title: #24 - Zane Mountcastle, Co-Founder & CEO of Picogrid
author: Relentless
contenttype: podcast
publication: Relentless
sourceurl: https://anchor.fm/s/e402cdc8/podcast/play/104095180/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-13%2F402118384-44100-2-d815442cdf3f4.mp3
word_count: 10951
Before Russian Ukraine joined us, we were using a tiny, tiny, tiny scale. They didn't just ramp up production. They invented an entirely new way of operating conflict. We realized, well, look, that could happen to us. When we look at our arsenal, we realize we wouldn't be ready for something about today. Let's start off with, you know, you're just moving into this new place, telling me about the past year or so. What's been happening? Yeah, a lot's been happening. We just moved into a new 25,000 square foot facility here in El Stegando. About two miles from our previous spot. Team has grown pretty dramatically. Just about 30 folks now. And it continued to ramp up the business. Yeah, what's the latest on as far as, like, how many, you know, like, heliosis and landers and stuff? A lot of folks in the past year, so I've been on supporting a lot of the more sensitive missions that US military works on, which limits a lot of what I, we've been able to say publicly on on this, but, you know, I think what that means is we get to support some of the most important missions the US military is working on today. So those cutting edge stuff they're doing, you know, we're fortunate enough to be able to support them on that. And so it's less. So, you know, looking at numbers of things and more so looking at the impact of the things we're at, like, yeah, what do you, like, super excited about right now? There's a lot of things, right? Like, on a lot of different fronts, and that's one thing that's happened in the past years, like business has expanded in many different directions. One of the things that I'm really excited about more recently is we're just starting to do a little bit of work with the intelligibility. So breaking out of just DOD, it's supporting some of their missions. That could see the more sensitive. So unless I can say on that front, but I think the point is, right, the problems that we solve with helping connect systems of all types, right, sensors, drones, robots, cameras, human satellites, it's becoming more and more and more important over time. As it becomes the way the military, the future of the way the military is operating. I think, you know, we sort of saw that coming even a couple of years ago. And I think it's becoming even more and more professional as time goes on. Yeah, how are things like changing out of the, we were talking earlier. And I think like over the past 12 months, or maybe in like 16 months, it's gotten a lot easier. I believe for smaller players to come in. Like I think when you did your interview with Jason Carmen, you said effectively, you just took the most painful route of, you know, you're basically not being like a subsidiary of one of the bigger, bigger guys. Like, why did you take that path? How is that going for you? I mean, I wouldn't say it's easy, but by any measure, we certainly took the two glass approach. I think it was a right approach. You know, I think a lot of this kind of backspacks to, or traces back to where, you know, the company started the first place where I was doing some work with the Army Corps in the Navy. It was right at the college. And, you know, working at some very early stage autonomous systems to act in, and you know, the tech worked and the question was, okay, now how do we scale this? And the answer I got to the multiple times was go work with the Rathie on Small Business Program, the Lockheed Small Business Program, right? And who is giving you that advice? A lot of folks in the government said, right? Because the idea of taking small company seriously was very foreign. It's not just that it's small business that's happening existed before, right? The defensive industrial base has a very long and excellent history of small business supporting all types of defense, but they've always played a very small part in terms of the missions that actually matter, right? You know, they'll be making the screw, but Lockheed is making that aircraft, right? It was part of it just like the built-up trust over many years of operation and stuff with those bigger players. I think the same, nobody gets fired for hiring IBM, but very much tracks in defense, right? If you're a contracting officer, you can give the contract to one of the primes, and like, you know, they're probably not going to do the best work, but they're going to do something, they're going to get the job done, right? They're not incompetent, right? They actually do a very good job with a lot of stuff they do. They're just large blood organizations, and so they operate like IBM operatives, right? They're more expensive, they're slower, they're less cutting edge, they'll get it done, though, right? And so I think what we've seen the past, I mean, up until very recently, the past couple of decades is there was a shift away from supporting the newer players in this base and moving towards, you know, the trustee old guys. That's shifted a lot, really. And I think even more so since we last tried it a year and a half ago or so, where the DOD has now in real ways started to take new companies seriously. What do you think catalyzed that shift? I think there's a few things that primarily it was the fact that the large primes that they're shifting away from, they just under-delivered for so long that it started to become something you couldn't ignore. Right? You mentioned that like a lot of the technology that like the military uses and stuff is the same stuff that they use like 10 or 15 years ago, which is crazy. Still the case. Still the case. I think people, you know, they see the big fancy flashy programs and like that, that there's some really amazing technology that's out there, including from large blocks, right? But I think you look at sort of the under-development of how the day-to-day personal military operates, the systems they use, the computers they use, the software they use, it's still just astonishingly out-of-date. And, you know, to the previous part where the government's now taking small companies seriously, they're these are the companies that are willing and able to actually address these problems in real ways. And I think it's happening. You're seeing just an explosion of types of companies that are serving the DOD of all types, right? Software companies, hardware companies, combinations, across every layer of the stack. I think it's a very healthy development of the defense and industrialization, how it needs to be to be healthy. And I think a lot of that's been pushed along by, you know, both from the technology side of, I think, that this sort of tech world has realized that there's actually one big market, but two are really important markets, right? There's a lot of money to be made. I think a lot of talent is kind of getting fed up with working on, you know, a large B2B SaaS obligation. And instead, you know, kind of want to put their talents to better use. The capital community, you know, followed that. We're now there's billions of dollars being put into defense tech, where even