#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies

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Dino Mavrukas, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

It is an honor to be here.

Well, likewise, it's an honor to have you.

I mean, you're

former SEAL reindustrializing the Navy's shipbuilding capacity.

You know, we were talking at breakfast, and I just, I think it's really cool, man, like what you're doing.

And I'm just, I mean,

it's fascinating.

It's inspiring.

I'm proud of you.

I mean, to see somebody come out of the SEAL teams and to do something as impactful as what you're doing for the United States and it sounds like maybe some of our allies.

I mean, that's just, I mean, it's congratulations, man.

That's

really cool to see.

Thank you.

I've been a huge fan of yours and the pod and seeing all the things that you're doing after the SEAL teams is just as exciting and you know it's an honor to just be here be able to tell the story be able to tell my story and then all the things we're doing at Saranic so thank you thank you thank you for being here but uh everybody starts off with an introduction here so

Dino Mavrucas Navy SEAL veteran with 11 years of service including eight combat tours leveraged your warden mba and private equity experience at vista equity partners to bridge your military grit with tech innovation launching Saronic in 2022.

We're going to focus more on your work in vision as co-founder and CEO of Saronic Technologies, a company building autonomous surface vessels, ASVs, to restore U.S.

naval dominance.

A leader in raising billions to scale Saronic's mission with a $4 billion valuation and a new shipyard, Port Alpha, to tackle America's shipbuilding crisis and counter China's massive shipbuilding shipbuilding lead.

A voice in the defense tech revolution warning that without scalable AI-driven solutions, the U.S.

risks losing its maritime edge.

A patriot committed to the Navy SEAL Foundation serving as a board director to support SEALs and their families, husband, father, and most importantly, a Christian.

And like I said, reindustrializing the Navy shipbuilding capabilities.

And, you know, just to kick this off with

a fact, I mean, we, we've talked a lot about China and their capabilities and how they're getting an edge on us in just about every capacity, power, AI,

shipbuilding.

They're not messing around.

They are investing heavily and the government's pouring billions and billions of dollars.

If we think China is not on a wartime footing right now, we're sticking our heads in the sand.

Man, you know, it just sounds like they're

gaining an edge in just about every important aspect of

being a global superpower.

And so I wanted to kick this off.

In 1943, we built 18,000 ships.

In 2023, we built eight and retired 12 for a negative four.

And the U.S.

accounts for only 0.1%

of global shipbuilding.

0.1%.

Crazy.

It's crazy.

In World war ii i'll give you another stat we commissioned over a hundred aircraft carriers aircraft carriers between 1942 and 1945

today

an aircraft carrier costs 10 billion as a baseline the the estimate the budget estimate actually went up to 13 billion geez but more importantly they take over 10 years to make

a decade to make one our entire involvement in World War II was four years long.

So not only are they wildly expensive,

but you can't afford, take human life out of the equation for just a second, because I'm sure we'll talk about that a bunch.

You can't afford to lose one because you cannot get another one.

It scares the hell out of me, man.

It's crazy.

It just seems like we're falling behind on everything.

And we'll get into this too, but just, you know breakfast we were talking about all the bureaucracy and the red tape that that

entrepreneurs have to go through and it's and and you would think that that would be

you would think they would fast track national defense but it sounds like it's even more of a pain in the ass than just being a regular entrepreneur And I mean, by the, like you just said, by the time we, and we'll get into this more too, but by the time this stuff even gets approved to be built let alone being built i mean

it's already obsolete that's right yeah it

starting sironic was an interesting challenge because not only did we have to build the best technology not only we set out to build the absolute best technology in both hardware and software and we'll talk more about the products but we also had to build a a government lobbying company We had to understand how to navigate the ecosystem, how to actually drive adoption, how to get our products into the field.

And that's not, that's not an easy task.

You know, one of the things I mentioned, and it was funny,

we had one of our

lead growth, with the leaders from the growth team gave a teach-in to the entire company on here's what government acquisitions actually looks like.

And there's this government acquisition management lifecycle map that exists within the Pentagon.

And if we stretch that map out on this entire wall,

the individual subcomponents still would not be legible.

Are you serious?

There's that many steps in the process.

One of the slides was, okay, now we're going to talk about rapid defense acquisition.

And the next slide said 48 to 72 months.

Three years.

48 to 72 months later,

the technology we're building is actually obsolete.

We're going to have version 234, we're going to have the software upgraded four or five times, we're going to have better sensors out in the world that we'll be able to incorporate on our boats.

The process isn't set up for this, and it's nobody's fault.

It's just the evolution of technology, right?

It's how warfare has changed over the last 50, 75, 100 years.

And we're just sitting at a point in time where there's massive technological disruption

right 20 years ago 20 years ago the iphone didn't exist

think about that yeah that's not a really long time ago and it's completely changed the world and now nobody can even think about operating in their life without a smartphone yeah you know it's it's

it's I kind of I wanted to slow down because I'm tired of having to learn all this technology.

But I mean, now is, it's just, I just, you said it's nobody's fault.

Somebody's to blame or, or some entity is to blame.

I mean, we can't, it's just, I,

every time I talk to a tech innovator like yourself, I'm just mind blown at

the,

how slow the government is to act on this stuff.

And, and, and I don't know what it comes from if it's, if it's, um,

like our own ego, because we've been on top for so long, you know, it's like, guys, you got to look outward, man.

Like

every country is innovating right now.

I feel like we're in this paradigm shift, like when the wheel was invented, or when we went from horse to automobile, or when the invention of electricity.

I mean, with all this AI stuff and the way the tech's, the pace the tech's, the tech is moving at is just astounding.

And if we don't get out of our own way, we're going to get passed up if we're not passed up already.

And I mean,

we just chatted about this.

I was on Tucker's a couple days ago, and we were talking about, you know, how slow everything moves and how we kneecap ourselves, everything from energy to AI to defense.

And

man, like we really, we better wake up.

I mean, it's.

It's,

it's, well,

I don't want to talk all doom and gloom because we have the innovators we have the innovators we have the capability and look I'm a firm believer in that when the United States of America collectively gets behind an idea There's nobody in the world that can beat us not China not anybody yeah

right the

issue that we're facing right now is again we're sitting at a center of technological disruption you're coming off of

a massively different environment so

we talked a little bit about World War II

talk about all the conflicts since then and kind of how the evolution of defense budget and defense spending and the things that were put in place since World War II

PPE process back in 1961, cost plus contracting actually started in World War I to to get the defense industrial base going.

And we can talk about the impacts of all of those things.

But really, you go back to 1993 and before that, you have this Cold War buildup, right?

You have the buildup before the Cold War, the Reagan eras, we were at 6 to 7% of GDP as far as our military budget.

The Cold War ends

and you had this moment in time where

Everybody

thought that global conflict or conflict between nation states just just isn't a thing anymore, right?

It's the new world, we're all friends, Cold War is over, we can communicate across the globe, all these things that never existed before.

So, we came out, we as a country, the United States, came out of the Cold War and drastically cut our military spending.

So, what that did, and the military, so 24% reduction in military spending after the Cold War,

41%

in naval spending after the Cold War.

Wow.

So you can imagine what happened to the shipbuilding programs.

Wow.

Not only that, the then Secretary of Defense, there's this very famous meeting they had.

They call it the Last Supper.

It's in 1993.

The then Secretary of Defense called in all the heads of the large defense contractors, and there were 55 or so at the time, and said, we're slashing defense spending.

There's not going to be enough budget to go around.

You guys have my blood.

You guys have to consolidate or you will go out of business.

And so those 55 companies went down to five.

Like, they're known as the big five.

It's Lockheed, Raytheon,

Northrop, Boeing, and General Dynamics, right?

So

that happened in 93.

And then obviously that consolidation took years to happen.

Then, so you have that trend.

That's one mega trend, right?

So, what happened?

Did those five buy all the other subsidiaries?

They bought all the other companies and they just combined into mega conglomerates.

Yeah.

So, you have that one kind of mega trend happening in the market.

The other thing was, obviously, 2001, we go into Afghanistan.

2003, we go into Iraq, and we're there for 20 years.

So, our attention as a nation

was on counterinsurgency, was on the global war on terror.

It wasn't how do we have the most powerful navy in the world to deter the Chinese.

We were focused somewhere fundamentally differently for 20 years.

So we have this reduction in spending, which actually ramps back up for Iraq and Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean that we're building the platforms we need for 2025 and beyond because again very different type of conflict we're still living in this world of everybody's still friends, but now there's just terrorists, but global conflict's not a thing.

So you have these two mega trends that kind of happen

that are one, reduction in spending for big platforms, consolidation in the defense industrial base, and then our focus as a military on a very, very different type of adversary.

So with decreased spending, and decreased competition, you don't have a whole lot of innovation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, not to be, I don't want to be all doom and gloom either, although usually I am.

But,

but, I mean, but I mean, I do, I don't, I don't think, I know we still have the best innovators in the world because we live in a capitalistic society and it's, it can be, you know, big risk, big reward.

But guys like, you know, guys like you and Joe Lonsdale and Palmer Lucky and Alex Wang.

And I mean, there's a whole slew of you guys out there that are, that are, are

astonishing innovators.

But man, it's just the government just cut your guys' kneecaps off.

I mean,

we got to fast-track this stuff.

It's hard.

It's hard.

And look,

there are organizations set up to fast-track this stuff.

DIU or Defense Innovation Unit, phenomenal organization.

We partner with them.

They've taught us a lot about the end user, the customer.

But the process that we've talked about, it's just really hard to drive adoption into the government.

And there's only been,

I mean, you go back to the 93, The Last Supper, you go back to, there's only been...

That was in 93.

1993.

What was that?

Was that Clinton?

The last, yeah, I think so.

I think so.

The Secretary of Defense was Les Aspen.

Since then, there's only been three

massive companies that have started.

SpaceX,

Palantir, and now Andoril.

SpaceX and Palantir started in the early 2000s.

So call it 2001, 2002-ish timeframe.

I think you had a 15-year gap

until Andoril was started in 2017.

And their last valuation was $14 billion.

I think they're talking about raising at a $28 billion valuation.

But those are, those are really only, when you talk about what matters for the military,

you really have to get to scale.

You really have to be able to build thousands of platforms that are extremely capable.

And that means you have to be a really big company, right?

There's only been three.

And the reason is, again, it's just hard to do business with the government.

And prior to 2017, and this is where I'll give Andorl a ton of credit, right?

People, investors, weren't really interested in driving money into defense.

It was a hard place to make a return.

This is why I try to tell the government, like, look, you actually want Saronic to make money.

You want us to do really well.

Don't worry about squeezing the margin because if we, every dollar we make, one, we reinvest it back into the company for R ⁇ D.

But two,

the more money we make, the more that investors will leverage, we'll be able to leverage private capital.

We'll magnify any dollar the government puts into our company through acquisition or otherwise 10 times over, and we'll be able to build even better systems faster.

And it will attract new innovators

to the sectors.

100%.

But the reason why there's been such

this like bottleneck in resilience, it goes back to this PPB process, planning, programming, budgeting, and execution.

It's a four to five year window where the government will go and plan for 18 months.

They'll then go through programming, which means writing the requirements.

Okay, what are the things that we actually need the platforms to do?

Then they'll go through budgeting and then execution.

So

again, four year, four to five year window.

What that means in actuality, like in practice, we started Sauronic in September of 2022.

So we're not even three years old yet, which is quite remarkable when we get into all the things that we've done.

I would say that's pretty remarkable.

It's, it's, we are,

we're, we're the fastest growing defense tech company in history.

Wow.

Now there's congratulations.

Thank you.

There's a lot of, I mentioned SpaceX, Palantir, and like we're not where we are today with the, without the strides that those companies have made.

But going back to the process.

So we started the company in September of 22.

The planning

phase for the government, now there's very distinct buckets of like when this is done,

the planning phase for the fiscal year 2024 budget had already ended, which means we started the company in 22.

We had no ability to influence the 2024 budget.

Are you serious?

Dead serious.

This is how the process works.

They were on the, they being the government, were on the tail end of planning for the 2025 budget, which means you have to get in and like, think about if you have an 18-month planning process and somebody comes to you three weeks before it's over and says, hey, squeeze me into this planning process.

I want to influence the 2025 budget.

Is that included in the what did you call it?

The rapid

48 to 72 months.

Is that included or is that that this is the overall PPBE process that the military goes through?

So, when we started the company,

we were really looking at this is

absent other contracting mechanisms that I'll talk about through DIU and otherwise, because there's a thing called OTAs, which is other transactional authorities that actually gives the government the ability to move very, very quickly.

But within that process, we were really looking at, when we started the company in 22, we were really looking at 2020, 26 and 2027 budget.

That's four years.

Now, an investor looking at that, that says, how am I going to make money?

Why would I invest in this company?

It's so hard.

And on top of that, you have had so few companies that have broken through

and there was

borderline, I don't want to call it monopolistic behavior, but that's how the primes acted.

But that's how that's how the system evolved.

There were five primes in 2023.

50%

of the $411 billion of government contracts that year went to those five companies.

70% of that,

70% of those awards to those companies had no competition.

They were sole sourced.

So

coming into this market, the only thing that I've been kind of evangelizing is

let defense tech startups that are showing that they can build real capability at scale, able to attract the funding that's needed.

Let those companies compete fairly for these large programs.

I'm not saying don't hand us anything.

Just because we're a startup doesn't mean we're any good.

Doesn't mean because we have a bunch of money, we can go and execute.

But as we prove things along the way,

let us compete for larger and larger contracts and larger and larger programs.

And that's what we focus on.

And we've really built that into the core DNA of our company where,

as you say,

Everything we say we're going to do, we're going to do it.

Beautiful.

If we say we're going to deliver this on this timeline for this price, that's what we're doing.

Come hell in high water.

And we have the team that is bought into that.

And you know what?

The Navy is actually not used to that.

They're not used to anything coming on time, anything coming on budget.

And so by just doing what we say we're going to do, over and over and over again, those opportunities to compete for larger programs will be there because

how can you not let a company like Seronic compete at this point?

Yeah, no kidding.

You know, you had mentioned something earlier about having to,

we're going to do a life story, by the way, but we're getting in the weeds a little bit too early, but I don't want to forget this.

So you had to

simultaneously start a lobbying company.

Yes.

What is a lobbying company?

It is a company that knows how to navigate Capitol Hill and the Admiralty within the senior leaders within the Navy.

So anytime you're looking at influencing defense acquisitions, there's a few different buckets of folks you need to influence without getting too far in the weeds.

One's the warfighters.

Two are the senior leaders in the military.

And three is Congress because Congress decides the budget.

So what that means is, you just walk through it.

One, you have to go to the warfighters and say, look, we actually have the best products and solutions.

These things are going to save your lives.

These are the things you want to use tactically in the field.

You can trust them.

You can rely on them.

And you have the warfighter, the actual warfighter, say, yes, okay, those are the best products, right?

Then you have to go to the senior leaders and really align on, are those products solving strategic initiatives of the Pentagon?

And

really, in order to get attention, and you know this from the themes, and I'll use a silly example to articulate this,

but it has to be a,

oh shit, we're screwed if we don't do this type of strategic initiative.

It's not just, oh, we can do this better, or there's a slightly better solution.

It has to be not only 10x better, probably 100x better, but also

we can't keep things in the status quo.

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And the example I always use is: we used embitters in the SEAL teams.

They were the radios that we carried in our gear.

They were the size of a brick.

They weighed five pounds.

They had to be rated for all these different things.

We're in the middle of Iraq and Afghanistan, and this had to be rated to dive to 50 meters.

And I could, it always stuck me.

And then I'd go back to my hunt, and we have an iPhone.

And I'm like, there's, there's a technological gap there.

And I'm not saying we should carry iPhones on ops, but certainly there's a better radio than this thing that was built in 1970.

But because it still worked and there wasn't a,

we're screwed if we don't change it, it really didn't drive change.

So if you're solving very important strategic initiatives, of the senior leaders that are critical to their mission, along with getting the buy-in from from the warfighters, you can then go to Congress and say, Congress,

we have the buy-in from the warfighters and we have the senior admirals that are not only saying we need this as a strategic initiative, but are also writing requirements and going through their whole process to say we need to adopt this into, in our case, it's the fleet or

we're actually working, we're trying to work with the Army and the Marine Corps and everything else.

You can then go to Congress and then lobby for budget and say, look, the military needs this.

They're saying they want it.

Can we appropriate money so that they can actually buy it?

And if you have buy-in of those three groups,

then you go and work with the program offices and the contracting officers and you see if you can actually get a deal done.

But that's, we had to understand how to navigate that ecosystem in parallel to building the best technology.

Because if we built the best technology and we weren't working on all of this, that again is a three to five year process.

It means you build the technology one, two years, and then you start the process.

Now you're five to seven years down the road.

And you can't afford those types of time lapses.

So we had to do both of those things in parallel.

And I mean, I was

I was on Capitol Hill

two weeks after we started the company with

PowerPoint slides of an electric surfboard with a quadcopter on top of it.

And this was just an image and a picture that

I kind of just made up.

I was like, went to artist, render, like,

go make this real.

Make this look cool.

It wasn't our actual product yet.

But it was a way to start telling the story of, hey, this is the future of the Navy.

It's a triitable, autonomous platform.

It's built very economically and very large scale, and this is what we need and why.

And I started telling that story on day one as our engineers were figuring out, talking to customers, both within the military and actually commercial customers as well.

We can talk about the commercial market and why that's important.

It's really important to make sure that you're building for a wide array of customers so that then the military can have the best products with a reliable supply chain that can be be built economically.

You build it so specific for the government, it becomes very bespoke.

And then you can't build enough of them.

So then they don't get what they want anyway.

So we built for a variety of military and commercial customers up front, completely

modular platforms that can be adapted to a variety of uses and missions.

But the whole point is you had to do that in, you had to do that in parallel.

And so I'm taking this slide deck and I'm walking around Capitol Hill saying, this is the future of the Navy.

