Epirus & Galvanick CEOs on the Future of Defense & Cyberattacks

Andy Lowery, CEO of Epirus, & Joshua Steinman, CEO of Galvanick, join Molly O’Shea to break down the next frontier of defense, from drone swarms to industrial cyber threats. Epirus has raised over $550M from StepStone, General Dynamics, T. Rowe Price, Gaingels, and 8VC, building its Leonidas™ solid-state, high-power microwave weapon to counter drones and drone swarms. Lowery explains how Epirus is pioneering the “sixth domain of warfare”—physical cyber attacks—and how their “one-to-many” defense approach gives the U. S. a strategic edge against mass drone threats. Galvanick, meanwhile, is tackling the cyber front. Steinman, who served four years in the Trump White House on the National Security Council, breaks down why industrial control systems (ICS/SCADA) are America’s greatest vulnerability—and how Galvanick’s platform detects and neutralizes attacks that could cripple manufacturing, energy, and defense supply chains. Together, we explore: What the sixth domain of warfare means for modern conflict. How Epirus’ Gen 2 systems are extending range and production readiness. Why cybersecurity for industrial infrastructure is mission-critical. The role of defense tech in America’s reindustrialization. Where geopolitics, AI, and national security intersect in the decade ahead. This conversation is part of Sourcery’s “Made in America” Mini-Series recorded at the Reindustrialize 2025 Summit. 1. Andy Lowery: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andylowery/ 2. Joshua Steinman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmsteinman/ 3. Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea%E2%81%A0 4. Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc⁠ https://x.com/sourceryvc%E2%81%A0 Brought to you by: • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. As a Sourcery Listener you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s), white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, & access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) visit → https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. Visit: https://turing.com/sourcery • Kalshi https://kalshi.com/sourcery—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: https://kalshi.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Chapters: (00:00) Future of Defense & Cyberattacks (01:25) Origins of Epirus & next-gen jamming roots at Raytheon (03:55) Defining the sixth domain of warfare (06:35) America’s edge: cleverness, phased arrays, & underdog strategy (08:47) Drones, consumer electronics, & the “one-to-many” defense approach (11:15) Epirus’ Gen 2 Leonidas system: extended range and readiness (15:00) Reindustrialization: manufacturing bottlenecks in amplifiers & rocket motors (19:00) U. S. talent and supply chain challenges in electronics (21:45) Epirus milestones & next Army tests (23:15) Transition to Joshua Steinman, CEO of Galvanick (24:00) Steinman’s background: Navy, Iraq, White House National Security Council (27:00) Lessons from working under Trump at the NSC (32:25) Galvanick’s mission: defending America’s industrial base from cyber threats (34:00) Real-world ICS/SCADA attack examples (Iranian steel mills) (39:15) The role of cybersecurity in reindustrialization and U. S. resilience

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The other thing that America does really, really well is we are underdog comeback kings. You know, I see us catching up, but we can't just play the me too game. Like Andrel's very me too to China. They said, we're going to go toe to toe manufacturing in volume, build computers, build drones. We're going to build everything that China does really, really well.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  The easiest way to defeat a weapon system is on the factory floor. CrowdStrike's a hundred billion dollar company to secure IT systems. In operational technology, it's almost zero.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia, all of those chips come preloaded with all the software and the control circuits you need. Build a drone or build a robot or build an augmented reality headset. And a lot of times the chip manufacturers even give you reference designs or plans to say, well, if you don't know how to build your own drone, here's how to do it. But it isn't how many we have today, it's how many can you build in a year?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Mike Flynn called me up and said, hey, come to the White House and then spent four years and owned all cyber telecom supply chain and crypto policy at the White House on the National Security Council. I think President Trump is probably the best boss I've ever had. He's like two increments smarter than most other people, like very smart people. Things would happen and I'd ask myself like, why did he do?

• 1:09Molly O'Shea?

  Joshua Steinman, Andy Lowery, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:25Molly O'Shea?

  Andy Lowery, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:28Molly O'Shea?

  So you're CEO of Epirus?

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:31Molly O'Shea?

  Could you give some background on Epirus?

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. Epirus was founded in 2018 by a team that I led back at Raytheon, where we worked on a really kind of incredible project called Next Generation Jammer, which was a long range standoff electronic attack system. That system kind of clued in a bunch of the engineers that founded the company into the direction of saying, you know, what could we use other gallium nitride phased arrays, which is sort of the essence or the key feature that the Next Generation Jammer came with. They looked at that and they looked at fields like directed energy and protecting and sort of using electronic warfare to protect things like bases or ships or aircraft or even vehicles.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  And when they looked at that, they said, this is a great idea. I mean, it's a really great idea to put the same sort of technology that we did in standoff electronic attack for this other mission of basically weaponizing electromagnetic interference in order to get consumer electronics not to function. So we said, all right, let's try it. But for the longest time at Raytheon, the Air Force and the military, the customer, didn't really see the viability of that approach. They didn't think it would work. In other words, not invented here. We're not quite sure this is going to work. We're not putting any money at it. And because traditional primes are so coupled with the interests and the directionality that the customer wants to take them in, they don't really have a lot of independent thinking, right?

