E454: True Anomaly’s Even Rogers on Space Warfare, China’s Military Advantage, and the Defense Tech Boom

What happens when space becomes the next battlefield, and America's adversaries are moving faster than its defense industry? In this episode, I sit down with Even Rogers, Chief Executive Officer of True Anomaly, to discuss why space is becoming one of the most consequential frontiers in modern warfare. Even explains how his experience as a U. S. Air Force space operations officer exposed critical gaps in America's defense capabilities, why traditional military procurement slows innovation, and how True Anomaly is building spacecraft and software designed for contested environments.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In 2024, it was reported that China had tested their first space-to-ground weapon. This is a satellite that is in orbit, that deploys a munition. That munition re-enters the atmosphere and guides itself to the surface of the Earth. There are some velocities you can achieve in space-to-ground weapons that will have the yield of a small kiloton-class nuclear weapon. These are colloquially called rods from God.

• 0:22David Weisburd?

  Let's just call this military weapon the Death Star from Star Wars. So you have this object in space that could now shoot nuclear weapons in Earth's orbit.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Well, it doesn't even need to be nuclear. The impact velocities will hit the ground with the force of a nuclear weapon, but they don't have to actually have a nuclear warhead.

• 0:40David Weisburd?

  There seems to be this proliferation of space companies. There's dozens and dozens of these companies. What inning of space deck are we in today?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  I think we're in the second inning of the space deck. I think the first inning was largely driven by the space race up until 1992, when the United States largely retired many of the capabilities that were driving space innovation. We lost the competitive pressure to really advance space capabilities for military purposes or civilian purposes. And I think that's a really important lesson in history, by the way. Trey Stevens from Androld Founder's Fund always says, which is like, basically, it's out of the company on day two. I was on an airplane, right? I was in DC.

• 1:17David Weisburd?

  You started True Anomaly four and a half years ago. You built it into this multibillion-dollar defense company. If you could go back four and a half years ago and you could give yourself one timeless piece of advice that you could bring into the founding of the company, what would that be?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  My advice to myself would be...

• 1:32David Weisburd?

  Evan, you spent years at the Air Force and Space Force thinking about American defense and space. What's the state of American defense and space today?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  It's not good. China, which is our principal adversary for space warfare, has been at this problem now for about 20 years. The indications that we've received from the public domain are that China really started research and development on space weapons in 2004. And if you remember the time, the United States was largely focused on the global war on terror, what became the global war on terror, à la the Middle East. And there's a different set of systems, space systems, that you use when you fight that war. You generally biased towards building really expensive things. And the United States, after the fall of the USSR, effectively mothballed the research and development of all of its defensive and offensive space capabilities.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  So the last publicly known system was SDI, and that shuttered in the early 90s. And really, in the Clinton administration, as part of a bargaining chip with nuclear negotiations for Russia. So we've come up largely empty-handed. The one thing that has changed just recently in the last month is that the Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Mink, has announced that the United States has fielded orbital weapons. For a long time, the United States has a ground-based electronic warfare capabilities, but Troy Mink recently came out and said that we have space weapons for the first time. The question is to whether those are effective at scale or not,

• 3:10Speaker 00

  and whether that is really a deterrence tactic vice having true combat capability.

• 3:16David Weisburd?

  And Troy Mink is the Air Force Secretary, and a lot of people are saying that space is the future of warfare. To what extent is that hyperbole? And to what extent is that actually factual?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  I think it is true. I mean, space, the way to think about the space domain truly is the ultimate high ground. It gives you unfettered access to the surface of the Earth. In traditional operations, global mission operations, we use that to keep track of troop movements on the ground. We take picture and we take video from space, and we understand the terrestrial environment through the space domain. And now there are so many intelligence satellites and so many commercial intelligence satellites that we largely have almost real-time coverage of the surface of the Earth. And so you can understand change detection. You can understand when troops are amassing at a border, for example. But from a combat capability standpoint, the high ground has traditionally been an important vantage from which to deploy systems.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  The air domain became the vertical flank. Marine Corps doctrine actually talks about the air domain as the vertical flank, which is, I think, unique to the Marines. And the space domain, I think, is the ultimate flank. It's the ultimate vertical flank from which you can deploy systems, re-enter those into the atmosphere. You can continue to have global mission operations effects. And so I think you're going to see the United States continue to invest in this space, which means that we need to also defend ourselves. It's not enough to just have surveillance satellites. You need to be able to defend those surveillance satellites. And then finally, as the United States and, I think, the global economy pushes further and further into the space domain and the orbital environment,

• 4:55Speaker 00

  the value of those assets will necessitate an active defensive posture. It will become critical infrastructure. And one of the things that the United States has spent probably over a decade on now is really shoring up critical infrastructure weaknesses. And space will go the same way.

• 5:11David Weisburd?

  So I want to talk later on about the geopolitical ramifications of space and what happens if China wins. But first, you guys raised a $2 billion valuation. You're a for-profit. Talk to me about your business model in terms of how True Anomaly makes money.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Our business model is to build defense products and sell those to the US government and its allies. So we build spacecraft and we build software. The way that we sell that to the US government is always program-dependent. But in general, we invest our own capital in products that can be sold to multiple programs. So we really make money off of the per-unit sales of Jackal spacecraft, supporting ONM tails as the spacecraft continue to age, and we make updates and improve their performance, as well as software licenses against their mosaic product. We do have a growing services business as well. So one of the areas that the Space Force is investing in really is in training, for example.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  They need to train combat forces to prepare for warfighting, and we'll provide some services. But largely, the vast majority of our revenue is coming from product sales of units of Jackal and other spacecraft.

• 6:24David Weisburd?

