Ian Laffey builds navigation that lets a drone fly with no GPS at all. His argument: Ukraine is the closest thing to a free market that exists anywhere in defense, and the only place a product can be told the truth about itself.
“I'm not a sniper. I've spent all this time learning to program.”
“You don't want to hit somebody first, but if somebody hits you, you need to hit them back as hard as possible.”
“You could spend $50,000 and look stupid, or you can spend a million and look stupid, or you can spend $100 million and look stupid.”
“It doesn't matter what size or scale or whether you're publicly traded or a really super small startup, you're just going to get your ass handed to you by the real world.”
“Where are all of the drones in the world being used in combat? It's in one place.”
“You can have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of kit come over here. And if it doesn't work well enough, people will just leave it in a warehouse and they won't use it.”
“People here are busy as shit and they have a war to fight. If you're 10,000 miles away, nobody is sitting around thinking about you.”
“It's a terrible circumstance, but in a lot of ways it's a privilege to get to work on things that matter.”
Hi, it's Sam Cook, the founder of the Borderlands Foundation and co-host of the Ukraine Military History Podcast. They didn't win the hackathon. They didn't even place. 24 hours in a room in Los Angeles, two hours asleep, a 3D printer that wouldn't cooperate, and somebody putting dubstep on at four in the morning to keep everyone upright. The judges said, cool, sounds good, and moved on. Then the founder posted what they'd built, slept 18 hours, and woke up to millions of views and a phone full of messages.
Today, that thing flies on the front line in Ukraine. My guest is Ian Laffey, co-founder and CEO of Theseus. They built navigation that lets a drone fly with no GPS at all, in a war where a GPS is jammed across every inch of the ground that matters, and this is not a feature. This is the whole problem, and most of the industry still can't solve it. Here's what I want you to listen for. Ian's best friend since he was six months old is Ukrainian.
Adopted just after independence from a couple who stopped his parents in the street to say they were flying to Ukraine to bring home a boy the same age. When the invasion came, Ian was in his final semester, and his first instinct was to come here and fight. He talked himself out of it. His words, I'm not a sniper. I spent all this time learning to program. And then he tells you what his father used to say to him, which is the line that this whole episode turns on. Don't ever hit somebody first,
but if somebody hits you, hit them back as hard as you possibly can. He came to Ukraine in November 2024, and he's brutal about what he got wrong. He'll tell you there are three ways to do this. Fly in for two days and take photographs, which he says is worse than not coming at all. Come for a few weeks at a time and watch every relationship you built go cold the second you leave because people here are fighting a war and nobody is sitting by their laptop waiting for your next Zoom call. Or move here. He moved here.
And then he makes the argument, I've not heard anyone put this plainly. Ukraine is the closest thing to a free market that exists anywhere in the defense market. units buy what works often with donated money at brigade level and below there's nowhere to hide ship a hundred million dollars of kit here and if it isn't good enough it sits in a warehouse and everybody knows his line you can prove you can sell a hundred million dollars of something
somewhere else you cannot prove it works anywhere but here if that is the kind of conversation you want more of subscribe right now before you forget youtube apple podcast spotify amazon music Every link is in the show notes. On YouTube, hit the bell because the next one is Rob Lee and a Third Corps advisor on an operation that most people have not heard of yet. Before we get into it, a brief word about the people behind this podcast.
This show is produced by the Borderlands Foundation, a nonprofit I established with a simple mission making sure that Ukraine's heroes are never forgotten. It's Ukraine Military History Institute is what makes this podcast, along with a university course that we're working on, workshops for serving officers, a professional journal, and soldier delegations and the Heroes of Ukraine tours here in Ukraine. The industrial history of this war is being written right now by people in their 20s,
and almost nobody is writing it down. Details on how to support us at the end. And the Borderlands Group, the company I run that funds all of this. We do military advisory and defense consulting and the bridge between Western defense technology and Ukrainian battlefield validation. More on this at the end. Before we start, I gave a talk in San Francisco this summer to a room full of founders building defense technology on why war matters, the power
law of war, how nations actually pay for wars, and what happened to the American defense industry after the Cold War. It's an hour, it's free, and it's the same history we do here. I'll leave a link in the description to this video. Okay, a hackathon they lost, a tweet that changed everything, two days versus two weeks versus moving here, moving your life here versus moving your life here. And the only market on earth that will tell you the truth about your product. Ian Laffey,
the CEO of Theseus, recorded here in Kyiv, the Ukraine Military History Podcast. Okay, welcome Ian Laffey to another episode here of Ukraine Military History Podcast. And I'm very excited today about having you on because as a historian, someone who's covered a lot about war. I think one of the understudied things about war, and I want to make sure we correct that here in Ukraine, is the industrial technology side of war, because ultimately war
is a competition between states and alliances and systems about technology and application of that technology on the battlefield. So I'm going to let you introduce yourself.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Yeah, let me let you introduce yourself. I think what's really interesting, our audience are people who follow the Ukraine war, whether they're analysts or military professionals or investors or other defense tech founders. Your story as a defense tech founder is particularly interesting to me because of the path you've chosen. We're sitting here in Kyiv. Tell me about how did you
get into founding a defense company? Yeah, so completely by accident. Yeah, so I'm Ian. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Theseus. We make navigation technology for drones that lets them fly without a GPS. And we totally started doing it by accident. So we started out of a hackathon about two and a half years ago in LA. So 2023? 2024, February 18th. And we went to this
hackathon. Okay. So I know your story, so I'm going to draw it back. How did you get to San Francisco. So you were living in San Francisco at the time of the hackathon. Go back to how did you, you know, because one of the things that is interesting to me is we, I believe, are entering a world of great power competition. We're already there. We're entering a period of much more instability, greater defense spending, and potentially a lot more wars in the future.
And what I'm particularly interested in is how does someone as talented as yourself decide to get into defense in the first place? Because I think you were early, but I think this is going to be a trend that we're seeing a lot more of.
Yeah. Yeah. I guess going back before the hackathon, my first startup was, or should I say my first venture backed startup was AI email. So I-
And when did you start that?
That was in 2023. I was working, I graduated university in 2022. I started working at fintech startup. I spent about six or seven months there. And then ChatGPT came out and I was like,
man, I need to go build something. So you're at a fintech startup where? Where were they based?
They were based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was living in Denver, Colorado. I went to University of Montreal and then I'm from Missouri. So I really was yearning to get back to the Midwest. And then I got out there and I was like, ah, I need to go someplace else, someplace a little bit more exciting denver's great but it's not really for me it didn't seem like where the
future was being built and so so chat gdb comes out you're living in denver at the time working at a fintech startup i remember when chat gdb came out i remember someone messaged me and said this is the most amazing thing probably since like the internet it felt like the internet i mean
And so my dad is a programmer and my grandpa was a programmer.
Oh, family history.
Yeah. So growing up, I would always hear these stories about like, oh, this is what it was like when the semiconductor came out. And this is what it was like when the internet came out. And I was always really envious because, you know, I was eight years old when the iPhone came out. And it was cool and that was like a revolution. But I remember being 12 years old and making iPhone apps. And I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis.
I had a really great upbringing. And I just remember thinking even at that age, you know, I don't really have any problems and necessity is the mother of invention. And I literally don't need anything. My life is so great. And so, yeah, it never really felt super clear to me of like, okay, what can I go and create that's actually going to have an impact in the world and shape it in the way that I want to. And then when AI came out, that was when I saw kind of the first
glimmers and really just this open field of things that used to be impossible and now were possible. And, you know, I tie that back to the work that we're doing today. That was why, you know, I really enjoy building any technology. But the thing that I'm really passionate about is doing things that I actually believe make the world a better place. And so, you know, yeah, go ahead.
