The Dual-Use Founder: Vets Now Building For America

As taxpayers, as veterans, and as founders, we should want that level of competition. All of these large organizations face a lot of the same challenges that the military or the federal government faces.

How do we do these things faster?

How do we win the scrappy, messy, asymmetric war that's sort of inevitable next time around?

Do you want to do something meaningful? Do you want to do meaningful work?

It's very clear what the stakes are, and it's very clear why it's important.

I'd like to start with just hearing your initial story: what you did in the service and what inspired you to join initially.

What inspired me to join initially was what I think inspires plenty of people: paying for school. The Air Force was good enough to pay for me to go to MIT, and for that, when I commissioned as an officer, I went and worked in the Air Force Research Laboratory for 4 years, focusing on how we actually innovate in the Air Force, how we bring new systems out to the warfighter, and how we rapidly get those systems out there.

Yeah, I mean, similar: a family history of service to the nation, and service to our people. I went to Cornell, did ROTC there, and commissioned into the Army. I left active service for a period of time, went to the private sector, and then actually went back into active service.

I ended up down at the Joint Special Operations Command for a number of years and ended up in some technology organizations at the end of my time there. Then I came back out and said, “Hey, I think we can do some great work from the private-sector technology side going into the defense world.” I should say, I’m still serving—still serving as an Army National Guard officer up in New York. So I do the one weekend a month, driving back there, and that’s been a number of years now at this point.

That's great, John. I almost joined, like a lot of folks of my vintage. I almost joined on 9/11, around 9/12. I was obviously heavily affected by that day. I was a senior in college, and I ultimately made the decision to finish my computer science degree.

But then, when we invaded Iraq in 2003, I felt that same call to service. I decided it wasn't just a whim, and it was something I shouldn't and couldn't ignore. So the day after the invasion, I went to the recruiter and signed up.

I think I'm unique on the panel in that I enlisted. I was on a program called 18X, which I think still exists. You can join the Army as an enlisted soldier and commit to 5 years up front, and in exchange, the Army will give you a shot to try out to be a Green Beret—to be Army Special Forces—after doing basic training and airborne school. I signed that contract the day after the invasion and was successful, so I spent 2 years doing really amazing training in the Special Forces training pipeline and 3 years on an SF team at 5th Special Forces Group.

Was entrepreneurship something you envisioned while you were serving? Did that come after? Tell me how all that works, because you’re all three founders now.

Part of my frustration in the Air Force was seeing how some of the acquisition programs were kind of broken or outdated for the pace of current technology. I think I saw a lot of opportunities to try to change that from the outside—to innovate and bring those technologies in from the outside.

For me personally, it actually wasn’t something that was on my radar. To be honest, when I left the active service for the first time, I went to about the biggest companies you could imagine. I ended up as an investment banker on Wall Street and did that at a massive international bank.

I think that was great for me. I don’t think I had, at that stage in my career, what I thought I needed to go out and start my own company or do the thing we’re all doing now. For me, it was about how I could build that toolkit of knowledge and learn how to do those sorts of things in a large organization. Then, when the time was right later on, an opportunity presented itself to hopefully give back to the mission and help the mission in whatever way we can from a startup standpoint.

I think for me, I’ve always been a builder. The thing I loved about computer science in college was building things. I’m very proud of my service. In some ways, that was a little bit of a detour on my inevitable path to starting a company.

In fact, when I left the service, I went to law school. The reason I never really practiced law was because I figured out pretty quickly that it was not a path to—or certainly not a direct path to—entrepreneurship or the kind of work I wanted to be doing.

I wound up at Palantir instead in 2013 and spent 9 years at that company. I was not among the first 100 employees, but it still felt very early stage, and I got a lot of exposure that I think helped me on the eventual journey to founding Cape 3 years ago.

As you look at the problems you worked on while you were in the service—you work in airspace management, logistics, and then privacy-first mobile carrier—were those problems you saw while serving, or did that help influence what you founded later?

At Rune, we’re focused on how we enable military logistics across services, but really on the Army and Marine Corps side right now. How do we do field logistics? How do we enable that?