  This episode is presented by Juniper Square, the operations partner for private markets. And I want to get back to what you said before, which you said space is the ultimate high ground. So in traditional warfare, 20th century, if you controlled the airfield, then you could do a lot of things. You could monitor the movements of troops on the ground. You could shoot down on those troops, and you controlled the area of conflict. Space is another level to that. It's even higher out. What are the ramifications of that? Is it just in terms of monitoring and getting information? Or can you actually attack adversaries in space?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  It's a great question. You know, one of the lessons from the air domain is that surveillance systems, generally, by virtue of their role, enter into a location that is close in proximity to its target. So if you can put the surveillance or the reconnaissance sensor on a target, that means in many cases, you can also put a weapon on that target. This has been an observation that has been made by the US government for a long time. It's not just in modern history that space as a high ground has been a relevant factor in combat operations. This was studied in the 60s, the 70s, and the 1980s,

• 7:49Speaker 00

  but it's surged again in terms of relevance because of the arms race that the United States finds itself in in space against the People's Republic of China. One of the things that the United States is particularly worried about is actually the deployment of space-based weapons in space that are designed to employ munitions against the surface of the Earth. So in 2024, China had tested their first space-to-ground weapon. And the weapon system they tested was kinetic. So this is a satellite that is in orbit, that deploys a munition. That munition re-enters the atmosphere and guides itself to the surface of the Earth.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  There's so much kinetic energy involved in dropping something from space to the surface of the Earth in an uncontrolled way. So the way that the dragon re-enters the atmosphere is really under... is in a free fall. You're dispersing all of that kinetic energy in the form of heat, and then shoots deploy, and that controls the closing velocity with the ground. In a space-to-ground kinetic weapon, you're relying on the kinetic energy to create the explosive effect on the target. So there are some velocities you can achieve in space-to-ground weapons that will have the yield of a small kiloton-class nuclear weapon. These are colloquially called rods from God.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  So large masses, tungsten rods typically will survive the re-entry velocities and heating that strike the surface of the Earth. This gives you basically unfettered access to any target on the ground. And we think China tested one of these in 2024, which is a monumental development in space warfare. And it really reflects how far ahead China is relative to the United States. These systems are called, if your audience wants to research them, they're called fractional orbital bombardment systems or multi-orbit bombardment systems. And these are concepts that were explored in the 60s and 70s by Russia. In fact, that's what everybody was worried about when Sputnik launched.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  The public response to that was, oh, God, now Russia's going to bomb the United States. They're going to nuclear bomb the United States from orbit, which is one of the reasons that you had the 1967 Outer Space Treaty provisions that happened. You know, that space is the ultimate high ground. You can deploy weapons from space. You can also do surveillance missions. And one of the challenges is that you don't necessarily always know what's being deployed to the orbital environment. So a really robust reconnaissance infrastructure is required to understand what our adversaries are doing.

• 10:32David Weisburd?

  Let's just call this military weapon the Death Star.

• 10:38David Weisburd?

  From Star Wars, so you have this object in space that can now shoot nuclear weapons on in the Earth, in Earth's orbit.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Well, it doesn't even need to be nuclear. It can just, there's the impact velocities from orbit. You have so much energy in orbit, the impact velocities will hit the ground with the force of a nuclear weapon, but they don't have to actually have a nuclear warhead.

• 11:04David Weisburd?

  Sort of like hitting a, throwing a nickel from the Empire State Building by the time it drops. It's like a ton of bricks. So let's say that China did actually test this and let's say that the capability is there. If that's the case, what could counteract something like that? Does it have to be another object in space or there's some ground to air defense system to this weapon?

• 11:30Speaker 00

  That's a great question. The ideal engagement time is before the weapon gets deployed. So in general, you want to eliminate the platform that has the threat on it. That's the best kind of risk adjusted opportunity to engage these things. You can do that from space. You could also do that from the ground, but your instinct is right. Shoot it before it releases its munition because then the dynamics get a lot harder. You're in kind of a classical missile defense problem where you're trying to engage a hypersonic glide weapon at these massive, massive velocities and doing that from a traditional anti ballistic missile system is very difficult.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  This is the adage of shooting a bullet with a bullet, except it's, it's way more challenging in orbital velocities than what we've seen the United States and Israel be successful in doing in encountering ballistic missiles launched from Iran. But yeah, you want to shoot something before it deploys the weapon. That's kind of the best, least risky time to do it.

• 12:34David Weisburd?

  You've compared this moment in time to the military moment following World War One. In what ways are these times comparable?

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Where we find ourselves in kind of the arc of space defense development for capabilities and technologies is very similar to what happened after World War One, before World War Two, and then, and then after World War Two, of course. But I think the interwar period is really interesting. So in World War One, we saw the, really the first demonstrations of the value of air systems. So this is coming off of the back of first winged flight right in the early 1900s. And some enterprising pilots and warfighters at the time

• 13:18Speaker 00

  asked questions like, well, if I'm over the adversary, couldn't I just drop a, drop a grenade on them? Or can I just take pictures of them to try to understand what's going on behind enemy lines? That created the first fighter escort, the first fighter sweep tactics, which were, well, if my adversary has an air platform that can go do all of these things, air to ground, well, then I have to be able to counter that aircraft. And so you had the first dogfights and the first aerial kills actually in World War One. The value that was demonstrated by air platforms in World War One really kicked off a development cycle and a period of experimentation in the late twenties and nineteen thirties

• 14:00Speaker 00

  in which the envelope of what was possible from the air domain was, was, started to be explored. And that actually drove the development of new air technologies as well. So there's this positive feedback loop between air technology development, aircraft development, so engines, airframe design, as well as combat operations concepts. And so the, the kind of convergence of events were the advancement of flight sciences, the, the buildup pre-World War Two, and then the advancement of tactics and techniques to, to extract the most combat value out of air platforms. The net result of that was the generation of entirely new air systems

• 14:44Speaker 00

  that really didn't have necessarily a commercial application or were built for defense purposes first and then repurposed for commercial value. In space, the opposite has been true, which is there's been a need to offset the capital risk associated with generating a commercial capability through defense sales. When you're dealing with a space domain that isn't a warfighting environment, you can get away with that, right? This idea of dual use. You can build a system that can provide services and capabilities to the battlefield as well as to commercial partners. And that's a great position to be in. It's a good risk adjusted position to be in. The problem is commercial platforms built for a commercial operating environment

• 15:27Speaker 00

  fall short of what's necessary for combat operations when space became a contested environment. So when your adversary is trying to shoot back at you, you have to deal with a contested environment or you have to deal with your adversary's own countermeasures. You need a performance envelope that's different than a commercial application. And it may, in many ways, actually may not even have a commercial application. And so I call kind of what happened in aviation in nineteen thirties, the Cambrian explosion of air platforms. Like you had the first fighters, the first bombers that were created. The same thing is happening in space. Space is a warfighting domain. Our adversary is ahead of us. A warfighting domain means you're optimizing for very different things in system design.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  And when you, and, and like that generates a different, a different product that may not have a commercial application.

