How Dual-Use Founders Raised Series A in Defense Tech | Insider Strategies from 4 Founders

All right. Welcome, everyone, to the Founder Institute session on fundraising and go-to-market for dual use and defense. So I'm Daniel Shires. I'm the managing director of the Founder Institute Defense Cohort, as well as the Veteran and Military Cohort. We've also got Greg Coleman on the line. He is also my co-director for this. For this session. So just a quick intro to Founder Institute. We're one of the world's largest accelerators, in fact, the largest network of startup accelerators, investors, and advisors, especially at the pre-seed stage in over 100 countries. We have close to 200 cohorts and over 35,000 mentors and leaders across this network and 15,000 investors. The Founder Institute is a little bit unique in that while you've got folks like Y Combinator who come in a little bit of a later stage, we are prior to that. So we are really at that zero, like you haven't built yet or you've got very early traction. So we're right there with you, helping you build and test your ideas. We've got 3 core programs, or we've got a core program with 3 tracks. It is 4 months long. We've got the Validate track. Again, if you are thinking about founding something, you've got the idea and you just need help iterating, testing it, validating that it's a solid plan and building your go-to-market. We're here for that. The Launch Track, we're helping you build the team, get your first traction, and advising on product development. And then Traction, maybe you've already got initial customers. We're making sure that that plan is scalable, ready to grow, and ready for institutional investment. Once you come out of that, core program, we have a few advanced accelerators, including our Funding Lab, where we help you with your pre-seed raise coaching and helping you secure a lead investor, and the Leadership Lab that helps you build management skills and leadership skills in a startup environment. Funding Lab runs 3 times a year and Leadership Lab runs 2 times a year. And then we also, when you are ready to raise, provide access to our FI Venture Network. Again, those thousands of investors that are tied into this network across the globe. We can get you introductions, access to angels, groups, syndicates, and micro VCs that are actively writing first or even second checks across nearly every business vertical. But of course, we're here today to talk about defense and national security. So again, myself and Greg are launching this cohort on February 17th. We'll be the first one. We'll run this twice a year. We're taking the Founder Institute curriculum, which has over 15 years of, you know, history history behind it and successful launches. And we're adding in defense-specific sessions with practical guidance on your go-to-market, as well as access to a dedicated network of mentors that span the gamut from operators, acquisition leaders, dual-use investors, everyone in that defense and national security space. If you'd like to apply, if that's something you're thinking about, go ahead and get your application in. February 1st is the deadline. So now let me introduce really quick our panel. So we're joined by John Doyle, who's the CEO of Kape, which was founded in 2022. So Kape is building a privacy-first mobile network designed to minimize the collection and storage of your personal data. They're focusing on protecting identity and location at the telecom layer rather than just securing the application content. And we've got Austin Gray, who is the CSO for BlueWater Autonomy, founded in 2024. So BlueWater is building unmanned surface vessels designed for long-duration operations in contested maritime environments. They're focusing on simplifying shipbuilding and autonomy for the open ocean and addressing core challenges in U.S. naval power and fleet modernization. We also have John Goodson, CEO at Darkhive. Darkhive is building secure open architecture for uncrewed aerial systems and software for operating and managing fleets in the field. World. And then last but not least, Tyler Saltzman, the CEO of Edgerunner AI. Edgerunner is developing domain-specific air-gapped on-device AI agents designed to operate in denied, disrupted, and disconnected environments. Its platform delivers mission and occupation-specific AI assistance that run locally without internet. So a couple of things that each of these— having each of these founders have in common, as I ask them to introduce themselves in a minute, they're all veterans, so they've all lived the problems that they're solving. Additionally, they've all successfully raised at least a Series A. So very recent experience on the fundraising front. And with that, let's go ahead and jump into our panel session today. Gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming on and joining us. If I'd like to start with kind of a first question to each of you, and that is you made this transition from being in the service, in the military, and to being a founder. And let's start with John Doyle. What kind of prompted that? What inspired you to make this move? And what prompted you to found CAPE?

Hey, Daniel, can you hear me all right?

Absolutely.

Yep. Okay, great. Hey, everybody. Really excited to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. My founding story, how did I come to start CAPE? Starts with my military service. So I was an 18E, which is an Army Special Forces Communications Sergeant, 2003 to 2008. And when I left the Army, I actually went to law school in search of civilian skills. I never practiced law, and I said I want to put Palantir. I was at Palantir for almost 10 years, started in technical roles, but wound up running the national security business from 2017 until I left in 2022. So that, you know, Palantir was relatively late stage when I joined. We were 1,000 people or so, 1,500 people maybe, but still pretty chaotic and still, there was still a lot to be built in 2013 when I joined the company. And so I got a pretty good exposure to what it felt like to work at an early stage company. I knew I loved it. And then running the national security business exposed me to a lot of problems and specifically a lot of problems related to vulnerabilities in the global cell network. And I had ideas on how to fix them. And so in 2022, I left to, to start Cape.

Awesome. And let's, let's continue. Austin, what, what inspired you?

Yeah. So, you know, I had a great question. I just got out of the Navy. I'd been to business school and I did something crazy after business school. Instead of going to consulting like all the other veterans, I didn't take my consulting offer and I went to Ukraine and I started working in a drone factory as a volunteer because you can't work, you can't, you know, take payroll from a foreign arms dealer if you want to keep your, your clearance. Right. And so I was volunteering in Ukraine and, you know, we're working with some drones. We're talking to all the soldiers on the front line. And these guys are like, the drone, you know, revolution, whatever you want to call it, you're seeing in the news back in the States, it's a sliver of what we're seeing here. Like it's, you know, it and the broader tech ecosystem is everything. It's our whole lives. It's how we're surviving out here. And I started thinking about how that applied to the US Navy that I knew better from my time out on aircraft carriers, you know, in the Pacific and the Middle East. And I was like, oh wow, we got a problem, guys. Because we're building, you know, a small number of very big, very expensive ships for the US Navy. And in Eastern Europe, they've got a large number of disaggregated warfighting systems. And the architectures are totally different. And so I just got really worried about the Navy. And I started applying what I was seeing in Ukraine to the fleet architecture that I knew from, from the Navy and came up with this thesis for, hey, let's build a ship-sized autonomous surface vessel. And so we're still the only pure play for autonomous surface ships. There's a bunch of shipbuilders, there's a bunch of maritime drone companies. We're the only ones who just do ship-sized maritime drones, you know, big 15-story building style things. So we're a shipbuilding company and autonomy company, and we're about 50 people now. It's been a total blast.

