Pirates Only

Black Flag
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“Pirates Only” is a podcast series created by pirates, for pirates (AKA visionary startup founders breaking new ground). Each episode brings together innovative founders working within similar industries to openly discuss groundbreaking ideas, hard challenges, and the massive opportunities ahead. From deep-sea robotics to space tech, AI, and beyond, we’ll explore the bold futures these pioneers are building. Join us as we dive into what’s next, celebrating this adventurous future, and the pirates building for it.

  1. Drones, Drones and More Drones

    6d ago

    Drones, Drones and More Drones

    In this episode, Mat sits down with Dan, CEO of Firestorm, and Michael LaFramboise, CEO of Aurelius Systems, two founders tackling the drone revolution from opposite but complementary angles. Dan conceived Firestorm after watching ISIS use $3,000 DJI drones to fight the U.S. military to a standstill in Mosul, and spent the years since rethinking drone manufacturing from first principles: stop building artisan Ferraris and start stamping out Camrys. Firestorm now produces four drone models and its flagship XL product, a containerized expeditionary manufacturing facility that can be parked in any available lot and immediately begin printing drones at the point of need. Michael LaFramboise built Aurelius Systems around the other side of the same equation, bringing low-cost, AI-driven directed energy weapons to the counter-drone fight with the goal of collapsing the marginal cost of a drone shootdown to a dollar or less per kill, using electricity instead of missiles as ammunition. The conversation covers the full scope of where the drone arms race is heading and what it means for American defense. Dan lays out a stark production gap: Ukraine and Russia each plan to build three to seven million drones this year, while the U.S. will produce closer to 30 to 50 thousand. Both founders agree that the winners in drone and counter-drone are largely already decided, that new entrants face brutal supply chain and procurement headwinds, and that the real fight now is go-to-market rather than pure technology. They also look ahead to unmanned ground vehicles reshaping land warfare in Ukraine right now, the emerging threat of satellite blind-and-destroy operations in low Earth orbit, and the long arc toward directed energy systems in space. For any founder bold enough to chart a course into hard defense tech, the shared advice is blunt: hire a lobbyist first, demo constantly, and plan for everything to cost twice as much and take twice as long.

    54 min
  2. Electroflow and the Battery America Needs

    Jun 10

    Electroflow and the Battery America Needs

    Eric McShane spent a decade in battery research before discovering, during his Stanford postdoc, that startups were the path he had been looking for all along. Together with co-founder Evan, he launched Electroflow in San Bruno to tackle one of the most consequential supply chain problems in modern energy: producing lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, the cheapest and most widely used battery electrode material on the planet. LFP goes into over half of all batteries produced today and 99% of it is manufactured in China. Electroflow's core innovation is a three-step process that produces LFP directly from lithium-containing brine waste streams, replacing the traditional 10-step method that relies on vast evaporation ponds and months of lead time. The target production cost is $3,000 per ton, half the current Chinese market price of $6,000. Fresh off a $10 million seed round and just over two years removed from a napkin sketch, Electroflow is weeks away from deploying its first full-scale electrochemical stack at a real brine site. The demand picture behind that milestone is staggering: Eric projects a 40X increase in global battery capacity between now and 2040, driven by grid and data center storage, electric vehicles, and what he calls the most under appreciated demand signal on the horizon: billions of humanoid robots. The episode goes beyond the technology to cover the equally demanding work of building the company, including how scientists-turned-founders need to rewire their pitch instincts, why over-secrecy about your idea harms more than it protects, and how the WHO hiring method helped Electroflow scale to 16 people without a single firing. The crew has barely lifted anchor.

    45 min
  3. Galadyne and the American Missile Crisis

    Jun 3

    Galadyne and the American Missile Crisis

    Chandler Luzsicza spent nearly five years at SpaceX as a propulsion engineer on the Dragon capsule and Starship programs before a brief stop at autonomous vessel company Saronic convinced him to found Galadyne in late 2024. Backed by a pre-seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, his Austin team is applying the commercial space playbook to what he calls an American missile crisis. The numbers are sobering: congressional war gaming estimates suggest the U.S. has three to eight days of critical munitions available for a South China Sea conflict, and replenishing just 20% of THAAD inventory transferred to Israel during a recent conflict could take three to eight years. The cost picture is equally grim, with per-round prices on legacy platforms reaching $13 million before a standard two-shot doctrine doubles that figure. The root cause, Chandler argues, runs deeper than procurement dysfunction. Solid rocket motors depend on a single domestic ammonium perchlorate facility so hazardous that workers who handle it have historically been called "angel pushers," and standing up a new one would take a decade the country does not have. Galadyne's answer is to chart a new course entirely: liquid-propellant systems loaded at the point of use, so the production line handles only inert metal components and can scale toward gigafactory throughput, targeting tens of thousands of units within three to five years. The episode rounds out with hard-won advice for early-stage founders: build conviction from first principles before you pitch, and reach out to tier-one investors far sooner than feels comfortable, because the proof bar at large funds is often lower than founders assume.