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Where they say, well, we're going to put $200 million to work, build a big machine, prove you guys wrong, and then sell a whole bunch of them to protect our warfighter. But that's what Neo Primes, or these new class of primes, like Androl, like even Palantir was the grandfather of us all, so to speak. But the new primes, S.H.I.E.L.D., Saronic, others like me, Epirus, we kind of do do that. That is the motion that we do. We're like a product company where we're looking at the capability gaps more than the requirements. And what's the capabilities you're trying to solve for? Like, what are you trying to fix as a warfighter? Taking the approach as like a product thinker, like, hmm, what's the human factors types

• 3:50Speaker 00

  of issues? What are the different issues? And what could we bring technologically that would go up against this particular type of threat? And when you look at traditional threats, okay, I still would say there was some benefit in being able to basically use a product motion, use a competitive motion to kind of analyze what kind of even sophisticated exquisite systems that we would need to fight sort of the old war. But when we're talking about the sixth domain of warfare, which is this fifth domain of warfare for your listeners is cyber. So it built up.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  It was like land, sea, air, space, and then came cyber. Well, now what's happened, we see within this, what I'll call sixth domain, is the cyber systems have become physical.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  So cyber has typically been only software attacking networks, attacking sorts of systems with software types of attacks. And we've learned to defend against cyber with what? One-to-many type of defenses like cyber protection, you know, antivirus, those types of things that can take many, many, many, many, many simultaneous threats, all coming at the same time, and repel them all equally. Like imagine a virus software that only could take one software at a time, it would just let anything in the back door. The same is true with the physical cyber is what I'm going to call six domain type stuff where you have computers that are flying, or computers that are in boats, or computers

• 5:27Speaker 00

  that are in robot men that are starting to walk the fields robotically that China's begun to build. All of those things are cyber types of attacks that are just now in the physical realm of the physical domain. And there's an element, one, of folks doing me too, like Andrel's very me too to China. They said, we're going to go toe-to-toe, we're going to manufacturing in volume, we're going to build computers, we're going to build drones, we're going to build everything that China does really, really well. They got a long way to go. I mean, China's building, I've heard 60 million drones per year is not outside of the question of China being able to do, but, and US maybe 50,000 drones in a year. So there's a huge disparity there.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  So they're making a lot of good ground. But the other thing that America does really, really well, and it's branded into our culture really, is we are underdog comeback kings, you know? We, from our, even our inception as the Revolutionary War, we were underdogs that somehow got past the English and struck our independence. And we're an underdog again, I see us catching up, but we can't just play the me-too game. This isn't going to be a war just mass versus mass, and whoever has the more massive type of arsenal wins. We have to be clever. We have to outthink the enemy as well, and leverage what we're really, really good at.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  And part of what we're really, really good at is radars, is phased arrays, is gallium nitride, and that comes from our military industrial complex like Raytheon and everything else. So take the knowledge, but now apply it to COTS, very simple systems that are easy to build, easy to field. And turn that into more of a Silicon Valley kind of design motion. And that's what we've done at Epirus. So we, unlike Andrel, have more of our roots back into traditional defense. But like Andrel, we also have our roots heavily cemented with a whole bunch of different folks from like Rivian, Waymo, and other Silicon Valley companies.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  So we've blended those two worlds and we think to deliver the types of systems like the force field generator that Epirus generates, I think, to deliver those type of systems, we're the type of company, we're the right blend, we're the right mix. And so far, the customer has thought the same.

• 7:49Molly O'Shea?

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• 8:30Molly O'Shea?

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• 9:00Speaker 00

  Sure. So when you look at drones, they have the advantage of coming out of what we'll call consumer electronics. And consumer electronics for years have been building around common system-on-a-chip cores. So Qualcomm, Intel, other companies build Nvidia, build the Jetson system. All of those chips come preloaded with all the software and the control circuits you need to build a drone, or build a robot, or build an augmented reality headset. And a lot of times the chip manufacturers even give you reference designs or plans to say, "Well, if you don't know how to build your own drone, here's how to do it."

• 9:40Speaker 00

  And so that feeds basically a very simple tinker toy way of building drones or fielding and building drones. And so we see lots of different folks that are becoming into the business. You know, you see folks from China, you see folks from Iran, but you see folks like the Houthis who don't even have their own country, but they're able to participate in this kind of warfare due to the ease of design and engineering. And then when you're talking about additive manufacturing, 3D printing and these types of things, then that makes the physical container for those chips easy to build as well and easy to scale as well. So we have a problem with manufacturing speed and capacity more than like arsenal depth or how many missiles we have.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  It isn't how many we have today, it's how many can you build in a year? And that becomes sort of similar in why we call this physical cyber at Epirus. It becomes similar to thinking about it from the aspect of a cyber attack where you might have many, many small little software packages all coming and descending upon some sort of vulnerability in some sort of a network. Well, this is just like that. You might have 1,000, 2,000, 10,000, 100,000, and it'll just keep going up until they overwhelm your defenses, overwhelm your ability to protect. And the traditional way of protecting, one effector, one threat, OODA loop, that isn't going to work.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  It does not scale with this sort of six domain threat. We need to do something different and that's what we're here to kind of solve at Epirus.

• 11:18Molly O'Shea?