From my career side, we saw that—not to say that military logistics can’t get the job done in the GWOT era, in our era of serving—but I saw very quickly that the same things we had in GWOT, from a military logistics standpoint, were not necessarily going to enable the force to be successful in a peer or near-peer adversary environment, whether that’s in the competition phase or the conflict phase.

When Peter, who’s my cofounder at Rune, and I were still at Anduril, before we left and founded Rune, we were thinking about this problem set. We said, “Yeah, this is something that actually needs help and needs attention.” No great technology companies were necessarily really focused on it, and I said, “Hey, this is a need that I felt while I was still serving in the military, and this is a need that we think we can help advance now from the private sector.”

When I was in the Air Force Research Laboratory, it was very early in the era of the Department of Defense thinking about drones on the battlefield, and especially small drones. We were thinking about small, inexpensive drones. At that time, in the 2007–08 era, inexpensive drones on the battlefield were like, “Oh, wow, a $100,000 drone. That’s so inexpensive,” or “$50,000.”

Whereas now, what anybody can buy off the shelf for $1,000 or $500 is greater than any capabilities we had at that time. At that point, the DoD was first starting to think about what it really meant when adversaries could bring low-cost capabilities to the battlefield, particularly adversaries who might not have a traditional air force.

What I saw early on in those initial tests and developments was a disconnect between old-school, big, heavy military systems and the small, light, fast threats they were trying to address. These were a totally new challenge, and I saw how difficult it was for the traditional structure and the traditional defense contractors to actually deal with it.

We saw a lot of big systems—missiles, 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. Frankly, in the beginning, they just didn’t work at all. I think that’s when the DoD first started to realize that it was a totally new threat and a totally new thing.

It’s something we’ve seen borne out since then in pretty much every conflict, certainly in Ukraine, where we’ve got tens of thousands of drones flying around all the time. I think that’s what really inspired me and a lot of the folks on our team to do something about it and to try to think about it in a new way.

As you brought up Ukraine, I think obviously that’s changed the whole paradigm in your space, and then also—I think, frankly, all three. I don’t want to speak for John, but I think all of us, as we look at what has happened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the new technologies that have been effectively or ineffectively used by both sides, and how that changes things from a logistics standpoint, certainly from a U.S. standpoint, and from a communications standpoint, I think that laboratory, for better or worse, has really impacted the way I think about things and the way we think about things at Rune. I’m sure it has for both of you.

I left Palantir in February 2022 to start Cape. I left Palantir on a Friday, checked into WeWork on a Monday morning, and the invasion was happening.

The very first question we asked ourselves at Cape 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 that we certainly need to prepare for?

Commercial cellular was a huge factor—and continues to be a huge factor—in Ukraine, but it was enormous in the initial days, as a force multiplier but also as a risk. Both sides were using commercial cellular heavily and enjoying the benefits of that, but they were also literally targeting missile strikes against each other based on that signature. That’s really been a motivating question for the company from the beginning.

I think if you look at logistics, obviously they stopped outside of Kyiv. Yep. So, the Russians had a few issues there. As we look at going from veteran to founder, can you jump straight from veteran to founding a company, or do you need to stop somewhere in between, at an Anduril or a Palantir, and know what right looks like, know what culture you need to set? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

I think you can become a founder at any point in your career. If it's something you're going to do and it's something that's sort of in your blood, I think it's inevitable. 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. I learned a ton about the culture at Palantir. I think it's 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—those are important lessons for a founder to learn.

You can learn them the hard way by just starting a company and going to do it, or maybe you can have some training wheels for a few years at a Palantir or Anduril. 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.

I would say—I think it's a very individual and very personal question. What are your life experiences? I think we all come out of the military with a great set of leadership skills and a great set of communication skills. We understand that we have some domain expertise in what we're doing. But I think it really boils down to, again, to use the toolkit analogy, how strong do you as a veteran feel coming out of this, and how committed are you to it? Do you think you have the skills to be able to do it?

