Finding Success in Defense as a Dual-Use Startup with Emma Bates

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:02]:
All right, here we are. Miss Emma Bates. We're at south by Southwest 2024. There's a lot of programming out there. I love the title glitter and rage, right?

Emma Bates [00:00:14]:
Does that resonate with you behind that? It does kind of resonate. I'm wearing some glittery shoes.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:20]:
You know, I almost wore some gemstones on my eyes because of a friend of ours out there.

Emma Bates [00:00:26]:
But I'm seeing that more and more and I'm kind of wanting to do it. So let's do it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:30]:
You should do it.

Emma Bates [00:00:30]:
Let's start that trend.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:31]:
Okay, tell me. Sorry. My name is Bonnie Evangelista. I'm with the chief digital and AI office. We met the other night. Tell me a little bit more about you, what you're doing now, and maybe a little bit of where you came from, how you got to where you are.

Emma Bates [00:00:43]:
Yeah. My name is Emma Bates. I am a career think tank, DoD kind of strategy thinker and writer. I got into modernization and the challenges of making modernization, strategy and execution and the bureaucracy of it all a couple of years ago through a DiU fellowship. And I spent time at army applications lab working for Doctor Perley and for then he's retired since. But three star general Todd, who really wanted to coordinate their innovation modernization efforts, essentially he had some, he had various different initiatives and he wanted somebody who could talk to everyone from, from the outside to help coordinate those and make sure that they were aligned. And for Doctor Perley, I worked on an analysis of the funding mechanisms that should be available for transitioning from R and D money to procurement money, because AAL, that's what AAL does. And so they wanted kind of a deep dive into what are the resources available to them.

Emma Bates [00:01:45]:
Since that, I went into the startup world. I founded a startup, it's called Kachai. And the reason I did that is because all throughout my career in looking at developing concepts and strategies and writing for net assessment on hedge strategies and things like that, I kept confronting this technical challenge of, hey, we're going to distribute all of our forces and they're going to mass fires and they're going to work together and it's going to be basically lots of computers working on the same problem at the same time. And yet that's not a capability that has been developed for the broad economy or for DoD, as far as I can tell, for most entities outside of 20 or 30 giant companies that employ hundreds of DevOps engineers and Kubernetes engineers and distributed systems engineers. And so that I was concerned by that as a strategically minded citizen civilian.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:51]:
Not a technical or not highly technical?

Emma Bates [00:02:54]:
Not being highly technical.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:55]:
Right.

Emma Bates [00:02:56]:
But every time I talked to somebody about this, we would get to a point where it was like, well, we don't know why we can't do that. Right? We don't know why we can't do that. We get three whys deep, and you can't get to five whys deep because there was sort of this fuzzy layer. And so I decided to spend a good six months teaching myself what I needed to know in order to understand what that was and to figure out where in the ecosystem it showed up. Like, what is this bottleneck? And why does it take hundreds of engineers to overcome it?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:03:27]:
What did you find?

Emma Bates [00:03:28]:
Well, I found that there's a bottleneck, and we call it state management throughput by state. I just mean the reality that a system shares in order to get a lot of computers to work together. Right. The common operating picture, that's the state in technical language. And it comes down to an algorithm called consensus, essentially. And you hear about this in the blockchain world, in the crypto world, but it is the same algorithm for all distributed systems. Cloud AI training, automated chip design, track correlation, drone swarming, all of the things where you need multiple computers on the same page at the same time to do one task, to do one task altogether. They can't split the task up and then each work on their own pile of puzzle pieces and then put them back together.

Emma Bates [00:04:23]:
We're talking about one big task that can't really be split into smaller pieces.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:04:28]:
But I need multiple, disparate, maybe systems working together to do the one task.

Emma Bates [00:04:36]:
Right, or multiple, even just computers.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:04:39]:
Oh, got it.

Emma Bates [00:04:39]:
Because clearly it's one big system.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:04:42]:
Got it.

