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

Dino Mavrookas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Saronic Technologies, a defense tech company pioneering AI-powered autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) to strengthen U. S. and allied naval capabilities. A former U. S. Navy SEAL with 11 years of service and eight combat tours, Mavrookas enlisted after 9/11 and gained firsthand insight into the importance of technological superiority in complex operational environments. He founded Saronic in 2022, and under his leadership, the company has raised over $850 million and reached a $4 billion valuation by early 2025—developing scalable, mission-driven ASVs for modern maritime defense. After his military service, he earned a BASC in Computer Engineering from Rutgers and an MBA from The Wharton School. He then transitioned to private equity, serving as a Senior Associate at Vista Equity Partners and Vice President at H. I. G. Capital, focusing on technology investments. A 2015 Pat Tillman Scholar, Mavrookas also serves on the board of the Navy SEAL Foundation and advocates for expanding opportunities for veterans in elite academic and professional programs. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://www.roka.com - USE CODE SRS https://uscca.com/srs https://www.aura.com/srs https://www.betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://www.helixsleep.com/srs⁠ https://www.blackbuffalo.com https://www.meetfabric.com/shawn https://www.shawnlikesgold.com https://www.hillsdale.edu/srs https://www.paladinpower.com/srs https://www.patriotmobile.com/srs https://trueclassic.com/srs Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at trueclassic.com/srs! #trueclassicpod Dino Mavrookas Links - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dino-mavrookas Saronic Technologies - https://www.saronic.com Navy SEAL Foundation - https://www.navysealfoundation.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  Dino Mavrookas, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. It is an honor to be here.

• 1:07Shawn Ryan?

  Well, likewise, it's an honor to have you. I mean, you're former SEAL, re-industrializing the Navy's shipbuilding capacity. It's, um, 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, I, 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.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  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 Saronic. So, thank you.

• 2:04Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for being here. But everybody starts off with an introduction here. So, Dino Mavrookas, Navy SEAL veteran with 11 years of service, including eight combat tours. Leveraged your Wharton MBA in private equity experience at Vista Equity Partners to bridge your military grit with tech innovation, launching Saronic in 2022.

• 2:28Shawn Ryan?

  We're going to focus more on your work as of in vision as co-founder and CEO of Saronic Technologies, a company building autonomous surface vessels, ASVs, to restore US 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 lead. A voice in the defense tech revolution, warning that without scalable AI-driven solutions, the US risks losing its maritime edge. A patriot committed to the Navy SEAL Foundation, serving as a board director to support SEALs and their families,

• 3:12Shawn Ryan?

  husband, father, and most importantly, a Christian, and like I said, re-industrializing the Navy shipbuilding capabilities. And, you know, just to kick this off with a, 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.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  They're, they're not messing around. They are investing heavily. The government's pouring billions and billions of dollars. If we think China's not on a wartime footing right now, we're, we're sticking our heads in the sand.

• 3:50Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you know, it just sounds like they're gaining an edge in just about every important aspect of, of, 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 US accounts for only 0.1% of global shipbuilding, 0.1%.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Crazy. It's crazy. In, in World War II, I'll give you another stat. We commissioned over 100 aircraft carriers, aircraft carriers between 1942 and 1945.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Today, an aircraft carrier costs 10 billion as a baseline. The, the estimate, the budget estimate actually went up to 13 billion.

• 4:45Shawn Ryan?

  Geez.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  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, let, take human life out of the equation for just a second. So I'm sure we'll talk about that a bunch. You can't afford to lose one because you cannot get another one.

• 5:18Shawn Ryan?

  It scares the hell out of me, man.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 5:20Shawn Ryan?

  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, 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.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah. Starting Saronic 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 under, 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. Uh, you know, one of the things I mentioned, and it was funny, we had a, one of our, uh, lead growth, with the leaders from the growth team gave a teach in to the entire company. Uh, here's what government acquisitions actually looks like.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  The individual subcomponents still would not be legible.

• 7:02Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 7:03Speaker 03

  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 forty-eight to seventy-two months.

• 7:18Shawn Ryan?

  Three years.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Forty-eight to seventy-two months later.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  The technology we're building is actually obsolete. We're gonna have version two, three, four, we're gonna have the software upgraded four or five times. We're gonna 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 fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years. And we're just sitting at a point in time where there's massive technological disruption. Right? Twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, the iPhone didn't exist. Think about that.

• 8:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, it's it's.

• 8:19Shawn Ryan?

  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, it's just, I. Every time I talk to a tech innovator like yourself, I'm just mind blown. It it 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 gotta look outward, man.

• 9:00Shawn Ryan?

  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 gonna get passed up, if we're not passed up already. And, I mean, we just chatted about this, it was on Tucker's a couple of days ago, and, and we were talking about, you know, how slow everything moves and how we kneecap ourselves, everything from energy to AI to defense and,

• 9:44Shawn Ryan?

  man, like, we really, we better wake up. I mean, it's,

• 9:51Speaker 03

  And we're, it's, well, I don't want to talk all doom and gloom.

• 9:56Shawn Ryan?

  Because we have the innovators.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Right? The

• 10:18Speaker 03

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

• 10:30Speaker 03

  a massively different environment. So we talked a little bit about World War II, we talked 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. PPEB process back in 1961, cost plus contracting actually started in World War I to get the 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? The buildup for the Cold War, Reagan era, as we were at 6 to 7% of GDP as far as

• 11:12Speaker 03

  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 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 milit- so 24% reduction in military spending after the Cold War, 41% in naval spending after the Cold War. Wow.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  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 bu- 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,

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Northrop, Boeing, and General Dynamics, right? So. That happened in ninety-three and then obviously that consolidation took took years to happen. Then, so you have that that trend, that's one mega trend, right?

• 12:55Shawn Ryan?

  So what happened? Did did those five buy all the other subsidiaries?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  They bought all the other companies and they just combined into mega conglomerates. Yeah, so you have that that one kind of mega trend happening in the market. The other thing was, obviously, two thousand and one, we go into Afghanistan. Two thousand and three, we go into Iraq, and we're there for twenty years.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  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 twenty 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 twenty twenty-five 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

• 14:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 14:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, not to be, I don't want to be all doom and gloom either, although usually I am. But um, 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 and it's, it can be, you know, big risk, big reward. But guys like, you know, guys like you and 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 that are.

• 14:58Shawn Ryan?

  Astonishing innovators. But man, the government just cut your guys' kneecaps off. I mean, we gotta fast track this stuff.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  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. You know, 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.

• 15:33Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:34Speaker 03

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

• 15:42Shawn Ryan?

  That was in 93?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  1993.

• 15:44Shawn Ryan?

  What was that? Was that Clinton?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  The last, yeah, I think so. I think so. Uh, Secretary of Defense was Les Aspen. Since then, there's only been three massive companies that have started. SpaceX, Palantir, and now Andorol. SpaceX and Palantir started in the early 2000s. So call it 2001, 2002-ish timeframe. I think you had a 15-year gap-

• 16:11Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  -until Andorol 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 Andorol a ton of credit. Right?

• 16:53Speaker 03

  People, investors, weren't really interested in driving money into defense. It was a hard place to make a return. This is why I tried 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 and D. But two- The more money you make, the more that investors will leverage, will be able to leverage private capital, will magnify any dollar the government puts into our company through acquisition or otherwise, 10 times over, and will be able to build even better systems faster. And it will attract new innovators.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. To the, to the sector. A hundred percent. But the reason why there's been such this, this like bottleneck and resilience, it goes back to this, this PBB 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

• 18:18Speaker 03

  means in actuality, like in practice, we started Saronic 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 a 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

• 19:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:19Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  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."

• 19:47Shawn Ryan?

  Is that included in the, what did you call it, the rapid, uh, this is the 48 to 72 months? Is that included or is that?

• 19:55Speaker 03

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

• 20:22Speaker 03

  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

• 20:58Speaker 03

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

• 21:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, yeah, I think.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  But that's how, that's how the system evolved into. 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 through those companies had no competition. They were sole sourced.

• 21:28Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  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, just.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  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, and that's what we focus on and we've really built that into the core DNA of our company where I just say, everything we say we're going to do, we're gonna do it.

• 22:25Shawn Ryan?

  Beautiful.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  If we say we're gonna deliver this on this timeline for this price, that's what we're doing, come hell and 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 said we're gonna 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 Serrana compete at this point?

• 23:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no kidding. You know, you had mentioned something earlier about having to, we're gonna do a life story, by the way, but we're getting in the weeds a little bit too early, but, but I don't want to forget this. You, so you had to simultaneous simultaneously start a lobbying company?

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:17Shawn Ryan?

  What, what is a lobbying company?

• 23:21Speaker 03

  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, of folks you need to influence without getting too far in the weeds. One's the warfighters.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  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. The, these things are going to save your lives. These, 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?

• 24:24Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 25:27Speaker 04

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• 25:53Speaker 03

  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. 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 hut 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. Yeah. But because it still worked and there wasn't a, we're screwed if we change, don't change it. It really didn't drive change.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  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 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 then go to Congress and then lobby for budget and say, look, the military needs this. They're saying they want it.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  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. Cause 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.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  And I mean, I was.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  I was on Capitol Hill

• 28:14Speaker 03

  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 a, an image and a picture that I kinda 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 tritable autonomous platform, 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,

• 29:00Speaker 03

  both within the military and actually a, a 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 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 upfront. Completely modular, 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.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  And at the time it was electric surfboard, like, okay.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  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. Cause 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 a hundred. Who cares?