Awesome.

All right, let's go with John Goodson.

Yeah, howdy everybody. Uh, yeah, fellow Navy guy, uh, like my man Austin over there. Uh, tactical electronic warfare operator with West Coast SEAL teams primarily. Uh, dirty enlisted guy, had no idea what I was doing when I got out of uniform, uh, in 2016. Was not entrepreneurial at all. I just wanted to find a way to, you know, make sure that I could still pay the bills. Uh, so got into government contracting initially, working in a national lab. Then, uh, was fortunate enough to work in a small business, take it all the way through to, uh, majority stake ownership by a PE group out of the DC area, and through, uh, eventual acquisition by Parsons. And through that whole process, learned strategic contracting, learned, uh, business development, technology development, all the way from building applications from source, and realized I had a lot of what would be necessary to start my own company if I wanted to. And that's exactly what I did in 2021. And we've been doing Darkhive ever since, honestly, you know, and a lot of the stuff that, uh, Austin obviously saw firsthand out there in Ukraine is a lot of the motivation that really inspired us even, uh, left of 2022 when Russia came across the border. Just from personal firsthand experience, I just never understood why these aircraft that were being given to me and my platoon mates cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though they were going to go crater into a side of a mountain, and I had to go get hump up a mountain and get shot at trying to call these things back down. I hated them. I hated drones. I'm a guy who hates drones who started a drone company, so that's kind of fun. And, uh, really we've just been solving problems along the way, you know. Uh, got very lucky to identify supply chain and manufacturing. You know, it's not what you can build, it's what you can build reliably at scale, uh, low lead time, cost effectively. So, uh, all the same stuff that our brothers and sisters in Ukraine have been highlighting for the world to see, those are things that we were kind of simultaneously identifying and Fortunately, have been lucky enough to partner with some amazing folks across the US, the US government, a lot of stakeholders there and our international partners and 30 people strong here in San Antonio, Texas, 2 sites, one manufacturing, one kind of our headquarters space. And we do hardware, we do software, even though we were told never to do both. So that's us.

Awesome. And Tyler, let's hear about your story.

Hi everyone, CEO, founder of EdgeRunner. I, um, I've really built my career in my AI shops at AWS. I helped architect a product called SageMaker HyperPod, which is now the fastest-selling solution at AWS. But really, it was a custom cluster to train Stable Diffusion, which is one of the most popular generative AI models in the world at the time, a few years ago. Uh, and it was to train Stable Diffusion across thousands of GPUs. And what happens if a GPU failed we would save the training run and it would hot-swap the GPU. So now you don't have to redo the training run, which is super expensive from a compute perspective. From there, I became effectively a founding team member of Stability AI, which they had a lot of buzz. I don't know if you've heard of them, but unfortunately there was a lot of accurate reporting in the news, so they did a good job. And what happened there was the CTO of Palantir reached out, Sham, wanting to use our open models with open datasets to power military applications that were offline. When our C-suite dropped the ball, that's sort of like when I rage quit because that was the way that we could turn around the company and bring value to shareholders. Also, it was near and dear to my heart because I was an Army logistician supporting Operation Atlantic Resolve in 2017 for Russian deterrence missions. So it all seemed to be at a crossroads and frankly serendipitous, but with My CEO in the UK— never work with the British— when they dropped the ball, I decided to quit, founded Edgerunner, and, you know, in 18 months we've raised $17.5 million. But I'll pause there.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. And so, guys, and maybe I should have done this during my intro, but, you know, my connection to this— 21 years in the military, retired out when I was the chief innovation and technology officer at Special Forces Command. So I've lived and breathed a lot of these problems as well and still stay tied into that community. So every problem that you guys are solving is something that I feel, right? I know people that are dealing with that. You're solving problems for my friends and my colleagues, you know, and the people that are still in my inner circle. So I really appreciate that. And to everyone in the audience, you know, I think this is, you know, the reason that we selected this particular group of founders is that they've lived both sides of this issue. And so really amazing to see what you guys are doing as you build these amazing companies. So I'll let you guys know a little bit of a preview. We've got some questions that we were kind of get often that we think we want to go through. So the way this is going to run is I'm just going to ask the question and I don't want to, you know, whoever wants to take it and run with it and then please add on caveat, you know, disagree. I think disagreement is always helpful so we can hear, you know, both sides. So please feel free to jump in and we'll just— and then at the end, we'll go to the audience Q&A. So I think one of the first questions is, you know, what, what did you get wrong about your initial customer or buyer and how long did it take you to realize it? Or did everybody get everything right? Sorry, go ahead.

So what I got wrong was Everyone says go after the POs and they're not wrong. The, the PO though is the buyer and in some ways the shot caller, but the real customer is the warfighter. And I think what's important is we need to stay focused on the warfighter and being obsessed with working backwards, with solving their problems. And often the left hand is not to the right hand, which means the PO and the warfighter aren't always aligned. So if you're going to bet your company on on a stakeholder, stay the course of the warfighters, they'll find a way to get to the PEO to get a deal done. And I would avoid the pitfalls of trying to sort of bend the knee to the PEO because I understand they do have that power. But again, be obsessed with the customer and that's the warfighters. And then the warfighters in turn will have your back.

Yeah, I would piggyback exactly on what Tyler said. Agree wholeheartedly. And would just add on that it's, it's if you go too hard to his point at the PEO, the PEO, if it's functioning correctly, is built to respond to warfighter validated requirements that have made their way up the chain and that have made their way into validated requirements within the CDD. And so you do it right, the PEO is aware of who you are. And that way, when you are doing it the right way, as Tyler's describing it, and getting in front of the warfighter, developing something that solves their problems, the PEO knows the name of your product, you, your company, as soon as it comes across his desk and says, wow, I got a mountain of AARs and feedback and, you know, operational need statements and joint urgent operational need statements and all of this other stuff that this is a perfect fit for. And good to know because this is my job to support the warfighter. So that pincher attack of PO needs to know who I am, warfighter need, I need to be solving problems for the warfighter and eventually they meet up.

I'll give sort of a different answer. And that's that I think I get stuff wrong about the customer like every single day. And even, you know, this week I'm working on some PowerPoint decks for next week, right? For some big meetings. And what I mean by that is every new customer I meet almost has a slightly different take on why they care about what we're doing, what exact problem we're solving for them. And the warfighters see it one way, the guys on the hill see it another way, the program office sees another way. Oh, and guess what? There's a— like in the Navy shipbuilding space, there's a big reorg going on. So some of the, some of the old school guys in one program office, you used to have the baton versus some of the new guys see it different ways. And then even within the shop, there's like the dudes who are really into the tech and the R&D versus more of the, the programming guys, and they just all have slightly different, different things that motivate them, they care about. And it's really important to remember that it's a very diverse, disaggregated customer architecture, and you need to really tailor your message to what makes each part of that system tick. All right.

John, any additional comments or has everybody covered it? It's pretty broad from, yeah, got everything wrong, got everything right, got nothing right.

We were right down the middle. We got some things wrong, we got some things right. We, you know, a balance we had to find early on and I should, I think Daniel, you said at the outset, Kape's building a privacy and security-focused mobile network and allowing users to take control of their personal information on the cell network in really novel ways. And mitigate some really serious threats. And a hard balance for us to find early on was how dedicated to be to our own product vision and our own expertise in this area versus the kind of ever-shifting deluge of good ideas that I think Austin is referring to, right? Like, they're, you know, the awesome thing about working with defense customers is You know, there are a lot of— it's a complex environment with a lot of experts and a lot of real experts and just as many self-proclaimed experts. And so you can get a lot of product input really quickly, actually, if you have a little bit of expertise in navigating the space. We, I would say, early on, tacked too hard towards if a customer says it, then it's right, right? Like if we hear someone from a tier 1 unit say it's this way, then it must be that way because they're the experts and they're the users. There's a lot of value in that. You need that signal and you need that customer intimacy. But you also, at the end of the day, like if you're starting a company, you're going to do this for a long time. We're coming up on 4 years now at Cape, which feels like a long time. You got to have a little bit of fidelity to your own product vision also, and you got to believe that you're going to make some number of calls following your own gut rather than following your customer. And I think that's right.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just, you know, having been on the inside now, worked from the outside, I think each of you could probably attest and happy to hear those stories of How much work did you have to do in educating the different, you know, sections, divisions within units about how their own process worked? Because a lot of people, you know, you'll see operators that they're dealing with the problem, but they aren't necessarily engaged in understanding how acquisition works or contracting or any of those things. So was there a big gap? Is that something you found yourself doing, you know, more than once?

Yes. I'll jump there. Like my guys were like, how do we get to you? They didn't even like pretend that they might know. They're just like, you guys need to, if you guys want to do something with us, you need to figure out how to do it and let us know when you figure it out. And literally like they're down, like the Navy guys are in my office 30 feet away on that contract with my team, you know, doing their monthly check-in right now. And that's because we figured out how to. Do the paperwork for them.

It's great.

Nice.

I mean, I'll, I'll say, having, having, having done GovCon for every minute of my life since 2016, before starting Darkhive, I, through a lot of, through a lot of trial and error, decided that I would not be engaging with groups that did not have some mechanism inside their organization, some organizational knowledge for how to access requirements generation, funding mechanisms, because the educational process and learning curve is incredibly steep. And if you have someone who, to Austin's point, operating in the markets we operate in, who wants to get to you but doesn't understand how to get to their supplier, doesn't understand micro-purchase threshold limit, doesn't understand all the things up the chain that are, or not authorized to do the things that are necessary to inform a buy or purchase decision, contracting, anything like that, especially early on. And given that the focus of this conversation is very much kind of pre-seed stage, early stage stuff, I would argue that those types of things are very much something that we can focus on now and focus on education now. But in the early stages, we didn't have time to focus on educating people on how to learn GovCon and how to get their paperwork flowing to the, in the right direction. You need that champion who's going to fight for you and do your BD from within the government, frankly.

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a good segue into, you just mentioned about this being, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, I'm sorry. So for me, it's thinking you're, you're going to get pulled in a lot of different directions and One of the biggest things I've learned too is stay really narrow scoped on, on the one problem that you're solving for with one agency. And you're gonna get tempted to want to branch out quickly and, and meet other stakeholders and solve other problems, but you need to figure out with my tech stack, what is the one problem it's solving that's gonna make people want to not live without it? And that's— and startups never fail from being too focused. They fail from trying to do too much at once. So that's something to think about too. It's like, don't, don't— and, and as you raise money, you're going to have a board and they're going to be pushing on revenue and all this stuff, but be— just stay the course and stay focused. And I'd say that's one of the biggest learnings too.

That's perfect. And that leads right into my next two questions actually. So first I want to say is, you know, What was the signal that told you you had found real product market fit or you were getting closer to that? What, you know, not just interest or enthusiasm for someone, but actually fitting, solving the problem that needed to be solved.

I mean, this is like, this is the billion-dollar question in defense tech, right? Is how do you define product market fit in defense sales because the, the safest answer is when you become a program of record, then you've pretty definitively found product market fit. That's a multiyear journey. Maybe we can bracket it in by defining what's not product market fit. SBIRs definitely aren't right. We all know that there are a lot of good reasons to do a SBIR, but to prove product market fit is not one of them. The people saying nice things about my product is not right. It's like, it's really tempting to index on highly credible warfighters saying this tech would be a difference maker if it was real and if I had it. That's good signal, but that's not product market fit. I would say for us, we shipped a bunch of devices for test and evaluation to a few different units. And when they started to come back, like when we started to get inbound back from those units for more, we called that product market fit. I think when people— we were still— this is a long way from contractual product market fit or program of record. But when people started doing drug deals to find a little additional funding to get a few more Cape phones, that felt pretty real to me. That felt like real traction.

I've got So for me, a wise man once said that you have real product market fit when your C-suite doesn't need to get involved to sell your solution, that a customer can just show up and buy it and not need any kind of custom curation. Uh, and that's true PMF, which, which I, which I kind of agree with. I'd say though, your real signals if you got something good isn't, isn't the excitement. Because I mean, that's good and it's, it's a nice dopamine hit and it feels good. But your real, your real signal is when they start getting paranoid of if this goes down or what happens if you're out of business or what happens if, if, you know, this, if the DOD can't push this forward further beyond pilot. And I feel like that's when I, when I had something good, when they already were getting worried about, man, I want this, but like, what happens if I have this for a year and it gets taken away? And, and I think that's a good signal as well. And I think it's because people are often led with fear and they, and they make decisions based on being afraid of something rather than excitement and jubilation and, and going towards something great.

Yeah. And, and then it shows that you've become a critical part of their mission or, you know, their, their, uh, uh, their standard way of doing business. So that's, that's pretty great as well.

Yeah.

And I'll, I'll add on to kind of some of the themes that John and Tyler have hit on. At my previous company, I feel like I was in a trap that I didn't fully understand because I just wasn't experienced enough yet to understand a lot of what they're highlighting. Everything, every deal close was, you know, in the room multiple times by myself, basically pushing the rope. Pushing the rope, pushing the rope, trying to get— there was no customer pull. And I didn't even understand what that was because I'd not ever seen it before. And for context, I was moving a lot of, you know, spectrum warfare, electronic warfare, signals intelligence, software analytic toolsets, and some hardware and things like that. And what I didn't understand enough about, and I think this is something that John hit on, is that just because someone sits in the room and says, yeah, that could be very valuable, you know, that could be game-changing, that would be really great. That individual, in many cases, whether they're operating in a combatant command at the service level or at the headquarters level or, you know, stateside and the PEO or whatever it might be, they have a budget, they have a cut line, and it doesn't matter how cool they think your thing might be. Is it going to make it above the cut line and the thing that they're getting ready to fund? And if it is not order of magnitude more value add than the other things that they are already funding that are high priority, you know, you don't have visibility of that list in many cases, then you're not going to get funded. And it wasn't until I think very, very much like the experiences of Tyler and John and what they were kind of articulating, getting to a point where the customers were beginning to kick our door down and say like, I need this, I need this, I need this, and I have tell me what I need to do to get access to you guys. And like Austin was mentioning, I think, and what he opened with, and that I think is what really opened my eyes to, okay, this is what it really is when you've built something that's valuable. It's when you are not pushing the rope anymore. It's when that's how I actually understood what customer pull was because I'd never seen it before.

So Yeah.

Well, let's shift a little bit from the focus on that initial interaction with customers and PMF, and let's talk a little bit— everybody that's joined this, we said, hey, let's talk about fundraising in this environment. So you guys have all raised a successful Series A or beyond, and you're building amazing companies. But if you can think back to the pre-seed stage, what was it that mattered most in getting that first serious investor? You know, what gave them their conviction? Was it the team? Was there early traction? Was it technical differentiation? How would you categorize that and where founders today should focus?

So for me, it's funny, I'll tell you verbatim. My lead seed investor, his name is Dan Shulnick. He actually seeded Docker, Weights and Biases, New Relic. So he's decently big time. And he said, you know, Tyler, I didn't give a shit about your idea or your vision or anything. I'm just betting on you and I'm betting on you because I'm assuming you're going to pivot a bunch of times, you're going to change your mind. And but you know what? You're going to figure it out. And I'd say at the, at the pre-seed and seed stage, it's all about founder market fit. Like you could have the sexiest deck with the coolest tech stack, the greatest idea, an awesome operation plan. But why you? Why, why you? Why are you going to solve that problem versus somebody else? And that's what you got to lean in on.

Yeah, I think team and timing. Spot on. Yeah.

Plus one, founder market fit. My version of that was Andreessen Horowitz wrote our first— wrote our pre-seed check. Fun fact, we were the first check written out of the American Dynamism portfolio by Catherine Boyle, and it was pure like founder market fit. For us, that meant, or for me, that meant I'd been really successful selling stuff to the government at Palantir. I'd closed some big deals and had rebooted a really troubled customer relationship. And so I had a good reputation in the space. The one piece of advice I got related to founder-market fit, actually from Brett Granberg, the CEO of Vannevar Labs, who's done quite well, when I was thinking about starting a company, he said, the thing you need is you need to be able to articulate what you know that no one else knows, right? Like, you're not going to have a tech moat at pre-seed, right? There's a lot of things you're not going to have. You need to know something that no one else knows, and you need to be pretty clear on what that is. And then you're ready to go start the company to action that. For me, for what it's worth, was I understood how deeply these vulnerabilities exist in the cell phone network and had affected the niche market of the intelligence community for a long time, but had not affected DOD, or they didn't care about it because they were fighting non-technically sophisticated adversaries in the counterterrorism fight, and they shifted focus to China and Russia. Who are technically sophisticated. Overnight, the market for solutions to these problems went from a niche IC problem to a Department of War-wide problem, and the budget, you know, 10x overnight, and the market 10x overnight. And so that was like, that was the thing I saw that no one else saw, and I was a good enough founder to, you know, to go after it.

Yeah, and I would say that for my part, I went into startup completely ignorant, pretty much like I've gone into everything in my professional career. And so I watched like a couple, you know, shorts on YouTube and thought I knew a thing about fundraising, which I absolutely didn't. And what I found, which was kind of 101 probably to everybody else on the call except for me and probably many of the folks in the channel, is that, you know, staying engaged with the folks that you maybe touch base with, even if you're a little too early, You know, if they're, you know, you're talking to a bunch of pre-seed investors, then you find yourself sitting in front of a seed stage or Series A+ investor. And really what did it for me and us was that I can say all day that I know GovCon, that I know strategic contracting, that I am going to within a year and a half take a Phase 1 SBIR nothing award and then take my sole source justification and flip it into a Phase 3, straight Phase 1 to Phase 3 with this customer. I'm going to boost my ceiling to $100 million. I'm going to do all these things and then I'm going to talk to you again in 6 months and I'm going to show you that I did it. And that has been really crucial. And then being able to stick to that and I can point very specifically to it actually, because I think much like, you know, other folks on the line have said, you know, I stayed in touch again, 101, you know, stuff that you can watch on YouTube that I didn't know any better about. But you had to stay engaged, follow up and hey, I'm going to go do this in the next 6 months. I did that in the last 6 months and then being able to point to that very specifically for our seed stage and Series A leads, they were like, yeah, everything you said you were going to do, you did. And that, that is the kind of stuff that is meaningful, particularly when you say, okay, now this is what I'm going to do over the next 12 to 18 months. That is what gives folks the confidence that you're, you know, you can whiteboard stuff all day, but when you actually start knocking things down that you say you're going to knock down, your, your revenue is looking kind of on track with what you said it would look like. And then you say you're going to go do this next big thing. People have confidence. And I think that that's important even at the early stages.

How did you guys look at early on, kind of you're splitting your time between your product, you know, your customer and then investors at whatever stage and pre-seed when the team is really small. How did you guys manage that as far as maintaining contact with investors, keeping them warm, building out that network?

I'll go. It's, it's tough. I'd say as, as the, as the founder and the CEO, I spend 80% of my time selling. I'm selling to investors, I'm selling to customers, I'm selling to partners, I'm selling to stakeholders, I'm selling internally. I'm having to sell my ideas. I'm trying to sell the next step, the next thing that we do. Um, and of course it's our way or the highway as the founder and the CEO, but no one wants to work for that guy or that gal. So you're always selling and you're making things people's ideas in order to execute with, with violence and move quickly. But you have to, you have to be able to explain the why. So I'd say 80% of my time is, is all the selling, the PR stuff, the marketing, you name it. But then on the product side, as, as I say, look, I want this feature built in, in, in, in this order of operations, but here's the why. And then my engineers will say, okay, that makes sense, or, or maybe it doesn't. And then we talk about it. And what I try to do is have an open debate. We did, we debate about it. And it, and if I, if I'm, if I'm losing overwhelmingly, then I'll go with my team. And if it's a two-way door, then we can pivot. So I'd say it's, we're responsible for everything, product, marketing, sales, engineering, research. But it's like the more we can If I think somebody can do 80% as good as me, I can delegate it. And I'd say that's— and then, and then now we have to remain constantly selling, especially in the early stages. You need these pilots, you need this traction. It comes from the CEO, whether you're technical or you're not.

All right. Well, that's actually— so, so let me follow up with that and then maybe get comments from everyone else on this as well. So You just talked about the selling, the selling, the selling. How did you think strategically about your go-to-market, how you sequence that? Right. So some folks are, you know, we've had discussions about direct-to-government or through primes or, you know, dual commercial paths. What are your thoughts on that? And how did you think about that problem when you were, when you're laying that out for yourself?

I think you can. I think this is a dangerous question. It's a good question, but a dangerous one because Every successful company will give you, like, will recount for you their tale of how they thought about it and how they think about primes and selling to primes versus avoiding partnerships early on and all the rest. And it's going to feel like that's, like, that feels very genuinely like the right answer to them. I, now from having worked at Palantir and founded a company and advised some companies, you see a lot of ways this can work, right? Like, selling to primes can definitely be an accelerant. It can also 100% get you shivved, you know, and waiting for a prime contract can be highly successful. And that's a swing for the fences, uh, home run style approach. And maybe, maybe you'll win and maybe you won't. Um, I think you have to be, my opinion, no approach you've taken at CAPE is to pursue all avenues. Um, like with vigor, but to prune, prune options really quickly, right? Like if primes will reach out and they'll say, hey, we've got this thing. We want to learn more about your product. And it's impossible to interpret from an original email whether there's a revenue opportunity there or they're just trying to screenshot your slide deck and make it their own, right? Both are like very, very within the realm of possibilities. And you just have to, like, you have to take that first call and ask hard questions, insist on hard questions from the prime. What's the specific opportunity, et cetera? And then make quick definitive decisions on whether you're pursuing that opportunity or not. My experience is you can't— like, you slow yourself down if you try to be too choosy early on and too exquisite in your go-to-market path. I think you got to just hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, and find the shortest path to revenue for the products you're trying to build.

All right.

I've got one.

I would avoid the big primes. Transparently, I've caught 2 flagship primes trying to steal my ideas and steal my tech. And, and they'll give you the song and dance like, we're here to help you and yada yada, we'll be a, a pull-through. Don't fall for it unless you know with 100% certainty you're getting that, that teaming agreement and you're getting money. Um, so be very careful. I work with the smaller boutique primes that are hungry to beat the bigger primes that need you and that will move fast. So work with the primes you've never heard of, if that makes sense. You know, and, you know, to John's point, you got to try everything. Also lobbying. GTM, you're going to want a lobbying firm. It's been super helpful with the latest NDAA. You're going to want to put language in there that benefits you. I know it sounds dirty and greasy, but you got to do it. And if you need help with boutique lobbying firms, I've got a good one that's not too expensive. But part of, part of your fundraise needs to be lobbying and you need to put that in your GTM deck because the most important model is the business model and they're gonna be on you of how you're gonna make money and that needs to be a part of it.

Plus one on lobbying. Spend earlier and more than you think. Uh, the economics, especially for founders, are just like, are no-brainers. I do personal giving also. Of course that's not tied to specific outcomes, but I do do personal giving and I think that that's worth it as well.

I think, and I just came off the Hill, like I was on the Hill, you know, 5 minutes before this call. That's why I was taking a tie-off. I think the most important thing that I would reflect back on is like, figure out where your champions really are. And for me early, some of my most important champions were on the Hill because guess what? The taxpayer and the Senate staffers are the ones who are paying for these billion-dollar ships that are pressurizing everyone else's defense budget.

Right.

And they're the ones who actually wanted, like, cheaper ships. And then there's some definitely some champions, you know, with the warfighter and the program office. But based on what you're building, some in some cases, you're actually going to do something that really helps out a prime that has a problem that's not really trickling down, you know, into a requirements process yet or into a program office yet. And I think it really just boils down to like, where are your champions? Be they in primes, you know, be they in the executive branch, be they on the Hill? Like, if you have no one in the executive branch, that's going to be a tough road. But I bet you it's like some combination of like the executive branch and then like some prime or some, some Hill, you know, Hill committee is where I'd want to build up, build up some champions and then go double down and like, you know, you use relationships, money, whatever to to bolster those champions.

One last thing too, I learned the military hates paying for SaaS fees, so don't have like recurring monthly costs, whatever. Just do like a one fee unlimited, probably by the command size. They're going to like that much more.

Yeah. And I would add, I would add two things. One is to Tyler's point, it's not that it's an— and probably John has a ton of experience with this from his old outfit, but It's not that you can't get a SaaS product into a PEO for a time, but the person at the head of that PEO will not be there forever. And when that, when that leadership cycles out, they may feel differently about some portion of their budget going to an enterprise license. And the last thing in the world you want to do and the cycle that you don't want to be in unless you're, unless you're Palantir and you can do it, is constantly fighting to win back the work that you lost and having to send in the army of people to the PEO to try to pull whatever levers they have from whatever command position they just left. And then the last piece that I'll add there to Tyler, and I know it's not related to the question necessarily, but it just occurred to me because of the, the mention of the primes and some of the issues that can occur there, which I absolutely agree with him on there. You have to, you have to tread lightly. But one thing that I would highlight, given the number of the large primes certainly that have venture arms, is that creating good relationships with the business units at some of the large primes while you are cultivating relationships with the venture arms— this is new, this was new information to me and something that I wish I had known earlier, so is the reason why I share it— can lead to potentially very large leading check sizes from some of the large strategic primes. Because while the venture arms are only capped at a certain check size for the amount that they can put into a round, if one of their business units tags in because there is strategic alignment with a requirement that they have internally or for a customer, they can potentially come in with very, very large check sizes because they are pulling from the business unit to support, to support that investment. So that is the reason why it can be valuable. But again, I want to, I want to absolutely emphasize Tyler's point that you have to be careful there because, yeah, some, some unscrupulous folks over there who would, who would happily hijack some of your, some of your stuff that you've worked very hard to develop.

And they're going to, they're going to bring up like, how much is it? And obviously you want to extract the data of how much are you willing to pay for it. But what I highly recommend is you do, you do zero-cost pilots and it's going to hurt. And it sucks to do pilots at no cost, but you got to do it to earn trust. From there, I would push to land a small $30K to $50K paid pilot, which is great because now you're getting through the acquisition process of the military. It's a small budget. These, these commanding officers have probably $250K around to play with at typical commands. Push for a small, a small paid pilot. But what you say is you say, look, we're a startup, we need to make money, but we're here for the mission. So pay me as much as you can pay me and we'll do the deal and we'll get it done. And that's sort of how I've been doing it. And I think it resonates well with, with our customers at the DOW.

All right.

Just quick, a couple of quick questions now, and then we're going to get to audience Q&A. I've been seeing the questions come in. So early on, again, thinking pre-seed stage, what would you say was the hardest trade-off you had to make? No easy questions. Sorry.

Trade-off in the sense of the fundraise, the vision, the tech stack.

Where was it like, hey, I actually, I can't do both of these things or I can't have both of these things. Like, what was the toughest kind of trade-off decision you had to make as a CEO early on?

The toughest trade-off is going to be you're going to do your operating plan. Let's say you think you need to raise $10 million. Then, then you're going to be pushed into a corner where you got to get it done in $5 million. And at $10 million, you're already as lean as you think you are. Now, now the tradeoff is going to be, all right, we'll give you $5 million, but can we trust you to get it done with $5 million? And then, then you got to figure out where am I going to trim the fat or am I going to get more efficient or am I going to get a little lucky and go from there? But I'd be very— I'd be prepared You go in, you want to raise 3, be prepared to only raise 1.5. Like, that's how this works. And in some ways that's good because you don't want a big round where you can't grow in your valuation. Then you have to do a down round, which is the kiss of death. So, so be prepared for that kind of tradeoff. Yeah.

And I'll, I mean, I'll throw in their biggest, biggest tradeoff or most difficult tradeoff was not making any tradeoffs. And very specifically, I think it kind of came up earlier and I would agree in large part with something that Tyler said earlier, which is, you know, trying to do too many things at once. But despite all the pressure that we were receiving from a number of potential investors when before hardware was cool, you know, back before manufacturing and supply chain were cool, you know, like Austin's obviously found it. We were, we were telling everyone like, it doesn't matter if you build the software only, it doesn't matter if you build the hardware only. If you build the software only, you're busy running around trying to find, trying to convince the L3Harris or, you know, the AeroVironments or all these other people to load your software on their vehicle. And they're not going to do it unless someone compels them to do it from and waves money at them to do it. And then if all you're doing is building hardware, you're also lacking some of the exquisite software capabilities that a lot of folks want. And so as difficult as it was, as much as we were a very small team, we said if we don't do both, then we're going to fail. And it doesn't matter what VCs are telling us right now. It doesn't matter if they think hardware is hard. It has to be done. And if we have to, if we have to unfortunately say goodbye to a potential investment to stay focused on the things that we know need to be done, like someone else on the line, I believe, said earlier, And that's what has to be done. And you have to have the conviction to follow through on that. And honestly, that pays dividends later for the folks who want to come back around later because you're a bit too early, you know, and want to see you follow through on the things you say you're going to do. You have the conviction to stick with it and get the work done the way that you said you will get it done. That, that's the thing that makes them come back around and want to have another look at you.

All right, Austin, John, any other comments on that?

We had a good early trade-off. Sorry, Austin, go ahead.

No, you go, you go.

You know, by virtue of what we're building, we acquire footprint on the cellular network kind of all around the world, which is a really cool thing to be doing, and we use it to provide defensive protections to our customers. You won't be surprised to learn if you know the space that we got approached pretty early on about some offensive use cases as well, and how could we leverage that footprint to carry out offensive cyber missions. And I've got nothing against offensive cyber missions. I think it's an awesome area for exploration, and I've got friends building cool companies in the space. It's definitely not what we do at CAPE. And so for reasons both of focus, but also sort of corporate principle, staying true to the product that we're building. We said no to a pretty significant, like, company-changing chunk of revenue early on to do offensive cyber work. And I think it was— I believe it was the right call now, several years later, based on how the company's doing.

Awesome.

Yeah, I mean, the question was about trade-offs, right? Like, yep, just stay focused and you won't have to make trade-offs because trade-offs suck.

Okay, fair enough. All right, we're going to get into some audience questions, but I'm going to preview our closing question. It's just, you know, short sync, so you can think about it now. If a strong technical founder asked you where they should focus— again, pre-seed— where they should focus in the next 90 days, to increase their odds of success, where would you tell them to focus? So that'll be our closing question at the end. So you guys can think of a really good final, you know, parting piece of advice for these founders. And let's jump into the audience questions. I see we've got one here. What, what pre-seed range worked for you? And they asked, you know, $0.5 million to $2 million. I think there's, there is some concern among a lot of early founders of watching the market change and discussion about pre-seed isn't really pre-seed anymore. But when you raised, what were your thoughts on that?

So I did a seed. I bootstrapped for the first month, just paid my guys straight up, but I wanted a $9 million seed. I only raised a $5.5 million seed. And as we do deep tech and defense tech, Push to raise more, because again, you're going to get cut in half, and investors understand you're going to need to raise more money. So don't, don't be afraid of the bigger numbers. Push bigger, think big, and then condense.

Yeah, I think it depends what you're trying to prove. Like, we needed to— we needed to build a large piece of hardware, uh, that involved like, like tens of tons of hardware with machinery running on it and then run some software on top of that. And so like you got to move some stuff, you got to get a couple people on payroll. And like we did a $5 million pre-seed, but just like don't get anchored to some number. It's all made up in the beginning, especially. So figure out what a really good proof point is that you can actually achieve over like, you know, 6 months, a year, something like that to get the next Yeah, I think that's—

it took me a while working through the fundraising rounds. We've done a B now and we're just kicking off a Series C, and I'm just now starting to understand that thing that Austin said. And actually, if you go watch, there's a really good Marc Andreessen interview where he talks about the risk onion and every early-stage company, which is just a founder, has like unlimited risk and you can peel off layers like founder risk and product risk and technical risk and market risk and all these things. And you want to raise enough money to peel a layer or two off that onion, because then you can go back to the investor community and raise more money because you've de-risked the ultimate idea. An extreme example of this, I can't remember the guy, but I met him really early on. I told him I just raised a $1.5 million pre-seed from Andreessen Horowitz. I was feeling good about myself. His company was a nuclear power plant. He had just raised a $2.3 billion pre-seed or seed or whatever. He just raised that. It's like a ridiculous comparison, but to even get started out, he was really super credible in the space also, but to even get started down that road of the thing he was trying to achieve, that's how much money he needed. There was no, I was going to build a little Android app prototype of the thing we were trying to do. He was going to build a nuclear power plant effectively. It's going to be super specific to your business and what the first couple of proof points are. In my mind, the game is how far down your breadcrumb trail of proof points towards ultimate vision can you get on the next tranche of funding and then go raise that much and add 30% because it always takes a little more than you think.

And one thing, one last thing too, in terms of your runway, this is why your operating plan needs to be really succinct in terms of, you know, what you're doing with the money that you're raising. You're gonna want like 3 years of runway cuz it feels good, but they're gonna only wanna give you 12 to 18 months. So be prepared to raise where you're only going to get 12, probably 12 months, and you got to execute with violence and have a prototype and start landing pilots. And then with another thing with the trade-offs too, there's something called CRADAs in the military. That's a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. A CRADA is a way to transact with the military at no cost whereby you build something together, but it's shared IP. From the CRADA, you can cut CBRs or OTAs against that, and then you can go to market against that. And that's— that could be a way you go to market. But within, within your operating plan, just plan on 12 to 18 months. Don't go for 3 months or you're going to get laughed out the room. Or, I'm sorry, don't go for 3 years or you're going to get— you're going to get a hard pass.

Yeah, it kind of signals like the momentum that you're going to build, right? And I think early stage momentum is is absolutely key in getting that investor confidence.

That's right.

I've got another question here. It says for Tyler, but I actually think it'd be great to hear any other options here. But we'll start with you, Tyler. It says, looking back on your Series A, what was the toughest leadership call you had to make about who to take money from, especially balancing investors who understood the warfighter mission versus the ones that were pushing you towards like a faster commercial expansion?

So I, so I raised with Madrona and I like them. And what's funny is they're not defense tech. They have maybe like 1 or 2 companies, but they're mostly— they did Snowflake, DocuSign, Smartsheet, Amazon, but they're not a defense company. But I, I loved Matt McIlwain, who's the head managing director of the firm, as like as a, as a guy that can mentor me, especially with first-time founders. We don't know what we don't know. And oftentimes with VCs, I know, I know the stereotype is they're not very smart and they're, they're a massive pain and they're not helpful. but, but my, my, my VCs are Matt McIlwain's brilliant. I learned a ton from him and that's why I chose him. And frankly, I think choose, choose VCs that have been builders before and that know how to build a, a good product and take it to market. And, and don't be, I wouldn't be easily persuaded by these defense tech firms cuz I don't think they know much more than, than typical investors. but go with the folks that can open up more doors for you, especially for dual-use technologies. And I think we all aspire to be dual-use, but I would say, look, we're going defense first, we'll go dual-use later, we'll stay focused, but think long-term about that VC. So that's why I chose Madrona. Bonafide firm, amazing partner, you know, and you gotta, you want to, you want to take money from people that you like, cuz you gotta figure you're gonna be in this for 7 to 10 years. So make sure you really like them.

Yeah, piggyback on what Tyler is highlighting there. I mean, particularly with your lead, because that's the person who's going to take a board seat more than likely, highly likely. So they're not only going to be with you for the next 7 to 10, they're going to be voting with you, you know, so you need to, you need to like them. You need to feel comfortable with the relationship. A lot of the follow money, you know, I've had very much hit or miss. But I think Tyler hit it on the head, quite honestly. I would fully expect that you are the most— you are the expert and you should be the expert in GovCon. You should know your product, your industry, GovCon a hell of a lot better than your VC. And I'm not just saying that for folks who have spent their entire career in banking and private equity, all that stuff. You know, I know that's a common thing that people like to complain about, but it's not even that. I mean, to Tyler's point, even folks who are ex-operators and whatnot, even as much as they can be incredible mentors and, you know, what it means to be a CEO, what it means to go out there and raise capital and whatnot. When it comes to your product, when it comes to the defense market use case for the warfighter, no one should be a bigger expert than you. And so looking at who you bring on board your team, I again, I just would echo what Tyler said. You know, you want somebody that you really feel comfortable with because they're the ones that are going to be helping you chart the path forward as a fiduciary and ultimately responsible for whether or not if you're the CEO, you get to keep your job. So you want to, you want to ensure that you get along with them real well. So.

All right. Let's see. Short on time here. So we're not going to get to everyone's questions. I appreciate all the engagement, though. Lots of them coming in. So one question here. Did any of you start commercial first or think about starting commercial first, or did you all start just fully 100% on the gov side? And maybe a little bit, do you, do you plan to expand to the commercial side?

I started commercial side first and it was a mistake. And what I did was I actually want to deal with Lionsgate. We retrofitted a mission planning agent to write scripts completely offline, which is cool. It was great to have revenue, but again, it becomes a distraction and then you got to, you got to— the second you take money, you've got SLAs, you got legal. You've got— and the customers can be a pain in the ass, and, and it's a lot to manage. And, and again, it just takes focus away from your mission and what you're trying to build. So yes, commercial first. I regret it. I've been approached by some bona fide commercial customers recently, and again, I turned them away. So stick to being focused on defense tech. And if you win defense, the commercial world knows if you're good enough for the military, you're good enough for them. So don't even think commercial until Series C and beyond, maybe B, but definitely not C or A.

Same as Tyler. Gov, gov first. And then we're selling to commercial now too. So it's— yeah, started with gov though, because that's what, that's what we knew. I'm not going to try to navigate a market I didn't really know anything about. Stuck with gov.

Same from Austin. John, I know that you, you know, speaking to you early on, known you for a couple of years now, I know there was a little bit of shift in that focus. How did that happen?

You know, if you're selling cellular service, you kind of have to be commercial first. Even the pointiest end operator doesn't tolerate a non-consumer-grade experience on their cell phone. And so we, you know, we launched direct-to-consumer basically right alongside our government offering. Running a consumer business is actually awesome. I love consumer, but I would say it was caffeine for the government business rather than a dedicated line of business to start. It's kind of taken on a life of its own now, but that's how we started. Dual use from the start.

All right. So we're running short on time. Again, apologies. Can't get to all these great questions. So I want to come back to that question I kind of previewed earlier. So again, everybody on the panel, one answer. If a founder asks you where to focus in the next 90 days at pre-seed, what piece of advice would you give them?

You're going to focus on what's the problem, what's the one problem you solve and why you, and then how are you going to do it? And one last thing too, as you do this and as you go to market and go to fundraise, Be prepared for lots of rejections. I got rejected 39 times in my, in my seat, and I was like, what the fuck? Like, how so? And what I learned too was they often, they already know they're going to reject you when they take the meeting, and they're doing this to pump their numbers, and they're also doing this to brain suck your ideas. So that's another thing I noticed. Don't take meetings with these, with folks that aren't actual partners at the firm. And if it's just an associate, you say, well, can you bring on a partner? Don't let these associates waste your time and pump their numbers that they met with you. Just, just another thing that will save you a ton of time.

Yeah, I would, I would just say market research is, is not sitting at your computer. If you're getting into defense tech, you need to go out. If you are building something that is supposed to go into a warfighter's hands, whether that's somebody in the dirt, whether that's somebody sitting at a machine inside of a skiff, whatever it is, like don't talk to one person, don't talk to 10 people, talk to 100 people and verify what you're building is actually solving a problem and that it is so— it is solving such a critical problem that someone's willing to buy it. And oh, by the way, get yourself a templated letter of support that that person will bottom line and throw that in your data room.

Yeah, that I think 100 is not an exaggeration by John. And you may find yourself thinking, I don't know where there are 100 people that I can talk to about this problem. And I would argue that's a problem you need to solve first before you start a defense company, because it doesn't get easier once you've raised money. It just— you're just burning at that point. And so that's, that's very good advice.

And I would say adding to that, the number— like, you need to get some really good quality conversations with like true super users. Who like really understand different parts of the customer's like decision-making architecture. And that's true if you're selling a keyboard. And I used to buy keyboards for the Navy when I was in, when I was an O1. Like if you're selling a keyboard that every single office in every DoD thing has, right? And there's like, there's a junior dude or girl who buys the keyboard for that office. But then there's also scalable programs, probably rules about how those keyboards are bought. Or if you're selling an autonomous ship like me and there's only one office in the whole Navy that can buy autonomous ships, right? Something really specialized. Regardless of which end of the spectrum you're on, you need to go and figure out like, who's the, who's the like GS-15 bureaucrat deep in the Pentagon covered in the sweat on the back of the chair from the guy who would— the guy who did that job in the Cold War. And how do I get to that guy? And what does he like think about while he's like on his walk to like the coffee shop at the Pentagon? And like, what problem can I solve for him? And then, and then who are the other 5 guys like that? I don't even know exist. And how do I get to the guy, to him and the, and her and the guys around them? Cause like, that's, that's how you're gonna figure it out.

Right.

And it's gonna take a lot of, bullshit calls to get there.

100%. Yeah. You've either got to have, you know, one big customer that cares enough about the problem that they're going to spend a lot of money or a lot of customers that'll spend a little money, right? If you don't have one of those, then you don't have a business. So I think to John's point earlier about should be able— your first thing is if I don't know 100 people, that's problem number one to solve. 100%. And we'll tell you that in the Founder Institute too, right? If you come through the program, that's the customer engagement. It's one of the first steps we do to validate Hey, are you even on the right track? And 5 people is not really a statistically relevant number of people to ask, you know, if they care. So find those customers and finding your first customer should be easier than finding your first investor. If it's the other way around, you've got a problem. So, well, gentlemen, we're out of time.

I got my black eye from a bar fight. So get a good crisis PR firm in case you get into bar fights. No, I'm just kidding. Just— I still wrestle and box. But to that end, a crisis PR firm is also good to have. They're great for media engagements. But also, if like with the media, it's getting squirrely now, especially the Venezuela takeover, be prepared for the media to reach out, you know, because they're looking for the new startups to talk about. Get a good PR firm. And I'll shut up.

Can attest Tyler is an avid Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner. So there is a legitimate explanation. I did see that question.

So if I do get into a bar fight, I've got alibis. So you never know.

All right. Well, I want to say thank you to each and every one of our panelists. I appreciate your time. I know it's valuable. I know you guys are building hard things for hard missions. Appreciate it. Appreciate you taking the time to share with folks that are either have just started or maybe even thinking about starting and trying to decide, you know, what their next step should be. So I really appreciate that. To everyone else, I'm going to go ahead and share a slide, share one more slide so you can see the, the links. Again, we're launching February 17th, this defense cohort. The deadline to apply is February 1st, and we will be hosting one more panel session at the end of this month on the 28th. So we did one last month with investors in the defense space, this time with founders. And on the 28th, we've got some very recent government folks that actually, you know, touched modernization budgets, DARPA, DIU, etc. So the folks that can talk a little bit more about the inside of the system and what that looks like when you're trying to sell to the Department of War. Again, thank you so much to our panelists and to those of you watching. Please reach out if you've got any questions. I know we'll probably have about two-thirds of you watching the recording, but really appreciate the audience engagement. Thanks, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.

Thank you.