The Startup Defense

Reindustrializing America, Democratize the Air, and Firestorm Labs with Dan Magy

• Callye Keen • Season 1 • Episode 43

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In this episode of The Startup Defense, Callye Keen sits down with Dan Magy, exited founder and CEO of Firestorm, to explore the future of UAVs, the reindustrialization of America, and the challenges of defense innovation. They dive into the evolving role of drones in modern warfare, the barriers faced by smaller defense companies, and how Firestorm is revolutionizing manufacturing at scale for defense technologies.

Topics Discussed:

[0:00] Introducing Dan Magy
Callye introduces Dan Magy, discussing his background in drones and counter-UAV technologies.

[0:55] The Changing Face of Warfare
Dan highlights how modern warfare and drone use have drastically evolved, with drones now serving as critical tools on the battlefield.

[3:34] Reindustrializing America
They explore how companies like Firestorm are helping to drive the reindustrialization of the U.S. through innovative, in-field manufacturing solutions.

[7:10] Challenges in U.S. Drone Manufacturing
Dan talks about the high cost, long lead times, and inefficiencies in current defense manufacturing, contrasting it with Firestorm’s agile approach.

[11:25] Risk and Innovation in Defense
The conversation turns to how the Department of Defense is risk-averse and the hurdles small companies face in getting contracts and scaling innovations.

Key Takeaways:

  • The Future of UAVs is About Resupply - Dan emphasizes that the real challenge in drone warfare is resupplying at scale, which Firestorm addresses through in-field manufacturing capabilities.
  • Small Businesses Drive Defense Innovation - Unlike traditional defense contractors, smaller startups like Firestorm are more agile and take risks to develop cost-effective solutions quickly.
  • The U.S. Faces a Manufacturing Gap - There’s an urgent need to reinvigorate America’s manufacturing capabilities to meet the demand for defense technologies, a gap Firestorm is helping to fill.

Quotes:

  • "Drones today are essentially flying IEDs, and we need to rethink how we build, supply, and use them." – Dan Magy
  • "Resupply and in-field manufacturing are critical to making UAVs truly attritable in modern warfare." – Callye Keen

About Guest:

Dan Magy is the CEO of Firestorm, a company focused on developing multi-mission drones and revolutionizing defense manufacturing through 3D printing. With a background in both destroying and manufacturing UAVs, Dan brings a unique perspective to the challenges of defense technology and risk management. Learn more about Firestorm at Firestorm.

Resources Mentioned:

Callye Keen:

Welcome to the Startup Defense. My name is Callie Keene. Today I have Dan Magee. Dan is a exited founder. He's been in and around the drone UAV space on the destroying them side and on the manufacturing them side. Today we're gonna get into risk. We're gonna talk about the industrial or re-industrial revolution of the US and we're gonna talk about yeah, we're gonna talk about drones. So how's it going, dan?

Dan Magy:

Good man. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and talk everything that's working and not working with drones and DoD How's that?

Callye Keen:

I love it. You're really passionate about this topic and I always start the conversation with what are you passionate about today? I'm going to guess that it's something around making drones or about fielding that capability. But what are you passionate about right now?

Dan Magy:

I'm really passionate about the US and the West realizing that the world is changing and that the way in which we have conducted battles for 100 years is changing, and that if we don't catch up and start adjusting how we procure, use and build these systems because they're literally flying IEDs we're in for a world of hurt over the next 10 to 15 years. And so my passion is I'm a taxpayer, america has been incredibly good to my family and I truly believe this is the best place in the world to build a business, and so I'm trying to harness all of those things paying reasonable prices, loving the place that you grew up and building a business and letting the market decide into something that will help us have the Western norms and values that we really cherish and love still kind of be the cherished norms and values that the world looks to over the next 100 years may be just because of my background, but when I hear you talk about that, I think about entrepreneurship growing up in an entrepreneur family.