• 16:14David Weisburd?

  There seems to be this proliferation of space companies. One of our portfolio companies, Varda Space, for example, is, is doing biology in space. And there's dozens and dozens of these companies. What inning of space deck are we in today?

• 16:29Speaker 00

  I think we're in the second inning of space deck. I think the first inning was largely driven by, by the space race up until nineteen ninety-two, when the United States largely kind of retired many of the capabilities that were driving space innovation.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  There, we just lost sort of the competitive impulse. We lost the competitive pressure to really advance space capabilities for military purposes or civilian purposes. And I think that's a really important lesson in history, by the way. That, that interplay between research and development and defense technology and advancing sort of like sciences and extending research and development to the commercial domain.

• 17:14David Weisburd?

  Tell me that, what's the lesson to learn there?

• 17:16Speaker 00

  The lesson is like, it is, is one for biologists, like competitive pressures generate, generate innovation, right? But you, you have to trim the branches of the tree that don't make sense from a technology standpoint. And, and only the things that have the maximum utility for their application end up surviving. And, and the, that combat performance is, as I said before, like very different than a traditional space environment. Like you're in space, it's really hard. The environmentals of space are really hard, the ride to space is really hard. But when you're dealing with an adversary that's shooting you back, you have to optimize for, for different things. Like a Boeing passenger jet or, or an A three twenty, for example, like most,

• 18:00Speaker 00

  almost everybody that's listening to this podcast is like flown on, on an aircraft before, for sure. They don't have countermeasures. They don't have the wing strength to, to pull nine Gs. They don't have the power plant that's necessary to climb to super high altitudes and maintain engine performance at fifty, sixty thousand feet, for example.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  That, those applications aren't necessary, those technologies aren't necessary when you're optimizing for like fuel efficiency and maximum payload capacity. You must put three hundred and fifty people into an aircraft, like you design it fundamentally differently. The general, I think the general lesson is like geopolitical pressure drives research and development and, and creates like entirely new markets.

• 18:44David Weisburd?

  Another lesson I'm trying to learn and get to ground truth on is I, I'm this capitalist. I believe that capitalism drives these efficiencies in these markets and you know, a small group of very smart, very motivated people can create industries as have been done over the last twenty, thirty years. But also what I'm coming across in all these defense tech companies is this public, private partnership. This partnership with the US government, Department of Defense, other wings and other public partnerships. Talk to me about that. How does that relationship look when done right?

• 19:18Speaker 00

  That's a great question. And I think we, we actually are executing against a program that I, I won't be able to say much about unfortunately, but I think is one of the best examples of when acquisition strategy drives

• 19:31Speaker 00

  R and D by industry. So there's a large program that has a couple of key characteristics to it from an acquisition standpoint. One is it is a really, really difficult problem, a really interesting problem that drives, I think, industry to want to deliver. Two, there is significant capital available. Three, there is a, the, the prize.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  The acquisition is open to multiple players. So there's not a first past the post or winner take all market. And four is like limited requirement specification. So on this program, we've been able to bring over $600 million in R and D to date. We're adding another billion dollars of R and D to that product. And that is like unprecedented, I think, in in modern defense tech. And we're not the only company that's doing it. So we're incentivized to deliver products on sort of like a milestone basis. Investing our own capital to do that.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  And then we're rewarded when we demonstrate capability, not when we turn in a PowerPoint presentation or show compliance analytically to a program. This is a great example where the opportunity is big enough that we're willing to put up the capital to fund entirely new products. Because the, you know, because the production volumes are so substantial that like will make it meaningful business case to us.

• 21:07David Weisburd?

  One thing I've learned from talking to hundreds of investors is that great investment firms aren't built on investment returns alone. The firms under are great at the things most people don't see. Their operations, their relationship with LPs and the quality of information they use to make decisions. And here's what AI has changed. Every firm now has access to the very same models. So the intelligence isn't the edge anymore. The edge is what you could feed it. A firm with its fund operations and data in one connected record can actually put AI to work. A firm running on disconnected systems simply can't. That's why thousands of GPs run their funds on Juniper Square. Juniper Square puts your fund operations, data and administration together in one connected record.

• 21:48David Weisburd?

  That means less time managing disconnected systems and more time investing, working with LPs and building your firm. This episode is brought to you by Juniper Square, the operations partner for private market GPs. Learn more at junipersquare.com/HowIInvest. That's junipersquare.com/HowIInvest. A lot of my friends in defense talk tell me about the transformation of the Department of War under Secretary Haxith and Under Secretary Emil Michael and how they're really evolving defense. To what extent is that true? And what exactly is being done to evolve the space and to make it more, I guess, commercially viable for startups?