So you started, because I think this is really important. I didn't know, actually, your father and grandfather were developers. So you come from a developer family. I know a lot of people, myself included. I remember when the dot-com boom happened and I was at the military academy and all I could do because I only had time was to invest in the stock market and make a bunch of money and then watch it go away when the market crashed. But I understood the significance of the
internet and what we were living through, but I was also too busy to actually go into that profession at that time i was in the military but i saw some of the effects of the technology that were coming out like the networked battlefield started to emerge and then there was a sense after a while the iphone comes out and it's like we're just optimizing the same stuff you know making more and more software that you know how many times can you make twitter analog or the next
whatever doordash or something like that and i think what is it peter thiel's comments like Like, you know, we went to the moon and now we're like doing 140 characters.
Yeah, we thought we'd have flying cars and instead we got 140 characters.
Yeah, so everyone went into software. It was safe. America kind of de-industrializes, you know, exports all of our production of anything that's not software and services to the rest of the world. We're optimizing for that and making a lot of money. And venture capitalists like the model because it's easy and repeatable and things like that. And we're wondering, have we kind of missed it? Have we missed the...
Yeah, and I'm glad you touched on the deindustrialization. And, you know, this is something that I got in a lot of trouble for because I went to university in Canada. And it's like a very progressive, like woo-woo, very intellectual university. And even in, this is like 2018, I used to, every time I would go drinking with my friends, I'd just start talking about China.
And like growing up in the Midwest and just seeing what happened to all of our industry there and what happened to all of the opportunity for just regular people, right? Because like, you know, you and I were both from America. Like we've ended up here. We get to work on exciting things. But like the vast majority of people, that's not the case for. And so that was always something where I felt like we could just do more than force our young people to move to these kind of superstar cities.
But yeah, and I guess like tying it back to Ukraine a bit, like I do think we are like very, very fortunate for all of the things that we have in the US and all of the advantages that we have. But I think the one thing that we're lacking is like purpose and like a need. And, you know, the really tragic thing is it seems like so frequently that has to come from these dire circumstances.
And something that I wish for everybody is that we could really build and care about things without having to have, you know, Russia invade our country, right? But that sadly doesn't seem to be the case.
Yeah, unfortunately, from a study of history, most major technological advances are born out of war and conflict. I think all the major advances of the last century either came from World War II or the Cold War in terms of space and nuclear energy and jet-powered propulsion and rockets and things like that.
The internet even.
Yeah, exactly. The internet was a DARPA project in the middle of the Cold War. and it seems like the peace dividend also created a bit of a technological, let's call it, cul-de-sac, technological cul-de-sac that we entered, which I think we're fortunately coming out of. Unfortunately, the circumstances are the return of war and great power competition and the threat of a much bigger war. So you moved to Silicon Valley. ChatGPT was October 2022. You moved to Silicon.
How long did it take you to get from Denver to Silicon Valley? When did you finally get there?
Yeah, so I quit my job in, I guess, November. I moved back in with my parents for like two months. And then I went, and so you know Sasha, my current co-founder. I went up to visit him in Montreal, and we started working on a project, which became a startup. And then we're like, we need to move to San Francisco to work on this. and we got out there and, we drove out there in, in late April of 2023, within a couple of days, you know, he, he had a PhD, program at Yale.
And so he's like, basically like, I'm not going to do this. and so, so we get out there, and then I'm just there, but I was just so struck by, you know, you, you drive over the Bay bridge and there's, I just remember seeing this billboard and the billboard is like import dot CSVs 10 X faster. And I just remember thinking, man, this is the place to be. This is so awesome.
Because as a developer, you understand the value proposition there.
I've just never seen an advertisement for something I actually wanted in my entire life.
And then most people in the world wouldn't understand what that is.
Well, yeah. And it's also, you know, I contrast this to people now of like, you know, you go to San Francisco, every ad is for like optimize your AI agent to do X, Y, Z. And then you come to Ukraine and every ad is like join the military or help us fund drones. And I think it's like it's really billboards say a lot.
Yeah, it's definitely an indicator of the times you're living in. OK, so you get out to San Francisco in April of 2023. You're building your first startup. And I think this is important for a lot of people to understand. The first one usually isn't the one that you make it big in. I know that from my own personal experience. How did the first startup go? What did you learn and what led you into this industry?
Yeah, I mean, it was great. I was extremely fortunate to have some really great people take a bet on me. You know, I didn't really know anybody there. I just went to, this is, I guess, a common story, a common theme in my life. I just went to like a hackathon and made this cool thing there and ended up getting some backing through Founders Inc., which is at the time they had this venture studio where they would basically pay you a full-time salary and then help you to fund everything like running your company.
And so I was like, oh, this is a sweet gig. And the founder of that place, Furkan, is just an industry veteran, really, really, really smart guy and very wise in addition to being smart. and i just remember him you know he had a couple different ideas that he wanted to explore and the one we landed on was was email and i just remember him describing this idea and you have to remember this is 2023 before cloud code or any agents no agents really existed and he just had
this idea of these these agents or these like little robots inside the computer like picking up your emails and looking at them and moving them around when you're not there and and basically just all the things that were impossible previous to AI and the fact that email has not been reinvented in like 30 years. It's still the same thing that it always used to be. My big takeaway from that was a couple of things. And I always say this, and it's a bit direct, but I just don't give a shit about email.
That wasn't your life's work.
No, I just don't care about email at all. I don't like my own email. I don't want to optimize it. It's just not something that I'm passionate about. And the other thing that I found is just that, you know, so some of the customers that we're working with were really, really great. They were just really, really busy people. And that was really fun. But I just found that the productivity crowd and building something for them was not something that I was really passionate about.
And so I just left that whole experience. You know, honestly, at the time, I never thought that I would do another like venture backed company. It just wasn't something that seemed very interesting to me. But it also drove home to me like the importance of building things that I'm actually interested in for people that I care a lot about, which kind of stuck with me through to Theseus now.
So moving on to Theseus, February 2024, you go to a hackathon. First of all, why would you go to a hackathon? And who did the hackathon? I think this is important. We have some mutual friends that participated there.
8VC and D3 and I believe Brave1 was involved.
Which we've had Eveline Buchatskiy on the podcast. And then also Brave1. Yeah.
No, it was really, really awesome.
So why did you go to such a hackathon in the first place?
Well, so my best friend since I was like six months old is Ukrainian. And so when the full-scale invasion happened, I was in my last semester of university. And I just remember instantly feeling like I should like come over and do something and fight. And I really talked myself out of it because it's like it just doesn't make sense. That's not my skill set. Like I've spent all this time learning to program. I'm not a sniper. And I remember having that conversation with some people close to me. But it just always...
They were probably pretty glad that you talked yourself out of it.
Yeah, yeah. I think they were. And I think I totally could have done that and it would have been great. Maybe I should have. But at the time, it just ... it didn't seem like the right choice. And so, but there was something that like stuck with me for like years.
And, and, and, and your best friend was from Ukraine, as I understand it adopted, right?
