AI transcript
0:00:03 – Frankly, in the beginning, they didn’t work at all.
0:00:05 That’s when the DOD first started to realize
0:00:07 that it was a totally new threat.
0:00:08 – You can learn them the hard way
0:00:10 by just start a company and go do it,
0:00:11 or maybe you can have some training wheels,
0:00:14 but ultimately there’s no way to learn how to do this job
0:00:15 other than to just do it.
0:00:19 – As taxpayers, as veterans, and as founders,
0:00:21 we should want that level of competition
0:00:22 and that cutthroat competition
0:00:25 to onboard things quickly and offboard things quickly.
0:00:28 – You can’t have a company where people are split
0:00:29 on what they care about
0:00:31 and what those foundational values are.
0:00:33 You have to be all on board.
0:00:35 – Do you want to do something meaningful?
0:00:37 Do you want to do meaningful work?
0:00:38 – It’s very clear what the stakes are
0:00:42 and it’s very clear why it’s important.
0:00:45 – In 2025, the battlefield is not just overseas.
0:00:48 It’s in the tech stacks, the logistics networks,
0:00:50 and airspace security systems
0:00:52 that power our national defense.
0:00:54 And who better to design solutions
0:00:57 than those who have faced these problems firsthand?
0:00:58 Those who have served.
0:01:01 In this episode, recorded live at our third annual
0:01:04 American Dynamism Summit in the heart of Washington, D.C.,
0:01:07 A16Z’s Matt Shortle, operating partner and chief of staff,
0:01:11 plus a veteran himself, sits down with three veterans
0:01:12 who have turned to the private sector
0:01:14 to build technology companies,
0:01:16 tackling secure communications,
0:01:19 military logistics, and drone defense.
0:01:21 Joining this conversation is John Doyle,
0:01:23 founder and CEO of Cape,
0:01:25 David Tuttle, co-founder and CEO of Rune,
0:01:29 and Grant Jordan, founder and CEO of SkySafe.
0:01:31 Today, you’ll get to hear on-the-ground stories
0:01:32 from these veterans,
0:01:35 like how their time in uniform has shaped the scope of problems
0:01:38 that they see and ultimately what they’ve chosen to build.
0:01:41 They also discuss whether a jump directly from military
0:01:43 to entrepreneurship is possible,
0:01:46 or whether a stint in the private sector is needed,
0:01:48 like the time that David spent at Anderil,
0:01:51 or that John spent at Palantir.
0:01:54 And finally, how does this unique group of individuals
0:01:57 who have spent time on the battlefield and in the boardroom
0:02:01 think our collective culture is changing around the national project?
0:02:05 Listen in to find out.
0:02:09 As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only,
0:02:12 should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice,
0:02:14 or be used to evaluate any investment or security,
0:02:19 and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:02:22 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments
0:02:25 in the companies discussed in this podcast.
0:02:27 For more details, including a link to our investments,
0:02:31 please see A16Z.com/disclosures.
0:02:38 I’d like to start with just hearing your initial story,
0:02:40 what you did in the service,
0:02:42 and then also what inspired you to join initially.
0:02:46 What inspired me to join initially was what I think inspires plenty of people,
0:02:48 which is paying for school.
0:02:51 So the Air Force was good enough to pay for me to go to MIT.
0:02:54 And for that, when I commissioned as an officer,
0:02:56 I went and worked in AFRL for four years,
0:02:57 working in the Air Force Research Lab,
0:03:01 and focusing on how do we actually innovate in the Air Force?
0:03:03 How do we bring new systems out to the warfighter?
0:03:07 And how do we rapidly get those systems out there?
0:03:09 I mean, similar family history of service to the nation.
0:03:12 I just service to our people, went to Cornell,
0:03:14 did ROTC there, commissioned into the Army.
0:03:16 I left active service for a period of time,
0:03:17 went to the private sector,
0:03:20 and then actually went back into active service.
0:03:22 Ended up down at the Joint Special Operations
0:03:24 Camp for a number of years and ended up in some technology orgs
0:03:27 at the end of my time there, and then came back out and said,
0:03:28 “Hey, I think we can do some great work
0:03:32 from the private sector technology side going into the defense world.”
0:03:34 I should say I’m still serving,
0:03:36 still serving Army National Guard officer up in New York.
0:03:38 So I do the one weekend a month driving back there,
0:03:41 and that’s been a number of years now at this point.
0:03:43 That’s great. John?
0:03:45 So I almost joined, like a lot of folks of my vintage,
0:03:48 I almost joined on 9/11 or on 9/12.
0:03:50 I’m obviously heavily affected by that.
0:03:52 By that day, I was a senior in college,
0:03:57 and I ultimately made the decision to finish my computer science degree.
0:03:59 But then when we invaded Iraq in 2003,
0:04:02 I felt that same call to service decided it wasn’t just a whim,
0:04:04 it’s something I shouldn’t and couldn’t ignore.
0:04:06 And so the day after the invasion, I went to the recruiter,
0:04:07 and signed up.
0:04:10 I think I’m unique on the panel in that I enlisted.
0:04:14 I was on a program called 18 X-ray, which I think still exists.
0:04:19 You can join the Army as an enlisted soldier and commit to five years up front.
0:04:24 And in exchange, the Army will give you a shot to try out to be a Green Beret,
0:04:27 to be Army Special Forces, after doing basic training in airborne school.
0:04:32 And so I signed that contract the day after the invasion and I was successful.
0:04:36 And so I spent two years doing really amazing training in the Special Forces training pipeline,
0:04:39 and three years on an SF team at the Special Forces Group.
0:04:43 Was entrepreneurship something you envisioned while you were serving?
0:04:44 Did that come after?
0:04:47 Tell me how all that works, because you’re all three founders now.
0:04:52 I don’t think it was something I thought about at the time in service, but I think part of my frustration
0:05:01 in the Air Force was seeing how some of the acquisitions programs were broken or were outdated for what the pace of current technology was.
0:05:09 And I think I saw a lot of opportunities to try to change that from the outside and to try to innovate and bring those technologies in from the outside.
0:05:12 To be honest, it was not something that was on my radar.
0:05:17 When I left the active service for the first time, I went to about the biggest companies you could imagine.
0:05:23 I ended up as an investment banker on Wall Street and did that, obviously massive international bank presence.
0:05:24 I think that was great for me.
0:05:33 I don’t think I had at the time, at my stage in career at that point, I don’t think I had what I thought I needed to go out and start my own company or do the thing that we’re all doing now.
0:05:39 So I think for me, it was like, how do I build that toolkit of knowledge and how do I do those sorts of things in a large organization?
0:05:46 And then now that the time was right later on, opportunity presented to us, hopefully, give back to the mission and help the mission that we can from a startup standpoint.
0:05:49 I think for me, I’ve always been a builder.
0:05:52 The thing I loved about computer science in college was building things.
0:05:54 I’m very proud of my service.
0:05:58 In some ways, that was a little bit of a detour on my inevitable path to starting a company.
0:06:00 In fact, when I left the service, I went to law school.
0:06:05 And the reason I never really practiced law was because I figured out pretty quickly that that was not a path to,
0:06:09 or not, it’s really not a direct path to entrepreneurship or the kind of work I wanted to be doing.
0:06:13 So I wound up at Palantir instead in 2013 and spent nine years at that company.
0:06:17 It was not among the first hundred employees, but it felt very early stage.
0:06:23 And I got a lot of exposure that I think helped me on the eventual journey to founding Cape three years ago.
0:06:30 As you look at when you’re in the service and your problems, you work in aerospace management, logistics, and then privacy first, mobile care.
0:06:35 Were those problems you saw while serving, or did that help influence what you founded later?
0:06:36 Absolutely.
0:06:45 So we at RUN are focused on how do we enable military logistics, cross-services, but really on the Army and the Marine Corps side right now, how do we do field logistics?
0:06:46 How do we enable that?
0:06:52 And I think from my career side, we saw that not to say that military logistics can get the job done in the GWAT era, in our era of serving.
0:07:05 But, you know, I saw very quickly that the same things we had in GWAT from a military logistics standpoint were not necessarily to enable the force to be successful in a peer adversary, whether that’s in competition phase or conflict phase.
0:07:10 When Peter was my co-founder at RUN, we were still at Anderil before we left and founded RUN.
0:07:14 We were thinking about this problem setting, saying like, yeah, this is something that actually needs help and needs attention.
0:07:17 No great technology companies necessarily were really focused on it.
0:07:25 And I said, hey, this is a need that I felt still serving when I was serving in the military, and then this is a need that we think we can help advance now from the private sector.
0:07:38 When I was in AFRL, it was very, very early in the era of DOD thinking about drones on the battlefield and thinking about especially small, inexpensive drones, which at that time, we’re talking like 07, 08 kind of era.
0:07:45 Expensive drones on the battlefield were like, oh, wow, a $100,000 drone, that’s so inexpensive, or $50,000.
0:07:51 Whereas now, what anybody can buy off the shelf for $1,000 or $500 is greater than any capabilities we had at that time.
0:08:02 But at that point, the DOD was first starting to think about what does it really mean when adversaries can bring low-cost capabilities to the battlefield, adversaries who may not have a traditional air force.
0:08:19 And what I saw early on in those initial tests and those initial developments was kind of a disconnect of the old-school, big, heavy military systems trying to be thrown at these small, light, fast threats that were kind of a totally new challenge.
0:08:25 And I saw how difficult it was for this traditional structure and the traditional defense contractors to actually do that.
0:08:36 We saw a lot of big systems, missiles and lasers and all of these things, which were big, expensive, bespoke systems built for a prior era of warfare, trying to be thrown at this small problem.
0:08:38 And frankly, in the beginning, they just didn’t work at all.
0:08:43 And I think that’s when the DOD first started to realize that it was a totally new threat.
0:08:43 It was a totally new thing.
0:08:52 And it’s something we’ve seen borne out since then in pretty much every conflict since then, you know, certainly in Ukraine, where we’ve got tens of thousands of drones flying around all the time.
0:08:59 And so I think that’s what really inspired me and a lot of the folks on our team to do something about that and to try to think about it in a new way.
0:09:03 As you brought up Ukraine, I think, obviously, that’s changed the whole paradigm in your space.
0:09:04 And then also you.
0:09:06 I think, frankly, I would say.
0:09:07 Oh, three, actually.
0:09:22 I don’t want to speak for John, but I think all of us, right, as we look at what has happened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, right, the new technologies that have been effectively used or ineffectively used by both sides and how that changes things, right, from a logistics standpoint, certainly from a U.S. standpoint, from a communications standpoint.
0:09:23 Yeah.
0:09:31 I think it’s changed, like, that laboratory, for better or worse, has really certainly impacted the way I think about things and we think about things at Rune, and I’m sure it has for both of you.
0:09:38 I left Palantir in February 2022 to start CAPE, left Palantir on a Friday, checked into that we work on a Monday morning, and the invasion was happening.
0:09:52 The very first question that we asked ourselves at CAPE was, if you recall, commercial cellular was a huge factor, continues to be a huge factor in Ukraine, but was enormous in the initial days as a force multiplier, but also as a risk.
0:09:59 Both sides were using commercial cellular heavily and enjoying benefits of that, but also literally targeting missile strikes against each other based on that signature.
