"Building the Base" - an in-depth series of conversations with top entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders from tech, financial, industrial, and public sectors.
Our special guests provide their unique perspectives on a broad selection of topics such as: shaping our future national security industrial base, the impact of disruptive technologies, how new startups can increasingly contribute to national security, and practical tips on leadership and personal development whether in government or the private sector.
Building the Base is hosted by Lauren Bedula, is Managing Director and National Security Technology Practice Lead at Beacon Global Strategies, and the Honorable Jim "Hondo" Geurts who retired from performing the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy and was the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition and Acquisition Executive at United States Special Operations Command.
Lauren Bedula 0:00
Welcome back to Building the Base. Hondo Geurts and Lauren Bedula here recording live from Manifest: Demo Day.
Hondo Geurts 0:07
What's neat about this event is it's got a number of founders who are presenting to a wide audience of government VCs, and it's really not about sales pitches as much as letting everybody know what's going on here. Juicing up everybody's thoughts and the excitement out there is pretty amazing.
Lauren Bedula 0:27
And we're trying a little bit of a different format, where we're doing quick hits with founders in the defense tech space, and we'll be stitching them together over the next two episodes.
Hondo Geurts 0:36
So don't freak out when you're listening. You're going to hear these kind of fast facts from a number of founders we want to, similarly to this day, expose you to a wide number of folks doing really interesting and impactful things in the national security landscape.
Lauren Bedula 0:52
So here we go.
We are here now with Jeff Cole, who is Co-Founder and CEO of Hidden Level, doing some really interesting work in the counter UAS space on the sensing side. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us.
Jeff Cole 1:08
Thank you for having me.
Hondo Geurts 1:09
So Jeff, we debate with many of the founders we talked to today, are founders born or made? What brought you here, what got you into this role, and what's your take on that?
Jeff Cole 1:21
I gotta say, as a former athlete, in some respects, I think they're born because you, you have to be willing to take big risks and not be afraid and just be like, yeah, if, if I fail here, I'll be successful the next time. And that's, I think that's something you're just born with. That's how I got here.
Hondo Geurts 1:38
So what would give me, like, the quick founder story, like, what, what? Yeah, do you start when you were 12, selling golf balls? Or, you know, what? You know, how did you get get to the starting this first?
Jeff Cole 1:50
So at a young age, my parents were like, hey, yeah, you know, if you want something, you got to go work for it. So for me, I have a big sneaker collection, and it started at a young age, and I would mow lawns. I would mow a bunch of lawns I'd want to buy the sneakers I was going to wear hoops and the ones I was going to keep for keeping them nice. And so at a young age, it was always building. When I became a teenager, my friends would go work at a restaurant, and I was like, Where can I get a commission sales job? And I worked at Sears, and I was selling lawn and garden and sporting good equipment and making commission and crushing my friends and saving that, and then I learned how to invest it. So, yeah, it's been something with me for a long time.
Lauren Bedula 2:32
Love that. And where did you get the vision for Hidden Level? Tell us about why you created what you've built.
Jeff Cole 2:38
Yeah. So my background, I have spent my career helping support mission and defense and intelligence community, and around 2011 time frame, I got to spend some time working with Apple, Disney and Google, and met and spent a bit of time with Sergey Brin, Astro Teller that that time, one of their moon shots was what they called Project Hermes, which was Wing, predated, and I was enamored at how fast they worked. They just fail fast, fail fast, fail fast. Apple, everything. It was just no things too big. And I go back over here and I'm at a defense prime where our customer is screaming, I need this. I need that. Well, write it in a requirement, and four years from now, we'll build it, and that's worked for a long time, but seeing how it could be done differently was really a motivating factor. And I said to my wife, like we're young, let's take some risks. Are you cool with this? And sold a bunch of cars, a home and a bunch of other things, and launched it from a basement.
Hondo Geurts 3:39
And what is Hidden Level for the folks not familiar, what give us the kind of well, what is it? And what's the big hairy goal you've got?