Yeah. Yeah. But I, at least, you know, it was always like, this is a place that I'm familiar with and then I associate with, with Jack and, and just like, and he knew he was from Ukraine
and what, what was the circumstances? Cause he probably came over here when Ukraine was in a really tough situation. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It was, yeah, exactly. Yeah, his parents ... I honestly don't know why, but they were like, we want to go to Ukraine. Like that's where we're going to find our son and... they, he, he lived like right down the street from me. And, and apparently, you know, I don't remember this, but, my parents were like walking me in a stroller and, his parents came, came by and they're like, Oh, you know, how old is your son? Like we're, we're actually
about to go to Ukraine and, and like adopted a child that's going to be the same age. and yeah, we've been best friends ever since. and yeah. And, and I just think it was always something where to me, it's just so clearly universally wrong. And, and I think that, you know, when I, when I was a kid, another thing that my dad would say to me, it's always like, you know, you don't, you don't want to bully somebody. You don't want to hit somebody first,
but if somebody hits you, you need to hit them back as hard as possible. And that to me is just like, obviously the case here, it's like just, just this aggressive evil force attacking, like, you know, somebody that's smaller than them and that person, that country, Ukraine, just trying to defend itself. And, you know, so to my version of morality, it's just like the most clear, like black and white thing. And so, I honestly just came across this, this hackathon
on Twitter and actually Sasha had sent it to me. and he, he was at Yale. So he was in Connecticut and he was like, I'm thinking about flying, to LA to go to this hackathon. And, you know, that's basically in my backyard in San Francisco. So I'm like, dude, let's do it. Like this,
this is going to be awesome. So Sasha was still at Yale. You guys were, I think, very good friends in college. Yep. And the hackathon brought you both together to LA.
Yeah. Yeah. And we met our third co-founder there, Carl. I remember we were talking ahead of time, like, okay, both of us are like software people. We've never really touched anything hardware related. I'd never touched a drone. I didn't know how drone worked. so it's like, we got to go find somebody that's super smart that actually knows about these things. and, and we met Carl there and yeah, I mean, the rest is kind of history, but, it was,
and to me just such a great, I mean, I remember thinking like if I could do something that had like the tiniest impact over there, like that would be so amazing. and just, just really, really, really hoping that something that we did would have an impact. And so then the next morning, I woke up and this tweet had all these views and all these people.
Okay. So you skipped a few things. So you went, you go to the hackathon. The tweet is the result of the hackathon?
Yeah. We built this prototype of a drone that would fly without a GPS.
And where did that idea come from?
so Carl was at Stanford at the time and he'd been talking to a lot of the, they have a bunch of veterans over there in a pretty big military community. and, and that was just like this really common repeated thing that he kept hearing. It's like, we don't have GPS. We need something that works without GPS. and so, yeah, I mean, the second that I heard that idea, I was like, that's a really, really good idea. We should definitely work on that.
Okay. So hackathon, how long did it take? What was the...
I mean, so we had 24 hours. It was a 24-hour hackathon.
No sleep.
We slept for two hours. We thought we were going to make it all night, but then we had to wait on the 3D print, and it was like 4 a.m., and they started playing dubstep in the hackathon venue to try to keep everybody awake, and we're like, okay, we're going to go sleep for a couple hours. but yeah then we finished and we didn't win the hackathon we didn't even place in the hackathon people are kind of like oh okay that's cool sounds good and then yeah then I put this tweet up and
then went and slept for 18 hours since we hadn't really slept and I woke up and it's funny because the first text I saw on my phone was from Luca, who's our COO now. And it was basically, dude, like I saw your tweet. That's so cool. And I'm like, that's really, why would Luca be texting me about that? Like that's, I guess it's cool. And then I opened up my phone.
And so Luca went to school with you guys.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, it was just this kind of crazy moment. The first person I called was a friend of mine, Prady, who had had a similar. So this is one of the things that I love about, about San Francisco, is there's always somebody that's been in your shoes before. and so I called him since he'd had a similar moment and that was how he started his company. And it's like, yeah, man, that's, that's really crazy. It's going to be really awesome. Like you
guys should definitely apply to Y Combinator. the early application deadline is in whatever, two days. and so, yeah, we were kind of off, off to the races, from there.
So how many, how many replies did you get to the Twitter? I guess you, it, it went a bit viral.
Just, yeah. I mean, there were, I don't know, many, many millions of people viewed it and, and many, many, many people messaged me. And then there was plenty of people that messaged me and, and I didn't see it till like six months later. And I was like, oh wow, I really wish I'd responded to that person. But yeah, it was kind of insane.
Yeah. So D3, Brave1 goes out to LA, puts together a hackathon. And little do we know that you're going to be out here very soon after that. Founding the company, talk through that journey about the early days, Y Combinator, and what you guys experienced before you got to Ukraine?
Yeah, I mean, it was really awesome in a lot of ways. It was fun because we kind of didn't know what we were doing at all. We had to figure it all out. I remember there was this moment in May of 2024 where Sasha and I were talking and we were thinking about just coming over here already, being like taking this like really kind of unfinished thing and just bringing it over here and starting to use it and test it and try it. And I really wish that we'd done that. I think we could have accelerated things significantly.
Were you already a Y Combinator then?
Yeah. Yeah. So we hadn't started the batch is what they call it, but we'd already gotten funding from them.
So you got accepted. They give $500,000 as an initial pre-seed investment.
Which would have been plenty to do everything that we needed to do over here.
So what do you think stopped you? Because this is actually, this is for founders that are probably in the same situation you were back at that point. And we've had interactions with a number of YC companies that have been making this decision. When do I come to Ukraine? When am I ready? When am I going to not look stupid? So why were you considering it? Why did you not come?
Yeah. I mean, to that point, it's like you're going to look stupid no matter what. Everybody looks stupid.
You can't delay your stupid moment.
Yeah. Well, you could spend $50,000 and look stupid, or you can spend a million and look stupid, or you can spend $100 million and look stupid. Whenever you come over here, you're going to look stupid at first, and then you're going to improve your product because it's actually going to be used in the real world.
So wait. Let me just make sure we emphasize that. no matter what you do in America as a defense tech founder, you're not going to avoid looking stupid when you come to Ukraine.
Yeah. And I mean, I, we both see it, right? Like it doesn't, it doesn't matter what size or scale or whether you're publicly traded or, you know, a really, really super small startup, you're just going to get your ass handed to you by the real world. And, and yeah, I think we had this feeling, which I think everybody else, I know everybody else also feels of, oh, if we just have one more extra thing, it will all be perfect. And, and then this will be great and everybody will like it. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody will
laugh at us. And that's just so far from the truth. And, and really the only thing that keeps people from, from laughing at you and in fact, makes them take you very, very serious and, and, and want to bet on you is, is when you can just show like consistency and that you're willing to stay and work with them through whatever issues there are. And you can be very upfront about that, which I think we felt at the time, but we just didn't have the experience to listen
to that little voice in our head. And instead we listened to the voice that said, you know, if we just do X, Y, Z, it'll be perfect. and it'll be great. and, and it's really easy to nail perfect when you control all of the variables. So if, if you're doing demos or even if you're working with, you know, users in a more forgiving, permissive environment, you can get that to the point where it's going to be perfect, you know, in a relatively limited amount of time. But then,
you know, even when our product was able to be demoed super nicely in a controlled environment, then you take it out here. And so we build a system that enables drones to fly without a GPS. us, our first version of that was a hardware module. And you can get the hardware module to work really well on your drone that you fly in day in, day out that you know every characteristic of. But then you're going to, I remember the first time we came over here was in November of 2024
and we completely shit the bed. And it was, you know, and it's such a simple, stupid thing that's so obvious to us now, but it's like the drone got launched off a catapult. We'd never seen a drone get launched off a catapult before people do that and it's like wow okay i don't think our product's gonna work off a catapult and so then it's like you know you're you're you're right back to to square one and if we'd have come over even with you know
some fucking cans of food or, or like a tube of toothpaste, we could have seen that it was launched off a catapult. We could have saved ourselves like several months. and I think that that's the big thing is like almost being afraid of the real world results and, and thinking that you can master that, when, when really you just can't at all. yeah. And, and so, you know, we, we, on the other hand, we did have the opportunity to develop the product with some really great people
in the U S and they gave us a bunch of good feedback and helped us work through that. but I think it's just a completely different thing when the people that you're working with, also the other thing that I emphasize to, you know, newer companies that are starting out is, like I said, like I'd never touched a drone before starting this company. Right. And, and so, at the time I didn't know what I didn't know. And the thing is, it's like, it's really obvious to
everybody if you know all of the ins and outs and like intricate details of these things or not. And folks are going to be able to, folks over here are going to be able to pick up if you know what you're talking about like very, very quickly, but they'll still be willing to help you if you can be honest about like, here are the parts that we know and here are the parts that we don't know. And what I really wish is that it's like, this is not only where you can get those like real
world feedback, but also where these, you know, we'll just take drones because that's the space we work in. It's like engineers over here have been working in this complicated little drone ecosystem for four and a half years now. And so they know all the- In combat. Yeah. And they know all the ins and outs of the system. They know, you know, the drone software better than anybody that you could meet outside of Ukraine will. And so you can start instead of basically like
mansplaining or having to explain your product to somebody that maybe has never encountered the type of thing that you're building, you'll say two sentences to somebody here and they know exactly what you're talking about. And they start like driving you towards actual technical result, which I think is just like, so, so, so important. So yeah, I really wish we'd come over here sooner. And then I wish that we'd spent more time here sooner. And then I wish that we'd established a full-time team here sooner.
