Dino Mavrookas
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Go and search this hundred square mile box in the ocean and take a hundred boats. Well, actually, software, you tell me how many boats I need to go send to that area. Okay, I need a hundred boats. Great, enter. The boats plan their routes. They all work together. They all communicate together. If one boat in that swarm sees a target vessel, that information gets shared between all of the boats
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
and gets passed back to a human operator that is in the loop. or on the loop, excuse me, I even get those terms mixed up and we can go through what those mean.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But the reason why there's been such this bottleneck in resilience, it goes back to this PPB process. Planning, programming, budgeting, and execution. It's a four- to five-year window where... The government will go and plan for 18 months. They'll then go through programming, which means writing the requirements. Okay, what are the things that we actually need the platforms to do?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But it creates a really, really scalable environment where you're now actually able to employ thousands of autonomous systems and control them with very few human operators, reducing the cognitive load, increasing reliability on the battlefield, and most importantly, keeping people very safe out of combat. All that's done through software. So one person can control up to 100 boats? More, more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
There's really no upper limit on how many boats you'll be able to control with our software.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And what that means, so each boat has artificial intelligence that lives at the edge. And it's critical for each platform to be intelligent in its own right. So each boat has to know where it's at in the swarm, what its job in the mission is, how have the sensors and perception and everything else to be able to operate independently.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And then once you have, we call them intelligent individual actors, you can then combine intelligent individual actors to do things very smartly together, right? And that's when the controls become very easy because you don't have to say, Hey, this boat, and this was what used to happen. There's kind of like two ways that autonomy developed. One is simply with waypoint navigation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So for each boat, I have to plan a route. I have to say, go to this waypoint, go to that waypoint, go to that waypoint, go to that waypoint. And then the sensors are something completely different. that doesn't scale with five boats or 10 boats. At some point you lose economies of scale and you just can't plan missions that way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So if I'm sending a hundred boats on a mission, I can't plan as a human. I can't plan the route for each and every boat. I just want to say, go into this area. If you see big Chinese ships coming at you, do this and let me know. Right? So you have 100 boats that each know where each other are. They're not going to crash into each other. They're all working.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They're all saying, okay, let's separate the environment this way. I'm going to search over here. You're going to search over here. We're all looking for this. Okay, I found it. Okay, 10 boats surround it. The other 90 split off. They keep searching. Again, we're just using 100 as a round number because it's easy. But it's how an operator controls
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
All the human operator does is say, authorize to attack. That's it. That's it. So very, very simple controls. Again, all the autonomous behaviors are all baked into the intelligence of not just each individual boat, but then the system of boats and the software running that. And let's use that example. There's a Chinese ship coming across the strait. You have 100 boats that identify it, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
system or the autonomy will notify the human operator. It'll say, okay, before any kinetic action is taken based on government regulations, Here's what we're, we have identified the target. And there's a lot of different ways that we do that. You have to be very thoughtful on how you're communicating information, especially in that type of environment. You might be jammed, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Then they'll go through budgeting and then execution. So again, four year, four to five year window. What that means in actuality, like in practice, we started Saronic in September of 2022. So we're not even three years old yet, which is quite remarkable when we get into all the things that we've done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You might not have full bandwidth to do that. So you have to be able to process information at the edge and only send the, only send like in this case, a small screen, a small picture of the, the target vessel. You don't have to send live streaming data feeds. So, okay, yes, approve authorized strike.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Then the tactics, how they're both split up, how they attack, all this is programmed in software.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You train the AI models around a variety of different scenarios so that the AI actually learns how to react. It's the same technology that's in a Tesla self-driving car. The road is never the same any two times that that car is on the road. A person might come out. A biker might come from here. But the car, the model, the AI model knows how to react to a variety of situations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And the more that it's in those situations, the more that it actually learns. So, and that's the importance of being able to like update and iterate on your software is if we're actually in a conflict with China, like the models were running on day one. won't even be the models we're running on day 25 or day 10, right? Because you can update and train the models in real time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So how do you get a baseline? I mean, do you just war game thousands and thousands of different scenarios? We have thousands of hours of testing. We invest in testing very, very heavily. Like we're out on the water seven days a week. We have thousands of hours under all of our platforms. I mean... We have our own testing facility in Galveston. We're opening a testing facility in San Diego.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We invest a lot of money into testing, reliability, and developing our autonomy to a way that it's going to be what the Navy needs when the Navy needs it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Yeah. So it goes down and it comes back to range and payload capacity. So the six foot boat has 30 nautical mile range with a 40 pound payload capacity. The 14 foot boat has a 300 nautical mile range with a 200 pound payload capacity. And our 24 foot boat has a 1,000 nautical mile range with a 1,000 pound payload capacity. So that's how far it can go and that's how much you can carry.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
If you think about the mission sets at 1,000 nautical miles actually opens up and how capable our 24 foot platform is, it's, Actually mind-blowing right the speedboats that we use in the SEAL teams In a four or five hundred I forget the range actually, but even if you're going 20 or 30 knots for eight hours You're going 240 miles at 30 knots for eight hours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We are... We're the fastest growing defense tech company in history. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you. There's a lot of, I mentioned SpaceX, Palantir, and we're not where we are today without the strides that those companies have made. But going back to the process. So we started the company in September of 22.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's a quarter of the range of our power. You don't want to be on a boat for eight hours just to go 200. That's a long time for a human to do anything. And especially getting beat up by the sea.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
On top of that, you can make these platforms much more rigorous to Seastate and everything else, where we were operating with SEAL teams, doing some testing, and the boats that they used couldn't keep up with our boats. Because there was no human that had to take the shock load coming off of a six-foot wave. So the capabilities open up dramatically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And going back to earlier, without getting into too specific of any concepts of a con ops or anything, you're seeing a lot of the ways that these platforms can be used in Ukraine. And we built just a completely modular platform, both hardware and software. And that's critical, right? What that means is you can put any payload you want. Sensors, electronic warfare, kinetic capabilities.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You basically put whatever you want on the platform as long as it fits within the range and payload characteristics of what the boat actually delivers. That's why we built it so modularly. Again, military and commercial, if we stay just on the military side, it might be this op one day, it might be that op the next day. You got to be able to swap it out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
that's where i'll be vague and i'll kind of leave it to whatever the military wants to put on the platforms the military can put on the plot again we're selling we're building a defense company um doesn't mean we don't have commercial customers doesn't mean that we're not building for the commercial market but what it does mean is that from a mentality perspective we're building things that are going to protect this country and that is
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
One of the things I was really, really clear about up front, and it drove a lot of the culture within our company. I told people, look, if you don't want to invest in a boat that might blow up one day, this isn't the company for you. Because we're building things that the military wants to put on it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And the last thing I wanted to do was create a Google situation where Google's working on this AI program and all their employees boycott the company. Like that's not what we're building. So modular platform and literally anything can go on it. We've done aerial drone, like it's just endless. How are they fueled? So six foot boats, all electric.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
14-foot boats, hybrid diesel electric, and 24-foot boats, all diesel. Everything above 24 feet will be diesel. You just don't get the energy density from batteries that you get out of diesel fuel. Again, range, payload capacity are really important. Turns out diesel fuel's just super energy dense, and that's what works the best, and that's what accomplishes the mission. That's what gives us range.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The planning phase for the government, now there's very distinct buckets of when this is done. The planning phase for the fiscal year 2024 budget had already ended, which means we started the company in 22. We had no ability to influence the 2024 budget. Are you serious? Dead serious. This is how the process works.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So diesel's really the primary fuel source.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Six feet, 14 feet, 24 feet and on up. Right. Um, you know, think of the 24 foot boat. We have eight cameras on it, 360 degree view perception built into the autonomy. It's just the complete, complete awareness of the environment. Now what we're building next, we're building a 40 foot, 60 foot and 150 foot autonomous ship.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So yeah, our vision is not to have any more buoys out there protecting things. It's having very, very smart robotic systems that can have a lot of persistence in the maritime domain and deliver complete domain awareness through advanced sensors and the most advanced software in the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That is a key point that needs to be focused on up front. That's why range is so important. Where are you launching from? Where are you deploying from? How do you get there? You know, our 24 foot boat was made to be really logistically simple, right? It fits within a 40 foot shipping container. So put it in the shipping container, ship it wherever you want, push it out of the back,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
off it goes you know um and so you got to think about that stuff yeah i think how do these platforms whether it's 24 foot boat or now 150 foot ship how does that 150 foot ship get to the other side of the world does it have the range that has the fuel can you just sail it there where is it sailing from right that's its mission how does it get there
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Too many people in industry hand wave that problem. Like, oh, I'm just gonna make cool stuff. And this is a government's problem, they'll figure it out. Or I'm gonna go make something cool and it's gonna go 50 miles. Well, you better have a plan how to get that thing into theater that is on the other side of the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And because of advances in hypersonics and other things that China has, we can't get that close. So that's why when we look at even our six-foot boat, and I'll be the first person to say it, even our six-foot boat that has a 30 nautical mile range, it's like, what are the real use cases for that? Right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It might not be certain con ops in the Indo-Pacific because 30 nautical miles, this isn't enough. So you can't hand wave these things. You can't pretend like they don't exist. And we work with the Navy. We're actually helping the Navy figure out what is all of the maintenance and sustainment and logistics and shipping and everything else that goes into actually
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Fielding these types of platforms in the fleet so you can change the way that our fleet fights. It's not, hey, I just want to buy some boats. It's just not that easy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I saw this. It was like a 737 and all the drones.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It is something we put a lot of thought and energy into and as a company and as a country, we need to figure out going back to the Cuba example, right? We're fighting, we could be fighting something in their backyard, it's not our backyard. How do we get it all there? How do we make sure we have the superiority? Let's have the deterrence in the first place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They were on the, they being the government, were on the tail end of planning for the 2025 budget, which means you have to get in and think about if you have an 18-month planning process and somebody comes to you three weeks before it's over and says, hey, squeeze me into this planning process. I want to influence the 2025 budget.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Let's get the deterrence in place so that we don't have to fight at all. That's the whole goal behind us building what we're building, how fast we're building it, and at what scale so that you can actually have the deterrence in place. You can stop this conflict from ever happening. If China wakes up and they're like, you know what? We're going to win today.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's going to be a bad day because that's the day they're actually going to pick the fight. So our job is to help avoid that. What kind of stuff can these detect?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I mean, you can detect anything that you can put any sensor on the platform. And if you talk about how anti-submarine warfare is done today, it's pretty archaic. A helicopter or aircraft will typically fly off an aircraft carrier, drop little buoys in the water. Those little buoys will listen for things. And then they'll try to identify things. And then if they're found, they're found.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's not super efficient. So you can think about, and this isn't anything we're doing today, but you can think about an autonomous boat with sonar attached to the bottom that's just listening for things under the water and able to relocate and move around completely autonomously.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And you can put hundreds or thousands of these sensors out there and create a listening network for submarine detection. That could be really powerful. Again, not anything we're doing today, but it's something that As we get into, again, like I said, we're just scratching the surface on how these autonomous systems can be used and employed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Well, the autonomous vehicles themselves can be the logistical vehicles, right? Our 150-foot ship can carry cargo containers, right? 240-foot fully loaded cargo containers. And 150 feet is not going to be the last ship that we build. So we'll build larger ships that can carry more things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
again being completely modular like those ships can carry containers of cargo you can carry containers of our boats you can just have our boats on the back you can have aerial drones on the back you can really integrate anything you want into them and so why would you ship anything on a manned platform when we can't build enough of them in the first place? We just don't have enough manned ships.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we don't have the people to man them even if we did. So you have to solve this problem with autonomy. And going back to the shipbuilding discrepancy with the Chinese that we were talking about earlier, the only way The only way you solve the problem is by building autonomously because the platforms we have today are so complex, so expensive and so exquisite
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And when you look at what the Chinese have done, they subsidized their entire shipbuilding industry and they have people to just throw at the problem and man shipyards to the max, right? Our workforce has shrunk dramatically. That's something we at Saronic are going to be laser focused on rebuilding, like changing the culture around shipbuilding. But the only way you really...