0:10:12 And so the first question we asked ourselves as a company was, what tech do we wish the Ukrainians were using right now, and how do we get that tech into Taiwan ahead of an eventual Chinese invasion that hopefully never happens, but we certainly need to prepare for?
0:10:15 And that’s really been a motivating question for the company from the beginning.
0:10:18 I think if you look at logistics, obviously they stopped outside of Kiev.
0:10:19 Yep.
0:10:21 So the Russians had a few issues there.
0:10:34 As we look at going from veteran to founder, can you jump straight from veteran and found a company, or do you need to stop somewhere in between an Anderol, a Palantir, and know what right looks like, know what culture you need to set?
0:10:36 I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
0:10:39 I think you can become a founder at any point in your career.
0:10:44 If it’s something you’re going to do and it’s something that’s sort of in your blood, I think that it’s inevitable.
0:10:54 I will say personally, my stint, which turned out to be almost a decade, at Palantir in between service and starting a company, I learned a ton.
0:11:09 The culture at Palantir, I think, is borderline legendary at this point, and the reputation is warranted, but also the mechanics of how to operate in a company, what does an innovative company look like, fostering innovation and allowing a little bit of chaos and a little bit of things to bubble up within the stew, but without the wheels coming off.
0:11:12 Those are important lessons for a founder to learn.
0:11:18 You can learn them the hard way by just start a company and go do it, or maybe you can have some training wheels for a few years at a Palantir in Anderol.
0:11:29 I would say my experience at Palantir certainly was helpful and I think has helped set us up for success in some ways, but ultimately there’s no way to learn how to do this job other than to just do it.
0:11:30 Right.
0:11:34 Yeah, I would say I think it’s a very individual and a very personal question, like what are your life experiences, right?
0:11:39 I think we all come out of the military with a great set of leadership skills, a great set of communication skills.
0:11:42 We understand we have some domain expertise, right, in what we’re doing.
0:11:50 But I think it’s really boils down to, again, to use the toolkit analogy of like how strong do you as a veteran feel coming out of this and committed to it?
0:11:52 And do you think you have the skills to be able to do it?
0:11:58 To John’s point, I think for me personally, I wanted to get out in the time that I had in finance and then the time that I had at Anderol.
0:12:00 Very similar to like the Palantir ethos there.
0:12:03 How do you move fast and break things, but that’s okay to get towards a mission and do those things.
0:12:07 To me, that is super valuable experience as I now lead a team and lead the company.
0:12:11 But that’s not to say that we have different paths to get here.
0:12:12 I mean, all three of us have different paths.
0:12:17 That doesn’t mean you might not have had different experiences prior to service, right, before serving or coming out.
0:12:22 And I think that’s a very individual, I hate to be a cop out on it, but I think it’s a very individual choice to make.
0:12:24 I would agree with that.
0:12:28 I would say for me, when I left the Air Force, I went to grad school after that.
0:12:36 And I think having some distance from it is helpful, whatever that distance is, whether that’s a big corporation or doing something entirely different or grad school.
0:12:42 I think having a little bit of distance, seeing a little bit of a different set of culture or a different set of problem sets.
0:12:54 Also, you know, it helps you maybe in some ways distance yourself from some of the frustrations of the government bureaucracy and the military and all of that to then kind of refresh yourself to go face those challenges and jump back into it.
0:13:06 But I think also just trying to figure out how you should do things differently out in the private sector, out in the commercial sector, how you can take the good parts of the military, of government service and apply them.
0:13:13 Take the good parts, ignore the bad, drop the bureaucracy bits that are not helpful to anybody and figure out how you can benefit from it.
0:13:18 But I think there’s a lot of good things to take from it, especially a lot of the kind of mission-driven focus.
0:13:27 We’ve had lots of folks on our team over the years who have been prior military or prior intelligence, and there’s no replacement for that mission-driven focus.
0:13:30 There’s no replacement for that actual commitment to making a difference.
0:13:33 Matt, where do you come down on that question?
0:13:35 So that’s a good question, and we debate that internally.
0:13:41 Personally, I transitioned out, and I was part of Lehman Brothers’ 08 MBA class, which went really well.
0:13:42 I was there 22 years.
0:13:44 Probably not technically your fault, though.
0:13:45 That’s not your fault.
0:13:45 No, it wasn’t my fault.
0:13:47 Me and Dick Folder were really tight.
0:13:50 But I think it helps to go to somewhere and see what right looks like.
0:13:57 For me personally, especially Anderol, Palantir, SpaceX, and then Tesla, just some companies that are producing these founders.
0:13:58 I think it really helps.
0:14:01 But there’s obviously folks that can make that jump.
0:14:03 So I think the answer is either.
0:14:06 But for me personally, I would want to stop along the way.
0:14:08 You made a great point as well that I think is important.
0:14:12 I think you always have to be careful that you don’t want to just create the thing that you thought you knew.
0:14:14 needed when you were in the military, right?
0:14:16 And I think that is sometimes a trap, right?
0:14:17 We all need to use our experience to do that.
0:14:22 But when I talk to folks about that, if you try to build the thing that you thought you needed,
0:14:28 every month that goes by, every year that goes by, what you thought you needed then is now out of date and it’s stale, right?
0:14:34 So especially as you lead a company, and I’m sure Sean can talk about it too, is you need to be constantly thinking forward,
0:14:42 not just creating the thing that you thought you needed in the Argandab River Valley in 2011 or 12 or in Herat or wherever it happened to be.
0:14:42 Yeah, I agree.
0:14:44 And we went 4G to 5G.
0:14:44 Let’s go to 10G.
0:14:46 Why stop at 4?
0:14:50 Or we built the Hornet, which is a Category 4 fighter, and we built the Super Hornet with Category 4+.
0:14:52 Skip that like the Marine Corps did.
0:14:57 I think that’s the essential skill for a founder, is that mindset.
0:14:59 In my opinion, you have that or you don’t.
0:15:00 That’s part of who you are or it’s not.
0:15:07 There are other skills that support that overall mindset, that insistence on way forward thinking, ambitious goal setting.
0:15:10 And you can learn those skills, certainly in the military.
0:15:12 You can learn those skills at great companies like the ones you mentioned.
0:15:17 So they’re supporting skills you can learn, but the core, that core mindset, I think, is just innate.
0:15:22 I don’t know your founding stories necessarily, specifically, but finding the right co-founder was important.
0:15:23 For me, right?
0:15:26 So finding the right software engineer, technical co-founder, right?
0:15:29 So Peter is my co-founder and CTO.
0:15:32 Like, I don’t know how I would have done that straight coming out of service, right?
0:15:35 So I needed to go to a place, thankfully a great place like Anderil,
0:15:39 where we’re surrounded by those types of people to be able to find that partner.
0:15:43 And now he and I, our Venn diagrams don’t overlap that much, which is great in a co-founding pair.
0:15:46 Let’s pull in a thread that Grant brought up, and let’s go culture.
0:15:47 You might have some good responses here.
0:15:50 Culture in the military, culture in startup land.
0:15:54 And then you could even add finance, city, which is very different.
0:15:54 So that’s a third.
0:15:59 But let’s focus on military and then startup land differences and similarities.
0:16:06 I think I probably have a unique perspective from the military side by virtue of being an 18x-ray
0:16:10 and only ever experiencing the special operations community in my military service.
0:16:16 That is a naturally more meritocratic, flatter organization, I think, than the rest of the DoD.
0:16:19 Having said that, there’s still a rank structure.
0:16:20 There’s still centralized planning.
0:16:26 There’s still a very clear hierarchy and a very clear set of doctrine and a book that literally tells you how to do your job.
0:16:30 Even in the context of special operations where you’re granted a lot more creativity and a lot more autonomy,
0:16:32 that structure still exists.
0:16:36 What is amazing about a startup is none of that exists.
0:16:41 You know, Monday morning, you check into a WeWork, and now you’ve just got a company and a couple bucks in the bank, hopefully.
0:16:43 And there’s literally nothing else.
0:16:44 You don’t have an email address necessarily.
0:16:47 And so you get to write the entire thing yourself.
0:16:50 That can be really disorienting, especially in my experience.
0:16:52 We have a ton of veterans at the company, and they’re all amazing.
0:16:54 And I love to hire veterans.
0:16:56 But that can be disorienting coming out of service.
0:17:02 And so you have to create, in my opinion, a culture around, I think it’s a little bit trite to say celebrating failure,
0:17:06 but at least openly accepting failure when it happens.
0:17:11 If people are working hard and people are taking risks and pushing the envelope and their efforts fail,
0:17:16 at CAPE anyway, the only thing you need to do is be transparent about that and call it out when we fail
0:17:19 and adjust and maybe name a couple of lessons learned for next time.
0:17:22 And it doesn’t do any damage to your reputation at the company or your ability to operate.
0:17:27 I think that’s the most important cultural aspect at a startup because it encourages risk-taking.
0:17:29 It encourages people to lean forward and push hard.
0:17:33 I find that there’s like common threads across all of them.
0:17:38 So when I think of like out of broad buckets, military service, my finance experience, and now startup experience,
0:17:43 there are like broad threads that make somebody or make something successful there,
0:17:46 which is initiative, drive, taking chances and doing those things, right?
0:17:49 Whether that is part of a deal team in investment banking,
0:17:53 whether that was part of a team within the JSOC enterprise or the military writ large,
0:17:55 or now it’s part of a startup, right?
0:17:56 So it’s, yeah, how do you celebrate success?
0:17:58 How do you encourage risk-taking?
0:18:01 I think also I view it as like, how do you hire talent?
0:18:05 But you understand that when that talent comes in, you got to train, you got to mentor, you got to develop, right?
0:18:08 And it’s not necessarily always at a startup, at least from my standpoint, at Rune.
0:18:11 It’s not been hiring just because somebody has a skill.
0:18:17 It’s hiring somebody that I think can grow into a position or do these things or with the right coaching and development can take chances
0:18:20 and maybe fail, as John says, but like you move on from that.
0:18:23 So I think there are like commonalities across all of these.
0:18:28 Obviously, at the startup, you don’t have the structure in place and the support structure that’s in place.
0:18:31 It’s certainly at a large company, but also somewhat in the military side.
0:18:35 So there’s some differences there, but I think from a human standpoint and a culture standpoint,
0:18:39 you can have some threads of success that are common across those.
0:18:44 Probably for most of our companies, it’s not just about government or military.
0:18:45 Everything is dual use.
0:18:48 Technology crosses a lot of different industries.
0:18:52 For us, it’s not just the kind of like military and federal market.
0:18:57 It’s also critical infrastructure, oil and gas, power companies, all of these large organizations
0:19:02 that face a lot of the same challenges that military or federal government face.
0:19:07 I think for us, it’s about balancing that culture and trying to figure out how to take the really mission-driven
0:19:11 and what that really translates to is customer-driven, user-driven.
0:19:13 I think there’s commonality there.
0:19:18 Not an over-obsession with the kind of military portion of it, but taking the part about it
0:19:23 about what are we trying to accomplish and how are we trying to help these people, these organizations.
0:19:25 Yeah, you mentioned dual use.
0:19:28 And first of all, I’d love you to define, are you dual use?
0:19:30 Would you consider all three of you dual use or not?
0:19:36 And then any cultural issues with that, bringing folks on board on the national defense side?
