Crossing the Valley

Frontdoor Defense
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Few companies make it from pilot to production in the defense market. Those who do often change the industry in the process. How do they do it? What lessons can startups take from their trials, successes, and failures? Crossing the Valley tells the stories of the trailblazers who are forging a new path for America's defense. www.valleycrossers.com

  1. 2d ago

    Ep. 97: Why SpaceX Outsourced 95% of Its Wire Harnesses

    Jordan Black had spent five years on wire harnesses at SpaceX when he flew to a factory in Mexico that builds automotive harnesses at high rate. One every two minutes. He spoke Spanish to the floor lead and asked to get on the line. He couldn’t build one. “I should know this,” he told me. “I’ve been through the wringer at SpaceX understanding how wire harnesses get made, and I couldn’t even build a wire harness down there.” His conclusion was that something in the industry was broken if an expert couldn’t walk into a factory and do the work. He compared it to Wi-Fi. Nobody thinks about how to connect when they walk into their house. A technician on a harness line should get the same treatment. He left SpaceX on a Friday and started Senra the next week. About Jordan Black Jordan’s path into manufacturing went through customer service first. He started as a busboy and host, and he liked making someone’s night out go well. Then he fixed roller coasters at the Santa Monica Pier, at 4 AM, on bad coffee. He interned at Ford. At 21 he interviewed at SpaceX with several teams, and they put him on wire harnessing. He says he had no idea what a harness was until he got to the department. He stayed in it for years as a manufacturing engineer, then became manager of avionics R&D, which covered machining, PCBAs, harnesses, and electromechanical assembly for rockets and satellites. In that role he brought machining and PCBs in house. Harnesses stayed outside. SpaceX sent him to suppliers in the US and abroad, and what he saw scared him: wooden tables, workers without formal training, and no tools or software telling anyone where a wire goes. About Senra Systems A wire harness is every wire that carries power and data through a machine. Jordan describes it as an iPhone charger that can be as long as a space shuttle. Without it, nothing turns on. He knows the cost personally. A rat ate through one wire in his Toyota and the car was dead. Senra builds these harnesses for aircraft, spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, and defense systems. It runs on its own software platform, Amp, which ties quoting, engineering, supply chain, and production together. The company opened its second factory in Cypress, California this year, raised a $65 million Series B in July co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Interlagos, and is already planning a third factory. The problem it solves emerges from the fact that the average harness technician is about 55 and has done this for twenty or thirty years. Demand for rockets, missiles, cars, and reactors keeps going up. The supply of people who can build harnesses keeps going down. For more on Senra: https://senrasystems.us/ Follow Jordan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-black-138419a1/ Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/ Follow Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