To John's point, I think for me personally, I wanted to get out, and the time that I had in finance and then the time that I had at Anduril—very similar to the Palantir ethos there—taught me how to move fast. How do you potentially move fast and break things, but that's okay to get towards a mission and do those things? To me, that is super valuable experience. I now lead a team and lead the company, but that's not to say that we have different paths to get here. All 3 of us have different paths. That doesn't mean you might not have had different experiences prior to service, before serving, or coming out. I hate to be a copout on it, but I think it's a very individual, right choice.

Yeah, I would agree with that. For me, when I left the Air Force, I went to grad school after that. I think having some distance from it is helpful. Whatever that distance is—whether that's a big corporation, doing something entirely different, or grad school—I think having a little bit of distance, seeing a different set of cultures or a different set of problem sets, helps you, maybe in some ways, distance yourself from some of the frustrations of government bureaucracy and the military, and all of that, to then refresh yourself to go face those challenges and jump back into it.

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 and of government service and apply them. 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. But I think there's a lot of good things to take from it, especially a lot of the mission-driven focus. We've had lots of folks on our team over the years who have been prior military or prior intelligence, and I think there's no replacement for that mission-driven focus. There's no replacement for that actual commitment to making a difference.

Matt, where do you guys come down on that question here?

That's a good question, and we debate that internally. Personally, I transitioned out, and I was part of Lehman Brothers' '08 MBA class, which went really well. I was there 26 years ago.

Probably not technically your fault, though. That's not your fault.

No, it wasn't my fault. Dick Fuld and I were really tight. But I think it helps to go somewhere and see what right looks like. For me personally, especially Anduril and Palantir, I could go to SpaceX and then Tesla—just some companies that are producing these founders. I think it really helps. But there are obviously folks that can make that jump. So, I think the answer's either, but for me personally, I would want to stop along the way.

I think you made a great point as well that's important: You don't want to just create the thing that you thought you needed when you were in the military, right? And I think that is sometimes a trap. We all need to use our experience to do that, but when I talk to folks about that, it's like, if you try to build the thing you thought you needed, 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?

Especially as you lead a company—and I'm sure we can talk about it, too—you need to be constantly thinking forward, not just creating the thing that you thought you needed in the Arghandab River Valley in 2011 or 2012, or in Herat, or wherever it happened to be.

Yeah, agreed. We went from 4G to 5G. Let's go to 10G. Why stop at 4G? Or we built the Hornet, which is a category 4 fighter, and we built the Super Hornet with category 4 plus. Skip that, like the Marine Corps did, and go straight to the F-35.

I think, if I can belabor the question, that's the essential skill for a founder: that mindset. You either have that, in my opinion, or you don't. That's part of who you are. There are other skills that support that overall mindset, that insistence on forward thinking and ambitious goal-setting, and you can learn those skills certainly in the military. You can learn those skills at great companies like the ones you mentioned. So, there are supporting skills you can learn, but that core mindset, I think, is just innate.

I don't know your founding stories necessarily, specifically, but finding the right co-founder was important for me. Finding the right software engineer and technical co-founder—Peter is my co-founder and CTO—would have been, I don't know how I would have done that straight coming out of service. I needed to go to a place, and thankfully a great place like Anduril, where we were surrounded by those types of people, to be able to find that partner. Now he and I—our Venn diagrams don't overlap that much, which is great in a co-founding pair.

Let's pull out a thread that Grant kind of brought up, and let's go to culture: culture in the military, culture in startup land. Then you could even add finance, which is very different. So that's a third, but let's focus on the military and then startup land.

I think I probably have a unique perspective from the military side by virtue of being an 18X and only ever experiencing the special operations community in my military service. It is a naturally more meritocratic, flatter organization, I think, than the rest of the DoD. Having said that, there's still a rank structure. There's still centralized planning. 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, right? Even in the context of special operations, where you're granted a lot more creativity and a lot more autonomy, that structure still exists.

What is amazing about a startup is none of that exists. Monday morning, you check into a WeWork, and now you've just got a company and a couple bucks in the bank, hopefully, and there's literally nothing else. You don't have an email address necessarily, and so you get to write the entire thing yourself. That can be really disorienting, especially in my experience. We have a ton of veterans at the company, and they're all amazing, and I love to hire veterans, but that can be disorienting coming out of service.

