Brett Granberg and Nini Hamrick on mission-driven tech for defense and intelligence
Felicis hosts a conversation with Nini Hamrick and Brett Granberg, co-founders of Vannevar Labs.
After working with intelligence agencies and meeting at Stanford’s GSB, Brett and Nini started Vannevar Labs to bring the best of Silicon Valley tech to the defense sector. Vannevar Labs is a defense technology company that builds software and hardware to support non-kinetic and intelligence missions worldwide to help the U.S. and its allies deter and de-escalate conflict. This conversation touches on how Brett and Nini learned to build impactful defense products that find a market, how they’ve structured their R&D team, and how to create lasting partnerships with the Department of Defense.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:10 How Brett and Nini met
05:25 The journey to product-market fit
09:32 You have to work on a top 3 national security problem
12:43 First deployment and mission win
14:59 How agencies use Vannevar Labs’ tech
18:19 The way Vannevar Labs approaches R&D
23:19 The kind of people that work at Vannevar Labs
25:42 Forward-Deployed Engineering
26:54 Partnership with the Department of Defense
29:20 Being a Program of Record for the DoD
33:40 Challenges for defense startups
37:04 Thinking long term
Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity, some errors may appear.
Niki Pezeshki: Maybe just to get started and to give some of the people context about Vannevar itself and both of you, meaning you used to work in the national intelligence community. Brett, you spent time at In-Q-Tel, which is a venture arm associated with the CIA. It'd be great to know with those backgrounds in mind, how you guys met, what you learned in your previous jobs that influenced what you've built at Vannevar so far, and what made you both feel now was the right time to jump into this founder journey and, start the company.
Nini Hamrick: And Niki, maybe I'll start with my previous experience that got me excited about starting Vannevar and meeting Brett. And then Brett can take it away on why the moment was right to start Vannevar. So, I started my career in the intel community, really had the privilege of serving as a counterterrorism officer for seven years.
The story of Vannevar for me starts in 2013 when I was deployed in Afghanistan. It was my first job out of college, out of a small team going after these really high value counterterrorism targets. And we had an embedded software engineer who would build applications for us to get after this really important mission.
And we actually had great technology. And I saw for the first time that technology ca be so important to these national security missions. And then every other job I had in the Intel community, that was not the case. It was not broadly available to me and my colleagues as we went after, other important missions, whether that was trying to rescue U S hostages out of Syria or respond after ISIS captured Mosul, we just didn't have access to great technology.
And yetI think I knew intuitively that there were, obviously great private sector companies out there building great commercial technology. It just, they weren't building it for government. And seeing that gap, I ended up requesting to go work in our IT procurement office for a bit of time, just to try and understand where this gap was coming from.
And I saw that a lot of it was because of the way that we procured. Software, which was from a limited number of prime contractors, none of whom were software companies. And so that was my perspective when I left government in 2018. And I came out to Silicon Valley and I'm starting grad school. And I met Brett.
We were on campus together and I was the only former intel officer in our business school class. And Brett was the only former defense investor. So, everyone thought. We should meet. In the first week, we went on a walk and just talked about the obsession I think we both share for the really important missions that we worked on, and the really great people we both worked with in the intel community, and this gap that we had both seen that we really wanted to be part of solving.
I'll let Brett pick it up from there
Brett Granberg: Yeah, for sure. On my side the journey for me started with the work with the counterterrorism mission center. I think it's all back in the 2016- and2008-time horizon, which was the counter Islamic state days. And very similar to me is the same problem where there was one particular mission that was really important.
There were a lot of targeters on the CIA side that were really smart and working really hard, but the main tool they had to do their job that was built byDefense Prime broke. And nobody cared, the prime didn't care that program manager at CIA didn't care. And as a result, people were having to work 80 to a hundred-hour weeks.
And the mission results were not what they should have been given what that problem set was. That contract was also, close to a hundred million dollars a year. And just seeing the enormous gap between the talent per that defense prime on the engineering side and what existed in Silicon Valley and the importance of the mission and also the size of the contract started to drive me a little bit crazy and I saw that different versions of that a couple more times at In Q Teland the thesis for us was just, Hey, there are really smart software engineers in the United States.
There are these problems that are very well funded by the US government. We should just solve them. We can bring these people together and solve these problems.