Emma Bates [00:04:42]:
Right. If you have one system. I'm defining. This isn't how everybody would necessarily define system, but I think of a system as kind of like a body. Right? A system's right hand knows what its left hand is doing. Once you have two systems, they don't necessarily each know what they're. You have to find ways to get them to look at each other, see each other, talk to each other. Right? Which is fine if there's two, but if there's a thousand, then that becomes the work of a lot of engineers to maintain.

Emma Bates [00:05:15]:
So my goal is to enable a system that has its own common operating picture to be as capable as you need it to be, rather than having.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:24]:
Without that manual labor.

Emma Bates [00:05:25]:
Right? So that's. And it all comes down to looking at something like, you know, distributed maritime operations and thinking, how are they gonna do that? Right. You need to have a common operating picture. It doesn't need to be the same picture shown to everybody in that system. They may need to see different things. Right. You don't shove all the information at everybody, but everybody needs to be working off the same reality. And that's what really, I think that if you ask me, as somebody who has written for DoD and all of CSIS and everything, I haven't seen any better contender for the center of gravity in future conflict than that capability.

Emma Bates [00:06:07]:
Are we on the same page? Can we actually mass fires together? Can we actually get the drones to collaborate even if there's no human involved? So I care deeply about it. I think that it will be important to ensuring advantage, decision advantage, but also just, you know, overall, I think it'll matter in terms of deterrence and dominance in the future.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:31]:
Why do you care so much about that? To change careers, essentially, and go all in on a startup and take. It's not an easy path, I would say. Right.

Emma Bates [00:06:45]:
No, yeah. There are very few universes in which I'm a startup founder. Like, it's not something that I started out wanting to do. I spent about a year, two years actually interacting with the inventors behind what Kachai does, figuring out, okay, is it legit? Can we make it a product? Right. But also just making sure, okay, I have this set of capabilities that I care about that I want our guys to have on the ground, in the air, on the sea, and then making them all work together. Right. Is that going to help? And if so, then that's the most important thing that I could possibly do for my country. Right.

Emma Bates [00:07:29]:
They don't need another strategy paper. They need for all the systems to work together in one common operating picture. That's what they really need. And nobody else. Yeah, nobody else was bringing that forward.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:42]:
And so my favorite line was, we don't need another strategy paper. I'm going to steal a line from you. So we were talking off Mike, and I said, what gives you chills in doing the work you do? And he said, get shit done.

Emma Bates [00:07:56]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:57]:
So is this how you're getting at after that?

Emma Bates [00:08:00]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't get me wrong, the ecosystem needs everybody who is in government and working on all of that stuff, but it also needs the private sector. And I'm realizing, like, you know, there is admiring a problem, right. There is being in a position to direct policy and to advise policy. And then, you know, I had kind of contributed as much as I could there, right. And I saw something that needed to get done. And nobody else was doing it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:08:37]:
Did you take that as your calling?

Emma Bates [00:08:40]:
I think so. I mean, not being a founder, not running a company, but solving a problem.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:08:47]:
Right.

Emma Bates [00:08:47]:
Yeah, I very much want to solve problems.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:08:50]:
Yeah, I kind of. I've heard that similar sentiment about where you saw a space that greatly needed a solution and nobody was solving, so you took that upon yourself to be the person to figure it out and how it's played out maybe wasn't your plan, but that's okay.

Emma Bates [00:09:08]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:09]:
Tell me about K'chai. Does that mean something? We'll get into the company specifics, but what is that to you?

