Alex Modon

So all those kind of incentives force the...

adoption of new technology down, like when you get to someone who might have some new piece of technology, it's just super unincentivized because there's no upside.

Like no one actually wins from that environment.

And it looks actually really similar to defense, you know, in a pre-Andral Day, if you will.

Like it is a someone's got budget, I'm going to pay you to- Before like four companies sued the government.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, yeah.

And that's the process of saying, hey, this is like, it's just wrong.

It's just like broken.

And that change just hasn't been able to kind of permeate through to this industry.

And we're kind of left with like, you'd walk into one of these firms and you'd look at people's computers and you'd feel like you're stuck in like the late 90s.

You're like, what is going on here?

So for us, you know, vertical integration is like, you know, we have to own enough of it that we can actually do a clean interface to the industry rather than, you know, trying to pick off one small part and then force people to kind of change and adopt that technology.

So, yeah, it is a process of us kind of owning a big enough portion where we can reasonably do it as a startup and then earn the right to continue to chunk more and more of that from a vertical integration perspective.

Yeah, I mean, most of our team is actually not software engineers.

Like, we're mostly multidisciplinary, mechanical, electrical, civil, lots of simulation controls.

We definitely have people who have, like, AI and software background, but in our experience, it's been much easier to teach a multidisciplinary person the latest and greatest AI tools, you know, than the other way around.

So, yeah, the team construction thing is...

As long as you can kind of think about AI as a core primitive to how we build it into the product, it's much easier to take the domain expert to it.

And the good thing is that like, you know, there are electrical engineers who are like incredibly bright and who love sitting at the cutting edge of a product.