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
counter the chinese in terms of mass in terms of real shipbuilding capacity is through autonomy and it's because you can strip all of the complexity out of the ship right we talked about aircraft aircraft carriers are amazing they're expensive they take a long time to build but they're incredible. They're feats of engineering.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I mean, these things are 24 feet tall or 24 stories tall, excuse me, 24 stories tall. They're a thousand feet long. You're landing jets on a ship. Like think about that, right? They house 5,000 people. There's eight different aircraft squadron. There's eight nuclear reactors on a carrier. They have four props that are 32 tons each. Each prop weighs 32 tons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So these things are massive feats of engineering. But think about all the complexity that has to be layered into that to support all of those people and all of those different missions, even down to feeding people. You feed 5,000 people for six months, it's like 5 million meals. It's insane, right? It's insane.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
This is the overall PPBE process that the military goes through. So when we started the company, we were really looking at, this is absent absent other contracting mechanisms that I'll talk about through DIU and otherwise, because there's a thing called OTAs, which is other transactional authorities, that actually gives the government the ability to move very, very quickly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Now, take all that out and all you have is a ship, some engines, sensors, payload, and a computer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I went under the water by the end of the year. Wow, right? We have an eight or nine month development cycle. Like that's, and that's on our first prototype. We're trying to get this down to weeks and then have multiple production lines. We want to be able to build hundreds of autonomous ships every year. Like that's, that's our vision.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so, and how we're doing that is, so we have a site in Franklin, Louisiana. We acquired a shipyard. Phenomenal shipyard. We're gonna invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three or four years into that shipyard to scale capacity there. And we're gonna be able to build, we're targeting 50 a year at that shipyard. Which in and of itself is this massive step up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I mean, we just talked 2023 was a net negative four. Net negative. And we built nine ships the whole year. You know, we have a plan to retire 19 over the next 24 months. So we keep going down. And the United States, this is an interesting thing. So the United States has 296 ships in its fleet. We were actually passed by the Chinese four years ago in terms of fleet count. We have a stated goal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We had a stated goal of 355 ships. that goal was increased to 381 last year, even though we keep declining and can't execute on the 355 that we had for 10 years. Assuming that we could execute on it, there's a 30-year plan that'll cost the taxpayer $1.2 trillion or $40 billion a year to execute on a plan that we can't execute anyway. But that's the shipbuilding plan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's how you get from 296 just to 381. Imagine how many autonomous ships that you can have, right? And the capabilities and how much more powerful the Navy will be with manned and unmanned ships working together, and you have much more unmanned ships patrolling the waters, all being controlled by humans. You keep people safe. Like, that's the other thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I sit in front of congressmen and women and senators, and I go through the stats that we just went through. Like, here's why we can't compete with the Chinese. Because the Secretary of Defense just came on, just like I was on the news, he said, Yeah, the Chinese can take out all our aircraft carriers in 20 minutes with their hypersonic missiles. So here's all the facts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Like that's the Secretary of Defense. That's not me making up a number. Here's the shipbuilding. Here's why if we lose an aircraft carrier, forget about the 5,000 people for a second. You can't get another one. So these are just facts. But take all that and throw it out the window, right? We now as a country have the technology, which means we have the capability to send robots into combat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But within that process, we were really looking at, when we started the company in 22, we were really looking at 2020-26 and 2027 budget. That's four years. Now, an investor looking at that that says, how am I going to make money? Why would I invest in this company? It's so hard. And on top of that, you have had so few companies that have broken through and there was
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That should mean that we have the responsibility to do that. No longer should we send people if we have the opportunity to send a robot, whether it's a robotic ship, whether it's a robotic plane. We have a responsibility to keep people safe. I mean, you've seen it, I've seen it. Combat's real. It's not what you see on a Hollywood movie.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's not anything you want people to have to go, I don't want my son to have to go through it. That's why we're building what we're building. And so we go through the stats all day long. You're not getting another aircraft carrier. We still need aircraft carriers, but let's keep those 5,000 people safe. Let's keep them out of the weapons engagement zone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Let's have them controlling thousands of autonomous boats and ships and everything else that are patrolling the waters and overwhelming our officers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
TBD, who knows, at the pace that we're moving, I think going to your point, anything's possible. Right now, we're focused on building the platforms, right? And going back to the shipbuilding and our ambition in shipbuilding, it's really staggering to think about. Even I pause and really digest what I'm saying. Right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But if you think about the Chinese and the numbers we were throwing out earlier, they have 23 million gross tons of shipbuilding capacity. The United States has 100,000 gross tons of shipbuilding capacity. Just total shipbuilding. I can build 23 million tons, I can build 100,000. That means I can build a whole lot of boats or ships and I can build very few. 230 times.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
what Charonic is doing through our Franklin, Louisiana site, and also through Port Alpha, which is our vision. And we're working on this now. So we're going through site selection. We're going through build plans. We're not waiting. We're doing it right now where we're going to go invest billions of dollars to completely revitalize the shipbuilding industry in this country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We're going to create the most advanced shipyard anywhere in the world. And our target is 10 million gross tons of shipbuilding capacity. So now when you take that in context, we're talking about building, just surrounding, taking the United States from 100,000 to 10 million and 100,000. You're talking about taking the deficit with Chinese from 230 to one to like two and a quarter to one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But because you're building autonomous platforms and they're still building man platforms, you can actually build at a much higher rate. That's what we need in this country. That's how we don't want to match the Chinese. We want to win. We want to beat them. We want to create that deterrence so that they're like, yeah, we're not going to pick that fight today.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's the capability we need in this country. And we're looking at bringing the shipbuilding industry back in a way that we haven't seen in this country since World War II. This is SpaceX. This is SpaceX. The space industry was dead. Yeah, you had Primes. You had Primes in the market. Boeing had a space program.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
SpaceX and Boeing in 2016 each got contracts to send astronauts to the International Space Station. So SpaceX got a $2.4 billion contract. Boeing got a $4.2 billion contract. In 2020, SpaceX sent the first astronaut at the International Space Station, and they've done 45 missions since 2020, just to the International Space Station. Boeing is delayed, over budget, and keep failing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So the large primes aren't getting it done. And we've seen this now play out in space industry. And you're gonna see the same thing play out in the shipbuilding industry, where again, I know it sounds crazy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That a two and a half year old company is the company that's going to invest billions of dollars and recreate the shipbuilding industry and build this shipyard from the ground up and build thousands of autonomous boats and hundreds of autonomous ships. And this is going to be the future of the Navy. Sounds crazy because it is crazy. But it doesn't mean it's not true.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I'm sure they are. I'm sure they are. But I don't think it's malicious. I think in some cases... some primes genuinely believe that they can go and do this. And in our, in our case, I think there's some primes that genuinely believe they can go and build autonomous ships at the speed and scale that the Navy needs and that there's no way that Serana can do it. And that's okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
borderline, I don't want to call it monopolistic behavior, but that's how the primes acted. But that's how the system evolved into. There were five primes in 2023. 50% of the $411 billion of government contracts that year went to those five companies. 70% of that, 70% of those awards through those companies had no competition. They were sole sourced.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
There should be other people in the market doing things. Like, The government shouldn't shut down, the Navy shouldn't stop and say, hey, Dino tells a great story, we're good, they're gonna reinvent shipbuilding, and everybody all stop. Charonix got it. No. Proof's gonna be in the pudding. Who's gonna actually go and do it? Who's gonna put their money where their mouth is, and who's gonna execute?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I'll tell you, we are. So the only thing we ever ask for is, yeah, let the Prime lobby. They should be telling their story. They should be trying to build things. Keeps us hungry, keeps us paranoid. But don't create a monopolistic environment where things are awarded without competition. Just let us compete fairly. And if a prime beats us and you want to go buy that ship, you should do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's what is best for the country. The best thing for the country is having an open competition, seeing who can actually do it, who can stand behind what they were gonna say. And I'll tell you, over the last three years, every single thing we have told a customer, we have stood behind and we have delivered every time. On time, on budget, with zero exceptions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And that is something I take very seriously and we will never, never waver on. And it's, the Navy's not used to that. I mean, just look at the shipbuilding programs today. I mean, they're all, I think they're literally all delayed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Yes and no. Yes and no. It goes back to the modularity of it. As long as you have, in your example, like weapon systems, what weapon systems can you put on the boat? We basically say, look, it's 24 feet long. Here's the length of our payload bay. Here's the width of our payload bay. And it can carry 1,000 pounds. What fits inside of that? Again, because it's not just weapon systems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's built for defense and commercial applications. And then, of course, we talk to the various customers and weapon systems. We talk to the military. We say, give us the universe of things that you would want to put on it, just like any product. You go and do the customer discovery. How do you think you could potentially want to use this? And then you build the most modular platform that you can.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
both hardware and software. So not only do you have to integrate from a hardware perspective, which we've made very easy, but you have to tie whatever that payload is into the software and autonomy so that it can then be controlled the same way that the boats are controlled. So unless you can integrate all of that together very quickly What's the point? So that's why we made the platforms module.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's why we focused on software first. That's why we focused on a very universally designed hardware platform. It's like, look, I don't actually know all the weapon systems that the military may want to put on this one day. So would you... I don't think the military knows, for that matter. Probably not. Right? Because, again, we're just starting to use autonomous systems on the battlefield.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's just... We're just scratching the surface of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So coming into this market, the only thing that I've been kind of evangelizing is let defense tech startups that are showing that they can build real capability at scale, able to attract the funding that's needed, just Let those companies compete fairly for these large programs. I'm not saying, don't hand us anything. Just because we're a startup doesn't mean we're any good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So we try to keep the engineering work out of the government's hands. Not saying they're bad engineers, but they're just not an organization that's set up to scale, right? That doesn't mean we're only going to be the ones doing the integration work, right? There could be a variety of ways that... sort of that side of the business works, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We talked about the large primes a lot, but they do make good systems. They do make weapons systems and things that the military wants to put on our boats. So maybe we partner with the large primes, and they send their people here to help with the integration, right? They send their people to Saronic. Or we're working with the government, and the government's like, hey, we want this on the boat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Great. The government may send some people to Saronic. And, you know, we're not really tied into this is how it has to happen. And it only has to be us. But when you want it at speed and scale, having the engineers with that mindset running the efforts, because here's the thing. You could build a thousand boats, but if your integrations aren't set up to say, and it takes you, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
you're building a boat every eight hours, but it takes you six months to do an integration, who really cares? Because at the end of the day, the capability that's rolling off the line is six months. That's the longest power in your chain. And that has to be at the same rate of our boat manufacturing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so that's what we have to work with all of our partners on to make sure that we're doing these integrations in the, quote unquote, the Saronic way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So there's a brain. The brain of the vessel lives in the boat. Okay. So it's critical. It is absolutely critical. And I'm going to hammer this point. The intelligence of the platform and the mission capability has to live at the edge. And let me explain why. So I'll back up a little bit, and I'll talk a little bit about the different types of autonomy and kind of where we're at.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I mentioned these terms earlier. Man on the loop, or man in the loop, man on the loop, and man out of the loop. What are they, and what are we building at Saronic? Man in the loop, think of a remote control. So this is your predator drone. It's actually... one, it's actually many to one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So it's the opposite of what we're building because you have one person on a joystick and you have three or four people behind that person reading all the sensor data coming off of the aircraft saying, hey, I'm seeing this over here, turn left. I'm seeing that over there, turn right. It actually takes about four or five people to pilot one Predator drone because a human's controlling everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's just, they're just not actually in the cockpit. They're in a connex box in Las Vegas. So that's man in the loop. Then there's man on the loop, which then flips that. And you go from many to one to one to many. And that's what we're building at Ceronic. It's how do you have a ton of systems out in the field that are all collecting information. The information is processed at the edge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