You have to create, in my opinion, a culture around—I think it's a little bit trite to say celebrating failure, but at least openly accepting failure when it happens. If people are working hard, taking risks, pushing the envelope, and their efforts fail—at Cape, anyway—the only thing you need to do is be transparent about that and call it out when we fail, adjust, and maybe name a couple of lessons learned for next time. It doesn't do any damage to your reputation at the company or your ability to operate. I think that's the most important cultural aspect at a startup because it encourages risk-taking. It encourages people to lean forward and push hard.

Yeah, I think there are common threads across all of them. When I think of the broad buckets—military service, my finance experience, and now startup experience—there are broad threads that make somebody or something successful there, which are initiative, drive, taking chances, and doing those things, right? Whether that was part of a deal team in investment banking, whether that was part of a team within the JSOC enterprise or the military at large, or now it's part of a startup.

How do you celebrate success? How do you encourage risk-taking? I also view it as: How do you hire talent, but understand that when that talent comes in, you've got to train, mentor, and develop? At a startup, at least from my standpoint, it's not been hiring just because somebody has a skill; 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 and maybe fail, as John says, but you move on from that.

So, I think there are commonalities across all of these. Obviously, at the startup, you don't have the structure in place and the support structure that's in place certainly at a large company, but also somewhat on the military side.

So there are some differences there, but I think from a human and culture standpoint, you can have some threads of success that are common across those. Probably for most of our companies, it’s not just about government or the military. Everything is kind of dual use, and technology crosses a lot of different industries.

For us, it’s not just the military and federal market. It’s also critical infrastructure—oil and gas, power companies, and all of these large organizations that face many of the same challenges that the military or federal government faces. I think for us, it’s about balancing that culture and trying to figure out how to take the really mission-driven—and what that really translates to is customer-driven, user-driven. I think there’s commonality there: not an over-obsession with the military portion of it, but taking the part about what we’re trying to accomplish and how we’re trying to help these people and organizations.

You mentioned dual use. First of all, I’d love you to define it: Are you dual use? Would you consider all 3 of you dual use or not? And are there any cultural issues with bringing folks on board on the national defense side?

Number 1, I would say we’re definitely dual use because threats and concerns about drones in the national airspace and in critical areas absolutely cut across all sorts of different areas—whether it’s an Air Force base, a power plant, or border security. Everyone is concerned, and not just because they’re concerned about malicious drones. It’s also about being able to use drones for good things: inspecting infrastructure, doing logistics, and all these other things.

You do need to make sure that you’re building a culture that understands why you’re there, what your values are, and what you care about. In our world, we’re going to end up dealing with serious stuff, and you can’t just have people who wanted to build iPhone games and happened to get a job. You have to make sure they understand that you’re here to do serious work. We had folks actually go over and assist the Ukrainians, providing support, services, and technology to them. You can’t have a company where people are split on what they care about and what those foundational values are. You have to be all on board.

There are some great quotes out there from Palmer Luckey talking about taking technology talent from the commercial sector and convincing them to come into the defense world. I’ll say, frankly, it’s not that hard. Do you want to do something meaningful? I think that’s the genius behind a lot of the American Dynamism companies, including all 3 of ours: bringing that amazing technical talent and those amazing software or hardware engineers, as the case may be, into something meaningful for the nation and for the people.

How do you fuse that together with those of us who have come out of the military and do those sorts of things? I don’t want to say it’s easy, but it’s not as hard as people would think to get people motivated to do what’s right for the country and for our people.

I’ll also add that what really sorts people out on whether or not they want to join a company that does this sort of work and these sorts of missions is showing them what you’re doing. Nothing sorts that out faster than real-world examples. When we show drones in places run by prison gangs to smuggle fentanyl into prisons, or in military environments, it’s very clear what the stakes are and why it’s important.

For the people it resonates with, it’s instantaneous. They think, “Wow, I want to be working on this.” For those it doesn’t resonate with, that’s fine. There are plenty of iPhone game companies to go join, and that’s great.