0:19:40 Number one, I would say we’re definitely dual use because kind of threats and concerns
0:19:46 about drones in the national airspace, in critical areas, absolutely cut across all sorts of different areas.
0:19:52 Whether it’s an Air Force base or a power plant or border security, everyone is concerned.
0:19:56 And not just because they’re concerned about just malicious drones, it’s about being able
0:20:00 to use drones for good things and use drones for inspecting infrastructure and doing logistics
0:20:01 and all of these things.
0:20:06 But I think in that, you do need to make sure that you’re building a culture that understands
0:20:09 why you’re there and what your values are and what you care about.
0:20:12 In our world, right, we’re going to end up dealing with serious stuff.
0:20:17 And you can’t just have people who wanted to build iPhone games and so they just happen
0:20:17 to get a job.
0:20:20 They’re like, no, you have to understand we’re here to do serious stuff.
0:20:26 We had folks actually go over and assist the Ukrainians and provide support and services
0:20:28 and technology to them.
0:20:33 You can’t have a company where people are split on what they care about and what those foundational
0:20:33 values are.
0:20:35 You have to be all on board.
0:20:39 Yeah, there’s some great quotes out there by Palmer Luckey talking about taking technology
0:20:43 talent from the commercial sector and how do you convince them to come into the defense
0:20:43 world.
0:20:45 And I will say that, frankly, it’s not that hard.
0:20:46 Do you want to do something meaningful?
0:20:47 Do you want to do meaningful work?
0:20:51 And I think that’s the genius behind a lot of the American Dynamism companies, to include,
0:20:54 I would say, all three of ours, is like, how do you bring that amazing technical talent
0:20:58 and those amazing software engineers or hardware engineers, the case may be, and bring them
0:21:03 to something like, hey, do you want to do something meaningful for the nation, for the people and
0:21:04 do those types of things?
0:21:07 And how do you fuse that together with those of us who have come out of the military and
0:21:08 do those sorts of things?
0:21:12 I don’t want to say it’s easy, but it’s not as hard as people would think to get them motivated
0:21:16 about doing what’s right for the country, doing what’s right for our people and to do those
0:21:17 sorts of things.
0:21:21 And I’ll also add, I think what really sorts people out on whether or not they want to
0:21:26 join a company that does these sorts of work and these sorts of missions is you show them
0:21:27 what you’re doing, right?
0:21:30 Nothing sorts that out faster than real-world examples.
0:21:36 When we show drones in places that are being run by prison gangs to smuggle fentanyl into
0:21:40 prisons or in military environments, whatever, it’s very clear what the stakes are, and it’s
0:21:41 very clear why it’s important.
0:21:46 And for those people who it resonates, it’s instantaneous, and it’s, wow, I want to be working on this.
0:21:48 And for those, it doesn’t, great.
0:21:49 Like, that’s fine.
0:21:52 There’s plenty of iPhone game companies to go join, and that’s great.
0:21:57 I think one of the things I really love about Cape and the company we’ve built is we really
0:22:03 are truly dual-use, and we’re dual-use in some sense defense and consumer, much in the same
0:22:04 way that Signal is dual-use, right?
0:22:08 It’s like Signal is used by privacy-preferring people all around the world doing all kinds
0:22:08 of stuff.
0:22:13 And also everyone here at the Summit, everyone on Capitol Hill has Signal installed on their
0:22:13 phone.
0:22:15 It’s very valuable technology.
0:22:19 I’m personally very motivated, and the company is very motivated by building this tech to
0:22:24 keep folks doing special operations work safe and allowing them access to commercial cellular
0:22:26 without incurring all the risk that typically comes with that.
0:22:30 It’s the same set of issues, and frankly, everyone has the same use case for their phone.
0:22:32 We have customers who are journalists.
0:22:36 We have customers who are survivors of domestic violence.
0:22:41 We do work with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation on detecting cell-size simulators at protests
0:22:42 and at demonstrations.
0:22:46 All those people have the same set of issues and the same desire to leverage the value of
0:22:50 the commercial cellular network without making that typically inherent set of compromises.
0:22:54 And you ask a really good question, which is, does that change the kind of people you can
0:22:55 attract, or how does that affect recruiting?
0:23:00 I think at Cape anyway, first of all, I’m like, I’m incredibly proud of the team that we’ve built,
0:23:02 and so I’m biased here.
0:23:06 But you just have, you have to work hard to find people who embrace both of those missions
0:23:07 simultaneously.
0:23:11 But when you find them, they just tend to be awesome, awesome folks, and the kind of people
0:23:13 that I really like to work with, and the people I want to work with.
0:23:18 One thing I’ll just say, tactically, that we’ve done internally that I really believe in is
0:23:24 we have not split the business into commercial and defense divisions, for lack of a better
0:23:24 word, right?
0:23:29 There’s an engineering team, and the engineering team, we all agree on a set of priorities that
0:23:32 serve the entire customer base, and I think that’s worked out really well.
0:23:34 We’re building one product, and it really serves both purposes.
0:23:35 That’s great.
0:23:38 You’re all busy building your own companies.
0:23:43 When you served, did you see any gaps there that you wish people would start looking to
0:23:44 build companies?
0:23:45 Any requests for startups?
0:23:47 It’s a big question.
0:23:49 This is such an unfair question.
0:23:53 I realize now that I ask every government person I talk to, if you have the magic technical
0:23:55 wand, what would you wave it and create?
0:23:57 Who, height or weight, body armor, and kit?
0:24:01 Give me all that stuff that I need to carry around and make it weigh 30% of what it weighs.
0:24:02 80 pounds of gear in your back.
0:24:03 Yeah, yeah.
0:24:03 Right, right, right.
0:24:05 Make it 25 pounds and make it less cumbersome.
0:24:08 I mean, I was actually just having a conversation this morning.
0:24:13 As we think about logistics and how do you enable autonomous logistics systems, maritime,
0:24:14 assets, ground assets.
0:24:19 One of the things, though, that we’re interested in is heavy lift aerial resupply platforms,
0:24:19 right?
0:24:21 Which is a hard problem, right?
0:24:23 Autonomous air vehicles, obviously a thing.
0:24:27 UASs, how do you actually lift substantial cargo with that?
0:24:33 As we think about driving the automation of military logistics or through autonomous vehicles, right?
0:24:36 Getting an air system that actually can carry the weight for that is something that’s like
0:24:39 particularly interesting to me and is a very hard thing to do.
0:24:48 Part of the thing with both military and government now is the challenges they face are less kind of hardware centric than they used to be.
0:24:51 It’s not about owning a particular set of kit.
0:24:57 A lot of it is about data and data sharing and being able to have the correct information to make decisions.
0:25:03 A lot of what’s needed now is how does data get shared between organizations.
0:25:12 So for us, right, in the drone tracking world, we actually shifted business models a lot over the last few years from what was initially traditional hardware sales,
0:25:15 building the fancy piece of military hardware and selling it.
0:25:19 And pretty much as soon as it goes out the door, you kind of never see it again, mostly if things go well.
0:25:28 But what we saw was that the need really was for the information to make those decisions to take action and that it wasn’t about having a fancy piece of hardware.
0:25:36 But I think changing the way that the government looks at that and the way that they buy things and the way that they’re able to actually share information, that’s the hard part.
0:25:46 And part of dual use and part of the cross problems between government agencies and private companies is being able to share information between those two.
0:25:54 It doesn’t do the power plant any good if the federal law enforcement agency next door can’t share with them the threats that are happening.
0:26:04 So I think anything that encourages and enables data sharing between organizations with government is super, super valuable and definitely needed in a lot of these cases.
0:26:05 You touched on hardware, software.
0:26:09 As we look at the future of war, we don’t want to be fighting the last war.
0:26:10 Obviously, we want to fight the next war.
0:26:15 We look at Ukraine, perfect test case for all three of your companies there.
0:26:22 Do you think we have the right weapons, whether it’s hardware, software, or do we need to be looking out further and making a bigger leap?
0:26:26 Do we need different types of programs, vice trillion-dollar programs?
0:26:34 I think that maybe the common thread to pull out as we think about the next war is an emphasis on asymmetric capabilities.
0:26:39 A lot of attention is being paid, I know, rightfully, to the need for low-cost achievable systems, right?
0:26:44 That’s, I think, there’s a growing consensus that’s the future of warfare in a lot of ways.
0:26:52 I think, although it’s certainly no secret, people don’t always contextualize cyber warfare in the same way as an asymmetric capability.
0:26:56 Relatively low amounts of investment can cost huge amounts of damage in an adversary.
0:27:01 That’s sort of where CATE plays, is in the cyber vulnerabilities in the global cell network.
0:27:04 But in general, that’s the theme to pay attention to.
0:27:10 Rather than investing in trillion-dollar bets on absolute dominance in a relatively small number of exquisite systems,
0:27:15 how do we win the scrappy, messy, asymmetric war that’s sort of inevitable next time around?
0:27:18 Do we feel we have the things now?
0:27:19 I mean, no.
0:27:23 I mean, that’s why we started, or at least in the middle of the time, that’s why all of us started our companies, right?
0:27:28 Is we feel like there is something there that we can give back to the military that doesn’t exist right now,
0:27:30 or we can do it better, or we can help enable operations.
0:27:33 One of the things we need to look at is, how do we do these things faster, right?
0:27:35 At least as a software company, right?
0:27:42 The idea of a 20-month prototyping effort to potentially get to something that then maybe a year later is going to transition.
0:27:44 I’m using that as a very specific example right now.
0:27:46 It’s just, it’s absolutely insane.
0:27:49 Would be insane to the commercial sector, right?
0:27:51 Is insane when you think about software development cycles.
0:27:57 So I think the ability to rapidly prototype things, develop them, get them out to the force, test, iterate with them,
0:28:00 and then frankly for the government to say, yes, that worked, great, cool, move on.
0:28:02 No, it didn’t, and off-ramp.
0:28:07 I think that’s what we are totally on board with, is the ability for the government to force us to perform,
0:28:09 to compete, to do things for the warfighter.
0:28:11 And if we are doing great, then awesome.
0:28:15 And if not, then off-board us and bring somebody else in, right?
0:28:20 And I think how you do those things, I think, as taxpayers, as veterans, and as founders,
0:28:26 we should want that level of competition and that cutthroat competition to onboard things quickly and off-board things quickly.
0:28:30 And I think that’s finally, the administration’s obviously moving towards that way, that direction.
0:28:33 And I think that’s the goodness for the force and the goodness for the nation to move that way.
0:28:38 I think a lot of attention has rightfully been invested in, how do we onboard things quickly?
0:28:42 You know, the resurgence to OTAs is the most visible example of this, and it’s great.
0:28:44 DIU’s doing amazing work.
0:28:49 I think there’s sneaky work to be done on killing stuff that’s not working still.
0:28:51 And there are big, high-profile, very expensive examples.
0:28:55 But also within the innovation ecosystem, just call it when you see it.
0:28:58 And if something’s not working and something’s not going to pan out, just kill it.
0:29:03 You do everybody a favor, including the folks at that company, if you say, this isn’t working, and you cut it off.
0:29:08 Yeah, the worst thing, like you have a zombie program that just goes on with millions or tens of millions of dollars,
0:29:11 or sometimes even more of that, that’s not being used by warfighters.