• 31:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I'll bet the, 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?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  It's, it's starting to come together. I, 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 combat and commands. So Indo-PACOM, 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.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  So when this admiral says, I want this to fight with. There has to be a, another admiral that goes through the same process, takes those inputs from all the different senior leaders, rights requirements, goes through the procurement cycle.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  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 gonna 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.

• 32:55Shawn Ryan?

  First time I've ever heard that.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give everybody credit. I'm gonna give a lot of credit to the, to the military, Congress, people are moving. Right? Again, you're trying to steer a massive cruise ship. It takes a lot of people to try to turn that rudder.

• 33:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  Right? But Congress, what the Navy was doing before we started Saronic, 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 others fundamental reasons why there wasn't adoption at scale. And one of those reasons was Saronic or another company, like Saronic didn't exist, and there wasn't another company that could actually build that scale. But Congress was looking at the Navy and actually saying,

• 33:50Speaker 03

  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, that's really what you need.

• 34:08Shawn Ryan?

  That's good. When you're, 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 just curious, is this, is this a bipartisan initiative?

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 34:23Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's good.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, when you think about, I mean, 2022, we were getting traction and there was a Democratic administration.

• 34:32Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Right? And the then Secretary, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced replicator program under, that started under Biden. And that was, hey, not only are we gonna go buy thousands of drones, we're gonna go buy them over the next 18 to 24 months. And that was the first thing.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  That I've seen in a really long time where the government has moved quickly. I tell them, 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 or a employee at our company, like the opportunity ahead. But two, it should, it should scare the shit out of you.

• 35:20Shawn Ryan?

  I was, I knew you were gonna say that.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Hey, uh, cause I'm looking around 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, 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.

• 35:51Speaker 03

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

• 35:57Shawn Ryan?

  Man, man, well, got a couple of things to knock out here before we get into your life story. Everybody gets a gift.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Oh, amazing.

• 36:07Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance lead gummy bears, legal in all 50 states, made here in the U.S. No funny business.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  My, my kids are gonna crush this.

• 36:16Shawn Ryan?

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

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 36:19Shawn Ryan?

  And then, um, secondly, we have, I 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, and they've just been here with me the whole time. So, one of the things that I do is I, um, offer the community the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is from Richard Beamer.

• 36:49Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  There certainly is going to be a very large market. Public sector, meaning government and military, and I'll talk about government, and 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 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.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  One is the small autonomous surface vessels.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  And the other ones, the larger ones that we're getting into now. So we started out building small autonomous boats. So right now, our largest platform's 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, you know,

• 38:33Speaker 03

  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. We 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.

• 39:07Shawn Ryan?

  Logistics.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Well, not just logistics, but if you think about just capacity. This is where, this is why we get into, when you build bespoke military system, and look, some systems have to be bespoke for the military.

• 39:22Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean by, what is?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Like NF thirty five 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 ten X or twenty X or more. So if you look at what China has done, look, they're outbuilding the Navy, the US Navy in terms of combatant ships, three X to one. Right? I can, I will go through all the, the stats on the Chinese fleet and the US fleet and

• 40:07Speaker 03

  kind of what all that looks like when we talk Saronic. But they're outbuilding on just a military capacity today, three X to one. But they actually have two hundred and thirty times our shipbuilding capacity. They have five thousand, over five thousand commercially flagged vessels when the US has less than a hundred.

• 40:30Shawn Ryan?

  So could you say that again?

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Over five thousand commercially flagged vessels to the US having less than a hundred. So now, go back to the World War Two example, and let me ask you this question. You have two hundred and thirty times the shipbuilding capacity. Only a portion of that shipbuilding capacity is being used for military and defense. The rest is commercial.

• 41:00Speaker 03

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

• 41:06Shawn Ryan?

  It's done.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  It gets converted to defense.

• 41:09Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, just, just to play devil's advocate, just a little bit here, because the first thing that pops in my head, did you say thirty five thousand to one hundred? Was that the numbers?

• 41:19Speaker 03

  For?

• 41:19Shawn Ryan?

  For shipbuilding capacity?

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Two hundred and thirty to one.

• 41:23Shawn Ryan?

  Two hundred and thirty.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  So, so the numbers are the Chinese can build and the, the, the, 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.

• 41:44Shawn Ryan?

  And these are, these are commercial and military.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  These are commercial ships, these are large cargo containers, these are military ships, these are destroyers, these are aircraft carriers, these are everything.

• 41:55Shawn Ryan?

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

• 42:08Shawn Ryan?

  But I mean, China is a major exporter. Right? And so the US is not a major exporter. So, I mean, they would need a lot more ships just for all the exporting that they do, correct?

• 42:27Shawn Ryan?

  Or am I off on that?

• 42:29Speaker 03

  You're not off on that. They, 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.

• 42:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  25 years ago. Today they have 50%.

• 42:57Shawn Ryan?

  50% at where it.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:08Shawn Ryan?

  Holy.

• 43:08Speaker 03

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

• 43:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Wow. Well, Dino, let's, let's get into some of your life story here. So we always start with, where did you grow up?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  So grew up in New Jersey. Down, down the Jersey Shore. I like to say everybody that's seen the TV show, it kind of gives it a bad rap. But, uh, great. Great, great place to grow up, about an hour south of 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. Uh, for three years back in the fifties. Um, came over, didn't speak a word of English, came to America. He was a, a busboy in the United Nations for three years.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  While he learned English and saved up enough money to bring my 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, 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.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  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 just 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, you stayed out of trouble?

• 45:35Speaker 03

  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 talk to some adults and. And so I actually met my wife when I was 13 years old. Oh, man, that's. At, at Greek Orthodox Church. And Greek Orthodox Church in New Jersey is sort of like a high school. It, basketball teams and volleyball teams and everything else. So when you say trouble, it's all relative, right? Um. 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 version here. So I'll kind of give the truth.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  But um, 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, she was way too cool for me. We were, we were friends. I was 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.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  It was like, hey, great reconnecting, great, I love this date and, and yeah, I have to go to Iraq for six months. She's like, what? Oh, so you meant while you, you made the move while you were in the SEAL? While I was in the SEAL teams. Yeah. And then I like to tease her about like, oh, okay. So you finally said yes after I became a SEAL back.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  But no, we've been married, we're going on 13 years now. We have two kids that are 10 and nine. And I, 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 gonna 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.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  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 this and probably 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 she had a phenomenal career. Before before switching and becoming a full time mom and staying at home. And it's funny, we uh. I'll come back to that because I'll get into the story and kind of like when we founded Saronic and everything.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  But going back to kind of the the childhood stuff, the whole point of it. Generally stayed out of trouble. But my wife's parents thought I was a huge pain in the ass. So when I when when she brought me home for the first time. They were really confused. But over time, um. We're very close and their 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. Twenty years old. They worked hard, say my my wife grew up poor. And so their parents worked hard, say, I mean, it's the American dream. It's it's literally the American dream. So I got to I got to see that growing up and like live with that.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Um, 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.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  But one of the most important lessons I learned. Was my freshman year in high school through basketball. And. I was going to this. 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.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  And so I was looking at that, and I've actually never told this story. This is, and think about how much this impacted, this is 30 years ago.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  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 three years 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.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  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 it like that taught me that it's never worth it to quit. Like that's what drove into me. Like I'll never quit it. I might not make it. But I'm not quitting.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  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 gonna be through failure. And that's okay. And I'm just here to support you.

• 52:52Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that? 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 and finding all the success that that you've amassed in Serrano?

• 53:07Speaker 03

  I think I think it's what gave me the the perspective to be successful. Hundred percent. Not just the. Not just the physical ability to make it through BUDs, but also the the mental ability to make it. And look, to be clear, I never. I never thought about joining the military. It was never on my list of things to do. I'd never even met. Anyone in the military before I joined.

• 53:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  So.

• 53:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  It was pretty crazy. Um, nine eleven was my junior year of college.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  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's happening. Like the first plane hit the tower. I was like, I I remember my thought like.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  What idiot flew their plane into a building in the middle of New York? Cause 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.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  And being from New Jersey, you're everybody's kind of like one or two degrees of separation away from somebody that's like really, really affected.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  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, uh, uh, this story's 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 gonna 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.

• 55:15Speaker 03

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

• 55:30Speaker 03

  And they didn't hear from him for forty-eight hours. So think about that. My buddy's sitting there, I'll, I'll never forget this. Forty-eight hours, I think he smoked two cartons of cigarettes and drank like two bottles of Jack Daniels, just waiting to hear from, from his dad. And then forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, the phone rings. He was okay. But think about what those two days could have been like. Yeah, no kidding. So, and then think about all the people that, that weren't okay.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  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 was studying computer engineering. I thought I was gonna 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 wanna go have an impact on the global war on terror.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  How do you do that? So I started to talk to people. I went and I I went to these career days. I started with federal agencies, so FBI, DEA. I'm like, what are these things all about?

• 57:01Speaker 03

  I go to this FBI career day. Best Navy blue suit I could find as a college student on. I'm 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 he just looked at me like I have three heads. Like, what? Why? What's your background? I'm like, I grew up in a restaurant. I played basketball.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  And they're like, you need military experience. And so I was like, okay. Well, what's military experience look like?

• 57:40Speaker 03

  So I start walking into recruiters' offices and I go to the army recruiter and I go to the airport. 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 SEALs. 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 frogman from Vietnam era. Gives me his phone number. And he goes, call this guy. He'll tell you all about the SEALs.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  So I call this guy up. 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.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  He's like, where? 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, this is true, by the way.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  So I get to his house. It's January in New Jersey. Never met this guy before. All I wanted to learn about the SEALs. So let's go for a run. He has fins in 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 in a mask.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  He runs me down to the Atlantic Ocean in January in New Jersey and hands me the fins and the mask. And he goes, go, go swim out to the end of the jetty and back.