a couple of years ago, right, you could, it was a tiny, tiny fraction, but... Well, what were those early conversations of you trying to raise money for like a defense contractor that you're going to take the painful path? And it was, it was really tough. Like raising money when we first started was incredibly hard. How many conversations do you think you had before the first person was like, yeah, I'll back you. I really don't even know at this point, a lot. I mean, it was kind of the pushback. It was like, you know, look, defense, we just don't do defense. Like a lot of the firms were like, yeah, it seems like a good idea, but it's like in our LP agreements, we cannot fund defense tech. It was something they agreed on with our LPs, right? They have to go back and change. And a lot of them have since done that. They've since gone back and changed that because they realized that that clause cost them a lot of money because that kept them from actually investing in defense. And defense has, has exploding out last couple of years. I think a lot of it was sort of this, you know, history is over mentality that you've seen in San Francisco. There's still a lot of that around, right? It's definitely not gone. A lot of that's kind of tapered down and quite a down since the war on Ukraine, but there's still a lot of that, right? Has that seriously shifted like the ability for new companies to get funded as well as I don't know, the like military to a top new technologies? It's a bit of a both. Yeah, I think it's, you know, that sort of quieting down of the worries over has made a lot of a lot of the sort of capital community that was otherwise resistant to funding defense because if you look back over the sort of the lifetimes of most GPs at VC firms, it was the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? It was these long drawn out wars that really didn't go anywhere. It didn't end, right? It was just lives and money and it's just to ask ourselves, like, what were we there for? And so, you know, I think it's not entirely without reason, right, that there was this kind of mentality of like, you just don't want to be part of that, right? Like there's, there was not an inspiring thing to do. There was, you know, the internet kind of world was so separate and like there was so much opportunity there. And I think we realized was, you know, sure, those were those were really drawn out awful conflicts. But conflicts still happen, right? Including conflicts that we don't want to happen, but we'll have been anyways, right? When Russia invaded Ukraine, what do you expect Ukraine to do? Right? Like roll over and let it happen or fight back. You know, I really hope that if the US was in a similar position, we would do exactly the same as what you created, right? Which is fight back across every layer of society, right? You know, people are making drones and they're garlanders and shipping them from lines. Like, that's still happening. And you do know people that did that? Not personally. Not personally. It's it's it's how Ukraine has actually been managed the production right there. It's because it's a lot of it's done by like just people, regular people, assembling drones and and their homes. Is it one of those things like if there is actually a conflict and all the regulations and stuff, just get peeled back to just let people rip and like just build the thing that we need? I mean, and I get that skill. It's like, you know, fuck the regulations. Like come after that, right? Like, you know, I'm what are you going to do, right? And so, you know, I think in that kind of case, you have a little bit more freedom. But I think you, you know, Ukraine has a ton of credit. You're going to be able to deserve a ton of credit, right? It's they didn't just ramp up production. They invented entirely new way of operating conflict. Right before, or actually, Ukraine, drones are using a tiny, tiny, tiny scale. Yeah. Almost never for for sure direct strike purposes, except for like the switchblade and and larger sort of animations like that. But in terms of treating it like a day to day munition, that was sort of unheard of. And you've essentially invented that, right? At the same small thousand dollar drones and stuff are taken out tanks. Exactly. And it just completely changes the way that that that a conflict can operate. And that was like that was like, that was big development. That big problem then trickled over to to the US where on one sense we realized, well, look, like that could happen to us, right? It might not be Russia, but it could still happen, right? And we look at our arsenal, realize we wouldn't be ready for something like that today, right? And that's not that that's just such a sort of well-accepted sort of belief in depending on today. It's changes. It's just like we're not prepared. Yeah, it's just sort of the problem with realization. Like we're not prepared for what a future conflict would look like. And it wouldn't look like you create. If they'd be a war anti-law, they'd be a war Pacific, like it wouldn't look like you create directly. But it would be look a lot more like that than it looked like Iraq or Afghanistan. And we're not ready for that. Is the new wars are going to be completely different than the last one? They will. Right. They'll be different than the wars. That's always the case. Through our history, it's not a new thing, but you always fight the last war until you realize that it's not worth it. I know it's the same insurance thing where people ensure the last disaster. Home insurance goes up crazy right after a forest fire. That kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. It's just a reactionary sort of approach. It's hard to imagine where things are going, but you'll have to go through it in history. There's this pattern that repeats itself. And I think we're in a spot right now where we realize that because there's a conflict happening elsewhere that we would not be ready for, we have to look at our own arsenal and realize that we would be ready for the same conflict, much less a conflict. And see even more sophisticated, you know, adversary. And that's really sparked a lot of the impetus on the government side to realize that we need to fund these new technologies. We need to buy them at scale. We need to deploy them. We need to train with them. We need to build them into our tactics. We need to develop new strategies. And that's really in the past, I wouldn't even say like 12, 18 months. That's, I've seen it just a real shift in how. Has that shifted your strategy as well? Yeah. How has that changed for the last 12 months? So I think one thing to understand about something to the government is you're in a very, sort of, I guess I'll describe this, like there's just sort of culture. They're something to indifferent services have different cultures. Different branches in the community have very different ways of operating. For a while, the the Air Force was sort of seen as the cutting edge. They were the ones that were buying the best of technology, trying things on scale. Even if it's not stated directly Air Force really did, but they were the ones who kind of pushed the audit loop, right? Why do you think that is? It's just a culture thing. They've always been a little bit more forward looking, a little bit more, they get adventurous, almost. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to kind of pin down exactly why I'm sure there's some kind of historic reason as to why, but it's a culture thing, right? Culture matters. What I've seen happen more recently, and then of course still calm as well, it's like always very cutting edge, always very like well, and it's trying things like much more sort of cowboy mentality. For a long time, Army was like a lot less receptive. Right? They're like, okay, show me how you're going to make my gun that much more fishing or jam that much less, or make my tank fuel that much, but that was kind of the extent of the innovation on the army side. That's drifted a lot in the past year. We've seen just an absolute ton of inbound and an interest from our units across the spectrum that realize that they need to modernize how they operate, and it's not just what you're on. That's kind of a big, big bleeding interesting, and I think there's been a lot of attention to that, but it's everything under the hood as well. How do you both do electronic warfare defensively and offensively? How do you detect and track electronics and devices of all types? How do you integrate that into weapons systems? How do you build new tactics around that? How do you change how the army operates? I think the army is going to be the ones that are adopting in the long term a lot of the new technologies being built out today. It's a river which is a forefront of pushing that forward. How do you think about figuring out which products to focus on versus others? There's always more at which we could do. With more time, with more people, with more capital, there's always lots more to do. I think the way we always operate are just being very, very close to the end user. I think oftentimes a lot of people in the tech world, when they come to the D&D space, they take a very sort of, they have a lot of heat risk. We're like, this should be better. Sure, maybe it needs to be better, but why? What is the actual reasoning? It is how it is. What are the actual constraints we're operating under? And how do we factor those into the better solution? If you're going to build in an action deploy, a real solution at scale, you have to understand the entire context and what it's going to be deployed, or it's just not going to be successful at scale. How do we go about building those next things? Really just being listening to what the end users are asking for? What does that mean to listen to an end user in your case? Go talk to them. Go out to an army base and talk to the guys in the ground who are struggling with whatever sort of their problem set is. I think we've seen recently both drone swarming and counter-swarming is a big sort of air event risk. Electronic warfare is going to be air event risk and a lot of people on the government side is like, they don't have any way to handle that. They understand an abstract. They understand these are things that need to happen, but what does it actually mean? Day to day, what does it actually mean to do electronic warfare at scale? Not talking about these massive semi-truck-looking things, like that's how it was done before, but now we're talking like backpack scale. What does that mean? How does the individual operate at that scale to do that kind of thing? It's just new things they need to train with. And so listen to that. Understand where the problems are. Sometimes that's a big new technology. A lot of times it's just making things easier to use. It's simple things. Making the software a little more clear, making the hardware interface simpler. The small things, but they add up. I think it's true as it has in other industries. Just listen to what the customer is asking for. They'll tell you what they want. It's up to you to actually listen to that. I know. For that first few interactions or whatever. What is the first contract? How do you get that first contract with the government? How did you do it? I was fortunate where our first contract for Pico Grid was, we wanted because we were very close to a couple of units that I was working with right into college from building the digital and systems programs. That was a very first contract. It was very small. We definitely did not make any money on it, but it was- That was that first lander. The first or a couple of landers or prototypes that were before lander. We deployed out on an Air Force Base. That was going to work. That allowed us to prove out the tech to demonstrate in a real operational environment, to fix the bugs I did come up and just really learned. Then that kind of spot- The government's still a very small space. People move around a lot. There's some bad sides of it, but one good side of that is- It's also a very small community. You build a relationship with one guy. My last installation I was at, they had this other problem. You should talk to this guy. You run this network and it's very related to driven. It's very trust driven. They want their own reputation online if the tech works. You have to not make them look bad. How do you go about building that trust with- They have to be able to rely on your systems and they want to rely on their partners. How do you build that trust? It's very hard to build. It's very personality driven. It's who the people are. On the other side of the table is what they care about. They want to see it operating in other environments. It's your job to show that, to show it operating, to show it working well, to show how it works, to show- Do you know what I think they're used to saying, hey, this works 100% of the time perfectly every time. Be honest about where it fails. Where the limits are, where you're building out today, where the next generation things bring them into the roadmap. It's something that I've seen very few companies do in this space that we do all the time. Why do you think people avoid doing it? I think, again, it's a culture thing. There's this culture of the tech community if they move fast and break things. Go to a demo and it's totally fine if the demo doesn't work. It's expected. If it works, it's- It's like in shit part and half for- Exactly. That's an expectation. There's some people on the government side that are open to that. But the bar is quite a bit higher. If you're going to demo, they expect it to work and expect it to do- Like function and do it. You told it exactly. Yeah. If it doesn't, that looks really bad. Obviously. It's a different way of looking at things. The truth is, they need to know that they can rely on this tool, this thing. On their worst day. That is the bar you need to cross. Of course, I understand that a lot of new tech doesn't- It's not going to get there on day one, but one you bring that to the customer. It needs to be that much further along. It takes a little bit of extra work and extra effort into the diligence to get to that level. But once you do, and it does work, and you have to know the kernel of what is working for a new product, bring them into the roadmap. Have them suggest what new features need to be built or how you can change the physical layout or how you can make it better, faster, integrated new thing. All of that, you should be able to bring them in for. Not everyone's going