then pass up into a universal kind of mission planner control system, and then shown to a human in a very condensed fashion that reduces the cognitive load on the human, not trying to interpret or digest all the information coming off of thousands of sensors across hundreds of boats, right? So one person, not really in the loop, but on the loop saying, oh, check, thread over there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Authorize to proceed. Check. Human has control of the platform. And in all of these things, I'm going to be clear, humans always have control. Humans are making decisions where they go. It's just how far along the, where in the kill chain are you putting approval processes? Then there's men out of the loop, which means the autonomous system's just alone and unafraid and doing whatever it wants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Doesn't mean because we have a bunch of money, we can go and execute. But as we prove things along the way, let us compete for larger and larger contracts and larger and larger programs. And that's what we focus on. And we've really built that into the core DNA of our company, where... I just say, everything we say we're going to do, we're going to do it. Beautiful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we actually have these types of systems, like our Aegis weapon systems on our destroyers that are for incoming air defense. Those are out of the loop. You've said it on the show, and I'm... simplifying this obviously, but you put it on the ship, you press a button, you enable it, and then if aerial threats come in, you're gonna shoot them down, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And you can imagine, if an aerial threat, if a missile was coming in, say there's like five missiles, you don't want a person to be like, Oh, yep, that's a missile. Shoot it down. Oh, yep, that's another one. Oh, shit, here comes 10 more. Yeah, right. You just want a computer to say, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And all the missiles get shot down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So there's men in the loop, on the loop, and out of the loop. The reason why the AI living on the edge is so critical is because in any type of real conflict, and you're seeing this in Ukraine, is there's going to be massive amounts of electronic warfare and there's going to be communications jamming. So not only does that remote control system not scale,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
because you can't control hundreds or thousands of boats altogether with people sitting next to each other trying to figure out what each other are doing. You just can't do it. Not only does it not scale, in a scenario where there's real jamming or electronic warfare, those radio links that are from the joystick to the platform go dead. And now that's rendered useless.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So you need autonomous systems with intelligence living at the edge that don't require constant connectivity, back to a satellite or human or whatever, able to know what to do. What's the mission? How do I process information? What information do I have to get sent back to the headquarters before I do the next step? What happens if I don't hear from headquarters? Okay, great.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Oh, I only have five kilobytes of bandwidth. Let me process this information down. Let me shrink it. Let me send only the most important information necessary for the mission back. So all of those things are hypercritical. All of that has to be defined through software. And that's fundamentally why man in the loop just does not work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Now, the difference between man on the loop and man out of the loop is really just
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
approvals it's really just a government regulation and policy that needs to get set and the argument that i hear from folks is okay do we really want robots making decisions on who'd kill no no but don't think of it like that because it's not the right way to think about it if you're in a combat scenario the robot isn't deciding who's Do I get employed here? Do I put a weapon system in this area?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
No. The human saying, I'm going to put a weapon system there. It's just, am I putting a smart weapon system or a dumb weapon system? What type of weapon system? Am I firing a torpedo that I can't call back? Or am I using an autonomous boat with other autonomous systems that I can call back because I can still control it through software.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So all of these things come into play when you're saying, OK, how should we really think about autonomy? And even man out of the loop autonomy, you're still saying, OK, this boat's going to go in the water. It's going to patrol this area. And if this type of threat comes in, then you have authority to execute. And you're just giving the approvals all the way through the end of the kill chain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So that's all man out of the loop is. You're basically just approving the entire kill chain at the beginning of the mission.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Look, I understand the need to have the approval process baked in. But when you get into comm, I mean, you've watched ISR feeds. You've seen how crappy they are. You've seen what kind of like smokes. Do I want like the most advanced computer vision in the world that's living on the edge saying, yes, that's the right target? Or do I want a human that's watching a game
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
If we say we're going to deliver this on this timeline for this price, that's what we're doing. Come hell and high water. And we have the team that is bought into that. And you know what? the Navy's actually not used to that. They're not used to anything coming on time, anything coming on budget.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
the worst bandwidth video feed that you can ever imagine with smoke and everything else around it, trying to say, yeah, I think it's the target. I mean, it's something we're gonna have to get comfortable with over time, but again, it's not, oh, we're just employing robots and robots are making the decisions on warfare, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Those are the types of autonomy and that's how they're employed on the battlefield.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You really can't. We're focused on cybersecurity. We use military-grade encryption. When you're operating in the military domain, you have to operate with the cybersecurity protocols of the United States government. So those are standard. Those are just, you have to have them, otherwise you're not being utilized in the field. So that is something we take very, very seriously.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We even take the cybersecurity of our company very seriously because Let's be clear, China as a nation state, they've been hacking into companies to steal secrets for years. That's a well-known fact.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So we have to think about not just how do we protect our solution, our products in the water, and we talk about how we do that with government standards and encryption and everything else, but how do we protect the company? The Chinese aren't, I mean, I hate to use this term, but they're not fighting fairly. And there's no such thing as a fair fight. You know that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So they're trying to take every advantage that they can. And if that means they can hack into our company and delay our production by six months, they might do that. So we have to make sure that we're protected 360 degrees, product, company, infrastructure, people. I mean, myself and the entire leadership team were, what's the word I'm looking for? We're basically banned from China.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I forget I'm blanking on the word. But they put out a term like our company and our leadership team is basically banned from China. Congratulations. I know. I was like, what the hell took him so long? But if I took a trip to Beijing right now, it would probably be a one-way trip with a lot of questions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
and putting in the hardware and software that you guys have developed to operate these ships without human manning no no no it would for a few reasons for a few reasons one and then i'll talk about two one is it'd be it'd be way cheaper to just build their ships It would actually be way cheaper than to go in and try to retrofit the entire naval fleet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so by just doing what we said we're going to do over and over and over again, those opportunities to compete for larger programs will be there because how can you not let a company like Ceronic compete at this point?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I can't even ballpark the amount of work and cost that that would entail. Not to mention the complexity behind actually integrating with hardware that wasn't selected purposefully to be controlled by software. So one of the things that we do is hardware software co-design, where our software engineers are picking all of the engines with our hardware engineers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Like, yeah, okay, I can control that engine through software because it has an API and it has this and it has that. Okay, cool, yes, you hardware engineer can now select that. That hasn't been done on naval ships today. Secondly, and more importantly, I am a very, we need manned ships. We still need the Navy ships that we have. Why do we need manned ships?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Well, China's not the only adversary we're facing, and it's not the only way to project power. The only way to project power is not just through autonomy. Think about aircraft carriers, for example. You go back to, well, let's go ahead. December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor. Before December 7th, the center of naval warfare revolved around the battleship.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
December 7th, carrier-based aviation really became the center of naval warfare. And you think about what carrier-based aviation provides the country. Its ability to put 5,000 people Eight different squads of aircraft anywhere in the world where we don't have a base and project power.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Mm-hmm That's important, but we could do that with drones Do that with drones We Don't right now we need people and get his men and unmanned teaming and I don't think over the next call it I 30 to 40, I don't think we're gonna see a world where it's like truly like robots on robots. Like people still make decisions, right? And there's a really important aspect.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Like, look, we're building autonomous aircraft, but we're also building next generation fighters, right? And we need both of those things as a country. It's not an or conversation. It really is an end conversation. We need this and this. Where it becomes an or conversation is really like, okay, do I really need that 12th aircraft carrier that costs $13 billion?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Or do I only need five aircraft carriers and I can save $50 billion on new construction, and I can build, say, $50 billion a year on maintenance, and I'm making up numbers, obviously, and I can now put that money towards autonomous systems. So what's the right mix to have the most powerful fleet and the most powerful military in the world?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I don't think it's saying zero people, but I don't think it's, We need 381 man ships either. So it's some mix in between.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
From a production rate perspective, I mean, we have the capacity to build hundreds, like literally hundreds of boats right now in our facility in Austin. We only have 65,000 square, or no, sorry. Our main manufacturing facility is 65,000 square feet. We have over 150,000 square feet in total online, but we're opening a facility that's 420,000 square feet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The main manufacturing facility would be close to 120,000 square feet. So we're 3X-ing the space that we have available. And we're going from hundreds to thousands of boats per year. So that's just- Thousands of boats per year. Thousands. And that'll be online by the end of the year. That is coming online very, very quickly. So we have that capability in Austin.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's for, call it small unmanned surface vessels. That's just one facility. It's just one facility. It's just one facility. That's for our smaller vessels.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
As many as it takes to put them in and out of the water. That's it. That's it. That's that's the logistic piece of it. How do you launch and recover? one person five years from now will be able to control every single boat in the water. Now, if they're on the same mission, right? If you say these 2000 boats are all doing the same thing, all patrolling the same area, we're on the same mission.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Now, if you have 200 boats in Taiwan Strait and you have 200 boats in the Red Sea and you just, you can have different operators for different mission sets in different areas, obviously. But the software is limitless. The software is increasing at a pace that I think it's hard to comprehend. And I'm not just talking about, I'm talking about software and technology in general.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It is a company that knows how to navigate Capitol Hill and the senior leaders within the Navy. So anytime you're looking at influencing defense acquisitions, there's a few different buckets of folks you need to influence without getting too far in the weeds. One's the war fighters, two are the senior leaders in the military, and three is Congress. because Congress decides the budget.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
ChatGPT over the last, I don't even know the timeframe, year or two, improved like 4,000%. I don't think I've ever seen anything in my life improve 4,000%. So that's how fast technology is evolving right now. And we're putting all of that tech into our boats. So the capabilities of the software quite literally are limitless.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I think it's got to be much lower. That's our goal. That should be the Navy's goal. All the services have recruiting issues right now. Nobody's fully manned. And if we're competing against a country with 1.2 billion people that are able to mandate military service, How do you compete with that unless you're adopting autonomous platforms, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And when you talk about cost drivers and how you're more efficient for the taxpayer, and then again, keeping people safe, I don't know the right mix of how many people do we need total in the Navy as we adopt these. Nobody knows. The Navy doesn't know because we don't have them yet. And so that's okay, right? How do you figure out all the con ops?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
How do you figure out what you need 10 years from now? You just, you start doing it. And it all kind of, you figure it out as you go. The, hey, we'll sit around and we'll figure this out on a whiteboard and we'll build PowerPoint slides for four years, that needs to stop. So what the ratio or what overall Navy Manning looks like 10 years from now? I don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But the number of humans that will be put potentially at risk will be exponentially lower.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Well, it goes back to my point earlier. I'm firmly not in the camp of we need less manned Navy ships right now. I don't think that's the right answer right now. Maybe 10, 20 years from now as everything evolves. We still have the most powerful Navy in the world. If we went to war with China tomorrow, would we win? Yeah, 100%.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Well, I don't know about 100%, but I believe, like Dino's belief, 100%, right? Because we're the United States. Now, maybe that's naive view. Maybe that's a disputed view. But I believe we have the most powerful military in the world still today. I don't think the Chinese ships have the capabilities that we have. I don't think their sailors have the resolve that we have. Right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But the trend lines are going in the wrong direction. Completely wrong direction. To where I don't know how much longer that's true for. Right? And so what we need to do is not replace and shrink the Navy that we have. It's augment and force multiply the Navy that we have. It's make our Navy 10 times more powerful, 100 times more powerful through autonomy so that we can
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So what that means is, and you just walk through it, one, you have to go to the war fighters and say, look, we actually have the best products and solutions. These things are going to save your lives. These are the things you want to use tactically in the field. You can trust them, you can rely on them, and you have the actual warfighter say, yes, okay, those are the best products, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
crush any hope the Chinese have of starting a conflict with us. That's the goal, right? I think it's a long time out. And I take your point, a flag officer, are they protecting their jobs and their domains? And is Congress really going to be like, let's go shrink the Navy? I don't even know if that's the answer. Right now, we're just focused on how do we make the Navy more powerful?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
How do we augment the ships that we have in the fleet? Because we can't get more of them, because we can't build them. And how do we keep the people safe? And how do we do that through autonomy? Look, we talked about the trade-offs earlier. What's the right ratio, right? Is it? Okay, I don't need the next aircraft.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I mean you're talking about the ability to 10x the capability of the entire fleet for the cost of a few ships like Single-digit ships that we can't really build anyway. So I
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The ability to do that at a much faster pace, at a much more economical price point, it's just, there's no, and so the universal view that I'm hearing, both within the Navy and Congresses, and I'm completely aligned with is like, there's just no other way. There's no other way. We need this. Right, and now it's our job, Seronic, Go get it done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We have to keep putting our money where our mouth is. We have to keep proving it out every single day because the country needs it. The world needs it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Yeah. We'll have it there. For sure. I told you that not just the commercial use cases. One of our key ones can be protecting your new studio. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