• 59:08Speaker 03

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

• 59:13Speaker 03

  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, Bud's 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.

• 59:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's how I got introduced to the SEALs. There was a recruiting platform in.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  I was based out of Long Island. It was ran by a retired captain, a guy named Drew Bisset. 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, this is exactly what I wanted 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.

• 1:00:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, what a, what a career change there.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was pretty bold. My mom, my parents had no idea what I was even taught. They're like, the what?

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  You did what?

• 1:00:46Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we're gonna take a break here, but. You and I met a couple of 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.

• 1:01:28Shawn Ryan?

  And use it, but I, I, I just think that's like really good parenting advice. So could you, could you walk us through that?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. 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

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna homeschool, we're gonna drive to the gymnastics gym, we're gonna 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 want to go to a division one 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 gonna get up in the morning, we're gonna drive an hour and a half to the gym.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  You're gonna train for four and a half hours. You're gonna come home.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  You're gonna stretch, you're gonna ice, you're gonna eat the right way and do all the things you have to do. You're gonna do your schoolwork. And you still have to go to school. We're just gonna homeschool so we could build in the flexibility.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  And then you're gonna get up the next day and do it again. And if you do that every single day for 10 years,

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  maybe, just maybe, you'll have a chance.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  And to her credit, now again, she's nine, she looked me dead in the eyes and said, "Great, let's go."

• 1:04:03Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's awesome. So you guys homeschool?

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  We're gonna homeschool, we're gonna start this year. And my wife, my wife and I's philosophy is like, look, if they find something that they're really gonna pour their energy into like that, we're gonna invest in it. That's what I wanted to, 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 the 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 gonna be the one, as her parent, that says, "No way, that's not possible. There's only four girls in the country."

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:05:08Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing, man. But I just feel like that's great advice for all parents. But um, let's take a quick break.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 1:05:33Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Dino, 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?

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Go right into BUDs. I enlisted the day I graduated. Well, back then you had 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.

• 1:06:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wait, were you an OS?

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  OS.

• 1:06:10Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit, that's what I was.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  That's funny. I still remember A school. It was down in Dam Neck, so Location 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?

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  So did that. So it took me about six months to get out to BUDs. So I show 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. Um, so, but I mean, BUDs was, I mean, you know, it's just the 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. Um, there's only, there's just two moments where I didn't think I was going to make it.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  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, break out and hell week starts and for everybody that's listening to hell weeks, 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.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  And I just think to myself, like, these, these motherfuckers are crazy.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

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

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  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 gonna go and give way. And I remember thinking all this stuff, and I'm sitting there at, at chow, or where they're feeding us dinner, and I just remember one of the instructors going,

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  "Hey, do not quit at chow. Your entire body's 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."

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  So I looked to the, 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.

• 1:10:09Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  It was like a light switch. Now it's still hurt.

• 1:10:13Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  But that thought of, hey, I can't make it. Went away and I just turned into the whatever.

• 1:10:21Shawn Ryan?

  What was, I mean, I had a similar, I had a very similar moment right about the same timeframe. What kept, cause it sucks. It's hard.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  That's terrible.

• 1:10:31Shawn Ryan?

  I was, I was like 18 at the time and yeah, it was, it was the next night and I, I, I was, I was like, man, that bill's looking pretty good. I'm gonna bring it. A hot meal sounds amazing. And um, 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 wanna call my dad and tell him that I had failed. What, what was it? Does this go back to the basketball thing for you or?

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  Maybe a little bit. I, to be honest,

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  I never really wanted to quit.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  I just didn't think I was gonna make it.

• 1:11:20Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  You know, there were people, and, 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,

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  I didn't, like, that's where I want, I wanted to be there. I wanted to make it.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  And I did not want to go chip paint on the ship for four years. Yeah. 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 after. Again, like I thought my legs were like literally broken. Um, that told me I could.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  And then fast forward, I finished hell week of all the stupid things to get, to have trouble with drown proofing. Drown proofing? Drown proofing. You had, you were.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  I could not float. So I'll, 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. Hmm. And all the way down.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  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, I failed during, on test day. I failed and I put work into it. Is drown proofing pre hell week? So at least the final one is they give you a couple of chances. I know the final one's post hell week. Cause I went through hell week. I went right up to the last day of first phase and ended up failing this, failing this test. And I'd worked at it and I'd gotten it before. But this really taught me is one of the lessons of you know, difference between and I talk about this difference between amateur and a professional.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  And goes back to my daughter's like an amateur does something till they get it right. And 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. Cause 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 had to go in front of the seal board. I had 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 then I'd say, okay, we're going to give you a couple more months. Keep working on it.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  Whatever. And it was one instructor. One person is the only reason I made it. He goes, hey, he was the, the, oh, I see it first phase. He's like, run over the pool right now. I'm going to meet you there. Like I had that same exact problem. I'm going to show you how to do it.

• 1:15:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So he saw something in you.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:15:30Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wow. You know, I did. Did you have any type of imposter syndrome? Going through, I mean, I just for I remember showing up at eighteen, I was probably a buck forty soaking wet.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Shawn Ryan?

  And I remember all of the people that we had like two hundred and forty something people at the beginning. And I remember seeing in in there was another class going through hell week at the time, two, three, nine. And I just, I remember seeing just gargantuan men quitting. Guys that had come from marine special operations and in Olympic level water polo players. And I'm just like watching them quit. And I'm like, holy shit. Like I would did high school wrestling and these guys, this guy's already been to war and back and.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  It was crazy.

• 1:16:20Shawn Ryan?

  He quit.

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  It's crazy. I mean, the the instructors are first day. They pulled up the list of here are the fastest runners and the fastest swimmers and the and they go, who's number one? Hey, don't take this personally. You're in quit.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  Don't care. You're in quit. Every class. And it was, I was like, wow, um, 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 thirty three years old. And his body just could not recover at the speed of a twenty two or an eighteen year old. And I eighteen, I would have made it. I would have made it. I had to have those other life experiences. I had to really put work into basketball.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:33Shawn Ryan?

  What did it feel like you for you to graduate?

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  It felt really good, obviously. 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 2, which is based in Virginia Beach, SEAL delivery vehicle. So it specialized 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.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  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 wet suit was, I guess, beyond me, but that's where I was. And honestly, each step of my career

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

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

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  It was just, as a new guy getting an SDV team, like, man, 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 gonna do four years. I'm gonna do my service and I'm gonna get out. My very first deployment, so it was eighteen months or two years in. I leave T, I leave the SDV team. I go over to team two and I augment team six. So that, 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 of months.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  And that's what it felt like too. And so I go on this deployment and I show up and this is, I show up the very first day. I didn't even meet anybody. They're all in the T, they're all in the team room. And they're briefing this up.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  And the person that picked me up from the airfield walks me into the team room and I kinda just slide in and I'm looking around the table. And these are like men, right? These are beers, mid thirty, 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.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  And the team leader who's briefing the mission was going through the things like, I need somebody that can, I'll tell you.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  And everybody looks at you. And yeah, I mean, I have, I'm Greek, I have tans, 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?

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  And then he kinda doubled, does a double take. He's like, who the hell are you? And I'm like, ah, from team two. He's like, whatever, shut up. Stop talking. You're coming with me.

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  And so that was, that was my first op. And coming off of that deployment.

• 1:21:41Shawn Ryan?

  What were you doing?

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  We were just doing some low vis stuff in Bagram. I mean, it was pretty basic, running surveillance ahead of a a 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.

• 1:22:05Shawn Ryan?

  So you, so your first, your very first deployment overseas was with Dev Group?

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:22:12Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. So you didn't even have any, any.

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  Thrown right into the fire.

• 1:22:16Shawn Ryan?

  Experience to reference.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Right into the fire. Like, oh my gosh. But those guys were great. I mean, honestly.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Come back, go to green team. And green team's sort of the tryouts for SEALs. It's another six month selection process.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  I did not know that there is 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.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  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 into green team and said, I'm gonna leave it all out there. I am gonna make every single decision I can. I am going to make the hard cause. I'm gonna be in the front of the line. I'm gonna 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.

• 1:24:17Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's like, that's the exact opposite approach of everybody I know that has gone through there is be the gray man.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  It's pretty.

• 1:24:24Shawn Ryan?

  Stand out, don't be bad, don't be excellent, just be the gray man.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Well, I think by doing that, I was the gray man because I was never the, 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 then I'll give you a story is kind of illustrates it.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

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

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  And I take the shots and all I hear from the rafters is Mavrookas. Wow.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  And in my brain, I'm like, and I'm going home.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  So we finished the run, we come out. And they're like.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  And I'm expecting to get like lit up, they're gonna yell, scream, or do all these things and then they're gonna 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.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  But just don't do that again. I was like, okay. Check.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  They gave me a really interesting point. They had me go carry two 20 pound medicine balls.

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  We're not gonna be fucking with you in Afghanistan. Like, we're not gonna be with you there. Nobody's gonna be answering questions. You're the only one that took a shot, whether you should have or not, whatever.

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  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, that's what I took away was like, 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.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  So spend, spend five years at Dam Neck? And ended up transitioning in 2015? Any significant stuff you want to talk about while you were there?

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Then a bunch of deployments, 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 in 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. Um, 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, maybe you don't, you do not want to do that.