to be receptive of that. A lot of people are, you know, want to clock out at 4.30 and go home. That's fine. You're going to see that- It's your job to find the person inside that doesn't want to do that. Yeah. You'll know when you see it. These people would actually see their job as of supporting the military and helping do the best fighting force you can make it. And you'll definitely know when you see it. They're a few and far between, but they're there. And I think they're getting more and more bold as time goes on because we're seeing just the urgency pick up and you need those kind of people to actually address them. What's been the most challenging thing over the past year or so? Oh boy. I like a lot of things. What's the first? I think one of the things that comes to mind is just scaling business and all that goes into just scaling the organization is always hard. It's perennially hard. The human brain is not good at understanding exponential growth very well. Even when you look at paper you see, okay, that is an exponential growth is going up. Yeah, it's hard to wrap your mind around. I change how the organization operates three months ago. Why do you- because that's exponential curve for work. And things have to change at a really fast clip and so just really continuing to build that out to be efficient and operate the organization as it should be operated with the right people, with the right structure, with the right communication paths, with the right levels of autonomy. It's tough. Is it hard to not only have to do this yourself, but also you have to find people and you have to stay ahead of the curve so that when if it's growing and becoming a different company every three months you have to be growing into that. Yeah, personally if you go into that like in terms of all that goes into running a company of exponential larger scale every couple months, it's you have to kind of stay ahead of that curve. You have to be very much this is not unique to defense. This is just any company as it grows is if you want to be operating efficiently you have to consider a lot of these things. Who are the next hires and next positions we at will open up in the next couple months so we should start hiring for today to be prepared to be because like a lot of this pressure for like more senior hires they will take a couple months to find the right person. Right, you're going to interview a lot of people to find the right person for that role. And so it's a multi-month journey. And so if you start that process when you're the person you're already late, right, you need to basically or on the back foot. You're always on the back foot and so you're always trying to like stay ahead of the curve in whatever way and as a company grows there's just lots more levels of complexity and lots more things to build out. And so I think that's one of the hard things that I think people talk about but I think it's one thing to talk about, one thing to experience. Yeah, what's been the biggest thing for you over the past, a year ago you have some mental models and after your worth of growth and all this stuff you think to yourself, oh man, I really under indexed on that or I'm going to change what I'm doing in the future. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think I probably under indexed on the importance of really, really high quality people. How did that manifest? I think in a couple of ways but like you say, you don't want to see it, right? You bring someone on a team who's just an absolute killer who's going far above and beyond like thinking three steps ahead and not waiting for that like extra class player. Yeah, and like, you know, we have a lot of those on the team but like you kind of you're hard at the next one you're like, wow, like we're so much further ahead than I could have thought of because this person like went off in that whole new direction even consider, right? It's like you're almost moving so fast like you're succeeding too much that it's like hard to keep on succeeding. Yeah, everything's breaking. And so and like I think the thing is like as you grow company, as you grow any sort of system of any type, you will have bottlenecks, you will have things that I broke and you have things that need repair, you have things that need more, they can be operating more efficiently. And I think as you grow as a company, it quickly becomes too much for one person to handle, right? Like I can't be in every part of a company all the time. But you know, hiring really good people means that you have really good representatives in all those parts of the company that are identifying those bottlenecks that are identifying those those inefficiencies that are identifying new growth paths that we hadn't considered before new opportunities. And so I guess, you know, previously, I guess I didn't, I didn't really appreciate your value. The importance of that and what the next people always talk about, you know, hiring good people, but like, what why? Like what does it actually mean? Oh, is it like do really good work, like right, really good code? Not really, right? It's all the other things around the business and like around the operations around the system that that's what really good people are really good at is everything else, right? Not just the technical, like you need really good people on the technical side. For sure, we need people who like think like founders. And we hard to guy recently who was a former founder and it's funny to see like the, the mental gear. I don't know how it works, but like the very different company and business as well, but like, somehow being a founder, like permanently scars you in certain ways, but in a good way, in a good way, or like you learned to really cut through the bullshit very quickly and not get bogged down by details. And one thing I haven't noticed is that if you like hire former founders or if you bring out former founders, they just have way higher agency. They don't require a whole bunch of micro management. They're just doing their own thing and they're kind of like thinking in that mode of you and they're saying like in your shoes, like what should we be doing? And they're trying to take those next steps without being told. Yeah, yeah. And it's really hard to train people. I don't know why, because I like former founders of all types of businesses have that sort of agency. They can completely fail. Yeah, even more if they fail, right? Because they've learned the lesson in a really hard way. Like they chew the glass. They chew the glass and like gone through that pain, like they understand why did it fail? Right? What are the inefficiencies? What could have changed before that that fixed it and how could we apply those lessons today? Right? So it's really hard to train people like you know, people can kind of be trained up to get to that on some small scale, but I think I get a chew glass to really get it on on any sort of large scale. Are you trying to be really conscious about like who you hire right now? Because you are growing very quickly and you want to make sure that you're not like you don't have to make the decision twice. I assume. We made some hiring mistakes previously, you know, really smart, really good people who just culturally weren't a good fit. And