Breaking Ground in the Defense Industry with Alex Wulff, Ben Harpe, and Isaac Struhl

Isaac Struhl [00:00:00]:
I think if you're like a very early stage DOD company, you will read the far at some point and think, oh my God, there is absolutely no way I understand any of this forever. And there's a lot of things like that. I mean, I picked the far because it's funny, really. There's so many different contracting vehicles and different program offices and different sets of requirements and so many players involved in absolutely everything that you do. And it can really feel overwhelming a lot of the time. And I think the way around that is with people who have navigated very specific parts. I don't consider any of us experts on any part of this, but we do now have a really good network of a whole bunch of local experts on each part of the process. And essentially our job is to piece that together to make a sale and to make a product that's actually going to be really useful.

Isaac Struhl [00:00:43]:
Ideally to operators.

Ben Harpe [00:00:44]:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other.

Alex Wulff [00:00:48]:
Things, not because they are easy, but.

Ben Harpe [00:00:51]:
Because they are hard. Through our blood and your bonds, we crushed the Germans before he got here.

Isaac Struhl [00:00:59]:
You and I have a rendezvous with Destiny.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:03]:
Ben, Alex and Isaac from Distributed Spectrum with me today. Let's do a 62nd rundown with all three of you because this is going to be a fun conversation. Ben, why don't you start? Who are you? What do you care about? What's your role in the company?

Ben Harpe [00:01:17]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Ben. I'm currently the COO of Distributed Spectrum. Me, Alex, Isaac. I'll let them give their introductions. But the three of us founded the company about three years ago now when we were still undergraduates in school. Pandemic hit. We all really wanted to do something meaningful with our time, so we took a year off from school and started this company.

Alex Wulff [00:01:42]:
I'm Alex. I'm the CEO of Distributed Spectrum. So we started distributed Spectrum a little over three years ago. Now, basically, we were all undergraduates at Harvard at the time, and we essentially wanted to create a business together and start a company together. And I had had this concept for my senior thesis project actually going into my senior year at Harvard to essentially kind of revolutionize the way that we sense and understand the radio environment. Use information about what's going on in the radio spectrum to inform both kind of operations on the military side, but also across the commercial domain, understanding if there's actual problems that you need to address or there's something going on that you need to know about. So that was kind of the initial concept that we went into starting the company, and then we'll talk a lot more about our journey within the Department of Defense and what we did. But essentially, we all feel very strongly about kind of revolutionizing the way that the Department of Defense Senses and understands the radio environment, and then building capabilities for the war fighter that are actually effective at what they do and are easy to understand and are easy to use at the tactical level.

Isaac Struhl [00:02:41]:
I'm Isaac. I'm the CTO of distributed spectrum. I met Ben the first day of college. We were freshman year roommates, and I met Alex, I think maybe also the first day we played Frisbee together. But since then, we've been friends for about, I guess, seven years now, and started serving spectrum three years ago. I basically joined this because I had worked in Big Tech, and I had done data analysis and machine learning. I'd also had a research background through some research internships and projects at Harvard. And none of that was really as exciting to me as making tech.

Isaac Struhl [00:03:12]:
And so, like Alex mentioned, we started this completely as a technology idea. What if we could take really low cost hardware and do some pretty advanced signal processing stuff with it? And that'd been a search interest of mine. And then about six months in, and we'll get into this later, we realized that there was a huge unmet need in the Department of Defense for this distributed sensing tech and this EMS spectrum awareness. And so we've been running with that for the last two and a half years.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:03:35]:
All right, before we get into the tech side of what your company does, let me get clear on a couple steps in your journey. You said you started the company while in undergrad, right?

Ben Harpe [00:03:45]:
We were going into our senior year of school, and that's when the pandemic hit. And so we were kind of faced with the decision of going into our senior year with virtual school online classes, which did not really appeal to any of us. And so we kind of were presented with the unique opportunity then to decide, hey, we can take time off from school and just try something completely new. And if it doesn't work, then that's okay, we'll go back and finish up your senior year as planned. But we were thankfully able to actually find something really cool and meaningful that we all enjoyed doing and cared about. Continue that into when we did go back to our senior year, and then have since graduated a year ago and are now pursuing us full time.

Isaac Struhl [00:04:20]:
We had also, as I mentioned, we've been friends for a while. All three of us had independently, and also as a group, talked about starting some company together. I have a note in my notes doc from think 2017 that says, and so I think that the pandemic gave us an opportunity to at, hey, are we really going to waste a year of our life doing school, or can we actually start something together? So that was, like, the impetus for us to start discussing what we might want to do together. And then we landed on sister history.