And honestly, in retrospect, all these things are pretty obvious. But at the time, they seem like these difficult trade-offs.
One second, just a second. My wife is calling me, so I just want to make sure there's no...
Emergency.
Yep.
I know. I found it. I found it. They were making sure I made it to the studio.
Everything right here?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So where did we leave off? You just... Oh, you wish you'd gotten here sooner. So that's a common thing, and thank you for opening up about what you wish you'd have done. Sorry, thank you for opening up about what you wish you would have done, because I think it's important for defense tech founders to hear if they've done some of these similar mistakes, you're not alone. You can fix it. And for those that are just getting started, I think it's very prescient advice
that they could certainly use to greater effect than you might have when you started. So you got over here in November 2024. You raised, when did you finish Y Combinator? When did you raise your first seed round? Because I think that's important for people to understand how that works.
Yeah, it was in September of 2024. And then we came over here after that.
Okay. How was that? So you get through Y Combinator. They have this demo day. You know, how did that go?
What was the... Yeah, I mean, for us, it was really straightforward. We closed around in like two days. We had some really significant interest from the U.S. Army. And at the time, I think folks were, yeah, just very impressed by the fact that we had actually fielded a product as quickly as we did.
And I think, honestly, a big learning experience for us and a place where I think it would have been possible to continuously miss is like there's a really big difference between fielding a product to the U.S. and then fielding a product to Ukraine. And, you know, I don't mean this to be ... it's just like you can get a really nice contract in the U.S. with something that's completely unproven and has never seen the light of day and maybe never will see the light of day.
And it's pretty hard to get any money over here in Ukraine if your product isn't like really good and useful and both those things while also being cost effective. And so, yeah, at the time, it was pretty, honestly, pretty straightforward. And I think then too, we were also looking at the US market as being this kind of end all be all. And I think what we've found is that Ukraine is just the best place to drive the initial use cases because the whole world is kind of looking at Ukraine.
It's like, okay, what works and what doesn't work and what, you know, you look at the companies that have been successful in drone dominance and any of those companies have a really significant presence over here. they either initially created their product here or they sent their first test units and all subsequent units here. Or yeah. So I think it's just really, you know, you can get some interest, but then to continue to have demand and to be able to really just have results that you can
show somebody like this does what I say it does and I can prove it to you in these ways, I think
is just so essential. So you decided initially to focus on the U.S. Army. Where did that come from? Was that something that investors advised you? Was that just something you thought was natural
because you're a U.S. company or? Yeah, I think the common advice that we got or really the question that we would always get is like, oh, well, what what about when the war in Ukraine ends? Right. That's going to it always seemed like when we were first starting, it always seemed like it was like two weeks away from ending. I think it's like seemed that way for a really, really, really long time.
Four and a half years later.
And I'd say that that is kind of the biggest thing is like, oh, you don't want to be too focused on like one specific place, which I think is just really misses the mark in terms of like, well, where are all of the drones in the world being used in combat? It's in one place. So you should focus on where all of the drones in the world are being used if you're building something for drones.
And if that's all in one place at one point in time, you should focus as much as possible on that one place at that one point in time until that's no longer the case. And yeah, just again, I think, you know, we just we were new to the space in the industry. And I also think that there's a lot of advice that sounds good on paper. And there's also a lot of dollars available outside of Ukraine, right? Like we're not here because we want to make the most money and this is the place to make the most money.
We're here because I really care so much about making a product that actually works really well, that works at scale for a lot of people. And you can prove that you can sell $100 million worth of something elsewhere. But to me, you just can't prove that scale anywhere but here and that efficacy, which is just ultimately what all of this is about.
That's a very important point. It's probably easier to sell $100 million worth of stuff anywhere but Ukraine. But if you can sell a tenth of that in Ukraine, if you can make 10 million of sales in Ukraine, you probably have one of the best products on the market.
Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And again, the whole world is just looking here for like what is effective here and what actually works. and you know, we, we both see this that just more and more or again and again, yeah, for, foreign companies from, from Europe and the U S just like want to be involved here. Everybody wants to be involved here and you need to be involved here. and if you don't, it's, it's kind of like a, what, what are you doing type thing?
and you can come up with like some really great reasons for, for that or, or like delay that forever. But eventually, like, again, it comes back to this, eventually you're going to start showing your product to people. And if they haven't taken it and just torn it apart and told you all the things that are wrong with it, they will do that. And the market will do that. And, you know, it's, it's hard to have a free market in defense. It's definitely not a completely free
market over here, but a lot of the funding that people get are through donations and they are through other people and they are done at a low level and at a unit level or at a brigade level. And so. To me, it's much, much, much closer to a free market than anywhere else in the world where if your system is good and it works well, people will like it and they will buy more and more and more of it and use it more and more and more.
And so I think there's just like really nowhere to hide where like you can have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of kit come over here. And if it doesn't work well enough, people will just leave it in a warehouse and they won't use it. And so there's also this aspect of like, yeah, you can have a presence here and you can have things that are used here. But like what is the throughput? And are you expanding or are you like just kind of stable? And again, yeah, you can ship a bunch of stuff.
But I don't know about you. To me, it's just deeply uninteresting to have something sit in a warehouse. It's like if I make something, I want it to be used. And so I think that as time goes on, also you see some really great companies that are doing really great things. And I think we're lucky to be one of them and to be expanding that. But you see people where they've just obviously had success here. And you look like the Hornet and that's just deployed at such great scale.
It's undeniable to everybody of like this system works well. And so then when you're looking at some contract and some other company that's very well funded has a different mid-strike drone, well, it's like, what's the story here? And why is that not as used as this system? And so I think it's ... as the war has dragged out, it's become increasingly harder to hide and to stay away because it's like, well, some people have been here and they've been here for a really long time making their system work really well.
Yeah. Yeah. And we've run into some people from the US side who were not happy with the performance of our own systems and other places across the world.
Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, everybody wants like things that work well, right? It's pretty simple. It's just that in defense, you can, especially if you're not actively at war, you can hide behind like a lot of that because it's not actually being tested. It's just deterrence. and deterrence is like, yeah, there's some, deterrence exists, but there's also this like paper tiger thing of like how many of these systems are actually going to work. And I don't
think you'd get that in other markets nearly as much. Like, can you imagine if you had, I like Facebook, it's like a, you know, they did really well as a startup. Can you imagine if, if Facebook, it was like, oh, okay, well people don't actually like using this. They don't actually want it but like you know we we have a billion users worth of people with accounts but none of them like use their accounts and it's like well that would be like a really crappy
it's actually really crappy and you can't hide there you can't yeah you can't hide there at
all yeah okay so you started come to Ukraine in november of 2024 and walk us through your journey from visiting to where you are now because i think your your journey and evolution in Ukraine is is
the model. Yeah, I think we've done, I think we've made all the mistakes. So I, I watched some podcast where I think Soren, the founder of Neros was talking about this, but there's, there's kind of like, and I was talking to, some other American people about this, but there's, there's kind of like three different things that you can do. you can come on like a couple of day trip and like take some pictures and, and like maybe talk to a couple of people
and then leave. And that's like, Ooh, like really bad. Then you can, it's almost worse than not coming. Yeah, totally. And it's like completely ineffective. And then there's like, okay, you can come for like a couple of weeks at a time. but then what, what's happening is you're going to invest in all this effort into like just meeting all these people, spinning up these relationships, trying to get them to use your system or getting them to use
it more. And then you leave and all of that momentum kind of dies because people here are busy as shit and they have a war to fight and, and nobody, if you're like 10,000 miles away, like nobody is sitting around thinking about you. They're not waiting for your zoom invite. Yeah, exactly. And so that was, and then there's like, okay, you, you come here and either, you know, you live here or your team has a permanent presence here and the leadership is visiting here
very, very frequently and like gives a shit about the permanent presence here. and we've kind of done all three, right? So we came over here for a week. and we had our system and we basically spent a week just waiting for these guys to integrate and test it and fly it. And we did that test flight off the catapult and it just sucked ass. And then we were like, okay, well we scheduled this other thing next week. So like, we have to go to Poland. So like, bye guys.
and, and that was just, you know, it, it felt bad for us. It felt bad for those guys. And, And it was just all around not the right way to go about things. And then last year, we spent about six months here between myself and Sasha, my co-founder, and some of our engineers. But it was very start-stop. And we would go and really spend a bunch of time working with people and get them to a really good state. And then we would go back to the US.
And it just felt like we had just such a split focus and an inability to just like keep compounding things. And, you know, what I realized, I was over here in May for the first time in several months.
And so this is 2025. You guys collectively spent about six months here. Yep. And then in May, that's actually I think when we first met.
Yep.
You had just spent, I remember this. You'd spent like eight, we're sitting down in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel. You'd spent like eight weeks in Ukraine. And what did you decide?
Yeah, I just say, man, I just need to move here. I need to move here. And we need to establish a Ukrainian company and hire Ukrainian people and just be a company that exists here. And we need to bring all of our engineers over here. They all need to see how things work. They need to learn here. They need to work here and just really understand everything. And we just need to be extremely focused in what we're doing around making sure that our product works really well for people here.
And that was this just big inflection point for us. Everything has been much busier, but a lot easier since we started doing that. Because, I mean, again, we make a product that makes it so that your drones can fly in a EW saturated environment. There's not EW saturated environment in the US. And you have to sit around waiting for months and months and months to get paperwork to turn on one jammer in the middle of nowhere for like one hour. And that's just not the case here.
I mean, you're driving around in an Uber and it's going to get jammed. And so it's, yeah, it was just this refocusing of like everything we're doing around, we need, I need everybody that's working in our company to understand like what we're doing and who we're doing it for and where we're doing it and where we're focusing. And, you know, we had somebody and he's a nice guy, but we had somebody quit because of that. Because he's like, I don't want to go live in Ukraine. I want to stay in California.
And it's like, you know, that's awesome. He's a really nice guy. I really like him. But it's like, that's just, that's just not what we're doing. Like we're coming over here and you guys are going to have, yeah, you're going to have fucking shaheads hit like right next to you. Like, and it's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. You're going to be fine.
Until it hits you.
Yeah. Well, and then, and then we're fucked and, and, and I hope our insurance is good, but it's, yeah.
Well, you said something really important because the first company you, you realized that, you know, you, you came to the gold rush, the AI gold rush in San Francisco. You wanted to work in AI, but then you realized that you hated working with your customer. In America, you're working on a defense product. You actually got some kind of traction in America. You got some contracts. But compare the experience of getting to know the American customer, the sophistication level, the urgency versus the Ukrainian customer.
And what is it like working with your customer here?
Yeah. And I'll preface this by saying, like, I love America. I love Ukraine too. I love America. I think our military is improving and getting there. And I hope that all of these learnings from here will go back to the US and we can make our country understand what this looks like as well as people in Ukraine do. So it's not like meant to be too negative. It's really just like, yeah, when you're facing war day in, day out, you just behave differently and you operate differently.
And there is definitely bureaucracy over here. But people are also extremely willing to push through that bureaucracy and push through that red tape and to find a way to make something work if they believe that it will have a difference on the battlefield because their lives and the lives of their brothers in arms depend on that. And so I think that that's like the biggest thing is it's just so much more focused on reality and the real world and so much less focused on requirements.
And it's also funny because when you talk to people here in Ukraine, they still complain about all the requirements and the testing and all of it. And it's like, oh, brother, like you don't know the half of it. And so I think it's really just like a pure focus that you can only get when you can't fake that, basically. And I don't know how anybody else would or would even try to or want to. But for me, it's also the thing that I'm passionate about, right, is like I care very deeply about the U.S.,
But I also care very deeply about helping people that have to get into a fucking shitty ass position and sit there for months on end. And people that actually like, you know, their lives do depend on this. And it's not some speculative future. It's like, these are real guys that we know that need this today. And that's the thing that like, you know, I feel and everybody that we work with and and that works for us feels is, is like, yeah, it's, it's just like super duper obvious,
that what we're doing needs, needs to be done and people need it now and they don't need it tomorrow. and that's what I, that's what really motivates me is like, regardless of, you know, what, what country you're from, like, we're all, I want to help the person that needs help today and needs the most help today. And, and, and where hundreds of thousands of people's lives are depending on it today. And to me, that kind of like transcends nationality. And I'd like
to, I want to go help the people that really, really, really need that right now in this, in this very moment. Yeah, much more so than I want to, it's important to be prepared for the next fight. And people like to talk about that. But it's also like, guys, like there's, there's a fight right here right now and it's it's not going away unless we do something about it
yeah the fight is here and you know this is where the help is and and you've you know since i've gotten to know you this this this last summer 2026 i think you've set like a world record for speed dating and getting to know like so many different companies and units and and you have like very, very deep connections and friendships now with, with people that whose technology you
can actually help, you know, their save lives. Yes. Speed dating. And then also, I think one thing that we have done well is, is show real genuine commitment and earnestness. And I'll go back to the like 20, 24 example is like, you know, we, we went to this exercise in Poland then, And then we met these guys there and it was like, we just didn't have the thing they needed right then. And then a year later, we still didn't have the thing that they needed, but we're like, we're doing this for you and we're trying.