I think you know, sort of learn the hard way with a lot of these things. I think we have got Ben Erdog hiring at filtering out the right people, not just technically but also those other sort of skills that really matter when you're at this stage of a company because you're not just going to throw somebody out of the problem. You know, the person like saw that problem very quickly and then figure out the next three or four problems that are beyond that that I hadn't considered right. If that person solves a problem and sits there in weights, like you can't be able to all the time right? And so it's hard for people that can do that. And unfortunately a lot of really good engineers are the latter and other former where like they can do they can crank out you know, Austin, Austin, like project, but then you ask them like why did you do this? Because it was awesome. Yeah, because it's hard because they're like hard things like that's not in this way so it's like not a good answer, right? They don't have as much of the why. Yeah. And like really get into the why is really important. So in our space like hard people who were formerly the military, very, very important to understand things in different ways that it's sort of understand like the multi-level sort of implications of a decision that someone who is out from outside the space doesn't necessarily sort of understand how do you like sign on this a little bit hard to filter on the like going inside, but like what does your hiring process look like to filter for those high agency, you know, go getters. For one role we hired or really needed a personal high agency, we just did not respond to anyone who didn't reach out to us separately from the application. Like we didn't even talk to them, right? Like if you need, like if you actually have an agency for this role, you want to email the CEO or something. Yeah, exactly. And like every time that happens and probably I'm gonna say this, but every time it happens like I will push that to the team, right? Even if the person's resume like isn't super stellar, I think it shows it's a great agency, which is like that's hard to train. Like teaching, teaching technical skills, it is terrible. Teaching those like the agency is really, really hard to train, almost impossible, right? I've had another person that I interviewed say that basically if someone wrote a hand, you know, this is the towards the end of the interview, so if they were watching through that maybe they cared, right? But like if they wrote a handwritten letter, incentive to them, they would go straight to the top of the stack. Oh yeah, yeah. And I think it's really important. And unfortunately, I think a lot of companies disincentive was that, right? Especially larger companies like, oh, you have to go through the right channels, like fuck the channels. Yes, exactly the opposite. Fuck the channels. Like I never had any respect for channels, like they're stupid. They really are, like there are just ways to build in more bureaucracy, you know, find the quickest path to solve it the problem. Right? And like the Isaiah Taylor is saying like a tactical path, right? If you're in person without a job, you're a critical path is to get a job. How do you do that? Like who's the decision maker? Who's going to get the job? Right? It says yes. It's not like the third tier HR person, like who just is like basically AI reading different, like different resumes. Like that is not the critical path, right? Find the critical path and solve it. Yeah, so it's hard to train and but I think we've in terms of the process, I still do the inter goals for pretty much every role today. Very short, like 10, 15 minute inter goals. We need to tell a lot in 10 or 15 minutes of how some operates. How they think, how they do they actually care. And from there, I can push on to let the text screen to me pass that, like then do another round of coming on to the meeting a team doing, you know, talking sort of more depth and like what are the problems we're solving? Why they solve them on the engineering side, I think one excellent sort of piece of advice that I received is just asking like what they did like 10 times. Like what's probably going to do different answers? No, no, no, no, like in terms of like tell me a project you worked on in your was pro, right? It's like a common question. I ask, okay, what do you do on that project? Like usually there's more people in the product. What did you do? No, not like the what the product does, like what specifically did you do, right? And then you drilled out like water, something like a non-obvious problem that you had to solve when you were doing that. Every problem is going to have some kind of thing that's non-obvious one and two you realize. If you can't answer that, you probably didn't like, I don't know too much. Or maybe just like didn't like you was kind of taking care of it for, yeah, you don't care. Like you were just kind of like, you know, cranking, cranking things away. And then you keep asking questions like that, like really drilled out. I think the candidates who who really excel are the ones who, like get excited about that. Like, oh, this person actually cares about this weird little technical detail that, you know, there was some like weird kernel bug it had to fix and like this like that like, you know, kept this whole thing from working and like that's the kind of stuff that like, wow, like that person really cares. And like they actually went to that next level rather than like, oh yeah, I just did it because I was told to. Okay. Yeah. And so you can do until I click, like, yeah. What is the thing that's like weighing on your mind the most right now? I think there's a lot more we could always be doing. There's always a new use case or mission set or a problem to solve. And there's only so many resources we have to give in time. So many people to manage these things. So it's constantly the tension between spreading ourselves too thin and really concentrating on the opportunities that matter. And this is a very relationship during game. It's very sort of intensive game that these the sales cycles for some of these contracts, especially like the larger ones. It's like a year. Multi years. Yeah. Like going from like, like completely new sort of ideation all the way through like large program. Like these things are multi efforts. And so they take a lot of intensive work to get right. And so I think, you know, one of the things that's constantly like, you know, constantly sort of battling is, it's like how do we best deploy the resources we have, the people we have, the engineering we have, to tackle these problems. And what are the problems that, you know, argued opportunities, but we just, you know, we want to refocus on other things. And one of those like future things, we're getting like, you know, unlocked yet. Like that's always is a very good wrenching feeling when like you you find, you know, the day after like the industry day four large program, like the sales happening, right. I think we've got much better than the past year, but like it's still like these things still happen. I think it's such a large space. And so I think the thing that the ways I'm going to just like, how do we, how do we manage that growth and really