Alex Wulff [00:04:45]:
And we can kind of dive into more details about how we actually got involved with Department of Defense stakeholders and problem sets. But essentially, we weren't even really planning on tackling any defense use cases. It was basically, I think, probably like six months after we founded our company, we just randomly stumbled across this national security innovation network, Hackathon, just kind of looking around at Google, and we decided to apply to it. And when we applied and got into this hackathon, we started hearing about all these people that are saying, literally, this is a life or death issue. I will get shot at if I don't have this type of awareness. I won't be able to conduct my operations safely or meet the objectives that I'm trying to accomplish. So we really saw that kind of really clear demand and need for this type of system. We decided to basically try and work on building out this product specifically for farm defense use cases.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:31]:
So you shifted, you pivoted from a commercial grab to let's go for defense tech.

Alex Wulff [00:05:36]:
Yeah, it wasn't exclusively just defense. After we did that hackathon, I think a lot of people warned us early on that bifurcating our business development efforts in between commercial and government sales would probably result in an outcome where we're not as focused as we need to. I think, you know, we tried for probably a period of about six months or a year to do both those at the same time and pursue both those avenues, but we really just saw this insane demand and need from the Department of Defense, and we decided to focus most of our efforts now and what we're doing now on trying to build out our technology with both commercial and defense applications in mind, but pursuing mostly defense business opportunities.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:13]:
Yeah, I heard you say three years old. Can I ask, is this offensive? How old are you?

Alex Wulff [00:06:19]:
Not offensive at all. So. I am 24, Ben is 25, and Isaac is 20.

Ben Harpe [00:06:24]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:24]:
So early. Twenty s, you start this company, haven't even graduated from Harvard. What did you guys major in? Anything relevant to what you're doing?

Isaac Struhl [00:06:32]:
Yeah, reasonably relevant. I majored in physics, I studied electrical.

Ben Harpe [00:06:36]:
Engineering, and I studied computer science. So all three of us are engineers.

Alex Wulff [00:06:40]:
So it was nice when we started our company, know we had the ability to execute a lot of the technical vision that we wanted to accomplish with our product, especially while it was just three of us working on it. Now we're in a position where we have engineers working alongside us, and now we're responsible for doing a lot of the business development, less so on the tech side.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:56]:
How large is your company? Like, how many people do you have working for you?

Alex Wulff [00:07:00]:
Yeah, so we have six employees right now, including. So we have kind of two leads, one on the machine learning, one on the embedded systems side, and then one bed systems engineer.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:08]:
Okay, so was the hackathon before or after you started the company?

Alex Wulff [00:07:13]:
So the hackathon was.

Ben Harpe [00:07:15]:
Yeah.

Alex Wulff [00:07:15]:
Was it probably six months into when.

Ben Harpe [00:07:17]:
We started the company?

Isaac Struhl [00:07:18]:
January 2021.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:19]:
And that largely influences or shapes is what I think I'm hearing, maybe the direction or your target audience or consumer.

Ben Harpe [00:07:27]:
It completely one of the first times we'd been at the start of our company just trying to talk with as many different people as possible and just kind of understand, hey, who has problems related to the radio spectrum, who is going to be interested in what we're trying to build? And I think that what really was important about that kind of first touch point with us within the kind of defense ecosystem was being able to actually interact with some of the end users who told us stories like, hey, I'm driving a ground vehicle. We get jammed and I have no idea what's going on. We're not even really use cases that we had thought about, but just being able to actually ask questions, understand, and talk to those end users was really impactful and kind of made us really reevaluate the direction that we want to see something.

Alex Wulff [00:08:08]:
And the hardest part for any defense tech startup is really getting those first few stakeholders if you're not an insider and don't have any kind of connections in the industry. So getting that first exposure to both end users and also just the ability to learn at least a little bit about the contracting process and all the acronyms and what we need to say and what we don't say and other things like that. We have entire rants that we can.

Isaac Struhl [00:08:30]:
Go on about all this stuff that's an ongoing process. We're definitely a lot better at it now than we were when we started. And I think every couple of months.

Ben Harpe [00:08:37]:
Or so, I know more, are you better or.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:08:40]:
Yeah, you're going to go nowhere. We'll get back to that. So I'm still enthralled with this startup story. During the hackathon, did you have a product or did you just have an idea? Because I heard you like radio spectrum tech or something. Did you actually have something, or you were still trying to figure out what are we selling or what problem are we solving?

Ben Harpe [00:09:01]:
Yeah, that's a good question.

Isaac Struhl [00:09:02]:
So we were definitely trying to figure out what we were selling. We had no idea what our packaged product was going to look like would be licensed software or a piece of hardware. We didn't know any of that. But we did have a prototype that was doing some basic signal detection and characterization on some really cheap boards. It was like an RTL SDR and a Raspberry Pi, which together cost, I think, like $50. Since we had a few of those and we had written a bunch of systems code that could actually get us information. And we sort of proved that this idea was actually legitimate at the time. But certainly we had nothing compared to what we have.