• 22:29Speaker 00

  There's a recognition by the Department of War that there's a substantial amount of capital and talent available to solve the most acute defense technology problems. But and so it's not a question of capacity. It's a question of incentives. Can a business make a case that there is meaning, there is meaningful revenue to be made profitably, by the way, which is, which is really critical. This is, this is a word that I think the Department of War is, is learning. I think in senior levels, it's well understood. I think in program management, in the, in the program managers, it's like a little bit more of a foreign concept.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  But the, the transformation they're driving is really to like capture the engine that is American capitalism and drive that into defense tech problems. So what has to be true in order for America's best talent and most capital to be applied to, to the defense of the nation and the development of interesting and, and combat capable products? There's a few factors. I named a few of them, but, but I'll repeat them. One is the opportunity has to be large. There's always going to be a company that is incentivized to solve a, a problem. Right? So what, what motivates her anomaly is a combination of the battlefield need.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  What is the problem that needs to be solved on the battlefield? Is it a real problem? Is it, is it an acute problem that warfighters need solved? And two is it an opportunity that's large enough where we can turn a meaningful investment and then take that capital and invest it in the next generation of products? The, the other element that has to be true is that you have to have open competition. And at least initially, there need to be multiple awardees on programs, but not too many. So there are programs where there have been, where, where, you know, a thousand companies or 20 companies get awarded an initial contract. That can be a very confusing signal to a company and the capital markets.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  And, and I think, you know, as somebody who has, who has fundraised in this environment, when there's a large contract with many players on it, you spend most of your time talking about what differentiates, what, how you're positioned relative to your competitors, which of course is really, really important, but it generates a lot of noise in the system. Right? Like, we have no problem articulating why our product is differentiated. But there's always a little bit of mistrust on the part of capital allocators in the decision-making process of program managers. So when you see a company, a contract that has like a dozen or more competitors on it, there's a question about like market structure. But can, are there going to be awards that are diffuse across industry? Or is it going to be concentrated?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  And really the only way that like you can turn a meaningful profit in many of these programs that keep the innovation and industrial engine driving is like to have some level of concentration that's meaningful. Now you can't over concentrate and get back into the days of, of like the previous era of defense. And even in many ways, like the, the current era of defense procurement, which is all of the procurement dollars go to a single company. Like there's one awardee on a contract because then the government doesn't have any leverage. You have massive waste and, and that means that like you're building, you are, you, you kind of have like the, the concentration issue of building a, a capability for a really long time that ends up being obsolete in, in a short amount of time, just like given innovation cycles at a PRC.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  And then finally, like these need to be acquired largely as firm fixed price contracts. And I think the Department of War like totally gets this. You're seeing a huge amount of for fixed price contracts under OTAs be used now, even for really, really big projects. There's always going to be a role for like the very, very difficult, cutting edge tech, like poor, low TRL R and D work needs to be cost plus. But technology's advanced so much that, and it's so prolific that you largely can like solve a lot of the problems on the battlefield with firm fixed price programs, as long as the other kind of two criteria are met. So firm fixed price programs incentivize industry, of course, to like reduce their costs, generate profit.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  When you generate profit, you invest in the next generation of products and you end up like in a virtuous innovation cycle. The one allergy within the Department of War, though, again, as I said, is like the word profit is, is, is a new word to the department.

• 27:03David Weisburd?

  Way more because my understanding is from the last supper in the early nineties, when the government encouraged defense contractors to consolidate. Then they had this market pricing that was very favorable to the defense industry and is extremely profitable to be a defense contractor. Why is, why is profit so controversial?

• 27:22Speaker 00

  It really is like the level of profit that's controversial. Right? So like in a cost plus contract, typically your fee is going to be something around like 10 to 12% or you're going to make 10 to 12%. But really like defense can, defense, large defense companies.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Yes, while they're turning a, maybe a 10 to 12% profit on a cost plus contract, they're actually incentivized to bulk up the cost portion of the cost plus contract. Right? So they, they will, there's no incentive to, to share costs. There's no incentive to drive per unit cost down and that you end up with these like very, very bloated programs. But if the Department of War wants innovation out of industry, they want us to co-invest alongside them. We have to at some point generate capital from sales. We have to generate profit from sales. So they, they equate, sometimes what happens is program managers will equate like large contract profits with profits, period.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  So they'll look at the F22 program or the F35 program, they'll be like, wait, you want to make more money on that program? You, you actually want the program to be larger? No, what actually you're saying is like over the long term, actually over the near term, programs will be less expensive because companies are footing the bill for the research and development and recouping the cost of that product through unit sales, through services, through licenses over time. But you know, you also have to, the Department of War has to give a long view into contracts. So like political instability is another challenge associated with some of these things. And then contracting philosophy around like how, how long a contract and how enduring a contract will be. If, if you give me the opportunity to go to spend a billion dollars, but I only have

• 29:03Speaker 00

  visibility into one year, two years of sales and those don't cover my research and development costs, that's not an opportunity we're going to go after. So we have to have long-term certainty in order of volume, in order to expend the amount of capital that's often required for these like large capital intensive defense programs, which is where, which is where like a lot of innovation really, really is required.

• 29:25David Weisburd?

  That's actually where I want to go to. I had Bradley Tusk, famous lobbyist, one of the top lobbyists really in the last 20, 30 years. We talked about lobbying and how coin operated.

• 29:38David Weisburd?

  Congressmen or senators are, and essentially he said something like 95 to 99% of congressmen are basic coin-operated, directly operate on senators, aren't really independent, don't have their own views. And essentially, you could shift them one way or another. And that by itself is somewhat alarming. One thing that I've learned from talking to hundreds of investors, founders and business leaders is that planning for the future isn't just about growing assets. It's also about protecting the people who matter most. Life comes with a lot of important milestones. Maybe you're buying a home, starting a family, planning for college, or simply thinking more intentionally about your financial future. As those responsibilities grow, it's worth making sure you protect those you love. Not sure what kind of life insurance you may need? Concerned about how much it may cost? Think life insurance is too complicated?

• 30:22David Weisburd?

  Your local State Farm agent can help answer those questions. They can help you explore your options for life insurance and choose coverage that you can adjust as your family's needs change over time. Financial protection for your loved ones when it matters most. Learn more about life insurance at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. In investing, we talk a lot about execution. The same principle applies to running a home service business. Doing great work matters, but so does everything behind the scenes. House Call Pro is the go-to software solution built for HVAC, plumbing, electrical and other home service professionals. House Call Pro brings scheduling, customer communication, dispatching, invoicing and payments into one place. So owners could spend less time on admin and more time growing their businesses. On average, businesses using House Call Pro saves more

• 31:07David Weisburd?

  than eight hours per week. Ready to save time and win more jobs? For a limited time only, our listeners get 50% off base plans for their first three months when you head to housecallpro.com/HHII. That's housecallpro.com/HHII for 50% off. After signing up, let them know how Invest sent you. In investing, we talk a lot about execution. The same principle applies to running a home service business. Doing great work matters, but so does everything behind the scenes. House Call Pro is the go-to software solution built for HVAC, plumbing, electrical and other home service professionals. House Call Pro brings scheduling, customer communication, dispatching, invoicing and payments into one place. So owners could spend less time on admin and more time growing their businesses.

