Episode 118: Decision-Making and Deep Tech with Laura Thomas: Insights from a Former CIA Officer

Informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight Brought to you by the team@ooda loop.com hello, I'm Bob Gourley.

I'm the Chief Technology Officer of OODA llc. And on today's oodacast, Laura Thomas. Laura, a deep tech consultant and previously a CIA officer. It's a real pleasure to have you here, Laura.

Thank you, Bob. It's a pleasure to be here.

You know, I want to get into so much of the deep tech stuff you're working on now and your background in the agency. But before getting into that, I wanted to start with your foundational story and how you got attracted to national security and how you got your start.

Sure. I come from a very small town, rural North Carolina and my parents, they, they were very service oriented people and also quite patriotic. So the idea of going to do something at CIA, it checked a lot of boxes for me. You know, it was considered to be a noble profession back then. You know, I certainly think that it still is but I know that public opinion has started to shift a little bit. So it's a noble profession. It was something that you're, you're working on something that's bigger than yourself for the public good. And it was also thrilling. I mean I watched a lot of spy movies and I fell in love with what I thought the job was going to be like according to those movies. And I wanted to live a life of intrigue abroad like those characters. So I ended up applying shortly. Well, actually I think I was still in school when I, when I applied and ultimately ended up getting hired and rest is sort of history.

Well Laura, let me just say since you mentioned it, sometimes opinions do change about agencies like CIA. But I remember in my youth there were a lot of conspiracy theories too. And nowadays with social media and everybody has an opinion, there are folks who say bad things about the CIA frequently. But I tell you my personal experience being around you guys forever, I have never met a bad person from CIA. Never. Now know everybody there is human beings.

And maybe there, yeah, maybe you've not met enough. I don't know. I mean there are bad people everywhere. I can also there's a lot of.

Good people, quality of performance. I've mostly been a technologist my whole life, a computer guy. And the technologists at CIA are world class best. They know their stuff. If no matter what their discipline, whether it's data analytics and data science or computer science or communications, these are some of the smartest technologists I've ever met. And yeah, good people.

Yeah, I mean you think about the hiring process itself and what someone has to go through to, to even get, you know, into that building and onto the payroll. And so, you know, I, I do think that they, they do a very good job of filtering out some folks who might not be the best or highest performers. Certainly, you know, integrity is something that they're looking for. So all the traits that I think would, you know, that you can do in the business world that would naturally select out and make someone, you know, or a company, their culture a little bit better. I think CIA can do that a bit through the hiring process itself.

Yeah, that must be part of it. And then the other part is also what you just mentioned about being attracted to a big mission, working on big, important things.

Yeah, yeah. And I think when you get a group of people together who care about something bigger than themselves, it's easy to make the sacrifices or easier.

Not.

It's never easy, but it's easier to make the sacrifices that are needed to really push that mission forward.

And Laura, what can you tell us about your career while you were in the agency?

Sure. I was a case officer, so I was the person that was out on the streets late at night trying to recruit spies. We don't really call them spies. We would call them assets or sources. But essentially they're people who are, are providing information that's very sensitive on their own governments or their own groups. Say, for example, if it were a terrorist, and we're handling them in a secure way to keep them safe, to keep them in place so they continue the reporting stream. And when we collect that information from these individuals, we have to be very careful that the way we write up the reports and the way we convey it doesn't necessarily point to the source, but also conveys the information as accurately as possible without our own biases or assessments in the data. And we're really just putting all of that information up on a platter and saying, here you go, analyst, for example, you can pull together all the different pieces. What do you assess is happening in the world based upon this raw reporting? Ultimately, that goes to policymakers, President of the United States, for example, as they're thinking through what policy decisions that they want to do. Now, whether or not policymakers want to hear some of that information or have already decided on their preferred course of action, you know that that's a very different story.

Right. So fascinating. And one thing I'd love to hear from you about is how a career doing that has impacted your decision making today. And I know there's so many aspects of decision making are studied and taught at CIA. And your field time must have given you a lot of experience with making decisions in a world where there's lots of ambiguity and uncertainty and conflicting information. And was wondering if you could tell us a bit about how you think and how you deal with uncertainty and ambiguous information.