Callye Keen:

I think of manufacturing, I think of making things, actually having an idea, turning it into a product, turning that product into a business and having that business create an impact for something that I care about. To me, that's the virtuous cycle of America is then creating that wealth, creating that impact and then helping other people do that same thing. We've gotten into a place where it's very difficult to make things, certainly at a scale to compete. Now you're in that drone market and it's just absolutely apparent. I use DJI as an example because when I look at these programs, they're like we're going to create UAVs at scale. I'm like well, the scale is pretty astounding. So scale means, relative to the market, a volume.

Callye Keen:

Well, you have China making millions and millions of these. So let's not say to scale, but let's get started here, because I think the scale ship has sailed and we have a long way to go. But I do like what you're doing with Firestorm's ability to manufacture in situ. I do like the conversation around learning how to make things and build things, that I think we're broader a group of us are more broadly having. But how does that all kind of play in together, the reindustrialization of America, and how does Firestorm play into that narrative?

Dan Magy:

So let me just tell you a little bit about our genesis, because I think that kind of if you understand what we saw and then what our Northern, like our North Star is as a company, it'll help kind of answer, hopefully, how we want to do our part in re-industrializing defense space. So I found myself in defense tech by accident. In 2016. We started a counter uas company for stadiums and naval special warfare, found it and took it to iraq when using DJI drones to basically use it for artillery spotting and then also to drop bombs or even to kamikaze into troops, and they were able to use this COTS technology quite effectively to the point where DoD went to the primes, couldn't find a solution and then started Googling startups that were working on solutions that could maybe help them solve this problem, and so I watched firsthand how COTS technologies could be a massive game changer. There were a lot of near misses where really important people on our side soft commanders having their cars blown up by drones. It was not quite at the scale of what we see in Ukraine, where 3,000 to 5,000 drones are used every single day, if you believe the numbers, and yet it was very influential in me thinking about what does the future of warfare look like? And this was 10 years ago.

Dan Magy:

So when Citadel got acquired, I told my wife I wouldn't work for six months and I lasted like five or six weeks. We thought of this idea, me and Ian and Chad. Originally. It was like God. If you could build a low-cost cruise missile to knock out all 40,000 of those Russian armored vehicles that were stuck in the mud in northern Ukraine in the first week of the invasion, you'd change the world. You'd basically have a smaller country, would beat up a hegemonic neighbor using asymmetrical technologies and they just didn't have the drones yet. If that was today, the war would be over in legitimately six hours. They would blow everything up with those FPVs.

Dan Magy:

But I saw that and then I started looking at who's building multi-mission drones. The answer is not a lot of people. How expensive are they? The answer is they are unbelievably expensive. And then I looked at the timeframes and I talked to people in the DoD and I learned most of these companies were 12 to 18 months behind on deliveries. So it's expensive. Okay, it can only do one job and it takes a year to deliver the product. That was mind boggling to me, and a lot of these products and a lot of these companies have received massive government subsidies to even get to that point.

Dan Magy:

And so, having a co-founder, Ian, who is an additive manufacturing genius, we started saying look, we can build a multi-mission drone. 3d printing right, which is a broad term has improved tremendously, and so there's stuff out there that's commercially available we could use and deploy to basically build an elastically scalable manufacturing approach for our airframe. Great, First part of the problem solved. Then the next part was well, how are you going to make it interoperable? How are you going to have it work together? So we started doing integrations and we learned that there are a couple things and some of it is proprietary that are not commercially available out there but that we've solved through building 25 to 50 different integrations over the last 18 to 12 months and that we needed a software layer to kind of string all that together. Months, and that we needed a software layer to kind of string all that together.

Dan Magy:

And then the third phase of this was we have gotten the idea of a trittable across the DoD and across the industrial base completely wrong. It's not about cost, it's about resupply, and so we decided to put our manufacturing lines in a box and we've spent millions of dollars building that, and they're starting to roll off the line right now, which is really exciting, because the whole idea is this Callie, if I give you 10 DJI drones and you are stuck on an island, are those attributable platforms? No, they're not. They're exquisite.