• 31:52David Weisburd?

  On average, businesses using House Call Pro saves more than eight hours per week. Ready to save time and win more jobs? For a limited time only, our listeners get 50% off base plans for their first three months when you head to housecallpro.com/HHII. That's housecallpro.com/HHII for 50% off. After signing up, let them know how Invest sent you. But on top of that, today, we have a more polarized Congress and Senate. Mostly, it's due to gerrymandering. So now you have basically no primary. Basically, today, you don't have much primary competition. So Democrats don't have to really run against Republicans

• 32:36David Weisburd?

  and Republicans don't really have to run against Democrats. Democrats always running against far-left Democrats and Republicans are running against far-right Republicans, essentially. So now you have more of a polarizing Congress. And also coin-operating, and also just functioning on these two-year intervals. On the other side, you have China, that probably the strength of their central planning is that they can make these 20, 30-year plans. You might argue against their democratic values, against their, the ethics of their policies. But this continuity is, is a huge advantage when it comes to these multi-decade programs.

• 33:19David Weisburd?

  How do you plan for this type of political climate today?

• 33:22Speaker 00

  To your point, you have a very well-resourced government affairs function that allows, that enables us to advocate for what is going to make America a better and more secure place. I think when, as we've, as we've, as we have engaged with members of Congress, generally, defense is not, there isn't a lot of bipartisan disagreement in defense. I think these are issues in other domains. I can't name one off the top of my head because most of my time is spent on defense, but like-

• 34:00David Weisburd?

  Basically, everything but defense.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  I think that's probably true. So like, so when you get behind closed doors, the reality kind of sets in, which is the United States is behind in some really critical areas, particularly in space. And the intelligence community is reporting on this information to members of Congress. And members of Congress have like faced, they face that reality. They have to choose between believing the intelligence record or not. And that's not to say that the intelligence record is infallible, by the way, but like the overwhelming evidence here is that the United States has some significant deficiencies relative to our ability to deter the PRC globally, not just in the South China Sea.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  So the challenge for us is like, if you had asked me five years ago, does every member of Congress understand space defense? I would have told you, like, they probably don't understand that space has become a warfighting domain and that we have to resource this. Or they would have said something like, oh, Space Force, is that that like Trump thing? And, and so there, there were like kind of reflexive reactions in members of Congress. That is not the case anymore. The service and the Pentagon, over the last really two administrations, have done a great job of ensuring that members of Congress are acutely aware of the growing threat to space infrastructure, to the United States'

• 35:29Speaker 00

  superiority and dominance in space. And so it is not a challenge for us. Like, it's not a difficult conversation for us to have with members of Congress. So we come in and we say, hey, we think these programs are really important. We think that like the United States is short in these areas and we need to invest more in these areas, like move dollars from, from legacy contracts. So like that box, to me, is largely checked. What we are seeing is some political reactions to kind of like Golden Dome Bradley, for example. And I think this is less about the capability and more about the reflexivity in Congress right now about anything that any one party does. Like, there's almost a moral obligation to just disagree for disagreeing its sake.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  That can be what is said in public. That is true for some members of Congress, but that is also like sometimes a member of Congress will say something in public and something completely different in private. So I think like for our purposes, these are bipartisan issues and we have like a lot of success in just, just calling, calling it like we see it, like calling our shot without having to do a lot of political maneuvering. But you do, I think as a defense tech company, you have to be extremely well-resourced from a GA standpoint. There's an adage that, that Trey Stevens, you know, from Andro and Founder's Fund always says, which is like, basically, you founded the company on day two, I'm paraphrasing, day two, I was on an airplane, right? I was in DC.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Time was spent in DC generating advocacy. Thankfully, other defense tech companies, like there's a coalition of defense tech companies that have really done, I think, a great job, like articulating that this kind of new, new set of players is, is, is capable, that we're capable, it's not just sort of like a bunch of VCs saying, hey, this is really important. It's actually like we had, we were generating combat effects on the battlefield. Look at what Sironic's doing. Look at what Shield is doing. The demonstrations that True Anomaly did this summer. Like, the capabilities are now, are now real. They've taken time to develop, but they're now real. I think members of Congress are really seeing the impact of that.

• 37:40David Weisburd?

  There seems to be this camaraderie, we were talking before we started recording, between defense tech companies. You guys are all, obviously, in some ways competitive, but also in many ways collaborative and also looking to help each other as well.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  That's right. I think we all want the same thing at the end of the day. Like, we want the United States to have meaningful deterrence capability. And, you know, I think defense tech founders do spend time with each other. We end up all going to kind of the same conferences or have personal friendships with each other. And we're, you know, we don't want to take each other's lunch. We actually want to just take the lunch of the primes. We want to take their market share. We want to grow the opportunity for other defense tech companies. And at the end of the day, like, we want to make sure that our troops are equipped with the right set of systems to do their job.

• 38:24David Weisburd?

  Reasons for this podcast is really to investigate how the most ambitious projects, AKA startups, start. True Anomaly is one of the most ambitious startups in the world today. How did you go from zero to one?