  You talk a lot about being a product company and now you're on the second generation. Could you explain how you've built this out and what the second generation brings you?

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Sure thing, yeah. We just, very exciting times. We're announcing officially, we're nearly done with our first four systems that we're building in the second generation technology. We've built into that. That second generation technology has Lots of benefits and a lot of features that the previous version didn't. So our generation one, and again, think of it for the viewers that are familiar with engineering that are out there in Silicon Valley, you typically use a heavy sort of leveraged prototype development system. They call it EVT, DVT, PVT. They stand for engineering verification test article, development, I'm sorry, design verification test article, and then production.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  So you're building basically prototypes at each stage. Now, this is in contrast to when I was an engineer at Raytheon, and we would build things through what you call a waterfall method, which has a lot of policy and procedures and checklist and things like that. And you're slowly building one system to kind of the end game to a set of requirements. You're not iterating with prototypes and iterating with generations. That feels like a product company. And so generation two is our next generation where we've taken in from two deployments now, two deployments overseas and four systems. We've taken in all of that data, all of that feedback, and we've rolled it in to the generation two system. The number one thing that they've asked us for is more range.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  You know, they want to see a half a mile or even further if we can make it further. And that's for two reasons. One reason is to push out the actual protection arc. But the other reason is, and people don't think about this, is a lot of these aircraft will continue even after we disrupt them in the force field, they continue to have some sort of forward motion. So you need to be able to contend with the tumbling, and we still want that sort of final detonation to be outside a fence line or outside wherever we're trying to protect. So generation two does that. It has about two and a half times the range. of the generation one system in the same size a box, exact same size of kind

• 13:39Speaker 00

  of a 10 foot by 10 foot box. It has two and a half times the range of the previous generation. And what I would consider it to be is a fully mission capable prototype, ready for action, ready for scale, ready for production, ready for overseas deployment, ready for integration into a variety of different C2 command and control systems, ranging from Androld's lattice to FAD C2 that the army uses.

• 14:04Speaker 03

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• 14:40Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, that's, that's a huge achievement.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's great. We're real excited at Everest right now. This, it feels like our, you know, child has grown up and gone to college and now he's well ready for the world and ready to get out there. And generation two will be that bird that finally flies from the nest and I think starts distributing these protective systems all over the world.

• 15:03Molly O'Shea?

  So we're at Reindustrialize. The heart of this summit and conference is reindustrializing in America. What is Everest's role in reindustrialization?

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Well, that's a great question. And, and it's a very interesting topic that I don't even know was fully explored. Like, there's a lot of defense companies here, and the question's why? Well, you know, I think Palmer Lucky said it in Laxor, the robot.

• 15:30Molly O'Shea?

  The robot.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Palmerbot, I guess. It's gonna go with murder bot, you know, that's now we got Palmerbot out there with his. What do you call it, bullet or whatever haircut that they had on that robot earlier? Well, as he was saying, though, there are regulations that require people to manufacture in America. So when we're talking about more and more volume defense systems at mass, when we're talking about millions of drones needing to be built for military purposes, not for just, you know, toys and things, we're talking about that being done in the United States. So that is a real need. The six domain drives a real need for us to build

• 16:12Speaker 00

  back into America. But here's what's going on as we're doing that. We're realizing that lots of the stuff that go inside at two or three levels down, these systems are also coming in without any manufacturing sources in America. So you, the microprocessors, the computers, you cannot buy an American-made computer. You have to go overseas. You have to go to China. And military doesn't want to buy a foreign-made computer, but there isn't any option. So they have to do by exception and so on and so on. And each of these drones are just little computers inside of flying gizmos. That's exactly what we're talking about. Those computers there are not sourced by the United States. So this is pulling,

• 16:56Speaker 00

  this kind of six domain is pulling a lot of that more consumer electronics manufacturing back to the US because now it's becoming militarized. So we see that in our system. Now, the other thing it does, though, is it accentuates enormous gaps in very simple pieces of equipment like rocket motors for the drones. And Palmer detected that he wasn't going to be able to source that many rocket motors in the entire United States, and he went and opened a factory in Ohio. And so what did we do? Something very similar. We have this big phased array system that requires hundreds and hundreds of high-powered microwave amplifiers, every single system. So if we get an order for a hundred systems, we're

• 17:38Speaker 00

  talking tens of thousands of high-powered microwave amplifiers. We haven't built that kind of volume of amplifiers in the United States anyways, since the early 2000s, when we were doing the base stations and all of the towers were going up for our cellphones everywhere, and you had Nortel Networks and all of that. That was really the last time we've built this kind of volume of high-powered amplifiers in the United States.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  So since then, what has happened, we've moved those overseas, the high-volume lines, we've lost the capacity, we've lost the formula, we've lost the quality. And so our rocket motor is really high-powered amplifiers. And that's what we're looking at very seriously because we really seriously think in the next year, maybe two years, we're going to get in order for at least dozens, if not hundreds, of our systems, which will drive this kind of weakness in our current sort of manufacturing capability in the US. But we're ahead of it, and we're working here, and we're here. This is why we're here. We're working with partners, we're working with partners like General Dynamics, we're working with lower kind of supply chain partners that we have as well.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  And we're looking at options and how we can expand capability, capacity, quality of all of those partners right now.