Jeff Cole 3:48
Yeah, well, we specialize in aerial surveillance, airspace awareness, also spectrum management. So the big hairy, audacious goal when we launched this was, hey, we've built incredible tech. We know there's some real issues, and drones present not only great opportunity for scaling commerce, but security and safety. So how do we go build this incredible software, definable hardware, and what's the business model to sell it? Well, we'll sell it direct, and then we're going to own an infrastructure and make aerial air surveillance data as a service, as a subscription, available to everything from the fence, commercial, state, local, and we're doing that now. It's pretty exciting.
Lauren Bedula 4:31
And you've made great progress in a pretty short amount of time. I think Hidden Level was a recipient of an APFIT award. Can you just talk about sort of the history to date at a high level.
Jeff Cole 4:40
Yeah, we've been very fortunate. As folks that have been in this world a long time, you get to learn a lot about how the colors of money and contracts work. But in startup world, it was okay, there's there's SBIR opportunities. We've received two direct to phase two has done phase ones as well, but we were one of the fortunate recipients in 2023 of an APFIT. That program is incredible. It's focused on taking technology that's ready to transition. We were very fortunate that in 2023 we won an APFIT that skilled procurement for our Army customer, and then in 2024 we transitioned to a program of record two years ahead of schedule. So that proved how that model worked.
Lauren Bedula 5:17
Wow. And what would be your advice to other founders that are looking for a successful way in?
Jeff Cole 5:25
Yeah, it's really you got to work hard, absolutely surround yourself by with just incredible folks around you and knowledge, not only internally, but externally, your partners that can help guide you through working with the customers. What's going on in the policy land, where where money is, and just learning about opportunities like app fit, when we won it in 23 was not really well advertised. We actually brought it to our customer's attention. Our customer didn't even know it existed. So sometimes you have to be creative. Ask a lot of people what's out there, what can you do? And how do I, how do I win in this? And they will help you.
Hondo Geurts 6:03
So being a founder is not for the faint of heart. Being a founder in national security is, you know, double tough. What keeps you going, and how do you overcome, you know, the adversity as it presents itself, as you're working your way through all this.
Jeff Cole 6:21
Yeah, we're as a company, a motivating aspect of our culture is very much mission focused. We say that safety and security are synonymous. They're one in the same, and so we work around big national security missions, both domestically and foreign. But then there's a huge safety aspect, and mean it means a lot to my team. Another thing is, in the world we're in, many of us have worked together in the big defense world for a long time. Might work on something for your entire career and never see it come to life, something at hidden level. We said we're going to do things differently. Everything we build will come to life. We'll see it through, because we're focused on multiple applications different customers. So it's really motivating to know that I'm working countless hours, my team is doing the same, and the things that we bring to life are going to have a real impact. And that is so motivating.
Lauren Bedula 7:15
And you talked about partnerships. You also announced a big partnership on stage today with Apple. Can you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of partnerships in the industrial base?
Jeff Cole 7:26
Yeah, it sounds great to work with a lot of folks, but really, when you go into a partnership, focus on what's the end goal and benefit for both, and when you have you're both paddling in the same direction. It's a beautiful thing. We were it was really exciting to be partnered with about objects and Apple integrating the data into the Vision Pro that was not something that just happens overnight. It was a timing thing that aligned for everybody. We both have the same goals, and that really has made a wonderful partnership. Similarly, with Palantir, we have known each other for a long time, the issues in New England around the drone situation that forced an opportunity for us to work together in a way that was beneficial for both, and it's been a wonderful partnership.
Lauren Bedula 8:11
And that's something too. You're seeing an issue that you're addressing creatively, right at first, maybe no one called to ask you to do that, and you set up. Could you talk a little bit about just the situation in New England?