One thing I’ll say tactically that we’ve done internally, which I really believe in, is that we have not split the business into commercial and defense divisions, for lack of a better word. It’s all one engineering team, and the engineering team agrees on a set of priorities that serve the entire customer base. I think that’s worked out really well. We’re building 1 product, and it really serves both purposes.

You’re all busy building your own companies. When you served, did you see any gaps there that you wish people would start looking to build companies around? Any requests for startups? It’s a big question. This is such an unfair question—I realize now that I ask every government person I talk to. We’ve got the magic technical wand, right? What would you wave it and create?

Lighter-weight body armor and kit. Give me all that stuff that I need to carry around, but make it weigh 30% of the gear on your back.

Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Make it 25 pounds and make it less cumbersome.

I was actually just having a conversation this morning as we think about logistics and how you enable autonomous logistics systems—maritime assets, ground assets. One of the things we’re interested in is heavy-lift aerial resupply platforms, which is a hard problem. Autonomous air vehicles are obviously a thing—UASs—but how do you actually lift substantial cargo with them?

As we think about driving the automation of military logistics through autonomous vehicles, getting an air system that can actually carry the weight is particularly interesting to me, and it’s a very hard thing to do. Part of the thing with both the military and government now is that the challenges they face are less hardware-centric than they used to be. It’s not about owning a particular set of kit. A lot of it is about data, data sharing, and being able to have the correct information to make decisions.

For us, in the drone-tracking world, we actually shifted business models a lot over the last few years. What was initially a traditional hardware sale—building the fancy piece of military hardware and selling it—meant that pretty much as soon as it went out the door, you never saw it again, mostly if things went well. What we saw was that the real need was for the information to make decisions and take action. It wasn’t about having a fancy piece of hardware.

Changing the way the government looks at that, the way it buys things, and the way it’s able to share information is the hard part. Part of dual use and part of the shared problems between government agencies and private companies is being able to share information between the two. It doesn’t do the power plant any good if the federal law enforcement agency next door can’t share information about the threats that are happening. Anything that encourages and enables data sharing between organizations and with the government is extremely valuable and definitely needed in a lot of these cases.

You touched on hardware and software. As we look at the future of war, we don’t want to be fighting the last war. Obviously, we want to fight the next war. Ukraine is a perfect test case for all 3 of your companies. Do you think we have the right weapons, whether it’s hardware or software, or do we need to be looking farther out and making a bigger leap? Do we need different types of programs, versus trillion-dollar programs?

I think the common thread to pull out as we think about the next war is an emphasis on asymmetric capabilities.

A lot of attention is being paid to the need for low-cost, attritable systems, right? I think there's a growing consensus that that's the future of warfare in a lot of ways. Although it's certainly no secret that people don't always contextualize cyber warfare in the same way as an asymmetric capability, relatively low amounts of investment can cause huge amounts of damage in an adversary.

That's where CAPE plays: in the cyber vulnerabilities in the global cell network. But in general, I think that's the theme to pay attention to: rather than investing in trillion-dollar bets on absolute dominance in a relatively small number of exquisite systems, how do we win the scrappy, messy, asymmetric war that's sort of inevitable next time around?

Do we feel we have the things now?

I mean, no. That's why we started—or at least, from the military, that's why all of us started our companies, right? We feel like there is something there that we can give back to the military that doesn't exist right now, or we can do it better, or we can help enable operations.

I think one of the things we need to look at is how we do these things faster, right? At least as a software company, the idea of a 20-month prototyping effort to potentially get to something that then maybe a year later is going to transition—I'm using that as a very specific example right now—would be absolutely insane to the commercial sector. It would be insane when you think about software development cycles.

So I think the ability to rapidly prototype things, develop them, get them out to the forces, test and iterate with them, and then, frankly, for the government to say, “Yes, that worked. Great. Cool. Move on. No, it didn't,” and off-ramp it—I think that's what we are totally on board with: the ability for the government to force us to perform, to compete, to do things for the warfighter. If we're doing great, then awesome. If not, then offboard us and bring somebody else in, right?

