Even (00:00):
One of the things that we've had to learn through experience the hard way, which is the best way of learning things, is to develop a language around failure to understand that failure is an essential part of the journey.
VO (00:10):
Welcome to Spotlight on a podcast about how companies are built from the people doing the building one messy, exhilarating decision at a time.
Jonathan (00:19):
Welcome to Spotlight On. I'm Jonathan Turner, and it's my pleasure to welcome Evan Rogers, co-founder and CEO of true anomaly.
Even (00:25):
Hey, jt, nice to see you.
Jonathan (00:27):
Nice to see you. So for those who may be unfamiliar, how would you describe true anomaly?
Even (00:32):
Trueno is a defense tech product company, so we're sort of part of this growing ecosystem of new companies that are building technology specifically for the Department of Defense. Our focus is on space defense. So we're building technologies that are really designed to protect and defend infrastructure that the United States and its allies have deployed over the last three decades. And I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more of that, but we're a defense tech product company for space.
Jonathan (00:57):
So we're going to get into this a little bit, but you'll know from the time when we were talking pre-investment that one of the things I really care about is who people are, who entrepreneurs and founders are as people, and I love hearing stories about them as people outside of the company that they've started. So we're going to get into the company in a second, but I'd actually like to start with tell the story about how you met your partner.
Even (01:26):
So yeah, this is an interesting one. I was in Sedona, Arizona helping my mom. So my stepdad was in hospice care for colon cancer. I remember on a Wednesday I had taken this really beautiful trail ride up to the top of Adobe Jack Trail, which is I found while I'm slogging my way up this hill that it actually is a great downhill trail. So I said, okay, tomorrow I'm resolved to go down this thing that is actually a downhill trail. And so Thursday rolls around and I go on this super long ride. I think I'm about 20 miles into this ride, hit Adobe Jack Trail start coming down, and I come around the corner under this huge ancient sort of shaded tree and there's this beautiful woman sitting there and she looked like she was a little bit in distress. She stopped me. She said, Hey, is this Adobe Jack Trail?
(02:19):
And I probably applied the brakes a little bit too hard out of eagerness, sort of got off the bike and said, yeah, hey, this are you okay? And you could kind of tell that she was a little bit distraught and she said, no, I fell. I think I hurt myself. I hurt my leg. And I said, well, do you mind if I take a look? And so I started looking at her leg and clearly one of her legs was starting to swell and I thought, okay, we're about a mile from the trailhead and I suspected she wasn't going to be able to walk. So I stood her up and we took kind of one hop and she screamed out in pain and wasn't going to work. So I said, well, do you mind if I carry you? I'm going to have to put you over my shoulders.
(03:03):
And she said to me, you mean like a deer? And I said, oh, this is going to be great. So I put her on my shoulders and I was quite fit at the time I was in the military and had sort of accountability to PT standards. And we just spent the next three quarters of a mile to a mile just talking and we hit it off and it was a great conversation. And I get to the very end, I put her down and that's when sort of the tears started to flow and she had a friend that was going to come pick her up. So the kind of shock set in, and I get her in the car and she's really crying, and I thought, this is not the time where you ask somebody for a phone number or any other information about them. And then I walked away and I said, you're an idiot.
(03:42):
Turn back around. But then they needed to go to the hospital. So I basically walked about You blew it. I totally blew it. I totally blew it. And so I go back, get my bike, I go home, and then the next week I back in Colorado Springs and I remember going to work or about to go to work and my mom sends me a text message with a picture, and it's a picture of a newspaper article, and there's this beautiful redheaded girl and a dress with inner crutches, and it was the front page of the Sedona Newspaper. I mean, there was nothing else for Sedona to report about other than this story. So it ended up on the front page of the paper and it said something on the order of Trail runner looking for hero or something like that. And then I ended up reaching out to the newspaper editor and they said, oh my God, this is the biggest story that Sedona has seen in three years. We're so excited to get into contact with you. We're going to connect you and Sydney. And so we did. And before you knew it, we were sort of talking for multiple hours during the day and then hit it off. About a month later, we started formally dating and then a bunch of other magazines started to pick it up. So we've got sort of a small legend.