Callye Keen:

We talk about this all the time. Yeah, in some conflicts the average life expectancy of a drone was under an hour, so approximately one and a half missions. They were destroyed right and so they're throwaway by the nature of the product. So they either have to be incredibly inexpensive or easy to repair. And given supply chain complexities or problems especially if you're talking about island-to-island logistics or you're talking about island-to-island logistics or you're talking about inter-country logistics resupply is difficult, right? So we think attributable to me means resupplying yourself. So having the ability to repair them in field makes a ton of sense. But that goes back to the.

Callye Keen:

We are not a nation of makers. We identify as this 1970s ideal of the big manufacturer and America's great at manufacturing certain things. But in general the average person can't fix something in their house or probably couldn't build an Arduino project. We sponsor a couple of robotics teams. It's amazing what a 12-year-old, 13-year-old, 15-year-old can do Unbelievable. But in my mind, if we had tracked kind of the skillset of the 70s and future, pace it to now, every kid would kind of know a little bit about how things work and how things are made. We're just not there right now, but we're fighting forces where that is the case and that's the truth right.

Dan Magy:

Yeah, the global manufacturing kind of hub and let's say the supply chains that support that hub, which is southern China. It's been built and streamlined over the last 20 to 30 years and you're seeing a bunch of that start to leave one because of COVID, two because of what happened in Hong Kong and three, I'd say, just kind of because of general policy of using trade as a weapon.

Dan Magy:

But it's not a parody, parody, and it won't be for a while. What the US does have is it has a sense of can-do mentality. We have a subculture where there are folks that love this type of stuff. I have a number of like let's call it UAV gurus who've been building planes for 20 to 30 years. They're on our team why? Because you can learn from people who've built hundreds of different planes and be modifying your design along the way to understand, like kind of the no shit how things will work outside of. Just like you know the product decisions we're making with like more of the operators, right, like you need to have the operators and you need to have the guys who've actually built and flown a lot of planes, and when you put them together you get a really cool product, which is what we're building.

Dan Magy:

But yes, our factory is 15,000 square feet, okay, and it's not loud. It's not an industrial Detroit from the 1970s line where this car is coming down and early dudes are like riveting shit on it. Like that's not how modern manufacturing works and what we found from customers when we bring them in here and we show them like a mobile print lab and then a fixed print lab in the same building. They're like I thought it'd be a lot louder. I'm like, no, it doesn't need to be loud, like we've simplified how the things are assembled, we've simplified how the things are manufactured, and then you have to try and use a commonality of parts and software so that the different sized vehicles you build can kind of all come out of the same machine. That's our goal and we're on our way to doing that, but a lot of it is. You got to talk to people in the field, you got to understand what the problems are, you got to build towards the requirements that exist today, but you've got to show people the light at the end of the tunnel for what manufacturing can be, especially given what you just said earlier, that the average lifespan on some of these drones is one flight.

Dan Magy:

Russian Telegram is full of complaints right now because of how successful the Ukrainian air wardens have become, where they basically will see the observation drones and then they send up these guys and run into them and intercept them or get close enough to detonate a charge. But they're saying that the old lifespan was like six months and now it's literally like one or two missions, and so that is the new normal and we are not going to be able to fight a war if we're building dozens of platforms a month. We need to be in the hundreds or thousands of platforms a month and it is possible and it can be done cheaper than how we're doing it right now. But it's up to people in the DOD and they are there who want to make a change to not just push the easy button and give the contract to a big company right. Small companies buy down risk.

Dan Magy:

That's my belief. We proved it on the counter UAS side, where we outperformed all of the primes full stop with a team of like 22 people. It's, you know, the counter UAS company. You know that I founded is SOCOM program record. I meet people every couple of weeks who tell me it saves their lives in various parts of the world. We can do the same thing on the drone side. We can do the same thing for air, land and sea, but the government needs to start taking risks. That's what it comes down to.