• 38:38Speaker 00

  So our founding story, I think, is like very different than many defense tech companies.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  I started my career in the Air Force in 2012. I was a Satellite Operations Officer. I was what's called a 13 Sierra. So I just happened to put the uniform on at a moment when the defense, or excuse me, when the space domain was becoming a warfighting domain. So I, my first assignment was a 4th Space Operations Squadron. So I show up, I go spend six months at Vandenberg, what is now Vandenberg Space Force Base, then Vandenberg Air Force Base. This is like before the Space Force existed. And the space community was like the redheaded stepchild of the Air Force. It was kind of like, oh, those space nerds, those kind of like all wanted the astronauts. We weren't really a meaningful player in combat operations. And I can tell a couple of like interesting stories around that if you're interested.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  We were there to provide a service. And that means like, just keep the GPS satellites flying, keep the satellite communication satellites flying. But you don't have anything to contribute. This is kind of like paraphrasing, I think, how fighter pilots and bombers would think about space, space professionals. Like you don't really have anything to contribute directly to my ability to get ammunition off of the wing of my aircraft and to its target. And like, for the most part, that, that was true because space was not a contested domain. So it, early on in my career, though, the sands really started to shift and it was driven by, by some

• 40:11Speaker 00

  foundational weapons tests by the People's Republic of China. So kind of over the decade of my career, I saw China advance. And I saw two big shortfalls. The first was in United States doctrine and tactics. So doctrine is the body of knowledge that military services assemble to try to understand conflict and to organize the way that we fight and think through operational and tactical problems. There was no warfighting doctrine for space. There was no philosophy for how we would organize forces on the battlefield. What effects do you want to achieve?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Not until like middle of my career, when some colleagues and I and others really started thinking about these things after, after we saw China do these weapons tests. And the second piece was the lack of defense industrial base investment. So the defense industrial base, you know, I think before modern defense tech players like largely have been contract manufacturers and contract engineering shops. They will do whatever the requirements require and their R and D budgets are also cost plus, like R and D budgets. They're, they're really there to kind of not fund ultra advanced tech. They're really there to, to, to, I think, like, in my view, advance the, the, the careers of like junior engineers that need, need to work on some,

• 41:37Speaker 00

  some like, it's basically to like, to keep, to keep the labor force engaged, right? I think is, is like 90% of R and D in, in big defense tech in the early 2000s and into the teens. So defense industrial bases are making the investments. The United States didn't have a service focused on space superiority, wasn't developing the doctrine and tactics. And so everybody, all the stakeholders kind of pointing at each other going like, what do we do about this threat that's coming out of China? And this was the theme through my career. So as I went from my first assignment, space operations, flying satellites that were designed, I mean, quite literally, the requirements were written in, in, in the Cold War. And then we figured out how to repurpose those Cold War capabilities for, for the modern battlefield.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Nobody was writing kind of new requirements for space warfare. And as I went through my career from that satellite operations to then threat replication, and then eventually flight test, and then eventually joint task, when I was a joint task force space defenses of fires officer, I just saw like capability versus threat continue to diverge. And I like to say, like, I was the only one with the romanticism, the stupidity and the hubris, like that perfect combination that's required to be, I think, to be a founder, to, to like, get out of the military and start the company. So I started True Anomaly 12 days after I left uniform. I mean, I left the military to start this business and didn't know anything about VC, didn't know anything about operating a company or, or really like frankly, building a product.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  And I've just learned along the way through, by like, continuing with reality and having good mentors and a good team.

• 43:13David Weisburd?

  How did you convince the first couple of people to join you?

• 43:15Speaker 00

  It really started with relationships between

• 43:20Speaker 00

  a couple of my co-founders and, you know, in particular, like on the engineering side, one of my co-founders, Kyle Zakchesky, who was a Ball Aerospace, he grabbed a couple of folks from Ball Aerospace and said, hey, do you guys want to work on space defense? And, and it just seemed like the, kind of the right time. And then that snowballs, right? So you have, you have the capital, you have good investors, good backers, you have a good idea. And then you hire just that, that, that first person and that second person. And then do you go to that person, you say, hey, give me a list of your, the five most important and credible and interesting people that you've worked with that you think would want to work on this problem. And then we try to hire as many of them as we possibly can. And that kind of just like play the network effect for a long time until

• 44:05Speaker 00

  you finally have the, the brand that kind of has a gravitational pull of its own, which I think is what we've been able to achieve for the last probably six months.

• 44:13David Weisburd?

  One of the things I've noticed in the founders of these very ambitious projects is almost, they didn't necessarily expect that the likely outcome was going to be success. They just wanted to move the battle down the field, move the football down, down the field. To what extent was that true? Did you expect True Anomaly to be successful? Or did you just find the need to bring space tech to the next inning?

• 44:38Speaker 00

  I actually didn't really have an expectation for success or failure. What it felt to me and it still feels to this day is this is just a thing that has to be done. Like, there has to be a company that creates advanced defense technologies for space superiority. And, and while sort of like there are incremental opportunities for success and, and failure that are, that are really, obviously really important. The, the broader mission just has always felt to me like it, it must,

• 45:12Speaker 00

  it must be achieved. It's the same, I think it's a mentality maybe that I developed when I was in uniform. That like you just, you execute the mission and, and it's going to come with a couple of, you know, left hooks and, and uppercuts. But like, you do your best, you execute the mission. When you fall on your face, you debrief that, which is a really important part of our culture at True Anomaly, is when you fall short, extract the lesson learned and then

• 45:47Speaker 00

  articulate that lesson to others so that they can learn. And then you, I think we've done a, we've done a great job of like creating a learning culture at True Anomaly. And I think like that, that fundamental capacity has been why we've been able to continue to drive towards the mission to date. So I never almost,

• 46:05Speaker 00

  I, I almost never thought about like acute success or failure as such. I always have thought about like, like, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make sure that the mission of the company is successful.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  Over, over time, right? Over the arc of our execution, by ensuring like every day we kind of like have these wins. But I, it never felt to me like failure was an option for us.

• 46:35David Weisburd?

  I think I know a single CEO in the world that doesn't want to have a learning culture. What's upstream of that? What are some first principles for building a culture that inherently learns and evolves?