Alex Wulff [00:09:34]:
And really what we'll talk about as we continue the conversation is, I think, especially within the Department of Defense, it took us probably a year and a half to actually figure out how we need to be positioning our products such that we're going to be able to capture contracts in the near term and make meaningful progress towards developing a system that's actually ready to be used operationally, but also not shoot ourselves in the foot long term and be able to position ourselves in a place where we can actually make this type of sensing ubiquitous across all the services.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:10:01]:
I'm guessing that after the hackathon, you continued, because it sounds like you were drawn to the mission and you found a way to continue to get that end user feedback. Can you talk about that journey? Because it said it took you a year and a half. So did you continue to get that kind of feedback as you were developing whatever your product or your capability is? And how did you get that?

Alex Wulff [00:10:22]:
Yeah, I think, again, it was innovation focused entities like the National Security Innovation Network were really the only reason that we were actually able to get those early touch points, because at that point we don't have anyone vouching for us saying, hey, I know these guys, their technology is good. It's more of just, we need the opportunity to actually get in front of some of these people and develop those relationships. So we did a few different ensign programs, we can talk about those, but I think it took us probably three or four programs to actually start getting stakeholders where we could go and actually show them demos and get them to trust us and understand our technology. So without that kind of early ability to access key decision makers and key stakeholders, I don't think we would have been able to get very far.

Ben Harpe [00:11:03]:
And I think every piece of meaningful progress we've made as a company pretty much has come from being able to talk to a new set of end users and either be able to get feedback that improves our product or just improve our own knowledge about the solution set out there, how we have to tailor a solution, or even just how we have to talk about and describe the types of things that we're doing. Because I think as a very early company, especially, neither of the three of us have any DOD experience. And so when we're first starting to come to a customer conversation, people are going to tell immediately, we don't know the acronyms, we don't know how we're supposed to talk about these things. So it is kind of like a learning feedback cycle of kind of learn how to best present yourself, and then that gives you access to talk to more people, and then you learn even more.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:11:49]:
Yeah. You mentioned Ensign programs. Is it the hacking for defense type of programs? Is that what you were talking about in terms of the programs that you did?

Alex Wulff [00:11:58]:
Yeah. So it was specifically, the Ensign hacks portfolio was the first thing that we did. So that's distinct from hacking for defense. So we did one Ensign hackathon, as that first event that I mentioned, and then we did an ensign accelerator called Vector, and then we did another ensign accelerator a year ago called. So it was kind of that pathway through at least Ensign.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:12:19]:
Was your access to Ensign because you were an undergrad as a student, or was it as a startup?

Isaac Struhl [00:12:26]:
So the hackathon that we did, the first one, it was called Mad hacks, I think, looked for university students, but wasn't exclusively limited to them. But it also wasn't through our university. We found them. We just applied, and they accepted us.

Ben Harpe [00:12:38]:
Yeah.

Alex Wulff [00:12:38]:
It wasn't like hacking for defense where it's a specific university program.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:12:41]:
Okay. I'm kind of trying to be very, or my questioning is very oriented around like this. How did you get to the end user? Because you're hitting on a note that is one of the weakest points in the DOD right now, as you probably know and understand right now, where our relationship with industry is so disconnected that the end user is not able to do what you're describing. Like, you found a way to do it. And that's why I'm like, how did you do it? And I'm not trying to share your secrets or anything, but your maybe more serendipitous way of how you got into it is actually showcasing though, that because now you're here and now you're doing something and you have something, but it wouldn't have happened if certain parts of a system maybe weren't in place to help you along the way. And I guess my point is we shouldn't make it so hard for individuals like yourself with passion and with a drive and with ideas to get that knowledge so that you can give us amazing offerings and capabilities.

Isaac Struhl [00:13:44]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's not so much that the programs in the DOD don't exist for extremely early stage ideas. It's that it's really hard to tell what's early stage and what's not. Like, for example, if you go on an innovation website and you see the DIU and you see Raider and you think, oh, look, it's reaching out to industry, and then I have this idea and maybe a TRL three product, and I can talk to a bunch of stakeholders through that. You're not going to get anywhere. And we didn't know that. We talked to the DIU extremely early, like maybe three weeks into our company. And of course they weren't interested because we didn't have a product that they could commercialize at all.

Isaac Struhl [00:14:18]:
The ensign was the opposite, and they had this inroad from a very small company where they would just say, hey, we want to take ideas and we might identify some transition partner years down the line, but the first thing we want to do is get you in front of a couple, even just operators so you can learn how to tail your tech toward bod. And so we found Ensign by luck, but they existed, they were there.

Alex Wulff [00:14:38]:
And I think the other interesting part is that is not even the entire piece of the story that you need to be successful. Obviously, it's extremely helpful to have that access to those end users and be able to figure out how we actually frame our technology such that people understand what we're doing and people trust us. But really, at the end of the day, you also need access to those key decision makers and program managers and other people that are actually able to take what you have and put real funding dollars behind that and get people interested in it. So I think that piece of the process has also taken us a really long time to figure out how do we actually get access to these people? How do we translate our end user interest and that trust develop into something that's actually going to be long term successful for the company and allow us to continue to grow?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:15:21]:
How long did it take you to realize the end user has very little.

Isaac Struhl [00:15:24]:
Money that was pretty early.

Alex Wulff [00:15:26]:
I don't think so at all. I think for me it was like maybe like a year and a half. And I think we're.

Ben Harpe [00:15:31]:
Yeah, okay, I agree. Like two years ago, it definitely took a while. I think people warned us about it. Well, you know, if you're going into government defense sales, the sales cycle is really long. It's really complicated. So we just talk to this end user. They love it. They're so excited.

Ben Harpe [00:15:44]:
It's the government. They have so much money. And so we kind of had those big picture ideas like, yeah, this is a really hard thing to do for a business, but I think it took a while to kind of put all those pieces together to understand, okay, here's who all the different characters are. Here's what they can do and what they can't do, and here's how that actually affects our business.

Isaac Struhl [00:16:02]:
There were some funny mishaps with that early on. I think we talked to an 18 Echo like six months into our company and they were really excited about this low cost, distributed RF sensing stuff. And we were like, all right, do you want to buy some units? I have no authority to do that. Let's keep talking about the technology. And we didn't realize that it really takes an extremely long time to actually understand all the key players. And we're still getting better at that.

Alex Wulff [00:16:24]:
I mean, it's only been in the.

Isaac Struhl [00:16:25]:
Last maybe six months to a year that we felt more comfortable understanding everybody that's involved in even an individual sale.

Alex Wulff [00:16:31]:
And I think the other piece that really just took us a long time to click was that there is a standard of open and fair competition, but whether or not that actually manifests itself as open and fair competition is a completely different thing. And I think it took us a while to figure out that there's a lot of groundwork that we need to lay when we're tossing these applications and proposals over the finish line in order for those to actually be successful and have a positive outcome. So that is still obviously the ongoing process that we're continuing to learn.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:16:59]:
Do you have a government contract?

Alex Wulff [00:17:01]:
So right now we've been successful at winning things like SBIRs and STTRs, but our near term objectives is getting those first few real R D or procurement contracts for our system. And we've been laying the groundwork for a lot of those, and hopefully some of those are going to start to pay off soon in the near future.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:17:18]:
Have you heard the term the Valley of Death?

Ben Harpe [00:17:20]:
Oh, yes.

Alex Wulff [00:17:21]:
And it really does seem like the value of death is just learning that process of figuring out who those actual key decision makers are that you need to talk to and getting them to trust you. And once you do that, then obviously you have the ability to start getting some of these contracts.

Ben Harpe [00:17:34]:
And one of the things I think kind of goes back to the, you were kind of saying, like, the serendipity of our path is, I think if we didn't have that full year, where we were just like, hey, we're taking a year off from school. We're going to experiment with things. I think if we had graduated and been like, okay, this is our full time job. We need to start seeing tangible progress and tangible results, I think we would have gone through the first three or six months and say, hey, this isn't tractable. We're not figuring out enough. We're not seeing actual results. And so I think it actually really worked well in our favor that we just had that built in experimentation period.

Isaac Struhl [00:18:05]:
We were like, we're just going to.

Ben Harpe [00:18:06]:
Learn as much as possible and then.

Isaac Struhl [00:18:07]:
Figure out what we want to do. Also, our first big innovation grant took nearly a year to be granted. And if we didn't have that year of this fallback of, we can go back to school and we can do stuff after graduation if distributed section doesn't work out, I don't think it would have.

Ben Harpe [00:18:21]:
I mean, like, that the NSF grant.

Isaac Struhl [00:18:23]:
We applied to in October of 2020, and it was awarded in January of 2022. I mean, it's ridiculous.

Ben Harpe [00:18:30]:
Yeah.

Alex Wulff [00:18:31]:
And I think the other thing that we can also talk about we took advantage of was we raised a seed round right as we were graduating from school. And that has given us a little bit of security and the ability to kind of think longer term about how we want to position our company such that we can get these contracts, raise a Series A, and really scale. So that's definitely been something that I think has been really helpful for us, especially now that we're working full time and we can hire engineers to actually start to implement more of our tech vision.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:57]:
Man, I'm not sure if I want to go down the acquisition path or the tech path with you, so let's close out the. I'M really curious. How did you find out about sibbers, for example?