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  It was calm. So she, she did a lot to support me through all of that. Did five deployments, I think in five years, which was very, very busy. And then the last deployment, second, it might've been the second to last deployment,

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  was really the reason why I decided to get out. It wasn't because I didn't like the job anymore. And obviously you're like, 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.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  I was, I won't say where I was, but we were with a foreign unit predominantly. I was managing, it's like five or 600 foreign special forces soldiers in this outstation and

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  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 600, like SEAL Team Six just opened up the door of experiences. And so I'm on this deployment in this really shitty part of the world and

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  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 working with them, we're doing all these things. And then this bad guy that we've been tracking for

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  months pops up.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  And he's four miles from where we are on this mountain somewhere.

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  And we're like, great, let's go throw our stuff on, we'll go get them, we'll be back by dinner.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  And because of the political environment, we, being the US soldiers that were there, and my team, we couldn't leave the base. We did not get approval to leave the base.

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

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

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 1:32:24Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  And so they walk around for six hours.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  They can't find them, the guy gets away. And I was just like, you know what?

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  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 want it 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.

• 1:33:07Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, there was that. So you'd planned on possibly doing a full career?

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  I, 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

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  I hadn't made my mind up and that that just really made my mind up. I was like, okay, like, I'm gonna go start a new career. I'm gonna go get into business. I'm thirty four years old. Like, I'm just gonna go do it now because

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  everything has changed and the impact that I can have as an operator is what I felt at that time had been diminished. And it was the right time for me with family, physical stuff. Like, I look at guys, uh, two knee surgeries and two shoulder surgeries and do like, I never got to that point. I was getting close. And it was the, 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 eleven years was was my time.

• 1:34:21Shawn Ryan?

  What was the interest in business?

• 1:34:24Shawn Ryan?

  Where did that come from? Was that from a line of entrepreneurs?

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  No, you know, I, I, I always wanted to go back and get an MBA at some point. I don't, 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

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  I bought Google and Apple stock while on deployment in two thousand and eight. And it turns out if you bought stock in two thousand and eight, it just did really well. So I was like, oh, this finance thing's interesting. So I showed up to business, still completely naive and not knowing. I like, I didn't know which way it was up. I didn't know what I was talking about. And I, 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 recruited, we have companies coming on campus next week. You still apply for your internship.

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  And I'm like, whoa, whoa. I just got out of the military like two weeks ago. I had 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? And what is it? 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.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  And I got really, really interested in private equity for a couple of 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. It's 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.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  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 of 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, of like 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.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  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, I didn't realize how.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  It's difficult it would be to break into private equity from business school.

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  I I assumed like, I was just your team sex.

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  Right? I get I get any job I want. And I very quickly started interviewing and they're like, yeah, I don't.

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  I don't know what to do with you.

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  You don't know to go financial models. Yeah, I get your leadership, but.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  I can't put you in as a leader. You don't know to build financial models. Like what? There's a huge disconnect. And so I started talking to the career counselors and.

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  They were like, yeah, you can't go into private equity. There's a career path for private equity.

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  I was like, okay, well, what's that look like? Like, well, you have you have to go to investment banking first.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  I was like, why? Like, well, because you have to. I'm like, why? Like, you can't do it any other way. I was like, okay. So I went home and I'm telling my wife this story. And I was like, I gotta go. And she she actually knows me better than I know myself at some point. And she looks at me, 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.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  And so I was like, no, no, no, I didn't make up my mind. She's like, okay, you say whatever you want. And so. Sure enough. And I'm like, you know what? Screw this. I'm gonna go into private equity. I'm gonna 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 thirty tabs long. They're insane. And the first one I reverse engineered took me.

• 1:40:21Speaker 03

  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, re-typed 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.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  And I talked, 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.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  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, this is what I've been doing. These are all the things that I, 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, 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. It was fun. It was fun.

• 1:42:23Shawn Ryan?

  What is the, what is the difference between private equity and venture capital?

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  It's the stage of company and the amount of ownership that you're gonna take. So, venture capitalists 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 gonna take a bet.

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:43:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  And so venture capitalists are taking those bets early on, and their whole investment model is, look,

• 1:43:23Speaker 03

  90-ish percent of these companies aren't gonna work. So those are gonna go to zero. So I'm gonna go invest, whatever it is, let's say we have a billion dollar fund. I'm gonna invest $900 million into companies that go to zero.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  The other, call it, 7, 8, 9%, will give me my money back. Meaning they just do okay. And then there's 1% of companies that will just completely crush it. The Facebooks and Googles of the world, hopefully the Saronic 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.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  Private equity is on the other end of the spectrum. Where they're buying companies. And their whole model is to. Make a three X return. Off of every single company.

• 1:44:27Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  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, the company doesn't do as well as I thought it would do. I'd make. Two X. Or I'd get my money back. Or if it does really well, I make a four X. 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.

• 1:44:59Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so you are. Okay, so private equity, but you're basically. You're taking the damn near for sure bet. And.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:07Shawn Ryan?

  And. Jet launching the business. Through capital.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  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 pot of land and hoping a city develops around it.

• 1:45:22Shawn Ryan?

  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've done. I mean, how did you? How did you fare with all of that?

• 1:45:51Speaker 03

  It was hard. It was hard. I mean, if you look at it. On paper. And the accomplishments. 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 to, I know how to clear hallways and shoot guns.

• 1:46:24Speaker 03

  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, I'm like, really, I'm not, I'm not getting a job. And she was just laughing, maybe like, you're out of your mind. I'm like, no, seriously, I'm being, I'm being serious. So there's all this stress that, looking back on it, I would have, I would have liked to just know that it would have been okay, right? And I think I put a lot, 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, like, how long this transition would really take. Mm hmm.

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  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

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  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. Like, I can do it. He can see, if he can keep going after four surgeries and being in an explode, like, I should keep going. And that's not necessarily the right attitude. And I, I love that you said post-traumatic stress and not post-traumatic stress disorder, because it's not really a 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,

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  for too long, I didn't think that my military career affected the way that I 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, right? I came out, I went, I'll never forget this. I went to the VA and did my whole like VA offboarding 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. Not used to hearing crazy stories. So you get out of that environment.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  And I go to the VA doctor and he's like, yeah, just tell me your, tell me your combat history.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

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

• 1:49:02Speaker 03

  And he almost falls out of his chair.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  And he's 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 telling you a story.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  He's like, yeah, we're going through these steps. And I was like, okay, okay. 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 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 team is 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 business school,

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  I didn't want anything to do with the military. I was like, I'm, I'm done here.

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  Checked out. I didn't even want to join the vets club. Didn't want to hang out with that. I wanted to go a complete opposite direction. And then little by little, I just

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  realizing, okay, that's my close friend. Okay, this is what I care. Okay. This is what I relate to. 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.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  You just mentioned.

• 1:50:41Shawn Ryan?

  Basically, you're talking about the competitiveness within the teams and measuring yourself against the guy next to you. And I think a lot, you know, that 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?

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  Being the best that you can be.

• 1:51:15Speaker 03

  Right? And I'm not saying, and I'm not saying measure yourself against others in the sense of don't compete. Competition's healthy. And I think a certain level of competition in the teams. I actually think that's the best form of competition where

• 1:51:34Speaker 03

  you're my buddy. I will literally give my life to protect you.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  But I also want to beat you at everything.

• 1:51:45Speaker 03

  And that makes everybody in the team better. Where I think it becomes unhealthy is the

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  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 is probably the right thing to do. Right? I did it. We had like, it was like, it's game time. We're gonna deal with this later. Right? But then go get it dealt with.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  And same, your brain's the same way. And I think we just, as a community, underappreciated both of those things.

• 1:52:52Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:52:59Shawn Ryan?

  Is then.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:53:01Shawn Ryan?

  It took, it took me a minute to figure this out, you know, just even though our businesses are obviously very different. You know, I, 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

• 1:53:37Shawn Ryan?

  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, 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.

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  Hundred, it's and in anything in life, in sports, you, you come in like you, there's a thing, you play to the level of your competition. And that's where you're going to step your game up to. And hundred percent, when I was in private equity, I wasn't competing against my peers uh, 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, how do I get better than them? How do I learn from them? Um, and now it's same thing in the business world. It's, I look at other CEOs, other business leaders.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  Work with Joe Lonzo a lot, who I know we talked about, how do I get to be that good? Right? How do I have that level of insight across that many different things that can drive this company into a truly, truly generational company?

• 1:54:53Shawn Ryan?

  When did you figure that out?

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:55:02Speaker 03

  Sometime after business school and before Saronic. 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.

• 1:55:14Speaker 03

  Every other vet going to recruiter, trying to find a job, you're kind of, you are kind of competing in that vet's network community. And it feels like you're, you're part of it was just. Getting out of that, going into private equity, but then also not doing that for a year or two. Like I, 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. And you talk 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.

• 1:55:56Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  And I'm like. Trying to remember what the revenue was on the company, the meeting we let us 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 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. And now I'm. 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.

• 1:56:40Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, do you believe in limitations?

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Shawn Ryan?

  You do.

• 1:56:46Speaker 03

  I think everybody has limitations, physical limitations and mental limitations.

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  I, 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, I'm just not.

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:57:16Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:57:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:57:31Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  Under two and a half years, yeah.

• 1:57:39Shawn Ryan?

  Two and a half years. I mean, to me, that proves it right there. Just another person that is.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:58:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  But this is, this is truly what I'm meant to be doing. And when you look at the decision to start Saronic, 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 gonna 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.

• 1:58:48Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:58:56Speaker 03

  that's what I want to dedicate my talents to. And I didn't know anything else than that.

• 1:59:06Shawn Ryan?

  Another question.