  2. Oct 21

    Ep. 96: Robert Slaughter, Defense Unicorns

    Rob Slaughter’s company exists because of a year and a half of pain. Early in his Air Force career he was handed a gnarly problem. It lived right at the intersection of his physics and computer vision background. Despite knowing how to solve it from a tech perspective, the data and systems he would have needed to stitch together all lived at different classification levels. He spent eighteen months trying to work the policy approvals to connect the tools he needed, but was ultimately unsuccessful. In a tale as old as time, Rob then received orders, and he moved on to the next assignment. But the problem followed him. “Every assignment, every month, every year, same issues. I know I can solve this problem. I just can’t get the software I need,” Rob said. And that’s where the Defense Unicorns story begins. About Dr. Rob Slaughter Rob joined the Air Force to pay for his physics degree. After missing out on the ROTC scholarship in his first year, he got it his second. While he initially planned to serve out the commitment and leave, he instead fell in love with the people and the mission. But the service, it turns out, does not need many physicists. What it does need is people who understand software. Modern physics is computation heavy, so while as a physicist “you are a terrible software engineer,” Rob says you do “know more than probably the person next to you.” So he kept getting assigned to the most software intensive job in the room. Rob looked at what DIU, AFWERX, and Kessel Run were doing. He liked Kessel Run the most but did not like how locked it was to a single vendor. So he recruited the best engineers he could find, including future co-founders Jeff McCoy and Andrew Greene, and started SpaceCAMP. It was meant to be an open source, Kessel Run style effort for space. Rob believes it ran some of the first Kubernetes deployments in classified environments. About a year later, Nic Chaillan and Dr. Will Roper pulled the team up to build what became Platform One. About Defense Unicorns Rob left in March 2021 to start Defense Unicorns. He came to realize that on the inside, you cannot truly control hiring and firing. From his perspective, “You cannot pay people what they are worth.” You cannot keep them. And he was spending much of his time drowning in finance and contracts. “Because it’s so hard to do the simple things, you never actually have time for the hard things.” There was also a design limit. Platform One existed to stitch together other people’s open source. It was about tuning someone else’s platform. Rob’s big idea for Defense Unicorns was to rebuild from the ground up, with the Pentagon as the only customer that mattered, from the start. The standard dual-use advice was to find commercial traction, get to a Series B or C, then get FedRAMP and back into government. By then, he argues, the architecture is set, and it was “always gonna be a terrible experience” for the defense customer. The core product Defense Unicorns offers is called UDS, or the Unified Defense Stack. It packages software once and deploys it to cloud, ships, aircraft, and edge systems, including networks with no internet connection. It is built in layers, so what goes on a fighter jet is different from what goes on a submarine or into a cloud. The company’s stated mission is “to make software a strategic deterrent,” which Rob defines as the ability to update software on 100 percent of systems every twelve hours. Defense Unicorns raised a $136 million Series B in January 2026 at a valuation above $1 billion, and its Navy work recently moved from a lab test in San Diego to testing at sea. And yes, there is a unicorn named Doug. Rob’s argument for Doug goes like this: the company’s largest customer, a submariner named Bill, has spent four decades on submarines in and out of uniform. “You do not have to remind Bill how serious his job is.” A logo with a sharp edge does not make his work feel more serious. People are at their best when they can laugh once in a while. (Rob also points out that the military has always done this, from cartoon nose art on WWII bombers to unit patches.) A little levity goes a long way. For more… * Defense Unicorns: https://defenseunicorns.com/ * On Rob Slaughter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertcslaughter/ * Crossing the Valley: www.ValleyCrossers.com * Noah Sheinbaum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

  3. Oct 7

    SPECIAL RELEASE: How ASW SO/LIC Put $650,000 on Contract in Eight Hours

    Most industry days end the same way. You hears some good pitches. You collect some business cards. Someone in the government says “let’s follow up in a few weeks.” Then nothing happens for a budget cycle. Not this day. This summer, ASW SO/LIC hosted an Accelerator Day, where over eight hours, 15 companies pitched. Government teams made decisions in the room. Contracting officers signed $650,000 in prototype awards before everyone went home. The companies could start to invoice that night. Our company - STEAM Studio - followed three companies through the day: Eudia, Dronetrace, and Dunedain Systems. Today we are premiering the documentary. Watch the SOLIC Accelerator Day documentary on YouTube. About Bonnie and Cara Bonnie Evangelista is the Acquisition Director for the Secretariat for Special Operations in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. She has 18 years in federal acquisition. Before SOLIC, she worked on the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul at GSA, and she held acquisition roles at Industrial Base Policy, the Chief Digital and AI Office, the Joint AI Center, Army Defensive Cyber Operations, and TSA. If you have watched a fast, odd, creative contract action happen in the Department in the last few years, there is a good chance she had a hand in it. Carmella Teeter has two jobs. She is the Chief Technology Officer for the Special Operations Forces Enterprise, where she sets the technical priorities and modernization path that USSOCOM carries out. She is also the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations Analysis, Resources, and Capabilities. In that job she oversees more than $15 billion a year in SOF programs, runs the Center for Special Operations Analysis, and does acquisition oversight of USSOCOM. She also directs a rapid prototyping office that shares costs with six partner nations, at more than $250 million a year. These two were the primary forces behind the Accelerator day, and they are our primary narrators. Take a look, and share with a govie who needs a little inspiration! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