• 18:55Molly O'Shea?

  One of the externalities of having this stagnation in production and manufacturing in the US is loss of talent or no talent. So how are you going about the talent issue?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Well, the experience we draw from is from Raytheon. And Raytheon, you know, being an aerospace and defense contractor, does do a lot of assembly, does do a lot of work, and how we design the systems even lend themselves to the type of the workforce that still exists that are able to do things like torque things together and assemble things physically and all of that. What we're really talking about a lot of times in at least our systems is sort of lower down in the food chain, sort of when you're putting boards through solder reflow or you're pick and placing components on top of those boards. And then you're tuning those boards by sort of a hand process where you're basically

• 19:48Speaker 00

  very carefully putting in capacitors or you're very carefully putting in wires in order to do some tuning for the systems. All of that is like tried and true aerospace manufacturing that I've managed many, many factories to do that. The problem with those factories is they're generally low-volume, high-mix.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  And we need that same quality, but now at high, high volume. And so that's what's missing. It's that ability to go high volume and push that button when we need it. We don't have that in the United States in electronics very much anymore. It's pretty much been shipped overseas.

• 20:24Molly O'Shea?

  How do we solve this?

• 20:25Speaker 00

  I think just one step at a time and one company at a time and one project at a time. Our project is driving a huge demand for it. So it'll be sort of a name maker when it comes to bringing back high powered amplifier design and manufacturing back to the U.S. I think EPRA alone will drive a lot of that one particular class of product. But then when you look at all the other classes of products that we're missing in America and missing being able to manufacture, we need companies to basically take the mantle and drive that change. I mean, Andrell talked about if someone doesn't build a U.S. made computer, they're liable to do it at Andrell. Okay, that's the type of sort of gung ho, hey, all on board, all on deck. We need to kind of collaborate.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  We need to kind of get some spirit, United States spirit here. And we need to really, really reinvigorate the whole made in America concept and not just on the surface. A lot of the made in America stuff has just been, oh yeah, we put a little paint on it at the very last step. We need to really look at the entirety of the supply chain and begin slowly but surely bringing that capability, capacity back into the United States. And I will say the, this administration is making it easy, much easier than other administrations. And they are willing to take risk. They are willing to lean forward and we've been a beneficiary or it's been benefiting EPRA very much since the new administration has taken over and have been pushing for this type of delivery, these types of systems.

• 21:54Molly O'Shea?

  As we wrap up, what are you most looking forward to in the next year?

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Well, I can't, I mean, generation two leaving the nest. I mean, I cannot wait and see in January, maybe February, we'll be testing these systems officially for score in the Army. If these systems go forward, if these systems work as well as I think they're going to do, it will be a dam breaking moment for us and customers internationally, customers in Department of Homeland Security, and then of course, all of our services, Navy, Air Force and Army will all be sort of given permission, if you will, to go forth and order as much as they want. So. I'm pretty excited about that. I'm pretty excited about where the direction of a lot of this whole neo-prime and six-domain-type warfare is going. And I'm really grateful

• 22:43Speaker 00

  to be in the center of it all. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world to be kind of a part of this really important stage of our country's sort of future.

• 22:52Molly O'Shea?

  Andy, it was a pleasure to have you on Sorcery. Thank you so much for the time.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciated it. Thanks.

• 22:59Speaker 03

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• 23:44Molly O'Shea?

  Joshua Steinman.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Molly O'Shea.

• 23:46Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to Sorcery.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 23:49Molly O'Shea?

  We need to start off with your background.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:52Molly O'Shea?

  You have one of the most intense backgrounds I've come across. Can you just break this all down? Don't leave anything behind.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I spent a summer in high school studying Al Qaeda and writing pretty extensively on it. And it just so happened that summer was the summer before 9/11. So like literally on 9/11, I was like, oh, there's an Al Qaeda attack. I had this huge paper that had been written critiquing US foreign policy with Al Qaeda up until that date, saying it wasn't going to work. And that sort of kicked off this crazy sequence of events that, you know, led me to get recruited into like a strange section of the Navy out of college, two tours in Iraq, doing fun stuff there.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And then working at the intersection of emerging technology and defense, both in uniform and then out. Left active duty, went to the private sector, joined a startup. And then, yeah, had an old boss, Mike Flynn, call me up and say, hey, come to the White House. And then spent four years and owned all cyber telecom, supply chain and crypto policy at the White House on the National Security Council for four years and then started Galvanick. It's been, it's been a ride so far.

• 25:14Molly O'Shea?

  Quite the highlight reel.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was, it's been fun, you know?

• 25:19Molly O'Shea?

  So have you been focused on cyber the whole time?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yes and no. I think the interesting thing is that if you, at a philosophical level, I like this mental model of thinking about layers of reality. So like the spoken word is a layer of reality. Like we're communicating using that layer. I could communicate through the written layer of reality by writing things. Money is another layer of reality. And then raw digital information is like sort of the most pressing layer of reality that exists right now that I think is changing the way in which things happen. And so I think a lot of my work over the past 15 years

• 26:08Speaker 01

  has been trying to find where we can use those layers of reality to positively affect America's national security. So, you know, forward in Iraq, that had to do with like running operations to find out critical information that we needed to know to, you know, find people that we wanted, stop things from happening that we didn't want to happen, et cetera. And you can use the various layers of reality to do that. And then, you know, at the White House, you know, crypto is like one version of that layer of reality. Cyber, obviously, is a huge part of that layer of reality. We've basically connected everything in the world to the Internet.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  And we're just now seeing what that actually means for security, prosperity, all those things.

