The Exchanges

Q What are some of the structural issues these companies face? Like, why aren't they solving all the problems that some of the new startups are solving?

A Well, that's a good question. I think that, ah, the biggest issue they face is that they kind of wait around for the government to tell them what to build, rather than going out there and trying to invent New solutions for the problems, and, and the government does things on a, along a structured approach, uh, you know, they used to call it the Klinger-Cohen approach, or, uh, sorry, the Klinger-Cohen approach. Klinger-Cohen, uh, was the, the name of the act that set it out with the DoD architectural framework, and various milestone A, milestone B, analysis of alternatives, all these different contracts that go for 10 or 15 years, and by the time they arrive at a solution, it's obsolete already. Because they've taken so long thinking about it and sort of gradually incrementally funding it as opposed to what we did at Epirus and others have done at other startups where they've come in and said, you know what, we have a way to solve this problem. We're going to run as fast as we can in sprints and iterate rapidly to get to the right, what we feel is the right solution. And that requires taking a risk.

AI assessment note: “the biggest issue they face is that they kind of wait around for the government”

Q And Nathan, what do you think about the future of Epris? You're not running it anymore, but you have a lot of really great talent you've hired there. What's it look like?

A I mean, everything I hear is absolutely amazing and great things. I mean, they brought in, it's kind of funny, they brought in my, uh, my old boss, uh, Andy Lowery, who Beau and I started working for all the way, 13 years ago as COO and Chief Product Officer. And, and Andy, Is really good at, you know, driving these things to scale, and he, his, his first company, RealWear, actually just did a, uh, a meaningful SPAC deal, not like a vaporware SPAC like we've seen. I think they're coming out for eight hundred million on the exit in the augmented reality space. Um, so I, I, I, the way I see it, directed energy weapons are a game changer on the battlefield. They don't have any of these magazine depth problems. The, the headlines right now are plagued with ammunition shortages and missile shortages and how are we going to replenish all this? The easy solution. Don't use ammunition at all. And EPRS is key to kind of breaking that wheel, uh, if you will. And then I think on top of that, the commercial applications of high power management for, you know, telecommunications for, for grid infrastructure management, uh, even medical applications open up hundreds of billions of dollars in, in, in total available market that otherwise, uh, would, would be unavailable. So, I mean, I'm really, uh, Honored and thrilled that I got to be part of it at the beginning, and I'm really excited to se…

AI assessment note: “I think that the sky's the limit for this company.”

Q Got it. So you got at Briscoe and you guys built, you learned a lot. I know you ended up replacing yourself in some different ways, moved on to Spartan. Tell us about Spartan Radar. What inspired you to start this? It's an automotive radar company.

A Yes. Yes. So, uh, Spartan, our, our mission is really to make the world's Road safer, um, you know, for both cars, trucks, specialty vehicles, all of it, through better radar software, right? Uh, I had a, uh, about a few months after I had, uh, kind of, uh, left, you know, stepped away from EPRS, um, I got a call from an old mentor of mine, Dr. Theogenes of Batsiglou, who taught me almost everything I know about radar signal processing, and he had retired a couple years before, was working as a consultant, uh, for a couple of, Uh, automotive radar companies. And he said, Nathan, I think I've come up with a way to build an automotive radar that has five times the resolution with a quarter of the parts. And I go, well, that sounds intriguing. Maybe that's something that we can, we can turn into a product. So I looked at it and said, well, you know, maybe there's more to this. So I started diving into it and I realized that they were still building automotive radars in a lot of respects, the same ways that we had built airborne radars, 3040 years before very single function devices that do one thing.

AI assessment note: “I got a call from an old mentor of mine, Dr. Theogenes of Batsiglou”

Q What surprised you, Nathan, about the first time, this is the first time you were starting a company, right? We'd start, you'd helped me before on things, we'd worked on stuff together, you'd been in a big company yourself for a while. What surprised you about doing a startup? Was there anything you didn't expect?

A I think it's the totality of a startup CEO's job, and that you touch everything, and there's really no guidebook For the situations that you encounter a lot of it, you're going to improvise on the fly. You're going to get it wrong. And you got to be willing to basically take a punch and get up and keep going. Right. And, and that took a little bit of adaptability. I mean, I'd been a, I'd been a middle manager before in aerospace, but it's a little bit different from being a middle manager in a, in a, in a process that's clearly defined in your roles known versus CEO of a startup or particularly with eight or 10 people, what you say goes.

AI assessment note: “I think it's the totality of a startup CEO's job, and that you touch everything”

Q And so, so you have a lot of the best people in the world in this area around you. Tell us what advancements are needed, uh, to move from, you know, driver assistance to fully autonomous. How far are we away from fully autonomous vehicles?

A I would say we're at least five years away. I think you're going to see incremental, uh, integration in various, starting with luxury car brands, where you're going to see something like Tesla full self-driving plus plus, um, in what they call various ODDs or operational design domains, or we call them use cases in aerospace. So like, They'll have a number of geo-fenced roads where you can turn it on, et cetera. The big issue that I see, though, is that so much of it is tied to basically taking a brute force big data approach, where it's, let's just gather as much data as we can about the environment with sensors on board the vehicle and everything, rather than trying to use kind of logic and heuristics and kind of how humans drive. Like, I mean, you don't need to know every tree on the road. You just need to pay attention to the thing that's in front of you and the lines going down the road.

AI assessment note: “I would say we're at least five years away.”

Q impressive getting Microsoft involved in that. They're going to be a big player there. I want to ask you a little bit more about autonomy, Nathan. How should we think about the culture and economic impacts of widespread automation? Is this, is this going to exaggerate the gap between the wealthy and the poor? Does it help the disadvantaged? Like, how do you think about this from a sociological perspective?

A I think that you, you, well, there's, there's always, um, You know, consequences to any new technology, and there's resistance to change, but I think about all the people with mobility problems in this, in this world, that if they had an autonomous vehicle, you know, they could get everywhere they need to go and avoid being shut in and, and, you know, handicapped or incapacitated, right? Um, so I, I look at that, and I say, you know, there's just so much in terms of, you know, uh, you know, grocery delivery, or, or, uh, you know, all the lives that I mean, we have 8000 people that die in truck related accidents every year, and it's just, it's, it's unnecessary, and it's wasteful.

AI assessment note: “if they had an autonomous vehicle, you know, they could get everywhere they need to go”