Niki Pezeshki: Okay. So today the company is focused on the China and Russia missions. But the biggest revenue driver is a product called Decrypt, but that wasn't always the case. The company started with a different focus, and you found your way to where you are today. And I think this could be helpful for a lot of people listening that are maybe thinking about starting defense tech companies, about what it takes to find product market Fit.
It'd also be good to hear more about just exactly what Vannevar does. So, can you guys maybe talk about the journey? Saywhat the original product was and how you found your kind of calling to what the product is today and tell the audience a little bit about what that product does today.
Brett Granberg: No idea what we were doing from a product development standpoint. In the beginning, the first mission problem that we wanted to work on was Arabic optical character recognition. So just extracting Arabic text out of image files, this was a really important problem at the time for some of the things that we worked on.
And we had this, half-baked vision of, okay, maybe we're going to build this API that, we process Arabic images, spit out outputs, and then on the government side, they'll buy it, they'll integrate it into their workflow and everything will be great.
A lot of problems with that assumption. The way that we went about development was we built the initial service. We built a little command line interface that we demo to people of here's an Arabic image out pops the Arabic text transcribed. And then we started demoing to people and we started trying to sell to people.
We did a bunch of these meetings. Nobody was interested. Nobody wanted to buy it. We didn't know if it was because we were bad at sales or, the product wasn't good. So, what we ended up doing was we just kept adding more features. Okay, nobody wants to buy our command line OCR, whatever tool, let's add translation.
And so, then I went from Arabic image to English searchable text at the end. And then it was, all right, let's build a UI around this. And then it was, let's build NER entity extraction on this. Then it was, let's build a search service on this. And so, we made the mistake of layering feature upon feature on an idea that we were not getting pull on, the mistake being, oh, if this were more feature complete, surely this would be great. The big change for us happened as we were 40 or 50 sales meetings deep. We started to hear a common thread around, all right, maybe not for Arabic, but Hey, do you guys have this for Chinese or Russian though?
That would be really interesting to us. And there was one weekend here, we had a trip to DC, where he emailed us before we went and said, hey, we're interested in Chinese aggression. We spun up a Mandarin model over the weekend and then demo that on that, that next week, and that was the first time where somebody actually perked up a little bit and, when we showed them, it was just a half working demo, but we got something and then we followed that thread a little bit further, built some, understood some more key components of the products.
And then we were, we had our first meeting where people, somebody actually wanted to use it on at a point that we pitched it, and it wasn't nobody getting back to us. It was, ‘Hey, I'm in a certain country right now, I need access to this now. How do I buy this from you?’ And that was a sort of new that we had product market Fit. yeah, that's not the way you should do a product development in defense. That's the opposite. That's the way you should do. You should not keep layering on feature upon feature, if you're not clicking on the core of a problem in retrospect for people listening, an easier way to do this is ‘Hey, we didn't even need to train in OCR model.’
We could have probably just used it. OCR at that point was somewhat of a solved problem. Maybe instead of spending months on the machine learning engineering side, maybe we could have gotten that answered in a day. And so, these are kind of product development lessons that we learned.
Nini Hamrick: Just to add why we weren't getting any pull on Arabic OCR and why we got a media pull on, even just the first step of exploiting other languages that were higher value. I think this turned into a principle for us as a company, which is you have to be working with on a top three national security problem.
And at the time the U S had made they'd been working for two decades plus on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. And we built a lot of our capabilities around those two missions. And in 2020, which is when we released the products that Brett's describing fully featured having spent six months on it with very little user feedback it was at a time when we were drawing down in the Middle East the entire government was really pivoting to thinking about how are we going to compete with our strategic competitors, China and Russia. And so that's why we're getting those questions from users who are saying, I'm being told to focus on this new mission, and I have no capabilities to do it. And so that meant when even our first approach at going after that problem set, there was so much pull from these user groups, high value user groups doing really important missions because they had no capability.
And so, our initial MVP was better than nothing, essentially. And that told us, if you are working on one of these top three national security problems, you can build a big company around that. You can build a number of products, which we've done since then. But it's really informed how we think about the problems that we choose to go after now, having seen what it looks like to work on a problem that's low value and you're not finding product market fit.
Brett Granberg: And then on the Decrypt side I can't talk too specifically about all the things we're doing but the key components of Decrypt were—the first was hey actually our national security national asset level collection or say China to Russia Aren't as strong as they are, or as they were on the counterterrorism fight, where we had immediate access to the physical locations that we needed to access.