Jonathan (04:53):
Well done, well done. That's much better than a Tinder date.
Even (04:56):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. Nobody meets their significant others like this.
Jonathan (05:00):
Not like that. Not like that.
Even (05:02):
Well,
Jonathan (05:02):
I
Even (05:02):
Love that. Also a demonstration of my extreme physical prowess.
Jonathan (05:05):
There you go. Which is important, which you've maintained. I love that story. It tells us a lot about you, but let's go back to the beginning. How did you get interested in space? Were you the kid with the NASA T-shirt? Were you watching Star Trek endlessly? How did you launch your career into space in the first place?
Even (05:22):
Yeah, I mean, the book that I think really turned me on to space was a book called Enders Game. And it's the story about these kids that go into space and they learn how to wage war and they learn how to deal with this sort of invading alien race. And it was everything that my, I think must've been like 11 or 12-year-old brain was interested in space and warfare and heroism and leadership and all these things. I thought, how do I kind of do this for real? And I started going to these, even as a 12-year-old, started going to these lunar mining conferences. My mom wanted to sort of stoke that interest. And so she would send me all over the place, and I remember reading a bunch of science fiction books and I was sketching space stations. I was really trying to invent space stations, and that interest carried me through as a kid until I was in high school.
(06:17):
I kind of lost interest. And I think that reflected a little bit of me and my priorities as a young man, but also as you can imagine. But also I think there wasn't much happening in human space flight between sort of 2002 and 2006. It wasn't a particularly inspiring time to be interested in space. So my focus went elsewhere. I ended up going to Virginia Military Institute for undergrad, and I started asking a line of questioning that included space, but was really much more about philosophy and why and why existence, good deep philosophical topics. But in 2008, SpaceX really started to come to more of a public awareness. They obviously had a few flight tests before that, but we're starting to build the Falcon nine. We're starting to get attention from the commercial resupply commercial crew program. And I thought this sort of fascination with space was reawaken.
(07:16):
At the same time as I was starting to ask these deeper questions about purpose, ended up going to graduate school at University of Chicago and found myself asking questions that I wasn't going to get answers to in Chicago. So I ended up going to the military and I went to the military to try to go be an astronaut again. That was the whole point was to try to go get space flight experience in space operations to dual track a PhD program in planetary science or applied physics and then go through the traditional test pilot school route and then off to go be an astronaut. Bottom line is that I've always had a deep love for space, but I think it's part of a broader set of questions about who humans are and what's our purpose and what's the evolution of humanity over time.
Jonathan (08:02):
So tell us a little bit about what's happened in space over the last few years, your transition from the military to wanting to pursue an entrepreneurial path. How did you meet your co-founder, Kyle? Was it a massive step to go from a military career and wanting to be an astronaut to running a company? So how was that transition and what was happening in and around space that made you feel like you had to make a move?
Even (08:30):
Yeah. So 2012 when I put the uniform on, I didn't really realize that I was entering uniform at this transformational moment in military history as the space domain was becoming recognized as a war fighting domain. And I'll describe what that means here in a second. My first assignment in uniform was at the fourth Space Operation Squadron, which is this unit in Colorado Springs at Shriver Air Force Base that flies these very expensive spacecraft that were really designed and conceived of in the late 1980s as communications assets that would allow the United States to communicate through nuclear warfare. So what happens when a nuclear detonation goes off in the atmosphere is you have what's called sation. So the upper atmosphere will get charged and it'll create this nearly RF impenetrable excitation of the atmosphere that prevents lower frequencies from getting from space through to the ground and vice versa.
(09:28):
So you can't use traditional high speed communications techniques to deal with that. So you need something that's super high frequency, but also anti jams. You assume that while nuclear warfare is happening, that there's also electronic warfare and things are going a little bit going to shit. And so this system was designed at the end of the Cold War, actually sort of in the last two thirds of the Cold War, but found utility and tactical satellite communications in the late 1990s and early two thousands. So in 2012, I head over to this organization flying these satellites and a traditional military satellite operations life, like you're working crew operations, you're working day shifts, and then you're going to swing shifts and then you're going to midnight shifts. And all the while you're wondering, am I ever going to really perform my mission? What's the probability of nuclear rewards or that was in the background, but at the same time I had my first really clearance and everything, obviously I'm going to talk about here is unclassified.