0:29:14 I think to John’s point, like, you’re not doing the service any favors.
0:29:15 You’re not doing the warfighter any favors.
0:29:16 Definitely not the taxpayer.
0:29:22 And frankly, you’re not doing that company any favors because you’re putting them into a false sense of that solution is useful,
0:29:27 and you’re stifling potentially that company to, like, reinvent itself or go forward and do something new on that.
0:29:28 So I think you’re right.
0:29:30 I think off-boarding is just as important as onboarding.
0:29:35 Yeah, I think one of the gaps right now is, like you said, DIU’s done a lot of great stuff.
0:29:42 A lot of different efforts have been done to try to get early-stage startups involved in those first government contracts,
0:29:44 that kind of $1 million phase, $2 million phase.
0:29:50 But we still have that gap, that kind of valley of death, of how do we take any of those successful programs
0:29:53 and scale them up to that mid-size level?
0:29:57 Not everything is going to jump from a $1 million to a $200 million contract.
0:30:01 How do we scale them up, get them out to the forces, get them out to the services,
0:30:03 and see the potential once you actually scale it up?
0:30:11 Because I think that’s one of the challenges is, it’s easy to deploy a couple systems in a little POC and see,
0:30:12 okay, well, that’s pretty useful.
0:30:16 But a lot of the types of things we’re talking about, you don’t really see the real value of them
0:30:19 until you have them at some sort of scale.
0:30:22 If I’m talking about monitoring the airspace and looking at all the drones,
0:30:27 it’s great at the kind of tactical level to see, oh, we’ve got a drone crossing into this airbase here.
0:30:34 But as soon as you scale it up to the larger scale of saying, oh, well, now we can see patterns of activity.
0:30:39 We can see that, oh, that’s funny, this drone showed up at three different bases over time.
0:30:44 And we can do that only because we’ve started to build that out at a not large scale.
0:30:49 We’re not fully committing to everything, but we can see the potential of it at a kind of mid-size scale, larger scale.
0:30:51 And I think that’s a missing piece that we have.
0:30:55 How do you scale it up to actually try it in the real world at a scale that matters?
0:30:57 Yeah, you brought up programs.
0:31:02 CIA’s got In-Q-Tel, DIU’s for the DoD, not only programs, but how to select the best tech.
0:31:05 And obviously, we think you three are all the best.
0:31:06 You’re our portfolio companies.
0:31:14 But you need to build that market map, find out the category leader, because it’s going to go 90% leader, 10%, everybody else gets steak knives.
0:31:17 So we need to help them select the best tech also.
0:31:22 And I think one of the challenges on the government side with that, especially on the DoD side,
0:31:29 is because people and officers rotate out so frequently, you run into situations where somebody started out a really good program.
0:31:31 They started to see the benefits of it.
0:31:34 And then a brand new person walks in the door the next day and says, OK, what are we doing?
0:31:36 And you’re starting from scratch.
0:31:38 And they don’t really understand why were the decisions made?
0:31:39 What was the intent?
0:31:47 And so I think there needs to be a little bit of a better focus on continuity of ushering these programs across those eras and understanding why they’re doing them.
0:31:51 Military units are renowned for their trust and confidence, their cohesion.
0:31:53 We all saw that, especially you and the Special Forces.
0:31:57 How do you instill that in your companies?
0:32:00 How do you build that teamwork, that trust, confidence, cohesion?
0:32:05 We’re an in-person company, which I don’t think is the final answer, but really helps.
0:32:07 Proximity matters, in my opinion.
0:32:13 When people are in the office working together, you get a lot of that more easily than you do in a remote configuration.
0:32:20 The key ingredient, the thing you’re really trying to build that the military has in space, you really want at your startup,
0:32:27 you want to know when you need someone on your team that they’re there and they’re picking up on the first ring.
0:32:30 I think that’s the most important thing in life, certainly in company building.
0:32:37 And so my barometer for this within the company is when someone, it just happened this weekend,
0:32:42 we had a PZERO with someone who was traveling abroad in support of a customer and was having an issue,
0:32:46 and they spun up an internal thread, and immediately seven people were on the thread,
0:32:49 and it was the right seven people, and they were all helping to troubleshoot,
0:32:51 and within 20 minutes they had the guy turned around and good to go.
0:32:57 And that sort of mindset, no one complained about it, and we didn’t even mention it.
0:33:00 On Monday morning, it was just, that’s how we do business at Cape, right?
0:33:06 And that’s where you want to get, in my opinion, and the way you do that, to quote Ben Horowitz,
0:33:07 culture is what you do, it’s not what you say.
0:33:11 And so as the founder, your job is to be on every single one of those Slack threads,
0:33:12 especially in the early days, right?
0:33:15 And to be at the office every single day and to be working on those things.
0:33:17 And people will follow your lead.
0:33:21 And then if you do it enough, and you do it over and over and over again, it becomes part of the culture.
0:33:22 I’ll amplify that.
0:33:27 The collaboration that happens across engineering, product, growth, company leadership, all in one place.
0:33:31 I can’t imagine having not had that when we first opened our first initial hires,
0:33:34 because your first hires are really also building the culture with you.
0:33:38 Yes, it’s top-down from founders and from the executive level,
0:33:40 but like those initial hires are part of that culture for us.
0:33:42 And then I think it’s the normal things.
0:33:44 After work, during Sun-Fridays, we do a happy hour.
0:33:46 Every single Friday, we go to the same bar.
0:33:48 But it’s little things like that.
0:33:49 I mean, what does it cost?
0:33:50 It costs us an hour of time.
0:33:52 We cut out a little bit early on a Friday,
0:33:54 but I also know that everyone’s working generally right now.
0:33:56 We’re working Saturdays over the weekend.
0:33:59 You know, in one day, let’s presume success, and we have thousands of employees.
0:34:01 I don’t think I can still fit in the same bar.
0:34:03 But right now, that’s important, right?
0:34:05 It’s important to know that, especially as a software company,
0:34:07 where my capital is my people, right?
0:34:10 It is my engineers, and it is my growth professionals.
0:34:12 And that’s really what we need to grow and build.
0:34:17 I think the biggest thing for us has been actually recognizing and calling out
0:34:19 real-world impacts of the things we do.
0:34:24 I think, especially initially, we were actually very bad at celebrating our successes
0:34:25 and calling attention to it.
0:34:29 I think part of that is because so many of our folks are very mission-driven
0:34:31 and very like, okay, we got to do this thing.
0:34:35 And so you accomplish something, and you never even take the time to notice.
0:34:40 And I think that is one of the good things of having that mix in the culture
0:34:46 of kind of the mission-driven military and intelligence people versus the normal people
0:34:48 is sometimes the normal people kind of step back and they’re like,
0:34:50 holy shit, like, what did we just do?
0:34:51 That’s amazing.
0:34:52 That’s incredible.
0:34:54 And there’s plenty of other people who are just like,
0:34:55 oh, well, yeah, we do this all the time.
0:34:56 It’s no big deal.
0:35:00 But actually stepping back and recognizing that and celebrating those wins,
0:35:04 I think that’s part of what really builds that culture and that cohesion.
0:35:08 And then that builds a culture in which when things are going bad,
0:35:10 when things are going wrong, which are always going to happen,
0:35:12 there’s always going to be new things popping up.
0:35:16 Suddenly, that’s a culture where everyone understands why they’re like,
0:35:18 okay, cool, let’s pull together a team.
0:35:18 Let’s hop on a flight.
0:35:21 Let’s go fix this thing, do this thing right now.
0:35:25 And everybody’s on board because they understand why they’re doing it
0:35:25 and what the stakes are.
0:35:27 All right, big question here.
0:35:29 Take your time before you answer.
0:35:32 Would you ever go back to the military,
0:35:35 either in a leadership, advisory, or an innovation role?
0:35:38 I think innovation roles are really interesting.
0:35:40 There are so many of them across government.
0:35:43 And without picking on any in particular,
0:35:44 a lot of them never get anything done.
0:35:46 So I know internally,
0:35:49 someday if I’m lucky enough to be approached about that sort of a job,
0:35:51 I’m going to have a list of demands.
0:35:52 Here are the ways I need to be empowered.
0:35:56 Here’s the authorities that I need so that I can actually make a real impact
0:35:57 and be empowered.
0:35:59 But given the right set of conditions, I would love it.
0:36:02 That would be a defining career milestone just like starting a company.
0:36:05 This is a little bit different for me because I am still serving
0:36:07 in the Army National Guard in that way.
0:36:09 And I love leading soldiers and I love being around soldiers.
0:36:13 But I think going back into like full-time some kind of role or governmental role,
0:36:16 if I am successful to the point that I’m offered that opportunity at some point,
0:36:16 same as John,
0:36:18 yeah, I think that would be an honor of a lifetime to go back.
0:36:19 I mean, I think we were all,
0:36:23 yes, we are doing these to grow companies and to do those things.
0:36:25 And I’m not ashamed to say we are here to make some level of money.
0:36:28 I mean, that is what we do as companies.
0:36:30 But there is a selfless service aspect to that.
0:36:34 And if that selfless service could eventually be back in a governmental role
0:36:37 and helping the mission, if I believe I can make an impact and be helpful there,
0:36:39 then yeah, that would absolutely be something I would do.
0:36:41 Yeah, I totally agree with that.
0:36:43 I think being able to know that you can have an impact
0:36:46 and being able to know that you actually have the authority
0:36:50 and the ability to go and do the things that need to be done as you see them.
0:36:52 Coming from the Air Force acquisition side,
0:36:55 I have strong opinions about what’s needed in that world
0:36:57 and acquisition reform and whatnot.
0:37:00 But one request, one thing that I know I would have
0:37:02 that I didn’t realize until I knew it was an option.
0:37:05 A number of years ago, I was talking with the Secretary of the Air Force
0:37:10 and she said, wow, we need a lot more folks like you coming back into service.
0:37:12 And I said, well, I don’t really know.
0:37:14 And she said, well, I can get you a beard waiver
0:37:16 so you wouldn’t have to shave your beard.
0:37:17 I’m like, okay, now you’re talking.
0:37:20 That’s my, gotta have a beard waiver.
0:37:21 That’s nice beard.
0:37:22 There you go.
0:37:22 Done.
0:37:26 Now, if you made it this far,
0:37:28 a reminder that this was recorded live
0:37:30 at our third annual American Dynamism Summit
0:37:32 in the heart of Washington, D.C.
0:37:35 And if you’d like to see more exclusive content from the Summit,
0:37:38 head on over to a16z.com
0:37:41 slash American dash Dynamism dash Summit.
0:37:43 Or you can click the link in our description.
0:00:05 That’s when the DOD first started to realize
0:00:07 that it was a totally new threat.
0:00:08 – You can learn them the hard way
0:00:10 by just start a company and go do it,
0:00:11 or maybe you can have some training wheels,
0:00:14 but ultimately there’s no way to learn how to do this job
0:00:15 other than to just do it.
0:00:19 – As taxpayers, as veterans, and as founders,
0:00:21 we should want that level of competition
0:00:22 and that cutthroat competition
0:00:25 to onboard things quickly and offboard things quickly.
0:00:28 – You can’t have a company where people are split
0:00:29 on what they care about
0:00:31 and what those foundational values are.