And at the time it was electric surfboard.

I'm like, okay.

It wasn't quite the future of the Navy.

But it got people's attention.

It got us started.

And then our engineers worked with those variety of customers to understand: okay,

where's that intersection?

Right?

What's actually needed?

What are the most important things in terms of range, payload capacity, power supply, mission sets, payloads?

And then,

and then, don't tell me what you want.

Don't tell me what you want me to build you.

Just let me understand your problems.

And then we'll build the most efficient solution.

And one of the things we did very early on to start actually understanding that was we signed a contract with the Navy within 90 days of starting the company.

It was with the Naval Postgraduate School.

It was a cooperative research and development agreement.

So completely unpaid.

But we knew we needed access to the customer.

We knew we had to have those conversations because the last thing we wanted to do was build a product in a black box

and then two years later, like, yeah, okay, whatever.

It goes 50 miles.

I needed to take 100.

Who cares?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'll bet the pushback, the least amount of pushback is the warfighters and then the flag officers and then Congress.

And I'd be willing to bet that none of these entities talk to each other.

Maybe the flag officers and the warfighters, but probably very limited.

Am I on, am I, I mean...

It's starting to come together.

I think the important part in understanding

the senior leaders is there's actually a bifurcation

where there's two splits within the military and within the services.

And we'll just use the Navy as an example.

There's the warfighter, there's the combatant commands.

So Indo Paycom, UCOM, Northcom, AFRICOM, CENTCOM.

Those are the admirals in charge of fighting combat engagements in those theaters.

And then there's the admirals that are in charge of man training equipping.

Those are two completely separate structures and entities.

So

when this admiral says, I want this to fight with,

There has to be

another admiral that goes through this same process, takes those inputs from all the different senior leaders, writes requirements, goes through the procurement cycle.

I feel like you would move much faster if the people that are sitting in the seat fighting the battles are saying, no, I'm just going to buy this.

And then they just, they're able to buy it when they need it.

But again, it's, and it's not, I think the admirals are aligned in both of those structures.

There's just, there's just the process.

The warfighters know what they need because they live it every day.

And then Congress,

I'll actually give Congress credit.

First time I've ever heard that.

Yeah,

I'm going to give everybody credit.

I'm going to give a lot of credit to

the military, Congress.

People are moving.

Again,

you're trying to steer a massive cruise ship.

It takes a lot of people to try to turn that rudder.

Yeah.

Right.

But Congress, what the Navy was doing

before we started Sironic, and I'll talk about this in the founding story and why we started the company.

But there was a lot of research and experimentation

and there wasn't adoption at scale.

And now there's fundamental reasons why there wasn't adoption at scale.

And one of those reasons was

Sironic or another company, like Saronic didn't exist and there wasn't another company that could actually build at scale.

But Congress was looking at the Navy and actually saying, hey,

we've been researching for a decade.

We need to adopt.

Like, get going.

Let's do this.

So you had different areas pushing on the same problem.

And that's really what you need.

That's good.

When you're dealing with Congress, I mean, you know, all we see is the media and all this other shit.

And

so I'm I'm just curious,

is this a

bipartisan initiative?

Totally.

Man, that's good.

Totally.

I mean, when you think about,

I mean, 2022, we were getting traction and it was a Democratic administration,

right?

And

the then Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, announced replicator program under, that started under Biden.

And that was, hey, not only are we going to go buy thousands of drones, we're going to go buy them over the next 18 to 24 months.

And that was the first thing

that I've seen in a really long time where the government has moved quickly.

I tell, I'm like, look, this is the fastest I've ever seen the government move with anything.

That should, one,

really excite you.

as an entrepreneur,

employee at our company, like the opportunity ahead.

But two, it should, it should scare the shit out of you.

I was, I knew you were going to say that.

Because I'm looking around.

I'm like, oh, this problem, everybody's thinking about this.

No, it's crazy.

It's crazy.

I mean, I've talked to four-star admirals, and this was when we were 12 or 18 months old.

And I just, I'm like, sir,

or ma'am,

I know it sounds crazy to you that an 18-month-old company is sitting here telling you we are the only company that can solve this problem for the Navy.

Doesn't it?

It sounds crazy because it is crazy, but it doesn't mean it's not true.

Man,

man.

Well, got a couple things to knock out here before we get into your life story.

Everybody gets a gift.

Oh, amazing.

Vigilance elite gummy bears, legal in all 50 states, made here in the U.S.

No funny business.

My kids are going to crush this.

Oh, we'll give you some extra ones for the kids.

Awesome.

And then,

secondly, we have a Patreon account.

It's a subscription account.

We've turned it into quite the community.

They were here when I was doing this in my attic.

And, you know, now we have this studio.

We're building another studio.

And they've just been here with me the whole time.

So, one of the things that I do is I offer the community the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

And so, this is from Richard Beamer: Beamer.

Is there going to be a market for autonomous surface vehicles in the public sector?

What is the timeline for widespread consumer adoption in the marketplace?

There certainly is going to be a very large market.

Public sector, meaning government and military, and I'll talk about government, maybe you mean private sector as well, because we're looking at commercial applications as well as defense and military.

And so when you talk about defense, you know, we hit on it, right?

The Navy has to go in this direction.

We're not going to maintain naval superiority without autonomous surface vessels.

But when you talk about commercial applications,

there's a ton of commercial applications that we are focused on

very deeply.

And it starts with, and I'll kind of bifurcate them into two segments.

One is the small autonomous surface vessels,

and the other one's the larger ones that we're getting into now.

So we started out building small autonomous boats.

So right now our largest platform is 24 feet, which is think of a full-size speedboat.

We are moving up to a 40 and 60 foot full-size speedboat, but we're also building a 150-foot autonomous cargo ship.

Wow.

That can be used for military and commercial applications, and we're building that now.

Wow.

So, when you think about commercial,

there's port and harbor security, there's Coast Guard, there's critical infrastructure.

If you just talk about

how our critical infrastructure that's on the coast right now is protected, it's quite scary.

There's a buoy that says keep out.

Oh, man.

So, we won't even get into all of that, but there's a lot.

Probably will soon.

Yeah, but there's a lot of commercial applications that we're building towards on our small vessels.

Now, on the larger vessels, you're talking about cargo shipping, right?

Why is the commercial market so important

for the military?

Logistics.

Well, not just logistics, but if you think about just capacity,

this is why we get into when you build bespoke military systems.

And look, some systems have to be bespoke for the military.

What do you mean by what is what is

like an F-35 is only ever going to be sold to the Navy and the Air Force.

It's only military, right?

But when you talk about ships, the most important thing is shipbuilding capacity.

So the Navy only needs X number of ships during peacetime.

But during a conflict, that goes to 10x or 20x

or more.

So if you look at what China has done, look, they're outbuilding the navy, the U.S.

Navy, in terms of combatant ships, 3x to one.

We'll go through all the stats on the Chinese fleet and the U.S.

fleet and kind of what all that looks like when we talk Sauronic.

But they're outbuilding on just a military capacity today, 3x to 1.

But they actually have 230 times our shipbuilding capacity.

They have 5,000, over 5,000 commercially flagged vessels when the U.S.

has less than 100.

So did you say that again?

Over 5,000 commercially flagged vessels to the U.S.

having less than 100.

So now

Go back to the World War II example and let me ask you this question.

You have 230 times the shipbuilding capacity.

Only a portion of that shipbuilding capacity is being used for military and defense.

The rest is commercial.

What do you think happens to all of that commercial capacity when the first shot's fired?

It's done.

It gets converted to defense.

I mean,

just to play devil's advocate, just a little bit here, because the first thing that pops in my head, did you say 35,000 to to 100?

Was that the numbers?

For shipbuilding capacity?

230 to 1.

230 to 1.

So the numbers are the Chinese can build, and

the statistic in the industry is gross tonnage.

It's kind of this weird measure of volume.

The Chinese can build 23 million gross tons of ships every year.

The United States can build 100,000.

And these are commercial and military ships.

These are commercial ships.

These are large cargo containers.

These are military ships.

These are destroyers.

These are aircraft carriers.

These are everything.

So I think, you know, when you say that, it's scary.

It scares the hell out of me.

At the same time, I think about, you know, not to give our government credit, I would never do that.

But I mean, China is a major exporter,

right?

And so the U.S.

is not a major major exporter.

So, I mean, they would need a lot more ships just for all the exporting that they do, correct?

Or am I off on that?

You're not off on that.

They do need more ships, but if you look at why they've been building out their capacity and how they've been doing it, they've been subsidizing it from the government, undercutting everybody on price, and doing it for a very, very strategic reason.

25 years ago, they had 5% of the world's global shipbuilding capacity.

Wow.

25 years ago.

Today they have 50%.

50%.

We're at 5-0%.

We're at 0.1%.

That means if you get every single country in the world that builds ships

all lined up against China, you're just at parity.

Holy shit.

So you better rethink this problem.

You better start thinking about autonomy and how to build things differently.

This goes back to like, you don't want to go head to

on just a purely, let's go see who can build more destroyers.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Well, Dino, let's get into some of your life story here.

So

we always start with, where did you grow up?

So grew up in New Jersey,

down the Jersey shore.

I like to say everybody that's seen the TV show, it kind of gives it a bad rap.

But

great place to grow up.

About an hour south of New New York.

You know, my dad had immigrated from Greece.

My grandfather actually left him with five kids and my grandmother in Greece for three, it's a phenomenal story.

For three years back in the 50s.

Came over, didn't speak a word of English, came to America.

He was a bus boy in the United Nations.

for three years while he learned English and saved up enough money to bring my dad's dad's family over from Greece to America.

They moved to Perth Amboy, which is sort of an inner city up by New York, and grew up there

as Greek families in New Jersey do.

They opened a diner.

My grandfather opened a diner, kind of built that business, built other businesses, saved money.

moved the family out into the suburbs, opened a restaurant there.

And that's where I grew up.

And I kind of grew up in the restaurant business, right?

That was, that was, that was the center of the family.

You know, I started working there when I was 12 years old, washing dishes and bussing tables.

And,

you know, one, it taught me the value of a dollar.

It taught me hard work and commitment.

But it also, if I'm being honest, it kept me out of trouble, right?

It was.

nights, weekends, holidays, everything.

I was working at the restaurant.

And after work, we'd go back to grandma's house.

And that was whether it was Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner, you know, we'd all be working as a family.

And then we'd all go back to my grandma's house and, and celebrate the holiday.

And that was, that was a big part of my life growing up.

So you stayed out of trouble?

For the most part.

I had work and yeah, I never really got in trouble.

I mean,

I never got in legal trouble.

My parents thought I was a pay.

If you talked to some adults and

this is, so I actually met my wife when I was 13 years old.

Oh, man, that's

at a Greek Orthodox Church.

And Greek Orthodox Church in New Jersey is sort of like a high school.

Basketball teams and volleyball teams and everything else.

So when you say trouble, it's all relative, right?

I like to tell this really funny version of the story where my wife had a huge crush on me the moment she saw me.

But she's not here to defend herself and I will get in way, way too much trouble if I tell that that version here.

So I'll kind of give the truth.

But

yeah, so I had this huge crush on her.

So her parents knew me when I was 13 years old.

And

they thought I was the biggest pain in the ass.

And I was always talking back to grownups.

And so when we ended up going on our first date, I think it was 10 years later.

10 years later?

Oh, yeah.

You didn't make the move for a decade.

Took me a while, man.

It took me a while.

She was way too cool for me.

We were friends.

I was stuck stuck in the friend zone for a while.

We went to the same college, went to school at Rutgers.

And then after the SEAL teams, we ended up reconnecting.

We started dating.

And as you can imagine, it was hard to build a relationship.

I was like, hey, great reconnecting.

Great.

I love this date.

And yeah, I have to go to Iraq for six months.

She's like, what?

Oh, so you meant while you made the move while you were in the SEAL teams?

While I was in the SEAL teams.

Yeah.

And then I like to tease her about it.

Like, oh, okay, so you finally said yes after I became a teen guy.

But no, we've been married.

We're going on 13 years now.

We have two kids that are 10 and nine.

And I tell her all the time, and probably not nearly enough, that, you know, her job is much harder than mine.

I could never

sit at home.

wonder where my significant other was,

whether they're going to call me back in eight hours or 12 hours or 24 hours or

never

right

and so the support system from the family and the support that she gave me throughout my career was

I wouldn't have been able to do it without her and still to this day like she supported me through business school she supported me through VISTA in private and we'll get into the kind of career stuff and then supporting Saronic.

Just, I couldn't do it without her.

Sounds like an amazing woman.

She's, she's absolutely incredible.

Our kids are incredible.

And it's just, if I'm not working, I'm with them.

Full-time mom?

Full-time mom.

She had a phenomenal career before

switching and becoming a full-time mom and staying at home.

And

it's funny.

I'll come back to that because I'll get into the story and kind of like when we founded Saronic and everything.

But going back to kind of the childhood stuff, the whole point was,

generally stayed out of trouble.

But my wife's parents thought it was a huge pain in the ass.

So when I, when she brought me home for the first time,

they were really confused.

But over time,

we're very close.

And their story is just as amazing, right?

My wife was born in Greece.

Her parents grew up there.

They came over to the United States without a dollar in their pocket when they were

20 years old.

They worked hard, saved money.

My wife grew up poor.

And so the parents worked hard, saved my, I mean, it's the American dream.

It's literally the American dream.

So I got to, I got to see that growing up and like live with that.

The other thing I did was I played a bunch of sports.

So if I wasn't working, I was playing sports.

And I got really into

basketball at a young age.

And

I use sports now with my kids to kind of teach lessons.

I don't actually care how good they are at the sport.

But one of the most important lessons I learned was my freshman year in high school through basketball.

And

I was going to this

kind of one of the one of the more elite high schools for basketball in New Jersey.

They had a great team, a great program.

Half of the people that come out of that high school go to D1.

And so as a freshman, I was really, I was intimidated.

I was kind of

okay.

I was good.

I made the, I was on the freshman team.

I was good enough to get into the program, but I wasn't a star in the program.

And so I was looking at that, and I've actually never told this story.

This is, and think about how much this impacts, this is 30 years ago.

So I was looking at where I was.

in relation to the rest of the group.

And so much of my identity was tied up in that sport that I was terrified of not making it the next year.

And so I quit.

Really?

I quit.

I finished out the year.

I made up some excuse of why I wanted to go to a different high school.

I went to a subpar high school where I ended up being a subpar basketball player.

I struggled for the next year in the sport.

I struggled.

And I just never recovered from that decision, right?

I went to college.

I tried to play basketball.

I didn't want to give up, though.

So I went to college.

Think about that.

I go to college.

And while everybody else is partying, my freshman and sophomore year, I was getting up at five o'clock in the morning, lifting weights, running, shooting a thousand shots every day, like doing the things that I thought

would help me make the team in college.

But because I didn't have the coaching and the development and all the reps at a super high level, I could just never make up for that.

So, and this is what terrifies me about parenthood too it's like

i never like i made a like that taught me that it's never worth it to quit like that's what drove into me

like i'll never quit at any i might not make it

but i'm not quitting

and if it wasn't for that experience and i had to live that for not long like i had to live that for years

and again like still telling the story like that's still impact like I still think about it right that's how impactful it was to me growing up and I look at my kids I'm like I just want to teach you all the lessons I have but I know I know like you're gonna have to go live it you're just gonna have to live it you're gonna have to feel the pain you're gonna have to go through the things and I'm gonna teach you things along the way obviously but there's some things the most important lessons you're going to learn are going to to be through failure.

And that's okay.

And I'm just here to support you.

Do you think that

basketball story is what drove you to make it into the SEAL teams, to make it into development group, all the way up to what you're doing now and finding all the success that you've amassed in Sauronic?

I think it's what gave me the perspective to be successful.

100%.

Not just the physical ability to make it through buds, but also the mental ability to make it.

And look, to be clear,

I never thought about joining the military.

It was never on my list of things to do.

I had never even met anyone in the military before I joined.

Wow.

So

it was pretty crazy.

9-11.

was my junior year of college.

I remember sitting in the gym, watching the TV.

The entire gym kind of just came over.

Nobody was working out anymore and there were rows of TVs and everybody was just glued to them

and nobody knew what was happening.

Like the first plane hit the tower.

I was like, I remember my thoughts like,

what idiot flew their plane into a building in the middle of New York?

Because it was just so crazy to think that this was actually a terrorist attack.

And then the second plane hit, you're like, oh, something's happening.

And

being from New Jersey, you're,

everybody's kind of like one or two degrees of separation away from somebody that was like really, really affected.

My wife was working in New York at the time.

She actually caught the last train out of the city before they shut the trains down.

She watched the second tower come down from the train.

Wow.

The person she was sitting,

this story is is creepy.

She was sitting next to,

I forget the person's role, but if they were like an architect or somebody that designed the towers, and she's sitting next to this person on the train, and he goes to her, that building's going to come down.

And

sure shit, they come out of the tunnel, whatever, and they watch it come down.

Holy shit.

So it was, it had a really large impact on the way I thought about the world.

You know, one of my other good friends at the time, I haven't talked to him in 20 years, but really close friend in high school, his dad worked for the Port Authority Police

and he was at a meeting

and they didn't hear from him for 48 hours.

So think about that.

My buddy's sitting there,

I'll never forget this.

48 hours, I think he smoked

Two cartons of cigarettes and drank like two bottles of Jack Daniels just waiting to hear from his dad.

And then 48 hours, 48 hours of phone rings.

He was okay.

But think about what those two days could have been like.

Yeah,

so, and then think about all the people that weren't okay.

So that's what drove me to really want to join the military.

You know, I was a computer engineer in college.

My

My whole goal in college was to

find a career that wasn't working in the restaurant, right?

So I I was studying computer engineering.

I thought I was going to go into cyber and network security.

I was writing code in a computer lab,

and I just kept looking in the mirror and asking myself, like, what impact am I having on the world?