Jeff Cole 8:23
Yeah. So, as I was saying today on the on the panel, we've been deployed over the DC area and other areas since 2021 it took a while to prove to people and show people what the art of reality was and when the situation took place in New England. First action was, let's go to the systems that we're used to, that we deploy in theater. And one of the folks said us, government said, you've talked to Hidden Level, they have an infrastructure. It exists, and they're partnered with Palantir. They can hook it right into our government networks and provide a commercial. I got a phone call on a Saturday. We were deployed few hours later and operational, and that was pretty incredible.
Lauren Bedula 9:06
Well, Jeff, thanks for taking time out of your busy day and just busy lifestyle as a founder to talk about what you're doing and give advice to our listeners. We really appreciate it.
Jeff Cole 9:14
Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.
Lauren Bedula 9:22
We're here now with our guest, Doug Bernauer, co founder and CEO of Radiant. Doug, thanks so much for taking time from your day to join us.
Doug Bernauer 9:29
Thanks, Lauren.
Hondo Geurts 9:30
Doug, how's How's Demo Day going for you so far?
Doug Bernauer 9:33
Demo Day is going great. You just red eye in you know, have three cups of coffee and get on stage and tell everyone what you're so passionate about.
Hondo Geurts 9:41
So being founder can be a lot of work. What, uh, what kind of got you into the founders game?
Doug Bernauer 9:47
Yeah, well, I think I was born this way. I don't know. I joined SpaceX back in 2007 when they had two failed rockets, no successful ones, and I thought this is an awesome thing to work on. I'm going to work super hard. And it's just in me to to do that, to work hard. No matter what. So I love it.
Lauren Bedula 10:02
And why this field? Why do you see it as so important?
Doug Bernauer 10:06
Yeah, so there's like a long and short version of it, I guess we'll start a short version right, which is basically, if you try to put a power facility on another planet to refuel a thing as big as starship to do fuel production on another world, you need megawatts of power, and you really can't do it with anything other than a nuclear reactor. Took me a long time to get to understanding that, but once I did, it became really clear that the mission I had joined Space X's mission that to make life multi planetary, we were not going to achieve it unless there was a company that was really good at building reactors regularly, that are reliable, that are delivered on time and on budget.
Hondo Geurts 10:42
So what's the long story? So, you know, what? Where do you guys? What are you chasing? Yeah, what's the real So, that's the that's the vision. How are you gonna turning that vision into a sellable product?
Doug Bernauer 10:54
Yeah, so space inspired me to look at reactor technology. I started for a while. I just read about the industry and read about the history trying to find, who can I just get a reactor from? Or, even better, who can NASA buy a reactor from? So they can buy some starships, also put them together and do those missions. But the best way to make a really reliable reactor is to build one on earth. Because if you launch reactors into space, even if you do it regularly, you never get the unit back to really see what was the root cause? Why did it stop working? How did the thing fail? So actually, the best way to make a reliable space reactor is to mass produce reactors on Earth, and that's what we now focused on, is this one megawatt size, portable nuclear Gen set that you can just use as an alternative to a one megawatt diesel Gen set.
Hondo Geurts 11:41
And for those of us who are not nuclear scientists or physicists, what is that one megawatt? To put that in practical terms, what does that look like?
Doug Bernauer 11:50
Yeah, one megawatt is quite a bit of power. A silly way to think about it is like 1000 hair dryers all going simultaneously, which doesn't sound like a lot, but an average house is only about the hair dryers amount of electric power. It's like one kilowatt. So about 1000 homes or charge about 500 electric vehicles in a in a day, desalinate 1.8 million gallons of water in a day. There's a lot you can do with a megawatt.
Hondo Geurts 12:16
And is that look like a big, big cooling towers and steam and all that kind of stuff?
Doug Bernauer 12:21
It looks like a product. It's a box that goes on a trailer. That's a totally custom trailer, because of the mass of the unit is actually quite high, but you can't, yeah, you ship it to a user site. It slides actually into a you need a pre fabricated concrete enclosure that slides into and with that enclosure, it allows you to operate a one megawatt nuclear reactor, or actually as many as you would like on your site, using only about 1000 square feet per reactor.
