Ian Laffey

Co-founder and chief executive of Theseus, which builds navigation that lets a drone fly with no GPS at all — the central constraint on a battlefield where satellite navigation is jammed across almost all of the ground that matters. The company came out of a 24-hour hackathon in Los Angeles in February 2024, run with 8VC, D3 and Brave1, which he and his co-founders did not place in; he posted what they had built, the tweet reached millions, and they were into Y Combinator days later. Two of the three founders were software engineers who had never touched a drone, and they met the third in the room. He first came to Ukraine in November 2024, where the product failed outright on its first test, and now lives and works in Kyiv, arguing that Ukraine is the closest thing to a free market that exists in defense because units buy what works and anything that does not sits unused in a warehouse.

Photo: still from Episode 20, filmed in Kyiv.