What can I go do about everything that's happening right now?

And I had no idea what that meant.

It's like, I want to go have an impact on the global war on terror.

How do you do that?

So I started to

talk to people.

I went and I

went to these career days.

I started with federal agencies, so FBI, DEA.

I'm like, what are these things all about?

I go to this FBI career day,

best Navy blue suit I could find as a college student on.

I'm ready to go.

I want to do HRT or tactical operations.

I really want to get into it.

I'm a pretty athletic guy.

Like, oh, this is what I want to learn.

And then you just look at me like I have three heads.

Like, how did,

what?

Why?

What's your background?

I'm like, oh, I grew up in a restaurant.

I played basketball.

And they're like, you need military experience.

And so I go, okay,

well, what's military experience look like?

So I start walking into recruiters' offices and I go to the Army recruiter and I go to Air Force and I walk in this naval recruiter office, recruiting office in a strip mall in New Jersey and I say,

you know, I want to do tactical operations.

He's like, oh, let me tell you about the SEAL team.

Why don't you just sign right?

I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I'm not ready to sign.

I just want to learn.

And

this Navy recruiter introduces me to this retired frog man from Vietnam era.

gives me his phone number and he goes call this guy he'll tell you all about the seals

So I call this guy up and I'm like, hey, you know, so-and-so recruiter tells me and told me to call you.

Like, I'm trying to learn about the seals.

He's like, oh, yeah, come on over.

He's like,

wear some cami pants and some boots and we're going to go for a run and I'd love to tell you about the seals.

This is true.

This is true, by the way.

So I get to his house.

It's January in New Jersey.

Never met this guy before.

All I want to do is learn about the SEALs.

He's like, let's go for a run.

has fins and a mask with him.

I'm like,

maybe it's just a seal thing.

Maybe you just always run.

Maybe you just always run with fins and a mask.

He runs me down to the Atlantic Ocean in January in New Jersey and hands me the Finns and the mask.

And he goes, go, go swim out to the end of the jetty and back.

And I'm standing there on the beach and I'm looking at the ocean.

And I have a decision to make.

And I'm just like, okay.

So I take the fins, the mask, I swim out to the jetty.

I come back in.

Only time in my life, buds, everything.

Only time in my life, I got legitimate hypothermia.

Legitimate.

I went back to his house.

He put a blanket on me.

I'm shivering.

His wife's bringing me chicken noodle soup.

And he's like, okay, now I'll tell you about the SEAL teams.

Wow.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And that's how I got introduced to the SEALs.

There was a recruiting platform

I was based out of Long Island.

It was ran by a retired captain, a guy named Drew Bissett, and he just put together a network of SEALs or retired SEALs from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey.

And once a month, everybody would just go and meet up.

And there would be all these recruits that want to be SEALs.

that would go and train for the day and then get mentored by these retired seals.

So I ended up going to that a few times and I was like, you know what?

This is exactly what I want to do.

This is how I had the impact.

Culture, mission, impact, everything was there.

And finished college, got my degree in 2003, and I enlisted the day I graduated.

Wow,

what a career change there.

Yeah,

it was pretty bold.

My mom, my parents had no idea what I was even talking.

They're like, The what?

You did what?

You know, we're going to take a break here, but

you and I met a couple weeks ago, I think now, on a trip that Joe Lonsdale had put together.

And you had mentioned, this is kind of going back to the basketball thing that you were talking about.

And your dad sounds like you're a phenomenal father.

And you had told me that I believe it's your daughter is really into gymnastics and wanted to be the best.

And you told me what you told her it takes to be the best.

And I still remember when my kids are of age, I'm going to steal that and

use it.

But

I just think that's like really good parenting advice.

So could you, could you walk us through that?

100%.

And so my daughter, for the listeners, my daughter's nine years old.

She's been into gymnastics since she's three.

It's nothing we pushed her towards.

We, I mean, candidly, my wife, my kids are 15 months apart.

So when they were three years old, we took them to gymnastics because there was a trampoline, something to bounce on on a Saturday afternoon.

And through that, she just fell in love with the sport and has become really good at it to where now my wife and I are like, okay, do we

do we make this investment?

Do we homeschool?

Do we drive her an hour and a half to a gym that can train her at the level in which she needs to be trained at if she wants to go to the Olympics,

which is that's her goal.

So this my daughter again, who's nine, says, you know, I want to go to the Olympics.

I'm like, okay,

well,

here's what we're going to do.

We're going to homeschool, we're going to drive to the gymnastics gym, we're going to do all of these things for you.

But is that really what you want?

Or do you just want to be good at gymnastics and have fun?

Do you you want to go to a

Division I school and be a really good gymnast and have fun with the sport?

Or do you want to go to the Olympics?

Which is, there's four girls on the Olympics team.

Which one do you want?

She goes, I want to go to the Olympics.

Okay.

Let me tell you what that takes.

Every day, we're going to get up in the morning.

We're going to drive an hour and a half to the gym.

You're going to train for four and a half hours.

You're going to come home.

You're going to stretch.

You're going to ice.

You're going to eat the right way.

You can do all the things you have to do.

You're going to do your schoolwork because you still have to go to school.

We're just going to homeschool so we can build in the flexibility.

And then you're going to get up the next day and do it again.

And if you do that every single day

for 10 years,

maybe,

just maybe,

you'll have a chance.

And

to her credit, no, again, she's nine.

She looked me dead in the eyes and said, great, let's go.

Wow, that's awesome.

So do you guys homeschool?

We're going to homeschool.

We're going to start this year.

And

my wife and I's philosophy is like, look, If they find something that they're really going to pour their energy into like that, we're we're going to invest in it.

That's what I want to do.

I'm not teaching my kid how to be a good gymnast.

I'm teaching my kid how to change the world.

I'm telling her that no matter what she puts her mind to,

she can go after it, but this is how you go after it.

And whether she makes an Olympic team or not, like it's not, I don't know.

I don't know if she's good enough to be in the Olympics, but I'm not going to be the one as her parent that says, no way, that's not possible.

There's only four girls in the country.

The world will tell her where her level is and where she tops out at.

And look, if in two or three years she decides that this isn't for her, that's okay too.

But if she's going to give that level of effort into it, we're going to invest behind it and we're going to encourage her to go be the best she can be.

That's amazing, man.

I just feel like that's great advice for all parents.

But let's take a quick break.

When we come back, we'll get into your military career.

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All right, Dina, we're back from the break.

We're getting ready to pick up on some of your military career.

And so

2003, graduate college, you go right into Buds, correct?

Go right into Buds.

I enlisted the day I graduated.

Well,

back then you have to go, you obviously went through boot camp.

It was enlisted.

And then A-school, which is, hey, what are you going to do in the Navy if you don't make it through Buds?

This since changed and they changed it a number of times, but I went to school.

I learned how to be a radar technician.

Here's how you read the radar.

I couldn't tell you.

Wait, were you an OS?

OS.

Oh, shit.

That's what I was.

Were you?

That's funny.

I still remember A school.

It was down in Damneck,

location of development group or team six.

And you see all these guys running down the beach.

And in A school, you're like,

who are those guys?

So did that.

So it took me about six months to get out to Buds.

So I showed up to Buds and it was December-ish timeframe.

And again, I don't know.

I didn't know San Diego in December was cold.

I didn't know anything about a winter hell week.

So, but I mean, buds was, I mean, you know, it's just a grind, right?

It's six months every single day.

Can you get up at five o'clock in the morning?

Can you go to nine o'clock at night?

Can you

go through and do all the things you have to do be cold wet sandy carry this do that keep going and just do it every day

There's only there's there's two moments where I didn't think I was going to make it.

And those were the two moments where I think I learned the most.

The first one was Hell Week.

Hell Week started February, I forget the exact date, but it was like the first week of February.

It was Super Bowl Sunday that year.

And the air temp was 50 degrees and the water temp was 50 degrees.

And it rained three days, three days out of that week.

It was, so they come in Sunday night, you know, breakout, and hell week starts.

And for everybody that's listening to Hell Week's the fourth week of SEAL training, where you basically stay up for five days straight, no sleep, and you do the first four weeks in a week, all crammed in.

So, Sunday night, and then you start carrying boats on your head, and you start carrying logs, and you're in the ocean freezing, you're doing all these things.

I'll never forget, I get to

Monday afternoon,

and for whatever reason, I decided to wear a watch, or I had a watch on my wrist.

And I look at my watch, and it's like 4:30.

And I just think to myself,

like,

these motherfuckers are crazy.

Crazy.

Like, they want me to go until Friday, and I didn't

think about quitting,

but I physically thought I couldn't make it.

By Monday afternoon,

I thought my legs were broken.

Not even 24 hours.

Not even 24 hours.

I thought, like, I literally thought, I believed in my head that my legs were broken, like right in the middle of my shins.

Not shin splints, not anything.

I'm like, they're broken.

I'm going to take a step.

One of these times and it's just going to go

and give way.

And I remember thinking all this stuff and I'm sitting there at Chow or where they're feeding us dinner and I just remember one of the instructors going, hey, do not quit at Chow.

Your entire body is gonna shut down.

You're gonna feel like you can't go on.

Just get up, take two more steps, and then if you wanna quit, quit.

So I

looked to my buddy next to me who ended up making it as well.

He probably doesn't even remember this story, but I looked to him and I go, hey, when they say, let's go,

don't ask me any questions.

Don't say, are you ready?

Don't do anything.

Just,

can you give me your hand and pull me up?

That's it.

And so they said, time to go.

He stood up, gave me his hand, pulled me up, took two steps,

never thought about it again.

No kidding.

It was like a light switch.

Now, it still hurt,

but that thought of, hey, I can't make it

went away.

And I just turned into the whatever.

What was, I mean, I had a similar, I had a very similar moment right about the same time frame.

What kept, because it sucks.

It's hard.

That's terrible.

I was, I was like 18 at the time.

And yeah,

it was the next night.

And

I was like, man, that bell's looking pretty good.

I think I'm going to ring it.

A hot meal sounds amazing.

And

I remember

telling somebody that I wanted to quit, and he slapped me.

And then the only thought that,

which I didn't care, but the only thing that really kept me going was I just didn't want to call my dad and tell him that I had failed.

What was it?

Does this go back to the basketball thing for you?

Maybe a little bit.

To be honest,

I

never really

wanted to quit.

I just didn't think I was going to make it.

You know, there were people,

and I remember this, and you probably remember this too, where the instructor was saying, okay, well, time to go get back in the ocean and freeze your ass off for 15 minutes.

And I remember people looking at me and saying,

screw this.

I got better things to do right now.

Literally.

I have better things that I could be doing right now.

And for me,

I didn't.

Like, that's where I want.

I wanted to be there.

I wanted to make it.

And

I did not want to go chip paint on the ship for four years,

which is the alternative.

But it's just, it was just a question of if, if I could.

And getting up and taking those two steps steps after again like I thought my legs like literally broken

that told me I could

and then fast forward I finish hell week of all the stupid things to get to have trouble with drown proofing drown proofing drown proofing you had you were

I could not float.

So I'll kind of, again, describe it for the listeners a little bit.

So this is when you get your hands tied behind your back, your feet tied together, you're thrown in the deep end of the pool, and it's 15 feet deep.

And you have to sink to the bottom, jump off the top, jump back up to the top.

You bob up and down for five minutes.

You float for five minutes.

You swim across the pool, swim back, and then you're done.

I

fundamentally could not float.

No kidding.

I would sit there and I would just watch my body go like this.

And all the way down.

And I'm like, I'm going to drown.

Like, I just can't do it.

And I ended up getting rolled for it.

So

I failed during on test day.

And I put work into it.

Is drown proofing pre-hell week?

Post or hell?

At least the final one is.

They give you a couple chances.

I know the final one's post-hell week because I went through hell week.

I went right up to the last day of first phase and ended up

failing this test.

And, you know, I'd worked at it and I'd gotten it before,

but this really taught me, it's one of the lessons of

the difference between, and I talk about this, the difference between an amateur and a professional.

And goes back to my daughter's like, an amateur does something until they get it right.

A professional is going to do it until they can't get it wrong.

And when it's test day, you want to have that level of confidence going in.

Because if you're just barely scraping by on your own and getting it right, you're not going to get it on test day or when it matters or more importantly, when bullets start flying or there's real pressure around.

So I have to go in front of the SEAL board.

I have to go and say, like, here's why you shouldn't kick me out of buds.

Like, it was a really shitty place to be.

And they would say, okay, we're going to give you a couple more months.

Keep working on it.

Whatever.

And

it was one instructor.

One person is the only reason I made it.

He goes, hey,

he was the

OIC of first phase.

He's like, run over to the pool right now.

I'm going to meet you there.

He's like, I had the same exact problem.

I'm going to show you how to do it.

Wow.

So he saw something in you.

So we went over there.

He's like, you need to stop trying to float and you need to rock your body up to the top everybody else floats you rock

and you could tie my hands behind my back right now and go throw me in the water i could do that for 20 minutes so it was just getting that to click and it was one person that taught it to me wow wow you know i did you have any type of imposter syndrome going through i mean i just for example i remember showing up at 18.

I was probably a buck 40 soaking wet.

Yeah.

And I remember all of the people that we had like 240 something people at the beginning.

And I remember seeing in, there was another class going through Hell Week at the time, 239.

And I just, I remember seeing just gargantuan men.

quitting, guys that had come from Marine Special Operations and

Olympic Olympic-level water polo players.

And I'm just like watching them quit.

And I'm like, holy shit, like, I would be in high school wrestling and these guys, this guy's already been to Warren back.

And it was crazy.

He quit.

It was crazy.

I mean, the instructors our first day,

they pulled up the list of, here are the fastest runners and the fastest swimmers.

And the fact, and they go, who's number one?

Okay.

Don't take this personally.

You're going to quit.

Don't care.

You're going to quit.

Every class.

And it was, I was like, wow.

Yeah, it was, it was incredible to see.

I mean, and then the other thing was like, just how important youth was, right?

We had this one person that was probably in the best shape out of anybody, but 33 years old.

And his body just could not recover.

at the speed of a 22 or an 18 year old.

And I think at 18, I wouldn't have made it.

I would have made it.

I had to have those other life experiences.

I had to really put work into basketball the way that I did in college.

I had to fail at that.

I had to have the mental strength, the perspective of, I don't ever want to quit at anything again.

If that wasn't in my brain, I wouldn't have made it.

What did it feel like for you to graduate?

it felt really good obviously you you made something but

it was very it's short-lived it's okay you made it now go to your team and you're a new guy and now get ready to go combat right so i left buds

and i went to an sdv team

so sdv team two which is based in virginia beach seal delivery vehicle so it specialize in it's like a miniature submarine you have two seals in the front that are drivers, four in the back that are being transported, and you spend a lot of your time learning how to pilot and navigate and do this thing on this mini-sub.

Why I chose Virginia Beach and not Hawaii, and we were doing eight-hour dives in the Chesapeake in the middle of February in a seven-mil wetsuit was, I guess, beyond me, but

that's where I was.

And honestly,

each step of of my career

was exactly where I needed to be.

The team that I went to,

even though we were working on diving, and look, you could say, okay, we're in the middle of Iraq and Afghanistan.

There's no water.

Like, why do we have to work on this?

So there was some sort of disconnect there on the mission.

But the team, the individuals,

the platoon I was in was so strong.

I think 50% of our team ended up going to Team Six.

Wow.

Which is incredible.

And we all just trained together, worked together, like pushed each other for this next.

And I still didn't really even know what Team Six was.

It was just, as a new guy getting an SDV team, I'm like, it's just kind of this thing.

And I thought when I went into the teams,

like, again, I didn't know what military was.

I was like, I'm going to do four years.

I'm going to do my service and I'm going to get out.

My very first deployment,

so it was, I think, 18 months or two years in.

I leave the SDB team.

I go over to team two,

and I augment team six.

So that

means like you're not at team six, but you're, it's like if you're a college basketball player getting to go train with the New York Knicks for a couple months.

And that's what it felt like, too.

And so I go on this deployment and I show up.

I show up the very first day.

I didn't even meet anybody.

They're all in the team room and they're briefing this op.

And the person that picked me up from the airfield walks me into the team room.

And I kind of just slide in and I'm looking around the table.

And these are like men, right?

These

beers, mid-30, like these are the most seasoned operators on the planet.

And this is my very first, this is my first time overseas.

And they throw me in the middle of this team room.

And the team leader who's briefing the mission

was going through the thing.

He's like, I need somebody that can, I'll tell this one.

I need somebody that can blend in with the local populace.

and everybody looks at you and yeah I mean I have I'm Greek I have tan skin like

I grow a beard I blend in very well in that part of the world so he looks around the room he's like you

and then he kind of double does a double take he's like who the hell are you

and I'm like oh I'm from team two he's like

whatever shut up stop talking you're coming with me

and so that was that was my first op

and coming off of that deployment what were you doing we were just doing some low viz stuff in in bagram i mean it was pretty basic running surveillance ahead of a uh broader a bigger group and ran a bunch of ops with them

spent three months on that deployment came back went to iraq for six months with team two and i went right to green team so you so your first your very first deployment overseas was with Dev Group?

Yep.

Holy shit.

So you didn't even have any

experience to reference.

Right into the fire.

I'm like, oh my gosh.

But the guys were great.

I mean, honestly,

truly the best operators in the world.

And that and seeing that, that's what gave me the drive to then say, okay, like I want to go to Team Six.

Like, that's what I want to do with my career from here.

I want to be a part of that.

That was incredible.

So, come back, go to Iraq for six months with Team Two.

Come back, go to Green Team.

And Green Team's sort of the tryouts for SEAL.

It's another six-month selection process.

I did not know that there was such a high attrition rate where you have experienced SEALs that are selected as top performers that are going through the selection course, and you still have another 80% attrition rate.

And I just kind of went in and said,

I took a very, I think, down-to-earth perspective.

And I think this is why I was successful.