Lauren Bedula 12:49
And you're not just passionate about the technology or the energy needs here, but also supporting the national security community and defense community. Can you talk a little bit about what drove you to that?
Doug Bernauer 13:00
Yeah, well, I like to study history. I think if you look at the military, they are the ones who push technology forward. And technology is not inherently good or bad. It just changes everything. It makes us. I would say actually, it makes us more human. Because to not have technology or not have power for your technology, you would be reduced to being able to just use your muscles, even if you got a big brain, you can think up something. If you only have your muscles, you're you're really an animal, not a not a human. So I kind of look at it in a bunch of layers. It's like the military will fund the most futuristic right and best technology. I think what why I'm excited about this event is I do believe that, like America should be first in in doing all of these things right, and being the leading edge on all technology fronts. And one that I'm especially worried about is space nuclear, which, just recently, there was one article that came out that said that Russia and China are working together on a reactor to put on the moon. And it said, by 2036 and Russia can build space reactors. The US has built one. In our history. Only Russia has built, I think, over 40 space reactors. They could easily do it. And China's launching to the moon regularly. So they can do that. They can put a half megawatt system on the moon. They can locate it in the lunar South Pole in these regions that have these craters that the sun never dips down to the inside of. So they're called permanently shadowed craters. And there's water ice in there. And if you have that much power, you can do electrolysis. You split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That's rocket fuel free. Rocket fuel, right? Only a few days space ride away, that's the leaping off point to go to every other thing out there, and how could we not be first?
Lauren Bedula 14:44
Wow. So what would you tell DoD leadership today about the urgency and need around this issue?
Doug Bernauer 14:51
I think it's already all there in the executive orders, right? There's a space policy directive six that says we need to have nuclear power and propulsion in space, and so we need to actually build programs and set up to acquire this technology, develop and acquire that technology as soon as possible. There are other executive orders that are not about space as well, like unleashing American energy. And we have a nuclear energy or something, a national energy dominance council. I always see it as nuclear, right? Any, any n in an acronym. I'm like, that's nuclear!
Hondo Geurts 15:27
And being a founder chasing this, you know, not for the faint of heart. Well, you know what keeps you resilient, and then how do you get over the challenges, you know, all the barriers and and keep motivated and keep your team motivated?
Doug Bernauer 15:42
Yeah, it's a great it's a good question. I never asked myself that maybe that's the secret, be a little foolish and just committed right now, just go in. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the way I look at it's like, you can only lose two ways, right? You like, run out of money, or you give up. And I don't see us doing either of those things. You know, we've raised about two, 30 million private capital and are ready to go and fuel our reactor just a year from now. It's been a it's like much, much less likely that we give up now, with all the momentum that we have with our great investors, DCVC, who led our Series C, and Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures who are big members on the cap table. So what we really need, though, is some more reasonable rules, some better interpretation of existing rules that allow us to go and quickly fuel our designs and test them in these totally safe conditions at a national laboratory, right with the right facilities and scientists supporting that. But right now, we haven't done this in so long. Well, the last new type of reactor we've done in the US was in 1977.
Hondo Geurts 16:52
Wow. So get off the stage question here, five years from now, do you think VCs will still look at the national security market as an attractive market the way they have the last couple years?
Doug Bernauer 17:07
I would say so. I definitely am not a expert in in what moves the needle for investors, but I think there's a total rekindling of all investment in national security, and I think it's just started like very recently, and I think we've discovered there's a hole in our manufacturing capabilities, and that a whole bunch of great Americans have raised their hands, and a lot of young entrepreneurs right have done this and have decided to go fill that gap and to build again, and to build en masse and to build rapidly, yeah? So no, I think it's really it's gonna be taking off. I don't think we're even on the knee of the J curve.
Lauren Bedula 17:51
Awesome. Well, Doug, thanks so much for joining us and taking time out of your busy day post red eye to chat through. Thanks Doug.