• 26:55Molly O'Shea?

  So you spent the first term for President Trump in the White House. You worked with him. What was that like during the first term?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  It was great. So I loved it. It, playing at that level is, you know, that, that's the human chess match. That's like the great game. You're playing against adversaries with live rounds. And I, you know, both in terms of, you know, from the military side, but you'll go visit a foreign leader on behalf of the President and you'll literally come to an agreement. And it's like, you're there on behalf of the President of the United States, on behalf of the country. And like, this is the offer. Let's go do this. And they're like, okay, great, let's do that. And it takes just an incredible amount of patience and aggression, intelligence,

• 27:47Speaker 01

  that is both sort of, you have to be able to understand or think about and try and understand, like, what do people want from me? What do people want from us? What do they want from the country? And yeah, I found it incredibly enjoyable. I think President Trump is probably the best boss I've ever had. He, and every day was just another realization of this. It's probably hard for him, I think. I think he's like an increment smarter, two increments smarter than most other people. Smart people, like very smart people. Things would happen. And I'd ask myself, like, why did he do that? You know, you don't say anything, right? He's the President, it's his show. But, you know, he would do something. I'd be like, why'd he do that?

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And then like two weeks later, you see like, oh my God, what a chess move. And so after like, after a certain period of time, it just became very easy to just like, hit the I believe button, go be a good staffer, give him the good options that he needs, give him leverage, give him opportunities, and then just sort of like let the master work. Yeah, that was great.

• 28:48Molly O'Shea?

  I'm really curious, like, what did that teach you about lines of command and power?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  I spent eight years in the military as an active duty, you know, sailor. And You have it drilled into you, like you obey the orders of those appointed over you. That's the actual language in the... And so it's somewhat natural, but at the same time, almost all of my assignments were such where I was like dropped off in the middle of nowhere with like a small team and they're like, "All right, go do what America expects you to do." Right? That was literally it. Just like, "We expect you to figure out the opportunities." And that was very rare. A lot of my peers did not have those opportunities. And so, you know, in the back of your mind, you're like, "Obviously, the commander in chief, this is like the top of the chain of command." But you're working at the White House and it just gave me an intense amount of pleasure

• 29:39Speaker 01

  because it was just like, "Look, I'm going out there, you can operate very aggressively." But at the same time, it's like Bezos has this line, "Disagree and commit." It's very easy to do that when you have a high degree of trust in the person at the top, where you just have to assume that like, that's the guy who has as much of the information as exists in reality, right? Like, he's got all of those information feeds coming to him. He's talking to his fellow executives, he's talking to other heads of state, he's seen the intel feeds, he's seen the markets, et cetera. And so, you know, a lot of times, people will second guess him in the media, they'll second

• 30:22Speaker 01

  guess him privately, in the group chats, on Twitter, whatever. And at least from my perspective, it's like, that guy's got the most information of anyone in the world. And he has repeatedly, repeatedly, over like, at this point, 12, I mean, really, it's 30 years of a public life, called it right. So it's like, "All right, people can panic, they can complain, they can this, they can that, but like, I have a high degree of trust in his judgment and track record."

• 30:53Molly O'Shea?

  What is the biggest difference between that term and this term?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Personnel.

• 30:57Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah. I think last time, he was, President Trump was new to Washington and picked a lot of people that folks in Washington thought were going to be the right people for those jobs. They didn't see eye to eye with the president and then they would essentially utilize their authority to...

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Do things that the president didn't want, or do them in a different way, when they should have been doing what he wanted, or just resign. Like, no one's gonna fault you for resigning for the secretary of some agency, but instead, they would go out and run their own program. And I think the president knows now that you have to have people that are gonna execute the program. That's what the American people voted for. You know, they get to choose every four years who's in charge. So, I think he's got a really good team this time.

• 31:42Molly O'Shea?

  It's creating a lot of tailwinds, too.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  It's amazing. I mean, like, the economy is cooking, and I think things are going really well.

• 31:49Molly O'Shea?

  And look at us, we're at reindustrialize.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  We're at reindustrialize.

• 31:52Molly O'Shea?

  We're in Detroit.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Detroit is reindu... I grew up in Detroit.

• 31:55Molly O'Shea?

  You did?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 31:57Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, you're home. I didn't know this before, but we're right next to Canada.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  It's very close, yeah. You can...

• 32:06Molly O'Shea?

  It's right there.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Can't throw a football, but you...

• 32:08Molly O'Shea?

  You can walk across a bridge.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  You can walk across a bridge.

• 32:10Molly O'Shea?

  Maybe get stuck there.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I learned to drive a forklift a mile and a half from here when I was 11 years old, yeah.

• 32:16Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my gosh, that's great. Well, so we're at reindustrialize, the heart of this industrialization movement of America. We need to talk about Galvanick. This is what you're building now after your tour of duty, in and out of the White House, in and out of service. How did we get here?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  It was the number one problem that kept me up at night when I was in the White House. We have connected the most essential equipment in our world, in our lives, in our economy, to the internet, and that has huge follow-on effects, many of them positive, and then some of them negative. And so, you know, for four years, I was the guy that had to get the phone call at 3:00 a.m., "Do we wake up the president?" when weird things are happening on our critical infrastructure, strange, you know, digital actors trying to undermine X or Y, or, "Oh, we found someone in this system, very sensitive." And I had a... when I was in the military, I also had some exposure to that problem as well. And

• 33:19Speaker 01

  so, left the White House, took a breather, went out, talked to some friends, and figured, "Let's do something at the intersection of cybersecurity..."

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And industry, and this is what we came up with.

• 33:34Molly O'Shea?

  What are the real, just to make it a little bit more tangible, what are the real threats that we're facing?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Give an example, several months ago, unknown actors took over several Iranian steel mills remotely, and you know, you have a steel mill, you have a huge cauldron of molten metal moving on gantry cranes across a big space, they're pouring molten metal into molds and things like that. These attackers took over several of those steel mills and just started pouring the molten metal on the floor of those facilities, essentially ruined the Iranian steel industry for multiple months, if not years.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Most data moves over industrial networks unencrypted, most industrial equipment simply receives any instruction sent to it with the proper protocol and just starts executing it. And so this is a huge problem. There's no security on industrial facilities, on almost any industrial facility worldwide. And as hackers have gotten much better over time attacking what we call IT systems, information technology systems, you know, there's been a huge investment, you know, CrowdStrike's a hundred billion dollar company, to secure IT systems. And on the OT side, operational technology, there's almost zero, it's almost zero. And so we set out to protect those systems.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Those systems actually like make sure that we have like clean water, you know, that the sewer systems work. They cool and freeze our food so that it can be transported over long distances. They're the robots that make the airplanes that we fly on, you know, you could just go down the list, you know, they're refining the oil that goes into creating plastics and creates gasoline for cars and just go down the list of literally everything that exists. And those systems basically exist because people don't want to do bad things to them, and that is changing.

• 35:38Molly O'Shea?

  So what is Galvanick providing?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  So Galvanick takes any data source off of an industrial facility and pulls it together, correlates it together, analyzes it in real time. And we replicate the work of a team of analysts that would have to manually go in and pull those data sources and try and find out, you know, when they see one small indicator of potential malicious activity, you have to go do a whole investigation. That can take hours, it can take days, it can take weeks, it can take months. Like when you have to call someone up at some remote facility and say, hey, you know, to some, you know, non-technical person, "Hey, can you take a thumb drive and like go over to this computer, plug it in, and then pull up the terminal, and I'm going to give you a bunch of commands to run, and you're going to pull logs off of that machine and then send them back to me."

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Almost impossible to do in large industrial facilities. So those investigations can take a very long time. Because we're tapped into all those systems live, we auto-generate those investigations in about two to five minutes. So we have essentially replicated a significant portion of the workforce that exists on the IT cybersecurity side for the OT cybersecurity sort of apparatus. And the problem is that there just aren't enough Americans that do OT cybersecurity. In fact, when I was at the White House, I chartered a study. You have like researchers that work for you there. And we found less than 10,000 Americans that do that. And so the problem is like I would love it if there were Americans that could do those jobs.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  They don't exist. Training for those jobs takes years. And there are multiple skillsets where if you get one of those skillsets, you're going to get a great paying job. So really, the people that get into OT cybersecurity are deeply passionate about it because they've, you know, seen what happens when someone hacks into a water treatment facility and starts to, you know, change the chemical dials or what have you. And so, yeah, we've replicated that and we can deploy it anywhere.

• 37:39Molly O'Shea?

  Talking about team, we need to talk about your team.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, rock star team. So my co-founder, two co-founders, Brandon Park, Felix Plajinsky. Brandon stood up as one of the first, as the first hire on Amazon's OT cybersecurity team. So there were four people responsible for 700 facilities worldwide. So think an Amazon fulfillment center, it's basically robots, right? It's robots and a few humans. So those robots, you know, are, it is possible to give them non-standard instructions. So Brandon and his team were responsible for trying to protect those facilities. Felix Plajinsky, our COO, Felix and I went to college together. I recruited him down from

• 38:26Speaker 01

  New York. He was a hedge fund trader, joined the Department of Labor as the Deputy Chief Economist, and then pulled him over to the White House. And we worked on the intersection of economics, markets, and national security together.

• 38:38Molly O'Shea?

  How big is the overall team? Is it just you three? You have more?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  No, we have 15 people.

• 38:42Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And some big hires coming in soon, all announced, once they, once they hit, but just signed paperwork. So things are going great.

• 38:50Molly O'Shea?

  Super exciting. Quite the intense team.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  It's great. Yeah. So we obviously pulled a lot of folks out of, out of Amazon and then some other great, OT cyber, it's so small, you kind of like know where all the players are. So yeah, pulled some really fantastic folks out of Google and Uber and a few other like niche shops around town.

• 39:14Molly O'Shea?