• 46:46Speaker 00

  So we've created a language around learning. We've created cultural expectations and performance expectations around adaptation and learning that, that I think like are all upstream of, of that, of that outcome.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  I'll just give you a couple of examples. Like the number one most important skill at True Anomaly is problem solving. Learning is about problem solving, right? And we problem solve from really two perspectives. The first is from the battlefield. So we don't build anything that doesn't have an operational impact, that has an operational effect. And the second is from physics and that reasoning from physics doesn't just apply to engineering. It actually applies to all of our business operations. If somebody is waiting on approval for something, it's like, there, there's nothing in physics that would prevent that approval from happening or the discussion from happening around like whether a decision should be made. And so like, how do you compress the timelines as much as possible and, and like get down to the,

• 47:45Speaker 00

  get down to the bits and the atoms as much as possible from a decision-making standpoint, even if it's just in HR. Another example is our rubric for failure. So we, we have a, we have a very high risk tolerance at True Anomaly, particularly early on in prototype development. As long as three criteria are met for failure. One is you have to have given whatever you're doing a hundred percent. So that's kind of like the no yellow rule. You can't, you can't sort of just like throw stuff at a wall, a wall later in the program development. You definitely can't early on when the, when the, like the costs are relatively low. We learn by doing. The second is you have to generate like meaningful data. So don't fail in a data sparse way.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  And that data is really important because when you go analyze the data, like extract and ask five whys for a failure, like that's, that's what you're relying on to point you towards the truth. And then finally is you can't make the same mistake twice. And so this is, this is like something, these rubric are like enforced broadly throughout the business and, and, you know, obviously that, like that starts at the top. But I think getting those right and getting the cultural foundations right, and then holding the team accountable is what generates that culture of risk-taking and, and, and of learning.

• 48:56David Weisburd?

  It makes me really think about the two greatest organizations of the last couple of decades. One is Google. Early on, this is a underappreciated philosophy that Google had early on. The two co-founders, Sergey and Larry Page, they used to say that the success of a project is based on whether it makes the entire organization learn something. If they learn something valuable from the project, even if they've spent a billion dollars on it, they saw that as success. And then Facebook has a similar philosophy. They don't articulate it that way, but if you look at all these projects that Mark Zuckerberg runs, and many of them have been spectacular failures, like virtual reality. But the learning of the organization, not just on the exact projects and the exact know-how,

• 49:37David Weisburd?

  but actually how to build and start projects within very established companies, that itself is not a simple task. That's why we have the innovator's dilemma, where the new generation of companies typically disrupt the old generation of companies. This has been one of the tacit reasons why Muse is now successful. They've learned the skill of how to build high failure rate into an organization, make it be as innovative as humanly possible. So you see this across some of the best organizations over the last 20 years.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Do you design, especially in a hardware company, like all of that is lip service unless you have the infrastructure to do it and the behaviors match the expectations? So like in hardware, this is easier in software, not trivialized in software, but like in hardware, what it means, if your goal is like learning velocity, then you actually have to have, that's the mandate for vertical integration, like bringing fabrication and development in-house. So it's not just, I think a lot of times there's a little bit of a dogma around vertical integration in aerospace and defense. And I think that is because that's like, there are some core unexamined beliefs or like people spend, like their information diet maybe exclusively comes from X or something like that. They're like, well, everybody's vertically integrating, that means I have to vertically integrate.

• 50:47David Weisburd?

  It's in many ways the reverse dogma. So the dogma for many years is you have suppliers and of course everyone uses suppliers, so you must use suppliers. And now it's like, of course you must vertically integrate every single function.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so these end up being like religious conversations. And so I think, so if you solve the problem from first principles and your desire is like organizational velocity, right, organizational velocity comes from rapid cycles of learning, both an input and an output. And in order to do that with hardware, you have to have the capacity to control your own destiny. You have to get through prototypes quickly. And the way that you get through prototypes quickly is either having very, very, very good suppliers or having your own fabrication capacity in-house. And I think as companies, companies that really want to learn and innovate, you end up biasing towards vertical integration for this reason.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Now, you can't do that necessarily, depending on the capital intensive nature of your business and like a risk profile, like risk acceptance of your investors and like capital capacity of your investors. Like you can maybe do it right out the gate. I think one of the things that we had to do though, particularly because of one of the key pillars of our product, and I'll get back to that here in a second, is we really relied on suppliers for a long time. And we felt the pain of not having the fabrication capacity and the product development capacity in-house.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Part of the reason we did that is because what we're actually focused on was this interaction between software and hardware. And like the point of convergence is in vehicle avionics. So like the spacecraft's computer systems.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Our thesis was like, performance of the battlefield is about like individual system behaviors and the culmination and combination of multiple system behaviors and systems of systems. And so like, if you architect your systems right, you end up with like emergent properties. One plus one equals three. So we were focused on how do you fly the system so that you have like a really effective and really efficient OODA loop? And that lends itself towards like spending most of your time on ground software, command and control, human and machine interface, flight software, autonomy, and then the avionics that allow for those, for flight software to like actuate the hardware.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  And so we could get away for a long, with a long, for a long time with like buying commercial off-the-shelf systems and focusing on software and avionics. Now we're at a point where there is, we are reaching the limits of our supply chain's ability to respond to our needs from a performance standpoint, from a cost standpoint, and from a schedule standpoint. And so it used to be just sort of like cost and we could stomach that because we have the capital backing we do. And the lesson learned was really in like this integration between hardware and software. Now we're at the point where everything is dependent on driving vehicle performance and accelerating cycles of learning. And the supply chain, like frankly, in many ways, doesn't support that.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  We do have phenomenal suppliers, to be clear, and like every defense tech company at scale is not going to be 100% vertically integrated.

• 54:04David Weisburd?

  You mentioned this term, OODA loop. I believe it's an air force term. Tell me about OODA loop and how does that translate into success in your business?