Callye Keen:

Well, let's talk about risk. This is always a really interesting conversation because this is one of the places where dual use, or transferring technology over, has a hard time. The startup mentality, or just more broadly, an entrepreneur mentality, is transforming risk into reward, where in DOD and government at large there is a fascination and there's no penalty for saying no. So bringing up risks is rewarded, is a favored activity, whereas taking risks is very often not rewarded, right? So the joke growing up would be you know, nobody got fired for picking Lockheed Martin, which was kind of a play on. We used to say that about IBM, which kind of proves the point is, how many IBM computers do you have at Firestorm, right?

Dan Magy:

I got about 100 of them.

Callye Keen:

You know. So it's like you know. So Just kidding, but you know what I mean, as over time, the market changes anyways. But my point being you have a culture that is not just risk adverse but incentivized to find risks and slow things down. Where a startup's job is to get money, buy down, risk move really quickly, and so there's a kind of a buttheads moment pretty commonly. But that gets us in this situation where you knew in 2016, hey, we should be making a hell of a lot more drones. Everyone knew this, everyone knew it. Who saw their kid's drone 10 years ago thought that this would be really cool if I could strap a camera to it. This drone is 200 bucks or 300 bucks. It was so apparent that a lot of people didn't even want to get into the market because there's so many people playing in it, it's so obvious. But then in DoD it was still too risky. So your perspective as an insider on this is like it just seems wild to me.

Dan Magy:

I think what you've got to do I mean it's kind of formulaic, right. What we've found there are people who will take risks and who realize that there's a better way out there. You have to find them For sure. So you know, year one was hundreds of phone calls. So go to market and defense is the hardest thing, because the best product doesn't always win. And I have some thoughts on how we should be framing that to folks in the government and the problems we are going to run into if we don't reframe the best product winning. I'll talk about that in a second.

Dan Magy:

But you got to go find some gold star customers, some folks who will pick up the phone when other people call and they're important folks, right. And they're like yeah, we like it. Why do you like it? Well, it's pretty good, and guess what it. And they're like yeah, we like it. Why do you like it? Well, it's pretty good, and guess what? It gets better every week.

Dan Magy:

So it's not like I have to pay them $12 million to go make a design change, because that's what startups do. Is we actually spend money on R&D? Big companies don't anymore, because you're penalized in the public markets for doing that. It's just much easier to acquire companies or to raise money to acquire companies than to actually do the R&D internally. And don't believe me, go look at how many Fortune 500 companies spend money on R&D Pretty small. But I think the other part of it really is, if you think about what is required to get over the valley of death, it's not just the customer who will buy a couple million dollars of something, it's how do you go build it into a program and so that's where appropriations are really important for small companies.

Dan Magy:

Big companies do it all the time, and that's something that you have to learn to play the game. And so we've learned to play the game the hard way at the last one, and we've come out of the gates really quick on this one to play that game, because we know that, again, the best product doesn't always win. And so your job as a company and your job as a CEO is to keep the company alive by any means necessary. And so getting customers, getting money programmed in, raising more money to then grow your team to meet those customers that's crucial. And then the final part of it.

Dan Magy:

What we found, too, is sometimes you have to go sell overseas first, while you're building the coalition of the willing domestically to then have the DoD make some fundamental changes in how it thinks about doing things or buying things, and so that's kind of the holy trinity. That's how I think about it it's gold star customers, it's appropriations, and it's selling overseas. It's gold star customers, it's appropriations and it's selling overseas. That's how you survive long enough to then go build your business into something that's big and valuable.

Callye Keen:

I mean, it's great advice because you're on your second, third round of doing this, so can you break down a little bit more insights?

Callye Keen:

I think I heard you on another platform talk about BD and building that BD team, and this is something that people mess up pretty continually because they'll find somebody who looks fancy, that has a great paper background, maybe they have one of the top consulting backgrounds or they came out of a big company or they had a really great DoD position and they spend a lot of money on getting let's call them faces building and understanding who they should get on that team, especially when you can only pick one or you can pick two people to be on your team is very difficult. And then setting them loose on who should they actually talk to? Should they just go to SOCOM and start cold calling? Or? We love working with SOCOM, we work with a lot of tangential groups, labs, things like that, but we've also been doing this for 20, 25 years, so it's not really you know like they know who you are, yeah yeah, but it's also different for every kind of business.