Yeah, you know, I think there is so much to be said on this topic, so I'll try to. I'll try to keep it brief. The first step is being able to think about your own thinking. That's actually very hard to do because we, we, you know, human nature is what it is, and we all of us walk through the world with giant blinders on because that's how we survive. And to even begin to think about our own thinking is really the first step. And, you know, when you're in a situation where the person you're meeting very well could have a bomb on them, they could, you know, be trying to set you up, blow you up, it is important that you think through all the different types of scenarios. You know, we call it a what if scenario, where you think through every possible outcome. Now, that can be very taxing. That can slow you down at the same time. So you're always balancing thorough decision making with speed. And there is no easy formula. I wish, you know, I could say that my time at CIA training and at CIA, I walked away with some easy formula. There's not, there is a little bit of intuition that has to go into it, but also, don't fool yourself with what you think is intuition, but really it's just bias. So. So I think the best way to do that, at least that I've found personally, is to, especially now in the business world, invite critique. And I tell everyone who works with me or for me, you have an obligation to disagree with me. If you're not disagreeing with me, then I'm going to, and I outright say it. I will lose respect for you. And I love people who disagree. And you can disagree politely. It doesn't mean you're constantly canning someone as a person or every opinion or thought that they have. I think that healthy debate is just so critical and a lot of us think that we invite it, but we don't really invite it. And putting the guide or the guardrails around you, when you first step into a position and you first are meeting with the folks who you're going to be working with, telling them that framework, disagree with me. I want to hear it. Here's how I would like to Hear it here are sort of the parameters around it. And don't, don't hold them back because you're only holding yourself back when you do that.

Yeah, there's a lot to digest there and I wish I could disagree with you so you would know.

Yeah.

But great point about thinking about how you think and understanding how you comprehend. And point about seeking input from others, including people who may work for you and may be intimidated by the fact that you're the boss and you know, you need to be open to criticism, to anything else about decision making that you learned at CIA. What about, you mentioned bias. How do you seek out your own biases to make sure that you're thinking as well as possible?

I, you have to look for disconfirming evidence. I mean, you're, you're, we're naturally going to form a view on something and we, we, we're going to walk into any given situation with what we think is the case and often we will filter everything that we take in to support that preconceived notion. So you really have to be active about seeking disconfirming evidence to your opinion. So say you're an investor and you're looking at investing in a deep tech company. You're going to meet with the founders and if they're, they're good, you know, salespeople, you're going to walk away from that first slide deck and that first meeting being super excited about that company. Well, that's not really going to do you, or perhaps your LPs, you know, a great service because you're going to be so excited and everything you sort of read about since then, you're going to be biased to filter it in terms of, I really liked this founder, I really liked the technology. So you got to go out and you got to find the disconfirming evidence and you have to set up questions in a way of third parties where they feel like they can give you that information and that you're not judging their answer. So, you know, I did that certainly at CIA and I, I, I do it now in my private sector career as well.

Yeah, it sounds like a great tip, frankly, especially as you mentioned, in the venture capital world, if you're doing a seed investment or a larger investment, you put money into a company, you believe it's going to be great. Yeah, that's going to be your anchoring bias.

It's absolutely. And, and look there then that's not to say that you shouldn't bet on founders because there are some, even if the technology is maybe not, you know what, where I think it should be, maybe that's the person that I want to place a bet on. And I think it's very similar at CIA when you're recruiting sources and there's this inbound and outbound with sources. I mean at CIA you're, you're going out and you're trying to find the people to recruit and you could compare that if you're in venture to, you know, you're going out and you're trying to find those founders, you're looking at deal flow, but you're also getting inbound. So CIA is certainly getting a lot of people who are clamoring, please let, let, let me work for you. And some of those can be really, really good. A lot of those are, they're going to be either nuts and people you don't want to meet with. They're going to be malicious actors, people you absolutely shouldn't meet with because you may never do a meeting again. And then you're going to get a lot of people who, so, so maybe sounds good, would take up a lot of your time and provide okay information but not great information and because when you're doing that then you're not going and chasing after the really great nuggets of information. I think there many parallels to the venture world.