Emma Bates [00:09:17]:
So I spent several years in my twenties living in Chile, in Santiago, teaching English at a university to adults, spanish speakers, and for a little less than a year in Patagonia, doing kind of tourism, supporting a startup, helping them, you know, just doing management stuff in Chile at the end of most sentences, similar to the way that Canadians say e, you know, Chilean se cacae. And it doesn't mean anything in any other spanish speaking country, but it's sort of a play on cachar, like to catch. Do you get it? You know? Right, right. It's a consensus building verbal tick, okay. That they just. You hear it all the time. And it struck me that it might be, you know, not that it's obvious to everyone, obviously, but it struck me as a good name, because what we've gotten at is consensus, maintaining secure, encrypted consensus across lots of computers working on the same problem at the same time. They need that consensus.

Emma Bates [00:10:26]:
That's what the algorithm is colloquially called. The existing one, not. We don't own it. I mean, it's an existing algorithm. And so it was meaningful to me because it reconnected me with a very.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:10:40]:
That part of your life?

Emma Bates [00:10:41]:
That part of my life, yeah. And then every once in a while I run into somebody whose eyes light up and I say, are you chilean? Because they see the name on my deck.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:10:50]:
That's how you find your people, I suppose. Yeah. That's great.

Emma Bates [00:10:53]:
So how old is the company we've incorporated? A little over a year ago. The invention's been percolating in the background for three years, probably four years.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:11:06]:
How mature would you say your solution or capability is?

Emma Bates [00:11:10]:
I would give it a self assessed TRL, four to five. So we're in the middle of beta testing with some private sector customers, and we're got some good conversations going on to beta test with some of the Navalx industry, connecting, what are they called? Techbridge, and then talking to DARPA. So there's various places that we can do some testing in the military intelligence context, but essentially it is the same product for everybody because it slots in at a level that's not different for military than it is for commercial. So, yeah, that's. And then it's. Then it's a function of just making sure we've caught all the bugs or anything and then going through the process of getting the certifications required to just plug in. I always like to highlight that it isn't, it's kind of like a, imagine a shim that you can slot in without replacing anything. Right.

Emma Bates [00:12:15]:
Right. Like there's a place where it goes and it's not. It's, the only thing that it is replacing is open source. So we don't pose a threat to any existing giant systems because we're not building a system, we're just enabling the ones that exist and the ones that are in plans and then enabling them to talk to each other by opening a bottleneck that had prevented that in the first place.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:12:41]:
Interesting. Yeah, well, we're going to see how that plays out. Unlike a lot of people I talk to who say they similar, maybe experience or moment where they saw a gap and they said, you know what? I think I know a person or a way to solve the gap and they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. And so it was very much experiential learning and trying to maneuver and navigate bureaucracy. And some of the things that it sounds like you have experience with, though, you worked at Al and you were talking about understanding the whole acquisition ecosystem. So how are you thinking about your product development strategy given you have some experience inside the government and DoD in particular?

Emma Bates [00:13:33]:
Yeah. So I have so many thoughts on this. So, you know, just, you know, you could squirrel. Let me know when you're permission.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:13:42]:
Yeah.

Emma Bates [00:13:44]:
So I see a very clear three step strategy that unfortunately, in the way that the terminology seems not to include the second part, but it must in order to succeed. So first step of the strategy, if you want to be a dual use company, is to go and get that non dilutive funding. Right. Siber sitter is great, but you're going to do phase one, you're going to do phase two, but meanwhile, you need to be doing step two of your own strategy, which is commercialization. That needs to just be completely separate and more important. Right. Because that's where you actually build your business. Then meanwhile, that sibber sitter's percolating in the background.

Emma Bates [00:14:27]:
It's influencing requirements. It's letting people on the inside, in the research labs, in the requirements, writing and futures of each of the services know, hey, there's a capability out there that you might want to build into your expectations of what the thing you're asking for is going to look like. But that has to happen in the background for a couple of years before they actually give you what is step three procurement dollars. Right. So a lot of startup founders and even just large bit, a lot of people just who don't have experience in this field have no idea that CBER phase one in phase two doesn't lead to phase three in any intrinsic way. Like you have to do a lot of work and also you need to be taking care of your business because it can't depend on that. Right. So that's the big picture of I deeply care about getting this into DoD intelligence communities, government critical infrastructure.