(10:34):
I started studying the threat to military satellites, and in 2013, China executed a test of a space weapon that was particularly dangerous and designed to go into higher altitudes than we had ever really seen before. So for the first time this protected, and I wouldn't even say protected this true high ground in space called geosynchronous orbit, which is 22,000 miles above the surface of the earth, was actually under threat. It was another sort of awakening in my career where I thought, oh wow, we're in this moment of transformation. And I started asking the question, how would I take these legacy capabilities that were designed in the 1980s, the 1990s or even in the early two thousands, and use what I've got on board because you're not changing the hardware, right? You're not sending folks up there to change out hardware strap on countermeasures or things like that.
(11:30):
You got what you got. So how would I fly the system differently to deal with the threat? And so I started asking that question that got the attention of some senior military officers, and at the time, anybody who was asking these questions was of interest to the evolution of the Officer Corps. And so I was sent to an organization called the United States Air Force Weapons School, which used to be called the Air Force Fighter Weapons School stood up in the 1970s in response to the Vietnam War as an advanced tactics and leadership school for frontline leaders who were planning and waging aerial combat. The success of that model was propagated into other domains. So space, intel, refueling, nuclear weapons, you name it. So now the Air Force Weapons School is this, as I said, advanced tactical and leadership school that brings together all of these disciplines to build the intuitions and the skills that are required for the United States to plan and wage significant conflicts globally.
(12:33):
After that, I went off to the space aggressors, which is a threat replication organization, and then went to an organization called Space Security and Defense Program after a brief stint at darpa. And I was at SSDP, which is really where the core ideas for true round came from. I was responsible for the developmental and operational test of a future space capability. You go back to the Air Force or the Navy, we have decades or centuries of the expenditure and blood and treasure to know exactly what works and why we know such thing exists for space. And so we had to Mike, a co-founder, Dan Brunski, one of my first co-founders, sort of joked at the time, we have to go invent the universe first. We know the physics, we know the basic tactics, but we have to find these measurements at the intersection of the physics and tactics that will allow us to measure the right things on the performance of this capability.
(13:26):
And this is so important because if you measure the wrong thing, then you can get into a situation where you have a lot of confidence, but you have a failure in combat. And there's unfortunately, there are dozens and dozens of examples of the failure of weapon systems and warfare due to poor tests, due to poor measurement techniques. And so we knew that we had to get this right, and in the result of developing that, we realized that we had also developed basically a set of design criteria for space warfare. But we're holding that book in our hands and looking around and saying, who do we give this to? Who do we give the answer key to? And unfortunately, it was really the primes, and I'm not a prime bacher. The primes do really important work for the United States and its allies, but they're not incentivized to build systems at risk and at scale. And so we realized, hey, there's something that has to change here. There's something new that needs to be made. And so I grabbed a couple of other guys and we sat down over whiskey and a couple of cigars and said, what needs to change? And it took the shape of true ly.
Jonathan (14:30):
So let's talk a little bit about True Anomaly in a moment. But before we get there, just for those who maybe don't spend all their time in space, just tell us a little bit about what's up there, both from a non-classified military basis, but economically why it matters so much to the United States and its allies. What's up there? How is it protected? What's going on? Because obviously it doesn't hit the news as much as many other areas.
Even (15:00):
So space is traditionally used for the application of the US' instruments of power. So there are really four instruments of power diplomacy, military informational, and economic space touches all of those things. So there are systems like global positioning system that are guiding the Waymo cars that are driving around in downtown San Francisco. There are satellite communications capabilities that are reducing the latency and banking transactions that are providing alpha to traders. There are environmental monitoring capabilities that are keeping track of the spread of wildfires. They're keeping track of sea states, they're keeping track of shipping vessels. So they're foundational to the Western way of life just day to day. They're foundational to the western way of life. A huge amount of economic activity depends on space or travels through the space domain, and it is sort of like the air you breathe. You don't know it's there until potentially it's gone. Our adversaries have started to get the same intuition and they've been interested in exploiting the space domain for decades and have started building the same sorts of systems.