Alex Wulff [00:19:05]:
I think it was literally just, like, googling around about the specific type of technology that we were looking for. I think we found some Google results where it was like, Sbir, and then it was like, colon. And this was like something. I was like, I don't know what this is, but it seems like it's right up our alley. So we slowly started to figure out, okay, I guess this is just kind of an innovation grant that's designed to get startups to take early stage tech and start to transition it. So first, one of those that we applied for was through the National Science foundation, so that was pursuing a much more commercial focused system. But as Isaac mentioned, it took a really long time to get that. But once we actually got that, that was kind of our first real revenue into the company other than a subcontract that we did.

Alex Wulff [00:19:44]:
So that really helped us both have the money to essentially build out this technology while we were still in school and really trying to work on the tech side of things, and also just gave us that first little bit of initial security about, okay, we can actually pay ourselves to do this and we can actually sustain ourselves.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:01]:
Yeah. Do you have any DOD Sibbers or sitters?

Alex Wulff [00:20:04]:
Yes, we do.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:06]:
Which did you get it from?

Ben Harpe [00:20:08]:
They've all been afwork so far.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:10]:
Okay, are they phase one or phase two?

Alex Wulff [00:20:12]:
Both.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:14]:
So you have a pathway now.

Ben Harpe [00:20:15]:
Right.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:15]:
So, Sibbers, I don't know if anyone's talked to you about, like, you do have a pathway to phase three. Right. Your competition is done with your siber phase one or two. The challenge you'll have is, depending on who the phase three partner is, no one's going to help you find a phase three partner. It sounds like you're connected. You have lots of relationships. You could potentially get there, potentially with your end user. You have to know, who cares about your end user? Who controls your end user's resourcing on the acquisition side, you were talking about this.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:45]:
If you can find those right levers or divisions of labor that can get you to phase three, then the next hurdle, like, if we're talking about actual contract execution, not every contracting shop knows how to do phase three. Siber awards. Not going to lie. So I don't know if that's something you've been discussing, but I just wanted to give you that tip as well. So you're going to have to become the expert, just in case.

Ben Harpe [00:21:10]:
It's a really good tip because I think we just started performing on a Siber phase two, literally a few weeks ago. And I think that if this had happened even like, six or nine months earlier, I think we'd be in a much, much worse position to actually transition that to a phase three. And I think right now for this one, we are in contact with the program office. We've been having conversation with them I think we are going to try and figure out how we can tailor the progress of the Siber so it can actually be transitioned to that phase three. But I think that is just a culmination of the last year of learning that has gotten us to. Now we're like, oh, maybe we actually understand how to actually move this forward. Where if we'd gotten this last year, I think we would have crashed into the valley.

Isaac Struhl [00:21:53]:
Yeah, I think that for a while, we were hearing things about how hard it is to get a sole source justification. And once you get that, everything is easy. And I don't really subscribe to that at all. I think, yes, it's great. We have a phase two. We now have soul source and how. We have a path toward a phase three. But the real hard part is, what are the requirements and what parts of our system meet which parts of the requirements? How do we match that up with actual dollars that are coming down, like me on this contract vehicle? Because if our contracting shop that we're working doesn't want to use phase three and they want to use an OT, fine, we'll use an OT.

Alex Wulff [00:22:23]:
We don't care.

Isaac Struhl [00:22:24]:
It's really about figuring out the requirements and how they match up to our tech.

Alex Wulff [00:22:27]:
And like, as a concrete example of that, we have had two selectable, but not funded, direct phase two proposals. So we've had contracted vehicles available for a while that we could have end users put funds on to help develop the system and tailor it to their use cases. But we are still in the process of laying that groundwork to actually get those customers interested in putting up some funds towards those existing contract vehicles. So even before we get to that phase three, we still have this opportunity to use those other vehicles.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:22:53]:
I'm going to give you some free advice. I don't know if this is the right characterization of it, but a dirty secret. So you're using some technical terms in my field. So you said justification and approval some people. So whoever is, maybe once you're ready to cross that Valley of death, you have the right person, has identified funds, and now they're looking for that contracting mechanism. They're going to say, we need to do A-J-A for this. And that is not true by statute and policy. There's nothing that requires A-J-A.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:23:21]:
However, some people have elected to default to what they are familiar with. And when you're doing sibers, you don't have to do traditional procurement contracts, which has a lot of rules, regulations, and there's a lot of structure and compliance oriented things that are happening. And when you're doing Siber phase three, there's an SBA policy that says you do not have to do that. You've already met the standard of competition, and some people still feel like they have to do A-J-A. And this is where, again, you have to kind of know that. You have to know the policy. Go read the SBA policy for Sivers and help whoever your client is understand, know that is not a requirement. And just ask good questions, like, you're obviously not in the seat to make the decision, but just ask them, why is this happening now? Why is it being required? Some people have implemented it as a policy, like a local policy to their local contracting unit or command or something like that.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:24:20]:
And if that's the case, that's just unfortunate. And you're just going to have to bear down and work through them, give them whatever information they need to complete their JNA, and that will likely delay your timelines. But those are the things that I'm talking about in terms of getting. You can find the money and you're going to have to do all that hustle, find the right people, maybe help them find the money. And then cutting the contract is the next part that we had. Actually, I'm probably going to send you a link to a previous podcast episode where Vince Pecorero, he's an excellent program manager at the Digital Transformation Office. He talked about industry being the knowledge source. You're going to have to be that knowledge source for your client.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:24:59]:
I'm not going to Belabor that. I just wanted to give that to you right here in this moment. I want to talk about your tech now. What are you selling? It sounds like you've been iterating or ideating for a while, and now you have sibbers. What is it that you're offering now that you're trying to go into a phase three, potentially, that could potentially scale and have that mission impact you were looking for three years ago?