Emma Bates [00:15:25]:
But also I know that I have to focus on the health of the company in a commercial sense in the meantime, otherwise we won't get there. Right. The other thing I'll say, and this is a, I say it with so much love, DoD and intelligence. And, you know, the federal government, I think, has retained the sense that they are going to be a company's most important customer and that they are the locus of emerging technologies far beyond that being the case. And it's not to say that emerging technologies are not coming out of the labs and are not, you know, it's not to say that. It's simply to say that the balance has shifted in terms of even just investment R and D dollars, but also in terms of a certain american dynamism into the startup and private sector. And so the power relationship naturally shifts such that I think that there's a lot of emphasis from DoD on teaching startups how to work with Dodge when, you know, from startups. Yeah.

Emma Bates [00:16:30]:
From the startup's point of view, it's not just a barrier. It's like, why would I spend my time doing that when you're going to be my most fickle customer? Why would I learn how to work with you? You should learn how to work with me because I'm, you know, a lot of startups get really bogged down in trying to work with DoD and then that kills them. Right. So what I would just like to see from DoD is adaptation rather than teaching an emphasis on adaptation and on learning, because the onus really is on Dod to make it an attractive opportunity. I absolutely understand. There's a lot of reasons why that's difficult. I just, you know, it's a reality that needs to be factored in. You know, like if you want the best tech, you need to make yourself attractive as a customer.

Emma Bates [00:17:16]:
And that's, you know, for me, I'm going to try hard regardless, but there's just a lot of, a lot of people in my field are like, yeah, I could get really bogged down there and I'm just going to wait for them to figure out that I'm here and reach out and I'm like, okay, hopefully they'll do that.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:17:33]:
What's an example of something that would make it more attractive if we did more of something or less of something?

Emma Bates [00:17:42]:
Yeah, so I like the so.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:17:49]:
Clear.

Emma Bates [00:17:49]:
Language broadcasted in communities that startup founders and already exist in. For example, people who aren't already involved in DoD don't know what effects means, they don't know what fires means. There's a lot of words that will go right over somebody's head even though they have a technology that would contribute to the effect that you're looking for. Right. But they don't know that you're asking for it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:22]:
I see.

Emma Bates [00:18:23]:
So even myself, I spend a lot of time in putting together my air Force Siber sitter phase one, really combing through technology interest area documents, language from people talking at conferences and of course rfis and rfps. I know what that language means. I live in that world and it's still kind of hard to be sure that what they're asking for is what we have in the sense that I can quote it and explain the connection. Does that make sense? I know from my background that when they say distributed maritime operations, for example, which is just an example at the front of my mind. I know that what they need is x, y and z in terms of the network and computer infrastructure, but it's not really spelled out in that it's described in terms of how you're going to mass fires with different platforms. So if there were a really serious effort to translate from kind of milspeak of the requirement that they have, or the technology interest area they have into, we're trying to get this to plug into that. Like, do you have a way to do that? Right. It may not look like what we expected or, you know, we need to detect a certain thing and it might look like this, it might look like that.

Emma Bates [00:19:56]:
And the problem is we're not sure whether it'll look like this or that, and so help us figure out whether it'll look like this or that. Right. Really plain language because then somebody who's working on something for an entirely different field can map their capability onto what you're asking for is, are use cases.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:15]:
Helpful in that scenario? That's something. Or my team's adopted that as a best practice. But now I'm wondering, is that even enough based on what you're saying? Because are we being too broad or unclear about what the actual gap is?

Emma Bates [00:20:33]:
I think it's a really big step in the right direction. I mean, there's just always room for improvement. Right. Um, the. I think that you guys are probably doing some of the best job among all of the different areas that I've looked at. Like, it's very clear to me that, of course, I need to go talk to CDo. Right. Um, you know, you guys are kind of.