capture the opportunities that will be transformational, which ones would be behind which ones do we go after. It's, it's, it's an easy, no, it's a constant, it's a constant circle. It really is. Yeah. You have a very unique, I mean, I don't know if you're unique is the right word, but your method of operating your business and growing your business is very different than the traditional playbook. And like VC and startups. Yeah, and VC world, yes. But yeah, who's, who's like the role model in your head for the type of business that you want to run? Like everyone builds, every founder builds their business in a slightly different way. And they have some idea of like the, the company that they're excited to wake up in the morning to build. Yeah. Who's that for you? Funny that's my grandfather. So my grandfather told a story a few times. I don't know if I told it in the last one, but you know, he ran businesses kind of his entire life like small to small businesses. And he actually had a farm in Ohio that was sort of a small, did like cows and sort of small some crops. Like, you know, very, very sort of small business middle class kind of existence. And when he was someone on his deathbed and my dad who just started a business at the time, so one time he's like, hey, what's the secret? You know, you were very successful, you've had a lot of failures, final successes. And he goes, son, got more money coming in the go now. We sound so so like, yeah, of course, but you'd be surprised at how, how infrequently that's considered. Right. And of course, you can make investments. So you can kind of even have, you know, sort of lost periods where you know, you're gonna, of course, you can do that. But on that, at the end of the day, in the long term, you've got to have more money coming in, they go out or these are path to get there. Right. And, you know, I very much, you know, M subscribe to grow very fast, like move very aggressively, like really build it, a really big business. But like you can always sell, you know, dollars for 90 cents and you'll be, you'll be, you'll be, you know, growth fast. If you remember, right? Right. Right. Exactly. Like, you're revenue wise, you'll be, you know, like, you can sell it all day, right? But that's not a business, right? That's just, like, that's just a loss making enterprise. Yeah. And so you have to consider how that's gonna operate. I think it's funny how infrequently like that is considered among a lot of sort of the venture space, you know, especially in sort of like the hard-tackered defense tech space, right? It's, these are hard businesses. They're very capital intensive. They take a long time to grow. Of course, they go very, very large when they work well. They work very well. But you have to be incredibly like driven by the finances behind it for you to actually build a like a sustainable long-term business, right? I think people often scale too quick where they actually don't have that under the hood or they don't have any sort of scalable. You think it's scaling too quickly or do you think it's like building not really like fully knowing what to build and like who wants to buy it or think they're both sort of symptoms of the same problem? Where even if you have sort of like a good sort of product or good sort of way of selling it, what does a business model look like and where is it? How do you adapt that for it to give a customer and how do you change it over time? And I think one of the things that becomes harder and I've even noticed this, even as a 30-person company, is like the way you're able to move as a three, four-person company is astonishing, right? How long were you at that stage of just a few people? Probably about nine, twelve months or so. You're glad that you didn't just start hiring really? Oh absolutely. We probably would have been dead at that point if we did. I really wanted to, it was painful, but in hindsight it was definitely the best thing to not. You wanted the higher people but you decided not to. We didn't have to have the money. One of the symptoms of no one wanted to find you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that made us a much better business. Because a lot of forces to really focus on how do we... How do cash has to be coming in the door? Yeah. Cash rest we're bringing in the door and we have to find a way to actually operate as a business. You can always burn money, you can only sell dollars for an descents, you can always do that. But I think a lot of founders won't admit it to themselves when that's what they're doing, whether just selling dollars for 90 cents. It was a good branding. I always encourage founders to at least be cognizant of that, which seems so obvious. That's what a business has to do. There's going to be any sort of success in the future. You have to have more money coming in and going out. That is how business operates. It's how you do that, or you eventually fail or get acquired. There's no path to long-term sustainability. Sustainability without that. It just obvious. It seems obvious. It's time to say raising ventures is a really good tool for growing quickly. Assuming you have a really good business under the hood that you can scale. Even if you scale, you're ramping up your engineering, you're ramping up your BD team, you're ramping up a lot of the company, and that will pay off. That's why ventures there. That's why capital is there. It's not there to go burn a bunch of money, and it asks yourself why when I find the increase in my prices to be profitable, nobody wants to buy it anymore. You've got to get to that point before you start scaling, or you're going to paint yourself into a corner that will be very hard to get out of as you scale and as it becomes harder to shift on a diet. Has the frugality just been absolutely baked into your DNA as far as a company in yourself because you just didn't have any money at the beginning? I know the last time that I came by Pico Grid, I was coming by the other location. The first actual factory. There was people working on the sidewalk outside, there was no space inside. You have an extreme utility per square foot was very high in that location. At what point were you like, okay, it's time to expand as far as actually getting this larger factory? What did you have to see business-wise and stuff to make that decision? It's less subjective. I mean, literally within three months we moved into there, we had a couple of recent hires, we need to find a bigger spot. Do we? That's what I heard. People immediately were saying. I think people mean very well. People always want to hire another person, they always want to have more space. That's always the case. Some healthy pushback on that is important. To find this place, to take us a while, that's what we're used to searching for. We want to stay in also going to know which is hard to expand square footage and also going to know there aren't that many places that are on the market at any given time. We wanted a place that wasn't stupidly expensive. There were some larger places at the time that I just started looking at. We're like, they were good size but there were way way more expensive ones, so a lot of cars were square foot basis where it just didn't make sense. And so, I ended up finding this place and