    SPECIAL RELEASE: How ASW SO/LIC Put $650,000 on Contract in Eight Hours

  4. Sep 23

    Ep. 95: Andrew Markoff, Smack Technologies

    Before Smack, Andy Markoff planned wars in PowerPoint. He was the operations officer for a special operations task force in northern Iraq during the fight for Mosul. Marine and coalition special operations teams were embedded with the Kurds, and later the Iraqis, and Andy’s job was to pull together what they were seeing on the front and figure out how to go after the ISIS network so the partner force could take the next piece of the city. The tools were whiteboards and napkins. That got turned into a Gantt chart in PowerPoint. Every morning, SharePoint crashed trying to upload it. At the end of the night the plan went into what he calls the “special filing cabinet,” which is the trash can. For three months he slept one to two hours a night, “hopped up on energy drinks and rage.” “There has to be a better way than this, but this is the way we have right now.” It took him about seven years to get back to that problem. About Andy Andy knew he wanted to be a Marine before he got to Princeton. After graduation upon commissioning he grew frustrated by the inability to specialize. He moved from Rifle platoon to mortars, to aviation fires integration. There, he learned that “most problems that are hard are integration problems. There’s very few problems that are worth solving that are single discipline problems.” After he got out, he worked at Palantir, where they kept him off defense work on purpose because he was “too in the box” on the problem. Then it was off to Origin Materials, where he ran operations from Tahoe and guided in the mountains on weekends. Then Pallas Performance, a sports performance company he started with his wife. About Smack In fall 2023, Andy’s friend Clint was leaving the Marine Corps, and the two of them decided to go after the very problem that had been troubling them for years. Through the Palantir network they met Dan Gould, the former CTO of Tinder. Here’s how Andy frames the problem: national leadership sets strategic goals. Units carry out tactical actions. Everyone talks about one or the other. The layer in between requires arranging all those tactical actions in space and time and tying them to strategic effects you can measure. But that layer still happens on napkins and whiteboards and in PowerPoint. “We can’t campaign. There are no tools that exist that enable campaigning.” So Smack builds small, domain-specific models that run on-prem in compute-constrained environments. The harder part is the training data. LLMs learn from text. Andy’s point is that very little of what matters here is written down. How platforms, effectors, and signatures interact at scale, given a mission and a set of objectives, lives in the heads of people who have done it in combat and taught it. So Smack has to build a dataset that doesn’t exist yet, combining physics models with knowledge pulled out of those people’s heads. Andy calls the output trajectories. Some are fully synthetic. Some are hybrid, with real post-mission data filling part of the schema and synthetic data filling the variables nobody measured. For more on Smack, visit: https://smacktechnologies.com/ Follow Andy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-markoff-0b096611a/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

  5. Sep 16

    Ep. 94: A Replicator Retrospective

    Building Replicator: What it Took, and What it Meant Nobody in Washington gets promoted for grading their own homework in public. Dr. Kathleen Hicks and Aaron Sherman did it anyway. Three years after Replicator launched, they sat down and wrote an insiders’ history of the initiative. It’s called Move Fast and Scale, published by the Belfer Center, and it landed just at a moment when it seems that the whole building is racing to run some version of the same play (albeit with a lot more money behind it). I’ve been wanting to have this conversation for a while, in part because of my own exposure to successors of Replicator, in the form of the Drone Dominance Program and Project Swarm Forge, two challenge-based acquisition initiatives focused on small, one-way attack drones. So I opened by asking Dr. Hicks for the single most important takeaway she’d pass along to someone trying to replicate Replicator. She didn’t talk authorities, and she didn’t mention contract vehicles. She said: “I think it’s for senior leaders, whatever that means in the particular context, to be as fascinated by the execution as they are by the rollout.” Or put another way, “If your boss is interested in something, you should be fascinated by it.” About Kath Hicks and Aaron Sherman Dr. Kathleen Hicks was the 35th Deputy Secretary of Defense (aka the person who actually ran the Pentagon day to day). Before that, seven years at CSIS, and a PhD from MIT. She has been in and around the Pentagon long enough to have watched this kind of fight go south before. Aaron Sherman was her speechwriter. He was inside the small group that built and launched Replicator, which means he wrote a lot of the words that the building, the Hill, industry and Beijing all read at the same time. That is an unusual seat, and the holder of the pen is also the first author of the policy. About Replicator In late August 2023, the Department of Defense launched what it called a “pathfinder initiative” to rapidly find, acquire and field new technologies. The target was multiple thousands of attritable autonomous systems, across multiple domains. The goal was to get them in warfighters’ hands inside 18 to 24 months. At the moment they announced the initiative, they named no systems. They identified no immediate “on-ramp” for companies. And they didn’t give Congress much of a heads-up. But they got a TON of attention. The first tranche included AeroVironment’s Switchblade 600. Upon leaving DIU, T.S. Allen, the former Director of Replicator-1 said in August 2025, “we were able to deliver…hundreds of drones to war fighters” and “put thousands more on contract.” But one thing both make clear is that drones were never the fully story. Hicks describes Replicator as a pathfinder: the idea was to pick one capability area, drag it through every blocker in the system inside a two-year appropriation cycle, and leave the road wider for everything behind it. Authority to operate. Clearances and SCIF space for new entrants. Cyber hardening for small companies who become PRC targets the day they get named in public. Every one of those blockers had been quietly taxing non-traditional contractors for a decade. The only times they got solved were when a leader couldn’t unlock a program they cared about. Read the Report: https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/move-fast-and-scale-brief-insiders-history-replicator-initiative Follow Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com Follow Dr. Kath Hicks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleen-h-hicks/ Follow Aaron Sherman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-sherman-04017817/ Follow Noah Sheinbaum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