And like, you know, those are guys that Sasha is with right now. And it's like, oh, you finally have, we finally have this thing for you. And, you know, it's not, and I think that's the thing that's easy for people to see is it's like, look, and also I think people need to come here as soon as possible. It's like, look, it's hard. everybody gets that it's hard. It's going to be hard, like figuring, figuring it out is the hard
part. Selling it is the easy part. So everybody wants to support you in the figuring it out part. And yeah, and I think it's a lot of that of just being able to consistently show people. And that's the place I think a lot of folks in the US get it wrong and really just can't compete with people that are over here is like, nobody, if you tell somebody that something is new, and you want them to try it and you're just very honest with them about what it is and what it
looks like. I think, again, this is a cultural thing, but it's also like a reality thing, right? It's like, don't, if you say that something does a thing, like make sure that it does the thing. And if it doesn't do that yet, explain to people that that's something that you'd like for it to do in the future. And that's something that we've always done a good job of and tried very hard to be sure of doing for people is explaining to them, you know, what is marketing material and
what is real life. And I think sometimes people, you know, they can't get that through their head, like what is in their marketing material versus what is actually going to happen in the real world. And so, again, just consistently doing that and demonstrating that to people, I think just, yeah, that helps in building relationships. Also, I think our team is like really, really wonderful and everybody really gives a shit. And, you know, some of our engineers,
like, yeah, they just go out and they're like best friends with guys. But it's, it's just, again, it's like this, this culture and mentality of like, yeah, we're here and we're going to solve your problem for you. Like whatever it is, whatever you need. and we're also going to be here until that problem is solved. We're not going to like leave you out to dry. because yeah, I just think so it's, it's so, so many people have gotten like fatigued,
not here, obviously. Well, people here are fatigued in a different way, but you go back to the U S and, and it's like the news cycles are so short. You could, you know, people are focused on something else. Right. And it's like, no guys, like this is still, this is still the same big deal that, that it always has been. and yeah, I think that that's like having a team full of people that are willing to just stay committed to people and to a problem until that problem is solved is
is is a really important thing so when we we have a lot of time in the car together sometimes we're driving to for those of you not familiar with Ukraine you've got Kyiv is the center of the universe in Ukraine politically economically financially it's an amazing city my favorite city in the world. But then the real frontline knowledge isn't in Kyiv. You have to go out to Dnipro or even farther out to Pavlohrad or some of these small cities up there. we've been down
there, and then up to Kharkiv, which is 35 kilometers from the Russian border. I mean, it's surreal. In Kharkiv, you'll be at a park and you'll see all these little shrapnel marks from S-300s that were lobbed by Russians, you know, when they were close to the city and, you know, entire neighborhoods in the north have been destroyed by artillery when Russia was close to the city. And even now it's just right there. And we've had a lot of conversations about the
fence industry and the best and brightest of the founders are starting to get into the industry. You go back to San Francisco a lot. You still have a lot of connections there. less and less now. You don't go back nearly as much. But you know the people there. What do you think the defense tech industry in America is getting it right? Where do you think they're still getting it wrong? And how do we fix that? Like, what's the message that needs to come
back from people like you and Eveline and other people that are, you know, spreading the message
of what's happening here? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. It's a hard question. So some things that the US is definitely getting right. So when I look at the war here, the three most critical pieces of technology, two of those are American. So the first one is like Chinese commercial electronic supply chain. That's obvious. The second is Starlink, and that's a U.S. commercial business that runs because of, you know, grandma in the Philippines wants to watch YouTube on her iPad. It's not military technology.
And then the third is AI and AI tools and the amounts that that has accelerated and proliferated, you know, people using Claude for everything is really impressive. And so I think that there's a lot that can be done in the U.S. that is future forward and that requires deep investment and is commercial ultimately. And, you know, a good example of that is you see a very large investment in a power generation for AI. Those are investments that are also very important for defense.
you see a push now towards re-industrializing a lot of critical industries. I think something that a lot of people have talked about, which is super on the nose, is that a lot of the re-industrialization is maybe too focused on defense and not focused enough on commercial use cases. But I do think that the US has some really good commercial advantages in big businesses and can leverage lots of capital in that way. The place that they are falling short is building things that they don't understand.
They don't understand what they're used for. They don't understand what they're useful for. And it's kind of just like this follow the leader mentality of seeing something that's employed over here or exists over here and then wanting to build that immediately without understanding the context. i know this from experience of just like you you need to you need it would it just wouldn't make sense and i'm sorry because i have i don't know i have friends that have it just doesn't
make sense to build like interceptors in the u.s it's just like what are what are we doing here how do you get the reps in how do you test this how do you know how how are you ever going to teach people how to employ these systems how are you going to learn about layered air defense where are you going to practice any of this shit? Like you, you literally, and then this is like a big news story, right? As everybody knows this, but it's like, you know, you have these jet powered
drones, you have people that are building interceptors that aren't even going to be useful at all because it's, it's just too far behind. But like, even if the, actual physical device caught on, like you still need to have the ability to employ that. And it's, it just, it almost just doesn't make sense why you would ever like build that in that way. Like you, you need to be over here or you need to be supplying it over here so that you get the
feedback. It just doesn't make sense to stockpile those things in a vacuum. I'm trying to think of
Like, again, that's a very interesting point you brought up is there are a lot of companies in America building air defense interceptors or missiles or other things. And one of the most successful stories for and even even in Ukraine is perennial autonomy, which built the mirror ops, which is now in huge demand all over the world. but that's struggling now against the jet-powered Shahed, right? So that company, Eric Schmidt founded, he's ex-CEO of Google, chairman of the board,
founded Perennial, and they're the ones that built the Hornet. They're the ones that built Merops. And the reason they're successful is they're here. American company, all the money in the world, but the main ingredient is still the fact that they're here.
Yeah, I mean, all the supply, yeah, all the supply. ends up where it's actually going to be used. And, and it just, yeah, it just doesn't, I mean, it does make sense to me why you, why you wouldn't do that, but I think ultimately it's, it's just like losing it. And I think what, you know, what could happen that would make that these things not necessary. And I know that you'll kind of laugh at this is like, we could just have a mean reversion, right? We could just go back to peacetime. Like this could
just end. Let's do it. Everything could, everything could just end. And then we'd be sitting around happy, just like, you know, buying these systems that are for deterrence. Like that could totally happen. And then there's like a bunch of bets that I think are good there. And you want to bet in a, in a different kind of defense company, if that's the case. Because that's a lot about like government capture and, and just like knowing the right people and building, you know, the systems that people want in that way.
But if that doesn't happen, then it's like, yeah, what are we doing here, right? We should either be building like space super weapons, or if you're going to build something that is cheap, that is low cost, that is based off of this like Ukrainian model, then you need to be deploying it here at great scale. And yeah, that's like my big... And yeah, with counter-drone systems, again, it's ... maybe the wars that people in the U.S. will fight are different or maybe the way that they'll do base defense is different.
Like, agree on all fronts. But, you know, one of the things I've thought a lot about ... I don't think there's political buy-in for this. But, you know, in the U.S. you have like a ... you have the SBIR program, right? And that basically exists to give small businesses a chance to develop and validate their technology. why should we be spending that silver money for slide decks that are made in America when we could spend, you know, that's billions of dollars that would be extraordinarily impactful
over here and could still fund American businesses to research and develop technology, but you could research and develop the technology in a place where it would actually be employed. And if you think about like a static base defense C-UAS system, yeah, maybe that's not the most useful thing in this fight. But like if you were getting it for free and you could put it on a position and test whether it shot down 10 drones, that would be extremely useful for people here. And it would
also be extremely useful for businesses in the US. And sure, yeah, maybe that's not, you know, worth $50,000 or $100,000 in this fight. But I do think that you could, you know, one of the places that the US has an advantage is they just have so much money and capital and they can invest in R&D. But like, why not invest in R&D in a way that actually helps people that are fighting today, and then also actually helps the technology to be validated. So that's just like, it doesn't,
You know, I think there's no perfect answer, but I do wish that we pushed our, you know, baby chicks out of the nest a little bit more and just forced them to go and do that.
Yeah, I think the incentives drive activity and the problem with the American, I would say that the very positive thing right now is that defense tech is being invested in now, which is drawing some of the most talented founders of this generation into defense because it's hard tech where software now is viewed as a commodity that AI can potentially swallow up or AI is greatly disrupting the software business model.
So venture capitalists have moved into an industry that they had no idea and probably still don't have a great idea of what it's all about. And there's a learning curve there. And I think one of the big things right now is very good, great founders like you are attracted to defense. Money's coming in, funding them. But now it's about, OK, incentives.
How do we, as VCs or as the U.S. government or as both, align to get defense founders to make the good choices like you've made, albeit later than you think you should have made it, to come over to Ukraine and test your technology?