Callye Keen:

There's not just like oh, make sure that you hire somebody that had this role. They have to have that role, understand what you're doing and you've done it in related, but you've done it multiple times. So I'd love to hear your insights. For my own selfish reasons, but because that's what this podcast is about how do you find those people that can open those doors and get those conversations going for you?

Dan Magy:

Yeah, I think one of my greatest strengths is also one of my greatest weaknesses. Like, I always have phone calls. I'm on the phone all day long. I want to meet people, I love meeting people, I like hearing what they're working on, and my brain naturally is built like a Rolodex. Now I'm really dating myself Maybe. How about an iPhone contact book? But in my brain I usually can remember what people do for work, where they went to school, what they tell me they're good at, and so my brain naturally does that. Okay. Now, why is that a weakness is because I've come to terms with the fact that, like, I really want to try and meet one or two new people every single day and just like listen and learn and yada, yada, yada.

Dan Magy:

When it comes to business development, what I found is that if you are unrelentingly competitive and you're naturally curious, you can literally train people to do almost anything If they want to know why.

Dan Magy:

Because their brain wants to solve, wants to understand the pieces so that they can solve it, and then they like to win. Oh, my goodness, you'll have a great BD team. I mean, that's why I think a lot of D1 athletes end up in sales, in the software, in the SaaS world. But what we did on our team, interestingly enough, is I have a co-founder named Chad and he was at JSOC for 18 years. He's one of the most competitive people I've met in my entire life and I told him when we met we met him through kind of just the bro network of folks in defense tech in San Diego I told him that you're going to have time. Okay, I'm going to be patient with you. You're going to use me as a resource, bring me on to as many of these calls to help ask the questions or frame the story, and then I'm going to let you go figure this out yourself, because if you don't learn to do it, I'll never be able to then go focus on what I need to do at a higher level.

Dan Magy:

And hiring people is binary it's either going to work or it's not. And in Chad's case it worked. And then I've let him have kind of full reign on building his team. But I've told him it takes 12 to 18 months to start seeing revenue from different parts of the DoD. So like Air Force big customer of ours initially Now we got to go hire someone to do Army, Now we got to hire someone to do Navy, Now we got to figure out what we're going to do with the Marines. You'd think the Marines would be buying tons of our stuff.

Dan Magy:

They are not Okay and they're the ones who are going to take it on the chin if there's a conflict in the Pacific. So having a tradable manufacturing you'd think would be a number one priority for them. But my point of this is and I digress if you can find people with those two skills and you give them the time and then you resource them appropriately with some training, if they want to win they're going to figure it out Like that's just what I've learned in life and so it really helps. On our side, when these guys were like kind of you know senior enlisted dudes, they've seen peripherally how a lot of the different pieces work and the number one thing I told them was your job actually is not going to be to sell a product, you know it's going to be. It's going to be to bring everyone to the table and make sure that information is being shared and that when requirements are written by this dude over here, the dude with the money, they're talking. That's it, a lot of. It is just like extreme coordination and organization. And so we have sled dogs who are hyper competitive. We have a business operations guy who is like never misses a dotted I or cross T operations guy who is like never misses a dotted I or cross t, which is what you need, and we have a culture where we try you, you try out before you kind of get hired full-time, and it's proven to be pretty effective.

Dan Magy:

At some point these guys got to stop all hiring their buddies. You know, I think we have like four jsoc guys now on the team. We just made our first non-JSOC hire, a guy named Nick, who's in DC, which is a presence you also have to build out, because Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, that's where the sausage is made and you've got to understand how to play the game, and so we do a lot of flights to DC, but we're going to open a second HQ over there and we're going to put a manufacturing line in downtown DC so that you you know, you can have people literally come out of the Pentagon or come from Capitol Hill and be like let me show you how, for pennies on the dollar, we can de-risk a conflict or keep us troops off of out out of foreign wars, cause that's what we really want to do is democratize the sky, and we want to give both the U? S and its and its allies this asymmetrical advantage that they're going to face over the next decade, because the cat is out of the bag in the war in Ukraine. All this stuff is open source, from pixel lock for terminal guidance to the parts you need to go build a $250 FPV. That is all there.