Alex Wulff [00:25:23]:
Yeah. So our platform, or our product we call RF Vision, is essentially a system that produces situational awareness in the radio spectrum, tactical level. So basically, RF vision consists of algorithms that operate at the edge on things like end user devices or edge computing devices that are available. And these algorithms ingest information from sensors that can scan the radio spectrum. So oftentimes things like software defined radios. And basically those algorithms describe essentially all of the emissions that they're seeing. They describe things about what they're doing, what the likely source is, what that signals essentially look like. And then the other piece of that is we build extremely easy to use software and interfaces that allow people, potentially even with very little technical knowledge about radio, to take that stream of data that's coming from our algorithms and ask questions about the radio spectrum in a very non technical and easy to use manner at the operational level.

Alex Wulff [00:26:16]:
So that could be things like, hey, push me an alert out on ATAp. Every time I see a ground based radar system, or if I detect a MAC address that I've seen twice in the past day, let me know about that. Or if I detect an emission that's associated with this particular type of IoT device that I care about, save that to disk. So it's really, really simple, kind of actionable objectives that people are looking to accomplish, but don't really have a way to that we can enable directly at the technical level.

Ben Harpe [00:26:42]:
And the other thing that I just want to give a bit more context on is what we're actually looking at in the radio spectrum and what that entails, because it is not just like a handheld radio or an FM radio station. Pretty much every type of wireless device out there is going to be using the radio spectrum to communicate. So if you think about cell phones, laptops using WiFi drones were being controlled from a ground station, radars, Alex mentioned Bluetooth devices, like pretty much anything wireless is all using the same core technology to function. And that is kind of the raw signals that we're picking up and then processing at the edge and then kind of providing that easy interface for people to just kind of ask questions.

Alex Wulff [00:27:19]:
So, yeah, during the past 20 or 30 years, during the global War on terror, we have a pretty permissive environment to fly planes around, to conduct electronic warfare, to try and snoop on things. And basically this very old kind of 50 to 60 year old electronic warfare technology was fine in that environment because it wasn't really contested. You could wait a year to detect a new transmitter, wouldn't be that big of a deal. But obviously now, as we transition into an era of great power competition, everything is happening much, much faster. So a lot of these old kind of processes and hardware and mechanisms that have currently been in place are simply not going to cut it to be able to produce that level of awareness that we need to actually stay safe on the battlefield and accomplish operational objectives.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:28:02]:
What's an example of, you said old processes, or basically there's some kind of legacy tech or model. What is that? Because I'm not an end user, I'm not an operator. So what are you changing? What is the status quo that you're hoping to change.

Ben Harpe [00:28:16]:
Yeah.

Alex Wulff [00:28:17]:
So here's a very concrete example of that. So, basically, most of the systems that are out there that the Department of Defense uses do just a baseline level of detecting certain types of emissions. They have kind of a pre programmed list of transmitters they're capable of detecting and looking for. So you can select, okay, let me know time I see this type of transmitter, and it'll do that and they accomplish their job. But the second that you need to detect something new that potentially has different characteristics, something you've seen, these systems are not flexible at all. They have this predefined list. So the end users that are actually experiencing these types of emissions they need to see have to go back to these large companies that produce these systems, say, hey, I need you to modernize the system to detect this type of training. That could take six months, it could take three years.

Alex Wulff [00:29:04]:
It's just this horrible process of getting a contract in place, getting them to update it, getting the new system shipped out in the field, and you can't wait three years to test something new. So one of the core principles that we baked into our system from the beginning is the ability to fingerprint essentially many different types of transmitters in real time and then be able to instantly detect those without having to do some type of long retraining process where you have to collect a lot of data or try and really figure out what's up.

Isaac Struhl [00:29:30]:
The funny thing is, so Alex mentioned the six long process in our demo to customers. Right now, we have a about three minute long process that does exactly that, where you say, here's a transmitter that is not in your previous list of transmitters. Go find it, make a label for it, and send an automated alert for when that transmitter is on or when it's off, and that's it. And end users, even without any technical background, are able to do that in about five.