Are there other parallels you've seen? Like is, I can't think of an analog to a case officer in corporate America, but is there such a thing? Are there people that do similar things in the corporate world?

You know, people try to fit case officers in certain boxes. And I, I think some people say, well they're definitely their bd, their business development because a case officer was out influencing others, persuading them to essentially spy and provide secrets. And you know that that's true. But I think that pigeonholes a case officer unfortunately because the case officer just does the full cycle. You're figuring out what we should even know. You're going out and you're identifying who would have that information. You're actually talking and making the first contact with that person. You're selling that person. So then you're closing the deal like in sales. Then you're handling the, the relationship like a customer relationship. And then you're taking all of that input and you're figuring out now what do we need to know and where should we go from here? So I think it's much more akin to a strategy type role at a company. But you know, you can't limit things to strategy either Because a lot of people, they fall in love with the word strategy and strategies are great, but they mean nothing if you don't know how to implement and actually do. So my experience, and I, you know, I, I will admit I'm biased here. I think a chief of staff type role is really good if you're, you know, there are different types of chief of staff role roles. The, the one where you're really actively helping inform sort of the company the way forward. You're, you're reaching through the, the entire organization and you're, you're getting raw feedback from people that are closest on the ground to whatever product or service it is that you're offering. And you can offer up and push upward unfiltered information that you know is going to be critical for decision making and then help set up, you know, five different options of ways forward and then ultimately help implement whatever the option that's selected, you know, implemented and move forward.

Hearing you say it that way makes me think maybe another analog for the case officer overseas, maybe depending on the level, is the CEO.

Because, well, that I wanted to be a little bit humble and not say CEO off the bat. But yeah, look, I think case officers can make great CEOs. I think good founders. I would say to anyone out there, if you're an investor and there is a founder who is a former case officer, definitely at least take the first phone call. Cool.

Laura, can we transition and talk a bit about geopolitics?

Sure.

You know, this is a very dynamic world. We live in threats around the globe. It's moving really fast. And you know, we're also interconnected too. And so when something happens overseas, we all see it and our supply chains are so interconnected, it can have an impact on business around the world when something happens. I guess what I want to ask you is if you have any frameworks that can help people think through the geopolitical situation we're in now.

Yeah, I mean, the, the, and this problem, maybe it sounds a little bit trite, but zoom out. I think whenever we're in any situation, we do have to zoom out and, and think that is this really going to last and for how long? And, and you know, when we're up so close, we, we become obsessed with it. And that's not always helpful either. At the same time, look, I don't want to say you should just discount geopolitical events around you. I mean, anyone who has any money invested has definitely seen a very real repercussion of, of the latest, I mean, we saw it with the war in Ukraine and then of course with Israel, Iran recently. I mean, it, you, you can't, you can't avoid the greater world today, especially if you're in business. And it would behoove you to be thinking quite deeply about second and third order effects. And you know, going back to your question on CIA and just frameworks for thinking it, really mapping out what you think the second and third order effects of certain things may be. And the point of doing that is not that you're going to be right about what, what's actually going to happen. So going back to my CIA days, you know, when we would think about meeting a high threat target or someone for the first time, often all the things we thought about and we sat around, I mean, we would sit for hours and some of the smartest people, as far as operationally smart, you're thinking about everything that could happen in that meeting. Inevitably things you do not expect happen. But because you have gotten yourself into the thought pattern of if this, then that, if this, then that, you're just much more easily able to, to, to go with whatever's thrown at you. And so I, you know, I do think that there's a parallel in the business world in that as well. So just having thought through, you know, what could it mean as far as if, if Israel does unleash, it could be happening as we speak, I don't know, a major attack response against Iran right now. You know, what are the second and third order effects when you look at shipping and supply chain and what is do, what is Russia going to do? How will the US be forced to respond? Yeah, anyone who claims that they know the future and exactly this is, you know, this or that is going to happen, I do think they're charlatans and, and they're frauds.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And so it really behooves these companies to think multiple scenarios and maybe there's one that's more likely than the other, but think through multiple scenarios because nobody can really predict where this stuff is going to, with any certainty.

No. And then when they do though, they'll pretend that, you know, oh, I knew this all along. And we forget the, the role that luck plays and we always attribute it to skill. And maybe going back to your original question as well, really discerning for your own self. And then with companies, what, what actually did I get because I was lucky versus what was truly skill. And if you can decipher between the two of those, then I think, you know, you're setting yourself up for much stronger decision making in the future and being able to take advantage of l leverage it. I mean, who doesn't want good luck?

You know, there are some books out there that I really, really, really love, but the authors are so arrogant because they do kind of what you just admonish people not to do. They say they have all the answers and you know, this is how the world works and this is, you know, how it's always worked. And I, I like reading those kind of books but the authors come across as so arrogant you just know it's going to fail. So one of them is called the Fourth Turning. I love that book.

Heard of it.

Talking about things like cycles that the world goes through and sometimes it's a, it's a really great patch and it turns into a rough patch but the, the negative is he then says, so here's what's going to happen definitely. And yeah, yeah, since I'm sure he doesn't watch this channel. Peter Zhan. Oh yeah, super smart guy. All his books are and here's exactly how the world works and if you turn this over here, this will happen over here.

Yeah, I, I, you know, I get asked about him quite a bit whenever I speak at different, different places and I, I haven't watched a lot of his work so I can't, you know, meaningfully comment on his analysis or ability to predict the future. But I did read and watched one of his latest analyses on quantum computing and I, he was really off on that having, you know, been very deeply in the quantum industry. So that just makes me question, well, if he's really off on that, you know, what, what is he off about? That's, and that doesn't mean he's not right about some stuff either. I'm just, you know, there was certainly.

Some room for every way. There is a predictive divergence and the only, all the methods of predicting the future, maybe they're important to thinking through scenarios, but they all fail. The one that seems to work the, the most is a simple linear projection. Like right now it's not raining outside, so five minutes from now it's probably not going to be raining either. Or, you know, the Soviet Union has always existed, so it always will exist. Or the Berlin Wall has always been up, so it always will be up and so the linear projections fail miserably.

Yeah, yeah. I mean look, there is no, I wish there were an easy formula. If so I would could probably be a much wealthier person at this point, at least in terms of money.

Hey, so let's transition and talk a bit about deep tech, if that's okay.

Sure.

I have seen your recent career. You've been working with some really cool deep tech companies. Excuse me. What is it that attracted you to the deep tech sector?

Well, it's hard. I mean, that's the shortest answer I can give you. It's really hard. And perhaps you go back and you look at my time at CIA. It's really hard to recruit a great source at the senior most levels of an adversarial government. I like working on things that are hard. I like working on things that are meaningful. And software is great. Doordash is wonderful. I don't want to go out and help create the next food delivery app. You know, I want to work on something that's going to be truly platform shift type technology that's going to be, you know, the new hardware, the systems that we build on in the future. And so that's why I chose deep tech. But I also have to, you know, not run into the, the same things I've already been talking about somehow. It's also luck. I, you know, I knew a person who knew a person who said hey, I, I know a senior executive at a quantum company, maybe you should have a chat. So you know, there were certain, there's, there's sort of two stories there. The story that I do like working on hard things, but it just happened to be so that I was connected to a former CEO at one of the Quantum companies.

Cool. So a little bit of serendipity.

Yeah, I'll take serendipity whenever I can.

So what now excites you about deep tech? What should we know about the deep tech stuff you've been working with?

Well, so there are two areas that I'm working on right now. Quantum is one. And I mean Quantum, you know, we, I think that in the U.S. and maybe this is globally too, we're under this impression that, well, Quantum is always going to be 20 years out and it's, it's so far away. And, and look, I'll be super honest. Yeah, breaking encryption, I do think that's pretty far out. But there are a lot of other aspects of Quantum that are already in the here and now. And quantum sensors are one example of that. Quantum computing also though is making dramatic leaps, leap forwards. Like it's just, it's incredible to, to watch some of the stuff that's coming out now in quantum computing and you know, to think that we could get to a place where we're doing quantum chemistry simulations over the next 10 years. You know, I don't think that that's fanciful, hyper optimistic best case scenario thinking anymore and that that would be a major game changer for the world and, and of the world also. You know, it's a double edged sword. Anytime you have a technology like this, it can be used for bad too. I do think we have to think about our adversaries specifically China in the quantum realm. So quantum attracts me because I think it will be sort of the, the underpinning of the next technological revolution that, that the world sees. Other than that fusion energy. I'm, I'm working with a company, it's called Fuse doing fusion and I mean the, the country that, and the company that's first diffusion. I mean this is like super high stakes. I mean that you think about this is a 40 trillion dollar. Yeah, 40 trillion dollar industry. I mean it's just sort of mind blowing when you think about the numbers around it. But what I like about certain companies on the deep tech side is not when they're only a science experiment but when they're are very clear things that you can do along the way. Milestones that are revenue generating that actually builds a business and builds business muscle. Not just a moonshot long term project that is akin to working in a national lab. So I've specifically identified companies that I think have those nearer term to midterm revenue potentials and core technology that helps that self funding cycle to eventually get to the moonshot goal.

Both of those excite me a lot. And one thing that I've been trying to do personally with quantum is find ways to express the bizarre world of quantum scale things. In plain English.

Yeah, it's hard.

It's really hard. So I've been saying things to grab attention like atoms are not real and people. What do you mean atoms are not real? That that's, you know, how chemistry works now biology works and that what matter there's a whole periodic table. But actually at the quantum level it's really strange and I think it's so hard to understand. I worry that trying to explain this stuff to CEOs is going to be, it's going to be tough.

Yeah, well you know, ultimately what it's going to take is when you start having groundbreaking, you know, results that come off of larger and larger, more powerful systems, quantum computers for example, that show the trend line of okay, this is where we are now. So reasonably if, if the current trend and rate of progression holds, you know, in five years we'll be at this point in 10 years. We'll be at this point. And here are the applications that it can unlock and from a very real sort of. And that means you can do new materials design. And when you were to, if you were to talk to a major CEO of a company like, okay, so you mean you could design new materials to create lighter weight aircraft that don't, you know, don't require fuel or whatever it is that starts to get people's attention. And I think we're, we're on, we're just on the cusp of that. But you do have to be careful in the quantum space because people have been saying, oh, we're just on the cusp for so long. And for the longest time there was a big focus on what they called NISK era quantum computers. Now there is a shift towards error correction, meaning you really have to build the really big hard computer before you're going to see true practical results in the real world. But what I'm saying is a lot of the risk in doing that has already been knocked down and it's not as much of a science project anymore as it is engineering. And now you'll also hear companies say that that way too often. Oh, it's just an engineering challenge. There are still some science challenges almost anytime someone says that to you. But the rate at which it becomes more and more of an engineering challenge is, is really exciting.

Yeah.

Well, I like the way you put all that because you spoke plain English. That's very understandable. And I think that is the way we have to talk to CEOs and others.

Yeah.

Now about nuclear. It's been a lot of exciting developments there in fission and fusion in the fission area. You know, for 70 years it's been the same design of nuclear plants until these small modular reactors came along. And there's now two of those have been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And that makes me hopeful that maybe there'll be a resurgence of nuclear power. And another thing that makes me hopeful is I just noticed Microsoft has named a VP of nuclear Power.

Oh really? Okay, I'll have to go look up that person.

I'll, I'll send you her LinkedIn profile. I want to get her on the Buddha cast.

You, you must, you must. I can imagine. She, she probably gets some hate mail too. Just that title. Because, you know, there's so many people are against nuclear for, for, you know, I think some legitimate reasons, but mostly illegitimate reasons and things that have, have sort of, we've evolved past or Worked our way. Great pass from a safety standpoint. But yeah, look, I think this is a field that's incredibly ripe for just amazing progress over the next 10 years. You know, we always looked at nuclear and atomic sort of energy as a force for destruction. You know, we kind of still associate it with the atomic bomb, but when you really think about it, this is a force for creation as well. Especially when you think about fusion. And you know, there is a fission fusion hybrid concept as well that's out there. You know, these are all things that if this is a nut that we can crack and the person to crack it, they're going to be a lot of, there's a lot of goodness there. But I do think that having, you know, near term milestones and ways to take the technology and generate revenue along the way is critically important.

Yeah, you remind me of something else. There's this guy, Josh Wolf from the VC firm Lux Capital. Yeah. Has been trying to help change people's vocabulary and instead of call it nuclear energy, call it elemental energy.

Maybe, maybe I don't, I don't know that he has actually a, an investment in fusion yet. But you know, I, yeah, I, I, I, it could be a rebranding issue or it could be that we just need investors to get off the sidelines.

Yeah. So with that, would you tell us more about Fuse and what Fuse is?

Yeah, yeah. So Fuse is a Palo Alto based company. They are building fusion energy. They, they have a really just strong sort of scientific background and approach to the technology coming out of Sandia National Lab, the Z Machine. That's how their technology is modeled after, and it's pulse power, nuclear fusion. What I find so compelling about the company is that along the way to the ultimate goal of fusion, there's the ability to use pulse power for a lot of different reasons. One would be nuclear effects and simulations, testing. And that's something that's incredibly important to the US Government. When you think about stockpile security, essentially, you know, the status of our nuclear deterrent capability, it's aging. There's a lot that is sort of decrepit at this point and helping the government, you know, understand where it really is. And you know, it doesn't stop there. Even though that's a huge market in and of itself. And you have to be careful sometimes when you only have government markets because they can be very difficult to penetrate. You can't always get the technology out. But I do see a, you know, beauty in dual use. When there is a government market, it's not so Bespoke that you're locking yourself into it. But there's also a commercial market. And when you think about all the different things that pulse power can do, specifically this type, you know, when you're looking at radiation tolerance, what, what, what if, if you can shoot and measure, you know, the radiation of something, when you're shooting different satellites in space, you know exactly what point they're going to fail when they get to certain layers of space. And that's really important when you think about how much money we're spending on the space economy right now.

Now.

So I just, I think that there are so many different markets that one can build into and fuse, has this opportunity where they can start to pick and that's a good position to be in. And then the, the hard part and the strategy is, you know, what do we do first and then what do we do next? And I won't get into all of that because maybe we'll leave that to the CEO of when he wants to talk about it. But it is very exciting.

Can you explain more about what pulse power is?

It's essentially taking different types of rays, so X rays, gamma rays, you can, you can funnel them and, and look, if a physicist is listening to this, I know you're, and I always tell this to my quantum folks too. Like I am not, I'm not a physicist, I'm not here to, to tell you exactly the way that something works, but I can tell it in a very general and analogous way. You're basically taking a large shot of energy and you're shooting it out at something and you're seeing how the device that is shot at reacts to it.

Got it. Cool. Well, Laura, I really appreciate your time today and I just to ask one final follow up question and that is are you reading anything interesting now? Any books you'd recommend to us?

Oh gosh, I have a very, very long list of, of books right now. H. What, what a, what do I have open? Oh, I'm reading Legacy of Ashes, which is a book about the history of the CIA. And it is not a flattering history in any sense of the term. So, you know, I had a fulfilling and great career at the Agency. Certainly saw it for some of its mistakes and errors that happened while I was there, but also saw a lot of the good things that it did and sort of contrast it to what I'm reading in this book. Either one tells me that the author did not have a very expansive view of the organization or just how much the organization has changed since the 19, late 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s to now.

Well, I'll look for that and I'll provide a link in our show. Notes here would say, you know, I mentioned earlier that I've seen so many great people at the agency. I also remember long, long, long time ago, I might not have said that in. Everybody I ran into at the agency was just one particular way and they didn't like people who were other than them.

Yeah, that. Well, that, that is a trap that I think some people still fall into. But, you know, I, I do think that it's evolving for the better over time. Just thinking of another book more business oriented. There's a book called Box how the Shipping Container Changed the World. I'm, I'm in that right now. So it's essentially the rise of the shipping container and how it changed so much about the way we do business. When I just finished, I finished it probably a year ago, but I go back to it. It's Hard Landing. It's a, it's a deep history on the airline industry and just, it really pulls out the human nature and how individuals, not just, you know, a system sort of evolves, but how individuals in that system truly, you know, because of good decisions or bad decisions or because of ego, shaped an entire industry and it sort of evolved into what it is today from, from that. So I, I highly recommend that.

Hard Landing. I'll look for that.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for the time, Laura. I really appreciate it.

All right, thank you. Take care.

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