    51 min
  4. Lux Aeterna and How Reusable Satellites Unlock the Next Space Era

    Jun 1

    Lux Aeterna and How Reusable Satellites Unlock the Next Space Era

    Brian Taylor spent 15 years in aerospace before founding Lux Aeterna, including building the first 60 Starlink satellites at SpaceX from zero to launch in nine months, followed by stints at Amazon's Project Kuiper and Loft Orbital. Those three organizations each took a different approach to the same bottleneck: satellites cannot be built fast enough to keep pace with demand. Taylor's insight was that loosening mass optimization constraints on a satellite opens the door to adding a heat shield, and a heat shield enables atmospheric re-entry, and re-entry enables reusability. Lux Aeterna has raised $15 million across two rounds and is fully funded through its first mission, a Falcon 9 rideshare in Q1 of next year, with a full re-entry and landing in Australia. The more consequential argument Taylor makes is not about cost but about lead time. The current two-year cycle from mission conception to orbit forces planners to design for problems they cannot yet see, leaving a vast treasure trove of shorter, time-sensitive missions completely off the table. Compressing that window to six to twelve weeks changes the calculus for defense ISR, rapid compute refreshes, and entire mission architectures no one currently bothers to conceive. Operating out of a 6,000-square-foot Colorado facility with a team of 17, Taylor also covers the company's aggressive AI adoption across hardware and software, why he actively recruits engineers who have experienced in-orbit failure, and the process discipline that separates founders who move fast sustainably from those who just move fast.

    53 min
  5. Volund and the Future of Propulsion Manufacturing

    May 26

    Volund and the Future of Propulsion Manufacturing

    Eric Hostetler spent years as a mechanical engineer building cult consumer brands, from Fox Racing motocross gear to Beats by Dre, logging nearly 100 trips to China and absorbing the high-volume manufacturing philosophy that governs those industries. That background turned out to be the map to buried treasure when he co-founded Volund Manufacturing, a Huntington Beach startup building a vertically integrated factory model to produce low-cost jet propulsion systems for attritable munitions, counter-UAS interceptors, and low-cost cruise missile programs. The core insight is straightforward: defense is starting to demand what consumer goods have always required, namely lower cost, higher run rate, and faster development cycles, and the traditional defense industrial base is structurally incapable of delivering that. The problem Hostetler and his co-founder diagnosed at their previous company was a fractured and aging supplier ecosystem where a pool of 20,000 machine shops nationwide collapses to roughly 25 once you filter for aerospace certification, security compliance, and five-axis machining capability, shops so overwhelmed that lead times stretch to 18 months and a $300 part gets priced at $10,000. Volund's answer is to bring those capabilities under one roof, connect CAD directly to manufacturing artifacts and an ERP system through a custom MES, and run the whole operation on a digital backbone optimized for moving fast within the regulatory rails of high-reliability industries. Hostetler's 10-year vision is a network of small, targeted factories modeled loosely on Foxconn's playbook: each one highly efficient at a single product vertical, collectively capable of serving as the manufacturing layer that lets other founders focus on their engineering innovations without building a propulsion team from scratch.

    39 min
  6. Aalo Atomics and the New Nuclear Age

    May 18

    Aalo Atomics and the New Nuclear Age

    In this episode of Pirates Only, I sat down with Matt Loszak and Yasir, co-founders of Aalo Atomics, the company betting that nuclear power isn't just making a comeback but is about to be industrialized at a scale humanity has never attempted. Matt grew up in Ontario watching smog days vanish when the province shut down its coal plants and went all-in on nuclear. Yasir grew up in Bangladesh studying by candlelight during daily brownouts, watching his country's coastline literally shrink. Both were ready to charge into nuclear right out of university, and both got Fukushima'd. What followed were years in the wilderness: Yasir designing five reactors across programs including Marvel at Idaho National Laboratory, and Matt building and selling software companies while waiting for the right moment to return. When they found each other, the alignment was immediate, same vision, same values, same conviction that nuclear is the ultimate underdog technology. What Aalo is building is unlike anything else in the nuclear space. Rather than gigawatt-scale plants that take 15 years to construct, or micro-reactors suited for military bases, Aalo designed a 50-megawatt pod of five sodium-cooled fast reactors purpose-built for AI data centers. Sodium is 100 times more thermally conductive than water, operates at high temperature without pressurization, and enables thin-walled vessels that can be factory-fabricated in two weeks instead of multi-year pressure forgings. The fuel is commercially available uranium dioxide with no exotic supply chains. The architecture provides N+1 redundancy by design, delivering the 99.999% reliability hyperscalers demand. The urgency is real: the US needs 100 gigawatts of new power in five years just to feed AI data center demand, natural gas is hitting its limits, and nuclear is counterintuitively becoming the answer to NIMBYism rather than the cause of it. Aalo was selected to respond to President Trump's executive order to achieve nuclear criticality by July 4th, 2026, America's 250th birthday. While others in that cohort are running small test reactors into existing buildings, Aalo is going to full-power operation on a 10-megawatt commercial-scale system built from a green field in under ten months, for roughly $70 million in total company spend. After criticality, the roadmap moves fast: a co-located nuclear plant and data center with Crusoe, one of the developers behind Stargate, at the Idaho site, followed by a phased Gigawatt Factory in Texas targeting 100 reactors per year. The long game is bigger than data centers: drive costs down far enough to power developing nations, eliminate energy poverty, and unlock billions of acres of currently uninhabitable Earth for human settlement.