I went in and said, I actually don't know if I belong here.

I don't know if I can operate at this level.

But I want to find out.

at a training center in Virginia Beach.

I don't want to find out on the middle of a hilltop in Afghanistan when it's too late and I get everybody killed.

So I just came in to Green Team and said, I'm going to leave it all out there.

I am going to make every single decision I can.

I am going to make the hard cause.

I'm going to be in the front of the line.

I'm going to do all the things.

And I actually just want the instructors to see me.

I want them to see everything I'm doing, and I want them to tell me if it's good or bad.

And then, if it's bad, send me home so I don't get anybody killed.

Wow, that's like

that's the exact opposite approach of everybody I know that has gone through there: be the gray man.

It's pretty stand out, don't be bad, don't be excellent, just be the gray man.

Well, I think by doing that, I was the gray man because I was never the most excellent at anything, nor was I the worst at anything, but it was more of just

putting your decision-making out there right and I'll give you a story this kind of illustrates it

obviously CQC or close quarters combat like how you go through a house or a training building or anything as a group it's a big part of that training and there was this one scenario where

Coming through a hallway, the whole team's behind me, they have the paper targets set up, and I kind of peek around this corner

and I see a target.

And it's got a hostage, you know, the paper targets with the hostage in front of it and the bad guy behind him.

And I look, and it's like way down the hallway.

And I'm like,

and I take the shots, and all I hear from the rafters is Matt Brukis.

Wow.

And in my brain, I'm like,

and I'm going home.

So we finish the run, we come out,

and they're like,

and I'm expecting to get like lit up.

They're going to yell, scream, they're going to do all these things, and then they're going to just send me home.

They're like, hey, so.

One of the rules that we have during training is don't shoot through open doors.

It was a hallway.

It was a really long hallway with an opening at the end.

I don't know if we really call that an open door,

but just don't do that again.

I was like, okay,

check.

Then,

and then I learned things after the fact too, and then there was this.

So then, after they told me not to do that again,

they gave me a really interesting punishment.

They had me go carry two 20-pound medicine balls

and I had to carry them like they were my balls.

And they made me scream at the top of my lungs, I'm so ballsy.

And everybody's looking at me like, what the hell is he doing?

I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing.

Like,

why is this...

Why is this such a big deal?

And I come to realize when I talk to them later and they're like

yeah you don't understand half a dozen people were in that same position you were in

you were the only one

that took the shot

you were we had people look up to the rafters

and ask

can I take this shot

We're not gonna be fucking with you in Afghanistan.

Like, we're not gonna be with you there.

Nobody's answering questions.

You're the only one that took a shot.

Whether Whether you should have or not,

whatever.

But I'm like,

they didn't actually care, they just wanted people that could make those decisions

in those moments.

And that's what I kind of

took away:

don't be afraid to make the hard decisions.

Be decisive.

Be decisive, act, and don't shy away from the hard ones.

And I, I still practice that today.

You have to.

So

spent five years at Damneck

and ended up transitioning in 2015.

Any significant stuff you want to talk about while you were there?

Did a bunch of deployments.

It goes back to, you know,

my wife supporting me through all this.

You know,

we got married in 2012.

She moved down to Virginia Beach in 2011.

it's right about when I was getting the squadron and this was before work from home was a thing

right

so she made a deal with her with her company I think it was American Express or she switched to Citibank

she's like look I'm gonna go down to Virginia Beach be with my husband and then

when he's traveling I'll come back to New Jersey, work from the office in New York.

And I was like, babe, you know, you do not

want to do that.

Right.

The amount of time that we're on the road,

four years later, nobody, nobody knew she moved to Virginia.

They're like, you live where?

It was Common Go.

So she, she did a lot to support me through all of that.

Did five deployments, I think, in five years.

She was

very, very busy.

And then the last deployment,

it might have been the second to last deployment

was really the reason why I decided to get out.

It wasn't because I didn't like the job anymore.

And obviously, you always love the guys and you love being around.

Like, people ask me, Do you miss the teams?

I actually don't.

I don't miss the job.

I miss the guys.

I miss just hanging out.

But it was our last deployment.

I was,

I won't say where I was, but we were with a

foreign unit predominantly.

I was managing

like five or six hundred foreign special forces soldiers in this out station.

And

wow, we were trying so many different experiences to

being on missions that were approved by the president.

I was not on the bin Laden raid, just for the record.

I don't even like throwing leaving that possibility out there.

I learned about that with a broken ankle, and I was in bed in Virginia Beach, and I saw it on CNN like everybody else.

But being on missions that were approved at that level to running five or six hundred like SEAL Team 6 just opened up the door of experiences.

And so I'm on this deployment in this really shitty part of the world

and

we had all these regulations and red tape of what we could do and what we couldn't do with the foreign units.

And so we're training them, we're we're working with them, we're doing all these things.

And then

this bad guy that we've been tracking for

months pops up.

And he's

four miles from where we are on this mountain somewhere.

And we're like, great, let's go throw our stuff on.

We'll go get them.

We'll be back by dinner.

And because of the political environment,

we, being the U.S.

soldiers that were there

and my team, we couldn't leave the base.

We did not get approval to leave the base.

So we went through this whole rigmarole where we're like, okay,

you go get them.

We'll be here.

We'll tell you where to go.

And it was just this game of telephone and we're watching the ISR feed, trying to direct them into the bad guy.

They can't, the foreign unit couldn't find them.

They're walking around in circles.

I'm calling back to headquarters.

If you just let me go,

I'll be back in 10 minutes.

And we couldn't get that approval.

Wow.

And so they walk around for six hours.

They can't find him.

The guy gets away.

And I was just like, you know what?

The impact that I'm able to have here as an operator is going away.

And if I'm going to be away from my family for six months,

I wanted to be for a really good reason.

And so I decided at that point that I was going to get out, go back to business school.

I got back from my last deployment two weeks before my son was born.

So I was fortunate to make it back

and

ended up going to business school six months later.

Wow, there was that.

So you had planned on possibly doing a full career.

I was taking it one enlistment, one like four-year block at a time.

But again, I thought I was going to do four.

I was at 11.

I was kind of thinking through the business school thing.

And

I hadn't made my mind up.

And that

just really made my mind up.

I was like, okay, like, I'm going to go start a new career.

I'm going to go get into business.

I'm 34 years old.

Like, I'm just going to go do it now because

everything has changed.

And the impact that I can have as an operator is what I felt at that time

has been diminished.

And it was the right time for me with family,

physical stuff.

Like,

I look at guys.

two knee surgeries and two shoulder surgeries.

And I never got to that point.

I was getting close.

And it was the right time for me.

I look back and I actually say, I'm like, you know what?

It wasn't too early.

It wasn't too late.

It was 11 years was was my time.

What was the interest in business?

Where did that come from?

Was that from a line of entrepreneurs?

No, you know,

I always wanted to go back and get an MBA at some point.

I don't know why.

I was just interested in business school.

And then

I think I liked education.

And then I was really interested in finance.

This is

because

I bought Google and Apple stock while on deployment in 2008.

And it turns out if you bought stock in 2008, it just did really well.

So I was like, oh, this finance thing's interesting.

So I showed up to business look completely naive and not knowing anything.

I didn't didn't know which way was up.

I didn't know what I was talking about.

And I thought I had two years to figure it out.

Come to learn that's not how business school works.

So you get to business school and within two weeks, they start,

the school starts asking, okay, what are you recruiting for?

What do you want to do?

We have companies coming on campus next week.

You have to apply for your internship.

And I'm like, whoa, whoa.

I just got out of the military like two weeks ago.

I had it two years to figure this stuff out.

So

I very quickly said, okay, I better get my act together and started digging into more of, okay, what does finance actually mean?

What does that mean?

Because I'm not going to just go buy Google and Apple and like, that's going to be my job.

So I started talking to people.

I'm like, tell me about hedge funds.

Tell me about venture capital.

Tell me about private equity.

Tell me about bond trading.

tell me about anything I can think of and all the things that I didn't know I just started learning about

and I got really really interested in private equity for a couple reasons one

you really get that finance and investing experience so you have to become a very good investor and

The skill set there, being able to identify companies and identify investments and what makes a good company and a good investment is actually something I use a lot now running a company.

So I was super interested in that angle.

But then also as a private equity investor, you get to, you own the company.

So the different kind of

methods of investing in private equity, you own, you buy over 51% of the company.

As an investor, you're directly responsible for it.

You're working with the CEOs, the management teams, you're implementing strategic initiatives, like you're doing all the things.

And so I was like, oh, wait, I'm going to get investing experience and I'm going to get operating experience.

This is the best of both worlds.

I think I want to be an investor for the next 25 years, but if I don't, I'll just have this great skill set all around.

And so I really looked at it as a continuous education of

my business school career.

And I looked at like the next five years is just, I'm just going to go learn as much as I can about as much as i can

and that for the most part really played out i went to a company called

hig capital and then went to vista equity partners which is based out in austin but the whole like how i got there was actually really interesting and eye-opening i didn't realize how

difficult it would be to break into private equity

from business school.

I assumed, like,

I was at SEAL Team Six.

Right?

I get any job I want.

And I very quickly started interviewing and they're like, yeah, I don't,

I don't know what to do with you.

You don't know how to build financial models.

Yeah, I get your leadership, but

I can't put you in as a leader.

You don't build financial models.

There's a huge disconnect.

And so

I started talking to the career counselors, and

they were like, Yeah, you can't go into private equity.

There's a career path for private equity.

I was like, Okay, what's that look like?

They're like, Well, you have to go to investment banking first.

And I was like, Why?

Like, well, because you have to.

I was like, Why?

Like,

you can't do it any other way.

I was like, okay.

So I went home.

I'm telling my wife this story.

I was like, I guess.

And she actually knows me better than I know myself at some point.

And she looks at me and she goes, she kind of like rolled her eyes and was like, oh, brother.

I was like, what?

She's like, they just told you you can't do it.

She's like, we're screwed.

And so I'm like, no, no, no.

I didn't make up my mind.

She's like, okay, yeah, you say whatever you want.

And so,

sure enough, and I'm like, you know what?

Screw this.

I'm going to go into private equity.

I'm going to figure it out.

So I started building financial models in my apartment at business school in my off time from class and kids and everything else.

I was staying up until two or three o'clock in the morning building financial models.

I completely reverse engineered my first one.

These are Excel spreadsheets that are, you know, can be anywhere from eight tabs to like 30 tabs long.

They're insane.

And the first one I reverse engineered took me

three weeks to do.

This is something that should take somebody that's not even that good.

Two hours.

Took me three weeks.

I went into literally every box in Excel, read the formula, retyped it, and then cleaning, and like just went back and forth.

And then just did it again, and again, and again, and again.

To the point at which when I started interviewing full-time,

I had heard enough of, hey, you can't do private equity because you have to go to investment banking.

So I just walked into the interview

and I was talking to the managing partner, and I said,

you know,

let's just get something on the table right out of the gates.

I didn't do investment banking.

I know that and you know that.

So let's have that conversation.

Let's not talk about my SEAL career and you think I'm a great leader.

And then I walk out of this room and you say, great guy, but can't do the job.

Let's talk about how I didn't do investment banking, why I can build you financial models.

And if you want me to just go build you one,

just give me a computer and I'll go in the room next door and I'll just build it for you.

And then we can talk about it.

And he looked at me and said, you build financial models?

I was like, yeah, I've been working on this for two years.

This is what I've been doing.

These are all the things that I recognized the gap in my skill set that I needed to close in order to be successful at what I wanted to do next.

And I just put all of my energy into it.

Impressive.

And so I ended up working at HIG Capital,

changing it, moving to Vista a year later, and Vista was phenomenal.

I was there for four years.

The team's incredible.

I got to work on cool deals.

It was like closing deals in London and Australia and working around the clock.

It was fun.

It was fun.

What is the difference between private equity and venture capital?

It's the stage of company and the amount of ownership that you're going to take.

So venture capital are the investors that we have now, and typically they're minority investors and they're investing much earlier.

So the risk profile is much different.

So venture capitalists will look at companies and say, you know what?

I'm going to take a bet.

And their model is because the companies are so early, they don't have

track record of success, they don't have financials to go and review, they don't have 10 years of revenue that you can forecast off of.

It's in some cases,

I think when we started the company, we had a dozen slides and the founding team.

And that was it.

Wow.

And so venture capitalists are taking those bets early on.

And their whole investment model is: look,

90-ish percent of these companies aren't going to work.

So those are going to go to zero.

So I'm going to go invest.

whatever it is.

Let's say we have a billion-dollar fund.

I'm going to invest $900 million into companies that go to zero.

The other call it seven to eight, nine percent will give me my money back, meaning they just do okay.

And then there's one percent of companies that will just completely crush it.

The

Facebooks and Googles of the world, hopefully the Saronics of the world, that just, that's what the venture capitalists make all their money.

So it's much riskier.

and you're not looking to make money off of every single investment

private equity is on the other end of the spectrum where they're buying companies and their whole model is to make a 3x return off of every single company okay

so

Where do I have complete conviction?

This company is 15 years old.

It has a ton of revenue.

I'm not really taking risk.

I might take a risk where, okay, if the company doesn't do as well as I thought it would do, I'd make 2X or I'd get my money back, or if it does really well, I make a 4X.

So you're, you're taking much less risk, but the variability in the outcome is also much different.

So you're investing at different stages and different risk profiles.

Okay.

So you are, okay.

So private equity, you're basically, you're taking the damn near for sure bet in

jet jet launching the business through capital.

Private equity, I equate to, is like you're buying a house and just trying to fix it up and flip it.

And venture capital is like, you're just buying a plot of land and hoping a city develops around it.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Wow.

What, um,

how was your transition out of the military?

I mean,

talking about not just going to school, but, but

post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, reintegrating in with the family on a full-time basis, dealing with civilians, going to school with a bunch of people that had never done what you'd done.

I mean,

how did you fare with all of that?

It was hard.

It was hard.

I mean, if you look at it on paper

and the accomplishments, it's like, yeah, A plus.

But

you sit down and have a conversation with my wife.

Like, it wasn't easy.

Right.

I was, you mentioned imposter syndrome earlier like this is where it really came into play for me like i didn't think i was gonna get a job

like

literally i'm like what do i know how i know how to clear hallways and shoot guns

i'm not gonna get

there's um one of the deans of the school really

mentors the the veterans a lot at war and she's she's amazing and i used to go in her office all i'm like marilyn i'm like i'm not getting a job and And she would just laugh at me and be like, you're out of your mind.

I'm like, no, seriously.

I'm being serious.

So there's all this stress that looking back on it,

I would have liked to just know that it would have been okay.

Right.

And I think

I put a lot of pressure on myself to

not only figure it out,

but figure it out quickly.

And that's the other thing I underestimated is like how long this transition would really take.

Right.

This is

10 years later.

It's like the first time I really feel like I have my feet under me.

Wow.

Right.

And

everything in the teams, too, is relative.

You're always comparing yourself to the guy next to you and you're like, well, I'm as messed up as that guy.

I can do it.

If he can keep going after four surgeries and being in an explosion, I should keep going.

And that's not necessarily the right attitude.

And

I love that you said post-traumatic stress and not post-traumatic stress disorder, because it's not really disorder.

Like, it's just

you're fundamentally different after going through certain traumatic experiences.

And if you think you're not, that's the, that's the problem.

And I think for

For too long, I didn't think that my military career affected the way that I was was thinking about things, affected my emotions, my ability to connect with my wife and my family and like all of these things that looking back on it,

I should have noticed earlier.

I came out, I went, I'll never forget this.

So I went to the VA

and did my whole like VA off-boarding thing.

And

I specifically waited.

So I didn't go in Virginia Beach.

I went in Philadelphia.

So in Philly, they're not used to seeing team guys and Marines and everybody at all the time and not used to hearing crazy stories.

So you get out of that environment and I go to the VA doctor and he's like, yeah, just

tell me your combat history.

And I just, and I just think I'm telling a story.

And he almost falls out of his chair.

And you're like, okay, just stop.

You need to go see this or this.

I'm like, no, no, no.

I'm just, I'm fine.

I'm just telling you a story.

He's like, yeah, we're going through these steps.

And I was like, okay, okay.

It's not normal.

It's not.

He's like, it's not normal.

But when you're living in the team environment, when you're in the SEALs or you're in the Marine, you're in a very high-paced culture like that.

It becomes very normal.

And people don't realize.

And I think the teams are doing a better job at it now,

but it's it should just be like an education.

Like, how does this type of trauma impact the way that you see and think about the world?

How does it impact the way you interact with other humans?

When I got, when I transitioned, when I went to the business school,

I didn't want anything to do with the military.

I was like, I'm done here.

Checked out.

I didn't even want to join the vets Club.

Didn't want to hang out with Vet.

I wanted to go a complete opposite direction.

And then little by little, I just

realized like, okay, that's my close friend.

Okay, this is what I care about.

Okay.

This is what I really do.

Okay, now it's, no, I actually want to dedicate my life to keeping people safe.

And this was just a little break that I needed.

And it just took me a while to get there.

You just mentioned

basically you were talking about the competitiveness within the teams and measuring yourself against the guy next to you.

And I think

a lot, you know, that's the way it is there.

And you said that that is, you know, maybe not the right mindset.

And

this is something I think about a lot.

So I just want to kind of see where you're going with this.

What is the right mindset?

Being the best that you can be.

Right?

And I'm not saying, and I'm not saying measure yourself against others in the sense of don't compete.

Competition is healthy.

And I think a certain level of competition in the teams, I actually think that's the best form of competition where

you're my buddy.

I will literally give my my life to protect you.

But I also want to beat you at everything.

And that makes

everybody in the team better.

Where I think it becomes unhealthy is the,

okay, I haven't had three knee surgeries.

I shouldn't be complaining.

I shouldn't go see the doctor.

I didn't have a house collapse on my head.

I shouldn't be, I shouldn't have PTSD,

right?