We're here now with our next guest, Topher Haddad, who is co founder and CEO of Albedo, and very timely conversation too, because you just had a major launch. So thank you for taking time out of your busy day here at Manifest: Demo Day, and also on the heels of such exciting news, thanks for joining us.
Topher Haddad 18:21
Absolutely. Thanks for having me
Hondo Geurts 18:22
So Topher, what, what got you into the founders space? I've heard founders are either born or made.What was your story? What got what got you into the founder game?
Topher Haddad 18:31
I'm not sure which of those I would be. I would say I didn't necessarily expect to start a company. I started my career at Lockheed Martin working on the Bay Area for the US government. And did that for about four years, and was kind of looking around at, kind of the new space, startup scene going on, and was looking at some potential jobs. And this idea kind of just landed in my lap, and I got obsessed with it, and couldn't, basically not start a company. So that's what I did.
Lauren Bedula 18:58
Tell us about the idea and why you're obsessed with it.
Topher Haddad 19:00
So the idea came about, funny enough, from when President Trump, in his first term, tweeted a satellite image that people saw and were like, well, this is super high resolution. We don't have any commercial satellites that can do this level of resolution. They estimate it was about 10 centimeters. And people inferred that it must be from a top secret, billion dollar reconnaissance satellite. And I had had mostly worked in the national security side every day in a SCIF at my job at Lockheed Martin, and so I didn't know anything about the commercial market for imagery, but as people were talking about this suite, they were like, oh, it'd be great to have this commercially, because it could replace planes and drones for all the commercial use cases that these customers will go through the pains of flying those platforms today. But it would cost a billion dollars because you would need, like, a Hubble sized space telescope to get that resolution. And so that's just going to be a million dollars. And there's this very one specific article I was reading over and over again that had this conversation, and that's basically in a nutshell what drove the idea to well, maybe we could rethink this architecture and fly satellite. Super low, and this new orbit called V LEO, or very low earth orbit, in an effort to shrink the size of the telescope, you need to get that same 10 centimeter resolution. And so that's where this, this idea for very low Earth orbit was born. And for the last four years, we've been building the new technologies required to fly satellite for a long period of time in this new orbit.
Lauren Bedula 20:17
And can you quickly tell our listeners about the reach recent milestone with the launch?
Topher Haddad 20:20
Yes, so now we just launched our first satellite Clarity One Friday night, so two and a half days ago, it was amazing. We were the cake topper on the transporter 13 launch. Our satellites are fairly big. It's part of kind of the V LEO architecture and getting that exquisite data quality. But we launched. We have very quickly made first contact, done a bunch of vehicle commissioning activities. Our engineers Mission Control are like questioning whether this is actually real data, because everything is just working pretty well right off the bat, which is pretty rare. So we are now at commissioning milestones that we actually hadn't expected to be at until two weeks after launch. So we're moving pretty fast. Soon, we will start our power descent from LEO to V LEO with our onboard propulsion.
Hondo Geurts 20:21
So so give us insight. It's 10 seconds. T minus 10. You're sitting at a country club in the middle of the night. Founder, you've been working for four years raising money. Everybody's betting on you. What was going through your brain?
Topher Haddad 21:16
It was incredible. And I have two amazing co founders that helped build this company from day one, we started out in Y Combinator and have hired now about 55 employees that totally made this possible. I mean, everybody is amazing and has been working so hard towards this milestone. But it was definitely, yeah, an amazing period of watching that rocket go out. Was my first time to see rocket launch in real life, and just seeing, you know, imagining clarity in that rocket going to space was a crazy feeling when we made first contact a few hours later. That was also a great milestone. But honestly, what really hit me was flying back from California, didn't have Wi Fi in the plane. When I landed, opened our slack and saw that we had hit this, this milestone that we called Protect mode functionality, which was something we didn't expect to hit for four days. And it was like, wow, we are really ripping through this early operations, talking to clarity, proving out all of the actuators and these different commissioning things. So that was the moment that it really hit me.