you're experiencing and and i just love it man so thank you thank you for the time well thank you for having me again it's an honor to be here and it's so exciting to see all the things that you're doing as well so keep crushing it and i'm looking forward to the next one you too thank you awesome man
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Then you have to go to the senior leaders and really align on, are those products solving strategic initiatives of the Pentagon? And really, in order to get attention, and you know this from the themes, and I'll use a silly example to articulate this, But it has to be a, oh shit, we're screwed if we don't do this type of strategic initiative.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's not just, oh, we can do this better, or there's a slightly better solution. It has to be not only 10x better, probably 100x better, but also we can't keep things in the status quo.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And the example I always use is we used embitterers in the SEAL teams. They were the radios that we carried in our gear. They were the size of a brick. They weighed five pounds. They had to be rated for all these different things. We're in the middle of Iraq and Afghanistan, and this had to be rated to dive to 50 meters. And it always stuck me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They're not messing around. They are investing heavily. The government's pouring billions and billions of dollars. If we think China's not on a wartime footing right now, we're sticking our heads in the sand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And then I'd go back to my hunt, and we have an iPhone. And I'm like, there's a technological gap there. I'm not saying we should carry iPhones on ops, but certainly there's a better radio than this thing that was built in 1970. Yeah. But because it still worked and there wasn't a, we're screwed if we don't change it, it really didn't drive change.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So if you're solving very important strategic initiatives of the senior leaders that are critical to their mission, along with getting the buy-in from the war fighters, you can then go to Congress and say, Congress,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We have the buy-in from the war fighters, and we have the senior admirals that are not only saying, we need this as a strategic initiative, but are also writing requirements and going through their whole process to say, we need to adopt this into, in our case, it's the fleet, or we're actually working, we're trying to work with the army and the Marine Corps and everything else.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You can then go to Congress and then lobby for budget and say, look, the military needs this. They're saying they want it. Can we appropriate money so that they can actually buy it? And if you have buy-in of those three groups, Then you go and work with the program offices and the contracting officers and you see if you can actually get a deal done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But we had to understand how to navigate that ecosystem in parallel to building the best technology. Because if we built the best technology and we weren't working on all of this, that again is a three to five year process. It means you build the technology, one, two years, and then you start the process, now you're five to seven years down the road.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And you can't afford those types of time lapses. So we had to do both of those things in parallel. And I mean, I was on Capitol Hill two weeks after we started the company with PowerPoint slides of an electric surfboard with a quadcopter on top of it. And this was just an image and a picture that I kind of just made up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I was like, went to artists, render and like, go make this real, make this look cool. It wasn't our actual product yet, but it was a way to start telling the story of, hey, this is the future of the Navy. It's a treatable autonomous platforms built very economically and very large scale. And this is what we need and why. And I started telling that story on day one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
As our engineers were figuring out, talking to customers, both within the military and actually commercial customers as well. We can talk about the commercial market and why that's important. It's really important to make sure that you're building for a wide array of customers so that then the military can have the best products with a reliable supply chain that can be built economically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You build it so specific for the government, it becomes very bespoke and then you can't build enough of them. So then they don't get what they want anyway. So we built for a variety of military and commercial customers up front, completely modular platforms that could be adapted to a variety of uses and missions. But the whole point is you had to do that in parallel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so I'm taking this slide deck, and I'm walking around Capitol Hill saying, this is the future of the Navy. And at the time, it was electric surfboard. I'm like, OK. It wasn't quite the future of the Navy. But it got people's attention, it got us started, and then our engineers worked with those variety of customers to understand, okay, where's that intersection, right? What's actually needed?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
What are the most important things in terms of range, payload capacity, power supply, mission sets, payloads? And then don't tell me what you want me to build you. Just let me understand your problems. And then we'll build the most efficient solution.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And one of the things we did very early on to start actually understanding that was we signed a contract with the Navy within 90 days of starting the company. It was with the Naval Postgraduate School. It was a cooperative research and development agreement. So completely unpaid. But we knew we needed access to the customer. We knew we had to have those conversations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Because the last thing we wanted to do was build a product in a black box And then two years later, like, yeah, okay, whatever. It goes 50 miles. I need it to go 100. Who cares? Yeah, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's starting to come together. I think the important part in understanding the senior leaders is there's actually a bifurcation where there's two splits within the military and within the services. and we'll just use the Navy as an example. There's the war fighter, there's the combatant commands, so Indo-PACOM, UCOM, NORTHCOM, AFRICOM, CENTCOM.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Those are the admirals in charge of fighting combat engagements in those theaters. And then there's the admirals that are in charge of man training equipping. Those are two completely separate structures and entities. So when this admiral says, I want this to fight with,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
There has to be another admiral that goes through the same process, takes those inputs from all the different senior leaders, writes requirements, goes through the procurement cycle. I feel like you would move much faster if the people that are sitting in the seat fighting the battles are saying, no, I'm just going to buy this. And then they just, they're able to buy it when they need it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But again, and it's not, I think the admirals are aligned in both of those structures. There's just the process. The war fighters know what they need because they live it every day. And then Congress, I'll actually give Congress credit. First time I've ever heard that. Yeah. I'm going to give everybody credit. I'm going to give a lot of credit to the military, Congress. People are moving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Again, you're trying to steer a massive cruise ship. It takes a lot of people to try to turn that rudder. Yeah. Right? But Congress, what the Navy was doing... before we started Saronic, and I'll talk about this in the founding story and why we started the company, but there was a lot of research and experimentation and there wasn't adoption at scale.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's crazy. In World War II, I'll give you another stat. We commissioned over 100 aircraft carriers, aircraft carriers, between 1942 and 1945. Today, an aircraft carrier costs 10 billion as a baseline. The budget estimate actually went up to 13 billion. But more importantly, they take over 10 years to make, a decade to make one. Our entire involvement in World War II was four years long.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And now there's fundamental reasons why there wasn't adoption at scale. And one of those reasons was Saronic or another company, like Saronic didn't exist and there wasn't another company that could actually build that scale But Congress was looking at the Navy and actually saying, hey, we've been researching for a decade. We need to adopt. Like, get going. Let's do this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So you had different areas pushing on the same problem. And that's really what you need. That's good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I mean, when you think about, I mean, 2022, we were getting traction and that was a democratic administration, right? And the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced replicator program that started under Biden. And that was, hey, not only are we gonna go buy thousands of drones, we're gonna go buy them over the next 18 to 24 months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And that was the first thing that I've seen in a really long time where the government has moved quickly. I tell if I'm like, look, This is the fastest I've ever seen the government move with anything. That should, one, really excite you as an entrepreneur, employee at our company, like the opportunity ahead. But two, it should scare the shit out of you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We're like, oh, this problem. Everybody's thinking about this. No, it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, I've talked to four-star admirals. And this was when we were 12 or 18 months old. And I'm like, sir or ma'am, I know it sounds crazy to you that an 18-month-old company is sitting here telling you we are the only company that that can solve this problem for the Navy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It sounds crazy because it is crazy, but it doesn't mean it's not true. Man, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
There certainly is going to be a very large market. Public sector meaning government and military, and I'll talk about government, and maybe you mean private sector as well, because we're looking at commercial applications as well as defense and military. And so when you talk about defense, we hit on it, right? The Navy has to go in this direction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We're not gonna maintain naval superiority without autonomous surface vessels. But when you talk about commercial applications, there's a ton of commercial applications that we are focused on very deeply. And I'll kind of bifurcate them into two segments. One is the small autonomous surface vessels. And the other ones, the larger ones that we're getting into now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So we started out building small autonomous boats. So right now our largest platform's 24 feet, which is, think of a full-size speedboat. We are moving up to a 40 and 60 foot full-size speedboat. We're also building a 150-foot autonomous cargo ship. Wow. That can be used for military and commercial applications, and we're building that now. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So when you think about commercial, there's Port and Harbor security, there's Coast Guard, there's critical infrastructure. If you just talk about how our... how our critical infrastructure that's on the coast right now is protected, it's quite scary. There's a buoy that says, keep out. Oh, man. So we won't even get into all of that, but there's a lot. We probably will soon. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But there's a lot of commercial applications that we're building towards on our small vessels. Now, on the larger vessels, you're talking about cargo shipping, right? Why is the commercial market so important for the military? Because logistics. Well, not just logistics. But if you think about just capacity, this is why we get into when you build bespoke military systems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And look, some systems have to be bespoke for the military. What do you mean by what is bespoke? Like, an F-35 is only ever going to be sold to the Navy and the Air Force. It's only military, right? But when you talk about ships, the most important thing is shipbuilding capacity. So the Navy only needs X number of ships during peacetime. But during a conflict, that goes to 10X or 20X or more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So not only are they wildly expensive, But you can't afford, take human life out of the equation for just a second, because I'm sure we'll talk about that a bunch. You can't afford to lose one because you cannot get another one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So if you look at what China has done, Look, they're outbuilding the Navy, the US Navy in terms of combatant ships, three X to one, right? I will go through all the stats on the Chinese fleet and the US fleet and kind of what all that looks like when we talk Saronic. But they're outbuilding on just a military capacity today, three X to one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But they actually have 230 times our shipbuilding capacity. They have 5,000, over 5,000 commercially flagged vessels when the US has less than a hundred. So- Could you say that again? Over 5,000 commercially flagged vessels to the US having less than a hundred. So now go back to the World War II example and let me ask you this question. You have 230 times the shipbuilding capacity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Only a portion of that shipbuilding capacity is being used for military and defense. The rest is commercial. What do you think happens to all of that commercial capacity when the first shot's fired? It's done. It gets converted to defense.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
230 to 1. So the numbers are the Chinese can build, and the statistic in the industry is gross tonnage. It's kind of this weird measure of volume. The Chinese can build 23 million gross tons of ships every year. The United States can build 100,000.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
These are commercial ships. These are large cargo containers. These are military ships. These are destroyers. These are aircraft carriers. These are everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You're not off on that. They do need more ships. But if you look at why they've been building out their capacity and how they've been doing it, they've been subsidizing it from the government, undercutting everybody on price, and doing it for a very, very strategic reason. 25 years ago, they had 5% of the world's global shipbuilding capacity. Wow. 25 years ago. Today they have 50%.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
50%, we're at .1%. 5-0, we're at .1%. That means if you get every single country in the world that builds ships all lined up against China, you're just at parity. Holy. So you better rethink this problem. You better start thinking about autonomy and how to build things differently. This goes back to like, you don't want to go head to head on just a purely let's go see who can build more destroyers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Yeah, yeah. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So grew up in New Jersey, down the Jersey Shore. I like to say, everybody that's seen the TV show, it kind of gives it a bad rap. But great... Great place to grow up, about an hour south of New York. My dad had immigrated from Greece. My grandfather actually left him and five kids and my grandmother in Greece for three, it's a phenomenal story, for three years back in the 50s.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
came over didn't speak a word of english came to america he was a a bus boy in the united nations for three years while he learned english and saved up enough money to bring my dad's family over from greece to america they moved to perth amboy which is sort of an inner city up by new york and grew up there As Greek families in New Jersey do, they opened a diner.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
My grandfather opened a diner, kind of built that business, built other businesses, saved money, moved the family out into the suburbs, opened a restaurant there. And that's where I grew up. And I kind of grew up in the restaurant business. That was the center of the family. I started working there when I was 12 years old, washing dishes and bussing tables.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You know, one, it taught me the value of a dollar. It taught me hard work and commitment. But it also, if I'm being honest, it kept me out of trouble, right? It was nights, weekends, holidays, everything. I was just working at the restaurant. And after work, we'd go back to grandma's house. And that was, whether it was Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You know, we'd all be working as a family, and then we'd all go back to my grandma's house and celebrate the holiday. And that was a big part of my life growing up. So you stayed out of trouble? For the most part. I had work, and yeah, I never really got in trouble. I mean, I never got in legal trouble. My parents thought I was a pain. If you talk to some adults, and...