• 1:59:09Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 1:59:21Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:59:23Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:59:28Speaker 03

  No, the dream was there, right? We wanted to build a really big company, but big so that could have an impact, right? Because you want to have a really big impact and to be have a really big impact, you have to be a big company.

• 1:59:42Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:58Speaker 03

  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 this trajectory that we're on. And one of my, one of my favorite quotes, I think it's Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, one of those two, said, we always over, we

• 2:00:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  How fast we move is completely remarkable.

• 2:00:53Shawn Ryan?

  What do you attribute that to?

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  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, Endroll, 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.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  Ray Tonsick from Caffeinated Capital. Catherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz, runs their American Dynamism Practice. Alad 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, for the pace of government contracting,

• 2:02:23Speaker 03

  so that we can get solutions into 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, and 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 and on certain places

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  where they've been very, very risk adverse, to start changing that culture.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  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 the ability to bring those three things together, world-class team, incredible investors with a lot of capital, like we.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  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 bullshit problem that we gotta go solve for them.

• 2:04:01Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:04:09Shawn Ryan?

  How did you come up with Saronic? And the conversations that you had with your wife when you decided to leave private equity?

• 2:04:18Speaker 03

  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 think I need to figure out who this quote is from.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  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."

• 2:04:51Speaker 03

  And it was pretty powerful. And so

• 2:04:57Speaker 03

  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

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  the kind of like all in mindset. And that's what I need. When I go after things 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 gotta be all in.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  So I went in thinking I was gonna 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, I'm getting promoted, I'm doing the things, everything's looking great. And I walk into the living room and I'm like, I have to quit.

• 2:06:08Speaker 03

  She looks at me.

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  And then I could just, she wanted to say like, get out of my face.

• 2:06:17Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have two kids at this point?

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  Two kids, oh yeah, this is in 2020, this is early 22, so my kids are

• 2:06:25Speaker 03

  seven and six? Seven and six, yeah. And we're living in Austin and we have a house and do I have all the thing? And so it's like, I have to quit, she's like,

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  okay, tell me why? And I go, well, I'm gonna go build a defense tech company.

• 2:06:48Speaker 03

  And she goes, that sounds great, that sounds really exciting.

• 2:06:54Speaker 03

  What is your, what does your company do? And I go, oh, really? It builds technology for defense.

• 2:07:05Speaker 03

  And I was like, 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.

• 2:07:17Speaker 03

  And so she heard me out.

• 2:07:21Speaker 03

  And as always, she supported me, which is incredible. And we came up with a plan and was like, look, here's, 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 gonna 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, 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.

• 2:08:07Speaker 03

  Well, first that was, I thought I was gonna take like a couple of 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 Lonzal. How did you guys meet? So Joe and I met.

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  2020 is timeframe. 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.

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  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 workout 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.

• 2:09:11Speaker 03

  So it was just. Nice guy, cool to go to. So.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  Fast forward, quit my job. I wanted these breakfasts. He's like, what do you have going on? I'm like, oh, I like, I quit Vista and. I'm gonna 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?

• 2:09:36Speaker 03

  And I've learned from the conversation, I go, no, no, don't ask me any questions. Cause I don't know. I'm not pitching anything. I don't know what it and he goes, no, no, no. That's perfect.

• 2:09:50Speaker 03

  Come join APC. Let's build this together. Let us support you. It's your company. It's your thesis. It's your idea, everything. He's like, use our resources. Use me as a mentor. Use me as 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. Right? 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.

• 2:10:32Speaker 03

  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 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 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.

• 2:11:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  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 this isn't a big enough problem to be a big company or have a big impact.

• 2:12:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:12:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  And of course, two team guys sitting there with a six pack say, oh, I bet I could put some explosives in that. That'd be a cool product.

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  And so I'm like, well, would it be?

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:13:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:13:22Speaker 03

  I'm like, why aren't there any autonomous boats at these conferences?

• 2:13:27Speaker 03

  And so I just walk over and I look at, I'm like, okay, well, we're just, we're just the boats. Right? And you'll, you'll appreciate this. So I walk up to the Zodiac booth.

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  And you know Zodiacs, the little speedboats we use in the SEAL teams with the outboard motor, carries six people.

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  They look like they're from Vietnam, like 1970s technology.

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  And you're always, the motor's never starting. It's always, 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.

• 2:14:10Speaker 03

  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?"

• 2:14:28Speaker 03

  And he goes, "Oh, they're actually different companies. That's Zodiac, big Zodiac. This is Zodiac Milpro. 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."

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:15:05Speaker 03

  And a lot of it has been

• 2:15:08Speaker 03

  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?" And I didn't see it.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  So then the second question I had to ask was like,

• 2:15:32Speaker 03

  "Does anybody care that this company doesn't exist? Or like, does it matter? Because it's okay to have a gap in the market. The question's like,

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  "Is that gap gonna 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's no, that's okay, then I just don't want to start this company, because then it doesn't matter.

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  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, there just isn't another choice. We have to move in this direction. We have to augment our fleet with autonomous ships. We, boats and ships, we have to,

• 2:16:27Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 2:16:52Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:16:54Speaker 03

  And they built their military solutions specifically to counter the US. We are their focus.

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  And

• 2:17:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:17:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:17:39Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think we are China's focus?

• 2:17:44Speaker 03

  Because we're the global power, right? Anytime you're on top, people are trying to take you down. And that, that's just anything. That's life, that's sports. People are, it's competition, right? And that's been happening since the beginning of human civilization.

• 2:18:03Speaker 03

  And the other thing is, like, 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 the United States.

• 2:18:21Speaker 03

  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, imagine that 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.

• 2:19:06Speaker 03

  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 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 projects, we don't want to live in that world. Right? That's not a good world. A world where the US is not the predominant superpower is 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.

• 2:19:53Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:20:06Speaker 03

  You just start building. That's...

• 2:20:11Speaker 03

  How you an elephant? Eat an elephant one bite at a time. So we had the capital. Next thing was founding team. Who's gonna actually build this thing? And when you talk about how that actually came together? Again, there's 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 Altekar, who's our chief technology officer, and then Rob Lehman, who's our chief commercial officer. What are their backgrounds?

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  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

• 2:21:25Speaker 03

  two weeks before? We were like getting ready to start Saronic. And so I got introduced to him in Austin. Wheeling 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, got 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.

• 2:21:58Speaker 03

  Vib was from Andorl. So he was in Andorl has, I don't know. Who knows now? 5,000 employees? He was employee 22 or 23. He ran software, computer vision, sensor fusion, across their product line. 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 Rob, I'll get into Rob's background. So it was me, Doug and Rob.

• 2:22:32Speaker 03

  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 gonna go. Like how are we gonna find this person? And he goes, oh, I got the guy. And I'm like, yeah, 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, he's like, this guy is brilliant. Brilliant.

• 2:23:17Speaker 03

  Phenomenal software engineer, able to art, like, 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 gonna be 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.

• 2:24:01Speaker 03

  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, we're having beers, whatever. And then six months later, he actually ran his own consulting company, which helps small businesses contract with government. He has this phenomenal background where he worked at large prime, was a registered lobbyist. So you can talk about like how we understood how to lobby, how we understood how to navigate the hell, how we understood how to navigate the government ecosystem. Rob. Rob lived it for 25 years. Right?

• 2:24:47Speaker 03

  Here's the piece that gets left out and then 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.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  John Lehman in the 1980s under Reagan. Now, and John's an advisor to us now.

• 2:25:08Speaker 03

  It's not saying like, hey, his uncle's why we're successful. But here's a person that I met on a hunting trip that grew up inside 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.

• 2:25:32Speaker 03

  So, once we had the team in place, I was like, let's just start building. All right. And we had a very,

• 2:25:41Speaker 03

  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. 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. He was our third employee. Runs our manufacturing.

• 2:26:21Speaker 03

  The first question I asked, I asked him was, John, we don't even have a design for a prototype yet.

• 2:26:30Speaker 03

  Why are we hiring ahead of, why do we need ahead 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.

• 2:26:52Speaker 03

  Insanely talented guy. I'm like,

• 2:26:55Speaker 03

  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 eighteen months, when you build your first prototype, you're screwed. You're having to start all over again. You're going to have to put the processes in place. You're going to 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.

• 2:27:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:28:06Speaker 03

  An $800 raft, they put $30,000 of cameras and sensors and batteries and a motor, and they turned this thing into a autonomous boat. Like, we just need something. We have to start programming.

• 2:28:18Speaker 03

  The hardware is going to take six months. We're going to start programming in the interim.

• 2:28:23Speaker 03

  Went to Amazon. That was built in like three weeks.

• 2:28:28Speaker 03

  And we're building out the software platform that's going to power all of our hardware platforms. And we, I'm not, 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

• 2:28:52Speaker 03

  It was a derma 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. This is the speed that the United States needs to be building at. And he loved it.

• 2:29:20Speaker 03

  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, 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

• 2:30:01Speaker 03

  from June of 23 to December of 23. And then we're producing at 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, 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,

• 2:30:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:30:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:31:39Speaker 03

  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, right? 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.

• 2:32:18Speaker 03

  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. Bringing the rigor and the processes back into manufacturing to let us scale. That really changed the game for the United States and our allies. Genius. How did you come up with the name Saronic?

• 2:32:53Speaker 03

  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 uh, we were looking for names and naming something new isn't, isn't easy. So we're searching for what, 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.

• 2:33:34Speaker 03

  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. Um, 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. I'm like, this is such a cool story, but we can't name the company Salamis. You just can't.

• 2:34:13Speaker 03

  And my wife goes, name it Saronic. And I think I'm like, nah, 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.