Emma Bates [00:20:54]:
I would say you're. You're doing a pretty good job. Um, the.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:58]:
We need to do a great job, though. So, like, even though, like, I mean, I'm hearing, like, okay, there's, like, a low bar, and we're, like, above this low bar. I'm like, no, like, we need to. Okay, we're going to press the gas a little bit. So I'm hearing you there, but I.

Emma Bates [00:21:11]:
Don'T have a specific critique of you guys to share, you know, but I'm.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:15]:
Actually trying to share, like, for anyone on the government side listening. Uh, because one thing that I've found in the acquisition community is speaking in problem statements versus requirements is difficult. Or when I say it's difficult, it's. It's an un, uh. It's not practiced.

Emma Bates [00:21:35]:
Yeah. It's not a strengthened muscle.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:37]:
Yeah, exactly.

Emma Bates [00:21:38]:
It's not a habit. Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:40]:
So some people, it is because their mission dictated they do something different. Our team is kind of a consequence of that. When we started at the Jake, the joint artificial intelligence center, what are AI required? We couldn't start there. So it was very natural for us to go toward, well, let's open up the aperture. Do that. But that's, again, us trying to get other people to start to get those reps in can be, depending on people's environments risk tolerances. It's just different. And that creates its own challenges.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:22:18]:
So what would you like? Can you talk about how that helps you in your seat if you can speak? And you already mentioned, like, language is important, how we're messaging things. Like, if you could take it, like, a layer deeper, though, what is meaningful or impactful to you on how we are asking for you to submit solutions or against requirements.

Emma Bates [00:22:41]:
Yeah. So, and a note on, I think, part of it, part of the clear language challenge is difficult because when you're speaking in terms of requirements, that's a very authoritative, like we've got it handled, or the United States, you know, like we have everything we need, but if you want to work with us, we require x, Y and Z. Right. Saying that you don't know how to do something and you need help is a much more vulnerable, you know, I mean, that's kind of staged. Is it the message we want to send? Right. Like is that, do we want to say the US government doesn't know how to plug these two things together? Right. So. So there's a tightrope to walk there.

Emma Bates [00:23:31]:
But I just think we're sort of, we're not quite properly balanced on it at this point and clear language would be useful. So, and this. So I'm going to throw out a scenario that sounds a little ridiculous from my perspective because I know how. What gets in the way. Yeah, but what would make sense to the community of kind of private sector startup VC people who aren't necessarily already involved with dual use and DoD would be an avenue of streamlined front door that's not just a front door to a small organization or an innovation outfit, but a front door that's kind of sibber sort of does this. But where you funnel yourself into certain categories and then you know that somebody who's an expert in your field will actually take a look at what you're submitting to and where it's very clear how the best ideas that come through there get funded. Each of those characteristics is present in various locations in the innovation ecosystem, but they don't seem to quite be present in the same process. Right.

Emma Bates [00:24:44]:
Because Siber sitter is great. But also I know that I need to design a deck that somebody's going to look at for maybe three minutes. Right. And they're not going to be an expert in that field. And I have something that's pretty darn technical and it's kind of hard to explain why it matters so much. So I took the route of essentially going and getting like a bunch of retired three stars and like a bunch of commercial people and a bunch of VC's to just give me quotations that I've talked to them for an hour or two and they understand what we're doing. And so they're like, okay, I see that this makes sense. So we just have pages of quotations from people because I know that our actual stuff is not going to necessarily make an impact on the reviewer because there's no reason they would be an expert in what we're talking about.

Emma Bates [00:25:30]:
So could there be something kind of like Siber sitter, but that gets funneled to whoever is the expert across any of the services. Right. They're out there. It can't be that there's not enough time among, you know, like that's the combination of things that I would like to see. And then for there to be a pot of money that can't get diverted anywhere else, that is just for the best stuff that comes in that way. Right. I know it sounds a little fanciful, but that's what would make sense to me and it shouldn't be too hard.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:26:05]:
Yeah. I think you're drawing a lens to how do you take this into action, which is where we started.