  I think taking a step back, what role do you think this team and this company has in reindustrialization?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  I've said to several people today, the easiest way to defeat a weapon system is on the factory floor. And so the defense industrial base is where the fight is happening right now. That's why reindustrialization is so important. And if you can't manufacture things and know that the way in which they were manufactured is the way that you wanted them to be manufactured, the software that's being, you know, deployed onto them is what you wanted to be deployed onto them, they're made to the specs that you wanted. And in the steel example, you want to make sure that those systems continue to function and can continue to function. It's critical. If you don't have a secure industrial base, you don't have an industrial base.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  It means that industrial base exists because your adversaries allow it to exist. So unless we're able to protect that, all of it's for naught.

• 40:12Molly O'Shea?

  Between all of the geopolitical tensions, which ones do you think are the highest threats for the US?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  I think the president is very deftly handling the situation in Russia and Ukraine, very much opposed to escalating and eventually nuclear conflict. Obviously, he's thinking a lot about the situation in the South China Sea and also with the Iranian nuclear program. From a cyber perspective, I believe that the most critical friction points exist between us and the Chinese Communist Party. You can look on the news, there are reports to Congress, open testimony by directors of national intelligence, that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and the

• 41:03Speaker 01

  North Koreans, but especially the Chinese, have been prolific in their efforts in the cyber domain to essentially preposition themselves on America's critical infrastructure. They are there now. And their goal is, at a time and place of their choosing, to be able to flip off things that we rely on. Again, water, power, sewer, transportation, manufacturing, just go down the list. This is publicly acknowledged at an unclassified level. I'm not breaching any confidences. It is announced in Congress every year. Just read the DNIs, the Director of National Intelligence's reports to Congress every year. You can look up salt typhoon and volt typhoon.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  These are two Chinese intrusion sets, we call it, and prolific in hacking things like telecommunications networks. And so I think that fight is happening now. I mean, that's a war that is literally happening right now that people don't understand because it's sort of hidden. But I think that's where the fight is, and that's certainly why we're doing what we're doing.

• 42:12Molly O'Shea?

  How do you resolve that, or how do you keep it at bay?

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Good defense and good offense. So I can't do the offense part now. I used to, but I can do the defense part.

• 42:23Molly O'Shea?

  Felix wanted me to ask you about your take on Taiwan. When do you think we're going to go to war? Or when do you think Taiwan's gonna get overtaken?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I desperately want the Taiwanese people to want to defend themselves. And so my gauge on that potential conflict has to do with what I see the Taiwanese people doing. Are they equipping every military-age male from 15 to 50 with AK-47s, 1,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor, and then forcing them to go out? Not forcing, but asking them to go out and drill and train and learn how to operate those and other weapon systems? Are they going out and procuring things that are going to survive the first 24 hours of an absolute onslaught of the Chinese Communist Party's People's Liberation Army and People's Liberation Army Navy, which is what it's called?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  And that's how I gauge whether or not I think they are going to want to actually preserve their way of life. It really is a fight in their own hearts and minds. Like, they have to make the decision. And I think America has always tried to be a friend to free peoples everywhere. And so we'll see. I certainly don't have the most up-to-date information on what it is that they're procuring and buying, but... When I do talk and do engage with folks, that is exactly where I go. It's like, tell me about, tell me about the official, you know, National Guard militia-type entities that they have there, and let's talk through, you know, what training is happening? What are they doing? Who's interested?

• 44:00Molly O'Shea?

  When you start working with customers, like, what are the first things that you always check? Like, what can companies do to make sure that they have some sort of defensible infrastructure?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Network architecture is really important. And so, there are certain companies where you go in and they're running email and a production system on the same, on the same network. That's inadvisable. Because it means that if you have, you know, someone that visits an illicit website from their laptop or computer, and a malicious actor happens to get onto that work computer, they have a straight line over to a CNC machine, or a robot arm, or what have you. So, the biggest thing that we always recommend, even when we're not working with a company, is what we call network segmentation.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  And then beyond that, you know, there's a whole bunch of other very technical things that you can do. You can firewalls, you, you know, you can create further segmentation.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  But at the end of the day, what Galvanick does is deeply monitor what's happening on the industrial side, on that OT network. And from our perspective, that's going to be the gold standard going forward. Because unless you're doing that, you have no idea what's happening on the network that actually produces what your company does. Like, right now, some of our customers, you know, what did it look like before in terms of monitoring, and what does it look like after? Before, is if you want to know what's happening on that production, on that production network, you go to a paper logbook, and you look to see if anyone's from the outside is like, logged in. Meaning like, oh, I've got a contractor who's going to come and, you know, do a system update for some large press that we have.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  You know, name, date, maybe it says the company, time in, time out. That's it. Other than that, it's like, your people know what's going on. Oh yeah, I operated, I operated that piece of equipment yesterday. Oh yeah, it's on the regular production cycle, et cetera, et cetera. But like, you want to know what's actually happening on those computers? No idea.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Once they deploy Galvanick, we have incredibly granular visibility into what's happening from moment to moment. Oh, a strange laptop was just plugged into this machine. Ah, look, it just reached out to a strange website we've never seen. It pulled down an executable file and installed, you know, a firmware update or what have you. Someone's trying to extract credentials out of this machine right here. We've never seen that. Just go down the list. Unless you know what's happening, you don't know what's happening.