Jonathan (16:14):
So what was the original vision when you launched True Anomaly? You got your book say, now what do I do with this? I'm not going to take it over there. I'm going to start a company. But when you originally started, what did you think when you launched, what did you think the specific problem was that you were going to solve? And then did you have a version of the product in your head or you didn't know and you just had the problem?
Even (16:42):
I think because we had such depth of expertise in the problem set, we had an intuition about both the thing that needed to be built and the scale of the problem that needed to be solved. It was almost a defiance. We wanted to build the system that we were testing better. We just wanted to do it right. It was like this thing that we were spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on was probably not going to be effective, and it needed to be effective for the sake of national security. The stakes were very high and somebody had to go in and do it right. I think I did what many entrepreneurs do, which is focus on that singular problem and singular response to a shortfall in technology. But also in the back of our minds, we knew that something substantial needed to be built.
(17:28):
That was the shape that was going to solve a very, very big hole in defense ecosystem. And that hole is really just not a company that's entirely focused on space defense, space protection, space superiority. A lot of defense companies that are building technologies for this space have much broader portfolios. So space superiority doesn't get the attention that it needs to because a company like Northrop Grumman, for example, has a $50 billion B 21 backlog. So space superiority is not getting the talent, the focus, the capital, and really the drive for innovation that other market segments do.
Jonathan (18:05):
So like any entrepreneur, you have to figure out, well, do I know the exact product that needs to be built and then I'm going to go show the customer what it is? Or is it the customer's told me what they want and I'm going to go build it? What was it in true an which of those was true? And true anomalies case,
Even (18:26):
I think it was a little bit of a third thing, which is we were the customer, we knew what needed to be built, and we just changed uniforms. So we were the customer insisting on
Jonathan (18:35):
Definitely more comfortable by that.
Even (18:37):
Yeah, that's right. Although the shoes, the combat shoes are now made by Nike, so they're pretty sweet.
Jonathan (18:43):
That's good branding by Nike.
Even (18:43):
They're pretty sweet. They're very good. So we were the customer and we said, okay, let's go switch out for a graphic tee and go build a thing that needed to be built.
Jonathan (18:55):
What challenges did you face in coming in and saying, well, I know I was wearing the uniform yesterday, but I can deliver something for you today where the stakes could not be higher against some incumbents who have produced amazing products for our national security over the course of decades. How did you think about that particular challenge?
Even (19:20):
It really comes down to having an open conversation with the customer about reliability. The incentives of a program manager are to deliver a capability and to have that capability be accepted by its war fighting customer. So the way that the DOD buys things is really free major stakeholders. They're the folks that program for the money, the people that come up with the idea, they have to go convince Congress or convince budget authority just to make sure that there's cash available. There are program managers in the acquisition community that's responsible for going to industry and buying the thing and competing that thing and doing the contracting. And then there's the warfighter organization that ultimately accepts it. So everybody in that process has an incredibly important voice. The program manager, when it gets to the program manager, that program manager has their own individual incentives. They don't lose their job if they choose Lockheed Martin instead of a defense tech startup.
(20:22):
And so we had to convince the customer a couple of things. One that we were going to be around two, that we had the experience and the ability and the product vision was never the problem. It's like, Hey, you are saying all the right words. You were wearing the uniform. Of course you're going to go say the right thing, but can you go build the team that's necessary and build repeatable production processes and run a design program that looks intelligible us? Which is to say, can you build a system that works? Can you go through the appropriate design reviews? P-D-R-C-D-R, can you speak the program manager's language? This is particularly acute in space. It's becoming less so in other domains, but in the space universe, there's a certain type of language that's used.