• 2:34:31Speaker 03

  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, for the company. It stands for everything we believe in. You know, the Greeks protected democracy for the world and that's, that's what we're doing at Saronic.

• 2:34:50Shawn Ryan?

  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, and what you're going to grow into and probably a lot more about China and, and, and our shipbuilding capabilities currently without Saronic. So.

• 2:35:09Speaker 03

  Sounds good.

• 2:35:13Speaker 01

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• 2:35:51Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 2:36:07Speaker 03

  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, okay, does anybody actually care? And it 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.

• 2:36:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:37:01Shawn Ryan?

  What are the... We'll get into that. What are these boats capable of? Actually, let me, let me, Brian, let me rewind here. Twenty-five foot vessels. Is that, that's what you started with? Why?

• 2:37:17Speaker 03

  We started with a six foot.

• 2:37:19Shawn Ryan?

  You started with a six foot?

• 2:37:20Speaker 03

  Six foot, so a half the size of a jet ski. Then we built the fourteen foot. Then we built the twenty-four foot. So our twenty-four foot vessel, Corsair, thousand nautical mile range, thousand pound payload capacity. And the capabilities are, you 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, the concepts of operations can move just as quickly.

• 2:38:03Speaker 03

  But to talk about kind of like what those platforms are capable, I just kind of spit out some, 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 platform is actually designed for defense and commercial applications that we discussed earlier, right? Whether it's military, or whether it's coast guard, port 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.

• 2:38:44Speaker 03

  Why is that so important? Why do we have to be dual? 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 cost down for the military. So you're building a tradable platforms and talking about defeating China. Cost is a big component.

• 2:39:27Speaker 03

  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 has 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.

• 2:40:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:40:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:41:24Speaker 03

  All that's done through software.

• 2:41:26Shawn Ryan?

  So one person can control up to a hundred boats?

• 2:41:29Speaker 03

  More, more. There's no, there's really no upper limit on how many boats you'll be able to control with our software.

• 2:41:36Shawn Ryan?

  Now, how, how would they do that? Does that mean that they always operate in some type of a formation? Or can, can the, what would you call them? The controller?

• 2:41:47Speaker 03

  The controller, yeah.

• 2:41:49Shawn Ryan?

  Or can they, can they operate independently of themselves with one controller?

• 2:41:54Speaker 03

  You can, you mean like single boats? You can operate one to one or you can operate one to many. And what that means, 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 and 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.

• 2:42:36Speaker 03

  Right? And that's when the controls become very easy because you don't have to say, hey, this boat, this was what used to happen. There's, there's kind of like two ways that autonomy developed. One is with simply way, and autonomy in maritime. 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.

• 2:43:02Speaker 03

  And then the sensors are something completely different.

• 2:43:06Speaker 03

  That doesn't scale with five boats or 10 boats. 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, as a human. I can't plan the route for each and every boat. I just want to say, go into this area.

• 2:43:27Speaker 03

  If you see big Chinese ships coming at you, do this and let me know. Right? So you have a hundred boats that each know where each other are. They're not gonna crash into each other. They're all working. They're all saying, okay, let's separate the environment this way. I'm gonna search over here. You're gonna search over here. We're all looking for this. Okay, I found it. Okay, ten boats surround it. The other ninety split off. They keep searching. Again, we're just using a hundred as a round number because it's easy. But it's how an operator controls a mission, not an asset.

• 2:44:04Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Okay, so

• 2:44:08Shawn Ryan?

  because I 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.

• 2:44:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:21Shawn Ryan?

  And so if you have a hundred six-foot boats in the water, and let's say they come across a, I don't know, a Chinese frigate.

• 2:44:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:44:33Shawn Ryan?

  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 a L ambush.

• 2:44:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:44:45Shawn Ryan?

  On the ship.

• 2:44:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:44:47Shawn Ryan?

  Do you just, excuse me, do you tell the, do you tell the the boats to form up in an L ambush, or do you actually tell each boat where to go? Does am, do I making sense here?

• 2:45:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. All the human operator does is say authorize to attack.

• 2:45:11Shawn Ryan?

  That's it.

• 2:45:12Speaker 03

  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, but then the system of boats and the software running that. And let's use, let's use that example. There's a Chinese ship coming across the strait. You have a hundred boats that identify it, right? The

• 2:45:38Speaker 03

  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 have identified the target.

• 2:45:50Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:45:50Speaker 03

  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're both split up, how they attack. All this is programmed in software.

• 2:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  So I mean, how does it know how to do that? I mean, like I said, I have zero experience, you know, with with naval combat operations on the sea.

• 2:46:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:40Shawn Ryan?

  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 hostages over there or the bad guys are over here. They're they're never going to maneuver in the exact same way.

• 2:46:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:58Shawn Ryan?

  And I would think that that naval skirmishes are

• 2:47:03Speaker 03

  They'll never be the same. They'll never be the same, but it's the same type of technology.

• 2:47:07Shawn Ryan?

  So if somebody has to put those scenarios into that AI platform.

• 2:47:12Speaker 03

  Well, they'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 it's the same technology that's in like a Tesla self-driving car.

• 2:47:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:47:27Speaker 03

  Right? The road is never the same any two times that that car's on the road. You know, a person might come out, a biker might come from here or some But the car, the, 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 like 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.

• 2:48:08Shawn Ryan?

  So how do you get a baseline? I mean, do you just war game thousands and thousands of different areas?

• 2:48:14Speaker 03

  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, that it's gonna be what the Navy needs when the Navy needs it.

• 2:48:44Shawn Ryan?

  What is the, I mean, we're gonna put a, a, we're gonna 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?

• 2:48:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it goes down, it comes back to range and payload capacity. So the six foot boat has thirty nautical mile range with a forty pound payload capacity. The fourteen foot boat has a three hundred nautical mile range with a two hundred pound payload capacity. And our twenty four foot boat has a thousand nautical mile range with a thousand pound payload capacity. So that's how far it can go and that's how much you can carry. If you think about the mission sets that a thousand nautical miles actually opens up and how capable our twenty four foot platform is, it's actually mind blowing. Right? The speedboats that we use in the SEAL teams. They had a four or five hundred, I forget the range actually.

• 2:49:44Speaker 03

  But even if you're going twenty or thirty knots for eight hours.

• 2:49:50Speaker 03

  You're going 240 miles at 30 knots for eight hours. Right? That's a quarter of the range where our. You don't want to be on a boat for eight hours just to go 200. Like, 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 sea state and everything else where we were operating with SEAL teams, doing, doing some testing and

• 2:50:23Speaker 03

  the boats that they use couldn't keep up with our boats.

• 2:50:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:50:26Speaker 03

  Because there was no human that had to take the shock load coming off of a six foot wave. So the capabilities opened up dramatically. And going back to earlier, without getting into too specific of any concepts of a con ops or anything. 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, right? What that means is you can put any payload you want. Sensors, electronic warfare, kinetic capabilities. You 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.

• 2:51:12Speaker 03

  That's why we built it so modularly. 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. You gotta be able to swap it out.

• 2:51:27Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of kinetic capabilities do these have?

• 2:51:30Speaker 03

  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. 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 building things that are going to protect this country. And that is.

• 2:51:59Speaker 03

  One of the things I was really, really clear about upfront and it drove a lot of the culture within our company. You know, I, I told people like, look, if you don't want to invest in boat, a boat that might blow up one day, like this is in 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 boycott the company. Like, that's not what we're building.

• 2:52:28Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:52:29Speaker 03

  So modular platform and literally anything can go on it. We've done aerial drone. Like, it's just endless.

• 2:52:36Shawn Ryan?

  How are they fueled?

• 2:52:38Speaker 03

  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 fuels 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 everything diesel is really the primary fuel source.

• 2:53:10Shawn Ryan?

  Man, this is, I mean,

• 2:53:15Shawn Ryan?

  so on 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,

• 2:53:23Speaker 03

  Keep out.

• 2:53:24Shawn Ryan?

  Do not keep out. It'll be autonomous unmanned. It'll be six foot boats that are patrolling our seas.

• 2:53:33Speaker 03

  Six feet, 14 feet, 24 feet and on up. Right? Um, you know, think of the 24 foot boat. We have eight cameras on it. 360 degree view perception built into the autonomy. It's just the complete, complete awareness of the environment.

• 2:53:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:54:30Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 2:54:41Speaker 03

  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. Put it in the shipping container, ship it wherever you want, push it out of the back, off it goes. You know, um, and so you gotta think about that stuff. You gotta think, how do these platforms, whether it's 24 foot boat or now 150 foot ship?

• 2:55:25Speaker 03

  How's 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, if that's its mission, how does it get there? Too many people in industry like hand wave that problem. Like, oh, I'm just gonna make cool stuff. And this is a government's problem, they'll go figure it out. Or I'm gonna go make something cool and it's gonna go 50 miles.

• 2:55:58Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:56:00Speaker 03

  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, even our six foot boat, and I'll be the first person to know, even our six foot boat that has a 30 nautical mile range, it's like, what are the use, what are the real use cases for that? Right? It might not be certain con ops in the Indo-Pacific, because 30 nautical miles, this isn't enough.

• 2:56:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:57:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:04Speaker 03

  It's just not that easy.

• 2:57:06Shawn Ryan?

  But 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, like a beefed up C seventeen or C one thirty.

• 2:57:18Speaker 03

  It was like a seven thirty seven and all the drones.

• 2:57:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, all the, the doors open and the drones all carries up to a hundred drones, I think I read. You know, that, that, and so I was just, it just popped in my mind on how, how logistically will we get the boats where we need them, not just on our shores.