0:00:33 You have to be all on board.
0:00:35 – Do you want to do something meaningful?
0:00:37 Do you want to do meaningful work?
0:00:38 – It’s very clear what the stakes are
0:00:42 and it’s very clear why it’s important.
0:00:45 – In 2025, the battlefield is not just overseas.
0:00:48 It’s in the tech stacks, the logistics networks,
0:00:50 and airspace security systems
0:00:52 that power our national defense.
0:00:54 And who better to design solutions
0:00:57 than those who have faced these problems firsthand?
0:00:58 Those who have served.
0:01:01 In this episode, recorded live at our third annual
0:01:04 American Dynamism Summit in the heart of Washington, D.C.,
0:01:07 A16Z’s Matt Shortle, operating partner and chief of staff,
0:01:11 plus a veteran himself, sits down with three veterans
0:01:12 who have turned to the private sector
0:01:14 to build technology companies,
0:01:16 tackling secure communications,
0:01:19 military logistics, and drone defense.
0:01:21 Joining this conversation is John Doyle,
0:01:23 founder and CEO of Cape,
0:01:25 David Tuttle, co-founder and CEO of Rune,
0:01:29 and Grant Jordan, founder and CEO of SkySafe.
0:01:31 Today, you’ll get to hear on-the-ground stories
0:01:32 from these veterans,
0:01:35 like how their time in uniform has shaped the scope of problems
0:01:38 that they see and ultimately what they’ve chosen to build.
0:01:41 They also discuss whether a jump directly from military
0:01:43 to entrepreneurship is possible,
0:01:46 or whether a stint in the private sector is needed,
0:01:48 like the time that David spent at Anderil,
0:01:51 or that John spent at Palantir.
0:01:54 And finally, how does this unique group of individuals
0:01:57 who have spent time on the battlefield and in the boardroom
0:02:01 think our collective culture is changing around the national project?
0:02:05 Listen in to find out.
0:02:09 As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only,
0:02:12 should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice,
0:02:14 or be used to evaluate any investment or security,
0:02:19 and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:02:22 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments
0:02:25 in the companies discussed in this podcast.
0:02:27 For more details, including a link to our investments,
0:02:31 please see A16Z.com/disclosures.
0:02:38 I’d like to start with just hearing your initial story,
0:02:40 what you did in the service,
0:02:42 and then also what inspired you to join initially.
0:02:46 What inspired me to join initially was what I think inspires plenty of people,
0:02:48 which is paying for school.
0:02:51 So the Air Force was good enough to pay for me to go to MIT.
0:02:54 And for that, when I commissioned as an officer,
0:02:56 I went and worked in AFRL for four years,
0:02:57 working in the Air Force Research Lab,
0:03:01 and focusing on how do we actually innovate in the Air Force?
0:03:03 How do we bring new systems out to the warfighter?
0:03:07 And how do we rapidly get those systems out there?
0:03:09 I mean, similar family history of service to the nation.
0:03:12 I just service to our people, went to Cornell,
0:03:14 did ROTC there, commissioned into the Army.
0:03:16 I left active service for a period of time,
0:03:17 went to the private sector,
0:03:20 and then actually went back into active service.
0:03:22 Ended up down at the Joint Special Operations
0:03:24 Camp for a number of years and ended up in some technology orgs
0:03:27 at the end of my time there, and then came back out and said,
0:03:28 “Hey, I think we can do some great work
0:03:32 from the private sector technology side going into the defense world.”
0:03:34 I should say I’m still serving,
0:03:36 still serving Army National Guard officer up in New York.
0:03:38 So I do the one weekend a month driving back there,
0:03:41 and that’s been a number of years now at this point.
0:03:43 That’s great. John?
0:03:45 So I almost joined, like a lot of folks of my vintage,
0:03:48 I almost joined on 9/11 or on 9/12.
0:03:50 I’m obviously heavily affected by that.
0:03:52 By that day, I was a senior in college,
0:03:57 and I ultimately made the decision to finish my computer science degree.
0:03:59 But then when we invaded Iraq in 2003,
0:04:02 I felt that same call to service decided it wasn’t just a whim,
0:04:04 it’s something I shouldn’t and couldn’t ignore.
0:04:06 And so the day after the invasion, I went to the recruiter,
0:04:07 and signed up.
0:04:10 I think I’m unique on the panel in that I enlisted.
0:04:14 I was on a program called 18 X-ray, which I think still exists.
0:04:19 You can join the Army as an enlisted soldier and commit to five years up front.
0:04:24 And in exchange, the Army will give you a shot to try out to be a Green Beret,
0:04:27 to be Army Special Forces, after doing basic training in airborne school.
0:04:32 And so I signed that contract the day after the invasion and I was successful.
0:04:36 And so I spent two years doing really amazing training in the Special Forces training pipeline,
0:04:39 and three years on an SF team at the Special Forces Group.
0:04:43 Was entrepreneurship something you envisioned while you were serving?
0:04:44 Did that come after?
0:04:47 Tell me how all that works, because you’re all three founders now.
0:04:52 I don’t think it was something I thought about at the time in service, but I think part of my frustration
0:05:01 in the Air Force was seeing how some of the acquisitions programs were broken or were outdated for what the pace of current technology was.
0:05:09 And I think I saw a lot of opportunities to try to change that from the outside and to try to innovate and bring those technologies in from the outside.
0:05:12 To be honest, it was not something that was on my radar.
0:05:17 When I left the active service for the first time, I went to about the biggest companies you could imagine.
0:05:23 I ended up as an investment banker on Wall Street and did that, obviously massive international bank presence.
0:05:24 I think that was great for me.
0:05:33 I don’t think I had at the time, at my stage in career at that point, I don’t think I had what I thought I needed to go out and start my own company or do the thing that we’re all doing now.
0:05:39 So I think for me, it was like, how do I build that toolkit of knowledge and how do I do those sorts of things in a large organization?
0:05:46 And then now that the time was right later on, opportunity presented to us, hopefully, give back to the mission and help the mission that we can from a startup standpoint.
0:05:49 I think for me, I’ve always been a builder.
0:05:52 The thing I loved about computer science in college was building things.
0:05:54 I’m very proud of my service.
0:05:58 In some ways, that was a little bit of a detour on my inevitable path to starting a company.
0:06:00 In fact, when I left the service, I went to law school.
0:06:05 And the reason I never really practiced law was because I figured out pretty quickly that that was not a path to,
0:06:09 or not, it’s really not a direct path to entrepreneurship or the kind of work I wanted to be doing.
0:06:13 So I wound up at Palantir instead in 2013 and spent nine years at that company.
0:06:17 It was not among the first hundred employees, but it felt very early stage.
0:06:23 And I got a lot of exposure that I think helped me on the eventual journey to founding Cape three years ago.
0:06:30 As you look at when you’re in the service and your problems, you work in aerospace management, logistics, and then privacy first, mobile care.
0:06:35 Were those problems you saw while serving, or did that help influence what you founded later?
0:06:36 Absolutely.
0:06:45 So we at RUN are focused on how do we enable military logistics, cross-services, but really on the Army and the Marine Corps side right now, how do we do field logistics?
0:06:46 How do we enable that?
0:06:52 And I think from my career side, we saw that not to say that military logistics can get the job done in the GWAT era, in our era of serving.
0:07:05 But, you know, I saw very quickly that the same things we had in GWAT from a military logistics standpoint were not necessarily to enable the force to be successful in a peer adversary, whether that’s in competition phase or conflict phase.
0:07:10 When Peter was my co-founder at RUN, we were still at Anderil before we left and founded RUN.
0:07:14 We were thinking about this problem setting, saying like, yeah, this is something that actually needs help and needs attention.
0:07:17 No great technology companies necessarily were really focused on it.
0:07:25 And I said, hey, this is a need that I felt still serving when I was serving in the military, and then this is a need that we think we can help advance now from the private sector.
0:07:38 When I was in AFRL, it was very, very early in the era of DOD thinking about drones on the battlefield and thinking about especially small, inexpensive drones, which at that time, we’re talking like 07, 08 kind of era.
0:07:45 Expensive drones on the battlefield were like, oh, wow, a $100,000 drone, that’s so inexpensive, or $50,000.
0:07:51 Whereas now, what anybody can buy off the shelf for $1,000 or $500 is greater than any capabilities we had at that time.
0:08:02 But at that point, the DOD was first starting to think about what does it really mean when adversaries can bring low-cost capabilities to the battlefield, adversaries who may not have a traditional air force.
0:08:19 And what I saw early on in those initial tests and those initial developments was kind of a disconnect of the old-school, big, heavy military systems trying to be thrown at these small, light, fast threats that were kind of a totally new challenge.
0:08:25 And I saw how difficult it was for this traditional structure and the traditional defense contractors to actually do that.
0:08:36 We saw a lot of big systems, missiles and lasers and all of these things, which were big, expensive, bespoke systems built for a prior era of warfare, trying to be thrown at this small problem.
0:08:38 And frankly, in the beginning, they just didn’t work at all.
0:08:43 And I think that’s when the DOD first started to realize that it was a totally new threat.
0:08:43 It was a totally new thing.
0:08:52 And it’s something we’ve seen borne out since then in pretty much every conflict since then, you know, certainly in Ukraine, where we’ve got tens of thousands of drones flying around all the time.
0:08:59 And so I think that’s what really inspired me and a lot of the folks on our team to do something about that and to try to think about it in a new way.
0:09:03 As you brought up Ukraine, I think, obviously, that’s changed the whole paradigm in your space.
0:09:04 And then also you.
0:09:06 I think, frankly, I would say.
0:09:07 Oh, three, actually.
0:09:22 I don’t want to speak for John, but I think all of us, right, as we look at what has happened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, right, the new technologies that have been effectively used or ineffectively used by both sides and how that changes things, right, from a logistics standpoint, certainly from a U.S. standpoint, from a communications standpoint.
0:09:23 Yeah.
0:09:31 I think it’s changed, like, that laboratory, for better or worse, has really certainly impacted the way I think about things and we think about things at Rune, and I’m sure it has for both of you.
0:09:38 I left Palantir in February 2022 to start CAPE, left Palantir on a Friday, checked into that we work on a Monday morning, and the invasion was happening.
0:09:52 The very first question that we asked ourselves at CAPE was, if you recall, commercial cellular was a huge factor, continues to be a huge factor in Ukraine, but was enormous in the initial days as a force multiplier, but also as a risk.
0:09:59 Both sides were using commercial cellular heavily and enjoying benefits of that, but also literally targeting missile strikes against each other based on that signature.
0:10:12 And so the first question we asked ourselves as a company was, what tech do we wish the Ukrainians were using right now, and how do we get that tech into Taiwan ahead of an eventual Chinese invasion that hopefully never happens, but we certainly need to prepare for?
0:10:15 And that’s really been a motivating question for the company from the beginning.
0:10:18 I think if you look at logistics, obviously they stopped outside of Kiev.
0:10:19 Yep.
0:10:21 So the Russians had a few issues there.
0:10:34 As we look at going from veteran to founder, can you jump straight from veteran and found a company, or do you need to stop somewhere in between an Anderol, a Palantir, and know what right looks like, know what culture you need to set?
0:10:36 I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
0:10:39 I think you can become a founder at any point in your career.
