. We are going to spend X billion dollars and we have 500 million to just blow on innovation. We want to see ideas. We're going to spend 100 million or 10 million. It's interesting. I think we're getting there, but it's hard to make that argument for people. It is.
Speaker 1:I don't want to defend the government on this one because I think there are ways of doing it. The major response to come out of the government on that is going to be something along the lines of a lot of this. What we're looking at is still classified in terms of the use cases and how we would use this technology. We don't want to tip our hand to adversarial nations of what we're trying to do, but we can still give some pretty broad overviews we try through the BAAs coming out of the research laboratories or DARPA or things like that. I think you're right that we could be doing a better job. I want to ask you a question now, because you hit on something which was dual use. I'm curious if you think that dual use is as in vogue today as it was a year ago and how that has changed.
Speaker 2:It's a complicated question to unpack. I think that it is a buzzword in some ways, similarly to the obsession of adoption with 5G or current obsession with AI. This is just another iteration of something that's been around for a while. You see, really people pushing dual use hard. The big credibility point to dual use is that it helps me be able to travel across the valley of death, or the actual multiple different valleys of death that you're going to experience as a defense startup, because it's not between like Sivir 1 and Sivir 2. There's constantly these gaps between going from one side to the other. My company we started as a machine shop. We're a manufacturing company. We do lots of other stuff other than our big innovation initiatives. We're crossing the valley of death because we're doing multiple different things. We also have multiple lines of business. If you're a startup, you have one thing that you're doing. You don't have it. Dual use. The concept of this is that now I can have a commercial arm that's selling and I can fill in the gaps. The problem with this is that that's a completely different sales team. Sales cycle is different, the marketing is different, the channels are different, your advisors are going to be different, the structure of your business. The cybersecurity is going to be different. The compliance is different.
Speaker 2:I think it's an easy term for people to slap onto a company. It's very difficult to actually execute on. Yes, it's become more and more popular, particularly in the VC community. I totally understand why it makes a robust business. We're kind of like, hey, I think defense then. This is total personal opinion, but it's also based on how I can help people versus someone else. This is just backed by. This is the resources that I have and say I think that government use, dod use, ic use he is a great first customer.
Speaker 2:I think it's an amazing place to go talk to people. It's an amazing place to get real need statements out of people, to get the funding to develop your idea. But you should be evolving where maybe that's your secondary line of business. If you need to build a graph of like, we're going to build this and we're going to deliver it to this high value customer first, but what's our volume or scale customer or is that something we don't want to do? There isn't enough talk about that transition. Is that if I want to be a dual use company, I need to be evolving, and when is the good time to start evolving my commercial sales, or the light version of my product, or the not secret version of my product. It is Very necessary to have those conversations and, because it's really popular right now, people aren't having them. I think they're leading people down a road which exacerbates the Valley of Deaths instead of solving it.
Speaker 1:I think you are a hundred percent correct that the work has to go into identifying a Realistic go-to-market strategy that that can capture that dual use, and I don't think people do that. I think they just say, hey, we're gonna sell a little bit on the side and enter the government at the same time, and everything will be good, because that will kind of Provide us enough capitalization that we can get over that, that Valley of Death. What I'm saying is that I am reassured to hear you Say the kind of the same thing, that that people need to have these conversations and be very deliberate in terms of how they go about building the plans and strategies that they will execute on if they want to try and diversify, because too often it becomes a distraction trying to do both, and it goes back to that asops fable, the Donkey and the guy and his kid, and eventually they all fall into the water because you're trying to please everybody and you can't get it right because you're doing too much.
Speaker 2:So I think you're right, though, that you can do it as long as you are smart about how you implement and go about building this plan and my biggest advice for people is and again Take this with a grain of salt, because this is again how I help people is is find a channel partner. So we use a channel partner for commercial business, because I don't want to be involved in commercial business at all. Sell to most of the top tech companies that you can. You can rattle off, but that's not really something that I understand deeply. It's Operates very differently. Like I don't go to their place, whereas in defense, like I'm at their location talking to them every single week.
Speaker 2:So I kind of understand that space pretty well. It's what I've done my whole life. Conversely, that's what I would advise is go find a, go find a business development group, go find an advisor or mentor or sales partner that understands that a new industry or space and work with them. Test and try it, taste it. If you feel like you could do it yourself, do it yourself, bring it in-house.
Speaker 1:But like it's very difficult to just build up the whole sales team and like all BD team and like an engineering team that understands like a whole different world, spend all that money and then get like one sale after three years, you know, and at the end of the day, most Technology companies, or most companies in general that are selling to defense, will needs to have a Commercialization plan that goes beyond right, because while the Defense Department has a budget annual budget this year, I think what 830 or around 830 billion dollars for 2024 was actually getting spent out of that on Technologies is only one little slice, and so the market availability within the defense is is limited as a great place to get some Traction early on, quickly, but unless you are building munitions or something that is strictly Defense, then you want some sort of commercialization that goes beyond it at some point of time.
Speaker 1:So you continue to grow and again, I just think that you know, as long as in this a company is, martin their approach to it and and deliberate that they can be successful doing it as a dual use strategy early on. However, a lot of them I don't see them actually doing that, so just kind of have tended to caution them against trying to adopt dual use to early and it's been great having you on Andrew.
Speaker 2:I think we could extend that conversation, probably privately, a lot longer, but it's nice to see your perspective because again, you do have that perspective from engineering on the customer side, on the user side, so ingesting innovation and technology, and then that advice on the Capital side and on the market side, so like what's what's wise to bet on and what's wise to go after it because we need it right. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show and they sure that was yep.
Speaker 1:I appreciate the opportunity to talk and hopefully we'll get to do it again sometime.
Speaker 2:How can everyone follow with you or if they're interested in something that you talked about, this linkedin a good place, or Leifton?
Speaker 1:is is probably the best place, so that would be linkedincom. The forward slash in forward slash, andrew Glenn 6 1 or sub stack is the other one building our defense on sub stack and that's Andrew Glenn sub stack. Comm.
Speaker 2:Great, we'll put both of those links in the description for everybody. A little quick aside. You know, on your sub stack you've got some great memes. So Like, yeah, thank you for bringing a human touch and a little bit of levity to our industry, because we work on very serious topics but in general, like you know, we're normal people too, so it's great.
Speaker 1:I'll throw in an old band wilder quote, right like don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out a lot. Yeah, we do a really, really important and serious business and and it's important that we know we remain human too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. It's more fun to work with fun people, even when you're doing something is super serious, so I appreciate that, but it, yeah, everyone should check out what Andrew is up to, because it's many things and a lot of things that we just didn't cover, is we don't have For out. We're not Joe Rogan, we can't talk all day long. So, alright, thank you Andrew, thanks Kelly, appreciate it. This has been the startup defense. Thank you you.