Emma Bates [00:26:17]:
Do something.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:26:19]:
So if I were problem solving with you right now, if we could do this on the fly, so I would set up a commercial solutions opening for this construct because that opens up the aperture similar to, so, you know, R and D broad agency announcement procedures is already doing this in the R and D space for the most part. That's kind of their normal way of doing business. They have these focus areas, topics of interest. They don't really know what they're looking for, but they have experts who can say there is merit to this proposal or this idea and we're going to research it. It's kind of the same thing on the product side. So the commercial solutions opening gives you that same pathway or methodology, but you don't have to. You're not limited to basic and applied research. Every.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:27:04]:
I've always. Anyone that'll listen, I've always told peos, PM's, everyone, every office should have a cso. The challenge is what you said. They may or may not have experts, though, to review what's coming through. I think there's some creative problem solving around that. How can we resource share or get access to innovators? I do think that wouldn't be a long pole in the tent. It's not a deal breaker, but they exist.

Emma Bates [00:27:32]:
It's just a function of mapping them and knowing where to send something for review.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:27:36]:
And you could even do it from an end user perspective. Get end users to look at it and say, do you think this would impact your life? You know, that could be a criteria. And then with the peos owning and driving that, they commit the money. And so there's a more clear path to your point than a siber sitter pathway.

Emma Bates [00:27:58]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:27:59]:
So like you're. I don't think that's not a pie in the sky shouldn't be too hard. But, yeah, I mean, that's a very real thing. Construct that can happen.

Emma Bates [00:28:08]:
Yeah, just.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:28:09]:
That was great.

Emma Bates [00:28:11]:
Thank you. I mean, I. And I'll say another thing, which is that I think that probably versions of this exist. It's just that I don't know which among the 450 innovation resources it is. Right. Like, where should I. So here's another.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:28:31]:
Just.

Emma Bates [00:28:31]:
I'll throw this out there. I think that there is a. I understand why it is decentralized. That makes sense. There's all sorts of innovation centers, and they all kind of seem to do everything, and you have to figure out what they really do. Right. And they operate at different trls and different colors of money and et cetera, use case interest areas. I think that a casualty of all of that diversity is a learned helplessness on the part of people who are trying to make use of it, because it is often enough, you think what you can actually get from one of those institutions is very different from what it seems like you're going to be able to at the beginning because they're all trying to do a lot.

Emma Bates [00:29:20]:
Right. And they've got ambitions.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:29:21]:
They don't believe, like, it's their job to, or that they have any ownership in that innovation space. Is that what you mean by they?

Emma Bates [00:29:29]:
You mean like startup people or.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:29:30]:
No. Oh, I was thinking on the government side, there's a learn helpless there.

Emma Bates [00:29:35]:
You do? Yeah. Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:29:36]:
Industry. Okay.

Emma Bates [00:29:37]:
Okay. In a nutshell, I think that the complexity and counterintuitiveness and thinking you found something and then realizing there's some bureaucratic reason why you can't use it. I think that that whole, the complexity of that, like, it's too much for a human brain to handle. And I think it teaches people to give up before they've found the place that will actually be helpful. Right. I wrote a memo on this for t three. Lieutenant General Todd, who was. He's retired now, but he was the commanding officer of army futures command when I worked here.

Emma Bates [00:30:15]:
And it just laid out, I looked for all the money that we're supposed to be able to access. Right. Like, as in, when you go to Congress and ask for transition money, they point to these funds and say, why aren't you using these? Once you use these, we'll give you more. So I went and followed up on them, and I spent, like, three months researching the existence and the rules and the norms and the offices behind these resources, and most of them are not actually usable for one reason or another. And one office actually stood out as being very available and friendly. And they picked up the phone and they seemed to really have money and it was actually available. And that was John Lazar at innovation and modernization and DoD. So just shout out to, he's running a really cool program, but that one isn't enough to support the expectations people have going in that they're going to be able to use this long list of funds and resources.