I shouldn't go talk to this person, right?

It's

just because you didn't have that experience doesn't mean you didn't have something impact you or affect you, and doesn't mean that you don't need either physical.

Like so many guys put off injuries so we could keep deploying, and that it's probably the right thing to do, right?

I did it, and we had it.

It was like, it's game time.

We're gonna deal with this later, right?

But then go get it dealt with.

And same, your brain's the same way.

And I think we just, as a community, underappreciated both of those things.

Do you think it is important to pick who your competition is?

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And it took me a minute to figure this out.

You know, just even though our businesses are obviously very different, you know, I still, when I left, I still had that mindset of, of,

you know, what are my peers doing?

How do I measure up against my peers?

And a lot of those peers, you know, had separated from the Navy at the same time or were still in.

And it was, it was just, I was always measuring myself against my peers.

It wasn't really until.

I had gotten rid of that and

leveled up my competition to people that weren't my peers, but people that were already way ahead of me.

And that's who I, you know, internally, not externally, internally in my head, that's who I, that's who I considered my competition to be were people that were way up here compared to where I was.

And in anything in life, in sports, you come to like, you, there's a thing, like you play to the level of your competition, and that's where you're going to step your game up to and 100% when I was in private equity I wasn't competing against my peers from the SEAL teams and saying hey, I just want to be more successful than them.

It was

how do I how am I the best private equity professional?

How am I better than this person that's been investing for 15 years?

How do I get better than them?

How do I learn from them?

And now it's same thing in the business world.

It's I look at other CEOs, other business leaders,

work with Joe Lonzell a lot, who I know we talk about.

How do I get to be that good?

How do I have that level of insight across that many different things?

I can drive this company into a truly, truly generational company.

When did you figure that out?

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Oh, man.

Sometime after business school and before Saonic,

I don't know if I could put a date on it.

It wasn't immediate.

Right?

Because in business school, you are, you're like

every other vet going to a recruiter, trying to find a job.

You are kind kind of competing in that vets network community.

And it feels like you're part of.

And it was just

getting out of that, going into private equity, but then also not doing that for a year or two.

Like I was there for five years,

right?

Really was building a career there.

And so somewhere along that way, I got over the imposter syndrome of

Then you're talking about like, I don't really belong here.

These people are like, they're brilliant.

There were folks that could sit there and tell you every single number about every single company they've ever worked on in the last decade.

Wow.

And I'm like

trying to remember what the revenue was on the company, the meeting we listed left 45 minutes ago.

I'm like, I better be.

And so it was getting into this process and building the habits and building the skill sets to be very, very good at it that then one, you got over the kind of of imposter syndrome.

The okay, I'm a veteran coming trying to be a private equity professional to, no, I just work in private equity and I'm going to be the best investor I can be.

To now, I'm

a CEO, but it's not I'm a veteran who's trying to be CEO.

That's just who I am, what I do.

I have to be the best at that.

And being in the teams is just part of my background.

Do you, do you believe in limitations?

Yeah,

you do.

I think everybody has limited limits.

You have physical limitations and mental limitations.

I do believe that.

I don't think I'm ever going to be able to solve quantum physics or jump 50 inches into the air.

I'm just not.

But within the capabilities that God has given me, how do I push those and maximize those to the...

have the largest impact and really get the most out of them

interesting

I believe there are limitations, but I think that if you find what you're meant to do, then it is limitless, what you can do.

I mean,

what you can do is limitless if you're doing the right thing.

I mean, to build a company that's got a $4 billion valuation in, what, three years?

Under two and a half years, yeah.

Two and a half years.

I mean,

to me, that proves it right there.

Just another person that is.

But it goes back to your point of if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, right?

I can't go and do anything in the world and be the best at it, right?

If you want to be the best at something,

I can't do that in every aspect of everything.

But

this is truly what I'm meant to be doing.

And when you look at the decision to start Sauronic,

the first

decision point that I made was, I want to get back into defense.

It wasn't, what company should I start?

Where's the market gap?

How big's the opportunity?

Okay, this is going to make a bunch of money.

Then, okay, now I'll go do it.

It was,

no, I want to get back into defense.

Okay, why do you want to get back into defense?

Because I want to help keep people safe.

That's what I did for 11 years of my life.

That is ingrained in who I am.

I needed a break from that.

But now I want to get back to that.

And if I'm thinking about my career and I'm thinking about the next 25 years of my life,

that's what I want to dedicate my talents towards.

And

I didn't know anything else in that.

Another question.

Like I had mentioned, you built a $4 billion company in valuation in two and a half years.

I mean, did you ever think that that's how this would turn out?

No.

Was there any aspirations for that even to happen, or were you totally ingrained in what you were doing?

No, the dream was there, right?

We wanted to build a really big company, but big so that it could have an impact, right?

Because you want to have a really big impact, and to be able to have a really big impact, you have to be a big company.

But going back to the time that it would take to do that, I thought

if we're wildly successful and everything works, we're in year

seven, year eight?

Maybe?

You know, I thought this was going to be a decade-long thing just to get here.

Now,

when you look at where we're going to be in a decade, it's awesome because of the trajectory that we're on.

And one of my favorite quotes, I think it's Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, one of those two, said, we always

overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and we underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.

A decade's a really long time.

In 10 years, you can change the world.

Now, I did not think we were had,

and we'll talk about kind of where we're going, but I didn't think we had this level of opportunity in this amount of time.

How fast we move is completely remarkable.

What do you attribute that to?

A few things.

One,

we've attracted a world-class team, like truly world-class.

I'll get into the founding team, how that came together.

But A-plus team from across industries, from top companies, SpaceX, Google, Tesla, Enderol out of the military.

I mean people that are super passionate about the mission and want to dedicate their talents to building the products that our country needs.

Second thing is capital.

Investors.

Joe Lonsdale was our first investor.

We have a list of phenomenal investors, Ray Tonsick from Caffeinated Capital, Catherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz, runs their American Dynamism Practice.

Allod Gill led our last round.

These are top investors in Silicon Valley that have given us close to a billion dollars to date.

Wow.

But it's not just about the money.

You know, my job is to go and make a return,

but it's not just that they've given us the money.

It's like they want us.

to go after the really hard problems for the country.

And they've trusted us with that money to move quickly, to build products faster than government contract for the pace of government contracting, so that we can get solutions in the hands of our warfighters as fast as possible.

We couldn't do that without private capital.

The third thing is the customer.

In this case, again, we'll talk just the defense.

It's military, right?

I haven't seen...

the Navy move with this pace in anything, right?

You can have a great team and a ton of capital.

And if the customer doesn't start changing and adopting things, one or both of those things are going to dry up.

So in order to create this like hyper-growth environment that we're in, you need those three things to come together.

And you need the Navy to lean in on certain places where they've been very, very risk adverse.

to start changing that culture,

right?

And moving alongside companies like Saronic and adopting solutions like this.

Otherwise, the investors aren't going to keep pouring capital into it.

So it's the ability to bring those three things together, world-class team,

incredible investors with a lot of capital.

Like we,

you say a billion dollars kind of lightly, like that's a lot of money.

I don't take that lightly for one second.

That's a lot of responsibility and a lot of trust that was placed in the company and in me and the leadership team.

Right.

We earn that trust every single day.

And then customer with a oh shit problem that we got to go solve for them.

How did you,

you told me this on our trip, but I love the story, by the way.

How did you come up with Saronic?

and the conversations that you had with your wife when you decided to leave private equity.

So, the first conversation we had, it was going back to what I was talking about a moment ago: like, I just want to work on things that keep people safe.

That's how I want to spend my life.

That's what gets me up in the morning.

One of my favorite quotes ever, and I need to figure out who this quote is from,

but it's, don't ask what the world needs.

Ask what makes you come alive, because what the world needs is more people that have come alive.

And it was pretty powerful.

And so

I figured out that this is how I wanted to spend my life.

And

I knew,

I just knew I would never figure it out working at a private equity firm, working anywhere.

But specifically at a private equity firm, working 80 to 100 hours a week, just grinding through other stuff.

You just don't have the time, the bandwidth, the mental capacity.

And for me, personally, it's like

the kind of like all-in mindset.

And that's what I need.

When I go after thinking, personally, everybody's different.

I know that if I'm going to do something or I'm really going to do it, then I just got to be all in.

So I went in thinking I was going to explain this in a very rational way to my wife.

And mind you, she had just left her job.

And she had a 20-year career she just we decided now

I'm in private equity for five years my salary has grown we're in a comfortable place I necessarily like I'm getting promoted I'm doing the things everything's looking great

and I walk into the living room I'm like I have to quit

and she looks at me

And I could just, she wanted to say, like, get out of my face.

And you have two kids at this point?

Two kids.

Oh, yeah.

This is in 2020.

This is early 22.

So my kids are

seven and six.

Seven and six.

Yeah.

And we're living in Austin and we have a house.

I'm going to do I have all the thing.

And so it's, I'm like, I have to quit.

And she's like,

okay,

tell me why.

And I go, well,

I'm going to go build a defense tech company.

And she goes, that sounds great.

That sounds really exciting.

What does your company do?

And I go, oh,

really?

It builds technology for defense.

And I didn't have the answer.

I just didn't know.

But I knew this is what I...

wanted to do and what I was supposed to be doing

and so she heard me out.

And as always, she supported me, which is incredible.

And we came up with a plan.

It was like, look, here's the plan.

If in 12 months, if I'm still wandering around the streets saying, hey, I want to build a defense tech company and there's nothing concrete, then I'm going to go get it.

Like, I'm not looking for perennial unemployment here.

I'm really looking to follow my dreams.

And this is my dream.

She's like, uh-huh then you gotta go for it and you gotta go for it so

walked in quit my job and

started building out saronic

with no idea what it was gonna be with no idea what it was gonna be so started started thinking through okay

well first step was i thought i was gonna take like a couple weeks off

and at least clear my head a little bit before diving right in

and

the next thing that happened was I caught up with Joe Alonzo.

How did you guys meet?

So Joe and I met

2020-ish time frame when he moved to Austin.

He was networking with some SEALs and military folks.

He invited me to his house for breakfast.

We did a workout.

This was again 2020, I think late 2020, early 2021.

And

it was great.

I was like, great, cool guy, like, awesome.

I thought I'd never see him again.

Six months later, his EA emails me.

He's like, hey, do you want to come to Joe's house for a workaround and breakfast?

Sure.

It was great.

Last time was fun.

Do it again.

We were talking about investments, things I was working on at Vista.

There were like some overlapping companies.

So it was just

nice guy, cool to go to.

So

fast forward, quit my job.

I have one of these breakfasts.

It's like, what do you have going on?

I'm like, oh, I quit Vista and

I'm going to go build a defense tech company.

And he kind of did the same double take that my wife did.

He's like, I'm sorry, what?

And I've learned from the conversation with my wife.

I go, no, no, no, don't ask me any questions because I don't know.

I'm not pitching anything.

I don't know what.

And he goes, no, no, no, no.

That's That's perfect.

Come join AVC.

Let's build this together.

Let us support you.

It's your company.

It's your thesis.

It's your

everything.

He's like, use our resources.

Use me as a mentor.

Use me as an advisor.

And we want to invest in you when you come up with that idea.

Wow.

And I was floored.

And that's a skill.

Like, Joe saw something in me

that

I didn't even see.

I think at that point, yeah, I was saying I wanted to build a defense tech company, but I really think it was going to come true.

Did I really know all the steps that it would take to get it done?

No.

So just jumped right in, started working, started building out thesis ideas, and Vista really taught me how to run a really disciplined and really intellectually honest diligence process.

So I was able to structure things and lay lay them out and say, okay, I'm going to go look at this, then I'm going to go look at this, then I'm going to go look at this.

And here's how we're going to map the universe.

And here are all the things that we can look at.

And I mean, the military puts out a strategy.

They're like, here are the 14 things over the next 50 years that we're going to be investing in.

Cybersecurity and autonomy and AI, et cetera, et cetera.

If you're not in one of those 14 things, what are you doing?

So I started mapping that out.

I actually started out looking at a 5G cybersecurity idea.

Kind of battlefield communications are changing, networks are changing, there needs to be new security.

And I just went really deep there for about six to eight weeks.

Again, laid out the diligence process.

And as in any diligence, the most important part is getting people on the phone.

It's having conversations with the experts and saying,

hey, tell me about the market.

Stop me when I'm wrong.

Talk to me about X, Y, and Z.

How is this evolving?

What are the real needs?

And I just did that over and over again.

And the more I did that, the more it was like, okay,

this isn't a big enough problem to be a big company or have a big impact.

And so we ended up killing that idea, turning it off pretty quickly.

And again, it goes back to just be disciplined, be unemotional, and just make the right business decision

and

started looking at maritime autonomy.

In fact,

a really close friend of mine showed me a YouTube video of

these two surfers in Germany that built a hydrofoil surfboard out of a Pelican gun case.

And of course, two team guys sitting there with the six-pack say, Well, I bet I could put some explosives in that.

That would be a cool product.

and so i'm like well would it be

and so i go and i start building out i'm like okay well what does maritime look like what does maritime autonomy look like and i'm going to conferences and i'm looking at things

and you walk into all these conferences and you see 25 different drones hanging from the sky

And you're like, oh, there's a lot of advancement in aerial autonomy.

There's even advancement in subsea autonomy.

And I wasn't seeing autonomous boats.

And I'm like, why aren't there any autonomous boats at these conferences?

And so I just walk over and I look at, I'm like, okay, well,

we're just the boats, right?

And you'll appreciate this.

So I walk up to the Zodiac booth.

And you know Zodiacs, the little speedboats we use in the SEAL teams with the outboard motor carries six people.

They look like they're from Vietnam.

They're like 1970s technology.

And you're always, the motor's never starting.

It's a piece of crap.

If you go on the Zodiac website, they have these really cool, fully electric, jet drive, like push-button zodiacs.

So I go up to the booth.

And I'm asking the guy, I'm like,

why on the Zodiac website do I see this thing that looks like it's from

2022 coming off the back of a yacht

when the SEAL teams get this?

And he goes, oh, we're actually different companies.

That's Zodiac, big Zodiac.

This is Zodiac Mil Pro.

And we're just the Zodiac Military Company.

And so I'm like, so you don't innovate?

He's like, no, we're different companies.

I'm like, oh, that's interesting.

So I started saying, okay, like, where's the innovation in maritime?

Where is it?

And I couldn't find it.

The Navy, again, going back to what Congress is doing with the Navy, the Navy's been doing research and experimentation with a number of different companies.

And a lot of it has been

just that, just experimentation, proof of concept.

I was like, where's the real capability that scales?

Where's the company that's software first,

hardware enabled that's vertically integrated that can produce at scale that's delivering real capability where's that company i didn't see it

so then the second question i had to ask was like

does anybody care that this company doesn't exist right like does it matter because it's okay to have a gap in the market the question is like

is that gap going to get filled can you build a real generational company here basically is the navy actually going to buy thousands of autonomous systems or not?

And if the answer is no, that's okay, then I just don't want to start this company because then it doesn't matter.

That's when you start going into

shipbuilding, shipbuilding capacity, all the things about China that we were talking about.

And you very quickly realize,

oh, crap.

The Navy actually doesn't have another choice.

There just isn't another choice.

We have to move in this direction.

We have to augment our fleet with autonomous ships,

boats and ships.

We have to be a force multiplication to the fleet that we have today in order to maintain naval superiority.

Otherwise, we just won't have it.

The Chinese have went from this

Little crappy littoral navy to one that has aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and hypersonic missiles in less than 25 years.

Wow.

And

they build their military solutions specifically to counter the U.S.

We are their focus.

And

that's scary.

So then you're like, once we've kind of put all of that together, it wasn't even a question of,

oh this is cool i'm an entrepreneur i want to start a tech company i want to do these things

it was like no

we have to start this company it's not even a question of do i want to anymore it's a we have to and it's our responsibility to do so

why do you think we are china's focus

Well, because we're the global power, right?

Anytime you're on top,

people are trying to take you down.

And that's just anything.

That's life, that's sports.

It's competition, right?

And that's been happening since the beginning of human civilization.

And the other thing is, look, they look at Taiwan and Taiwan's, they view it as their right to go and reclaim that as part of China.

Like that is fundamentally their right as a country.

And And the United States

does not agree with that.

And,

you know, we, for better or worse,

feel it's our place to project democracy around the world.

And I fundamentally believe in that.

Right.

And so

those are two diametrically opposed viewpoints.

But to give you a sense of kind of the problem that we're facing,

imagine like Cuba was critical to the world's economy, like critical to the world's economy,

and the Chinese wanted to stop us from invading Cuba.

It's a hard problem.

Cuba's 80 miles off the coast.

Taiwan's 80 miles off the coast of China.

It's on the other side of the world for us.

So you really have to have deterrence in place to make sure that

they're they're not projecting what they view right and what they view the world should look like and the world

that the Chinese government projects and

the CCP project.

We don't want to live in that world,

right?

That's not a good world.

A world where the U.S.

is not the predominant superpower, it's actually a really, really scary place.

So we have to make sure that we're able to deter or defeat the Chinese in the South Pacific if it ever comes to that.

How do you even know where to start?

You see a gap, something that needs to happen.

I mean, there's a lot that goes into this.

There's raising the capital, which we've established, but there's also getting in front of the right people.

You just start building.

That's

how you eat an elephant.

You eat an elephant one bite at a time.

So

we had the capital.

The next thing was founding team.

Who's going to actually build this thing?

And when you talk about how that actually came together,

again,

there's something very special happening here that's outside of any one individual's control.

So three co-founders, Doug Lambert, who's our chief chief operating officer, Vib Althekar, who's our chief technology officer, and then Rob Lehman, who's our chief commercial officer.

What are their backgrounds?

Doug was the head of engineering at a company called Liquid Robotics, which was a maritime autonomy company.

That company sold to Boeing in 2017.

He's been in maritime autonomy for 15 years.