to jump around the day we toured it. This used to be Castellan's office. Their first office, they recently relocated to Torrance to a much larger space in Torrance. They grew out of El Segón. They wasn't in sort of space of that scale. They could operate in. It seems to be the theme. Starting to know the small company and by the time you scale up to 100 plus people, you kind of have to go to Torrance or go to one of the industrial parks nearby, which is not great. There are some places where they don't come up at enough of a clip where sometimes you're going to get pushed out or some other requirements. I can know, Isaiah ended up in Hawthorne, not because of square footage, but because of height requirements. And like the height for the reactor of the building, they couldn't find a spot. And I was going to have had enough height in the building. I know Teddy Feldman's going to deal with some similar problems right now. There's huge drill with those drill rigs. These things are 20, 30 feet tall. You couldn't really fit it in here without it barely. Yeah, it'd be very tough. Yeah, so one of five spots was like, good size. That was reasonable on a dollar basis. I think fit the company, which I think was one of the surprising things that we toured a lot of places. They're like, this is just doesn't feel right. It just doesn't feel right. You just don't feel like this is the place for the company to grow. And I feel like this place really did feel like that. Was it just like instant you walk in here and you're just like, this feels good? Yeah, it felt good. I mean, it's kind of fun enough, like very similar in terms of layout to bring this spot, just much larger in every dimension. So I have like one little office in the front, in like the front space. And now we have sort of an entire built out office space a bit up here in the front. We had the whole warehouse in space in the back. I'm like, that's much, much larger now. And all I mentioned, so it just felt like a really good sort of scale for the company to grow into. I mean, if all things go well, give it a completely filled up in like a few months. Yeah, give it a year or two will be will be, you know, the person with the same tier will look like an Amazon warehouse just going back. I mean, at some point, you got to go vertical, right? Exactly. Not going vertical. Not not bullish. Yeah. Not going vertical. You don't actually need the space. Exactly. Sorry. You know, we started like storing things on top of the bathrooms. That was when we started to I was like, okay, maybe we actually do need more space. Were you waiting until people were like pounding on your doors saying like, we have to do something. There's not enough space. Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, like, like, I think what really kind of did for me is one production started to take a hit because we didn't have enough space. And for us, as with a lot of companies and defense, you build multiple products because you're trying to serve different missions, you're trying to serve different use cases in different ways. So you end up building multiple products. Do that. So we have three different hardware products. And one of the challenges of manufacturing on, I don't know what they call like a high mix manufacturing line is a sort of tear down and set up. So you have different parts for different products, different ways they need to run through the production line, different, different tools, different things, right? You can be smart about that. They're used by reusing the same tools, reusing the same sort of fasteners across different things. But there's still sort of some tear down some setup for any production line. And so what we got to with the previous spot is we were trying to move production on such a clip that we would do sort of production run of a product A, they do a tear down which took a good day or two to fully get things reorganized, get everything all set up, then trundling a production line with another thing. It's almost like a chef's kitchen. And you have to use the exact same line for like five different main things that take six or eight hours to prep each time. And so that was I think the big thing that was a forcing function for me is realizing that like there's actually a real hit to production and downstero of that to sort of revenue growth. It's like a just dampener on growth. And so just people being able to be affected. And so like we were late on like delivering hardware, we were like falling behind on things. It was just really hard to keep up. And how long were you in that space? Was it like two years? About a little over two years. A little over two years. We did in February of 23. Yeah, I think again, like even brains really bad at understanding exponential curves. So you know, we'd say about the same time as the last place. But I think you know, there's certainly a chance that with even like 12 or 18 months, I think there's we might be kind of bursting out of the seams with this current spot. So it's hard to, it's really hard to say. I think when it starts to cause production capacity to fall behind where it needs to be for us to grow. Even if it costs more to be in somewhere else, like it it makes like financial decisions. Yeah, I mean, you want the space to grow just ahead of the company. Right. And so I mean, this place right now feels really big for previous spot. The last place we've been to felt really big for when we were moving in there, right? But it allows you to kind of ramp up and be the business that you want. You want the company to be. And when you're building physical things, like a lot of that has been streamed by space, space multiplied by usage of space. Yeah. What is your typical like day look right now? Kind of all over the board. Still very involved in product, very involved in the engineering of of all the things we're building out right now internally, which I still love to do. Like that's what my background is on as on really software but on product more generally. Still involved in that less than I used to be driving a lot of the BD conversations or sort of sends in growth conversations and kind of stepping in when it makes sense for you to try to be as close to the customer as possible like personally. I tried to. There's still a couple of customers that I'm one of texting like basis with especially so early as customers are still sort of sticking around which is good. And when I can try to get to the level with other folks as well as for new customers and understands what their problems. It's tough now because to get to that level, you need a lot of like dedicated hands on time, which is hard to. You just have don't have all the hours in the world kind of thing. Yeah. You just don't have the time to dedicate that that amount of attention to giving you and so oftentimes like other folks on the team will have those kind of wish to their folks. So do quite a bit of that. Of course hiring and just like building out the company and the operations of the system as well. So split kind of across the board. And I think I was asked recently like but one of the new hires like, you know, what do you do? It's a fair question. It's a fair question. Like I think my, as I see my job is sort of twofold, right? So primary focus is identifying and putting out fires, right? Like be the firefighter, right? And fires aren't necessarily always like the company will end tomorrow if we don't solve this. But they'll get there, right? If you let them sort of smolder for long enough. Also partially like figuring out if even if there is a fire like, is it worth actually spending time on and trying to put it out in first place? So the weeks where I'm the most nervous and most on edges or weeks where I don't see a fire. Because I know it's burning. I know there's something there. So you just got like anxiety in the back of your mind. Like sleep, you know, I have a sleep at night. I'm just trying to flex going on. Truly. Like honestly, when when when when whenever things go and right, you get nervous. Well, I mean, I'm more nervous than when things are going wrong. Which is which is a really funny thing I've sort of discovered. So like that's that's what I think is like and that's like the so keep the business running. Keep it operating. Keep it operating efficiently. The other one is is is growth, right? Not just growth in terms of like new customers, but what are the new products, what are the new angles, what are new like avenues to to go down that are building ahead of the curve, right? That is a big part. It's one that you know, I've always done, but but I think even more more recently that now we have teams that are handling the engineering and the right teams that are the BD teams that are handling operations, we have teams that are handling a lot of the the the the runner functions I still have to be involved on some level with that. But it's you know, it's growth, right? It's it's it's moving the right direction, you know, trying to see around quarters trying to, you know, like I said earlier, I tried like who those people would need to be hiring three months from now based on our current trajectory and our current challenges that right now are like, yeah, it's a little uncomfortable in three months. It'll be like this is a real like limitation to growth. So I mean that now like total bottleneck yeah, trying to figure out what the bottleneck is trying to figure out not what the bottleneck is today, but where the bottleneck is in a couple of months from now. What's your favorite like on figuring out those bottlenecks like has has there been any in the past in the 12 months where you just didn't see something coming and you know, three months goes by, you should have been working on that and it just absolutely crushes things. It's a good question. It's hard to say. It's really hard to say, right? I think there's there's plenty of cases where I wished I I moved faster or sort of moved earlier to hire someone or make a change or whatever. Everything's clear behind side. So it's hard to you know, beat yourself up about it. Yeah, you shouldn't even necessarily beat yourself up about it. It's just like, you know, if you hit, if you get like 12 out of 13, you got to reach top. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's that high. Again, like human brains would be better understanding one X seven maybe. Yeah, but you know, anything reasonably well. But it's always balancing it right against like where we are as a company. Like, you know, the more senior to hired, like these people get very expensive, right? And but it's not just that. It's also how we operate, right? A lot of releasing your people cannot operate by themselves. They need a team to operate efficiently effectively. So you're not hiring one person. You're hiring five, right? The person and like sort of hiring the guy that can control or like manage those. Yeah, until like they won't be able to operate until they have that team under them or like they just paying a lot of money for someone who who cannot operate. We made a sort of higher mistake at the end of last year where we hired some very, very senior very experienced like very paper on paper exactly who we we need. You know, I think unfortunately and you know, I think it's just really like just not a good fit. It's that hard time meeting the culture and the pace and like the way we operate. And it would have been really good if we had a team around him for like this role. We did, right? He was the person for that for that space. Yeah, I want to build like have him build out the function. Yeah, yeah. And I think just didn't just didn't work. He came from some larger companies. I think was really interesting and sort of messenger been about working in this in the space. But the end of the day, you need people who can operate and who can who can who can who can work well. So you know, unfortunately had to cut him loose. How fast do you make those decisions when someone's not working? Like is it does it take a week, two weeks? When you know it's not working, it takes like a few days, you know, just you just make the call instant. Yeah. But sometimes it does take a while to know it is not working, right? People need time to ramp up. Like they're not going to be good perfectly day one. So when do you call that, right? It's tough. Sometimes you just know, right? Sometimes it does take a little bit of extra time. There was a case last year. Um, really amazing engineer, but just was not fitting with the team wasn't, wasn't just not a culture fit. Not a culture fit. Um, I think took a lot of baggage from like the previous industry. Here's working in that was not a good fit for how we operate. Um, and I wish I'd I'd cut it earlier for both for for him and for us as well. Um, because it just wasn't wasn't a healthy, um, healthy thing. So, um, you know, had to come, I probably waited a month too long on that front. Um, but uh, was it kind of like thumb sucking where you just like know what you should be doing, but you just don't want it. In hindsight, yeah. Like in hindsight, like yeah, I was like this, this guy's just not working out. And I think I just gave him too many, too many chances. Um, did you update your model at all? Or did you? Yeah. No, after that, we kind of got much more sort of like trust my god. Um, um, but you know, everything is clear in hindsight. Yeah. Okay. Let's end on, you know, what, over the next like six to 12 months, what are you most excited about? Um, that's a great question. I, I, I, there's a lot of things. Um, I mean, we get to support some of the most critical missions for the US military, um, which is there's a lot of really exciting work on in front. Um, of course, it's very difficult to share publicly. Um, but I think seeing the culture shift on the military side now change, um, and kind of being ahead of the curve on that front has, has put us in a really, really strong spot. Um, there's a lot of opportunities that are kind of opening up now, um, for us to grow that I'm, you know, I'm very, very excited to move into and support. Um, and really help the, the art customers kind of meet the needs that are, that they know they need to hit and don't really have a good way to hit them. Um, and so there's a lot along that front, of course, like that comes down to, to product and product is kind of a navel for that. But I think what I'm most excited about is, is helping actually drive those missions for it. Right. Yeah. Um, and do what we can and adapt product whatever we need to adapt it to, to help them operate.