Emma Bates [00:31:16]:
And I think that people learn, I can't do it, when the truth of it is, it wasn't really that possible to begin with. So I think there's a lot that's not getting done because people are discouraged. Right. And then they kind of retreat into, okay, fine, I'll just stamp papers. Right. They become more checkers than doers because they've tried to do and it was simply too complicated. And, you know, I think that there's just sort of a, there's a lot of good things about the way that we've constructed our modernization ecosystem, but that's a casualty of, I think that innovative people often find themselves discouraged before they find the answer, even though it may be out there. Right.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:02]:
Yeah. There's maybe too many layers and it seems impossible to get there.

Emma Bates [00:32:05]:
Yeah. And it's a lot of, it takes heroics to find the right money, the right contract, the right end user, the right mou.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:15]:
Right money. Yeah. Well, let's not end on a sour note.

Emma Bates [00:32:19]:
Yeah, sure.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:21]:
What do you, what are you encouraged by right now in terms of. So that that's a reality, but stuff still has to get done.

Emma Bates [00:32:30]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:30]:
So what are you, anything out there that you think is encouraging for startups like yourself to keep going? Don't give up.

Emma Bates [00:32:37]:
Oh, my God. So this whole weekend at Capitol factory and south by southwest. Right. So I come here each year to just get re energized because so many of the people who are part of the solution are here and reminding each other that what we're doing is actually pushing the ball forward. So I see a company like second front systems. I'm a big fan. They have supported me in so many ways, and I think that what they do for modernization is really important. You see a company like mobilize vision.

Emma Bates [00:33:11]:
Right. I've been watching them for a couple of years, and at the beginning I was like, yeah, we need that. That'll be really good. And then each year I see them incorporating more services. Now I think they've got them all and they're working on adoption and they're working on where do they belong in, who owns the contract with them but those are good problems to have, because their product is something that brings it all together. Their product is something that lets people in the air force know that the Navy's found something cool, right. And that's the solution. It is people talking to each other.

Emma Bates [00:33:47]:
It is people, I mean, picking up the phone and calling instead of feeling like they shouldn't.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:33:52]:
So, to your point, just. This isn't a brag so much as it is. You're not just saying these things. So mobilize vision. Last year at south by southwest. What has happened in the last year for them, I think started with a conversation at south by southwest between some people here, and they. They were having trouble with, uh, I think, getting the army to kind of come to the table and try out what. What they had going on.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:34:19]:
And it. They. They've, uh, started a pilot. Like a. Like a. I don't know how big the pilot is, but, like, um. It. It all happened again.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:34:31]:
Cause I was. I was there. Like, I just happened to know this. So that that is. I think there's some truth in what you're saying. It's not just a, hey, go. Go to conferences and meet people kind of thing. You're saying, like, there's some of the humans that want to create change are in these spaces, and they're there.

Emma Bates [00:34:47]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:34:47]:
Yeah.

Emma Bates [00:34:48]:
That's what overcomes that helplessness that I was talking about. Like, you know, we. We recognize it, and then we're also figuring out how to make those connections. And I think that's also what gets at the kinds of solutions we were talking about earlier. That one area that you. The one innovation hub that you put some time into connecting with, they may not have the expert, right. But the expert is out there in the government. Like, there's so many great experts in the other innovation hubs.

Emma Bates [00:35:20]:
Right. And so it really takes events like this. It takes people like yourself.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:35:24]:
Like the honey pot.

Emma Bates [00:35:25]:
Yeah, exactly. It's a synergy, you know, uh, generator. And. And I think that this really is kind of what overcomes it, because you have representatives from all of these different entities and organizations. And, you know, like, now, after this weekend, now I know where I'm going to go to do some testing and validation in a phase two. And I know who the mou writer's gonna be, and I know who the end user is gonna be, and I know where the money's going to come from. And it's because, you know, the most innovative people from all of the organizations came here and just, like, you know, put our brains together so let's go.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:36:03]:
Yeah.