He

got recruited away from Liquid Robotics to start building an autonomous submarine in Austin, Texas.

What are the odds of that?

Wow.

And he left that role

two weeks before

we were like getting ready to start saranic.

And so I got introduced to him in Austin.

We link up.

We're like, I'm like, I want to go build this.

He's like, that sounds awesome.

We worked together on it for a few months.

He's like, We got along really well, along with the other two who I'll go into in a minute.

And he's like, yeah, we're like, let's go do this together.

But

what are the chances that somebody with 20 years of experience in maritime autonomy is sitting in Austin?

Not high.

Vib

was from Andoril.

So he was employed.

Andoril has, I don't know, who knows now, 5,000 employees.

He was employee 22 or 23.

He ran software, computer vision, sensor fusion, crosses their product lines.

So I was talking with Alex Moore, who's one of the partners at APC,

who helped start the business.

He's on our board.

And I'm like, man, and we had Rod, I'll get into Rod's background.

So it was me, Doug, and Rob.

We need a software guy, but we don't just need a, we need like the

software guy.

Like an absolute killer.

We need the best software person on the planet.

And we're just talking and I'm just going off on where I'm going to go, like, how we're going to find this person.

And he goes, Oh, I got a guy,

and I'm like, okay,

I'm like, yeah, okay.

And

he introduces me to Vib

Vib flies out to Austin.

We spend the weekend together, introduce him to the other co-founders.

Universally heads, like, this guy is brilliant,

brilliant, phenomenal software engineer,

able to make me understand the technology.

That's a very special skill set for an engineer to be able to articulate, talk to customers, build things, manage team.

This is a guy.

And we knew just like that.

Rob,

this is going to be a...

A crazy coincidence.

I met Rob on a hunting trip with some folks from ABC.

So we're hunting in South Dakota.

We're shooting pheasants in South Dakota.

One of our good friends from Austin puts on this hunting trip, invited some folks from ABC, invited me, invited Rob, who he knows for a really long time.

And so we're all together in South Dakota randomly.

And Rob and I, former Marine, he was in the Marines for five years and then finished out his career as a reservist.

So Marine, former Marine, former Navy, like we're talking or having beers, whatever.

And then six months later, he actually ran his own consulting company, which helped small businesses contract with government.

He has this phenomenal background where he worked at large prime, was a registered lobbyist.

You're going to talk about like how we understood how to lobby, how we understood how to navigate the hill, how we understood how to navigate the government ecosystem.

Rob.

Rob lived it for 25 years, right?

Here's the piece that gets left out.

And it's like these little intangible things as what makes Saronic so special.

Rob's uncle was the Secretary of the Navy for six years,

John Layman, in the 1980s under Reagan.

Now,

and John's an advisor to us now, but

that's not saying like,

hey, his uncle's why we were successful.

But here's a person that I met on a hunting trip that grew up inside the the Navy that understands how to navigate that ecosystem in only a way that somebody that grew up in it could understand.

And that's what you need to be successful.

So once we had the team in place, I was like, let's just start building.

All right.

And we had a very

very like laser focused view from the beginning on scale.

It's like, yes, we can build the best software.

Yes, we can go design really cool hardware.

But if we can't put it all together and build at scale,

like thousands of units, it doesn't matter.

I don't care how good the software is.

I don't care how cool the hardware looks.

I don't care how cool the boat looks.

If you can't build thousands, it doesn't matter.

It's all irrelevant.

So our next hire was a guy named John Morgan, who's our third employee, runs our manufacturing.

The first question

I asked him was, John, we don't even have a design for a prototype yet.

Why are we hiring a head of?

Why do we need a head of manufacturing now?

Explain it to me from your perspective.

Because he lived it.

He was at SpaceX for 10 years.

He was a direct report in the Elon Musk.

He took the...

Falcon 9 engine from prototype all the way to production, or the Raptor engine, excuse me, from prototype all the way to production

insanely talented guy I'm like

we're not building anything I don't even have a design for you to build like if we don't start thinking about manufacturing now in 18 months when you build your first prototype

you're screwed you're gonna have to start all over again you're gonna have to put the processes in place you're gonna have to redesign it for manufacturing your product isn't even going to look like what your prototype looked like like you have to start now

if

you actually want to produce that rate.

Now, if your goal isn't to produce that rate, start whenever you want.

But if your goal is to produce that rate, you have to start now.

And I go, okay, I'm sold.

Right.

So we had this core nucleus that was just A plus players.

And it just built from there and built from there.

And we just started building things.

And

we had our very first prototype in the water in under six months.

No kidding.

Yeah.

We actually had one.

That's our first official prototype.

One of the very first things our engineers did, they bought an $800 raft on Amazon.

An $800 raft.

They put $30,000 of cameras and sensors and batteries and a motor, and they turned this thing in an autonomous boat.

Like, we just need something.

We have to start programming.

The hardware is going to take six months.

We're going to start programming in the interim.

Went to Amazon.

That was built in like three weeks.

And we're building out the software platform that's going to power all of our hardware platforms.

And

we had a 5,000 square foot warehouse,

which was essentially just one rectangle.

There was one door in the front.

And we had our first visit from a congressman.

And this $800 raft is sitting on top of a

it was a dermo bin essentially it was a rectangular garbage can was our stand for this boat and it was cargo strapped on and i'm like what what am i going to tell this congressman we're actually doing here

and he came in i'm like sure this is what we're doing here's what we're building here's our first test unit We're building so fast that we can't wait for the hardware to get developed.

He goes, this is the speed that the United States needs to be building at.

he bumped it.

Do you have a picture of the raft?

I do not, actually.

I'm sure we do somewhere.

I'll send you one.

I'd love to see it.

Yeah, I'll send you.

I'll send you some photos.

So

had that, built our first prototype in six months.

But more importantly,

we sent that right out to the Navy.

We're like,

let's go start testing it.

Let's get it in customers' hands.

We started using it with the Navy.

We started using it with commercial customers.

We started testing it.

We started putting in environments and saying, okay, where does it work?

Where does it doesn't work?

What needs to be better?

And then we iterated on it and we made it better and we brought it to manufacturing.

In another six months, we did a complete design spin

from June of 23 to December of 23.

And then we're producing a rate by January of 2024.

All in the same time, we're launching our second product and then our third product to where in under two years, we brought three different

product lines to market all ready to be manufactured at scale our six foot boat our 14 foot boat and our 24 foot boat now we did that again in under two years that's remarkable right it truly is i i don't think and we went and did the research a little bit but i don't think there's been a hardware company let alone a defense hardware company that has brought products to market and has had them fielded in under two years.

Now, that may be changing a little bit, but

that is an incredible pace to operate at.

And so from there,

we're now launching three new products this year.

So we're only speeding up

because we've been able to raise a billion dollars.

We have 450 employees.

and growing by the week.

We have 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space to build these solutions in.

We have, gee, I don't even know how many different locations.

We have Austin, DC, San Diego.

We just acquired a shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana to build large autonomous ships, and we can get into that.

We're moving from autonomous boats to autonomous ships, and we're doing that now.

And we're opening a Sydney office, Australia.

and London in the UK.

So our focus on global sales.

And not just global sales.

One of the things we focus on is production.

As we partner with countries around the world,

how do we really give them the same capabilities that the United States has?

Well, if you designed a system

that can produce platforms at scale, and those platforms are designed in a way where the whole production line is just set up to be easily replicated, then you can put that production line anywhere in the world.

So your production line and your manufacturing process and your end products actually become the product.

And that's typically not how

the maritime universe works.

Like boat building and shipbuilding has been a very bespoke process for a very long time.

It's bringing the rigor and the processes back into manufacturing to let us scale.

That'll really change the game for the United States and our allies.

Genius.

How did you come up with the name Saronic?

I told you this earlier, so this is a trick question.

But my wife actually came up with it.

If I don't, I have to give her credit.

Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to go home tonight.

But

we were looking for names, and naming something new isn't easy.

So we're searching for what's the right name for this company.

And

we come across the story of the Battle of Salamis, which is the naval battle between Greeks and the Persians after the Battle of Thermopylae.

So you have the Second Greco-Persian War.

You have the famous stand of 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae.

Right after that, there was this huge naval battle.

called the Battle of Salamis, where the Greek Navy was actually surrounded by the Persian Navy.

They were outnumbered two or three to one.

Themistocles, who was the commander of the Greek Navy at the time, basically writes a letter to Xerxes, tricks him, gets him to split his fleet.

The Greeks are then able to pick off the Persians and they decimate the Persian fleet.

And that all happened in the Saronic Gulf.

So we're reading this story, and I'm like, this is such a cool story, but we can't name the company Salamis.

You just can't.

And my wife goes, name it Sauronic.

And I think, I'm like,

no, I don't like it.

And she's, for like two or three days, she just keeps coming back.

She's like, no, no, no, I really think it should be Saronic.

I was like, nah.

And then I think on day three, I was like, you know what?

I'm starting to, I'll go with it.

It's okay.

It's okay.

And I love it.

It's the absolute perfect name for the company.

It stands for everything we believe in.

You know, the Greeks protected democracy for the world, and that's what we're doing at Sauronic.

That's amazing.

I love that.

Well, Dino, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about the capabilities of all of this stuff and what you're going to grow into, and probably a lot more about China

and our shipbuilding capabilities currently without Sauronic.

Sounds good.

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All right, Dino, we're back from the break.

I want to talk about the capabilities of these autonomous boats that you're making.

But first, how did you land on autonomous vehicles?

Autonomous boats?

So it goes back to the story we were talking about earlier, just identifying the gap in the market,

the real

lack of technology, I'll call it lack of technological advancement, right?

We saw, or what we were able to see was

aerial drones, subsea drones, other things were moving forward, and

boats weren't.

And so that went back to the question of, okay, does anybody actually care?

And

goes back to, okay, yes.

Without autonomous boats,

the surface fleet of the Navy does not have what it needs to actually.

maintain naval superiority.

And so we started this company and we said,

how are we going to redefine

maritime superiority and just use autonomy to do that?

And we can talk about all the different ways we redefine it.

What are the

we'll get into that.

What are these boats capable of?

Actually,

let me rewind here a little.

25-foot vessels.

That's what you started with.

Why?

We started with a six-foot.

You started with a six-foot.

We started with a six-foot, so a half the size of a jet ski then we built a 14 foot then we built a 24 foot so our 24 foot vessel corsair thousand nautical mile range thousand pound payload capacity and the capabilities are we talked about limitless earlier really limitless we're we're just starting to scratch the surface on how we employ autonomous systems across the battlefield as a country.

Like we're just starting to scratch the surface.

So, what that means is, as software evolves, as the technology evolves, the concepts of operations can move just as quickly.

But to talk about kind of like what those platforms are capable of, I just kind of spit out some hardware specs on you, the thousand nautical mile range, thousand pound payload capacity.

From the hardware side,

they are completely modular.

So, what that means is the base platforms actually designed for defense defense and commercial applications that we discussed earlier, right?

Whether it's military or whether it's Coast Guard, port and harbor security, critical infrastructure, you may need different payloads or different sensors to meet those various uses.

So we built this base platform to be completely modular and dual use.

Why is that so important?

Why do we have to be dual use?

Well, it's actually critical

because you want a commercial off-the-shelf supply chain.

You want to be able to build resiliency and robustness in your supply chain so that you can actually build the quantity of units that the military wants.

So you design for dual use upfront.

The other reason it's important is if you design that way, you're now working with companies that can leverage unit economics in the commercial market and you can buy less expensive components that then drive the costs down for the military.

So you're building a tradable platforms and talking about defeating China.

Cost is a big component.

So from the hardware side, we're delivering range and payload capacity with a completely modular platform that can be adapted to any mission set

or any use case.

On the software side, this is where it gets really interesting.

And we should probably dive into kind of what autonomy means and all the different things, but completely autonomous vessels, right?

So,

what does that mean when Saronic says it?

Well, that means you can actually control

10 boats.

You, one individual operator, can control 10 boats, can control 50 boats, control hundreds of boats, right?

That is limitless.

The upper end is limitless because it's controlled by software and making a user interface that's very easy to work with and operate out of and say,

hey,

go and search this 100 square mile box in the ocean and take 100 boats.

Well, actually, software, you tell me how many boats I need to go send to that area.

Okay, I need 100 boats.

Great.

Enter.

The boats plan their routes.

They all work together.

They all communicate together.

If one boat in that swarm sees a target vessel, that information gets shared between all of the boats and gets passed back to a human operator that is in the loop

or on the loop, excuse me.

I even get those terms mixed up, and we'll go, we can go through what those mean.

But it creates a really, really scalable environment where you're now actually able to employ thousands of autonomous systems and control them with very few human operators, reducing the cognitive load, increasing reliability on the battlefield, and most importantly, keeping people very safe out of combat.

All that's done through software.

So one person can control up to 100 boats.

More, more.

There's really no upper limit on how many boats you'll be able to control with our software.

Now, how would they do that?

Does that mean that they

always operate in some type of a formation?

Or

can the,

what would you call them, the controller?

The controller, yeah.

Can they operate independently of themselves with one controller you can you mean like single boats you can operate one to one or you can operate one to many and

what that means though so each boat has artificial intelligence that lives at the edge and it's it's critical for each platform to be intelligent in its own right so each boat has to know where it's at in the swarm what its job in the mission is, have the sensors and perception and everything else to be able to operate independently and then once you have we call them intelligent individual actors you can then combine intelligent individual actors to do things very very smartly together right and that's when the controls become very easy because you don't have to say

hey this boat and this is what used to happen There's kind of like two ways that autonomy developed.

One is with simply way and autonomy and marines.

One is simply with waypoint navigation.

so for each boat i have to plan a route i have to say go to this waypoint go to that waypoint go to that waypoint go to that waypoint

and then the sensors are something completely different

that doesn't scale with five boats or ten boats like at some point you lose economies of scale and you just can't plan missions that way so if i'm sending a hundred boats on a mission

I can't plan as a human.

I can't plan the route for each and every boat.

I just want to say, go into this area.

If you see big Chinese ships coming at you, do this and let me know.

Right?

So you have 100 boats that each know where each other are.

They're not going to crash into each other.

They're all working.

They're all saying, okay, let's separate the environment this way.

I'm going to search over here.

You're going to search over here.

We're all looking for this.

Okay, I found it.

Okay, 10 boats surround it.

The other 90 split off.

They keep searching.

Again, we're just using 100 as a round number because it's easy, but it's how an operator controls a mission, not an asset.

Interesting.

Okay, so

because I don't know much about

naval wartime combat formations, any of that stuff, but my mind goes immediately to some type of a skirmish.

Yeah.

And so

if you have 100 six-foot boats in the water, and let's say they come across a, I don't know, a Chinese frigate, and they need to set up into some type of a formation.

Like

the only thing I can think of is I did some anti-piracy work, and the Somali pirates set up a L ambush on the ship.

Do you just, excuse me, do you tell the

do you tell the

boats to form up in an L ambush or do you actually tell each boat where to go?

Am I making sense here?

All the human operator does is say

authorize to attack.

That's it.

That's it.

So very, very simple controls.

Again, all the autonomous behaviors are all baked into the intelligence of not just each individual boat, boat, but then the system of boats and the software running that.

And

let's use that example.

There's a Chinese ship coming across the strait.

You have 100 boats that identify it, right?

The

system

or the autonomy will notify the human operator.

It'll say, okay, before any kinetic action is taken based on government regulations,

Here's what we're we have identified the target.

And there's a lot of different ways that we do that you have to be very thoughtful on how you're communicating information, especially in that type of environment.

You might be jammed, right?

You might not have full bandwidth to do that.

So you have to be able to process information at the edge and only send

the, only send like in this case, a small screen, a small picture of the target vessel.

You don't have to send like live streaming data feeds.

So, okay, yes, approve, authority, authorized strike.

Then the tactics, how they both split up, how they attack, all this is programmed in the software.

So, I mean, how does it know how to do that?

I mean, like I said, I have zero experience, you know, with

naval combat operations on the sea.

Yeah.

And so, but, you know, just going back to my time as a warfighter, you know, every scenario is different.

And every single scenario is different.

The hostage is over there or the bad guys are over here.

They're never going to maneuver in the exact same way.

And I would think that

naval skirmishes are very similar.

They'll never be similar to that.

They'll never be the same, but it's the same type of technology.

So somebody has to put those scenarios into that AI platform.

Well, we're training the models.

You train the AI models around a variety of different scenarios so that the AI actually learns how to react.

It's the same technology that's in like a Tesla self-driving car,

right?

The road is never the same any two times that that car is on the road.

A person might come out, a biker might come from here.

But the car, the model, the AI model knows how to react to a variety of situations.

And the more that it's in those situations, the more that it actually learns.

So, and that's the importance of being able to update and iterate on your software is if we're actually in a conflict with China, like the models we're running on day one won't even be the models we're running on day 25 or day 10, right?

Because you can update and train the models in real time.

So, how do you get a baseline?

I mean, do you just war game thousands and thousands of different areas of testing with thousands of hours of testing?

We invest in testing very, very heavily.

Like, we're out on the water seven days a week with thousands of hours under all of our platforms.

I mean,

we have our own testing facility in Galveston.

We're opening a testing facility in San Diego.

We invest a lot of money into testing reliability and developing our autonomy to a way that it's going to be what the Navy needs when the Navy needs it.

What is the, I mean, we're going to put a,

we're going to overlay the screen with what these six-foot boats look like, but what is the, what is the mission of of a six-foot autonomous wave runner yeah so it goes down it comes back to range and payload capacity so the six foot boat has

30 nautical mile range with a 40 pound payload capacity the 14 foot boat has a 300 nautical mile range with a 200 pound payload capacity And our 24-foot boat has a thousand nautical mile range with a thousand pound payload capacity.

that's how far it can go, and that's how much you can carry.

If you think about the mission sets at a thousand nautical miles, actually opens up and how capable our 24-foot platform is, it's actually mind-blowing, right?