Ben Harpe [00:29:52]:
And I think one of the key kind of distinctions that we're going for is a lot of this legacy technology is very based around the hardware. So you buy a really exquisite piece of hardware that costs $10 million and weighs 200 pounds, and you can stick that in a vehicle, stick that on a plane, and that it will do a very good job at the specific thing that that hardware has been built for. And then obviously, as Alexis was saying, if there's any change, like, okay, this adversary has changed the type of waveform that they use. There's a new radar that they're trying to use. It is all hardware fixes or hardware adjacent fixes that you have to then make to be able to update your technology. And so with just advances in modern technology, we are able to then really shift the focus to the software. And so all the hardware that we're using is not exquisite stuff. It is commodity, commercial, off the shelf software, defined radios that cost like hundreds or maybe low thousands of dollars.

Ben Harpe [00:30:45]:
And then we're writing all the software that runs on top of that. That is then able to be really flexible to run all these advanced algorithms out of the edge. And so it's really kind of capitalizing on how good computing powers become. That for such a small amount of money, you can get a really powerful computer, then flexibly do all that.

Alex Wulff [00:31:02]:
Puts us in a position where we can add this intelligence layer on top of these existing platforms that need some modernization. But that has to happen really slowly. Or we could also integrate with really inexpensive, just commercial, off the shelf things you can literally buy on Amazon and stick together into a sensor, basically. So we can operate in both regimes, which gives us the ability to be a little bit more flexible about how we're deploying our software.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:31:25]:
So is your core offering a software product? And I think I heard you say you can integrate to your agnostic to hardware or you can sell it as a hardware software set. I'm seeing head nods.

Isaac Struhl [00:31:36]:
Yes, that's exactly right. So our vision for our company is to be the software layer. We're not hardware experts. Our entire team is built around really being really good at real time single processing, analysis and alerting and having really nice, easy to use interfaces. But because of the way that the DOD buys right now, it's a lot easier to sell a couple test units to get people excited and understand how this actually could work. And then at scale, we think that we'll work with integration.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:01]:
Got it. I think I'm hearing you say we want exquisite software on cheap hardware, and that's kind of the direction you're building your model. I think that's the right direction. I think that's the department is going because it also realizes it has a ton of technical debt.

Ben Harpe [00:32:17]:
Right.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:17]:
So the legacy stuff is not going away overnight. So you have to consider that. I think it's super cool. You went from an idea to starting a company in three years, and you did it while you were in college. It sounds like you're very much going through maybe not normal wickets, but you are very early in your learning journey. But you guys have accomplished a ton in just three years. Like, really, some companies take way longer to even get a siber. So I mean, congratulations to that.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:53]:
I'm excited, I'm encouraged because you are the story. Stories like yours are what we need more of. We need more people, we need more. Innovation has no age, but I jokingly say no one's innovating at the Pentagon. We need our industrial base too, but we need to expand the industrial base to startups. And I think you guys are an incredible example and showcase of that. I want to give you the last word. I want you to think about this.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:33:18]:
So now you're speaking more to the audience, less to me maybe about your journey, and maybe if you have some tips that you want to share with other startups or something that you want to share for encouragement or know, because you guys have a unique perspective on what you've seen, especially because you have a strong relationship with the end user. So Ben, let's start with you. We'll just go down the line. Ben, what do you want to share with the audience about your journey or what you've learned?

Ben Harpe [00:33:43]:
Yeah, and this kind of goes back to one of the things we've been talking a lot is that it all revolves around kind know, not only the end user, obviously, the other people within the talk to, but it always comes back to the people. I think that is kind of how we've always centered how we're going to prioritize things. And I think that's also where most of the progress that we've had as a company comes from. And so what I would say to, and who we want to talk to is other young founders who are trying to evaluate, like, hey, is this the type of market? Is this the hyper space that I can actually be helpful and I can create something that's actually meaningful to people? I think that's the biggest piece of advice, is just to talk to as many people as possible, even if you don't really know who they are or how they can connect. We've just seen both for our own learning and for the success of the company. By far, that be the biggest lever that we can pull, is just trying to create as many conversations as possible, trying to just be pushy about like, hey, please introduce me to other people. Please let me talk to other people. I think that's by far the biggest thing.

Alex Wulff [00:34:39]:
Yeah, and I was going to say something kind of similar along those lines, which is one thing that has been very, very helpful for us throughout our journey, is reaching out to other defense tech founders who have created a business that's maybe a year or two more advanced than us, and that has given us the ability to really ask the kind of questions that we're wondering about in the moment and actually figure out, okay, here's what we should be doing and here's the wrong way to do it. So I think the defense tech startup ecosystem is really starting to grow and is really starting to take off. We've seen a lot of interest both kind of from the venture capital side, but also just from founders wanting to do this. So it's something that people love to talk to other startups about. So anybody that's interested in doing this type of thing should definitely just try and find as many people to talk to on LinkedIn and try and find other founders who are in general very happy to provide advice and help.