Emma Bates [00:36:03]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:36:04]:
Okay, so my new favorite way to end the podcast is to ask a super serious hard question. Ready? Would you dip your grilled cheese in hot chocolate?

Emma Bates [00:36:16]:
Oh, my. Under what circumstances? I don't currently do. So I would do it once.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:36:27]:
Once.

Emma Bates [00:36:28]:
I'll try it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:36:28]:
You're skeptical, though. Cause you would try it once, but may not be a thing I would be into. Sounds like.

Emma Bates [00:36:34]:
Okay, here's a question. What kind of cheese is on the grilled cheese? Cause if it's cheddar, Taylor's choice, less interesting. But I could imagine some interesting, like brie. You know, the nuances to how people.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:36:45]:
Answer this question is amazing. The fact that you're like, what kind of cheese is on there actually makes a difference. Never thought of that.

Emma Bates [00:36:53]:
Makes a difference. I would dip a, like a grilled cheese with brie into hot chocolate or some other kind of nice, creamy, fancy french cheese, like sharp cheddar cheese in hot chocolate. Probably. That would probably be a one time experience, but I'm gonna go try it now. Well, okay, here's what prompts you to ask.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:37:15]:
So it's a midwest. I learned that this is a Midwest staple, a thing that they do, and I had never heard of it, and I thought I was crazy because I was the only person who never heard of this. But now I ask everyone, no one's heard of this whatsoever. So it's not just me. Midwest people are just, you know.

Emma Bates [00:37:32]:
So have you dipped grilled cheese in hot chocolate?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:37:34]:
I have not partake yet, but. So a new one I learned today was, would you dip your peanut butter.

Emma Bates [00:37:41]:
And jelly in chili in, like, being chilly?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:37:46]:
Sure. Yeah. Being chilly.

Emma Bates [00:37:53]:
Probably a one time experience as well.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:37:55]:
But you would be open to it?

Emma Bates [00:37:57]:
Yeah, I'll be open to it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:37:57]:
You would be open to it.

Emma Bates [00:37:58]:
I'm going to do both of them, and I will reach out and let you know.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:38:00]:
Both are Midwest things and that I'm learning about. The more I ask people this, the more you learn. Apparently for school children. Crustable, uncrustable.

Emma Bates [00:38:12]:
That's what it's called.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:38:13]:
Dipped in chili is kind of a thing.

Emma Bates [00:38:15]:
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, well, I'm.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:38:18]:
I don't know if it's still a thing.

Emma Bates [00:38:19]:
Very weird little kid who loved broccoli, but I would dip it in ketchup. And everyone in the room goes, well, yeah, that's. For some reason that was like, I've kind of grown out of it, but.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:38:30]:
Like, raw or cooked broccoli?

Emma Bates [00:38:32]:
Cooked, yeah. And raw broccoli goes in ranch broccoli goes in ranch.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:38:39]:
But yeah.

Emma Bates [00:38:39]:
No, there's for some reason that that emerged as something I wanted as a kid and still wouldn't say no to it. It's very weird. We like different things, don't we?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:38:49]:
Well, Emma, I can't thank you enough. I appreciate you giving me some time, sharing your experience with everybody.

Emma Bates [00:38:55]:
I appreciate that you do the podcast. I think it brings a lot of good knowledge into the space.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:39:00]:
Awesome. Well, I hope you're gonna get some stuff done right. I wanna see some great things.

Emma Bates [00:39:05]:
All right. From Kachakin. Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:39:08]:
Kachai.

Emma Bates [00:39:08]:
Kachai.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:39:09]:
Got it.

Emma Bates [00:39:09]:
Yeah. Thanks so much for bringing me on.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:39:12]:
Yeah, take her.