You could fly a plane or a UAV overhead, you had people on the ground, you have really good collection. For China and Russia, you have much, a much weaker collection apparatus. And so, the first chunk of Decrypt was actually about collecting data. What type of data can we collect that has national security value?
That we are ourselves able to get access to through either creative technical means or other means that we can then provide to some of the analysts that are working on these problems. Once you solve the collection problem, that's great. But now you have a bunch of text, imagery, video, and audio data to process.
And so, then it turns into more of, ‘how do you process those different types of data to get analysts to specific answers more quickly?’ And since Decrypt we've built several software products in one hardware product. But the common theme between those products is actually usually the same two things.
It's what kind of unique data can we either create ourselves or can we collect? And then how do we uniquely process that mission that critical mission data? Those are the two common themes across the products that we build.
Niki Pezeshki: Got it. And if I remember correctly, I'm going to call it a pivot, even though it wasn't a full company pivot, but this new change in strategy and mission orientation happened between this Series A and the Series B, right?
Brett Granberg: It was right before the Series A was when we started to get conviction. And what happened was we got our first area. It was around a 25, 000 deployment. That was our first actual deal. With one user who was using our products, but that user's work was going right up to the commander of a really important group focused on the mission problem in Asia.
And within the first couple of months, we got a mission that informed an operational decision for that group. This is, yeah, again, we only have 25, 000 in revenue at that point. But at that point it seemed clear to me that we were going to work. It was just a matter of time and making the product more mature.
And it's a lot of things we had to figure out, but that was right before this series.
Niki Pezeshki: Got it. And then by the time that I met you guys, you're telling us about getting standing ovations as you were demoing the product to some people and I was like, oh my gosh Standing ovations? I’ve never heard of a company getting standing ovations before so that you know It's just a testament to how much product pull you were getting and how kind of unique And valuable.
This was for some of the people that you were selling to.
Brett Granberg: Yeah. And even for that, I remember the first time that happened because it was so weird. That example was a group of people that were tasked with this really important mission of in the China and Russia domain, they didn't have the data on the DOD side to solve the problem, and so they were spending all their time in this windowless room.
Google searching things and then turning that into the briefs that they were making. And so, the reason they were so excited, we gave them something that allowed them to actually do their job in a way that. Actually, contribute to the vision. And it was also more fun for them.
Niki Pezeshki: To the extent that you can and you can feel free to keep it high level, but can you talk about how maybe some agencies have been using Vannevar or anything to give the audience a sense of the scale of the company or the rapid adoption of the product because I think, Vannevar does an amazing job and you're starting to really have a bunch of products and a bunch of different agencies and it's generating a significant amount of revenue and traction.
It would be great to hear just how you guys are building those dominoes and building on that momentum, whether it's becoming multi product, multi-agency, I think it would be really helpful for the audience to understand your strategy around that and how it's working.
Brett Granberg: So, in terms of the group deployments were deployed across 40 or so groups right now in DoD across most of the major services, not all the services, but most of the major services. So, within each service, usually we have multiple deployments. The missions that we work out very a lot, they can range everything from counter weapons trafficking to identifying and disrupting influence campaigns that are in certain countries or even tracking ships, military vessels the common themes between these problems that we work on is they are usually China or Russia related.
We're most successful on the mission side when we build, we combine products into a bundle that's end to end solves a complete mission problem. And so, what we're looking at now is looking for those top three mission problems that we usually end up deploying multiple capabilities against and use that as the basis of a program deployment.
Nini Hamrick: Yeah, I think that the category of capabilities when you talk about the dominoes Niki, how did they stack up has been Watching what our users were doing in Decrypt when we first got access. They first got access to it I think as Brett described, a lot of these users actually said to us, I didn't have a job before I got access to Decrypt, they didn't have any outputs, and they started using Decrypt to do things that are not what Decrypt was designed to do.
So as, but it's described, it's an intelligence product. It collects data in contested information environments, surfaces it for analysis. And we saw users doing things like trying to inform operations, which is how do I perceive what my adversary, how does my adversary perceive what I'm doing and how do I shape that perception?
And so, we realized that there were other categories. of missions that users were trying to do in this strategic competition phase with our competitors ahead of armed conflict where we're trying to advantage the U. S. and our allies over those competitors or other categories that weren't being covered.
And so that's information operations something that DOD would call special activities or targeting. And so, we've moved into those as our users have pulled us in those directions by showing us that they had no other capability there except a crypt.