Dan Magy:

There are Facebook groups. There are Telegram chats. It's unbelievable, it's all there.

Callye Keen:

Incredible new controllers that kids are making right. Correct 3D print libraries for every profile of Everything you want 15 bucks Amazing.

Dan Magy:

And so what we need to do, though, is like, that's the hobbyist shit. We need to transfer that to an industrial grade solution, and that's why we've invested heavily. This is a huge project we've undertaken, because you have to build multiple drones. You have to build the control software so that it's simple to use, cause I don't want any, like me or you, who've flown drones for 10 years.

Dan Magy:

I don't actually want us to be able to, like have to have like a part 107 license to fly this. I want a dude to pull it out of a backpack and put it together and test it. We call that the Dan test in the office. So you need to have that ability on the product or it's not going to work. And then you need to be able to make a ton of them really cheap, and so design for manufacture with assembly in mind is super crucial for everything we do.

Callye Keen:

We talk about transforming technology for defense. That's become more of our tagline than saying like inventing or developing, because in spaces like autonomy there's already so much that's out there. But then, actually making it so it's hardened, making it so it's easy to use, making so it's available, that it's made in the US, that it meets the mission requirements specifically, that's a transformational effort and it is very difficult. But it's not like you're not inventing physics, right. You're not changing the nature of reality. You're changing the physics of a combat situation or an intelligence situation, but you're not changing the laws of science, right. And that transformational effort has to go fast and you have to have awesome people.

Callye Keen:

I really like when you're talking about your people. You got really excited and a friend of mine said this is really simple In two weeks you can tell if somebody is incredible or not. And I thought about it. I was like you know, I can't think of a scenario in my life where somebody didn't prove that they were awesome within that period of time. There's lots of times where you see somebody and you're like they could be good or they could be developed. But awesome people make it apparent, like pretty quickly. So that's all it made me think of, you know.

Dan Magy:

I totally agree. We also got some people who are like slow burners. You know the guy I've worked with now for 10 years. He was an intern at my first company. We built robotic camera systems for sports stadiums. We had like five interns. It was like that scene in the Batman where there's like 10 dudes and they break the pool queue and they're like one of you gets to live right. So five interns and one of you got a job and he's the quietest, most unassuming person and he outworked everyone. Why? Because he was naturally curious, so he always asked questions to understand how to do his job better.

Dan Magy:

But I agree, man, people are the lifeblood of a company. You got to hire good people we talk about. I went to UCLA and the old coach talked about the jackass farm, where you have one jackass on your team, you get a second one, then you have a farm and you're screwed. And so we like really focus on hiring A players, because the second you stop hiring A players like you'll get B, c, d players. You know what I mean. So we do a pretty extensive interview processes At some point. I'm super frustrated. I'm like we need that electrical engineer six months ago. But when you find the right one, it makes all the difference.

Callye Keen:

My electrical engineer was a D1 football player. You can't steal him, Sorry Dan.

Dan Magy:

I have a D1 football player on my team too. You're in trouble because I'm going to have them now link up on LinkedIn.

Callye Keen:

We'll see it from you in no time. Where do we go from here? What's on the horizon that you can talk about for Firestorm?

Dan Magy:

Because I know that there's a lot of exciting stuff that isn't made for I think the two big things I'd just say is one we continue to beat the drum to show folks that there is a way to build stuff at the edge and if it's not us, then it should be our partner forces right? Like, let's de-risk this by having a cheaper product that's just as performant, be able to be built anywhere in the world so you actually can build a charitable systems. And that does require, like you know, either pre-positioning some of the inputs that go in or localizing supply chains. Like I'm not trivializing how difficult that's going to be, but you got to take the first step and we do have some folks that look like they're going to be taking the first steps here end of this year, early next year, which is awesome.