• 46:33Molly O'Shea?

  I want to talk about the vulnerabilities and new exposures that we'll have as AI advances more. AGI becomes a thing. A company I recently came across is Turing and they helped build and deploy next-gen AGI within real-world problems across industries. How is AGI either going to help you or what do you now need to consider?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  So, part of what we do is extract and organize one of the most unique data sets in the world, which is, you know, for our customers. We don't hold on to that data ourselves. It's their data, but we're extracting the information off their production system. So certainly in the future, you're going to need those types of data, structured data, you know, elements in order to understand and then build those types of capabilities. From a security perspective, you know, AGI is very interesting, AI is very interesting, whatever you want to call it, because the vulnerability side of the cybersecurity

• 47:41Speaker 01

  world is really critical to running many operations, not all, but some significant portion. So, finding holes in code is an art. There's some science, there's a lot of art, and very smart people have been doing it for a very long time. And one of the biggest things that people talk about in terms of AI and cybersecurity is that you can essentially now do this at a certain degree of scale with these artificial intelligence platforms. We're starting to see some of that stuff come online. So what it really means is, one, the discovery of vulnerabilities in systems is

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Very likely going to experience this like Cambrian explosions, people say, right? What took a single person or a group of people, you know, a lot of time, a lot of energy to try and find a way into a system, you're going to be able to point one of these, you know, egregores at, be like, find me ways into this. Great. Then the question is, okay, are you going to then be able to run operations at that level of scale? And I think that, we'll see. It stands to reason at some point, maybe the answer is yes. All this for us at Galvanick is really just about, okay, you have to know what's going on on your systems. You can't trust, you can't trust that what you assume is happening is happening.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  You know, what we say in the military is trust but verify. And that's what we're building to do, is have that deep visibility into everything that's happening at all times. And as we see one, two, maybe three unconnected, random things happening, we can correlate that together in real time, and then immediately produce the analytic product like, hey, we saw these three things, it just happened here, these are your next steps, this is what it could be. You need to go look at this right now.

• 49:38Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, that's a good way to segment into our final section. We're going to go a little bit faster on these ones. We only have like three minutes left. First, sorcery's partnered with Brex. We're going to get you one of these hats. They're really cool. They're like technical, they're reflective, they're sweet. But Brex is all about performance, spending smarter, moving faster, making sure that you actually can track performance over time and make sure that the operations are running at full speed. It seems like that's exactly what you're doing with Galvanick. For you in particular, like, what are some of the components that you like to measure and track for performance within these infrastructure systems?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  It really varies system by system. With people, I keep a index card for every person that we hire. And that index card has like, three to five things that I expect that person to be cranking on every year. And that's how we run our check-ins on our team, is like, you have big goals, and every week you're meeting with someone, it's like, okay, how much closer are we to this? What are the blockers that you have? And how can we get rid of those blockers? Go faster.

• 50:48Molly O'Shea?

  Great. Now we're going to go into these really fun, Kalshi questions, a little bit spicier. Do you think Trump will make a new free trade agreement with China? What are the odds on that?

• 51:03Speaker 01

  I think he is certainly looking to do a trade agreement with China. But, you know, he's in no rush. I think there's plenty of other people that we can trade with as well.

• 51:13Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, right now it's at 29%? 29%?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say I'd give it like mid 30s. Am I gonna move the market?

• 51:24Molly O'Shea?

  You're gonna, yeah, you're a size mover.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:28Molly O'Shea?

  And then will the US government mandate security clearances for top AI employees this year?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  I think they should, I don't think they will.

• 51:37Molly O'Shea?

  You think they should? But they won't?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  It's just really hard, right? Like, you're gonna go to a private company and say these people have to have clearances? I

• 51:46Molly O'Shea?

  I feel like they're like very obvious, though. Like, now that we're seeing all these huge, like, talent trades, like, security clearance.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's hard. It's hard. Clearances and the law around that are, are very strange.

• 52:00Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  I put that on a wish list.

• 52:04Molly O'Shea?

  Explain.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  They're granted when you have what's called a need to know. And I'm just not sure, under what auspices you would say, because a need to know is generated by having like a program that the information within it, if disclosed, would cause grave harm to the United States government.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  It's usually downstream of, you know, employment or a contract. So, could, could you mandate that senior engineers at companies that are doing business with the United States government have clearances? Yes. There probably are some right now. But those are contract dependent. And so it's like if a company has a contract with the United States government, and they're like, these three bullets have to have clearances, then they can go through the process. But like to mandate every top AI, you know, engineer to have one, I just That'd be hard.

• 53:01Molly O'Shea?

  This is why we ask you these questions.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:04Molly O'Shea?

  Straight to the source.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 53:05Molly O'Shea?

  It's at about like 15% right now, so.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  That's a zero.

• 53:09Molly O'Shea?

  You know? It's a zero.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Free money right there.

• 53:12Molly O'Shea?

  Free money. Well, perfect. This was so much fun. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 53:17Molly O'Shea?

  I've learned so much. Thank you, Joshua.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Thanks, Molly.

• 53:21Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.