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I actually met my wife when I was 13 years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
At a Greek Orthodox church. And Greek Orthodox church in New Jersey is sort of like a high school. Basketball teams and volleyball teams and everything else. So when you say trouble, it's all relative, right? Yeah. I like to tell this really funny version of the story where my wife had a huge crush on me the moment she saw me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But she's not here to defend herself, and I will get in way, way too much trouble if I tell that version here. So I'll kind of give the truth. But yeah, so I had this huge crush on her. So her parents knew me when I was 13 years old. They thought I was the biggest pain in the ass, and I was always talking back to grownups.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so when we ended up going on our first date, I think it was 10 years later. 10 years later? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You didn't make the move for a decade? It took me a while, man. It took me a while. She was way too cool for me. We were friends. I was stuck in the friend zone for a while. We went to the same college. Went to school at Rutgers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And then after the SEAL teams, we ended up reconnecting. We started dating. And as you can imagine, it was hard to build a relationship. It was like, hey, great reconnecting. I love this date. And yeah, I have to go to Iraq for six months. She's like, what? Oh, so you made the move while you were in the SEAL teams. While I was in the SEAL teams, yeah. And then I like to tease her about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Oh, OK, so you finally said yes after I became a team guy. But we've been married, we're going on 13 years now. We have two kids that are 10 and 9. And I tell her all the time, and probably not nearly enough, that her job is much harder than mine. I could never sit at home, wonder where my significant other was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
whether they're gonna call me back in eight hours or 12 hours or 24 hours or never, right? And so the support system from the family and the support that she gave me throughout my career was, I wouldn't have been able to do it without her, and still to this day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
She supported me through business school, she supported me through VISTA and private, and we'll get into the kind of career stuff, and then supporting Saronic. Just, I couldn't do it without her. Sounds like an amazing woman. She's absolutely incredible. Our kids are incredible, and it's just, If I'm not working, I'm with them. Full-time mom? Full-time mom.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
She had a phenomenal career before switching and becoming a full-time mom and staying at home. And it's funny. I'll come back to that because I'll get into the story and kind of like when we founded Saronic and everything. But going back to kind of the childhood stuff, the whole point was you generally stayed out of trouble. But my wife's parents thought I was a huge pain in the ass.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So when she brought me home for the first time, they were really confused. But over time... We're very close, and their story's just as amazing. My wife was born in Greece. Her parents grew up there. They came over to the United States without a dollar in their pocket when they were 20 years old. They worked hard, saved money. My wife grew up poor. And so the parents worked hard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I mean, it's the American dream. It's literally the American dream. So I got to see that growing up and live with that. The other thing I did was I played a bunch of sports. So if I wasn't working, I was playing sports. And I got really into basketball at a young age. And I use sports now with my kids to kind of teach lessons. I don't actually care how good they are at the sport.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's right. Yeah. It's, Starting Charonic was an interesting challenge because not only did we have to build the best technology. Not only we set out to build the absolute best technology in both hardware and software, and we'll talk more about the products, but we also had to build a government lobbying company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But one of the most important lessons I learned was my freshman year in high school through basketball. And I was going to this, one of the more elite high schools for basketball in New Jersey. They had a great team, a great program. Half of the people that come out of that high school go to D1. And so as a freshman, I was really, I was intimidated. I was kind of okay. I was good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I was on the freshman team. I was good enough to get into the program, but I wasn't a star in the program. And so I was looking at that, and I've actually never told this story. This is, and think about how much this impacted, this is 30 years ago. So I was looking at where I was in relation to the rest of the group.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so much of my identity was tied up in that sport that I was terrified of not making it the next year. And so I quit. Really? I quit. I finished out the year. I made up some excuse of why I wanted to go to a different high school. I went to a subpar high school where I ended up being a subpar basketball player. I struggled for the next three years in the sport. I struggled.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I just never recovered from that decision, right? I went to college. I tried to play basketball. I didn't want to give up though. So I went to college. Think about this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I go to college and while everybody else is partying, my freshman and sophomore year, I was getting up at five o'clock in the morning, lifting weights, running, shooting a thousand shots every day, doing the things that I thought would help me make the team in college.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But because I didn't have the coaching and the development and all the reps at a super high level, I could just never make up for that. So, and this is what terrifies me about parenthood too. It's like, I never, like I made a, like that taught me that it's never worth it to quit. Like that's what drove into me. Like I'll never quit it. I might not make it. but I'm not quitting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And if it wasn't for that experience, and I had to live that for not long, like I had to live that for years. And like still telling the story, like that's still, like I still think about it, right? That's how impactful it was to me growing up. And I look at my kids and I'm like, I just want to teach you all the lessons I have. But I know, I know like you're going to have to go live it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
you're just gonna have to live it you're gonna have to feel the pain you have to go through the things and i'm gonna teach you things along the way obviously but there's some things the most important lessons you're going to learn are going to be through failure and that's okay and i'm just here to support you do you think that
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We had to understand how to navigate the ecosystem, how to actually drive adoption, how to get our products into the field. And that's not an easy task. One of the things I mentioned, and it was funny, We had one of our leaders from the growth team gave a teach-in to the entire company on, here's what government acquisitions actually looks like.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I think it's what gave me the perspective to be successful, 100%. Not just the physical ability to make it through buds, but also the mental ability to make it. And to be clear, I never... I never thought about joining the military. It was never on my list of things to do. I'd never even met anyone in the military before I joined. Wow. So it was pretty crazy. 9-11 was my junior year of college.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I remember sitting in the gym, watching the TV. The entire gym kind of just came over. Nobody was working out anymore, and there were rows of TVs, and everybody was just glued to them. And nobody knew what was happening. The first plane hit the tower. I remember my thoughts. What idiot flew their plane into a building in the middle of New York?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Because it was just so crazy to think that this was actually a terrorist attack. And then the second plane hit, you're like, oh, something's happening. And being from New Jersey, you're, everybody's kind of like one or two degrees of separation away from somebody that was like really, really affected. My wife was working in New York at the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
She actually caught the last train out of the city before they shut the trains down. She watched the second tower come down from the train. Wow. The person she was sitting on, this story's creepy. She was sitting next to, I forget the person's role, but they were like an architect or somebody that designed the towers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And she's sitting next to this person on the train and he goes to her, that building's going to come down. And sure as shit, they come out of the tunnel, whatever, and they watch it come down. Holy shit. So it had a really large impact on the way I thought about the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
One of my other good friends at the time, I haven't talked to him in 20 years, but really close friend in high school, his dad worked for the Port Authority Police. And he was at a meeting. and they didn't hear from him for 48 hours. So think about that. My buddy's sitting there, I'll never forget this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
48 hours, I think he smoked two cartons of cigarettes and drank like two bottles of Jack Daniels just waiting to hear from his dad. And then 48 hours, 48 hours the phone rings. He was okay. But think about what those two days could have been like. And then think about all the people that weren't okay. So that's what drove me to really want to join the military.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I was a computer engineer in college. My whole goal in college was to find a career that wasn't working in the restaurant, right? So I was studying computer engineering. I thought I was gonna go into cyber and network security. I was writing code in a computer lab. And I just kept looking in the mirror and asking myself like, what impact am I having on the world?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
What can I go do about everything that's happening right now? And I had no idea what that meant. It's like, I want to go have an impact on the global war on terror. How do you do that? So I started to, Talk to people. I went to these career days. I started with federal agencies, so FBI, DEA. I'm like, what are these things all about? I go to this FBI career day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Best Navy blue suit I could find as a college student on. I'm ready to go. I wanna do HRT or tactical operations. I really wanna get into it. I'm a pretty athletic guy. This is what I wanna learn. And he just looked at me like I have three heads. I'm like, what? What's your background? I'm like, oh, I grew up in a restaurant. I played basketball. And they're like, you need military experience.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And there's this government acquisition management lifecycle map that exists within the Pentagon. And if we stretch that map out on this entire wall, the individual subcomponents still would not be legible. Are you serious? There's that many steps in the process. One of the slides was, okay, now we're going to talk about rapid defense acquisition. And the next slide said 48 to 72 months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so I was like, okay. Well, what's military experience look like? So I start walking into recruiters' offices, and I go to Army recruiter, and I go to Air Force. And I walk in this Naval recruiting office in a strip mall in New Jersey. And I say, I want to do tactical operations. He's like, oh, let me tell you about the CLT. Why don't you just sign right? I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I'm not ready to sign. I just want to learn. And this Navy recruiter introduces me to this retired frog man from Vietnam era, gives me his phone number, and he goes, call this guy, he'll tell you all about the SEALs. So I call this guy up, and I'm like, hey, so and so recruiter tells me and told me to call you, I'm trying to learn about the SEALs. He's like, oh yeah, come on over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
He's like, wear some cami pants and some boots, and we're going to go for a run, and I'd love to tell you about the SEALs. This is true, by the way. So I get to his house. It's January in New Jersey. Never met this guy before. All I want to do is learn about the SEALs. He's like, let's go for a run. He has fins and a mask with him. I'm like, maybe it's just a SEAL thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Maybe you just always run with fins and a mask. He runs me down to the Atlantic Ocean in January in New Jersey and hands me the fins and the mask. And he goes, go swim out to the end of the jetty and back. And I'm standing there on the beach, and I'm looking at the ocean, and I have a decision to make. And I'm just like, OK. So I take the fins, the mask. I swim out to the jetty. I come back in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Only time in my life, buds everything. Only time in my life I got legitimate hypothermia. Legitimate. I went back to his house. He put a blanket on me. I'm shivering. His wife's bringing me chicken noodle soup. And he's like, okay, now I'll tell you about the SEAL teams. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. And that's how I got introduced to the SEALs. There was a recruiting platform in...
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It was based out of Long Island. It was ran by a retired captain, a guy named Drew Bissett. And he just put together a network of SEALs, or retired SEALs from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey. And once a month, everybody would just go and meet up. And there would be all these recruits that want to be SEALs. that would go and train for the day and then get mentored by these retired SEALs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I ended up going to that a few times, and I was like, you know what? This is exactly what I wanna do. This is how I had the impact. Culture, mission, impact, everything was there. And finished college, got my degree in 2003, and I enlisted the day I graduated. Wow. What a career change there. Yeah. It was pretty bold. My parents had no idea what I was even talking about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They were like, the what? You did what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so my daughter, for the listeners, my daughter's nine years old. She's been into gymnastics since she's three. It's nothing we pushed her towards. I mean, candidly, my kids are 15 months apart. So when they were three years old, we took them to gymnastics because there was a trampoline and something to bounce on on a Saturday afternoon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And through that, she just fell in love with the sport and has become really good at it to where now my wife and I are like, okay, do we make this investment? Do we homeschool? Do we drive her an hour and a half to a gym that can train her at the level in which she needs to be trained at if she wants to go to the Olympics? Which is, that's her goal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Three years. 48 to 72 months later, The technology we're building is actually obsolete. We're going to have version 2.3.4. We're going to have the software upgraded four or five times. We're going to have better sensors out in the world that we'll be able to incorporate on our boats. The process isn't set up for this. And it's nobody's fault. It's just the evolution of technology.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So, my daughter, again, who's nine, says, you know, I wanna go to the Olympics. I'm like, okay, well, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna homeschool, we're gonna drive to the gymnastics gym, we're gonna do all of these things for you. But is that really what you want? Or do you just wanna be good at gymnastics and have fun? Do you wanna go to a
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
division one school and be a really good gymnast and have fun with the sport or do you want to go to the olympics which is there's four girls on the olympics team which one do you want she goes i want to go to the olympics okay let me tell you what that takes
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Every day, we're gonna get up in the morning, we're gonna drive an hour and a half to the gym, you're gonna train for four and a half hours, you're gonna come home, you're gonna stretch, you're gonna ice, you're gonna eat the right way, and do all the things you have to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You're gonna do your schoolwork, and you still have to go to school, we're just gonna homeschool so we can build in the flexibility, and then you're gonna get up the next day and you're gonna do it again. And if you do that every single day for 10 years, maybe, just maybe, you'll have a chance. And to her credit, now again, she's nine, she looked me dead in the eyes and said, great, let's go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Wow, that's awesome. So you guys homeschool? We're going to homeschool. We're going to start this year. And my wife and I's philosophy is like, look, if they find something that they're really gonna pour their energy into like that, we're gonna invest in it. That's what I wanna do. I'm not teaching my kid how to be a good gymnast. I'm teaching my kid how to change the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I'm telling her that no matter what she puts her mind to, She can go after it, but this is how you go after it. And whether she makes the Olympic team or not, it's not, I don't know. I don't know if she's good enough to be in the Olympics, but I'm not gonna be the one as her parent that says, no way, that's not possible. There's only four girls in the country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The world will tell her where her level is and where she tops out at. And look, if in two or three years she decides that this isn't for her, That's okay, too. But if she's going to give that level of effort into it, we're going to invest behind it, and we're going to encourage her to go be the best she can be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's how warfare has changed over the last 50, 75, 100 years. And we're just sitting at a point in time where there's massive technological disruption. 20 years ago, the iPhone didn't exist. Mm-hmm. Think about that. Yeah. That's not a really long time ago. And it's completely changed the world. And now nobody can even think about operating in their life without a smartphone. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Go right into BUDS. I enlist the day I graduated. Back then, you had to go, you obviously went through boot camp, it was enlisted, and then A school, which is, hey, what are you gonna do in the Navy if you don't make it through BUDS? This since changed and they changed it a number of times, but I went to school, I learned how to be a radar technician.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Here's how you read the radar, I couldn't tell you. Wait, were you an OS? OS. Oh shit, that's what I was. Were you? That's funny. I still remember A school. It was down in Dam Neck, so location of development group or team six. And you see all these guys running down the beach. And in A school, you're like, who are those guys? So did that. So it took me about six months to get out to Bud's.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I show up to Bud's, and it was December-ish time frame. And again, I don't know. I didn't know San Diego in December was cold. I didn't know anything about a winter hell week. But, I mean, Bud's was great. I mean, you know, it's just a grind, right? It's six months every single day. Can you get up at 5 o'clock in the morning? Can you go to 9 o'clock at night?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Can you go through and do all the things you have to do, be cold, wet, sandy, carry this, do that, keep going, and just do it every day? There's only two moments where I didn't think I was going to make it. And those were the two moments where I think I learned the most. The first one was Hell Week. Hell Week started February. I forget the exact date. But it was like the first week of February.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It was Super Bowl Sunday that year. And the air temp was 50 degrees, and the water temp was 50 degrees. And it rained three days out of that week.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