Yeah, and I think sadly it'll take a lot of time. And hindsight is 20-20. And like what you said about perennial autonomy is a great example. And I think that there's such a success case of doing that and just doing extremely well having run that model. So I think it just takes people time to ... maybe one thing that will be helpful is looking at them and then looking at other similarly well-funded large American companies and then looking at kind of what have they done in terms of development in the last two years.
Oh, okay. These people are kind of still in the same spot. They're kind of still talking about the same stuff. What have they blown up? What's the impact they've had in the world? Not much. Maybe they created some jobs. These people, okay, well, they said they were going to actually go to Ukraine and make it work. And now look at how many hundreds of thousands of systems they've sold and how much everybody else wants it. And so I do think we're all learning this as we figure
it out, but it becomes pretty clear to me that the companies that do take the bet and take the risk, and there is risk. I mean, you said, and we both joked, it's like, yeah, it's not fun to be in a place where things blow up, but it's also like, that's what war is. And if you're building something for war, you need to be there. And also like we as, you know, foreigners have this luxury of like, we can go in and out whenever we want. It's like, this is like easy mode. It's like totally easy mode.
You're not getting drafted. You're not, you know, you can leave the country. You can go have these business relationships with people elsewhere. It's just so much easier for us. And I think that that's another thing that sunk into us after spending a lot of time here. And, you know, I admit this to everybody. It's like the first time I came over to Ukraine, I was like so scared. I was that like, you know, image of the person visiting that was just like really, really, really afraid.
And then you start to, A, it's like, okay, this is fine. And it's actually like really, really nice here. And then B, you meet actual real soldiers that are actually really fighting. And, you know, it's like, man, there's like just such a wide gap there. And I just think we have it like so good. And yeah, it's just, but I do think that there is like a risk.
And I think that that risk has to be, it's very easy to see the risk and it's hard to see the payoff until you have examples of companies that have done that and have succeeded in doing that. And so I wouldn't be surprised to see like more and more of like a fervor and like a clamor to actually like deploy and send things over here as the companies that have invested in that when there was a significant risk and not so clear of a payoff actually demonstrate that that was a good bet to make.
Yeah. And what's happening is you're building this support group, like YC graduates who mentor other YCs that I said to you, too, that are asking you, and then, you know, when should I come to Ukraine? And, hey, it's okay. You know, you can come over here. And I actually met you through another company that I was already helping, David, who made the exact same decision you did. And I think we'll have them on the podcast soon about, hey, I'm just going to focus 100% on Ukraine.
I've got limited resources I need to focus. This is where we're going to learn the fastest. It's not about making money. It's about making a product that works and then the money will come. And that kind of pureness of motive, willingness to take risks and then do the right thing for the war effort, for the customers, which is the Ukrainians who aren't going to overpay for anything because they're too savvy to do so.
And then asking your investors to bear with you as you do that and your family and everyone else who's worried about you. It's just the right way to be.
Yeah, and I think the big thing. that I get across, because when we're first starting, I talked to people over here, and it seemed like I was talking to an alien, right? They were like, come on. And I'm like, no, I just can't fathom that. And it's just like, first of all, all the soldiers that are fighting in Ukraine, the vast majority of them, they're not career soldiers, right? They were normal, like people with normal jobs. They were software engineers and accountants and all of these things.
They just don't have a choice, right? So it's not like you're in a room with or in a world with with a million two million navy seals right these are just like normal guys that are doing their best and and also for me it's like i you know i i am just the last person where i ever would have thought that i would end up here and it's like you just you can just do it and it's like okay and and and there's nothing you don't have to be like a superhero by any means you just
have to like show up and just give a shit and and it's actually like extremely easy to do and people are very welcoming and very friendly to to folks doing that and that's what i would hope
to get across to everybody yeah we were talking we were joking at the beginning about people laughing at you i've never seen anyone in Ukraine disrespect someone for coming over here and not knowing as much as them yeah they're very understanding of the fact that hey you know and and this is this is what i think is so humbling when you're in Ukraine is people will thank you like thanks for coming over here and you know it's like someone will never take a zoom meeting with you but but
you come to Ukraine and they'll they'll sit down and meet you and they'll break bread with you because you actually show that you're not afraid to like come here. Yeah. And you're real.
Yeah. And I mean, I do the same thing. I've been doing the same thing for a while now where it's like, no, dude, I'm not fucking putting you in a signal group chat with anybody while you're in California. Like the amount of people that ask that and they're like little ears perk up and they're like, oh, you know, you know, all these people here, like put me in touch and they'll help me with this, this and that. And I can give them my fucking product deck.
And it's just like, man, that's just not like nobody has time for that. And I think they probably did have time for that four years ago when they needed all the help that they can get. But it's just like people here are busy and they're doing like really awesome stuff. And they will take the time, like you said, to meet. But you do have to show up in person. I mean, that's literally the least you can do.
Yeah. I mean, that's the price of admission is showing up to the war zone. if you want to but let's be honest they're helping you more than you're helping them at the at the very beginning for a long time until you create something useful there's a there's an asymmetry of exchange in terms of value provision because if you are just pitching an idea and uncertain capital funding until you get a certain amount of traction you need them way more than
they need you and expecting them to be and they will actually thank you and it's very humbling when people say oh thank you for living in Ukraine and being here with us you know for me it's like no i mean thank you you guys are fighting for all of us right and i've been here for nine years my my wife's Ukrainian but i know what it's like to be that guy on the front lines in the u.s army and i know how hard that is and what we went through was nothing compared to what these guys
are going through at the front guys and gals on the front lines and there has to be a certain amount of humility for anyone who's not doing that to you know support and respect those people the most and and thankfully here they'll they'll treat you very well for for coming here and taking their time and and you know yes you're trying to help but the help you provide takes
little while to show up. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. But then it shows up and it's great. And then people are, are, are really happy. And, and I, I do think that there's more and more success cases. And, you know, I, I, I just think we're really lucky to have, have pushed through all of that and gotten to a point where you do actually bring somebody value and then you're still doing it at, you know, at a low affordable cost that's good for them.
And I think that's when you can really, you know, because the thing with technology is once you've made it, it's very easy to deploy in scale. And so, yeah, you push through all the initial pain and you get all these people that take a bet on you and then you finally get it. And then it's, you know, like we've been talking about this, but it's like, we're literally we're literally so busy that like we're like exploding like we we can't hire fast enough
and a year ago that was not the case at all right a year ago it was like me and Sasha sitting in Dnipro with the same guys for six weeks just like trying and trying and trying and trying and trying and trying and yeah it's it it and I think that's the ultimate opportunity to give back to people. It's like, yeah, you can spend a bunch of time. They'll take a bet on you. You work with them. And then eventually you make something that's super kick-ass that people can
deploy widely. And then you give it to them at a very reasonable price point and you do everything in your power to get, get as many of them to them as possible. and yeah, I think that's the opportunity that like everybody had. And I guess the reason I emphasize that is, is I just remember one it's like i just think the notion of like and i know that there's some like market yeah it's like test in Ukraine i think that that's like not a good idea and it's it's not it's it's
like don't don't just like get the 10 flights or the 10 tests and then be like oh this is good like here look at this thing like i'm gonna leave like no it's like after you have like made the thing finally work and done the thing that you're promising, like, yeah, sure. Okay. Now you can go get more money elsewhere, selling it there because they just have more money. But it's like, you, you, you should, you owe it to them. Yeah. You should just, I mean, like, what are we doing
here? Right. Like this is a, that's kind of like the whole point is that you, you figure it out and
then you sell it at scale here. Yeah. And that's one of the things I love about your, your strategy and other founders and actually won't work with anyone. If I know, and we've run into these people, hey, you're just trying to go to Ukraine to try and make as much money as possible rather than make as big an impact as possible. I always tell people, if you get this down in price, you'll get so much more value out of usage and product iteration feedback loops than if you just try to squeeze every last dollar
and sell it for those Western prices. But even if people don't seem to understand this, even if a Western government is willing to pay for it, Ukraine could spend that money on other things like patriots and other things that they really need. So they care about the price no matter who pays for it. And that's one of the things I think you've done really, really well. And I commend you for it is you're here to make an impact rather than the profit. And you understand that they'll come later.
you know, in either here at scale, which I think you're very, you're getting there very close to, or on, you know, U.S. other contracts, because the U.S. is, I think, finally starting to realize that what happened in Ukraine is important. I think it's taken us a little while, but it's starting to, I think, sink into a lot of the people you're dealing with.