Dan Magy:

The second thing is I think DOD and Congress really needs to understand that a ton of money from the venture community has been put into the defense ecosystem. All of that is private citizens or funds saying this is important and spending their money in there. This isn't taxpayer dollars. And if the DOD doesn't start figuring out a way to on-ramp more companies and I'm not talking about Firestorm, I'm talking about the $300 billion of private money that's poured into this space over the last decade. If they don't start taking that seriously, that money is going to evaporate full stop.

Callye Keen:

I could not agree with you more. If orders don't come to startups and smaller businesses that are venture-backed, the venture dollars will go away and the free lunch will go away.

Dan Magy:

It is free lunch, and so you know what A really easy way for us to do this on the DoD side. When you're bidding on contracts, you know what we should do. You should say how much money has come from the taxpayer to that company to get it to a certain price. So if you've received $300 million of appropriations over the last five years and you're building something for $2 million, say that If a small company is building it for $2.5 million but they've raised $30, $40, $50 million of private capital, okay, great, we didn't take any money from the DoD. We need to have some sort of transparency that, I think, would allow for the no shit understanding that this is not taxpayer dollars that's got us to this price. It's private dollars and it is free lunch and it will go away. And that's what scares me the most about this. Right, it's even this is not me saying this. There are VCs telling me that that DIU has been completely co-opted by the bigs. Now, that's their concern, and if that is your innovation group, that means we have a problem.

Callye Keen:

So I don't know how we solve it. This gets into a conversation that I'd love to have, like a rodeo, with a few people from our community on to talk about it, because I have very spicy opinions about all of the venture side and the way that the budget works and carving up the budget. When you look at our innovation spending inside of the DoD and you take that big pie that they show everybody, you know like, oh, it's almost a trillion dollars. And you're just like, well, you have to spend the money on this. Okay, all right, but then we're buying cool stuff with this money, right? You're like, no, the majority of that's on sustaining stuff that we've already bought.

Callye Keen:

Okay, so the leftover is that's what all the innovators are getting. No, 90% of that is for these people. And then, okay, so now we have, this is what all the startups and small businesses are getting. They're like, no, actually it's a fraction of that. And then when you really look at, you look at the amount of money that's going in. That's going to companies that are creating new technology and putting it in the hands of the warfighter or attempting to do so. It is smaller than the amount of private capital that's coming into almost any technology space, and it's hard to make this assessment when you're looking at peer competitors that spend hundreds of billions of dollars on innovation, with the direct purpose of them it being dual use or weaponized platforms, and then you're proportionate to like billions of dollars on the other side. The asymmetry on spend and research is so wild.

Dan Magy:

The frustrating thing, I think, for people like me and you, callie, is that we're taxpayers too, so we understand how the sausage is made and where the money goes, but then we also are paying for it, and that's where I think, at least for me. I can't speak for everyone on my team. There's a mission here, and that mission is we should and we should be doing better. We owe the taxpayers that, and we have a really unique opportunity right now, at this point in time, to truly protect what we value, because it's not going to be the big guys who get us out of the problems we're going to face. It's not the last ask from USA. This is all publicly available. Do you know how many American drones the Ukrainians asked for in their last?

Callye Keen:

How many?

Dan Magy:

Zero, nope, they don't want anything we're making. That tells you all you need to know.

Callye Keen:

That is shocking. I'm going to leave it at that. Dan, this has been really great. I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show.

Dan Magy:

Yeah, man Excited to be here. If you want to do that roundtable, I'm happy to come back for that. But yeah, keep doing these type of interviews. I think it's really important because when more people hear that there are folks who are dedicating their time to try and solve these problems, I think that you get a groundswell of momentum and you actually get change. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Callye Keen:

My name is Callie Keene and this has been the.

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Callye Keen

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