it was so they come in sunday night you know break out and hell week starts and for everybody that's listening to hell weeks the fourth week of seal training where you basically stay up for five days straight no sleep and you do the first four weeks in a week all crammed in so sunday night and then you start carrying boats on your head and you start carrying logs and you're in the ocean freezing you're doing all these things
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I'll never forget. I get to Monday afternoon, and for whatever reason, I decided to wear a watch, or I had a watch on my wrist. And I look at my watch, and it's like 4.30. And I just think to myself, like, these motherfuckers are crazy. Crazy. Like, they want me to go until Friday, and I didn't. I didn't think about quitting, but I physically thought I couldn't make it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
By Monday afternoon, I thought my legs were broken. Not even 24 hours. Not even 24 hours. I thought, like I literally thought, I believed in my head that my legs were broken, like right in the middle of my shins. Not chin splints, not anything. I'm like, they're broken. I'm going to take a step one of these times and it's just going to go and give way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I remember thinking all this stuff and I'm sitting there at chow or where they're feeding us dinner. And I just remember one of the instructors going, hey, do not quit at chow. Your entire body is going to shut down. You're going to feel like you can't go on. Just get up, take two more steps. And then if you want to quit, quit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I looked to my buddy next to me who ended up making it as well. He probably doesn't even remember this story, but I looked to him and I go, hey, when they say let's go, don't ask me any questions. Don't say, are you ready? Don't do anything. Just can you give me your hand and pull me up? That's it. And so they said, time to go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
He stood up, gave me his hand, pulled me up, took two steps, never thought about it again. No kidding. It was like a light switch. Now, it still hurt. But that thought of, hey, I can't make it, Went away. And I just turned into whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Maybe a little bit. To be honest, I never really wanted to quit. I just didn't think I was going to make it. You know, there were people, and I remember this and you probably remember this too, where the instructors say, okay, well time to go get back in the ocean and freeze your ass off for 15 minutes. And I remember people looking at me and saying, screw this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I got better things to do right now. Literally better things that I could be doing right now. And for me, I didn't. That's where I wanted to be there. I wanted to make it. And I did not want to go chip paint on the ship for four years, which is the alternative. But it was just a question of if, if I could.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And getting up and taking those two steps after, again, I thought my legs were literally broken. That told me I could. And then fast forward, I finish Hell Week. Of all the stupid things to get, to have trouble with, drown-proofing. Drown-proofing? Drown-proofing. You had, you were... I could not float. So I'll kind of, again, describe it for the listeners a little bit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So this is when you get your hands tied behind your back, your feet tied together, you're thrown in the deep end of the pool, and it's 15 feet deep. And you have to sink to the bottom, jump off the top, jump back up to the top, you bob up and down for five minutes, you float for five minutes, you swim across the pool, you swim back, and then you're done. I fundamentally could not float.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
No kidding. I would sit there and I would just watch my body go like this. and all the way down. And I'm like, I'm going to drown. Like, I just can't do it. And I ended up getting rolled for it. So I failed. On test day, I failed. And I put work into it. Is drown-proofing pre-hell week? Oh, it is. At least the final one is. They give you a couple chances.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I know the final one's post-Hell Week, because I went through Hell Week. I went right up to the last day of first phase and ended up failing this test. And I'd worked at it, and I'd gotten it before. But this really taught me, and it's one of the lessons of the difference between, and I talk about this, the difference between an amateur and a professional.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And goes back to my daughter's like, an amateur does something until they get it right. A professional is going to do it until they can't get it wrong. And when it's test day, you want to have that level of confidence going in. Because if you're just barely scraping by on your own and getting it right, you're not going to get it on test day or when it matters.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Or more importantly, when bullets start flying or there's real pressure around. So... I had to go in front of the seal board. I had to go and say like, here's why you shouldn't kick me out of buds. Like it was a really shitty place to be and Dan said, okay, we're going to give you a couple more months, keep working on it, whatever. And it was one instructor.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
One person is the only reason I made it. He goes, Hey, he was the, the, Oh, I see a first phase. like run over the pool right now i'm gonna meet you there he's like i had the same exact problem i'm gonna show you how to do it wow so he saw something in you so we went over there he's like you need to stop trying to float and you need to rock your body up to the top everybody else floats you rock
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
and you could tie my hands behind my back right now and go throw me in the water and I could do that for 20 minutes. So it was just getting that to click and it was one person that taught it to me. Wow, wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It was crazy. I mean, the instructor's our first day. They pulled up the list of, here are the fastest runners and the fastest swimmers. And they go, who's number one? OK, don't take this personally. You're going to quit. Don't care. You're going to quit. Every class. And I was like, wow. Yeah, it was incredible to see. And then the other thing was just how important youth was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We had this one person that was probably in the best shape out of anybody, but 33 years old. And his body just could not recover at the speed of a 22 or an 18-year-old. And I think at 18, I wouldn't have made it. I would have made it. I had to have those other life experiences. I had to really put work into basketball the way that I did in college. I had to fail at that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I had to have the mental strength, the perspective of, I don't ever want to quit at anything again. If that wasn't in my brain, I wouldn't have made it. What did it feel like for you to graduate? It felt really good, obviously. You made something, but it's short-lived. It's, okay, you made it, now go to your team and you're a new guy, and now get ready to go combat, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I left BUDZ and I went to an SDV team. So SDV Team 2, which is based in Virginia Beach, SEAL delivery vehicle. So we specialize in, it's like a miniature submarine. You have two SEALs in the front that are drivers, four in the back that are being transported. And you spend a lot of your time learning how to pilot and navigate and do this thing on this mini sub.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Why I chose Virginia Beach and not Hawaii and we were doing eight hour dives in the Chesapeake in the middle of February in a seven mil wetsuit was, I guess, beyond me, but that's where I was. And honestly, each step of my career was exactly where I needed to be. The team that I went to, even though we were working on Diving and look you could say okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We're in the middle of Iraq and Afghanistan. There's no water Like why do we have to work on this? So there was some sort of disconnect there on the mission but the team the individuals the platoon I was in was so strong. I think 50% of our team ended up going to team six. Wow. Which is incredible. And we all just trained together, worked together, like pushed each other for this next.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I still didn't really even know what team six was. It was just as a new guy getting the SDV team, I'm like, man, it's just kind of this thing. And I thought when I went into the teams, Like again, I didn't know what military was. I was like, I'm gonna do four years, I'm gonna do my service, and I'm gonna get out. My very first deployment, So it was, I think, 18 months or two years in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I leave the SDV team. I go over to Team 2, and I augment Team 6. So that means, like, you're not at Team 6, but it's like if you're a college basketball player getting to go train with the New York Knicks for a couple months. And that's what it felt like, too. And so I go on this deployment, and I show up, and this is... I show up the very first day. I didn't even meet anybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They're all in the team room, and they're briefing this up. And the person that picked me up from the airfield walks me into the team room, and I kind of just slide in, and I'm looking around the table. And these are men, right? beers, mid 30, like these are the most seasoned operators on the planet. And this is my very first, this is my first time overseas.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And they throw me in the middle of this team room. And the team leader who's briefing the mission was going through the things like, I need somebody that can, I'll tell this. I need somebody that can blend in with the local populace. And everybody looks at you. Yeah. I mean, I'm Greek. I have tan skin. I grow a beard. I blend in very well in that part of the world. So he looks around the room.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
He's like, you. And then he kind of does a double take. He's like, who the hell are you? And I'm like, oh, I'm from team two. He's like, whatever. Shut up. Stop talking. You're coming with me. And so that was my first op. And coming off of that deployment. What were you doing? We were just doing some low-vis stuff in Bagram. I mean, it was pretty basic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's really cool to see. Thank you. I've been a huge fan of yours and the pod and seeing all the things that you're doing after the SEAL team is just as exciting. And, you know, it's an honor to just be here, be able to tell the story, be able to tell my story and then all the things we're doing at Seronic. So thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Running surveillance ahead of a broader, a bigger group. And ran a bunch of ops with them. Spent three months on that deployment. Came back. Went to Iraq for six months with Team 2. And I went right to Green Team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Right into the fire. I'm like, oh my gosh. But those guys were great. I mean, honestly... truly the best operators in the world. And seeing that, that's what gave me the drive to then say, okay, I want to go to team six. That's what I want to do with my career from here. I want to be a part of that. That was incredible. So come back, go to Iraq for six months with team two.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Come back, go to green team. And green team's sort of the tryouts for CLT. It's another six month selection process. I did not know that there was such a high attrition rate where you have experienced seals that are selected as top performers that are going through the selection course and you still have another 80% attrition rate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I just kind of went in and said, I took a very, I think down to earth perspective. And I think this is why I was successful because I went in and said, I actually don't know if I belong here. I don't know if I can operate at this level. But I want to find out at a training center in Virginia Beach.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I don't want to find out on the middle of a hilltop in Afghanistan when it's too late and I get everybody killed. So I just came into Green Team and said, I'm going to leave it all out there. I am going to make every single decision I can. I am going to make the hard calls. I'm going to be in the front of the line. I'm going to do all the things. And I actually just want the instructors to see me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I want them to see everything I'm doing. And I want them to tell me if it's good or bad. And then if it's bad, send me home so I don't get anybody killed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Well, I think by doing that, I was the gray man because I was never the most excellent at anything, nor was I the worst at anything. But it was more of just putting your decision-making out there, right? And I'll give you a story that kind of illustrates it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
obviously CQC or close quarters combat like how you go through a house or a training building or anything as a group it's a big part of that training and there was this one scenario where coming through a hallway the whole team's behind me they have the paper Target set up and I kind of peek around this corner
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I see a target and it's got a hostage, you know, the paper targets with the hostage in front of it and the bad guy behind them. And I look and it's like way down the hallway. And I'm like, and I take the shots. And all I hear from the rafters is Mavrucus. Wow. And in my brain, I'm like, and I'm going home.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's depressing. Well, I don't want to talk all doom and gloom. Because we have the innovators. We have the innovators. We have the capability. And look, I'm a firm believer in that when the United States of America collectively gets behind an idea, there's nobody in the world that can beat us. Not China, not anybody. Yeah. Right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So we finished the run, we come out and they're like, and I'm expecting to get like lit up. They're yell, scream or do all these things. And then they're just going to send me home. They're like, Hey, so one of the rules that we have during training is don't shoot through open doors. It was a hallway, it was a really long hallway with an opening at the end.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I don't know if we really call that an open door, but just don't do that again. I was like, okay, check. Then, and then I learned things after the fact too, and then there was this. So then after they told me not to do that again They gave me a really interesting pun. They had me go carry two 20-pound medicine balls. And I had to carry them like they were my balls.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And they made me scream at the top of my lungs, I'm so ballsy. And everybody's looking at me like, what the hell is he doing? I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing. Like, why is this such a big deal? And I come to realize, and I talk to them later, and they're like, yeah, you don't understand. Half a dozen people were in that same position you were in. You were the only one that took the shot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We had people look up to the rafters and ask, can I take this shot? we're not going to be fucking with you in Afghanistan. We're not going to be with you there. Nobody's answering questions. You're the only one who took a shot, whether you should have or not, whatever. But I'm like, they didn't actually care. They just wanted people that could make those decisions in those moments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And that's what I kind of, that's what I took away. It was like, don't be afraid to make the hard decisions, be decisive, be decisive act, and don't shy away from the hard ones. And I, I still practice that today. You have to. So spend, spend five years at damn neck. and ended up transitioning in 2015.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Did a bunch of deployments. It goes back to my wife supporting me through all this. We got married in 2012. She moved down to Virginia Beach in 2011, so right about when I was getting the squadron. And this was before work from home was a thing, right? So she made a deal with her company, I think it was American Express, or she switched to Citibank.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
She's like, look, I'm gonna go down to Virginia Beach, be with my husband, and then When he's traveling, I'll come back to New Jersey, work from the office in New York. I was like, you do not want to do that. The amount of time that we're on the road, four years later, nobody knew she moved to Virginia. They're like, you live where? It was comical.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So she did a lot to support me through all of that. Did five deployments, I think, in five years. Very, very busy. And then the last deployment, it might have been the second to last deployment, was really the reason why I decided to get out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It wasn't because I didn't like the job anymore, and obviously you always love the guys, and you love being around, like people ask me, do you miss the teams? I actually don't. I don't miss the job. I miss the guys. I miss just hanging out. But it was our last deployment, I was, I won't say where I was, but we were with a foreign unit predominantly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I was managing, it's like five or 600 foreign special forces soldiers in this outstation. And wow, we were trying so many different experiences to being on missions that were approved by the president. I was not on the Bin Laden raid, just for the record. I don't even like throwing, leaving that possibility out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