0:10:44 If it’s something you’re going to do and it’s something that’s sort of in your blood, I think that it’s inevitable.
0:10:54 I will say personally, my stint, which turned out to be almost a decade, at Palantir in between service and starting a company, I learned a ton.
0:11:09 The culture at Palantir, I think, is borderline legendary at this point, and the reputation is warranted, but also the mechanics of how to operate in a company, what does an innovative company look like, fostering innovation and allowing a little bit of chaos and a little bit of things to bubble up within the stew, but without the wheels coming off.
0:11:12 Those are important lessons for a founder to learn.
0:11:18 You can learn them the hard way by just start a company and go do it, or maybe you can have some training wheels for a few years at a Palantir in Anderol.
0:11:29 I would say my experience at Palantir certainly was helpful and I think has helped set us up for success in some ways, but ultimately there’s no way to learn how to do this job other than to just do it.
0:11:30 Right.
0:11:34 Yeah, I would say I think it’s a very individual and a very personal question, like what are your life experiences, right?
0:11:39 I think we all come out of the military with a great set of leadership skills, a great set of communication skills.
0:11:42 We understand we have some domain expertise, right, in what we’re doing.
0:11:50 But I think it’s really boils down to, again, to use the toolkit analogy of like how strong do you as a veteran feel coming out of this and committed to it?
0:11:52 And do you think you have the skills to be able to do it?
0:11:58 To John’s point, I think for me personally, I wanted to get out in the time that I had in finance and then the time that I had at Anderol.
0:12:00 Very similar to like the Palantir ethos there.
0:12:03 How do you move fast and break things, but that’s okay to get towards a mission and do those things.
0:12:07 To me, that is super valuable experience as I now lead a team and lead the company.
0:12:11 But that’s not to say that we have different paths to get here.
0:12:12 I mean, all three of us have different paths.
0:12:17 That doesn’t mean you might not have had different experiences prior to service, right, before serving or coming out.
0:12:22 And I think that’s a very individual, I hate to be a cop out on it, but I think it’s a very individual choice to make.
0:12:24 I would agree with that.
0:12:28 I would say for me, when I left the Air Force, I went to grad school after that.
0:12:36 And I think having some distance from it is helpful, whatever that distance is, whether that’s a big corporation or doing something entirely different or grad school.
0:12:42 I think having a little bit of distance, seeing a little bit of a different set of culture or a different set of problem sets.
0:12:54 Also, you know, it helps you maybe in some ways distance yourself from some of the frustrations of the government bureaucracy and the military and all of that to then kind of refresh yourself to go face those challenges and jump back into it.
0:13:06 But I think also just trying to figure out how you should do things differently out in the private sector, out in the commercial sector, how you can take the good parts of the military, of government service and apply them.
0:13:13 Take the good parts, ignore the bad, drop the bureaucracy bits that are not helpful to anybody and figure out how you can benefit from it.
0:13:18 But I think there’s a lot of good things to take from it, especially a lot of the kind of mission-driven focus.
0:13:27 We’ve had lots of folks on our team over the years who have been prior military or prior intelligence, and there’s no replacement for that mission-driven focus.
0:13:30 There’s no replacement for that actual commitment to making a difference.
0:13:33 Matt, where do you come down on that question?
0:13:35 So that’s a good question, and we debate that internally.
0:13:41 Personally, I transitioned out, and I was part of Lehman Brothers’ 08 MBA class, which went really well.
0:13:42 I was there 22 years.
0:13:44 Probably not technically your fault, though.
0:13:45 That’s not your fault.
0:13:45 No, it wasn’t my fault.
0:13:47 Me and Dick Folder were really tight.
0:13:50 But I think it helps to go to somewhere and see what right looks like.
0:13:57 For me personally, especially Anderol, Palantir, SpaceX, and then Tesla, just some companies that are producing these founders.
0:13:58 I think it really helps.
0:14:01 But there’s obviously folks that can make that jump.
0:14:03 So I think the answer is either.
0:14:06 But for me personally, I would want to stop along the way.
0:14:08 You made a great point as well that I think is important.
0:14:12 I think you always have to be careful that you don’t want to just create the thing that you thought you knew.
0:14:14 needed when you were in the military, right?
0:14:16 And I think that is sometimes a trap, right?
0:14:17 We all need to use our experience to do that.
0:14:22 But when I talk to folks about that, if you try to build the thing that you thought you needed,
0:14:28 every month that goes by, every year that goes by, what you thought you needed then is now out of date and it’s stale, right?
0:14:34 So especially as you lead a company, and I’m sure Sean can talk about it too, is you need to be constantly thinking forward,
0:14:42 not just creating the thing that you thought you needed in the Argandab River Valley in 2011 or 12 or in Herat or wherever it happened to be.
0:14:42 Yeah, I agree.
0:14:44 And we went 4G to 5G.
0:14:44 Let’s go to 10G.
0:14:46 Why stop at 4?
0:14:50 Or we built the Hornet, which is a Category 4 fighter, and we built the Super Hornet with Category 4+.
0:14:52 Skip that like the Marine Corps did.
0:14:57 I think that’s the essential skill for a founder, is that mindset.
0:14:59 In my opinion, you have that or you don’t.
0:15:00 That’s part of who you are or it’s not.
0:15:07 There are other skills that support that overall mindset, that insistence on way forward thinking, ambitious goal setting.
0:15:10 And you can learn those skills, certainly in the military.
0:15:12 You can learn those skills at great companies like the ones you mentioned.
0:15:17 So they’re supporting skills you can learn, but the core, that core mindset, I think, is just innate.
0:15:22 I don’t know your founding stories necessarily, specifically, but finding the right co-founder was important.
0:15:23 For me, right?
0:15:26 So finding the right software engineer, technical co-founder, right?
0:15:29 So Peter is my co-founder and CTO.
0:15:32 Like, I don’t know how I would have done that straight coming out of service, right?
0:15:35 So I needed to go to a place, thankfully a great place like Anderil,
0:15:39 where we’re surrounded by those types of people to be able to find that partner.
0:15:43 And now he and I, our Venn diagrams don’t overlap that much, which is great in a co-founding pair.
0:15:46 Let’s pull in a thread that Grant brought up, and let’s go culture.
0:15:47 You might have some good responses here.
0:15:50 Culture in the military, culture in startup land.
0:15:54 And then you could even add finance, city, which is very different.
0:15:54 So that’s a third.
0:15:59 But let’s focus on military and then startup land differences and similarities.
0:16:06 I think I probably have a unique perspective from the military side by virtue of being an 18x-ray
0:16:10 and only ever experiencing the special operations community in my military service.
0:16:16 That is a naturally more meritocratic, flatter organization, I think, than the rest of the DoD.
0:16:19 Having said that, there’s still a rank structure.
0:16:20 There’s still centralized planning.
0:16:26 There’s still a very clear hierarchy and a very clear set of doctrine and a book that literally tells you how to do your job.
0:16:30 Even in the context of special operations where you’re granted a lot more creativity and a lot more autonomy,
0:16:32 that structure still exists.
0:16:36 What is amazing about a startup is none of that exists.
0:16:41 You know, Monday morning, you check into a WeWork, and now you’ve just got a company and a couple bucks in the bank, hopefully.
0:16:43 And there’s literally nothing else.
0:16:44 You don’t have an email address necessarily.
0:16:47 And so you get to write the entire thing yourself.
0:16:50 That can be really disorienting, especially in my experience.
0:16:52 We have a ton of veterans at the company, and they’re all amazing.
0:16:54 And I love to hire veterans.
0:16:56 But that can be disorienting coming out of service.
0:17:02 And so you have to create, in my opinion, a culture around, I think it’s a little bit trite to say celebrating failure,
0:17:06 but at least openly accepting failure when it happens.
0:17:11 If people are working hard and people are taking risks and pushing the envelope and their efforts fail,
0:17:16 at CAPE anyway, the only thing you need to do is be transparent about that and call it out when we fail
0:17:19 and adjust and maybe name a couple of lessons learned for next time.
0:17:22 And it doesn’t do any damage to your reputation at the company or your ability to operate.
0:17:27 I think that’s the most important cultural aspect at a startup because it encourages risk-taking.
0:17:29 It encourages people to lean forward and push hard.
0:17:33 I find that there’s like common threads across all of them.
0:17:38 So when I think of like out of broad buckets, military service, my finance experience, and now startup experience,
0:17:43 there are like broad threads that make somebody or make something successful there,
0:17:46 which is initiative, drive, taking chances and doing those things, right?
0:17:49 Whether that is part of a deal team in investment banking,
0:17:53 whether that was part of a team within the JSOC enterprise or the military writ large,
0:17:55 or now it’s part of a startup, right?
0:17:56 So it’s, yeah, how do you celebrate success?
0:17:58 How do you encourage risk-taking?
0:18:01 I think also I view it as like, how do you hire talent?
0:18:05 But you understand that when that talent comes in, you got to train, you got to mentor, you got to develop, right?
0:18:08 And it’s not necessarily always at a startup, at least from my standpoint, at Rune.
0:18:11 It’s not been hiring just because somebody has a skill.
0:18:17 It’s hiring somebody that I think can grow into a position or do these things or with the right coaching and development can take chances
0:18:20 and maybe fail, as John says, but like you move on from that.
0:18:23 So I think there are like commonalities across all of these.
0:18:28 Obviously, at the startup, you don’t have the structure in place and the support structure that’s in place.
0:18:31 It’s certainly at a large company, but also somewhat in the military side.
0:18:35 So there’s some differences there, but I think from a human standpoint and a culture standpoint,
0:18:39 you can have some threads of success that are common across those.
0:18:44 Probably for most of our companies, it’s not just about government or military.
0:18:45 Everything is dual use.
0:18:48 Technology crosses a lot of different industries.
0:18:52 For us, it’s not just the kind of like military and federal market.
0:18:57 It’s also critical infrastructure, oil and gas, power companies, all of these large organizations
0:19:02 that face a lot of the same challenges that military or federal government face.
0:19:07 I think for us, it’s about balancing that culture and trying to figure out how to take the really mission-driven
0:19:11 and what that really translates to is customer-driven, user-driven.
0:19:13 I think there’s commonality there.
0:19:18 Not an over-obsession with the kind of military portion of it, but taking the part about it
0:19:23 about what are we trying to accomplish and how are we trying to help these people, these organizations.
0:19:25 Yeah, you mentioned dual use.
0:19:28 And first of all, I’d love you to define, are you dual use?
0:19:30 Would you consider all three of you dual use or not?
0:19:36 And then any cultural issues with that, bringing folks on board on the national defense side?
0:19:40 Number one, I would say we’re definitely dual use because kind of threats and concerns
0:19:46 about drones in the national airspace, in critical areas, absolutely cut across all sorts of different areas.
0:19:52 Whether it’s an Air Force base or a power plant or border security, everyone is concerned.
0:19:56 And not just because they’re concerned about just malicious drones, it’s about being able
0:20:00 to use drones for good things and use drones for inspecting infrastructure and doing logistics
0:20:01 and all of these things.
0:20:06 But I think in that, you do need to make sure that you’re building a culture that understands
0:20:09 why you’re there and what your values are and what you care about.
0:20:12 In our world, right, we’re going to end up dealing with serious stuff.