I think, as taxpayers, as veterans, and as founders, we should want that level of competition and that cutthroat competition to onboard things quickly and offboard things quickly. I think the administration is obviously moving in that direction. I think that's good for the force and good for the nation.

I think a lot of attention has rightfully been invested in how we onboard things quickly. The resurgence of OTAs is the most visible example of this, and it's great. DIU is doing amazing work.

I think there's sneaky work to be done on killing stuff that's not working still. There are big, high-profile, very expensive examples, but also within the innovation ecosystem, just call it when you see it. If something's not working and something's not going to pan out, just kill it. You do everybody a favor, including the folks at that company, if you say, “This isn't working,” and you cut it off.

Yeah, because the worst thing is that you have a zombie program that just goes on with millions or tens of millions of dollars, or sometimes even more than that, that's not being used by warfighters. To John's point, you're not doing the service any favors. You're not doing the warfighter any favors, definitely not the taxpayer, and frankly, you're not doing that company any favors because you're putting them into a false sense that the solution is useful, and you're potentially stifling that company from reinventing itself or going forward and doing something new. So I think you're right: offboarding is just as important as onboarding.

I think one of the gaps right now is, like you said, DIU's done a lot of great stuff. A lot of different efforts have been done to try to get early-stage startups involved in those first government contracts—that kind of $1 million phase, $2 million phase—but we still have that gap, that kind of valley of death, of how do we take any of those successful programs and scale them up to that midsize level?

Not everything is going to jump from a $1 million to a $200 million contract. How do we scale them up? Get them out to the forces, get them out into the services, and see the potential once you actually scale it up. I think that's one of the challenges: it's easy to deploy a couple of systems in a little POC and see, “Okay, well, that's pretty useful,” but a lot of the types of things we're talking about, you don't really see the real value of them until you have them at some sort of scale.

If I'm talking about monitoring the airspace and looking at all the drones, it's great at the tactical level to see, “Oh, we've got a drone crossing into this air base here.” But as soon as you scale it up to the larger scale of saying, “Oh, well, now we can see patterns of activity. We can see that, oh, that's funny. This drone showed up at 3 different bases over time,” we can do that only because we've started to build that out at a midsize scale. We're not fully committing to everything, but we can see the potential of it at a midsize or larger scale. I think that's a missing piece that we have: how do you scale it up to actually try it in the real world at a scale that matters?

Yeah. And you brought up programs. The CIA's got In-Q-Tel for the DoD. It's not only programs, but also how to select the best tech. You need to build that market map, find out the category leader, because it's going to go 90% to the leader; for the other 10%, everybody else gets steak knives. So we need to help them select the best tech also.

I think one of the challenges on the government side with that, especially on the DoD side, is that people and officers rotate out so frequently. You run into situations where somebody started a really good program, they started to see the benefits of it, and then a brand-new person walks in the door the next day and says, “Okay, what are we doing?”

You're kind of starting from scratch, and they don't really understand why the decisions were made or what the intent was. I think there needs to be a little bit of a better focus on continuity, ushering these programs across those eras, and understanding why they're doing them.

Military units are renowned for their trust and confidence, their cohesion. We all saw that, especially you in the Special Forces. How do you instill that in your companies? How do you build that teamwork, trust, confidence, and cohesion?

We're an in-person company, which I don't think is the final answer, but it really helps. Proximity matters, in my opinion. When people are in the office working together, you get a lot of that more easily than you do in a remote configuration.

The key ingredient—the thing you're really trying to build that the military has in spades—is what you really want at your startup. You want to know that when you need someone on your team, they're there and they're picking up on the first ring. That's, I think, the most important thing in life, certainly in company building.

My barometer for this within the company is when someone—this just happened this weekend—we had a P0 with someone who was traveling abroad in support of a customer and was having an issue. They spun up an internal thread, and immediately 7 people were on the thread. It was the right 7 people, and they were all helping to troubleshoot. Within 20 minutes, they had the guy turned around and good to go.

That sort of mindset—and no one complained about it, and we didn't even mention it on Monday morning—was just, that's how we do business at Cape, right? That's where you want to get, in my opinion. And the way you do that, to quote Ben Horowitz, culture is what you do; it's not what you say.

