Crossing the Valley

Frontdoor Defense

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. 17h ago

    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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. Aug 12

    Ep. 90: Friends Don't Let Friends Start Drone Companies

    Josh Giegel has spent his career on what he calls “the wrong side” of the software-hardware divide. He built rocket engines at SpaceX. He built supercritical CO2 power cycles in Ohio. He built a hyperloop and then climbed inside it. So when he tells you not to build hardware, it should mean something. Josh started Gambit in 2023, in the middle of the drone gold rush, and deliberately did not build a drone. Set against the backdrop of the drone “gold rush,” that fundamental decision has shaped the company he’s built, and the impact they’re having just a few years into the journey. About Josh Josh grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of a nuclear reactor engineer and an electrical engineer. His sister is an engineer. His wife is an engineer. His brother-in-law is an engineer. Suffice to say, the dude has forever been surrounded by tech nerds. His formative moment came at twelve, in the garage, watching his dad fix the car. Josh assumed his father was the smartest man alive who knew everything. But his dad corrected him that day: he actually did not know how to fix the car. But he knew how to solve the problem. Josh went to Penn State, then Stanford for grad school, and interned at NASA Glenn at 21, which he describes as “underwhelming compared to the movies.” A colleague pointed him toward a small space company in Los Angeles, so he found himself interviewing with an up-and-coming entrepreneur named Elon Musk in the window between Falcon 1’s third and fourth flights, before SpaceX had ever reached orbit. Musk described building a reusable rocket engine rated for a hundred flights. Josh asked why anyone would want that. The answer was that they were going to land the rocket. Josh went on to become one of about five engineers who built the Merlin 1D. It sits in the Smithsonian now. He left when SpaceX had grown from 400 people to 2,500 (still the largest company he ever worked for), because he could tell the founding-level experience was no longer available there. Then came Virgin Hyperloop, where he served as CTO and later CEO across roughly seven years. Six years after starting, he sat inside the vehicle his team had built and put his own life on the line. About Gambit Gambit builds a platform-agnostic software layer that lets one operator orchestrate many autonomous systems across air, ground, and sea. The thesis is that robots are commoditizing, platforms are proliferating, and no single manufacturer is going to rule them all. The constraint becomes less about machine availability and more about the people to run them. Gambit thinks about their product as an entire robot workforce rather than a “better robot.” Each entity is a specialist that works together toward a cohesive whole, much the same way a soccer team has forwards and a goalie, or a band has a guitarist and a lead singer. The product architecture reflects the thesis: roughly ten software containers, from behavior building to composition to runtime interfaces, that can be split apart and sold in pieces. Behaviors are solved by platform class rather than by manufacturer, so a quadcopter class or a fixed wing class covers many vendors with a parameter file rather than a bespoke integration. The company exited stealth in January 2026 with partnerships including AWS, L3Harris, RTX, and Sierra Nevada. Since then it has announced two multi-million dollar Air Force contracts, an Army GVSC OTA for counter-UAS simulation, a red force as a service partnership with the Pendleton UAS Range, and integrations with ModalAI and Psionic. For more on Gambit: https://www.gambit.us For more Crossing the Valley: https://www.youtube.com/@crossingthevalley Follow Josh Giegel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-giegel/ Follow Noah: 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

  8. Aug 5

    Ep. 89: Lux Aeterna

    How Lux Aeterna Is Building a Market the Pentagon Didn’t Ask For About Brian Brian Taylor spent about fifteen years as a mechanical engineer before he ever sat in the founder’s chair. He came up through aviation and aerospace, then landed at SpaceX, where he did development, qualification, and testing on Starlink satellites, including the structural qualification of the first stack of 60. From there it was Amazon’s Project Kuiper for high rate satellite production, then Loft Orbital. But despite this tour d’force through a who’s who of space companies, by his own admission, Brian was never a space nerd. It really bugged him that you would work that hard on something, and unless you happen to be an astronaut, you would never see the hardware again. You do not get to iterate on it. You do not get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. An engineer who wants his hardware back. That frustration became a company. About Lux Aeterna Lux Aeterna builds fully reusable satellites. While there’s been lots of attention heaped on the rockets, Brian and Lux are focused on the satellite itself. The goal is to fly the mission, survive re-entry, land intact, refurbish it, put a new payload on it, and send it back up. Brian founded the company in Denver in August 2024. It came out of stealth in June 2025 with a $4 million pre-seed led by Space Capital, and closed a $10 million oversubscribed seed led by Konvoy in March 2026, bringing the total to $14 million. The company’s first vehicle is called Delphi. It is roughly 200 kilograms, built around a rigid conical heat shield that doubles as the satellite’s primary structure, with a parachute assisted return. It will fly on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare in Q1 2027, with recovery at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia through a partnership with Southern Launch. The company holds a Space Act Agreement with NASA Ames and two CRADAs supporting the re-entry and thermal protection work, and has stood up a Defense Advisory Board. The entire payload capacity for that first mission is already sold out, across civil, defense, and commercial customers, hardware and software, small companies and large. Also worth noting for the culture watchers: he did this interview from inside a sauna. An actual, off the shelf sauna, sitting on the production floor, because it was cheaper than the fancy sound-proof pods that Google puts all over its offices. The idiot index on that thing has to be excellent. For more on Lux Aeterna: https://www.luxaeterna.com/ Follow Brian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianjtaylor/ For more Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com Follow Noah: 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

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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
    98
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Noah Sheinbaum
  • Show Website
    Crossing the Valley

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