The speedboats that we use in the SEAL teams

had a four or five hundred.

I forget the range actually.

But even if you're going 20 or 30 knots for eight hours,

you're going 240 miles at 30 knots for eight hours, right?

That's a quarter of the range of our plot.

You don't want to be on a boat for eight hours just to go 200.

That's a long time for a human to do anything.

And especially getting beat up by the sea.

On top of that, you can make these platforms much more rigorous to Seastate and everything else, where we were operating with SEAL teams doing doing some testing, and

the boats that they use couldn't keep up with our boats wow because there was no human that had to take the shockload coming off of a six-foot wave

so the capabilities open up dramatically and going back to earlier without getting into too specific of any concepts of a conops or anything um you're seeing a lot of the ways that these platforms can be used in ukraine and you know we built just a completely modular platform both hardware and software and that's critical critical, right?

What that means is you can put any payload you want.

Sensors, electronic warfare, kinetic capabilities.

You can basically put whatever you want on the platform as long as it fits within the range and payload characteristics of what the boat actually delivers.

That's why we built it so modular.

Again,

military and commercial, if we stay just on the military side,

it might be this op one day.

It might be that op the next day, and you got to be able to swap it out.

What kind of kinetic capabilities do these have?

That's where I'll be vague, and I'll kind of leave it to whatever the military wants to put on the platforms.

The military can put on the platform.

Again, we're selling, we're building a defense company.

Um,

doesn't mean we don't have commercial customers, doesn't mean that we're not building for the commercial market.

But what it does mean is that from a mentality perspective, we're we're building things that are going to protect this country.

And that is

one of the things I was really, really clear about up front.

And it drove a lot of the culture within our company.

You know, I told people, like, look, if you don't want to invest in a boat that might blow up one day, like, this isn't the company for you.

Because we're building things that the military wants to put on.

And the last thing I want to do is create a Google situation where Google's working on, you know,

this AI program and all their employees that boycott the company like that's not what we're building

so modular platform and literally anything can go on it we've done aerial drone like it's just endless how are they fueled so six foot boats all electric 14 foot boats hybrid diesel electric and 24 foot boats all diesel everything above 24 feet will be diesel you just don't get the energy density from batteries that you get out of diesel fuel.

Again, range, payload capacity are really important.

Turns out diesel fuel is just super energy dense.

And that's what works the best.

And that's what accomplishes the mission.

That's what gives us range.

So

diesel is really the primary fuel source.

Man, this is, I mean,

still in a,

I don't know when.

In the near future, when we go to the beach, it's not going to be a buoy that says deep out.

Do not out.

Keep out.

It'll be autonomous, unmanned

six-foot boats that are patrolling our seas.

Six feet, 14 feet, 24 feet, and on up, right?

You know, think of the 24-foot bow.

We have eight cameras on it, 360-degree view, perception built into the autonomy.

It's just the

complete awareness of the environment

now what we're building next we're building 40 foot 60 foot and 150 foot autonomous ship

so yeah our our vision is not to have any more buoys out there protecting things it's having very very smart robotic systems that can have a lot of persistence in the maritime domain and deliver complete domain awareness through advanced sensors and the most advanced software in the world

Is there any type of

how would you deploy these on the other side of the world?

Is there some type of a mothership that would bring these over?

Would they drop them out of a plane?

How would they get there?

That is

a key point

that needs to be focused on upfront.

That's why range is so important.

Where are you launching from?

Where are you deploying from?

How do you get there?

You know, our 24-foot boat was made to be really logistically simple, right?

It fits within a 40-foot shipping container.

So put it in the shipping container, ship it wherever you want, push it out of the back, off it goes.

You know.

And so you got to think about that stuff.

You got to think, how do these platforms, whether it's a 24-foot boat or now

a 150-foot ship.

How does that 150-foot ship get to the other side of the world?

Does it have the range?

Does it have the fuel?

Can you just sail it there?

Where is it sailing from?

Right?

That's its mission.

How does it get there?

Too many people

in industry like hand wave that problem.

Like, oh, I'm just going to make cool stuff.

And this is a government's problem.

They go figure it out.

or I'm gonna go make something cool and it's gonna go 50 miles

okay

well you better plan how to get that thing into theater that is on the other side of the world and because of advances in the hypersonics and other things that China has like

we can't get that close

So that's why when we look at even our six-foot boat, and I'll be the first person to type, even our six-foot boat that has a 30-nautical mile range, it's like,

what are the real use cases for that?

Right?

It might not be certain conops in the Indo-Pacific because 30 nautical miles just isn't enough.

So you can't hand wave these things.

You can't pretend like they don't exist.

And we work with the Navy.

We're actually helping the Navy figure out what is all of the maintenance and sustainment and logistics and shipping and everything else that goes into actually

fielding these types of platforms in the fleet so you can change the way that our fleet fights.

It's not, hey, I just want to buy some boats.

It's just not that easy.

I mean, I just think about the logistics.

I just saw this thing on X where China, you know, they're talking about their drone capabilities and they had something that looked like

a beefed up C-17 or something.

I saw this.

It was like a 737 and all the drones flying.

Yeah, the doors open and the drones all carries up to 100 drones, I think I read.

You know, that, that,

so I was just, it just popped in my mind on how, how logistically would we get the boats where we need them, not just on our shores.

It is something we put a lot of thought and energy into.

And as a company and as a country,

we need to figure out going back to the Cuba example, right?

We're fighting, we could be fighting something in their backyard it's not our backyard how do we get it all there

how do we make sure we have the superiority or the let's have the deterrence in the first place let's get the deterrence in place

so that we don't have to fight at all

that's the whole goal behind us building what we're building how fast we're building it and at what scale So that you can actually have the deterrence in place.

You can stop this conflict from ever happening.

If China wakes up and they're like, you know what?

We're going to win today.

That's going to be a bad day because that's the day they're actually going to pick the fight.

So, our job is to help avoid that.

What kind of stuff can these detect?

Can they detect subs?

I mean, you can detect anything that you can

put any

sensor on the platform that.

And if you talk about how anti-submarine warfare is done today it's pretty archaic right uh helicopter aircraft will typically fly off an aircraft carrier drop little buoys in the water those little buoys will listen for things and

then they'll try to identify things and then if they're found they're found

it's not super efficient so you can think about

you know and this isn't anything we're doing today but you can think about an autonomous boat with sonar attached to the bottom that's just listening for things under the water and able to relocate and move around completely autonomously.

And you can put hundreds or thousands of these sensors out there and create a listening network for submarine detection.

Like that could be really powerful.

Again, not anything we're doing today,

but it's something that as we get into, again, like I said, we're just scratching the surface on how these autonomous systems can be used and employed.

Do you think you will be the one to develop that type of technology or develop the logistics vehicle that will take them from point A to point B?

Or will you solely focus on the autonomous vehicles?

Well, the autonomous vehicles themselves can be the logistical vehicles, right?

Yeah, our 150-foot ship can carry cargo containers, right?

Two 40-foot fully-loaded cargo containers.

And 150 feet is not going to be the last ship that we build.

So we'll build larger ships that can carry more things.

And again, being completely modular, like those ships can carry containers of cargo.

They can carry containers of our boats.

They can just have our boats on the back.

You can have aerial drones on the back.

You can

really integrate anything you want into them.

And so, why

would you ship anything on a manned platform when we can't build enough of them in the first place?

We just don't have enough manned ships, and we don't have the people to man them, even if we did.

So, you have to solve this problem with autonomy.

And going back to the shipbuilding discrepancy with the Chinese that we were talking about earlier, the only way,

the only way you solve the problem is by building autonomously.

Because

the platforms we have today are so

complex, so expensive, and so exquisite.

And when you look at what the Chinese have done, they subsidized their entire shipbuilding industry and they have people to just throw at the problem and man shipyards to the max, right?

Our workforce has shrunk dramatically.

That's something we at Saronic are going to be laser focused on rebuilding, like changing the culture around shipbuilding.

But the only way you really

counter the Chinese in terms of mass, in terms of real shipbuilding capacity, is through autonomy.

And it's because

you can strip all of the complexity out of the ship, right?

We talked about aircraft.

Aircraft carriers are amazing.

They're expensive.

They take a long time to build.

but they're incredible.

They're feats of engineering.

I mean, these things are 24 feet tall or 24 stories tall, excuse me.

24 stories tall.

They're a thousand feet long.

You're landing jets on a ship.

Like, think about that, right?

They house 5,000 people.

There's eight different

aircraft squadron.

There's eight nuclear reactors on a carrier.

They have four props that are 32 tons each.

Each prop weighs 32 tons.

Wow.

So these things are massive feats of engineering.

But think about all the complexity that has to be layered into that to support all of those people and all of those different missions, even down to feeding people.

You feed 5,000 people for six months?

It's like 5 million meals.

It's insane, right?

It's insane.

Now,

take all of that out, and all you have is a ship, some engines,

sensors,

payload, and a computer.

That's it.

Yeah,

I remember our conversation on the plane.

You were talking about, you know, some of the pushback from the Navy or the government, whoever it was, about having kind of a, you know, half autonomous, have a a little bit of,

have a small amount of humans on.

And you were totally against that.

And you had mentioned, you know, if we have one human on there, we need a place for him to sleep.

We need a place for him to go to the bathroom.

We need hallways.

We need chow halls.

We need gyms.

We need all this

stuff that you, that really, I mean, it all just becomes obsolete.

Yep.

which saves you a ton of weight, I would imagine, as well.

More importantly, it it saves time.

It saves time and complexity, and it lets you get the shipbuilding process down from years to, I mean, we're talking about weeks and months.

I told my team, I'm like, we're building a 150-foot ship.

I want it in the water by the end of the year.

Wow.

Right?

We have an eight or nine month development cycle.

And that's on our first prototype.

We're trying to get this down to weeks and then have multiple production lines.

like we want to be able to build hundreds of autonomous ships every year.

Like, that's that's our vision.

And so, and how we're doing that is: so, we have a site in Franklin, Louisiana.

We acquired a shipyard, phenomenal shipyard.

We're going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three or four years into that shipyard to scale capacity there.

And we're going to be able to build,

we're targeting 50 a year

at that shipyard, which in and of itself is this massive step up.

I mean, we just talked 2023 was a net negative four.

Net negative.

And we built nine ships the whole year.

You know, we have a plan to retire 19 over the next 24 months.

So we keep going down.

And the United States, this is an interesting style.

So the United States has 296 ships in its fleet.

We're actually passed by the Chinese four years ago in terms of fleet count.

We have a stated goal.

We had a stated goal of 355 ships.

That goal was increased to 381 last year, even though we keep declining and can't execute on the 355 that we had for 10 years.

Assuming that we could execute on it,

there's a 30-year plan

that'll cost the taxpayer $1.2 trillion

or $40 billion a year to execute on a plan that we can't execute anyway.

But that's the shipbuilding plan.

That's how you get from 296 just to 381.

Imagine how many autonomous ships that you can have,

right?

And the capabilities and how much more powerful the Navy will be with.

manned and unmanned ships working together and you have much more unmanned ships patrolling the waters all being controlled by humans.

You keep people safe.

Like, that's the other thing.

And I sit in front of congressmen and women and senators, and I go through the stats that we just went through.

Like, here's why we can't compete with the Chinese.

Because the Secretary of Defense just came on the, just announced, like, I was on the news.

He said, yeah, the Chinese can take out all our aircraft carriers in 20 minutes with their hypersonic missiles.

So here's all the facts.

Like, that's the Secretary of Defense.

That's not me making up a number.

Here's the shipbuilding.

Here's why if we lose an aircraft courier, forget about the 5,000 people for a second.

You can't get another one.

So these are just facts.

But take all that and throw it out the window, right?

We now as a country have the technology, which means we have the capability to send robots into combat.

That should mean that we have the responsibility responsibility to do that no longer should we send people

if we have the opportunity to send a robot whether that's a robotic ship whether that's a robotic plane like we have a responsibility to keep people safe and

I mean you've seen it I've seen it like combat's real it's not what you see on a Hollywood movie it's not anything you want people to have to go.

I don't want my son to have to go through it, right?

That's why we're building what we're building.

And so we go through the stats all day long.

You're not getting another aircraft carrier.

We still need aircraft carriers, but let's keep those 5,000 people safe.

Let's keep them out of the weapons engagement zone.

Let's have them controlling thousands of autonomous boats and ships and everything else that are patrolling the waters and overwhelming our adversaries.

Would you guys build the weapon systems that will go on these

TBD?

Who knows?

At the pace that we're moving,

I think going to your boy, anything's possible.

Right now, we're focused on building the platforms, right?

And going back to the shipbuilding and our ambition in shipbuilding,

it's really...

Staggering to think about.

Even I pause and really digest like what I'm saying, right?

But if you think about the Chinese and the numbers you were throwing out earlier, they have 23 million gross tons of shipbuilding capacity.

The United States has 100,000 gross tons of shipbuilding capacity, just total shipbuilding.

I can build 23 million tons.

I can build 100,000.

That means I can build a whole lot of boats or ships and I can build very few.

230 times.

What Saronic is doing through our Franklin, Louisiana site and also through Port Alpha, which is our vision, and we're working on this now.

So we're going through site selection.

We're going through build plans.

We're not waiting.

We're doing it right now.

Where we're going to go invest billions of dollars to completely revitalize the shipbuilding industry in this country.

We're going to create the most advanced shipyard anywhere in the world.

And our target is 10 million gross tons of shipbuilding capacity.

So now when you take that in context, we're talking about building, just sharing, taking the United States from 100,000 to 10,100,000.

Wow.

You're talking about

taking the deficit with Chinese from 230 to 1

to like

2.25 to 1

But because you're building autonomous platforms and they're still building manned platforms, you can actually build at a much higher rate.

That's what we need in this country.

That's how we, we don't want to match the Chinese.

We want to win.

We want to beat them.

We want to create that deterrence so that they're like, yeah,

we're not going to pick that fight today.

That's the capability we need in this country.

And we're looking at bringing the shipbuilding industry back in a way that we haven't seen in this country since World War II.

Right.

And this is, this is SpaceX.

This is SpaceX.

Space was, the space industry was dead.

Yeah, you had primes, you had primes in the market.

Boeing had a space program.

SpaceX and Boeing in 2016 each got contracts

to

send astronauts to the International Space Station.

So SpaceX got a $2.4 billion contract.

Boeing got a $4.2 billion contract.

In 2020, SpaceX sent the first astronaut to the International Space Station.

And they've done 45 missions since 2020 just to the International Space Station.

Boeing is

delayed, over budget, and keep failing.

So the large primes aren't getting it done.

And we've seen this now play out in the space industry.

And you're going to see the same thing play out in the shipbuilding industry.

Where, again, I know it sounds crazy that a two and a half year old company is the company that's going to invest billions of dollars and recreate the shipbuilding industry and build this shipyard from the ground up and build thousands of autonomous boats and hundreds of autonomous ships.

And this is going to be the future of the Navy.

Sounds crazy because it is crazy,

but it doesn't mean it's not true.

I mean, I love it.

I think that the, what was it, the big five, survive, you know, they've monopolized the entire defensive

industry.

And so, you know, a guy like you pops up on the map or Palmer Lucky pops up on the map.

I mean,

what kind of, I mean, we talked about the lobbying firm earlier.

You know, do you, do you think or do you know, are they lobbying against you?

I mean, that's going to put a major dent in their pockets, I would imagine.

I'm sure they are.

I'm sure they are.

But I don't think it's malicious.

I think in some cases,

some primes genuinely believe that they can go and do this.

And in our case, I think there's some primes that genuinely believe they can go and build autonomous ships at the speed and scale that the Navy needs, and that there's no way that Serana can do do it.

And that's okay.

There should be other people in the market doing things.

The government shouldn't shut down.

The Navy shouldn't stop and say, hey, Dino tells a great story.

We're good.

They're going to reinvent shipbuilding and everybody all stop.

Sauronic's got it.

No.

Proud's going to be in the pudding.

Who's going to actually go and do it?

Who's going to put their money where their mouth is?

And who's going to execute?

I'll tell you, we are.

So, the only thing we ever asked for is, yeah, let the primes lobby.

They should be telling their story.

They should be trying to build things.

Keeps us hungry.

Keeps us paranoid.

Creates the competitiveness.

But

don't create

a monopolistic environment where things are awarded without competition.

Just let us compete fairly.

And if a prime beats us and you want to go buy that ship,

you should do that.

That's

what is best for the country.

The best thing for the country is having an open competition, seeing who can actually do it, who can stand behind what they were going to say.

And I'll tell you,

over the last three years, every single thing we have...

told a customer,

we have stood behind.

And we have delivered every time

on time, on budget, with zero exceptions.

And that is something I take very seriously and we will never,

never waver on.

And it's the Navy's not used to that.

I mean, just look at the shipbuilding programs today.

I mean, they're all,

I think they're, I think they're literally all delayed.

Wow.

Back to the kinetic capabilities of these boats.

It doesn't sound like right now that you are manufacturing and designing new weapon systems that will go on these boats,

which means you must know what ship capabilities have or what kind of kinetic

tech goes on the ships or weapon systems or...

or whatnot.

So

you would have to know, because

I would think that you're designing the ships around our current capabilities so that those can be placed on your boats.

Am I correct?

Yes and no.

Yes and no.

It goes back to the modularity of it, right?

As long as you have,

in your example, like weapon systems, what weapon systems can you put on the boat, we basically say, look, it's 24 feet long.

Here's here's the length of our payload bay, here's the width of our payload bay, and it can carry a thousand pounds.

What fits inside of that?

Again, because it's not just weapon systems, it's built for defense and commercial applications.

And then, of course, we talk to the various customers and the weapon system.

We talk to the military, and we say,

Give us the universe of things that you would want to put on it, just like any product, right?

You go and do the customer discovery.

How do you think you could potentially want to use this?

And then you build the most modular platform that you can,

both hardware and software.