issue that we're facing right now is again, we're sitting at a center of technological disruption. You're coming off of a massively different environment. So we talked a little bit about World War II, Talk about all the conflict since then and kind of how the evolution of defense budget and defense spending and the things that were put in place since World War II.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I learned about that with a broken ankle and I was in bed in Virginia Beach and I saw it on CNN like everybody else. But being on missions that were approved at that level to running five or 600, like SEAL Team Six just opened up the door of experiences. And so I'm on this deployment in this really shitty part of the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we had all these regulations and red tape of what we could do and what we couldn't do with the foreign units. And so we're training them, we're working with them, we're doing all these things. And then this bad guy that we've been tracking for months pops up and he's, four miles from where we are on this mountain somewhere. And we're like, great, let's go throw our stuff on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We'll go get them. We'll be back by dinner. And because of the political environment, we being the US soldiers that were there and my team, we couldn't leave the base. We did not get approval to leave the base. So we went through this whole rigmarole where we're like, OK, you go get them. We'll be here. We'll tell you where to go. And it was just this game of telephone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we're watching the ISR feed, trying to direct them into the bad guy. The foreign unit couldn't find them. They're walking around in circles. I'm calling back to headquarters. If you just let me go, I'll be back in 10 minutes. And we couldn't get that approval. And so they walk around for six hours, they can't find him, the guy gets away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The impact that I'm able to have here as an operator is going away. And if I'm going to be away from my family for six months, I want it to be for a really good reason. And so I decided at that point that I was going to get out, go back to business school. I got back from my last deployment two weeks before my son was born.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I was fortunate to make it back and ended up going to business school six months later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I was taking it one enlistment, one four-year block at a time. But again, I thought I was going to do four. I was at 11. I was kind of thinking through the business school thing and I hadn't made my mind up. And that, that just really made my mind. I was like, okay, like I'm going to go start a new career. I'm going to go get into business. I'm 34 years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Like, I'm just going to go do it now because Everything has changed, and the impact that I can have as an operator is what I felt at that time had been diminished. And it was the right time for me with family, physical stuff. I look at guys that had two knee surgeries and two shoulder surgeries, and I never got to that point. I was getting close. And it was the right time for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I look back and I actually say, I'm like, you know what? It wasn't too early, it wasn't too late. It was 11 years was my time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
No, I always wanted to go back and get an MBA at some point. I don't know why. I was just interested in business school. And then I think I liked education. And then I was really interested in finance because I bought Google and Apple stock while on deployment in 2008. And it turns out if you bought stock in 2008, it just did really well. So I was like, oh, this finance thing's interesting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I showed up to business school completely naive and not knowing anything. I didn't know which way it was up. I didn't know what I was talking about. And I thought I had two years to figure it out. Come to learn that's not how business school works. So you get to business school, and within two weeks, the school starts asking, okay, what are you recruiting for? What do you want to do?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We have companies coming on campus next week. You have to apply for your internship. And I'm like, whoa, whoa. I just got out of the military like two weeks ago. I thought I had two years to figure this stuff out. So I very quickly said, okay, I better get my act together and started digging into more of, okay, what does finance actually mean? What is it? What does that mean?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
PPE process back in 1961, cost plus contracting actually started in World War I to get the defense industrial base going. And we can talk about the impacts of all of those things. But really, you go back to 1993, and before that, you have this Cold War buildup, right? You have the buildup for the Cold War, the Reagan era, as we were at 67% of GDP as far as our military budget.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Because I'm not going to just go by Google and Apple and like, that's going to be my job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
i started talking to people i'm like tell me about hedge funds tell me about venture capital tell me about private equity tell me about bond trading tell me about anything i can think of and all the things that i didn't know i just started learning about and i got really really interested in private equity for a couple reasons one you really get that finance and investing experience.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So you have to become a very good investor. And the skill set there, being able to identify companies and identify investments and what makes a good company and a good investment is actually something I use a lot now running a company. So I was super interested in that angle. But then also as a private equity investor, you own the company. So the different kind of,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
methods of investing in private equity, you own, you buy over 51% of the company. As an investor, you're directly responsible for it. You're working with the CEOs, the management teams, you're implementing strategic initiatives, like you're doing all the things. And so I was like, oh wait, I'm gonna get investing experience and I'm gonna get operating experience. This is the best of both worlds.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I think I wanna be an investor for the next 25 years, but if I don't, I'll just have this great skill set all around. And so I really looked at it as a continuous education of my business school career. And I looked at the next five years as just, I'm just gonna go learn as much as I can about as much as I can. And that, for the most part, really played out. I went to a company called
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
hig capital and then went to vist equity partners which is based out in austin but the whole like how i got there was actually really interesting and eye-opening i didn't realize how it's difficult it would be to break into private equity from business school i i assumed like I said, it's your team six. Right? I get any job I want.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I very quickly started interviewing, and they're like, yeah, I don't know what to do with you. You don't know how to build financial models. Yeah, I get your leadership, but I can't put you in as a leader. You don't know how to build financial models. There's a huge disconnect. And so... I started talking to the career counselors and they were like, yeah, you can't go into private equity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
There's a career path for private equity. I was like, okay, well, what's that look like? They're like, well, you have to go to investment banking first.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Like, well, cause you have to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Like, you can't do it any other way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I went home, and I'm telling my wife this story. And I was like, OK, OK. And she actually knows me better than I know myself at some point. And she looks at me, and she goes, she kind of rolled her eyes and was like, oh, brother. I was like, what? She's like, they just told you you can't do it. She's like, we're screwed. So I was like, no, no, no, I didn't make up my mind.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The Cold War ends, and you have this moment in time where everybody thought that global conflict or conflict between nation states just isn't a thing anymore, right? It's the new world, we're all friends, Cold War's over, we can communicate across the globe, all these things that never existed before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
She's like, OK, you say whatever you want. And so sure enough. And I'm like, you know what, screw this. I'm going to go into private equity. I'm going to figure it out. So I started building financial models in my apartment at business school. In my off time from class and kids and everything else, I was staying up until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning building financial models.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I completely reverse engineered my first one. These are Excel spreadsheets that are... It can be anywhere from eight tabs to like 30 tabs long. They're insane. And the first one I reverse engineered took me three weeks to do. This is something that should take somebody that's not even that good two hours. Took me three weeks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I went into literally every box in Excel, read the formula, retyped it, and just went back and forth. And then just did it again and again and again and again to the point at which when I started interviewing full time, I had heard enough of, Hey, you can't do private equity because you have to go to investment banking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I just walked into the interview and I talked, was talking to the managing partner and I said, you know, Let's just get something on the table right out of the gates. I didn't do investment banking. I know that and you know that. So let's have that conversation. Let's not talk about my SEAL career and you think I'm a great leader.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And then I walk out of this room and you say, great guy, but can't do the job. Let's talk about how I didn't do investment banking, why I can build you financial models. And if you want me to just go build you one, Just give me a computer and I'll go in the room next store and I'll just build it for you. And then we can talk about it. And he looked at me and said, you build financial models?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I was like, yeah. I've been working on this for two years. This is what I've been doing. These are all the things that I recognize the gap in my skill set that I needed to close in order to be successful at what I wanted to do next. And I just put all of my energy into it. Impressive. And so I ended up working at HIG Capital, moving to Vista a year later, and Vista was phenomenal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I was there for four years. The team's incredible. I got to work on cool deals. It was like closing deals in London and Australia and working around the clock. It was fun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's the stage of company and the amount of ownership that you're going to take. So venture capital are the investors that we have now. And typically they're minority investors and they're investing much earlier. So the risk profile is much different. So venture capitalists will look at companies and say, you know what? I'm going to take a bet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And their model is because the companies are so early, they don't have... track record of success. They don't have financials to go and review. They don't have 10 years of revenue that you can forecast off of. It's in some cases, I think when we started the company, we had a dozen slides and the founding team and that was it. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so venture capitalists are taking those bets early on and their whole investment model is look, 90 ish percent of these companies aren't going to work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So we came out, we as a country, the United States, came out of the Cold War and drastically cut our military spending. So what that did, so 24% reduction in military spending after the Cold War. 41% in naval spending after the Cold War. Wow. So you can imagine what happened to the shipbuilding programs. Wow. Not only that, the then Secretary of Defense, there's this very famous meeting they had.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
those are going to go to zero so i'm going to go invest whatever it is let's say we have a billion dollar fund i'm going to invest 900 million dollars into companies that go to zero the other call it seven eight nine percent will give me my money back meaning they just do okay and then there's one percent of companies that will just completely crush it the
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Facebooks and Googles of the world, hopefully the Saronics of the world. That's what the venture capitalists make all their money. So it's much riskier. And you're not looking to make money off of every single investment. Private equity is on the other end of the spectrum, where they're buying companies, and their whole model is to make a 3x return off of every single company. Okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So where do I have complete conviction? This company's 15 years old. It has a ton of revenue. I'm not really taking risk. I might take a risk where, okay, the company doesn't do as well as I thought it would do. I'd make two X or I'd get my money back. Or if it does really well, I make a four X. So you're, You're taking much less risk, but the variability in the outcome is also much different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So you're investing at different stages and different risk profiles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Private equity I equate to is like you're buying a house and just trying to fix it up and flip it. And venture capital is like you're just buying a plot of land and hoping a city develops around it. Gotcha. Gotcha.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It was hard. It was hard. I mean, if you look at it on paper and the accomplishments, it's like, yeah, A+. But you sit down and have a conversation with my wife. It wasn't easy. You mentioned imposter syndrome earlier. This is where it really came into play for me. I didn't think I was going to get a job. Literally, I'm like, what do I know? I know how to clear hallways and shoot guns.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I'm not gonna get, there's one of the deans of the school really mentors the veterans a lot at war and she's amazing. And I used to go in her office and I'm like, Marilyn, I'm not getting a job. And she would just laugh at me and be like, you're out of your mind. I'm like, no, seriously, I'm being serious. So there's all this stress that looking back on it,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
i would have i would have liked to just know that it would have been okay right and i think i put a lot i put a lot of pressure on myself to not only figure it out but figure it out quickly and that's the other thing i underestimated like how long this transition would really take right this is 10 years later it's like the first time i really feel like i have my feet under me wow right and
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Everything in the teams too is relative. You're always comparing yourself to the guy next to you, and you're like, well, I'm not as messed up as that guy. I can do it. If he can keep going after four surgeries and being in an explosion, I should keep going. And that's not necessarily the right attitude.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I love that you said post-traumatic stress and not post-traumatic stress disorder because it's not really disorder. It's just you're fundamentally different after going through certain traumatic experiences. And if you think you're not, that's the problem. And I think for too long, I didn't think that my military career affected the way that I was thinking about things, affected my...
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
emotions my ability to connect with my wife and my family and like all of these things that looking back on it i should have noticed earlier right i came out i went i'll never forget this so i went to the va and did my whole like va off-boarding thing And I specifically waited. So I didn't go in Virginia Beach. I went in Philadelphia.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They call it the Last Supper. It's in 1993. The then Secretary of Defense called in all the heads of the large defense contractors. And there were 55 or so at the time. and said, we're slashing defense spending. There's not going to be enough budget to go around. You guys have my blood. You guys have to consolidate or you will go out of business. And so those 55 companies went down to five.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So in Philly, they're not used to seeing team guys and Marines and everybody at all the time and not used to hearing crazy stories. So you get out of that environment and I go to the VA doctor and he was like, yeah, just tell me your combat history. And I just think I'm telling the story. And he almost falls out of his chair. And you're like, okay, just stop. You need to go see this or this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm fine. I'm just telling you a story. He's like, yeah, we're going through these steps. And I was like, okay, okay. It's not normal. It's not, he's like, it's not normal. But when you're living in the team environment, when you're in the SEALs or you're in the Marine, you're in a very high-paced culture like that. it becomes very normal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And people don't realize, and I think that Teams is doing a better job at it now, but it should just be like an education. How does this type of trauma impact the way that you see and think about the world? How does it impact the way you interact with other humans? When I transitioned, when I went to business school, I didn't want anything to do with the military. I was like, I'm done here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Checked out. I didn't even want to join the vets club. Didn't want to hang out with vet. I wanted to go a complete opposite direction. And then little by little, I just realizing, okay, that's my close friend. Okay. This is what I care. Okay. This is what I relate to. Okay. Now it's no, I actually want to dedicate my life to keeping people safe. And this was just a little break that I needed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And it just took me a while to get there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Being the best that you can be. And I'm not saying measure yourself against others in the sense of don't compete. Competition's healthy. And I think a certain level of competition in the teams, I actually think that's the best form of competition, where you're my buddy, I will literally give my life to protect you, but I also want to beat you at everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And that makes everybody in the team better. Where I think it becomes unhealthy is the, OK, I haven't had three knee surgeries. I shouldn't be complaining. I shouldn't go see the doctor. I didn't have a house collapse on my head. I shouldn't have PTSD. I shouldn't go talk to this person. Just because you didn't have that experience doesn't mean you didn't have something impact your effect too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And doesn't mean that you don't need either physical, like so many guys put off injuries so that we could keep deploying and that it's probably the right thing to do. Right. I did it. We had like, it was like, it's game time. We're going to deal with this later. Right. but then go get it dealt with. Right. And same, your brain's the same way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I think we just, as a community under appreciated both of those things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They're known as the big five. It's Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, Boeing, and General Dynamics. Right? That happened in 93. And then obviously that consolidation took years to happen. Then, so you have that trend. That's one mega trend, right? So what happened? Did those five buy all the other subsidiaries? They bought all the other companies and they just combined into mega conglomerates. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
In anything in life, in sports, you come in like, there's a thing like you play to the level of your competition, and that's where you're going to step your game up to. And 100%, when I was in private equity, I wasn't competing against my peers from the SEAL teams and saying, hey, I just want to be more successful than them. It was... How do I, how am I the best private equity professional?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
How am I better than this person that's been investing for 15 years? How do I get better than them? How do I learn from them? And now it's same thing in the business world. I look at other CEOs, other business leaders, work with Joe Lonzo a lot, who I know we talk about. How do I get to be that good, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
How do I have that level of insight across that many different things that can drive this company into a truly, truly generational company? When did you figure that out?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Oh, man. Sometime after business school and before Saronic, I don't know if I could put a date on it. It wasn't immediate, right? Because in business school, you are like every other vet going to a recruiter trying to find a job. You are kind of competing in that vets network community, and it feels like you're part of it. It was just...