• 2:57:38Speaker 03

  It is something we put a lot of thought and energy into. And as a company and as a country, we need to figure, going back to the Cuba example, right? We're fighting, we could be fighting something in their backyard, it's our backyard. How do we get it all there? How do we make sure we have the superiority? 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.

• 2:58:22Speaker 03

  If China wakes up and they're like, you know what?

• 2:58:26Speaker 03

  We're gonna win today.

• 2:58:30Speaker 03

  That's gonna be a bad day, cuz that's the day they're actually gonna pick the fight. So our job's to help avoid that.

• 2:58:37Shawn Ryan?

  What kinda stuff can these detect?

• 2:58:40Shawn Ryan?

  Can they detect subs?

• 2:58:42Speaker 03

  I mean, you can detect anything that you you can put any sensor on the platform. That, and if you talk about how how anti-submarine warfare is done today, it's pretty archaic. Right? A helicopter or 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

• 2:59:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:59:53Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 3:00:09Speaker 03

  Well, the autonomous vehicles themselves can be the logistical vehicles, right? Our our hundred and

• 3:00:15Shawn Ryan?

  Going.

• 3:00:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, our 150-foot ship can carry cargo containers, right? Two 40-foot, fully loaded cargo containers. And 150 feet's not gonna 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. You can carry containers of our boats. You 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?

• 3:00:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:01:10Speaker 03

  So you have to solve this problem with autonomy. And going back to the the shipbuilding discrepancy with 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.

• 3:01:51Speaker 03

  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?

• 3:02:17Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 3:03:01Speaker 03

  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,

• 3:03:33Speaker 03

  sensors, payload, and a computer. That's it.

• 3:03:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I remember that. 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, about having kind of a, you know, half autonomous, have a little bit of, uh, have a small amount of humans on and, and you were totally against that. And, 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.

• 3:04:11Speaker 03

  All the things.

• 3:04:12Shawn Ryan?

  Stuff that you, that really, I mean, it all just becomes obsolete.

• 3:04:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:04:18Shawn Ryan?

  Which saves you a ton of weight, I would imagine as well.

• 3:04:22Speaker 03

  More importantly, 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, like, we're building a hundred and fifty foot ship.

• 3:04:37Speaker 03

  I want to know the water by the end of the year.

• 3:04:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:04:40Speaker 03

  Right? We have an eight or nine month development cycle. Like that's, and that's on our first prototype. We're trying to get this down to weeks and then have multiple production lines. 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.

• 3:05:19Speaker 03

  We're we're targeting fifty a year at that at that shipyard, which in and of itself is this massive step up. Yeah, and we just stopped twenty twenty three was a net negative four. Net negative, and we built nine ships the whole year. You know, we have a plan to retire nineteen over the next twenty four months. So we keep going down. And the United States, this is an interesting thought. So the United States has two hundred and ninety six ships in its fleet. We're actually passed by the Chinese four years ago in terms of fleet count.

• 3:05:53Speaker 03

  We have a stated goal. We had a stated goal of three hundred and fifty five ships. That goal is increased to three hundred and eighty one last year, even though we keep declining and can't execute on the three fifty five that we had for ten years.

• 3:06:10Speaker 03

  Assuming that we could execute on it.

• 3:06:14Speaker 03

  There's a thirty year plan.

• 3:06:19Speaker 03

  That'll cost the taxpayer one point two trillion dollars or forty billion dollars a year. To execute on that plan that we can't execute anyway. But that's the shipbuilding plan. That's how you get from two hundred and ninety six just to three hundred and eighty one.

• 3:06:37Speaker 03

  Imagine how many autonomous ships that you can have.

• 3:06:41Speaker 03

  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 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 another like I was on the news. He said, yeah, the Chinese can take out all our aircraft carriers in twenty minutes with their hypersonic missiles.

• 3:07:20Speaker 03

  So here's all the facts. Like, that's the Secretary of Defense. That's not me making up a number.

• 3:07:27Speaker 03

  Here's the shipbuilding. Here's why if we lose an aircraft carrier, forget about the five thousand people for a second.

• 3:07:34Speaker 03

  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 to do that. No longer should we send people if we have the opportunity to send a robot, whether it's a robotic ship, whether it's a robotic plane. Like, we have a responsibility to keep people safe.

• 3:08:07Speaker 03

  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 through. 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. And let's have them controlling thousands of autonomous boats and ships and everything else that are patrolling the waters and overwhelming our adversaries.

• 3:08:48Shawn Ryan?

  Would you guys build the weapon systems that will go on these?

• 3:08:54Speaker 03

  TBD. Who knows? At the pace that we're moving, I think going to your way, 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

• 3:09:15Speaker 03

  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 we 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. Two hundred and thirty 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.

• 3:09:58Speaker 03

  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 Saronic, taking the United States from 100,000 to 10 million and 100,000. Wow.

• 3:10:37Speaker 03

  You're talking about taking the deficit with Chinese from 230 to one to like two and a quarter to one. 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, we want to win. We want to beat them. We want to create that deterrence so that they're like, yeah, why don't I pick that fight today? Right? That's the capability we need in this country.

• 3:11:17Speaker 03

  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's had a space program, this, you know, SpaceX, 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.

• 3:11:58Speaker 03

  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 gonna 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

• 3:12:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:12:53Shawn Ryan?

  I mean I love it I think that the was it the big five five you know they've monopolized the entire defense industry and so you know 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 gonna put a major dent in their pockets I would imagine.

• 3:13:29Speaker 03

  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 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 Serrana can do it and that's okay there should be other people in the market doing things like the government shouldn't shut down the Navy shouldn't stop and say hey Dino tells a great story we're good they're gonna reinvent shipbuilding and everybody all stop Serrano's got it no.

• 3:14:16Speaker 03

  Who's gonna be in the pudding? Who's gonna actually go and do it? Who's gonna put their money where their mouth is? And who's gonna execute? I tell you, we are. So the only thing we ever ask 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.

• 3:14:37Shawn Ryan?

  Creates the competitive vest.

• 3:14:38Speaker 03

  But

• 3:14:40Speaker 03

  don't create a monop- a monopolistic environment where things are awarded without competition. Just let us compete fairly. And if a prime beats us, and you wanna go buy that ship?

• 3:14:56Speaker 03

  You should do that. That's what the coun- what is best for the country?

• 3:15:00Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:15:01Speaker 03

  The best for, the best thing for the country is having an open competition. Seeing who can actually do it. Who can stand behind what they were gonna say? And I'll tell you,

• 3:15:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:15:38Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:15:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:15:51Shawn Ryan?

  Back to the kinetic capabilities of these boats. I mean, it doesn't sound like right now that you are manufacturing and designing new weapon systems that will go on these boats, which, which means you must know what ship capabilities have, or, or what, what kind of a kinetic?

• 3:16:13Shawn Ryan?

  Tech goes on the ships or or weapon systems or or whatnot. So

• 3:16:20Shawn Ryan?

  you would you would have to know because I'm I mean, 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?

• 3:16:34Speaker 03

  Yes and no. Yes and no. It goes back to the modularity of it. Right? As long as you have in your your example, like weapon systems, what weapon systems can you put on the boat? We basically say, like, it's 24 feet long. Here's the length of our payload bay. Here's the width of our payload bay, and it can carry 1,000 pounds.

• 3:17:01Speaker 03

  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 the various customers and weapon system. We talk to the military.

• 3:17:17Speaker 03

  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,

• 3:17:35Speaker 03

  both hardware and software. So not only do you have to integrate from a hardware perspective, which we 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,

• 3:18:01Speaker 03

  what's the point? So that's why we made the platforms modular. That's why we focus on software first. So I focus on a very universally designed hardware 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.

• 3:18:16Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. So would you would?

• 3:18:18Speaker 03

  I don't think the military, I don't think the military knows for that matter.

• 3:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Probably not.

• 3:18:22Speaker 03

  Right? Because again, we're just starting to use autonomous systems on the battlefield. It's just, it's just, we're just scratching the surface of it.

• 3:18:29Shawn Ryan?

  Would Saronic be the one that does the modifications to the ships to, to place?

• 3:18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 3:18:34Shawn Ryan?

  We would do. Because I mean, you have, basically, you have a, for lack of a better term, you have a cookie cutter product.

• 3:18:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:18:41Shawn Ryan?

  Right? That can be manufactured in record time. Lots of them within a year. You get that, you, you sell, let's just say, fifty, fifty ships.

• 3:18:52Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:18:52Shawn Ryan?

  To the US 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, 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?

• 3:19:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:19:18Shawn Ryan?

  That kind of stuff.

• 3:19:19Speaker 03

  So.

• 3:19:23Speaker 03

  We try to keep the engineering work out of the government's hands.

• 3:19:28Speaker 03

  Not saying they're bad engineers, but they're, 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, that sort of, that, that side of the business works, right? You, we talked about the large primes a lot and, 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 Saronic. And, you know, we're not really tied into, this is how it has to happen.

• 3:20:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:20:28Speaker 03

  You could build a thousand boats, but if your integrations aren't set up to say, and 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 Saronic way.

• 3:21:02Shawn Ryan?

  When it comes to the AI that, that, you know, the, the, the brain of the vessel, is that inside the vessel or does it live outside of it?

• 3:21:14Speaker 03

  Both. So there's, there's a brain, like the brain of the vessel lives in the boat.

• 3:21:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:21:19Speaker 03

  So it's critical. It is absolutely critical. And I'm going to hammer this point like, the intelligence of the platform and the mission capability has to live at the edge. And let me, 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 the and what are we building at Saronic? Men in the loop, think of a remote control. So this is your, this is your predator drone. This is, it's actually one, it's actually many to one. So it's the opposite of what we're building.