Ben Harpe [00:35:27]:
And the thing I'll add on to that quickly is like, we're available for that as well. If there are any people who are maybe have been doing this for a year or two and are looking for more other people to talk to, we're there and happy to talk. Yeah, I think the final thing I'll.

Isaac Struhl [00:35:38]:
Say is it's really easy to get discouraged at many points along the way by how complex everything is. I think if you're like a very early stage DOD company, you will read the far at some point and think, oh my God, there is absolutely no way I understand any of this or ever. There's a lot of things like that. I mean, I picked the far because it's funny, really, there's so many different contracting vehicles and different program offices and different sets of requirements and so many players involved in absolutely everything that you do. And it can really feel overwhelming a lot of the time. And I think, like Ben and Alex have said, the way around that is with people who have navigated very specific parts. So, like, I don't consider any of us experts on any part of this, but we do now have a really good network of a whole bunch of local experts on each part of the process. And essentially our job is to piece that together to make a sale and to make a product that's actually going to be really useful, ideally to operators.

Isaac Struhl [00:36:32]:
And that's the part that to me, when I keep that in my mind, that we're actually making some technology that can save lives or improve missions or things like that, makes me want to keep doing this because I can't think of a better place for a founder to be other than creating something of value for.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:36:46]:
Okay, you guys are so great. I have one more question for each of you. What would you like to see differently? Or what can people like me do more of to help startups like yourself. And this can be a group answer or we can go down the line. Again, your choice, but I think that's.

Alex Wulff [00:37:00]:
A prudent .1 of the things again that I've talked about that has been most challenging for us is talking to people at the programmatic side, because it is possible to get access to end users and talk to end users, but it is extremely challenging to find those inroads to talk to people that actually hold the requirements and have an understanding of what's going on from the program side. What are they actually looking for down the road. So some type of resource that basically makes that easier for startups, or even just some type of meetup or community that allows startups to actually ask those questions to program managers is I think really the only thing that's going to make these companies actually be successful long term is like if you don't have an understanding what the requirements are, there's just no way that your product is going to succeed. And that's something that's just taken us a while to be able to actually get to have this conversation.

Isaac Struhl [00:37:47]:
Yeah, I think furthermore, this is something that big defense tech really doesn't understand, because if you're Raytheon and you want to compete on a contract, you already know every single person that's involved in the sale, and you know exactly what requirements have existed, probably because you lobbied for them, and you know exactly what's written, how your system compares, how all the other three systems that are pair and the total contract value might be $100 million. As a startup, you don't even know the product offerings that you're competing against. Even if it's for something that's like cafes three, there's still a program manager trying to fit you into other product offerings that they're constantly competing for. And so it's something that we're slowly learning how to do, mostly through network. But none of these requirements sometimes are classified, but if they're not classified, that could be open information that would be really useful for people who are building tech to understand where they fit into the ecosystem.

Ben Harpe [00:38:37]:
The other kind of way that I'll take this is, I think sometimes, and this is related to what Alex and I was saying, I think sometimes with a lot of the earlier stage or more innovation focused groups, it can kind of be unclear what the outcome of things are, what people are actually looking. And so I think obviously there's going to be a range of different outcomes for a range of different programs and there are different goals for everything. But I think one example that I think is really good is the Army X tech search. They do a great job of saying, here's exactly how this program is going to run, and the end result, if you are selected, is going to be this phase two Sig or that. Then we're going to help you try and trans issue going forward. And so I think that's like, if you're making a business decision about how much do we want to focus on this opportunity? It's easy to kind of make that calculation and figure out what it's worth to you. But I think there are a lot of other opportunities that pop up where both obviously in terms of monetary value, but also in terms of end user engagement, in terms of in person testing, in terms of programmatic engagement, it's never really clear exactly what a lot of these different parameters are. And so that just adds to the uncertainty of what is worth our time.

Ben Harpe [00:39:40]:
How can we kind of optimize for the success of the pumpkin?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:39:43]:
Awesome. You guys have been a true pleasure to talk to. I greatly appreciate everything you're doing. Good luck with the value of death. I'll give you the same offer you gave everybody else. If you're looking for some unofficial advice or something, feel free to call me up as well. And I think there's a lot to be said about some of the successes in your story, as well as some of the areas where you've kind of highlighted some challenges for us to consider. So thanks again for taking some time to talk to me.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:40:13]:
We appreciate you.

Ben Harpe [00:40:14]:
Well, thank you so much for having us on, Bonnie. And also, of course, thank you for all the work you and your team are doing on the trade with Marketplace. Obviously, we think things like that are going to only be a huge help to other startups list, so thank you as well.