• 54:11Speaker 00

  The OODA loop is a concept that was pioneered by a fighter pilot named John Boyd. And John Boyd is famous not just for the OODA loop, but also for the kind of science and tactics of air warfare. So if you've, almost everybody knows about John Boyd through the lens of the OODA loop. But his philosophy is a lot more interesting and a lot deeper than that. But we'll stay on the OODA loop. So the OODA loop stands for, OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And it really is a mental model for decision-making and for learning. So observation covers like what you can see in your environment. I'm going to come back to orientation in a second.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Decision-making is like what you do about those observations. And action is, or rather, what you choose between the range of options. And then action is like what you end up doing in time and space. What is, most people focus on kind of like OODA loop, the OODA loop as a system, and equally weight the O, the O, the D and the A. But what John Boyd's writings really point to is actually like a heavy emphasis on orientation. So this is, orientation is like what you do with the data that you have available to you. What do you wait? Do I care about this thing or do I care about that thing? If I have imperfect information, do I, how do I make good assumptions

• 55:40Speaker 00

  to fill in the gaps in the information that I have at my disposal? And the relationship between this and fighter tactics, which he pioneered, he was called 42nd Boyd. He had the ability to kind of start from any 1V1 merge between two aircraft and get on your six and beat you within 40 seconds.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  So the reason he did that is because he understood how to rapidly orient himself to the relative energy problems between two aircraft. So the geometry, the airspeed, et cetera. And he noticed that like, that he had, what he actually tried to do throughout his career is like decompose his instinct into a science, which I think is like extraordinary. And so he came up with a framework for effectively orienting oneself to like complexity. And there is almost nothing more complex in human experience than like frankly, the battlefield.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  So we've taken that, I studied this when I was in the air force and many of my colleagues did as well. We've taken that as a mandate for product development, which is what drives operator and mission success and vehicle success and system of system success is like, how do you appropriately weight the information that you have at your disposal? And the science of tactics is really, if I have geometric conditions, how do I accurately orient, how do I accurately make sense of the geometric conditions of two spacecraft, for example, in relation to each other? So we just proved this out in, from a product standpoint, at TrueAnomaly was in the Victus Hayes mission.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  So this summer, we did a, we did a kind of a 1V1 operational demonstration of uncooperative RPO and space-to-space engagements. And it was us versus Rocket Lab. And

• 57:33Speaker 00

  We demonstrated that you can take a system with less kinematic performance and the way you orient the conditions of those two spacecraft and then make decisions about what to do about it ends up resulting in mission success nine times out of 10.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  And so like what's special about Trinomie spacecraft and software and adionics is we are optimizing for certain metrics of mission success that are like were, I think, that probably best in the world outside of the Space Force. So I think it's a good news story from like the integration of hardware and software standpoint.

• 58:17David Weisburd?

  We started this conversation about the sobering reality, what happens to the United States from a defense standpoint, in many, in many ways, this existential question of what happens to the United States on every level, even politically, even as a sovereign country. If the US does not progress in space tech. Is there a more optimistic way to think about the future of space technology?

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Yes, the optimistic way of thinking about space technology is like is frankly, American capitalism. The capacity to innovate rapidly, the core industrial capacity and drive to win.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  And the mechanisms that make that possible are what are going to enable the United States to regain space superiority from China. The, the force of entrepreneurship and the force, I think of like industrial might, the United States is second to none. We've, we're at risk of seeding that, but I think the good news story is that the problem, there are really, really smart people that are trying to solve this problem inside of government, inside, inside of industry, and it has everybody's attention. You know, we saw something similar in World War II. The United States didn't have really like a robust standing military in the twenties and thirties. Most of our forces were conscripted in, in World War I.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  And, and like, we just, we had a, we had a antipathy against, against standing militaries until, until like the experience of World War II and then, and then eventually the Cold War. And what made the United States capable of really fighting the fight and like posing a meaningful

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  counter to, to the Germans, to the Nazis and, and the Japanese was just the ability to ramp super quickly. And that came from

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  latent industrial capacity repurposed, but then the explosion of that industrial capacity, the hiring of, of unskilled labor and the skilling of that labor. And then the, the allocation of, and, and the ability to capture capital to go solve these problems. So the United States has the, has an unprecedented ability to marshal the resources of this country to go solve these problems. Assuming the sort of like mandate and incentives are there, the problem with, of course, like to your point, you were making a comment about, about like, what are the advantages that, that the PRC has is the ability to lay out these like really long-term goals and, and like drive execution against those goals.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Democracies do not have that ability, obviously, like they're subject to a vagaries and like wins of, of, of the public. And, but democracies are very good at responding to a crisis, not necessarily preventing the crisis from existing, but like very, very good at, at responding to the crisis. And I absolutely still have hope, otherwise we would be doing this.

• 1:01:18David Weisburd?

  You started Trinomie four and a half years ago, you built it into this multi-billion dollar defense company. If you could go back

• 1:01:27David Weisburd?

  four and a half years ago, and you could give yourself one timeless piece of advice that you could bring into the founding of the company, what would that be?

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  My advice to myself would be spend all of your time on talent. Be specific about cultural expectations, be specific about talent expectations. And

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  the score will take care of itself, which is, that's not my formulation. Early on in the company, we just, when you come out of the military, you, you under, I had this conversation with JT from Excel, we did a podcast on, on this. When you come out of the military, you lose your agency, or when you spend time in the military, rather, you lose your agency around talent. You, you tend to, this is not true across the entire military, it's, it's true certainly in some parts, your bar isn't where it needs to be when you're building a company. And you accept behaviors and you accept

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  a performance that, that you otherwise wouldn't if you just approached it objectively. But when you're in the military, the habit, the intellectual habit we develop is like, I'm going to go to war with what I've got. I am going to do my best with what I have, with the resources that I have. I don't, I don't have the best equipment, I may not have the best team around me, but like through sheer willpower and leadership, like I am going to extract as much as we possibly can out of the people around me, regardless of like what their, their like underlying capabilities are. And I think when you go to a startup, it's when you start a company, that's a really great approach because I think it can

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  inspire people to do things that are kind of like outside of their, their typical norms. But sometimes, like, you just have to have the best team to win. And when you're in the military, you don't have the, the mechanisms, you don't have the, you don't have like the, the know-how to necessarily navigate, navigate those issues. And so I've had to learn those over the last three years. So I think like the short version is spend more time on talent.

• 1:03:38David Weisburd?

  Well, Evan, this has been absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Thanks, David.