  6. Sep 9

    Ep. 93: Building Minimum Useful Products

    How Chariot Defense Replaced Product Market Fit With a Weight Test Adam Warmoth took this interview from Fort Carson. A division commander had called him the Friday before and asked him to be in Colorado on Monday, so he was in Colorado, sitting in a vehicle with a Starlink terminal doing the work of an internet connection. Ross Fubini, who wrote Chariot’s first check, opened by pointing out that this is every call he has ever had with Adam. One guest measuring things in the field, while the other measures the field. Both agreed to be unusually specific about how they make their decisions. About the guests Adam Warmoth is the founder and CEO of Chariot Defense. He started in the Stanford lab of Ilan Kroo, who had just come back to teaching after founding the first electric aircraft company on Larry Page’s money. That led to Kitty Hawk, then to Uber Elevate as one of the early employees, then to Anduril at roughly 200 people, where he built the counter intrusion business unit and then took over counter UAS air defense. Ross Fubini is the founder and managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital. He was first money into Anduril and first money into Apex Space. A very long time ago he introduced Palantir’s first employee to its second. When he started XYZ almost ten years ago, the premise was simply that he should back people coming out of the Palantir ecosystem. He describes that premise as having been correct, “shockingly so.” About the company Chariot Defense builds the power layer for the battlefield. The Amphora systems are modular, high voltage, and low signature, and they charge and run the things that now go forward with a unit: drones, radars, comms, sensors, directed energy. Founded in late 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, Chariot came out of stealth in July 2025 with an $8M seed led by General Catalyst, and announced a $34M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in February 2026. XYZ was in both. Systems have been through JIFX at the Naval Postgraduate School, up to Alaska with the 11th Airborne, out to a National Training Center rotation with the Black Jack Brigade, and onto DIU Project GI. Adam’s framing of the market is that there are three critical infrastructure layers under any robotic modernization story: comms, compute, and power. He thinks Palantir has taken the network layer and Anduril has taken edge compute, and that power is the third slot, and that after those three there are not really any more slots. Chariot Defense: Website | LinkedIn XYZ Venture Capital: https://www.xyz.vc Crossing the Valley: https://www.valleycrossers.com Adam Warmoth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamwarmoth/ Ross Fubini: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fubini/ Noah Sheinbaum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