Jonathan (21:06):
It's mostly acronyms that nobody else understands. I usually get wrong
Even (21:09):
In acronyms. Soup. Yeah, yeah, that's right. But you're well on your way, jt. So it really came down to reliability. Can you go build a system that is going to survive in orbit for long enough to be able to go execute the mission? And so the pivot that we have navigated with the customer is to think about the deployment of these capabilities differently than they have before. Challenge the requirements for a 10 year survivability right, or 20 year survivability of the program and focus on enveloping a system, reaping the cost benefits and the performance benefits of enveloping a system that maybe needs to last for one or two years, and demonstrating that you can achieve the reliability that you need to, and then use that as an opportunity to iterate more quickly than, for example, the primes who are going to build on these five to 10 year centers.
Jonathan (22:02):
Well, let's talk about the products a little bit, jackal and mosaic in particular and why you started there. And as you touch on that, be interested in how you thought about investing ahead, because obviously these are very significant systems you just described that we believe that they're going to last for decades, not for just a couple of years, but that requires a significant amount of upfront time, commitment, resources, capital, et cetera, before you're able to execute on that. So how did you think about products product evolution and what risks did you take along the way?
Even (22:36):
Yeah, so the product, we really started from first principles of the product modulated by the fact that we knew exactly what that first product was going to go be. So we said from day one, in order to be a space superiority prime, you have to have a product portfolio across the three canonical engagement profiles that you see for space warfare. The first is ground to space, the second is space to space, and the third is space to ground. And so there are weapon systems and threats that are applicable across all of those engagement and across all of the different mission sets that are executed in each one of those engagement phenomenologies where we knew that we had the opportunity to really disrupt and bring something to market that was going to be far superior than anything the primes were building was in space to space.
(23:25):
And the approach we took was a relatively straightforward approach that is not novel in other domains, is becoming more adopted in the space domain, which is a platform and payloads approach except that, and there's a lot of companies that are building platforms that are generic space platforms that are designed to do space surveillance or terrestrial surveillance or environmental monitoring or communications. But what we knew is that mission drives design. When you build a war fighting capability, you're building for a different performance envelope than a traditional satellite that's just staring at the earth and just needs to check in every once in a while. There's a reason that aircraft are different, right? The Boeing 7 37 is not suitable for an area engagement, just like the F 35 is just not going to get you.
Jonathan (24:20):
I'm not flying on the F 35. You're
Even (24:22):
Definitely not. Yeah, you're not. And we proved this to ourselves early on in the product design process. We actually didn't want to go out and build jackal from day one. We knew that was going to be an expensive prospect, but when we canvased the small SAT market, the answers we got back for the system that with the KPIs that jackal now has were it's going to take five years and $150 million, or Hey, we'll give you this six U satellite that skimps on all the KPIs we were looking for with jackal, but you can still do all the software things that you wanted. When we realized that there was a massive need, it was even bigger than we thought. As soon as we were on this side of it and we were interacting with program managers more freely and that there wasn't anything remotely close to jackal on the market, we said, okay, we're going to go.
Jonathan (25:11):
Yeah. So let's talk about you. So how has it been making the transition from wearing a uniform to wearing a T-shirt and sitting on a couch talking to the venture capitalists at Excel? I'm a natural, natural, I think you're nailing it, but just in terms of your style and what you look for in others and how has it been a benefit to you? How have you had to evolve?
Even (25:35):
Well, first of all, I grow a beard now, but that's actually to cover up the 35 pounds that I've gained since not being before.
Jonathan (25:45):
Since you carried a beautiful woman down a mountain bank truck. Yeah, yeah,
Even (25:49):
Exactly. So I think I've benefited a lot from my time in the military. Obviously that's the thesis of True normally came from that, but my leadership and management style was fundamentally formed by my time in uniform because you can't make changes to the team that you have. You have to work with what you have. And I think that's been both good and bad in my journey as a CEO. My bias in forming the team at True early on wasn't actually to make drastic changes to team composition or people. It was to say, Hey, I've got people that are good now let's try to make them great. Let's try to point them in a direction. And I think as a result, I didn't make some leadership and team changes early on enough because I went into this, I can't make any movements, I can't make any changes to the team or hire who I want to.
(26:42):
And sometimes you don't even necessarily know what you're looking for. You just have a very different set of biases. However, I think what my co-founder Kyle and I are very good at doing is connecting people to the mission. The thing that we always go back to at True Anomaly, and the thing that I've learned to really embrace as a founder and CEO is the reemphasis on the mission. When there's ambiguity, reemphasize the mission. When you are working on selling a candidate, just bring the mission back to the forefront, and that evens out the sort of rough waters of an experience of building a company. I think one of the things that folks would say a lot about trueno in the early days, and now in particular, it's just second nature to us, is that we were very good at goal setting that just when you're in uniform, you got to know, you got to know what your target is, you have to know what you're going after. And so that kind of strategy to task flow where you say, what's our North Star? What are our near 10 objectives? What are our long-term objectives? What are our lines of effort? How much weight of effort are we applying to each one of those lines of effort? That kind of strategic motion comes more naturally to us.
Jonathan (27:53):
Yeah, well, I've certainly seen that in the time that we've been working together. And you've just closed your series C led by Excel. Congratulations.
Even (28:01):
Thank you.
Jonathan (28:02):
What are your plans for the proceeds from that round and how are you thinking about scaling?
Even (28:08):
We're going to invest in team and product. We're going to continue this motion of investing ahead of need to show that we have the manufacturing production capacity to deal with an order of any size that would drop on us. We're going to continue to advance jackal and Mosaic. We're going to make some strategic investments in facilities and infrastructure now in Long Beach. So we have a footprint in Denver footprint in Colorado Springs, but we've just opened a 90,000 square foot manufacturing space in Long Beach that needs a lot of equipment. And we are going to hire some really key senior leaders that are going to help us leapfrog our competition and help us position ourselves relative to the primes. Again, all in the spirit of convincing the customer by demonstration that true anomaly can be a reliable and enduring industrial partner that is going to be there when the space force needs it the most. And there are countless examples of this in military history in the 1930s, the scale up of aviation production, Lockheed Martin, skunk courts building the U2, the SR 71, the F Lon 17. There are core industrial partners that make the game changing asymmetric technologies that really change the outcome of geopolitical tensions and the geopolitical landscape, and that's what we're positioning ourselves to do.
Jonathan (29:27):
So what do you think happens in space over the next 5, 10, 20 years? What are the big trends that you think will have a significant impact?
Even (29:39):
I think the two most important trends for space, barring geopolitical outcomes and politics purely technically, and we can talk about the geopolitical and political domestic landscape if you're interested. The two most important technology trends are autonomy and cost of launch. If the cost of launch doesn't come down substantially in the form of Starship or competition between heavy lift vehicles, new Glenn, SpaceX, ULA and others, then it's largely going to be a slow burn towards building the infrastructure that I think the United States wants to build in the space. There will be a continued bias towards small systems in the kind of 500 to a thousand kilogram range or meter cubed up to two to three meter cube range. You're going to see a lot of really interesting innovation that comes out of that. I mean, there's already commercial reentry companies, there's already space to ground companies.
(30:41):
There's prolific launch partners, but unless there's a major breakthrough in heavy lift capacity to lower earth orbit, we're not going to see the stuff of science fiction. And that really the only thing that's really trending in that direction in Starship. The second piece is autonomy, particularly autonomy on top of reliable avionics. So if we're going to do anything interesting in deep space or we're going to do anything interesting on the surface of Mars or the surface of the moon, that is all going to be dependent on sophisticated autonomy underwritten by largely the innovations that we're seeing in humanoid robotics and that space.
Jonathan (31:23):
So I'm asking for a friend, but for anybody who lives on planet earth as I do, what's my relationship to space going to? How's it going to change in the next five, 10 years? Are I going to notice any difference? So you described space as sort of like the air that you breathe. You don't notice it, you not pay attention that continues. Or do you think that there are things, there are products, innovations that make me more aware? Do you think I'll just continue to live completely without knowledge of what's going on above my head?
Even (31:53):
I think it'll become more normal to see people go to space. We've already seen multiple private missions to lower orbit and to the ISS. Sometimes those are just cast as the fantasies of wealthy people, even if they're done under the auspices of deep research, deep microgravity research or even philanthropy. I think not until you see humans really set foot on another body, the moon again or Mars, are we really going to see a foundational change in the way that people experience space kind of psychologically every single day? I think you'll see the impacts of it, but I think again, it will sort of be like the air you breathe. It won't be part of the broad public consciousness until there's one of two things happens, boots on another body, or unfortunately a conflict that extends into space.
Jonathan (32:52):
Hopefully not the latter. What tips and advice do you have? Founders would be founders, entrepreneurs, those along the journey.
Even (33:00):
One of the things that we've had to learn through experience the hard way, which is the best way of learning things, is to develop a language around failure, not in a post hoc justification way, but to understand that failure is an essential part of the journey. And it was easy for me to sort of gloss over that when I was an early, I'm still an early founder, but especially in the first year where for a while we hadn't really experienced any significant challenge. We were deploying capital, we were building the team, we were heading towards a target, and we had yet to really experience the gut shot type failure where you're truly let down, right? Some really important things came out of that failure. And one of the most important things was the language of how to fail and how to communicate that failure to your team.
(33:48):
Everybody has a different version of that. For my part, I set a standard for how to fail at true ly. And there's three ways that you can fail at ta. The first is to make the same mistake twice. The second is to fail in a data sparse way. The third is, it's okay to fail as long as you gave it a hundred percent, and that was our version. Everybody will have their own interpretation of that, their own version of that. But failure is a really important part. But planning for failure is also an essential part. It's not a question of if, but it's a question of when you fail and when you fail on a big way.
Jonathan (34:26):
SpaceX is still failing every now and again.
Even (34:28):
Yep, that's right. What's the best advice you've ever given to a founder?
Jonathan (34:32):
That assumes that I've given good advice to a founder ever, but I give the same advice to people, whether they're founders or people I work with or just in general life, which is taking as much business risk as you want, but don't take any people risk. At the end of the day, whatever we achieve and you are doing amazing things in space, but whether it's in space or somewhere else, whatever we achieve, we achieve through other people. So the people we surround ourselves with, that's everything.
Even (35:00):
I used to put the product first in the people second after our first failure. I inverted that because I recognized that the product was an outcome of only having the best people, and I don't mean the best by the most. Brilliant. It's not measured by IQ and academic attainment. Are they great teammates? Do they grind? Do they believe in the mission? Can they execute? Obviously? But I had to invert that after our first set of failures.
Jonathan (35:26):
Yeah, I think that's right. But then as we think about wrapping up here, what's next for true anomaly? What do you see as the big opportunities ahead? What might stand in your way?
Even (35:36):
We're going to start looking for aliens. That's the next product. I've been meaning to talk to you about this.
Jonathan (35:40):
Yeah, yeah. Actually, we have a startup. We've done a few series A and seed rounds of alien finding companies.
Even (35:46):
I didn't know we were in competition with your portfolio. No,
Jonathan (35:49):
Not yet. Although there's probably somebody inside Excel who is No, but tell me more. What's next?
Even (35:55):
Our focus for the next 12 months is really on two missions that we need to go execute. The first is a mission called Victus Hayes. It is the Capstone operational demonstration to a program called Tactically Responsive Space. And Tactical Responsive space is all about making sure that the United States can get systems that can execute space control and SDA missions to the time and place of our choosing rather than having that engagement be dictated by our adversaries, which it has today. Russia even recently just launched a new platform that we suspect to have a weapons test capability. I mean, just within the last couple of months. And they're launching into the same orbital planes as suspected US systems. So Victus Hayes is our demonstration of the US' prowess in being able to put a system like jackal into a precision orbit relative to an adversary capability so we can understand what adversaries are really up to, what they're fielding, and then even have a response. And then finally, we are headed out to Lin orbit, which means we're going to put a spacecraft around the moon. And we're not talking about any of the details about that quite yet, but we're super excited on a partnership there. Jackal from day one was designed to deal with any threat, any orbit, any time, and our lunar mission is going to be an awesome extension of that capability.
Jonathan (37:23):
Well, Evan, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming in and seeing us on Support Light on, and it's been a real pleasure.
Even (37:28):
Yeah, thanks.