    53 min
  7. The One Big Beautiful Bill: And What It Means for Founders and VCs

    07/24/2025

    The One Big Beautiful Bill: And What It Means for Founders and VCs

    In this episode we haul anchor with Clint Brown, our very own Capitol-Hill insider, to chart the One Big, Beautiful Bill that just splashed down in D.C. We unpack how a $150 B defense-tech infusion, sweeter R&D expensing, juiced QSBS rules, and a four-year spending fuse light a fire under founders and VCs alike. Clint explains the process of how the bill came to be, how drones, autonomous shipbuilding, and space-laser line-items send an unmistakable political demand signal, and why private capital is now expected to plug the gaps faster than a pirate plugs a leaky hull. We also riff on the macro ripple effects: deficit worries, tariff tail-winds, and the existential AI sprint with China, plus the new three-year QSBS on-ramp that could turn earlier exits into a liquidity cannon aimed straight back at innovation. TL;DR? Washington just rang the ship’s bell and shortened the plank: founders have four-ish years of clearer regs, generous tax treats, and a giant customer waving orders. So hoist your sails, build like you’ve got a frigate chasing you, and remember, when Uncle Sam says “all hands on deck,” it’s time to build. Highlights: 00:00 Introduction to the One Big Beautiful Bill 01:42 Breaking Down the Bill 34:36 Innovative Programs and Venture Capital Ecosystem 35:38 Political Landscape and Its Impact on Startups 45:08 Urgency in Government Spending and Startup Innovation 54:13 The Call to Action for Founders and Investors

    1h 1m
  8. The Data Center Revolution: Including Discussions on Aerospace, AI and Energy

    07/17/2025

    The Data Center Revolution: Including Discussions on Aerospace, AI and Energy

    I had the privilege of hosting two remarkable founders from Y Combinator - Sam Mendel from Network Ocean and Philip Johnston from Star Cloud - who are tackling one of the most pressing challenges in modern computing infrastructure: the exponential growth in data center energy consumption and cooling demands. Both companies are pursuing radical solutions to the same fundamental problem, but through dramatically different approaches. Sam’s Network Ocean is developing underwater and floating barge data centers that leverage the ocean’s natural cooling properties, while Philip’s Star Cloud is pioneering space-based data centers that can scale beyond terrestrial limitations. What struck me most about their conversation was how both are responding to the same crisis - the AI boom is driving compute demand that’s outpacing our current infrastructure’s ability to efficiently support it. The technical advantages each approach offers are compelling in their own right. Sam’s ocean-based solution achieves a Power Usage Effectiveness lower than industry standard, translating to cost savings for customers while eliminating the massive cooling infrastructure that consumes enormous amounts of water and energy. Philip’s space-based approach promises even more dramatic economics, with data centers costing millions less than their terrestrial equivalents. Both founders emphasized that they’re not just building alternative data centers - they’re fundamentally reimagining how we approach computing infrastructure at scale. What became clear during our discussion is that these aren’t competing visions but complementary approaches to humanity’s expansion into previously untapped frontiers. Sam envisions a future where ocean-based infrastructure could power entire floating cities and provide grid-level energy storage, while Philip sees space as the ultimate scaling solution for compute-intensive applications that will eventually require Dyson sphere-level energy harvesting. With Network Ocean’s 200-kilowatt pilot launching soon and Star Cloud’s first satellite scheduled for orbit in August, both companies are moving rapidly from concept to reality. The convergence of AI demand, energy constraints, and innovative deployment platforms suggests we’re witnessing the early stages of a fundamental transformation in how and where we build our digital infrastructure. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Data Center Revolution 05:08 The Technical Advantages of Underwater Data Centers 10:34 Building in Space: Challenges and Opportunities 16:00 The Future of Data Centers: Demand and National Security 21:33 Maintenance and Longevity of Ocean and Space Data Centers 31:15 The Growing Demand for Data Centers 35:58 The Limits of AI and Energy 42:21 Unlocking the Ocean Economy 51:50 Future Plans and Opportunities

    56 min
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About

“Pirates Only” is a podcast series created by pirates, for pirates (AKA visionary startup founders breaking new ground). Each episode brings together innovative founders working within similar industries to openly discuss groundbreaking ideas, hard challenges, and the massive opportunities ahead. From deep-sea robotics to space tech, AI, and beyond, we’ll explore the bold futures these pioneers are building. Join us as we dive into what’s next, celebrating this adventurous future, and the pirates building for it.

Information

  • Creator
    Black Flag
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Black Flag
  • Show Website
    Pirates Only