Niki Pezeshki: The rapid scale has just been insane, but I think it's even more than that. It's the efficiency at which you guys have done it. Vannevar is a true software company. And so maybe a little bit different than a lot of the defense tech companies that we see today that are super highly CapEx intensive and need to raise a ton of money.
In order to keep on funding their growth, it gives you a lot of flexibility to go and build products in multiple domains and keep on growing the company. And right now, the business is I think 150ish employees with 80 engineers with plans to scale a bunch over the coming years, especially on the engineering side.
I think it's an incredible place to work. There's a lot of really good problems to work on. And maybe we can just jump into that and talk about the way that Vannevar approaches R&D both from how you think about what projects to work on, but also how you structure your organization in order to move as quickly as possible and build what your customers want and need.
Niki Pezeshki: So maybe can you talk a little bit about that and how that is. different than some of your competitors and also what you guys have learned about structuring your R& D organization to build the best defense products that will continue to enable you guys to grow really quickly over the coming years.
Brett Granberg: Yeah. The most important part of building the right product. whether that's a new product or iterating on one you already have deployed is making sure your products and engineering people are as close to the mission users as humanly possible. And so, we spend a lot of time sending engineers to military bases or product people in military bases, oftentimes with people on our mission team to really build domain knowledge on what the problem actually is.
And it's not about. sitting in a room or being at a conference where people are describing the problems to you. It's about watching them do it at their desk. Or in the case of the hardware stuff that we're working on, it's watching him do it on an island in Asia. for example, you learn more doing that
It's always worth it to deploy engineers as close to that as possible. Or the best we've made, I should say, have been mission problems where we know them better than other people. And that's usually because of what Needy has described, which is we have a lot of existing customer deployments.
And we get pulled into different mission problems on those deployments. And so oftentimes we'll start to see common threads across different groups within DoD and groups running into similar problems. And that sort of knowledge allows us to have an advantage in terms of where we decide to bet R& D time.
So, I think really important for us i, we make bets on problems, not tech solutions, if that makes sense. So, we'll bet on a mission problem. And we start agnostic to what technology might solve. You might have some guesses, but it's what I've seen a lot of companies. That try to enter the defense space do as they start technology forward.
Oh, we're a computer vision company that does this thing with sorry, injury or satellite entry or whatever. That's a feature. That's not how DoD buys systems that solve complete mission problems. So, you need to orient the way you think about products and product development around that.
In terms of how structure the teams, because we're a multi-product company and we're doing both, mostly software, but a little bit of hardware. We, split the teams into several really small team. It could be two to eight engineers that own an entire product line. And what that means is there's pros and cons to that.
What's what that being on the pro side, what that means is every person has a completely outsized impact on what that product ends up looking and the direction that we go. From an engineering standpoint. And that can be really exciting for some people. The main things are just focus on the mission problem and get engineers as close to the mission problem as possible.
Niki Pezeshki:Yeah, that's great. I meet a lot of the end of our employees and engineers at various defense tech conferences and stuff. And I think the resounding feedback whenever I talk to them is. They're having a lot of fun. They feel a great sense of autonomy and ownership and, they're traveling a bunch meeting with customers and just feel they're just building a business within a business. And it, most of the time they feel very mission oriented and it's amazing to see.
So, I think at least from a very biased perspective, a very high employee NPS at Vannevar, maybe talk a little bit about your recruiting process. how do you recruit for Vannevar? What kinds of people are you finding that are excelling there? I think that would just be helpful as well, because again, we're talking about you're 150 now with 80 engineers, and I think the plan is to scale significantly. And so, for the people that might be listening and thinking about what it would be like to work at Vannevar and how to get a job there. What are you guys looking for?
Nini Hamrick: Yeah. So, the first thing to say here, Niki, we've been talking about how we're trying to build a lot of new products and a lot of new programs. And so, there's a lot of opportunity for people to own big chunks of our business end to end, whether that's engineering, or squads of engineers owning entire product end to end or on the mission team that I lead.
But the difference here is that there are very few people that have done that before. So, we're not selecting for on the engineering side, like domain expertise in defense or on the growth side, people who have been there, done that and built programs before, because that's a very, small pool of people.
We believe that we can actually build this. If they have a couple of core qualities that we select for, as we're interviewing and getting to know people, the first is this idea of, the ability to operate really autonomously and to take on that level of ownership and really act as an entrepreneur in the business.
The second is one that's in our kind of operating principles and one that we screen for which is around people who are low ego. We really believe that ego is the enemy of learning in a startup. And if you're doing something for the first time, there's going to be a ton of learning, you're going to be wrong a bunch.
And so, I've found that the best people for working with our customers and the best people for working with other people on our team are low ego. And the third is just this really pervasive quality across the whole team, which is being pretty obsessed to a rational level with the problems that we're working on and the impact that we can have for our users.
It’s incredibly hard to build new defense products, incredibly hard to build new defense programs. We actually have to partner with people in government that are irrationally excited about what we're doing to go through that gauntlet with us. And we select for people on our team that have that level of irrational excitement about the types of problems we're solving in this strategic competition space with the government.
Brett Granberg: Yeah. And I think a really good example of a role that displays those qualities is our core deployed engineering Team. those engineers do what the name describes as they deploy forward a lot on military bases with our customers.
And what's unique about that engineering role is you actually have full autonomy to build whatever you want. You are working with a team on the Vannevar side and with the team on the government side, and you decide what you think the right thing is to build for that mission.
One of our highest performing new products was actually a prototype that a forward deployed engineer built in Europe in a three-day customer trip, they heard about a problem. sat in a coffee shop with coffee shop, Wi Fi built a V zero. And iterated for three days in a row with that customer that now is the third most used product across all the things that we do at Vannevar.
And so that's a really special type of engineer where, you're looking for people that really thrive in that I want to work directly with users on really hard issue problems. And I want the autonomy to be able to make decisions on what I think the right thing to build Is.
Niki Pezeshki: Taking a step back and, let's talk a little bit more about just defense tech broadly and Vannevar's role in it. So, the US defense tech budget is in the billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars and it's growing pretty rapidly, particularly in AI. And so, I'm curious. What that means for Vannevar in particular, as you're thinking about growing the business over the coming years, that seems like a massive tailwind for you. How are you guys feeling that on a day to day or quarter to quarter basis?
Nini Hamrick: Yeah, I think the tailwind for us is what I described of this moment where the U. S. government is facing and our allies are facing the most complex national security challenge since the Cold War, which is this strategic competition with China and Russia.
And we both have the most complex challenge, but also availability of great technologies that have never existed before. that means that the Defense Department is really open to new ideas, creative ways of bringing great software and great hardware together against large mission problems, which creates a huge opportunity.
And I think the two if talk to most mission groups or senior leaders in the national security community right now, there are two things they're working on. One is How do we prepare for potential armed conflict? Lots of people working on that.
The second area is how do we compete today? How do we advantage the U. S. and our allies? And that's an area that's not well covered. And that's where Vannevar is building a lot of capability. And so that's the opportunity that we see. And I think it's meant that, a lot of the procurement challenges that people describe when they talk about DoD, they exist, but we're seeing a lot more pull from those two groups.
I described mission groups and senior leaders in the DoD, and then a third group, which is program managers. We're trying to build. These next gen capabilities for mission. we see them pulling us in as a, commercial player in this space, that's building great technology in a way that has never existed before.
Niki Pezeshki: There's, I think only been a few defense tech companies that have gotten to program of record status. And I've heard some founders say, you know what? That doesn't actually matter that much. Just go and find the money wherever you can get it.
And then there's others who are like, no, that if you want to build a really large business, that's super important. It's a lot more sticky. can you guys maybe just talk about what it means to become a program of record and what are the. difficult steps that it takes to get there, especially for maybe earlier stage founders in the space or engineers that are trying to better understand what makes a company very special in this market and how you get to hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, what it takes to get there and what you've learned about that process.
Nini Hamrick: Yeah, I can start. So just on a technical level, what is a program of record? It means that Congress has. Defined it in the budget and that's aligned to a set of capabilities that a company like ours is building. that's what a program of record is how to get there. we also believe what you described that to be a large public defense company, you need to be capable of winning multiple programs of record, very large ones that are really important to the national security community and the defense department. There are three groups that you're bringing together around that new program that you're trying to build. The first is the mission groups. These are the folks that Brett described that we try and get as close as possible to out forward.
These are operational commanders that actually own operational missions. And they have unmet needs. They're trying to compete with China or Russia in a certain contested place overseas, and they need things that group is the first group we solve for. There's a second group, which is the senior decision makers in the Defense Department.
They're the ones that are thinking really long term. How do we take the capabilities that someone needs out in the field? And think about how those align to the big priorities. So, when we talked earlier about how we want to be building around a top three national security problem, that's in one of these senior decision makers’ top three.
You can think of Admiral Paparo out in Hawaii who owns all the forces in the Pacific, one of his top three problems is deterrence. How do we compete with the PRC and deter them from armed conflict? That's a top three problem we'd build a program around. And then the third group of people are these program managers.
There are civilian PMs that exist on bases around the U. S. And they have this really hard job, very valuable for the DOD, which is take what the mission users say they need, what the senior leaders say is in their top priorities and therefore in their budget that Congress is going to approve and actually turn that into a program. That becomes the program of record. the challenge is all three of these people. are motivated by the same thing ultimately, right? Delivering for the mission, but they're very different personalities and they exist in three different places, and you have to stitch them together to create a new program.
And so that's where we spend a ton of our time doing: winning for all three of them and then making sure that we're building, they're all building around a common vision. Building programs of record is so hard in the DOD, but it is really about those three groups. Coming together around a big vision and a big budget.
Niki Pezeshki: Yeah. it takes a lot of time, right? many years to make these types of programs happen.
Nini Hamrick: Typically, the fastest would be in the two-to-three-year timeframe, because that's how the DoD plans their budget. So, this year they're planning their budget for. 2027 and 2028 and thinking about how the programs that they want to stand up in that year. And so, we, as a company are working with those three groups that I just described to shape programs that would come into existence in starting in 27 or 28.
Niki Pezeshki: Maybe you both can share just a little bit of help or advice to other founders building the defense tech space. What challenges do you think other defense startups might start to face in the next few years? And based on what you've learned about how to navigate some of them, what advice would you give to avoid some of the pitfalls that they might get into?
Nini Hamrick: In terms of this idea of Building toward a program of record. Something that we've learned is it's amazing if you're building great capability for users, but if you don't have those senior sponsors and you don't have the program office on board, you're not going to build a program and the reverse is true.
You can have senior sponsors, and you can have the program office on board, but if you're not building something that matters. It really matters in a top three way; you're also not going to build a program. And that sounds very simple, but there are a ton of cycles at Vannevar and getting punched in the face went into learning those, two truths.
And I think because you take so many punches to the face and building a defense company, I'd also just say build around something that's both a big, hard problem and something that's deeply meaningful to you. Because otherwise it's going to be really hard to get through the all the gauntlet that, that I just described.
And that's certainly that's very true for us at Vannevar, right? Like big, hard problem. And it's personally meaningful for a lot of people on the team and motivational for engineers that are coming to join us. But yeah, go ahead, Brett on your take here.
Brett Granberg: I would say the failure modes that I've seen are most common for defense companies.
First failure mode that I see is really technical folks that are focused on the technology, not actually on. Solving a mission problem. This was very common in the 2016 to 2022 phase. So, there's a lot of tech companies that are defense, had big budgets, were tech forward not mission problem forward or even defense-only companies that thought this way and have since failed.
So, I think that's a pretty common failure mode. Typically, those teams are more like founding teams or engineering. The second failure mode is what you described, which is you're building a great problem that solves a mission problem, but you're spending not enough, nearly enough time on the go to market in business development side, you need to be spending as much time as you are on the product side, trying to figure out an eight on the sales motion. That's a very common failure mode.
And then the third problem, which is what I see former DoD people run into sometimes is they are focusing all their effort on the program office and requirements and not, their effort on building a thing that actually works and solves a mission problem.
I think those are the three failure modes. it's really hard to do a defense company. You just have to know that all of it's going to be hard. The go to market is going to be hard. And the product stuff is going to be hard. And you'd have to be thinking iteratively on both of those.
Niki Pezeshki: Yeah. I think it's always impressive to me how you guys are always thinking super long term, a lot of our conversations are around what we need to do today in 2024, that will make an impact in 2028. I'm always like, oh my gosh, this is definitely long-term planning. How do we structure the organization?
What products do we need to work on? Who do we need to get closer to? And so, the fact that you guys are profitable and have that runway to think long term, I think is also a major asset for you, for a lot of companies in this space making sure you're managing your capital in the right way to give you the opportunity to think long term is crucial.
So that, that's another thing I'd say, but guys for so many things. One, for your time doing this session with us. Thank you for letting me and Felicis be a small part of your journey. Thank you for helping share some of the wisdom that you've learned over the years to a lot of people that are either on this path already or going to be on this path.
I think it's super valuable. And then thank you for all that you do to help these various missions that are helping our Country. Really appreciate your time. And thanks again.