0:20:17 And you can’t just have people who wanted to build iPhone games and so they just happen
0:20:17 to get a job.
0:20:20 They’re like, no, you have to understand we’re here to do serious stuff.
0:20:26 We had folks actually go over and assist the Ukrainians and provide support and services
0:20:28 and technology to them.
0:20:33 You can’t have a company where people are split on what they care about and what those foundational
0:20:33 values are.
0:20:35 You have to be all on board.
0:20:39 Yeah, there’s some great quotes out there by Palmer Luckey talking about taking technology
0:20:43 talent from the commercial sector and how do you convince them to come into the defense
0:20:43 world.
0:20:45 And I will say that, frankly, it’s not that hard.
0:20:46 Do you want to do something meaningful?
0:20:47 Do you want to do meaningful work?
0:20:51 And I think that’s the genius behind a lot of the American Dynamism companies, to include,
0:20:54 I would say, all three of ours, is like, how do you bring that amazing technical talent
0:20:58 and those amazing software engineers or hardware engineers, the case may be, and bring them
0:21:03 to something like, hey, do you want to do something meaningful for the nation, for the people and
0:21:04 do those types of things?
0:21:07 And how do you fuse that together with those of us who have come out of the military and
0:21:08 do those sorts of things?
0:21:12 I don’t want to say it’s easy, but it’s not as hard as people would think to get them motivated
0:21:16 about doing what’s right for the country, doing what’s right for our people and to do those
0:21:17 sorts of things.
0:21:21 And I’ll also add, I think what really sorts people out on whether or not they want to
0:21:26 join a company that does these sorts of work and these sorts of missions is you show them
0:21:27 what you’re doing, right?
0:21:30 Nothing sorts that out faster than real-world examples.
0:21:36 When we show drones in places that are being run by prison gangs to smuggle fentanyl into
0:21:40 prisons or in military environments, whatever, it’s very clear what the stakes are, and it’s
0:21:41 very clear why it’s important.
0:21:46 And for those people who it resonates, it’s instantaneous, and it’s, wow, I want to be working on this.
0:21:48 And for those, it doesn’t, great.
0:21:49 Like, that’s fine.
0:21:52 There’s plenty of iPhone game companies to go join, and that’s great.
0:21:57 I think one of the things I really love about Cape and the company we’ve built is we really
0:22:03 are truly dual-use, and we’re dual-use in some sense defense and consumer, much in the same
0:22:04 way that Signal is dual-use, right?
0:22:08 It’s like Signal is used by privacy-preferring people all around the world doing all kinds
0:22:08 of stuff.
0:22:13 And also everyone here at the Summit, everyone on Capitol Hill has Signal installed on their
0:22:13 phone.
0:22:15 It’s very valuable technology.
0:22:19 I’m personally very motivated, and the company is very motivated by building this tech to
0:22:24 keep folks doing special operations work safe and allowing them access to commercial cellular
0:22:26 without incurring all the risk that typically comes with that.
0:22:30 It’s the same set of issues, and frankly, everyone has the same use case for their phone.
0:22:32 We have customers who are journalists.
0:22:36 We have customers who are survivors of domestic violence.
0:22:41 We do work with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation on detecting cell-size simulators at protests
0:22:42 and at demonstrations.
0:22:46 All those people have the same set of issues and the same desire to leverage the value of
0:22:50 the commercial cellular network without making that typically inherent set of compromises.
0:22:54 And you ask a really good question, which is, does that change the kind of people you can
0:22:55 attract, or how does that affect recruiting?
0:23:00 I think at Cape anyway, first of all, I’m like, I’m incredibly proud of the team that we’ve built,
0:23:02 and so I’m biased here.
0:23:06 But you just have, you have to work hard to find people who embrace both of those missions
0:23:07 simultaneously.
0:23:11 But when you find them, they just tend to be awesome, awesome folks, and the kind of people
0:23:13 that I really like to work with, and the people I want to work with.
0:23:18 One thing I’ll just say, tactically, that we’ve done internally that I really believe in is
0:23:24 we have not split the business into commercial and defense divisions, for lack of a better
0:23:24 word, right?
0:23:29 There’s an engineering team, and the engineering team, we all agree on a set of priorities that
0:23:32 serve the entire customer base, and I think that’s worked out really well.
0:23:34 We’re building one product, and it really serves both purposes.
0:23:35 That’s great.
0:23:38 You’re all busy building your own companies.
0:23:43 When you served, did you see any gaps there that you wish people would start looking to
0:23:44 build companies?
0:23:45 Any requests for startups?
0:23:47 It’s a big question.
0:23:49 This is such an unfair question.
0:23:53 I realize now that I ask every government person I talk to, if you have the magic technical
0:23:55 wand, what would you wave it and create?
0:23:57 Who, height or weight, body armor, and kit?
0:24:01 Give me all that stuff that I need to carry around and make it weigh 30% of what it weighs.
0:24:02 80 pounds of gear in your back.
0:24:03 Yeah, yeah.
0:24:03 Right, right, right.
0:24:05 Make it 25 pounds and make it less cumbersome.
0:24:08 I mean, I was actually just having a conversation this morning.
0:24:13 As we think about logistics and how do you enable autonomous logistics systems, maritime,
0:24:14 assets, ground assets.
0:24:19 One of the things, though, that we’re interested in is heavy lift aerial resupply platforms,
0:24:19 right?
0:24:21 Which is a hard problem, right?
0:24:23 Autonomous air vehicles, obviously a thing.
0:24:27 UASs, how do you actually lift substantial cargo with that?
0:24:33 As we think about driving the automation of military logistics or through autonomous vehicles, right?
0:24:36 Getting an air system that actually can carry the weight for that is something that’s like
0:24:39 particularly interesting to me and is a very hard thing to do.
0:24:48 Part of the thing with both military and government now is the challenges they face are less kind of hardware centric than they used to be.
0:24:51 It’s not about owning a particular set of kit.
0:24:57 A lot of it is about data and data sharing and being able to have the correct information to make decisions.
0:25:03 A lot of what’s needed now is how does data get shared between organizations.
0:25:12 So for us, right, in the drone tracking world, we actually shifted business models a lot over the last few years from what was initially traditional hardware sales,
0:25:15 building the fancy piece of military hardware and selling it.
0:25:19 And pretty much as soon as it goes out the door, you kind of never see it again, mostly if things go well.
0:25:28 But what we saw was that the need really was for the information to make those decisions to take action and that it wasn’t about having a fancy piece of hardware.
0:25:36 But I think changing the way that the government looks at that and the way that they buy things and the way that they’re able to actually share information, that’s the hard part.
0:25:46 And part of dual use and part of the cross problems between government agencies and private companies is being able to share information between those two.
0:25:54 It doesn’t do the power plant any good if the federal law enforcement agency next door can’t share with them the threats that are happening.
0:26:04 So I think anything that encourages and enables data sharing between organizations with government is super, super valuable and definitely needed in a lot of these cases.
0:26:05 You touched on hardware, software.
0:26:09 As we look at the future of war, we don’t want to be fighting the last war.
0:26:10 Obviously, we want to fight the next war.
0:26:15 We look at Ukraine, perfect test case for all three of your companies there.
0:26:22 Do you think we have the right weapons, whether it’s hardware, software, or do we need to be looking out further and making a bigger leap?
0:26:26 Do we need different types of programs, vice trillion-dollar programs?
0:26:34 I think that maybe the common thread to pull out as we think about the next war is an emphasis on asymmetric capabilities.
0:26:39 A lot of attention is being paid, I know, rightfully, to the need for low-cost achievable systems, right?
0:26:44 That’s, I think, there’s a growing consensus that’s the future of warfare in a lot of ways.
0:26:52 I think, although it’s certainly no secret, people don’t always contextualize cyber warfare in the same way as an asymmetric capability.
0:26:56 Relatively low amounts of investment can cost huge amounts of damage in an adversary.
0:27:01 That’s sort of where CATE plays, is in the cyber vulnerabilities in the global cell network.
0:27:04 But in general, that’s the theme to pay attention to.
0:27:10 Rather than investing in trillion-dollar bets on absolute dominance in a relatively small number of exquisite systems,
0:27:15 how do we win the scrappy, messy, asymmetric war that’s sort of inevitable next time around?
0:27:18 Do we feel we have the things now?
0:27:19 I mean, no.
0:27:23 I mean, that’s why we started, or at least in the middle of the time, that’s why all of us started our companies, right?
0:27:28 Is we feel like there is something there that we can give back to the military that doesn’t exist right now,
0:27:30 or we can do it better, or we can help enable operations.
0:27:33 One of the things we need to look at is, how do we do these things faster, right?
0:27:35 At least as a software company, right?
0:27:42 The idea of a 20-month prototyping effort to potentially get to something that then maybe a year later is going to transition.
0:27:44 I’m using that as a very specific example right now.
0:27:46 It’s just, it’s absolutely insane.
0:27:49 Would be insane to the commercial sector, right?
0:27:51 Is insane when you think about software development cycles.
0:27:57 So I think the ability to rapidly prototype things, develop them, get them out to the force, test, iterate with them,
0:28:00 and then frankly for the government to say, yes, that worked, great, cool, move on.
0:28:02 No, it didn’t, and off-ramp.
0:28:07 I think that’s what we are totally on board with, is the ability for the government to force us to perform,
0:28:09 to compete, to do things for the warfighter.
0:28:11 And if we are doing great, then awesome.
0:28:15 And if not, then off-board us and bring somebody else in, right?
0:28:20 And I think how you do those things, I think, as taxpayers, as veterans, and as founders,
0:28:26 we should want that level of competition and that cutthroat competition to onboard things quickly and off-board things quickly.
0:28:30 And I think that’s finally, the administration’s obviously moving towards that way, that direction.
0:28:33 And I think that’s the goodness for the force and the goodness for the nation to move that way.
0:28:38 I think a lot of attention has rightfully been invested in, how do we onboard things quickly?
0:28:42 You know, the resurgence to OTAs is the most visible example of this, and it’s great.
0:28:44 DIU’s doing amazing work.
0:28:49 I think there’s sneaky work to be done on killing stuff that’s not working still.
0:28:51 And there are big, high-profile, very expensive examples.
0:28:55 But also within the innovation ecosystem, just call it when you see it.
0:28:58 And if something’s not working and something’s not going to pan out, just kill it.
0:29:03 You do everybody a favor, including the folks at that company, if you say, this isn’t working, and you cut it off.
0:29:08 Yeah, the worst thing, like you have a zombie program that just goes on with millions or tens of millions of dollars,
0:29:11 or sometimes even more of that, that’s not being used by warfighters.
0:29:14 I think to John’s point, like, you’re not doing the service any favors.
0:29:15 You’re not doing the warfighter any favors.
0:29:16 Definitely not the taxpayer.
0:29:22 And frankly, you’re not doing that company any favors because you’re putting them into a false sense of that solution is useful,
0:29:27 and you’re stifling potentially that company to, like, reinvent itself or go forward and do something new on that.
0:29:28 So I think you’re right.
0:29:30 I think off-boarding is just as important as onboarding.
0:29:35 Yeah, I think one of the gaps right now is, like you said, DIU’s done a lot of great stuff.
0:29:42 A lot of different efforts have been done to try to get early-stage startups involved in those first government contracts,
0:29:44 that kind of $1 million phase, $2 million phase.
0:29:50 But we still have that gap, that kind of valley of death, of how do we take any of those successful programs
0:29:53 and scale them up to that mid-size level?
0:29:57 Not everything is going to jump from a $1 million to a $200 million contract.
0:30:01 How do we scale them up, get them out to the forces, get them out to the services,
0:30:03 and see the potential once you actually scale it up?
0:30:11 Because I think that’s one of the challenges is, it’s easy to deploy a couple systems in a little POC and see,
0:30:12 okay, well, that’s pretty useful.
0:30:16 But a lot of the types of things we’re talking about, you don’t really see the real value of them
0:30:19 until you have them at some sort of scale.
0:30:22 If I’m talking about monitoring the airspace and looking at all the drones,
0:30:27 it’s great at the kind of tactical level to see, oh, we’ve got a drone crossing into this airbase here.
0:30:34 But as soon as you scale it up to the larger scale of saying, oh, well, now we can see patterns of activity.
0:30:39 We can see that, oh, that’s funny, this drone showed up at three different bases over time.
0:30:44 And we can do that only because we’ve started to build that out at a not large scale.
0:30:49 We’re not fully committing to everything, but we can see the potential of it at a kind of mid-size scale, larger scale.
0:30:51 And I think that’s a missing piece that we have.
0:30:55 How do you scale it up to actually try it in the real world at a scale that matters?
0:30:57 Yeah, you brought up programs.
0:31:02 CIA’s got In-Q-Tel, DIU’s for the DoD, not only programs, but how to select the best tech.
0:31:05 And obviously, we think you three are all the best.
0:31:06 You’re our portfolio companies.
0:31:14 But you need to build that market map, find out the category leader, because it’s going to go 90% leader, 10%, everybody else gets steak knives.
0:31:17 So we need to help them select the best tech also.
0:31:22 And I think one of the challenges on the government side with that, especially on the DoD side,
0:31:29 is because people and officers rotate out so frequently, you run into situations where somebody started out a really good program.
0:31:31 They started to see the benefits of it.
0:31:34 And then a brand new person walks in the door the next day and says, OK, what are we doing?
0:31:36 And you’re starting from scratch.
0:31:38 And they don’t really understand why were the decisions made?
0:31:39 What was the intent?
0:31:47 And so I think there needs to be a little bit of a better focus on continuity of ushering these programs across those eras and understanding why they’re doing them.
0:31:51 Military units are renowned for their trust and confidence, their cohesion.
0:31:53 We all saw that, especially you and the Special Forces.
0:31:57 How do you instill that in your companies?
0:32:00 How do you build that teamwork, that trust, confidence, cohesion?
0:32:05 We’re an in-person company, which I don’t think is the final answer, but really helps.
0:32:07 Proximity matters, in my opinion.
0:32:13 When people are in the office working together, you get a lot of that more easily than you do in a remote configuration.
0:32:20 The key ingredient, the thing you’re really trying to build that the military has in space, you really want at your startup,
0:32:27 you want to know when you need someone on your team that they’re there and they’re picking up on the first ring.
0:32:30 I think that’s the most important thing in life, certainly in company building.
0:32:37 And so my barometer for this within the company is when someone, it just happened this weekend,
0:32:42 we had a PZERO with someone who was traveling abroad in support of a customer and was having an issue,
0:32:46 and they spun up an internal thread, and immediately seven people were on the thread,
0:32:49 and it was the right seven people, and they were all helping to troubleshoot,
0:32:51 and within 20 minutes they had the guy turned around and good to go.
0:32:57 And that sort of mindset, no one complained about it, and we didn’t even mention it.
0:33:00 On Monday morning, it was just, that’s how we do business at Cape, right?
0:33:06 And that’s where you want to get, in my opinion, and the way you do that, to quote Ben Horowitz,
0:33:07 culture is what you do, it’s not what you say.
0:33:11 And so as the founder, your job is to be on every single one of those Slack threads,
0:33:12 especially in the early days, right?
0:33:15 And to be at the office every single day and to be working on those things.
0:33:17 And people will follow your lead.
0:33:21 And then if you do it enough, and you do it over and over and over again, it becomes part of the culture.
0:33:22 I’ll amplify that.
0:33:27 The collaboration that happens across engineering, product, growth, company leadership, all in one place.
0:33:31 I can’t imagine having not had that when we first opened our first initial hires,
0:33:34 because your first hires are really also building the culture with you.
0:33:38 Yes, it’s top-down from founders and from the executive level,
0:33:40 but like those initial hires are part of that culture for us.
0:33:42 And then I think it’s the normal things.
0:33:44 After work, during Sun-Fridays, we do a happy hour.
0:33:46 Every single Friday, we go to the same bar.
0:33:48 But it’s little things like that.
0:33:49 I mean, what does it cost?
0:33:50 It costs us an hour of time.
0:33:52 We cut out a little bit early on a Friday,
0:33:54 but I also know that everyone’s working generally right now.
0:33:56 We’re working Saturdays over the weekend.
0:33:59 You know, in one day, let’s presume success, and we have thousands of employees.
0:34:01 I don’t think I can still fit in the same bar.
0:34:03 But right now, that’s important, right?
0:34:05 It’s important to know that, especially as a software company,
0:34:07 where my capital is my people, right?
0:34:10 It is my engineers, and it is my growth professionals.
0:34:12 And that’s really what we need to grow and build.
0:34:17 I think the biggest thing for us has been actually recognizing and calling out
0:34:19 real-world impacts of the things we do.
0:34:24 I think, especially initially, we were actually very bad at celebrating our successes
0:34:25 and calling attention to it.
0:34:29 I think part of that is because so many of our folks are very mission-driven
0:34:31 and very like, okay, we got to do this thing.
0:34:35 And so you accomplish something, and you never even take the time to notice.
0:34:40 And I think that is one of the good things of having that mix in the culture
0:34:46 of kind of the mission-driven military and intelligence people versus the normal people
0:34:48 is sometimes the normal people kind of step back and they’re like,
0:34:50 holy shit, like, what did we just do?
0:34:51 That’s amazing.
0:34:52 That’s incredible.
0:34:54 And there’s plenty of other people who are just like,
0:34:55 oh, well, yeah, we do this all the time.
0:34:56 It’s no big deal.
0:35:00 But actually stepping back and recognizing that and celebrating those wins,
0:35:04 I think that’s part of what really builds that culture and that cohesion.
0:35:08 And then that builds a culture in which when things are going bad,
0:35:10 when things are going wrong, which are always going to happen,
0:35:12 there’s always going to be new things popping up.
0:35:16 Suddenly, that’s a culture where everyone understands why they’re like,
0:35:18 okay, cool, let’s pull together a team.
0:35:18 Let’s hop on a flight.
0:35:21 Let’s go fix this thing, do this thing right now.
0:35:25 And everybody’s on board because they understand why they’re doing it
0:35:25 and what the stakes are.
0:35:27 All right, big question here.
0:35:29 Take your time before you answer.
0:35:32 Would you ever go back to the military,
0:35:35 either in a leadership, advisory, or an innovation role?
0:35:38 I think innovation roles are really interesting.
0:35:40 There are so many of them across government.
0:35:43 And without picking on any in particular,
0:35:44 a lot of them never get anything done.
0:35:46 So I know internally,
0:35:49 someday if I’m lucky enough to be approached about that sort of a job,
0:35:51 I’m going to have a list of demands.
0:35:52 Here are the ways I need to be empowered.
0:35:56 Here’s the authorities that I need so that I can actually make a real impact
0:35:57 and be empowered.
0:35:59 But given the right set of conditions, I would love it.
0:36:02 That would be a defining career milestone just like starting a company.
0:36:05 This is a little bit different for me because I am still serving
0:36:07 in the Army National Guard in that way.
0:36:09 And I love leading soldiers and I love being around soldiers.
0:36:13 But I think going back into like full-time some kind of role or governmental role,
0:36:16 if I am successful to the point that I’m offered that opportunity at some point,
0:36:16 same as John,
0:36:18 yeah, I think that would be an honor of a lifetime to go back.
0:36:19 I mean, I think we were all,
0:36:23 yes, we are doing these to grow companies and to do those things.
0:36:25 And I’m not ashamed to say we are here to make some level of money.
0:36:28 I mean, that is what we do as companies.
0:36:30 But there is a selfless service aspect to that.
0:36:34 And if that selfless service could eventually be back in a governmental role
0:36:37 and helping the mission, if I believe I can make an impact and be helpful there,
0:36:39 then yeah, that would absolutely be something I would do.
0:36:41 Yeah, I totally agree with that.
0:36:43 I think being able to know that you can have an impact
0:36:46 and being able to know that you actually have the authority
0:36:50 and the ability to go and do the things that need to be done as you see them.
0:36:52 Coming from the Air Force acquisition side,
0:36:55 I have strong opinions about what’s needed in that world
0:36:57 and acquisition reform and whatnot.
0:37:00 But one request, one thing that I know I would have
0:37:02 that I didn’t realize until I knew it was an option.
0:37:05 A number of years ago, I was talking with the Secretary of the Air Force
0:37:10 and she said, wow, we need a lot more folks like you coming back into service.
0:37:12 And I said, well, I don’t really know.
0:37:14 And she said, well, I can get you a beard waiver
0:37:16 so you wouldn’t have to shave your beard.
0:37:17 I’m like, okay, now you’re talking.
0:37:20 That’s my, gotta have a beard waiver.
0:37:21 That’s nice beard.
0:37:22 There you go.
0:37:22 Done.
0:37:26 Now, if you made it this far,
0:37:28 a reminder that this was recorded live
0:37:30 at our third annual American Dynamism Summit
0:37:32 in the heart of Washington, D.C.
0:37:35 And if you’d like to see more exclusive content from the Summit,
0:37:38 head on over to a16z.com
0:37:41 slash American dash Dynamism dash Summit.
0:37:43 Or you can click the link in our description.
In today’s world, the battlefield extends far beyond war zones—it’s embedded in our tech stacks, supply chains, and airspace security systems. So who better to solve these modern challenges than those who’ve served on the front lines?
Recorded live at the third annual American Dynamism Summit in Washington D.C., this episode features a16z’s Matt Shortal—a veteran himself—moderating a conversation with three founders who transitioned from military service to building cutting-edge defense startups:
- John Doyle, founder & CEO of CapeÂ
- David Tuttle, cofounder & CEO of RuneÂ
- Grant Jordan, founder & CEO of SkySafe
The panel covers their journeys from service to startups, how their time in uniform shaped what they chose to build, and whether veterans should go straight into entrepreneurship—or stop first at places like Palantir or Anduril. They also discuss how Ukraine changed the game, how dual-use tech is shifting the innovation landscape, and how to instill trust and culture in mission-driven companies.
The big question: how do we win the next war—the asymmetric, fast-moving, tech-enabled kind—and build the industrial base we need to do it?
Â
Resources:Â
See more from The American Dynamism Summit 2025: www. a16z.com/american-dynamism-summit
Find John of LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-doyle-48633227/
Find David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidtuttle1/
Find Grant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantjordansd/
Find Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-shortal/
Â
Stay Updated:Â
Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16z
Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z
Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z
Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/
Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.