  7. Aug 26

    Ep. 92: Conductor AI is building the layer between Law and Action

    Conductor AI: Building the Layer Between Law and Decision About Zach Long and Eric Schwartz Zachary Long and Eric Schwartz are the co-founders of Conductor AI. Both spent seven years at Palantir, where they met on a Department of Justice project supporting large-scale fraud prosecutions. But this wasn’t “start a company at first sight.” After collaborating, they split: Eric moved toward law enforcement and other USG components, then took what he calls “a bit of a rumspringa” into health tech; Zach went deeper into the Department of Defense. When Zach decided to leave Palantir, the two reconnected. Ben, the third co-founder, knew Zach from college and originated the idea with him; Eric joined shortly after as the first employee and built out the company. The founding insight came from Zach’s own frustration. He wanted to write up a meeting in a Slack channel and was told he could not. He asked why. The internal security team said no, and there was no mechanism to challenge it. “Show me the document,” he said. Nobody could. Multiply that across the defense supply chain and you have put your finger on the systemic over-classification that riddles the national security enterprise. With a bit of good luck (and good timing), the LLM era arrived, and Zach found his solution. About Conductor AI Conductor AI builds software for high-stakes government decision workflows: security classification and declassification, foreign disclosure, export licensure, FOIA, and evidence review on the justice side. The platform ingests complex policy documents and institutional tradecraft, then orchestrates the decision tree a human expert would walk. The goal is for the product to generate more than just an answer; it also shares an underlying policy that supports it, so the reviewer can show the math to a starred superior. Their customers are some of the least glamorous and most under-resourced offices in national security. One person at Nellis Air Force Base handles the entire technical manual transfer review process for the Air Force: 500,000 pages. One GS-13 adjudicates roughly $40 billion in export license approvals a year. These offices ask for more people annually and receive rotational staff who take six months to train and serve twelve months in seat. The company has solid early traction: a direct-to-Phase-II Air Force Open Topic SBIR, deployment on classified networks with multiple releases per week, and two multinational exercises this summer. Those exercises were big wins, as they were able to take reviews that typically take a day down to an hour. Learn more about Conductor AI: conductorai.com Follow Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-long-20a78a21/ Follow Eric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epschwartz/Follow Noah: For more Crossing the Valley: www.ValleyCrossers.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

  8. Aug 19

    Ep. 91 - John Conafay, CEO of Integrate

    Overview They were four people. They had ~$150,000 in the bank. And John Conafay wrote a check to an accreditation partner. That check was easily a double-digit percentage of the company’s value at that moment. And he risked it all on the conviction that a Space Force contract was going to land. Well, this is Crossing the Valley, so you already know that it did. Three years later that relationship became a $25 million, five year SBIR Phase III with Space Systems Command. We’ve covered a lot of acquisition orthodoxy these last few years on CTV. This conversation was fun because of how John went a different path, and bucked convention. He spent money he didn’t have. He started the transition conversation before he’d delivered value. He hired strangers to knock on doors for him. And he pitched the hardest version of his product first. Here’s a bit more from my awesome conversation with John Conafay. About John John is a US Air Force veteran and the founder and CEO of Integrate. He enlisted after a failed run at a metal and hardcore record label he started in high school, and spent his service in COMNAV fixing AWACS on the flight line in Alaska. He calls it “a swift swift kick” that he needed. Those early days on the flight lane have paid dividends to this day, by helping the “business guy” hold his own in engineering conversations. After leaving the Air Force John studied economics at Arizona State, where he took over the national chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). It was during this time that he ran a coordinated campaign to win a donation from one particular individual: Mr. Jeff Bezos, himself a former SEDS chapter president. John and team had no idea they’d succeeded until Bezos folded up his $250,000 Heinlein Prize check and announced that it should go to SEDS instead. His career spanned a variety of startups, including joining BryceTech, becoming employee number eight (roughly) at Astranis, Director of Business Development at Spaceflight, and Head of Business Development at ABL Space Systems. And he did all this before founding Integrate. About Integrate Integrate builds multiplayer program management software for organizations that build complex hardware. Founded in early 2022 and based in Seattle, the company sells what John describes as “a schedule that many organizations can share, without seeing each other’s private data.” John describes the status quo they’re up against as “Microsoft Project,” a piece of software that shipped in 1984. The company won a $1.25 million SBIR Phase II with the Space Systems Command Mission Manifest Office in 2023, then a $25 million five year Phase III in June 2025. It reached IL6 accreditation and deployed into a classified environment in under twelve months. For More: * Integrate: integrate.co * John Conafay on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/conafay This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.valleycrossers.com

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Ratings & Reviews

4.9
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

Few companies make it from pilot to production in the defense market. Those who do often change the industry in the process. How do they do it? What lessons can startups take from their trials, successes, and failures? Crossing the Valley tells the stories of the trailblazers who are forging a new path for America's defense. www.valleycrossers.com

Information

  • Creator
    Frontdoor Defense
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Noah Sheinbaum
  • Show Website
    Crossing the Valley

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