Pirates Only

Black Flag
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

“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. 1d ago

    EraDrive and Building Autonomy in Space

    Sumant Sharma, co-founder and CEO of EraDrive, joins Mat to explain why the satellites circling Earth today are effectively blind and micromanaged from the ground, and why that model breaks the moment constellations scale into the thousands. EraDrive spun out of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory in 2025, but its core vision-based navigation software was already flying first, demonstrated on four NASA CubeSats as part of the Starling mission, the world's first instance of multiple satellites navigating relative to each other using vision alone. That reverse order, technology in orbit before incorporation, became the foundation for a $5.3 million seed round and five active customer contracts spanning civil, commercial, and defense work. Sumant lays out the three problems EraDrive solves: a coordination crisis as roughly 30,000 tracked objects head toward 60,000 or more within five years, a contested domain where adversary satellites jam and shadow US assets on a weekly basis, and commercial applications like orbital data centers and in-space manufacturing that simply cannot run with a human in the loop. He argues that autonomy in space is not optional the way it is for cars, and paints a future where a handful of engineers steer a million satellites by typing mission intent and walking away. Every captain eventually has to let the swarm steer itself. The conversation closes with hard-won fundraising advice for hard tech founders: sell milestones, not vibes, and let revenue and signed contracts do the talking. Episode Summary: EraDrive spun out of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Lab in 2025 after its software was already flying on four NASA satellites.The team is 12 people based in downtown Palo Alto, deliberately near Stanford talent rather than the larger hubs in LA and Colorado.Falling launch prices and cheaper AI tooling have collapsed the barrier to building space hardware, though go-to-market remains the hard part.Roughly 30,000 objects larger than ten centimeters are tracked in orbit today, with credible estimates of 60,000 to 70,000 within five years.Space traffic coordination still relies on the 18th Space Defense Squadron emailing operators when a collision is predicted.China, Russia, and India have demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities, and adversary jamming of US assets happens on a weekly basis.Gen 1 of EraDrive's product retrofits onto satellites already in orbit using off-the-shelf cameras and existing flight compute.Eighty to ninety percent of EraDrive's revenue today comes from government and defense primes rather than purely commercial operators.The long-term vision is a handful of engineers steering a million-satellite swarm through natural-language mission intent.Sumant's fundraising advice is to sell concrete milestones and de-risk with real customer contracts and revenue.

    EraDrive and Building Autonomy in Space

  2. Jun 24

    Odin and the Future of Maritime Dominance

    Amir Khan and Jon Haase came to Odin Dynamics from opposite ends of the same problem. Amir built batteries and powertrains at Tesla, ARC, and Matternet, then spent mid-2024 cold-emailing admirals, sailors, and special forces to learn where maritime warfare was headed. Jon spent nearly 25 years in the Navy as an EOD officer and program manager who owned most of the service's underwater vehicle portfolio, and his first reaction to Amir's pitch was to tell him to pack up and go home. What changed his mind was a Tesla Plaid battery pack, the kind of first-principles energy engineering that the underwater world had never seen. Together they are building a system that functions as both a UUV and a torpedo, unlocking a mission set neither category could reach alone. The conversation charts why the ocean may be a harder build than space, where water is a thousand times denser than air and a vehicle is effectively blind past a few feet. Amir lays out the Tesla playbook of low idiot index, deleting parts that add no value, and designing for a hull every 20 minutes rather than a beautiful one-off. Jon makes the strategic case that undersea remains the last invisible domain, a place where whoever masses smart, long-endurance platforms first earns a decisive advantage. They close on fundraising hard truths, the value of functional hardware over promises, and a shared belief that for any founder ready to chart a course into deep water, the sea is their oyster.

    Odin and the Future of Maritime Dominance

  3. Jun 17

    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.

    Drones, Drones and More Drones

  4. 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.

    Electroflow and the Battery America Needs

  5. 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.

    Galadyne and the American Missile Crisis

  6. 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.

    Lux Aeterna and How Reusable Satellites Unlock the Next Space Era

  7. 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.

    Volund and the Future of Propulsion Manufacturing

  8. 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.

    Aalo Atomics and the New Nuclear Age
See All (16)

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
    16
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Black Flag
  • Show Website
    Pirates Only

You Might Also Like