Hondo Geurts 22:08
So now you're in, you've come from the traditional space. Now you're in this founder space. Kind of new domain is very, so very low Earth orbit. For those that don't know what V LEO is, what would you tell DoD leadership about where are there opportunities that would enable you and folks like you to just keep hitting out of the park versus, you know, having to drag, drag through, you know, some of the bureaucracy and stuff.
Topher Haddad 22:37
It definitely seems like everybody is kind of moving in the right direction on that front, I think there's a lot of there. I mean, there's a lot of amazing companies here today demoing their technology. It is amazing what you can build as a startup when you're, you know, raising these different tranches of capital that unlock future milestones, that you can take higher risks in those early days. And so what? What's come through that over the last four years for Albedo, but also all these other companies? I mean, it's some pretty amazing technology that's very needed today for the war fighter, for national security and everything going on. So I think we're moving in the positive direction. I I think maybe specific, you know, advice or thoughts would be, there's a meme going around it's like, says, like, you can just do stuff. And I know that's not actually true in the federal government, but there is, I think, so much technology that is ready to be tested and piloted and used and gotten to a point where it's not just that initial, you know, phase one, kind of pilot approach, but like actually using it in the field and testing things out. And I think that's really what's going to unlock, you know, pulling that even further forward, and putting that in more of an operational sense. So I would kind of use that meme as kind of the motivation of, there's so much available today, from from what's been innovated on, from other startups as well as Albedo.
Lauren Bedula 23:54
Love it, and going back to having played a role in the traditional defense industrial base, and now from that disruptive side, what drove you to the Defense industrial base and mission area?
Topher Haddad 24:07
So we are the first company that, I think, with this V LEO architecture that we've developed, we have these large satellites with big telescopes flying twice, close to the Earth, and so we can capture what folks would call exquisite data quality. There's also a huge push right now from counter space weapons that are being developed by our adversaries that make our few satellites in space very vulnerable, exquisite satellites, as they would call them. And so there's this big push to these proliferated, distributed architectures that are more resilient to those counter space threats. And so the value proposition from us and where we are true dual use. We've pre sold a lot of our capacity to commercial companies. We've signed now 22 customers for those first few years that will have clarity, one on orbit, solo. But in addition to that, we this architecture can enable kind of these two things that have previously been thought of as mutually exclusive, which is exquisite capabilities and proliferated architectures, given the cost of our satellites. And so that's really where you know the the interest from the national security side is.
Hondo Geurts 25:08
So being a founder is not faint, not for the faint of heart, being a founder in natural security is like double challenge. I'm sure you've had plenty of challenges, obstacles, and what's what's helped you, personally and maybe with your team, kind of get over these, these hills that look like mountains and allow you to keep pushing on, even when other folks are questioning?
Topher Haddad 25:35
Yeah, to start a company, it's no joke. You guys got to put one foot forward and keep it moving. But we've hit, you know, a lot of walls that we've knocked down, a lot of twists and turns. I have personally learned so much over the last four years. It's one of my favorite parts about the job, is you just have to learn so quickly, because you are elbows deep in the context of what you're trying to learn at the moment. But I mean, a huge thing that's helped us is our is our amazing team we have. We have bias towards more experienced engineering employees. Most of our company right now is engineering, and that has helped a ton. Because even these, these people that we hire from the large defense primes, when you, when you take them and put them in a higher risk, you know, startup environment away from the bureaucracy, we can just move so fast, and so having them come in on day one know exactly what to do, and building also the culture around the mission and the focus on on both the dual use sides of the mission, and being very aligned to that has has been motivating for us. You know, work long hours when we need to, especially getting clarity ready for the launchpad.
Lauren Bedula 26:38
Awesome. Well, Topher, thanks for taking time from your busy day and such a busy time too, to chat with us and our listeners. We really appreciate you coming on.
Topher Haddad 27:13
Thanks for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai