How Two Marines Cracked the Defense Tech Industry (Reveal Technologies)

1:15 Jon McLachlan

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. We have an amazing guest with us, Garrett Smith, the founder and CEO of Reveal Technologies, with us, broadcasting live from, actually, Bozeman, Montana. Garrett, welcome to the show.

1:33 Garrett Smith

Thanks, Jon. Thanks, Sasha. Happy to be here. Garrett Smith, founder and CEO at Reveal. We do run the company out of Bozeman, Montana, but we have people on the team all over the map, not just here in the U.S., but overseas as well, to include the Pacific Rim and growing presence in Europe and servicing our NATO ally partners and customers.

1:52 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, I have to say, like, I was looking at your LinkedIn and I see that you were part of the United States Marine Corps for 20 years before you jumped in and started Reveal Technologies. So I just wanted to say, like, thank you for your service.

2:06 Garrett Smith

Yeah, thank you. And some of that service actually overlaps with my time building Reveal Technology. I'm still in the Reserve component of the Marine Corps. I've been in for just over 21 years. I'm a lieutenant colonel in the reserves, and I've been able to pursue that line of my profession in parallel with building Reveal and my kind of time in Silicon Valley proper. So it's been a unique pleasure and definitely informs all of what we do at Reveal. It's my professional, personal and passion background, for sure.

2:35 Sasha Sinkevich

Thank you for your service, Garrett. What is the most interesting and maybe difficult part transitioning from being in service and becoming a founder of a company?

2:45 Garrett Smith

So there's almost nothing more addictive and more meaningful than being oriented on a public service initiative as a mission. So being attached directly to a national security mission imbues everything you do with a sense of purpose and a sense of high impact and a sense of importance and meaning in a way that building the next great dating app probably doesn't, unless you're just incredibly passionate about solving people's relationship problems, which maybe you are. And great. If that's your thing, amazing. But I came up through the ranks of the military and caught what I would call the national security bug and was never cured of that bug. This has been a passion project for us, my co-founders and I, and it extends way back into the mid-2000s, when I first enlisted in the Marines with my brother in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And we were absorbed into this heady space where we were overseas, in harm's way, learning and working together and, you know, working on each other's behalf and doing it in service to a national mission that we really believed in. In retrospect, obviously, there's all kinds of criticisms you could level at the national security enterprise. Should we, should we not have been in X, Y or Z location? But at the end of the day, we believed at the time that we were doing a good and righteous thing. And the truism that at the end of the day, in combat, you're fighting for the person to your left or to your right and your teammates, it's totally true. And we found through the course of that experience that the national security enterprise and the warfighters like us were ill-equipped in terms of technology to confront real 21st-century problems, especially as we transitioned from open desert warfare against relatively backward opponents and now confronting a global security crisis that really looks more like peer competition from Russia and from China. So coming back to answer your question, Sasha, the hard thing about transitioning from the military into the civilian or private sector is finding a way to attach yourself to a mission that can be as meaningful as the one that we used to serve while in uniform.

4:51 Sasha Sinkevich

Awesome. There are so many different levels of noise about different problems, and different problems present themselves in many different ways. How do you determine and how do you distill down what actually is important and what we should focus on in order to solve that pain point?

5:10 Garrett Smith

How do you remove the noise and focus, identify the pain points? It's really difficult. And as you know, a successful founder in your own right and being surrounded by lots of successful projects and founders in your communities, you know that focus is everything. And focusing on the wrong thing is actually death of a company. And focusing on the right thing is literally the whole game. So at the beginning of our company's history, Reveal, back in 2018, I had the benefit of starting this project with three of my best friends and co-founders, with whom I'd been working for many, many years. And so the kind of team element of the equation was relatively solved. And so what we needed to do was find a mission and a problem area or a gap in the national security market and figure out whether we could build an adequate solution that we were also still passionate at solving, and do it over the course of a young company lifespan. So that problem that we found, and in fact, this was the problem we identified well before we started the company, was born of personal experience. So my co-founder, Andrew Dixon, and I are both Marine officers by background. We both served in combat operations overseas in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And we directly and personally experienced a technology gap and shortfall that meant that we didn't have enough information and intelligence going into high-risk raid scenarios and high-risk other military operating scenarios. And so we set out intending to solve an intelligence and information gap for people who looked a lot like us. So we came into that problem area with a huge amount of empathy. We, in other words, were our customers. We were the people we were trying to serve. That allowed us unique insight into the product development phase of the company, so that we not only understood the product that we needed to build, but why we were building it and who would be using it. It just so happened that that thing that we imagined building was also high value enough to where the customer in this case was willing to pay.

7:13 Sasha Sinkevich

Yeah, so this is actually very interesting, because there is no lack of funding in the national security space. And there are so many different vendors that are constantly iterating over existing solutions, coming up with new technologies to solve the pain points. What you have mentioned is you've experienced lack of intelligence, or essentially lack of information, or maybe, if I were to [fetch] there, some type of silos of information. And there was no central system that would give you the most relevant piece of information that you needed at that point of time, when that information was critical to make the right or the wrong decision.

7:50 Garrett Smith

Yeah, I mean, to get really specific, in too many situations, I found myself leading Marines into a combat scenario, and the only inputs that I had to make decisions and plans and make kind of on-the-fly decisions in live combat operations was a very outdated 1 in 50,000 topographic map and some outdated low-resolution images that in no way represented the terrain and the environment that we were going to move into. In other words, we had insufficient mission planning and situational awareness materials. And so the thing that we built and the thing that we dreamed of having was a mobile device optimized software application that could ingest video streams from drones and rapidly generate high-resolution two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps. At its basic level, that's it. And that was our flagship product. And we've built a number of analytic capabilities that live on top of that in a user interface that is highly engageable by the user demographic. But that was it, right? Like, we needed to be able to decide and act in high-risk environments where time was short, risks were high, people's lives were on the line, and we needed to give an ability to generate intelligence right there at the point of the problem. Historically, if you wanted to get this kind of a mission planning or situational awareness product, you had to request it from a higher headquarters. You would be stacked into a prioritization queue. If you were like my units, you were probably just one of many and not in any way special, or you wouldn't find yourself on the top of that priority queue. And so, more often than not, we would never get the intelligence that we requested. And those intelligence resources were always overtasked, overburdened and had too many constituent customers asking for this kind of support. So our entire thesis was, how do we enable that decision maker, that tactical decision maker who's actually adopting all of the physical risk, how do we endow that person with the ability to generate their own intelligence on the fly, at the point of the problem? From there, our flagship product, Farsight, was born.

9:54 Jon McLachlan

Wow. So Farsight, it almost feels like a thing that I can hold in my hand as there's tactical, like, operation unfolding around me, and I can stream live information about what's happening in places I can't see that is 3D enhanced, like a traditional, like, Apple Maps or Google Maps or whatever, but is actually like a live stream of what's going on. Is that more or less?

10:19 Garrett Smith

Live stream is likely overstating it, but just imagine the days before we had Apple and Google Maps that allowed us to quickly and intelligently navigate around our city, or even more, a cross-country trip where you didn't know how to get from point A to B. Imagine that analog, querying the lap atlas in your car to get around. That's how the military, in many places, still operates. So what we are doing is facilitating the mobile revolution for the military and doing it with an application that mimics an experience that almost everybody has in the civilian world, in other words, engaging with high-reliability digital mapping capabilities that allow for easy navigation and understanding of your environment. We're helping the military get it into the 21st century, in other words.

11:06 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, I couldn't imagine, like, a more meaningful delivery to, like, these are the men and women putting their lives on the line. Of course, we want to have the greatest technology at play, with the latest maps and the latest intel, all of that. I'm super surprised, like, Palantir didn't step in, or someone like that, to do something like this.

11:25 Garrett Smith

But they did, actually. So they did.

11:28 Jon McLachlan

You're killing Palantir, displacing them.

11:30 Garrett Smith

We would prefer to see it as partnering with Palantir or others like Palantir operating in the space. But here's a description of our specific gap that we're filling. Palantir offered a very exquisite, very, very powerful capability in the way that we just described. But they offered it first to command centers and senior decision makers who were relatively abstracted from the actual tactical problems. So they were solving a different layer of the problem stack, and they were doing it for relatively well-endowed, high-resource key decision makers in the upper echelons of a military or intelligence organization. What we're doing is servicing the highly decentralized, low-echelon decision maker first. So we are doing it from the hyper-tactical level, the edge environment, all the way up to the place where Palantir continues to deliver value at upper echelons, if that makes sense.

12:23 Jon McLachlan

Makes perfect sense. So your technology is used by, you know, close to where the rubber hits the road, so to speak.

12:29 Garrett Smith

That's right.

12:29 Jon McLachlan

The men and women actually, like, unfolding.

12:32 Garrett Smith

That's right. We call that place the tactical edge. You know, that's where corporals and sergeants and lieutenants are making decisions in the high-risk physical terrain, right at the point of the problem, right at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, the pointy tip of the spear, however you choose to describe it. That's where our value proposition lies, because we've done so much technological kind of advancement to optimize this capability for low-compute mobile devices rather than high-compute, high-resource architectures like servers and clouds and command centers. That's right.

13:07 Sasha Sinkevich

So corporals and boots on the ground is your ICP. That's your ideal customer profile.

13:13 Garrett Smith

That's our ideal user profile. In the defense security kind of environment, the customer or the buyer is actually highly abstracted and distant from that end-user set. But you're right, Sasha. Yeah.

13:25 Sasha Sinkevich

So that's where I'm actually leading with my question. Yeah. How do you connect with the EB, the economical buyer, to make sure that your ICP, the corporal and boots on the ground, they get all of the value from the technology that you get to offer?

13:41 Garrett Smith

This is the problem that any company trying to engage with the national security market is going to encounter, the abstraction between end user and the EB, or the economic buyer. So what we chose to do as a company is very different than how traditional or legacy military vendors or tech vendors go to market in the national security space. The legacy set typically will go top-down. In other words, they'll engage with the economic buyer and the high-order program managers first, generate a list of requirements, build to those requirements, line up funding in partnership with those economic buyers, and eventually that technology will make its way down to the end users who will actually employ the technology. What that doesn't do is what Silicon Valley has been great at for decades now, which is engaging the end user and the consumer first and understanding how they prefer to engage with technology, maybe even advancing the way that people engage with technology, so that by the time they adopt it, it's something they're very comfortable with, that answers their needs and answers it in a way that they can adopt and immediately use and onboard it into their lives or their work environments. The legacy defense technology vendor set doesn't do that. They go from top-down. The benefit of that is that you get a lot of money and resourcing and kind of political heft and stickiness around that go-to-market strategy. So what we chose to do was blend a Silicon Valley approach with that top-down legacy approach. So we first went to the end users, the corporals, the sergeants, the people who would actually be using the technology in their hands in live operations at the point of the problem, solving their problems. We then kind of arrived at a minimum viable product and achieved something like product-market fit with those end-user personas and had a pretty broad-based, ground-level support for what we wanted to deliver and a high appetite for adopting the technology, provided that the top-down problem could be solved. So in parallel with building the right product, we went and engaged with the US Congress, we engaged with program managers and senior decision makers and influencers across the United States Department of Defense, so that by the time the demand signal reached the buyer, the top-down resourcing, appetite to buy, requirements, all of those things were also lined up. So we married those two efforts really healthfully for our end-user set. And now we can scale adoption with a product that they actually want to adopt, which is not always the case with legacy technologies in the military.

16:09 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, definitely not. Were you able to do that particularly effectively because of your connection with the Marines, and you kind of knew who to go to and could navigate sort of the bureaucracy or the individual units, so to speak?

16:23 Garrett Smith

So I don't think we were particularly good in the early days at navigating the bureaucracy and navigating the top-down side of how this sales process works for the federal government. But what we did know were units and people who would be the prototypical customer and user. So we brought all that empathy into the product development phase. We then networked aggressively to get our technology into the hands of people in the testing and evaluation and exercise environment. That allowed us to do a lot of refinement. It allowed us to arrive at min viable product and at product-market fit, so that by the time we actually figured out how to go to market from the top-down perspective, we had all of that groundswell of support. We also, I think, benefited from always remaining in the mindset of the prototypical end user, rather than trying to empathize aggressively with the economic buyer. So the economic buyer is always going to come along when there's an intensive groundswell of support and demand signal for a technology that they want. In other words, they can't ignore what their constituents are telling them they want and need. So we aimed all of our energy there first. And our background as tactical and military operators meant that we had a high degree of empathy and connectivity with that end-user set and could help them generate the demand signal. And then we could help them focus and intensify that demand signal up to the key decision makers and the economic buyers.

17:45 Jon McLachlan

That's a really unique entrepreneurial story. Congratulations on pulling that one off. You did a bottom-up go-to-market strategy with the military.

17:53 Garrett Smith

Yeah, it's irregular. It is maybe one of the key disruptive elements of companies like ours that are positively impacting the national security market. There are a lot of companies that are trying to mimic the legacy way of going to business or going to market in this environment, and they're met with middling success, because it's very difficult to do that with all of the noise and the incumbency and the legacy baggage that exist at that level. I think you really have to focus in on what does the end user actually want. And that's the only way to really add value, ethically, in my opinion, and add value for a long time. You get sticky and you remain sticky when you're actually solving problems at the end-user level.

18:33 Jon McLachlan

I just remember hearing stories about, like, how contract bidding works. And let's say you have a spec for, like, an M16, and you can put a contract out to produce, like, 50,000 of them or 100,000 or whatever. And if you just look at the numbers, maybe it should go to the lowest. There's a case to be made, a business case, maybe, to just go with the lowest number. But then, like, what are you sacrificing in terms of quality? And there's all of these other questions. And I've just been very cautious around only looking at numbers. And I think, like, the obsession to empathize with, you know, what you're building, will actually be used, how it will perform, how it'll be deployed, much more value to be had there.

19:11 Garrett Smith

Well, thank you. I think this may or may not be near and dear to the hearts of your listeners, but there's a very different and much slower road to success in defense. But once you're there, it's quite big. And what that means is that the traditional venture capital model actually might not be fully appropriate for a defense upstart project as well. In other words, venture capitalists want to very quickly see growth in the earliest phases of a company's life cycle. And a traditional Series Seed to A to B process is just not going to play out in the same way on the same timeline going to market in defense, because of the many hurdles and the long road to achieving meaningful revenue from a customer in this space. So it's been a journey, I think, for both the investor groups who are getting interested in and investing into the defense market, and a bi-directional journey shared by the entrepreneurs who are helping to define what venture capital looks like in the national security market.

20:10 Jon McLachlan

Did you guys raise?

20:11 Garrett Smith

I like to say that we bootstrapped, or kind of bootstrapped. We didn't take very much venture capital in our early days, knowing that there was unlikely to be success on the timeline typically preferred by an investor. And so we did not get too far out over our skis, as they say, in terms of headcount and ramping the company growth metrics of headcount, high burn, all that stuff. We didn't get into that territory. Instead, we focused maniacally on building the right product with a very small, kind of focused team first. Once we did that, we went out and raised a traditional Series A and then followed it with a Series B earlier this year. Series A led by Next Frontier Capital in Bozeman, Montana, and the Series B led by a firm that's likely familiar for your listeners, Ballistic Ventures, which is kind of a tier A cybersecurity firm in San Mateo, California. One of the founders over there, Kevin Mandia, very good friend of mine, a mentor for many years and a seed investor in our earliest days, been tracking us for quite some time. And because we have not only national security implications that, obviously, they like to see as a cyber investor, we also have ambitions to layer in cybersecurity tools into our mobile-optimized set of software tools for this same type, the same user set as our flagship product. So it was a good marriage of interest there. And we're definitely on the ramp for revenue, having hit the hockey stick inflection point, as they say. And I think venture is now appropriate for us. But we're six and a half years into this company, and that's a different pace given alternatives in the SaaS market.

21:46 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, definitely. And the growth, do you see it all coming from, like, government, military? Maybe do you see anything with, like, private security? Do you see anything, like, with local law enforcement? Or what's your vision?

21:58 Garrett Smith

Yeah, so we're definitively and explicitly a defense company. That being said, there are many user sets in the non-DOD federal ecosystem, so law enforcement or Homeland Security, certainly local, municipal, state law enforcement as well, who are potentially prototypical adopters of this kind of technology. An infantry unit in the military is so much like a SWAT team in a regional SWAT office or a sheriff's department, right? So the law enforcement community is one that we intend to expand into, but they still are not a co-equal focus market for us. Definitely, we see it as an expansion opportunity.

22:37 Sasha Sinkevich

What are some of the top three new, I don't want to call it features, but new value-add developments that you and your team are working on right now that will add value and help boots on the ground in the coming 12 months?

22:54 Garrett Smith

Yeah, so I'm actually going to answer that question in maybe a different way. The defense market is full of platforms and consolidators. So if you think of the legacy defense technology vendors, big names you'll have heard of, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, these are companies that are familiar to everybody. Since the 80s and early 90s, they have been consolidators. They're buying up small, innovative companies. As companies grow, certainly as that legacy set has grown, they become fundamentally less organically innovative. And in order to deliver value over time, they often make acquisitions of younger, more innovative companies to onboard tech to their platform. They become a delivery mechanism to this customer set. So in this defense technology renaissance, which is a period that I would say began in 2015, 2016, 2017, where you saw ramping amounts of venture capital going into defense startups, and as defense startups started making waves, disruptive waves and market-share-grabbing waves in the defense ecosystem, think larger upstarts like Anduril, certainly Palantir, is a little bit of an OG entity in this grouping, but Anduril Industries and others, companies on the rise, bigger companies, Anduril certainly is carving this pathway, are going to start acquiring other companies. And indeed, many have already built an established way forward in growth by doing just that. So Reveal Technology is going to do that as well. And in fact, we already have. So one of the key features recently of the company-level platform is that we made an acquisition last year of a young technology company that was building a handheld or mobile biometrics data collection and analysis suite. And we helped, post-acquisition, deliver that as a program of record to U.S. Special Operations Command. So what I see as a key feature of our company going forward is that we will be a heterogeneous multi-product platform, part grown through inorganic means. So we will acquire companies. We are a consolidator. We're a buyer, in other words. So that's, I think, one of them. The second, just to double-click on that biometrics product, we acquired a company last year. They had a very good prototype product called Identifi that we thought could be a contender for a Special Operations Command program of record. We battle-hardened it and tested it and put it through kind of our version of the product refinement ringer process. And we recently outright won the program of record, competing with large legacy contractors, for that major contract over a multi-year basis.

25:29 Jon McLachlan

Congratulations.

25:30 Garrett Smith

Thank you. Yeah, and it is huge. And so now we're demonstrating that we have multiple products that are generating real production revenue, one of which is now a program of record with the US military. So we think that we've proved that that inorganic growth model is high viability and that we can integrate new products onto a Reveal company-level platform. So in future, what does Reveal look like? We look like a product portfolio that will continue to expand, continue to leverage our expertise in taking new, disruptive, innovative products to market through the pathways that we're carving and the relationships that we've built and the contracts that we've won. So I would expect that in the future, Reveal has even more products. And one of those, very specifically, will be in the electronic warfare and signals domain, which will get into the network and cybersecurity elements, all optimized for the mobile environment, all optimized for that corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, junior decision maker that's out there at the tactical edge of the battle space.

26:28 Sasha Sinkevich

This is very interesting. And a couple of things I find very interesting. The story of the company, the company was born through that direct relationship with boots on the ground. So, bottoms up. And then I'm sure it now shows up in your acquisition journey as well, because you continuously talk to the boots on the ground. You know exactly the pain points that are present today and will be present a year from now. And you are in this really unique position where you can then scope out the technologies that can quickly be added onto the platform and offered through the technology stack that is already in hands of the boots on the ground. Whereas the alternative, the legacy companies, they do acquisitions, but those acquisitions are primarily driven by decisions made at the very top that may not necessarily then trickle down to the actual end user.

27:25 Garrett Smith

Or at minimum, they're not built in a way that is easily adopted by or easily used by those end-user personas. And so we do think that we've maybe found a little bit of a groove in this sense. We've built the relationships of trust with this customer and user set, so that as new emerging requirements come about, we'll be involved in those conversations quite early. And we'll be able to either acquire technologies and then onboard them onto our platform to deliver value that way, or we'll have enough heads up and advance kind of relationship input so that we can organically build products for this end user and end customer set. And we become a trusted component of the next generation of the national security technology enterprise.

28:12 Jon McLachlan

Absolutely. It sounds like you are a trusted component of the next generation technology that's being on board.

28:18 Garrett Smith

I think so. Yeah. We still need to prove ourselves every day. I mean, it really is that, right? I think one of the reasons why the legacy set has sort of failed to be a part of the innovation narrative nowadays is because they got too comfortable and they didn't innovate fast enough. So we intend to prove our value every single day with new products, with thought leadership and partnership with this critical end-user group.

28:39 Jon McLachlan

Spectacular. It's a labor of love, and I really feel the passion. And I'm super curious, I'm sure our listeners are curious too. A lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show when we're thinking about organizations like our companies and how do we demonstrate that a company is secure, that we're producing secure products that are worthy of adoption by specific markets. I think, like, defense is sometimes left in sort of a very high regard, but just kind of a fuzzy high regard. Are there specific certifications that you just had to land in order to open up the business for the economic buyers? I thought it was great that you built those feedback loops with the actual users of this new technology. There's a whole piece, and you're talking about, like, cybersecurity being a new space, and maybe there's a new product that's in the works, and there's more the cyber and the signal space. But in terms of demonstrating that, how do you demonstrate that to the federal government?

29:36 Garrett Smith

Yeah, so yet another hurdle that a new company needs to clear in order to do meaningful scaled work with the US government is an incredibly high barrier to entry in the form of compliance regimes. And so there's a whole list of compliance measures that you need to adhere to and satisfy before a technology, specifically software, can be adopted into an ecosystem that is connected to sensitive government systems. And that includes cyber vulnerability, cybersecurity regimes. It's a set of certifications called interim authority to test, when you're testing and evaluating technologies on the ramp to adoption. There's an authority to operate, or ATO, certification that you achieve on a system-by-system or integration-by-integration basis. There's this whole list of technology readiness and integration readiness compliance metrics that you need to hit in order to do that work at scale with the government. And it's really difficult. Not only do you need to build a great product, you need to also build a compliance regime that satisfies all of the customers' needs and requirements and demands. I mean, if you don't know what you're doing, it could add many years to the product development and product adoption cycle. That can be death for a young company that is resource-constrained and maybe living on the fumes of venture capital and limited bank accounts. So that's a tough one. Often, what you can do as a young company entering this market is partner with the adopter, indicate that you don't know everything they need from you in terms of compliance, and to partner with you, the young company, to make it happen. And oftentimes, we've discovered that while it can be a slower process, that actually engenders a huge amount of trust with the end user and adopter and the customer, so that by the end of that process, there's a long track record of having worked together. Nobody shows up fully compliant with all the statutory and policy regimes over there. And I think it's one of those ways to generate trust with the market, is partnering with the end user and the customer to get that done.

31:39 Sasha Sinkevich

So are you talking about a sponsor? And I think it's called sponsorship, where one of the agencies or a team within the agency will essentially walk with you through the process, because they are an interested party in adopting the product.

31:54 Garrett Smith

That's exactly right. That's part of it. Having a really great sponsor or partner that can walk your company down the pathway to compliance and adoption and integration and onboarding, that's absolutely part of it. A challenge that many companies run into with the federal government is that fully satisfying the compliance regime with customer X doesn't always mean that you're immediately adoptable by customer Y. And so some amount of compliance reciprocity that we expect in the commercial world actually doesn't exist in a full form of the federal government. And so awareness of that dynamic is an important thing to be aware of for a young company trying to do work in this space. It can also be seen as a barrier to entry for competition. So that's a useful note to make. And I think the federal government is awakened to the idea that they need to be better in terms of compliance reciprocity across and between agencies. So it's a complex environment, but absolutely is something that can be overcome. Like you said at the prompt of this line of discussion, Jon, this is an important level of security that's baked into federal acquisition processes that does slow things down, but it does mean that the systems and ecosystems that you're working within are quite secure.

33:08 Sasha Sinkevich

Why, given all of the hurdles that do exist, and there is some bureaucracy, just part of any large organization, and government happens to be a large organization, why is it still important for national security to make sure that people like yourself still show up every day and build innovative technology?

33:29 Garrett Smith

Yeah, I think this is a really important core question. I've been gratified and excited by the fact that the venture capital and Silicon Valley ecosystems have rediscovered the imperative for building national security technologies. For a long time, that was not the case. So back in the Cold War, so like the 1940s to the 1980s, the Silicon Valley was heavily engaged in building all of the technologies that won the Cold War, that presented a deterrent effect on the enemies of open societies in the world, ended up allowing the United States and its Western partners and other partners to win the Cold War. So when the 1989 to 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of history and the end of the Cold War, all of a sudden all that energy and risk capital and ingenuity started flowing elsewhere. That's when we saw the rise of the internet and cloud computing and mobile telephony and software and all of the things that really generate a huge amount of value for individual human consumers. What happened in the interim, though, was that other malign actors or adversaries to the United States continued to rise, in some cases stealthfully. And so by the early 2010s, we saw revisionist forces like those in Russia and those in China continuing to exert malign influence on the world and challenge the global order that was championed by and built by the United States and its Western allies, to include the EU and NATO and many, many others. And so by the mid-2010s, venture capital and the national security enterprise, everybody realized, wait, we need some disruption here. We need disruption, we need innovation. And what that means is a market opportunity. So when you marry up market forces and capitalism in the American style, which is very entrepreneurial, with a national security market that's hungry for innovation, that means there's a market opportunity. Those two things collided in the mid-2010s into the end of the 2010s and is very active now. So between 2016 and 2020, something like $40 billion was invested into defense and dual-use companies. Much of that went into SpaceX, actually. From 2020 to 2024, that actually tripled to $125 billion. And that continues to rise. This is a hot and frothy market. And that is all market signaling that there's an important mission here. And that not only can you satisfy a mission by engaging in this space, which is the thing that really energizes me, you can make money here. And that's the way that the market forces and Western-style capitalism are solving problems in the world. This is a meaningful space where you can do well by doing good, and is important for our society and keeping peace and deterrence in the world.

36:14 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, I really feel the passion and the patriotism, too. So it's all connected. I'm super curious. So we have a lot of entrepreneurs who are listening to this, a lot of folks in the security space. This is a little bit of a leading question, but if there were one tool or service that does not exist today that you just wish already existed, and if it existed, you would buy it, you would throw money at it to solve some pain point that you experienced, like, regularly, or that you've seen, like, regularly, but you just don't have the time or the energy, like, or maybe the expertise to go off and solve it the right way, what would that be?

36:47 Garrett Smith

Yeah, so this is an easy question. So every day we see highlight videos from the Ukraine-Russia front where small drones are being used as one-way attack munitions to kill people, destroy lives, destroy infrastructure, and otherwise challenge the Ukrainians or the Russians, either direction. And so this is a new mode of warfare that we have not seen at scale in previous conflicts. There have been some. ISIS used small drones in this way in the early 2010s, when they were challenging the Western-led efforts in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere. But that was relatively minor. Armenia, Azerbaijan went to war a number of years ago, and we started seeing small drones killing major military assets like tanks and that sort of thing. But only in the case of Ukraine-Russia have we seen this at true industrial scale. And what this means is that we need to figure out how to guard against that type of capability in massive swarms of low-cost, attritable drone munitions. So if you think of, like, swarming drones coming at you on the receiving end of an attack, that is terrifying and is very real in the case of Ukraine-Russia. And so what we need in the West is really good drone deterrence and counter-drone capability. And that includes everything up and down the awareness stack to the kinetic defeat of drones. So awareness of, spotting, tracking, identifying threats in that space, and then everything between that, all the way up to taking kinetic action to neutralize or destroy incoming small drones. I mean, it's an incredibly complex problem. It's not just a military problem. Think about how Ukraine a number of months ago infiltrated trucks that then flew small drones on a semi-autonomous basis to destroy major Russian assets way behind enemy lines. That could happen for critical infrastructure here in Middle America. I live in Montana. There are civil and military infrastructure projects here that are highly vulnerable to that kind of an attack and disruption. And it doesn't cost very much money for an adversary to do it. So I think that's the major opportunity space right now, where there aren't good solutions and there need to be, how to detect and defeat small drones.

39:05 Jon McLachlan

That sounds like a huge problem. That's not a weekend project. You can't vibe code that one.

39:11 Garrett Smith

No, no, that's true. You can't vibe code that one. That's true.

39:14 Jon McLachlan

Yeah. Well, Garrett Smith, everyone, the founder and CEO of Reveal Technology. Thank you so much for joining us. Would you like to leave our listeners with any words of wisdom?

39:26 Garrett Smith

Sure. This is a market that is in need of ingenuity, resourcing, talent, energy and focus, and it means something. It's a meaningful place where a lot of opportunity exists and a lot of opportunity for good exists. I would also say that while military technology on its face sounds aggressive, it sounds violent, it sounds whatever it sounds like, that might tickle you wrong, right? That might not be an attractive thing. You might have philosophical or ideological considerations in play if you're thinking about and getting involved with this industry. I'll just say that there are real, true threats out in the world. We do not want to go to war with those threats, with those entities. We would prefer to deter that one. And the only way you deter war is by preparing adequately to win. And so if any of that speaks to you, this is an industry in high need of entrepreneurial talent and ingenuity and resourcing. So bring that talent. Also, our company, Reveal Technology, is in a growth phase. And so if any of what I said was interesting, I'm more than happy to connect you with our recruiting and talent team to come join our mission. This is an exciting place. We have an incredible company culture that is mission-focused. We love each other. We're doing good. And this could be a place for you. So thanks, Jon. Thanks, Sasha, for hosting, and happy to reconvene for a good conversation anytime.

40:47 Jon McLachlan

Thank you, Garrett. I'm super grateful that there are super smart and talented folks busting their chops to solve it and make sure we're always in a good position in terms of defense. With that, thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to another episode of The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. I was one of your hosts, Jon McLachlan, joined with the other host, Sasha Sinkevich, and this is a YSecurity production.