As the founder, your job is to be on every single one of those Slack threads, especially in the early days, right? To be at the office every single day, to be working on those things, and people will follow your lead. If you do it enough, and you do it over and over again, it becomes part of the culture.

I'll amplify that. Collaboration that happens across engineering, product, growth, and company leadership, all in one place, really is just—I can't imagine not having had that when we first made our initial hires. Your first hires are really also building the culture with you. Yes, it's top-down from the founders and executive level, but those initial hires are part of that culture for us.

I think it's the normal things: after-work drinks on Fridays. We do a happy hour every single Friday; we go to the same bar. It's little things like that. What does it cost? It costs us an hour of time. We cut out a little bit early on a Friday, but I also know that everyone's working generally right now. We're working Saturdays. I have a team out right now at 29 Palms; that was over the weekend.

One day, let's presume success and we have thousands of employees. I don't think I can still fit in the same bar. But right now, that's important, right? It's important to know that, especially as a software company, my capital is my people. It is my engineers and it is my growth professionals. That's really what we need to grow and build.

I think the biggest thing for us has been actually recognizing and calling out real-world impacts of the things we do.

I think especially initially, we were actually very bad at celebrating our successes and calling attention to them. I think part of that is because so many of our folks are very mission-driven and very focused: “Okay, we got to do this thing, do this thing.” So you accomplish something, and you never even take the time to notice.

I think one of the good things about having that mix in the culture—the mission-driven military and intelligence people versus the normal people—is that sometimes the normal people step back and they’re like, “Holy, what did we just do? That’s amazing. That’s incredible.” And there are plenty of other people who are just like, “Oh, well, yeah, we do this all the time. It’s no big deal.” But actually stepping back and recognizing that and celebrating those wins, I think, is part of what really builds that culture and that cohesion.

Then that builds a culture in which, when things are going bad, when things are going wrong—which are always going to happen; there’s always going to be new things popping up—suddenly, that’s a culture where everyone understands why: “Okay, cool. Let’s pull together a team. Let’s hop on a flight. Let’s go fix this thing. Do this thing right now.” And everybody’s on board because they understand why they’re doing it and what the stakes are.

All right. Big question here. Take your time before you answer. Would you ever go back to the military, either in a leadership, advisory, or innovation role?

I think innovation roles are really interesting. There are so many of them across government. Without picking on any in particular, a lot of them never get anything done. So I know that someday, if I’m lucky enough to be approached about that sort of a job, I’m going to have a list of demands: Here are the ways I need to be empowered; here are the authorities that I need so that I can actually make a real impact and be empowered.

But given the right set of conditions, I would love it. That would be a defining career milestone, just like starting a company is. It’s a little bit different for me because I am still serving in the Army National Guard in that way, and I love leading soldiers and being around soldiers. But I think going back into some kind of full-time governmental role—if I am successful to the point that I’m offered that opportunity at some point...

Same as John. Yeah, I think that would be an honor of a lifetime to go back. I think we are all doing this to grow companies and to do those things, and I’m not ashamed to say we are here to make some level of money. That is what we do as companies.

But there is a selfless-service aspect to that, and if that selfless service could eventually take me back into a governmental role and help the mission, if I believe I can make an impact and be helpful there, then, yeah, that would absolutely be something I would do.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think being able to know that you can have an impact, and being able to know that you actually have the authority and the ability to go and do the things that need to be done as you see them, is important.

Coming from the Air Force acquisition side, I have strong opinions about what’s needed in that world and acquisition reform and whatnot. But there is one request—one thing that I know I would have, which I didn’t realize was an option.

A number of years ago, I was talking with the Secretary of the Air Force, and she said, “Wow, we need a lot more of you, folks like you, coming back into service.” I said, “Well, I don’t really know.” And she said, “Well, I can get you a beard waiver so you wouldn’t have to shave your beard.”

I said, “Okay, now you’re talking. That’s my got-to-have-the-beard waiver.”

Nice beard.

There you go. Done. Deal.