Yeah. Well, thank you.
Yeah. So last thing, if people are watching this, I'm sure there's military units that are going to want to reach out to you, whether they're, you know.
Well, we've been incredibly vague, so probably not.
Yeah, yeah.
They probably are.
Well, if people really want to find you, just message us. We'll figure out if they're worth speaking to you. I'll filter them through our website. I'm a pretty good gatekeeper. And then if people want to work for you also, I think they should reach out.
Yeah. If you want to work for us in Ukraine, we have job postings. I don't think they are under our company name, but just message me on LinkedIn. Yeah. And if you want to work for us in the US, that's cool too, but you will need to come over here for a while. and you shouldn't say that you're going to come over here in the first job interview and then change your mind when you actually have to move over here. So yeah, we'd love to have anybody
reach out and yeah, we're hiring as quickly as possible. So if you write code, then please
message. And then finally, if I'm an investor watching this and want to throw money at you and put it towards a good cause and a good technology in the right place, I think they could also figure out how to get in touch with you.
Well, that's great. Well, Ian, thanks for sharing your journey because I hope that your story inspires other founders. I truly believe, I say this, that we're entering a period of, I think, geopolitical instability that we've not seen in our lifetimes. And certainly. In these periods, the calling for the best and the brightest to get into defense has never been more important. And I hope more people are inspired by your story to do the same.
Whether you can fight or you can code or whatever you want to contribute to this, the environment for the United States and our allies and the rest of the world is unfortunately getting much more challenging. And we need more people like you in defense. So thanks for doing what you're doing here in Ukraine. It's been a pleasure to work with you and hopefully continue to work with you for a long time to come to help you grow this. So thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you. And it's a terrible circumstance, but I also think in a lot of ways it's a privilege to get to work on things that matter. and we've had this deep societal malaise and now we don't get that luxury anymore and we need to fight.
Yeah, and I think both of us would agree that the people we've met here and the relationships you get in the trenches or in the foxhole of defense industry in Ukraine are incredibly rewarding and I think will last a lifetime. So it's fun to watch that. come together with all the people you know and you're getting in contact with.
Thanks.
Well, Ian, thanks for joining us on Ukraine Military History Podcast and where defense industry executives and startup founders like you are participating in the making of history in Ukraine. And thanks for fighting the good fight here.
Thanks for having me.
That was Ian Laffey, co-founder and CEO of Theseus here in Kyiv. Here is what he gave you. A company that came out of a 24-hour hackathon it did not place in, built by two software people who had never touched a drone and a third co-founder they met that day. A product aimed at the single hardest constraint on this battlefield, flying without GPS. And a founder who is honest that the conventional advice he was given, don't focus too much on Ukraine because the war might end, was exactly wrong.
His answer, every drone in the world being used in combat is being used in one place. So that is where you need to go until that is no longer true. The part worth repeating is what he says about proof. Ukraine is as close to a free market as defense industry gets because the buying decisions happen at the brigade level and below, often with donated money by people who will stop using your system tomorrow if it doesn't work. Elsewhere, you can hide behind deterrence and a paper tiger never gets tested. Here it does.
Ship a warehouse full of equipment that is not good enough and it will just stay in that warehouse. And Ian is clear-eyed about the cost of doing it properly. A year ago, he and his co-founder were sitting in Dnipro with the same unit for six weeks, trying and trying. Today, they can't hire fast enough. He has no patience for the 10-test visit. Go, run your flights, take the validation, and leave to sell at Western prices somewhere easier. His view is that you finish the thing first.
You price it so Ukrainian units can actually field it at scale, and the money will follow afterwards. The thought I want to leave you with is this. Almost at the end. He said it is a terrible circumstance, but in a lot of ways, it is a privilege to get to work on things that matter, that we've had a deep societal malaise and we do not get the luxury anymore. Ian, thank you for building it here, for being straight about the mistakes and for staying. If you got something out of that, please do two things for me.
And they take about 15 seconds each. Subscribe, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and on Apple. If you enjoyed this, please leave a five star review. I know everybody says it. Here's what it actually matters for this show. We're competing for attention with people who have huge marketing budgets, and we don't have any. The reviews are the budget. Now, the organizations behind this work, the Borderlands Foundation. Our mission is
to make sure that Ukraine's heroes are never forgotten. We have two centers, the Ukraine Military History Institute, and our mission is to preserve, translate, and distribute the lessons of Ukraine's wars in English for soldiers, historians, and military allies worldwide. We're building a university course. We produce this podcast. We do workshops for serving officers, and we're working on a professional journal. We also help with soldier delegations
and give the heroes of Ukraine tours here in Ukraine. Ian's whole argument that the truth about a weapon is only knowable when it is being used in combat is our founding thesis applied to industry instead of doctrine. Go to ukrainemilitaryhistory.org. Every episode is there with a full transcript, the chapters, and the analysis we write off the back of it, which is where the detail lives that will not fit in an episode. If you're a serving military
or a veteran, our publications are free. Register on the site and enjoy them. Ukraine Center for Traumatic Stress. PTSD research, treatment, and education for Ukrainian veterans. Ian builds systems so fewer people have to be in the worst place on the battlefield. This center is for the ones who already were, and there are hundreds of thousands of them. If you've ever listened to one of these episodes and wanted to do something concrete rather than just feel
something, this is the one. Donate through the Borderlands Foundation. The link is in the description. The Borderlands Group, the company that funds all of the above and the main thing we're working on in Ukraine today. Everything Ian described, the brigade level buying, the warehouse test, the impossibility of faking performance here, is the environment the Borderlands Group was built to help you navigate. We help Western defense and technology companies
validate their products with Ukrainian frontline units under real combat electronic warfare conditions. Then we convert that battlefield demand and help them in creating funded procurement, letters of request, letters of intent from allied government contracts or from local funds. Validate, fund, and then scale. We've helped our clients close over $90 million in sales. We've helped our clients raise over $150 million from venture capitalists. We have 15 plus
companies served. If you want to build for defense and you want your system proven where it matters, not on a test range, but on the battlefield, that is what we do. Ian did it the hard way on his own over 18 months. You don't have to. Please reach out to us and get in touch. One more thing. I gave a talk this summer to a room of people building defense technology on why war matters and why Ukraine matters. The objections you hear every time somebody considers going and what 15 companies
on the ground have actually found out working with us. Part one is free. The link to it is in the description to this episode. If you run a miltech company or you work for the government or in service, this video will also be very helpful for you. And finally, StoryFunnels. There are a few thousand engineers who should hear this episode and will probably never find it because nobody told the algorithm they exist. That is the problem StoryFunnels solves. One episode in, a month of content out,
articles, clips, posts, in your own voice, put where search engines and AI search systems will actually surface them. If you make anything and nobody finds it, go to storyfunnels.ai. We can help you. My name is Sam Cook. Thanks for listening to the Ukraine Military History Podcast, where we're making sure that Ukraine's heroes are never forgotten.
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