So not only do you have to integrate from a hardware perspective, which we've made very easy, but you have to tie whatever that payload is.

in to the software and autonomy so that it can then be controlled the same way that the boats are controlled.

So unless you can integrate all of that together very quickly,

what's the point?

So that's why we made the platforms module.

That's why we focused on software first.

That's why we focused on a very universally designed harbor platform.

It's like, look, I don't actually know

all the weapon systems that the military may want to put on this one day.

So would you, would I think the military, I don't think the military knows for that matter.

Probably not.

Right?

Because again, just starting to use autonomous systems on the battlefield.

We're just scratching the surface of it.

Would Saranic be the one that does the modifications to the ships to place?

I mean, you have, basically, you have a

lack of a better term, you have a cookie-cutter product

that can be manufactured in record time,

lots of them within a year.

You get that, you sell, let's just say, 50, 50 ships

to to the U.S.

Navy.

And then do they do the modifications to the boats to put their weapon systems on, or do they say, hey, this is what we want to put on this thing.

We need you to modify the boat however you need to to be able to carry this.

I mean, if it's a missile silo, if it's a

crazy radar system, if it, you know what I mean,

that kind of stuff.

So

we try to keep the engineering work out of the government's hands.

Not saying they're bad engineers, but they're just not an organization that's set up to scale, right?

That doesn't mean we're only going to be the ones doing the integration work, right?

There could be a variety of ways that

side of the business works, right?

We talked about the large primes a lot, but they do make good systems.

They do make weapon systems and things that the military wants to put on our boats.

So maybe we partner with the large primes and they send their people here to help with the integration, right?

They send their people to Saronic.

Or we're working with the government and the government's like, hey, we want this on the boat.

Great.

The government may send some people to Sauronic.

And you know, we're not really tied into this is how it has to happen and it only has to be us.

But when you want it at speed and scale, having the engineers with that mindset

running the efforts because here's the thing

you could build a thousand boats but if your integrations aren't set up the same it takes you you know

you're building a boat every eight hours but it takes you six months to do an integration who really cares because at the end of the day the capability that's rolling off the line is six months That's the longest power in your chain.

And that has to be at the same rate of our boat manufacturing.

And so that's what we have to work with all of our partners on to make sure that we're doing these integrations in the quote-unquote the surrounding way.

When it comes to the AI,

the brain of the vessel, is that inside the vessel or does it live outside of it?

Both.

So there's a brain, like the brain of the vessel lives in the boat.

Okay.

So it's critical.

It is absolutely critical.

And I'm going to hammer this point.

The intelligence of the platform and the mission capability has to live at the edge.

And let me explain why.

So I'll back up a little bit and I'll talk a little bit about the different types of autonomy and kind of where we're at.

I mentioned these terms earlier.

Men on the loop or men in the loop, men on the loop, and men out of the loop.

What are they?

And what are we building at Saronic?

Men in the loop, think of a remote control.

So

this is your predator drone.

It's actually many to one.

So it's the opposite of what we're building because you have one person on a joystick and you have three or four people behind that person reading all the sensor data coming off of the aircraft, saying, hey, I'm seeing this over here, turn left.

I'm seeing that over there, turn right.

It actually takes about four or five people to pilot one predator drone because a human's controlling everything.

It's just, they're just not in the cockpit.

They're in a

connex box in Las Vegas.

So that's men in the loop.

Then there's men on the loop, which then flips that.

And you go from many to one to one to many.

And that's, that's what we're building at Saronic.

It's how do you have a ton of systems out in the field

that are all collecting information?

The information is processed at the edge, then passed up into a universal kind of mission planner control system,

and then

shown to a human in a very condensed fashion that reduces the cognitive load on the human, not trying to interpret or digest all the information coming off of thousands of sensors across hundreds of boats, right?

So, one person, not really in the loop, but on the loop saying, oh, check, thread over there.

Authorized to proceed.

Check.

Human has control of the platform.

And in all of these things, I'm going to be clear.

Humans always have control.

Humans are making decisions where they go.

It's just how far along the, where in the kill chain are you putting approval processes?

Then there's men out of the loop, which means like the autonomous system is just alone and unafraid and doing whatever it wants.

And we actually have these types of systems, like our Aegis weapon systems on our destroyers that are for incoming air defense.

Those are out of the loop.

You set it on the ship,

and I'm simplifying this, obviously, but you put it on the ship, you press a button, you enable it, and then if aerial threats come in, they're going to shoot them down,

right?

And you can imagine if an aerial threat, if a missile was coming in,

say there's like five missiles,

you don't want a person to be like,

oh, yep.

That's a missile.

Shoot it down.

Oh, yep, that's another one.

Oh, shit, here comes 10 more.

Yeah, right.

You just want a computer to say, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And all the missiles get shot down.

So there's men in the loop, on the loop, and out of the loop.

The reason why the AI living on the edge is so critical

is because in any type of real conflict, and you're seeing this in Ukraine, is there's going to be massive amounts of electronic warfare and there's going to be communications jamming.

So not only does that remote control system not scale, because you can't control hundreds or thousands of votes all together with people sitting next to each other trying to figure out what each other are doing.

You just can't do it.

Not only does it not scale, in a scenario where there's real jamming or electronic warfare, those radio links that are from the joystick to the platform go dead.

And now that's rendered useless.

So you need autonomous systems with intelligence living at the edge that don't require constant connectivity back to a satellite or human or whatever,

able to know what to do.

What's the mission?

How do I process information?

What information do I have to get sent back to the headquarters before I do the next step?

What happens if I don't hear from headquarters?

Okay, great.

Oh, I only have five kilobytes of bandwidth.

Let me process this information down.

Let me shrink it.

Let me send only the most important information necessary for the mission back.

So all of those things are hypercritical.

All that has to be defined through software.

And that's why, that's fundamentally why man in the loop just does not work.

Now, the difference between men on the loop and men out of the loop is really just

approvals.

It's really just a government regulation and policy that needs to get set.

And the argument that I hear from folks is, okay, do we really want robots making decisions on who to kill?

No.

No.

But don't think of it like that because it's not the right way to think about it.

If you're in a combat scenario, the robot isn't deciding who's,

do I get employed here?

Do I, like,

Do I put a weapon system in this area?

No.

Like, the human saying, I'm going to put a weapon system there.

It's just, am I putting a smart weapon system or a dumb weapon system?

What type of weapon system?

Am I firing a torpedo that I can't call back?

Or am I using an autonomous boat with

other autonomous systems that I can call back because I can still control it through software?

So all of these things come into play when you're saying, okay, like, how should we really think about autonomy?

And even man out of the loop autonomy, like you're still saying, okay, this boat's going to go in the water.

It's going to patrol this area.

And if

this type of threat

comes in,

then you have authority to execute.

And you're just giving the approvals all the way through the end of the kill chain.

Okay.

So that's that's all man of the loop, man out of the loop is.

It's like you're basically just approving the entire kill chain at the beginning of the mission.

Is that really?

I actually

look, I understand

the need to have the approval process baked in.

But when you get into comm, I mean, you've watched ISR feeds.

You've seen how crappy they are.

You've seen what kind of like smoke's in the...

Do I want like the most advanced computer vision in the world that's living on the edge saying, yes, that's the right target?

Or do I want a human that's watching a

the worst bandwidth video feed that you can ever imagine

with smoke and everything else around it, trying to say, Yeah, I think it's the target.

I mean, it's something we're gonna have to get comfortable with over time, but again, it's not,

oh, we're just employing robots, and robots are making the decisions on warfare, right?

Those are the types of autonomy, and that's how they're employed on the battlefield.

How simple would it be for China to hack an entire fleet?

You really can't.

We're focused on cybersecurity.

We use military-grade encryption.

When you're operating in the military domain, you have to operate with the cybersecurity protocols of the United States government.

So those are standard.

Those are just, you have to have them.

Otherwise, you're not being utilized in the field.

Right.

So that is something we take very, very seriously.

We even take the cybersecurity of our company very seriously.

Because

let's be clear like

China as a nation state

they've been hacking into companies to steal secrets for years like that's not a that's a well-known fact that's

so we have to think about not just how do we protect our solution or our products in the water and we talk about how we're doing that government standards and encryption and everything else

But how do we how do we protect the company?

Because

the Chinese aren't, aren't, I mean, I hate to use this term, but they're not fighting fairly, and there's no such thing as a fair fight.

You know that.

So they're trying to take every advantage that they can.

And if that means they can hack into our company and delay our production by

six months, then they might do that.

Right?

So we have to make sure that we're protected 360 degrees, product, company, infrastructure, people.

I mean, myself myself and the entire leadership team were,

what's the word I'm looking for?

We're basically banned from China.

I

forget I'm blanking on the word.

But they put out a term like our company and our leadership team is basically banned from China.

Congratulations.

I know.

I was like, what the hell?

What the hell took him so long?

But if I took a trip to Beijing right now, it would probably be a one-way trip with a lot of questions.

Do you have any aspirations to repurpose the fleet that we do have, our current naval fleet, into making those autonomous surface warfare boats as well?

So basically what I'm saying is pulling off the entire staff and putting in the hardware and software that you guys have developed to operate these ships without human manning?

No.

No.

No.

It would, for a few reasons, for a few reasons.

One, and then I'll talk about two.

One is,

it'd be way cheaper to just build their ships.

It'd actually be way cheaper than to go in and try to retrofit the entire naval fleet.

I can't even ballpark the amount of work.

and cost that that would entail.

Not to mention

the complexity behind actually integrating with hardware that wasn't selected

purposefully to be controlled by software.

So, one of the things that we do is very like we do hardware software co-design where our software engineers are picking all of like the engines with our hardware engineers.

Like, yeah, okay, I can

control that engine through software because it has an API and it has this and it has that.

Okay, cool.

Yes, you, you, hardware engineer, can now select that.

That's not, that hasn't been done on naval ships to date.

Secondly, and more importantly,

I am

a very, like, we need manned ships.

We still

need the Navy ships that we have.

Why do we need manned ships?

Well,

China's not the only adversary we're facing, and it's not

the only way to project power.

Like the only way to project power is not just through autonomy.

Think about aircraft carriers, for example.

You go back to, well, let's go ahead,

December 7th, 1941,

Pearl Harbor.

Before December 7th, the center of naval warfare revolved around the battleship.

December 7th,

carrier-based aviation really became the center of naval warfare.

And you think about what carrier-based aviation provides the country, its ability to put 5,000 people,

eight different squadrons of aircraft anywhere in the world where we don't have a base and project power.

That's important.

But we could do that with drones.

Could do that with drones.

We

don't have, right now we need people.

Like it is men and unmanned teaming.

And I don't think over the next, call it

30 to 40, I don't think we're going to see a world where it's like truly like robots on robots.

Like people still make decisions.

Right.

And there's a really important aspect.

Like, look, we're building autonomous aircraft, but we're also building next generation fighters.

Right.

And we need both of those things as a country.

It's not an or conversation.

It really is an end conversation.

We need this and this.

Where it becomes an or conversation is really like, okay,

do I really need that 12th aircraft carrier that costs $13 billion?

Or do I only need five aircraft carriers?

And I can save

$50 billion on new construction.

And I can build save $50 billion a year on maintenance.

And I'm making up numbers, obviously.

But, and I can now put that money towards autonomous systems.

So what's the right mix to have the most powerful fleet and the most powerful military in the world?

I don't think it's saying zero people.

But I don't think it's

we need 381 manned ships either.

So it's some mix in between.

how many people would it take to let's let's fast forward five years how many how many boats do you think you'll have in the water that are operational

from a production rate i mean we have the capacity to build hundreds like literally hundreds of boats right now in our facility in austin we only have 65 000 square feet or no sorry Our main manufacturing facility is 65,000 square feet.

We have over 150,000 square feet in total online, but we're opening a facility that's 420,000 square feet.

The main manufacturing facility would be close to 120,000 square feet.

So we're 3xing the space that we have available.

And we're going from hundreds to thousands of boats per year.

So that's just...

Thousands of boats per year.

Thousands.

And that'll be online by the end of the year.

That is coming online very, very quickly.

So we have that capability in Austin.

That's for, call it small unmanned surface vessels.

That's just one facility.

It's just one facility.

It's just one facility.

That's for our smaller vessels.

So throw out a number, five years.

How many boats do you think?

Just any, just an estimate.

That are operational that we could build.

Operational.

Navy implements this.

Thousands.

Thousands.

Let's say 2,000.

I'll throw out a number.

Yeah,

2,000.

That's fair.

I mean,

How many humans does it take to operate a fleet of 2,000 of your autonomous boats?

As many as it takes to put them in and out of the water.

That's it.

That's it.

That's the logistic piece of it.

How do you launch and recover?

One person.

Five years from now will be able to control every single boat in the water.

Now,

if they're on the same mission, right?

If you say, these 2,000 boats are all doing the same thing, all patrolling the same area, we're on the same mission.

Now, if you have 200 boats in Taiwan Strait and you have 200 boats in the Red Sea and you just,

you can have different operators for different mission sets in different areas, obviously.

But the software is limitless.

And it's only...

like the software is increasing at a pace

that I think it's hard to comprehend.

And I'm not just talking about, I'm talking about software and technology in general.

Chat GBT over the last, I don't even know the time frame, like year or two, improved like 4,000%.

I don't think I've ever seen anything in my life improve 4,000%.

So that's how fast technologies is evolving right now.

And we're putting all of that tech into our boats.

So the capabilities of the software,

quite literally, are limitless.

So where I'm kind of going with this is what does the future of the Navy look like in terms of manpower?

Oh,

I think it's got to be much lower.

That's our goal.

That should be the Navy's goal.

All the services have recruiting issues right now.

Nobody's fully manned,

right?

And if we're competing against a country with 1.2 billion people that are able to mandate military service,

how do you compete with that unless you're adopting autonomous platforms, right?

And when you talk about cost drivers and how do you make more, how are you more efficient for the taxpayer?

And then again, keeping people safe, you know, I don't know the right mix of how many people do we need total in the Navy as we adopt these.

Nobody knows.

The Navy doesn't know because we don't have them yet.

And so that's okay, right?

How do you figure out all the con ops?

How do you figure out what you need 10 years from now?

You just start doing it.

And it all kind of, you figure it out as you go.

Hey, we'll sit around and we'll figure this out on a whiteboard and we'll build PowerPoint slides for four years.

That needs to stop.

So what the ratio or what overall Navy manning looks like 10 years from now, I don't know.

But the number of humans that will be put at potentially at risk will be exponentially lower.

I'm 100% with you.

I mean, if

when I first started hearing about,

I mean, I guess drones, you know, was the kind of the first thing that crossed my mind is there goes, there goes the human connection from a guy on the ground to the aerial platform that's covering your ass.

You know,

once I got over that, and I,

I mean, it's just less people going to war that have to, I mean, you, you had mentioned it earlier,

less people that have to live with the traumatic experiences that

war gives you.

And so

I'm 100% on board with you.

I think it's amazing what you're doing.

It's just, I can also see the aspect of how it will be hard for

especially

flag officers and

congressmen to go this is going to shrink the navy it's going to shrink it quite a bit well it go it goes back to my point earlier like i don't i'm not i'm like firmly not in the camp of

we leave we need less

manned navy ships right now

I don't think that's the right answer right now, right?

Maybe 10, 20 years from now as everything evolves.

Look, we still have the most powerful navy in the world.

If we went to war with China tomorrow, would we win?

Yeah, 100%.

Well, I don't know about 100%, but I believe, like Dino's belief, 100%,

right?

Because we're the United States.

Now, maybe that's a naive view.

Maybe that's a...

disputed view, but I believe we have the most powerful military in the world still today.

I don't think the Chinese ships have the capabilities that we have.

I don't think their sailors have the resolve that we have.

Right?

But the trend lines are going in the wrong direction, completely wrong direction.

To where I don't know how much longer that's true for.

Right.

And so what we need to do is not replace and shrink the Navy that we have.

It's augment and force multiply the Navy that we have.

It's make our Navy 10 times more powerful, 100 times more powerful through autonomy so that we can

crush any hope the Chinese have of starting a conflict with us.

That's the goal, right?

I think it's a long time out.

And I take your point, and flag officer, like, are they protecting their jobs and their domains?

And is Congress really going to be like, let's go shrink the Navy?

I don't even know if that's the answer.

Right now, we're just focused on how do we make the Navy more powerful?

How do we augment the ships that we have in the fleet?

Because we can't get more of them because we can't build them.

And how do we keep the people safe?

And how do we do that through autonomy?

And look, we talked about the trade-offs earlier.

What's the right ratio?

Is it

okay?

I don't need the next aircraft.

You're talking about the ability to Pen X the capability of the entire fleet

for the cost of a few ships, like

single-digit ships that we can't really build anyway.

So

the ability to do that at a much faster pace, at a much more economical price point, it's just, there's no, and so the, the universal view that I'm hearing both within the Navy and Congress is, and I am completely aligned with, is like, there's just no other way.

There's no other way.

We need this.

Right?

And now it's our job, Saranic,

like,

go get it done.

We have to keep putting our money where our mouth is.

We have to keep proving it out every single day because the country needs it.

The world needs it.

I love it.

I love it.

You know, I told you at breakfast, we're building a new studio, and I'm actually putting a moat around the entire studio.

So, you know, I expect to get a six-foot wave runner autonomous vehicle to patrol.

I'll have to have you sign it, though.

Yeah, well, we'll

have it there.

For sure.

I told you that not just the commercial use cases, one of our key ones can be protecting your new studio.

Oh, I'm only semi-bullshit.

But,

well, Dino, this has been a fascinating conversation, and uh, man, it was just an honor to have you here, and and I'm just so happy for you and what you're doing for the country and all the success that you're experiencing.

And I just love it, man.

So, thank you, thank you for the time.

And thank you for having me again.

It's an honor to be here, and it's so exciting to see all the things that you're doing as well.

So, keep crushing it, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

You too, thank you, awesome, man.

Thank you.

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