• 3:21:59Speaker 03

  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 the humans control in everything. It's just, they're just not actually in the cockpit. They're in a Conex box in, Conex 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?

• 3:22:44Speaker 03

  That are all collecting information. The information is processed at the edge. Then pass 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 want to be clear, humans always have control.

• 3:23:28Speaker 03

  Humans are making decisions where they go. It's just how far along the, where in the kill chain are you putting approval processes? Mm hmm. Then there's men out of the loop, which means like the autonomous systems just alone and unafraid and doing whatever it wants. And we actually have these types of systems, like our ages weapon systems on our destroyers. That are for incoming air defense. Like those are out of the loop. You've said 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. We're gonna shoot them down. Right? And you can imagine if an aerial threat, if a missile was coming in.

• 3:24:11Speaker 03

  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. Usually, 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, the AI living on the edge is so critical.

• 3:24:39Speaker 03

  It's 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 communication jamming. Mm hmm. 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 with from the joystick to the platform, go dead. Mm hmm. And now that's rendered useless.

• 3:25:19Speaker 03

  So you need autonomous systems with intelligence, living at the edge, that don't require constant connectivity, back to a satellite or a 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.

• 3:26:01Speaker 03

  And that's why, that's fundamentally why man in the loop just does not work. Now, the difference between man on the loop and man 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?

• 3:26:31Speaker 03

  No. No.

• 3:26:34Speaker 03

  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 whose 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 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

• 3:27:10Speaker 03

  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, 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 just like, you're basically just approving the entire kill chain at the beginning of the mission.

• 3:27:50Speaker 03

  Is that really, I actually, look, I understand the, the need to have the approval process baked in. But when you get into com, I mean, you've watched ISR feeds. You've seen how crappy they are. You've seen what kind of like smokes the Nick. 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, a

• 3:28:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:28:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:28:43Speaker 03

  Right? Those are the types of autonomy and that's how they're employed on the battlefield.

• 3:28:47Shawn Ryan?

  How simple would it be for China to hack an entire fleet?

• 3:28:51Speaker 03

  You really can't. We're focused on cybersecurity. We use military-grade encryption. When you're operating 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 has a nation-state. They've been hacking into companies to steal secrets for years. Like, that's not a, that's

• 3:29:33Speaker 03

  a well-known fact. That's, so we have to think about not just how do we protect our solution, our products in the water, and we talk about how we do that, government standards and encryption and everything else, but how do we, how do we protect the company?

• 3:29:50Speaker 03

  Because the Chinese 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, they might do that. Right? So we have to make sure that we're protected 360 degrees, product, company, infrastructure, people. I mean, myself and the entire leadership team were, um...

• 3:30:29Speaker 03

  What's the word I'm looking for? We're basically banned from China. I forget, I'm, forget I'm blanking on the word. But we put out, they put out a, our company and our leadership team is basically banned from China.

• 3:30:44Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:30:45Speaker 03

  I know, I was like, what the hell, what the hell took them so long? But if I, if I took a trip to Beijing right now, it would probably be a one-way trip with a lot of questions.

• 3:30:57Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 3:31:24Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:31:25Shawn Ryan?

  No?

• 3:31:25Speaker 03

  No. It would, for a few reasons, for a few reasons. One, and then I'll talk about two. One is, it'd be, 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, is like, we have hardware-software co-design, where our software engineers are picking all of, like, the engines with our hardware engineers.

• 3:32:10Speaker 03

  Like, yeah, okay, I can, 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, we need manned ships. We still need the Navy ships that we have.

• 3:32:36Shawn Ryan?

  Why do we need manned ships?

• 3:32:37Speaker 03

  Well, China's not the only adversary we're facing, and it's not...

• 3:32:45Speaker 03

  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. December 7th, 1941. Pearl Harbor.

• 3:33:02Speaker 03

  Before December 7th, the center of naval warfare revolved around the battleship.

• 3:33:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:33:27Speaker 03

  Air, eight different squadrons of aircraft, anywhere in the world where we don't have a base and project power. Mm hmm. That's important. But we could do that with drones.

• 3:33:39Speaker 03

  Do that with drones.

• 3:33:42Speaker 03

  We don't, right now, we need people. It is man and unmanned teaming. And I don't think over the next, call it.

• 3:33:54Speaker 03

  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. Mm hmm. Right? And I, 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 "and" conversation. We need this and this. Where it becomes an "or" conversation is really like, okay.

• 3:34:30Speaker 03

  Do I really need that 12th aircraft carrier that costs $13 billion? Or do I only need five aircraft carriers? And I can save.

• 3:34:42Speaker 03

  Fifty billion dollars on new construction and I can build, save fifty billion dollars if you're 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.

• 3:35:10Speaker 03

  But I don't think it's, we need three hundred and eighty-one man ships either.

• 3:35:17Speaker 03

  So it's some mix in between.

• 3:35:20Shawn Ryan?

  How many?

• 3:35:23Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 3:35:34Speaker 03

  From a production rate per, I mean, we have the capacity to build hundreds, like literally hundreds of boats right now in our facility in Austin. We only have sixty-five thousand square, or no, I'm sorry. Our main manufacturing facility is sixty-five thousand square feet. We have over a hundred and fifty thousand square feet in total online. But we're opening a facility that's four hundred and twenty thousand square feet. The main manufacturing facility would be close to a hundred and twenty thousand square feet. So we're three X-ing the space that we have available and we're going from hundreds to thousands of boats per year. So that's just-

• 3:36:14Shawn Ryan?

  Thousands of boats per year?

• 3:36:15Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:36:27Shawn Ryan?

  That's just one facility.

• 3:36:29Speaker 03

  Just one facility. It's just one facility. That's for our smaller vessels.

• 3:36:35Shawn Ryan?

  So throw out a number, five years. How many boats do you think, just any, just an estimate?

• 3:36:41Speaker 03

  That are operational that we could build?

• 3:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  Operational. Navy implements this?

• 3:36:46Speaker 03

  Oh, thousands, thousands.

• 3:36:48Shawn Ryan?

  Let's say two thousand. I'll throw out a number.

• 3:36:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, two, yeah.

• 3:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  Two thousand.

• 3:36:52Speaker 03

  That's fair. I mean, the Navy-

• 3:36:53Shawn Ryan?

  How many, how many, how many humans does it take to operate a, a fleet of two thousand of your autonomous boats?

• 3:37:01Speaker 03

  As many as it takes to put them in and out of the water.

• 3:37:04Shawn Ryan?

  That's it.

• 3:37:05Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 3:37:07Speaker 03

  That's 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, oh. You can have different operators for different mission sets in different areas, obviously. But the software is limitless and it's all, like, the software is increasing at a pace that I think it's hard to comprehend.

• 3:37:54Speaker 03

  Not, and I'm not just talking about, I'm talking about like software and technology in general. Like, ChatGPT over the last, I don't even know the timeframe, like, year or two, improved like 4,000%. Right? I don't think I've ever seen anything in my life improve 4,000%. So that's how fast technology is evolving right now, and we're putting all of that tech into our boats. So that the capabilities of the software quite limit, quite literally are limitless.

• 3:38:26Shawn Ryan?

  So where I'm kind of going with this is, what does the future of the Navy look like in terms of manpower?

• 3:38:34Speaker 03

  Oh, I think it's gotta be much lower. That's, that's our goal. That should be the Navy's goal, right? They have, 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.

• 3:39:01Speaker 03

  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, you start doing it. And it all kind of, you figure it out as you go.

• 3:39:41Speaker 03

  The, 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.

• 3:40:09Shawn Ryan?

  I'm a hundred percent 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, less people that have to live with the traumatic experiences that, that war gives you. And so I'm, I'm a hundred percent on board with you. I think it's amazing what you're doing.

• 3:40:51Shawn Ryan?

  It's just, I can also see the aspect of how it will be hard for especially flag officers and.

• 3:41:00Shawn Ryan?

  Congressman to go, this is gonna shrink the Navy. It's gonna shrink it quite a bit.

• 3:41:06Speaker 03

  Well, it goes back to my point earlier, like, I don't, I'm not, I'm like firmly not in the camp of we need, 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 naive view, maybe that's a, that's a disputed view.

• 3:41:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:42:09Speaker 03

  Right? And so what we need to do is not, 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

• 3:42:31Speaker 03

  crush any hope the Chinese have of starting a conflict with us. Like, 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 gonna be like, let's go shrink the Navy? I don't even know if that's the answer. Right? 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? Right? And how do we do that through autonomy? And look, we talked about the trade offs earlier. What's the right ratio? Right? Is it? Okay, I don't need the next aircraft.

• 3:43:16Speaker 03

  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 in Congress is, and I'm completely aligned with this, like, there's just no other way. There's no other way. We need this.

• 3:44:00Speaker 03

  Right? And now it's our job, Serrano, 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.

• 3:44:17Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 3:44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we'll, 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.

• 3:44:47Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I'm only semi bullshit, yeah. But, um, well, Dino, this has been a fascinating conversation and, 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, and all the success that you're experiencing and, and I just love it, man. So.

• 3:45:07Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:45:08Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for the time.

• 3:45:09Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for having me again. It's an honor to be here and it's so exciting to see all the, the things that you're doing as well. So keep crushing it and I'm looking forward to the next one.

• 3:45:19Shawn Ryan?

  You too. Thank you.

• 3:45:20Speaker 03

  Awesome, man.

• 3:45:20Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.