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Getting out of that, going into private equity, but then also not doing that for a year or two. I was there for five years. Really was building a career there. And so somewhere along that way, I got over the imposter syndrome of, and you talk about I don't really belong here. These people are, they're brilliant.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
There were folks that could sit there and tell you every single number about every single company they've ever worked on in the last decade. Wow. And I'm like trying to remember what the revenue was on the company, the meeting we last left 45 minutes ago. And I'm like, I better think.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so it was getting into this process and building the habits and building the skill sets to be very, very good at it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
that then, one, you got over the kind of imposter syndrome, the, okay, I'm a veteran coming, trying to be a private equity professional, to, no, I just work in private equity, and I'm going to be the best investor I can be, to now I'm a CEO, but it's not I'm a veteran who's trying to be a CEO. That's just who I am, what I do, and I have to be the best at that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And being in the team is just part of my background.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Yeah. You do. I think everybody is limited. You have physical limitations and mental limitations. I do believe that. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to solve quantum physics or jump 50 inches into the air. I'm just not. But within the capabilities that God has given me, how do I push those and maximize those to have the largest impact and really get the most out of them?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So yeah, that one kind of mega trend happening in the market. The other thing was, obviously, 2001, we go into Afghanistan. 2003, we go into Iraq. And we're there for 20 years. So our attention as a nation was on counterinsurgency, was on the global war on terror. It wasn't How do we have the most powerful navy in the world to deter the Chinese?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
What you can do is limitless if you're doing the right thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But it goes back to your point of if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, right? I can't go and do anything in the world and be the best at it, right? If you want to be the best at something, I can't do that in every aspect of everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But this is truly what I'm meant to be doing. And when you look at the decision to start Saronic, the first – decision point that I made was, I want to get back into defense. It wasn't, what company should I start? Where's the market gap? How big is the opportunity? Okay, this is going to make a bunch of money. Okay, now I'll go do it. It was, no, I want to get back into defense.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Okay, why do you want to get back into defense? Because I want to help keep people safe. That's what I did for 11 years of my life. That is ingrained in who I am. I needed a break from that. But now I want to get back to that. And if I'm thinking about my career and I'm thinking about the next 25 years of my life, that's what I want to dedicate my talent to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I didn't know anything else in that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
No, the dream was there, right? We wanted to build a really big company, but big so that it could have an impact. Because you want to have a really big impact, and to have a really big impact, you have to be a big company. But going back to the time that it would take to do that, I thought if we're wildly successful and everything works, we're in year seven, year eight, maybe?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I thought this was going to be a decade-long thing just to get here. Now, when you look at where we're going to be in a decade, it's awesome because of the trajectory that we're on. And one of my favorite quotes, I think it's Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, one of those two, said, we always overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, and we underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
A decade's a really long time. In 10 years, you can change the world. Now, I did not think we had, and we'll talk about kind of where we're going, but I didn't think we had this level of opportunity in this amount of time. How fast we move is completely remarkable. What do you attribute that to? A few things. One, we've attracted a world-class team, like truly world-class.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I'll get into the founding team, how that came together. But A-plus team from across industries, from top companies, SpaceX, Google, Tesla, Endroll, out of the military. I mean, people that are super passionate about the mission and want to dedicate their talents to building the products that our country needs. Second thing is capital. Investors. Joe Lonsdale was our first investor.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We have a list of phenomenal investors, Ray Tonsig from Caffeinated Capital, Catherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz, runs their American Dynamism practice. Elad Gil led our last round. These are top investors in Silicon Valley that have given us close to a billion dollars to date. But it's not just about the money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
we were focused somewhere fundamentally differently for 20 years. So we have this reduction in spending, which actually ramps back up for Iraq and Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean that we're building the platforms we need for 2025 and beyond, because again, very different type of conflict.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
My job is to go and make a return, but it's not just that they've given us the money. They want us to go after the really hard problems for the country. And they've trusted us with that money to move quickly, to build products faster than the pace of government contracting so that we can get solutions in the hands of our warfighters as fast as possible. We couldn't do that without private capital.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The third thing is the customer. In this case, and we'll talk just the defense, it's military, right? I haven't seen the Navy move with this pace in anything, right? You can have a great team and a ton of capital. And if the customer doesn't start changing and adopting things, one or both of those things are going to dry up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So in order to create this like hyper growth environment that we're in, you need those three things to come together. And you need the Navy to lean in on certain places where they've been very, very risk adverse to start changing that culture right, and moving alongside companies like Ceronic and adopting solutions like this. Otherwise, the investors aren't going to keep pouring capital into it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So the ability to bring those three things together, world-class team, incredible investors with a lot of capital. You say a billion dollars kind of lightly, that's a lot of money. I don't take that lightly for one second. That's a lot of responsibility and a lot of trust that was placed in the company and in me and the leadership team. We earn that trust every single day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And then customer with a oh shit problem that we got to go solve for them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So the first conversation we had, it was going back to what I was talking about a moment ago, like, I just want to work on things that keep people safe. That's how I want to spend my life. That's what gets me up in the morning. One of my favorite quotes ever, and I need to figure out who this quote is from, but it's don't ask what the world needs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Ask what makes you come alive because what the world needs is more people that have come alive. And it was pretty powerful. And so I figured out that this is how I wanted to spend my life. And I knew, I just knew I would never figure it out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We're still living in this world of everybody's still friends, but now there's just terrorists, but global conflict's not a thing. So you have these two mega trends that kind of happen that are one, reduction in spending for big platforms, consolidation in the defense industrial base, And then our focus as a military on a very, very different type of adversary.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
working at a private equity firm working anywhere but specifically at a private equity firm working 80 to 100 hours a week just grinding through other stuff you just don't have the time the bandwidth the mental capacity and for me personally it's like the kind of like all-in mindset and that's what i need when i go after think personally everybody's different i know that if i'm going to do something or i'm really going to do it then i just got to be all in
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I went in thinking I was going to explain this in a very rational way to my wife. And mind you, she had just left her job. And she had a 20-year career. We decided now I'm in private equity for five years. My salary has grown. We're in a comfortable place. I'm getting promoted. I'm doing the things. Everything's looking great. And I walk into the living room. I'm like, I have to quit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And she looks at me and I could just, she wanted to say like, get out of my face. And you have two kids at this point, two kids. Oh yeah. This is in 2020. This is early 22. So my kids are seven and six, seven and six. Yeah. And we're living in Austin and we have a house and then do I have all the thing? And so it's, I'm like, I have to quit. She's like, OK, tell me why.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And I go, well, I'm going to go build a defense tech company. And she goes, that sounds great. That sounds really exciting. What does your company do? And I go, oh, it builds technology for defense. And I didn't have the answer. I just didn't know. But I knew this is what I wanted to do and what I was supposed to be doing. And so she heard me out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And as always, she supported me, which is incredible. And we came up with a plan. It was like, look, here's the plan. If in 12 months, if I'm still wandering around the streets saying, hey, I want to build a defense tech company, and there's nothing concrete, then I'm going to go get it. I'm not looking for perennial unemployment here. I'm really looking to follow my dreams. And this is my dream.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
She's like, huh? Then you got to go for it. Then you got to go for it. So walked in, quit my job, and started building out Saronic. With no idea what it was going to be? With no idea what it was going to be. So started thinking through, OK. Well, first step was I thought I was going to take like a couple weeks off and at least clear my head a little bit before diving right in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And the next thing that happened was I caught up with Joe Lonsdale. How did you guys meet? So Joe and I met 2020-ish time frame when he moved to Austin. He was networking with some SEALs and military folks. He invited me to his house for breakfast. We did a workout. This was, again, 2020, I think late 2020, early 2021. And it was great. I was like, great, cool guy, like awesome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I thought I'd never see him again. Six months later, his EA emails me. He's like, hey, do you want to come to Joe's house for a workout and breakfast? It was great. Last time was fun. Do it again. We were talking about investments, things I was working on at Vista. There were like some overlapping companies. So it was just nice guy, cool to go to. So fast forward, quit my job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So with decreased spending and decreased competition, you don't have a whole lot of innovation. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I had one of these breakfasts. It's like, what do you have going on? I'm like, oh, I quit Vista and I'm going to go build a defense set company. And he kind of did the same double take that my wife did. He's like, I'm sorry, what? And I've learned from the conversation with my wife. I go, no, no, don't ask me any questions because I don't know. I'm not pitching anything. I don't know what it is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And he goes, no, no, no. That's perfect. Come join AVC, let's build this together. Let us support you. It's your company, it's your thesis, it's your idea, everything. He's like, use our resources, use me as a mentor, use me as advisor, and we want to invest in you when you come up with that idea. Wow. And I was floored. And that's a skill. Like Joe saw something in me that I didn't even see.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I think at that point, yeah, I was saying I wanted to build a defense tech company. Did I really think it was going to come true? Did I really know all the steps that it would take to get it done? No. So just jumped right in. Started working and started building out thesis ideas. And Vista really taught me how to run a... really disciplined and really intellectually honest diligence process.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So I was able to structure things and lay them out and say, okay, I'm going to go look at this. Then I'm going to go look at this. Then I'm going to go look at this and here's how we're going to map the universe. And here are all the things that we can look at. And I mean, the military puts out a strategy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
They're like, here are the 14 things over the next 50 years that we're going to be investing in cybersecurity and autonomy and AI, et cetera, et cetera. You're not in one of those 14 things, what are you doing? So I started mapping that out. I actually started out looking at a 5G cybersecurity idea.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
kind of battlefield communications are changing, networks are changing, there needs to be new security. And I just went really deep there for about six to eight weeks. Again, laid out the diligence process. And as in any diligence, the most important part is getting people on the phone. It's having conversations with the experts and saying, Hey, tell me about the market. Stop me when I'm wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Talk to me about X, Y, and Z. How is this evolving? What are the real needs? And I just did that over and over again. And the more I did that, the more it was like, okay, this isn't a big enough problem to be a big company or have a big impact. And so we ended up killing that idea, turning it off pretty quickly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And again, it goes back to just be disciplined, be unemotional, and just make the right business decision. And started looking at maritime autonomy. In fact, a really close friend of mine showed me a YouTube video of these two surfers in Germany. that built a hydrofoil surfboard out of a Pelican gun case.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And of course, two team guys sitting there with a six pack say, well, I bet I could put some explosives in that. That'd be a cool product. And so I'm like, well, would it be? And so I go and I start building out. I'm like, okay, well, what does maritime look like? What does maritime autonomy look like? And I'm going to conferences and I'm looking at things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And you walk into all these conferences and you see 25 different drones hanging from the sky. And you're like, oh, there's a lot of advancement in aerial autonomy. There's even advancement in subsea autonomy. And I wasn't seeing autonomous boats. And I'm like, why aren't there any autonomous boats at these conferences?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so I just walk over and I look at, I'm like, okay, well, we're just the boats. Right? And you'll appreciate this. So I walk up to the Zodiac booth. And you know Zodiacs, the little speed boats we use in the SEAL teams with the outboard motor, carries six people. They look like they're from Vietnam. They're like 1970s technology. And you're always, the motor's never starting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's a piece of crap. If you go on the Zodiac website, They have these really cool fully electric jet drive, like push button Zodiacs. So I go up to the booth and I'm asking the guy, I'm like, why on the Zodiac website do I see this thing that looks like it's from 2022 coming off the back of a yacht when the SEAL teams get this? And he goes, oh, we're actually different companies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's Zodiac, big Zodiac. This is Zodiac Mill Pro. And we're just the Zodiac military company. And so I'm like, so you don't innovate? He's like, no, we're different companies. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. So I started saying, okay, like where's the innovation in maritime? Where is it? And I couldn't find it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The Navy, again, going back to what Congress is doing, what the Navy, the Navy's been doing research and experimentation with a number of different companies. And a lot of it has been Just that, just experimentation, proof of concept. I was like, where's the real capability that scales?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Where's the company that's software first, hardware enabled, that's vertically integrated, that can produce at scale, that's delivering real capability? Where's that company? And I didn't see it. So then the second question I had to ask was like, does anybody care that this company doesn't exist? Or does it matter? Because it's okay to have a gap in the market.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The question is like, is that gap going to get filled? Can you build a real generational company here? Basically, is the Navy actually going to buy thousands of autonomous systems or not? And if the answer is no, that's okay, then I just don't want to start this company because then it doesn't matter. That's when you start going into...
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
shipbuilding, shipbuilding capacity, all the things about China that we were talking about. And you very quickly realize, oh crap, the Navy actually doesn't have another choice. There just isn't another choice. We have to move in this direction. We have to augment our fleet with autonomous ships, boats and ships. We have to
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
we have to be a force multiplication to the fleet that we have today in order to maintain naval superiority. Otherwise, we just won't have it. The Chinese have went from this little crappy littoral navy to one that has aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and hypersonic missiles in less than 25 years. Wow. And They build their military solutions specifically to counter the US.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We are their focus. And that's scary. So then you're like, once we've kind of put all of that together, it wasn't even a question of oh, this is cool, I'm an entrepreneur, I want to start a tech company, I want to do these things. It was like, no, we have to start this company. It's not even a question of do I want to anymore. It's a, we have to, and it's our responsibility to do so.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
It's hard. It's hard. And look, there are organizations set up to fast-track this stuff. DIU, or Defense Innovation Unit, phenomenal organization. We partner with them. They've taught us a lot about the end user, the customer. But the process that we've talked about, it's just really hard to drive adoption into the government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Because we're the global power, right? Anytime you're on top, people are trying to take you down. And that's just anything. That's life, that's sports. It's competition, right? And that's been happening since the beginning of human civilization. And the other thing is, look, they look at Taiwan and Taiwan's, they view it as their right to go and reclaim that as part of China.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That is fundamentally their right as a country. And the United States does not agree with that. And we, for better or worse, feel it's our place to project democracy around the world. And I fundamentally believe in that, right? And so Those are two diametrically opposed viewpoints.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But to give you a sense of kind of the problem that we're facing, imagine that Cuba was critical to the world's economy, like critical to the world's economy, and the Chinese wanted to stop us from invading Cuba. hard problem. Cuba's 80 miles off the coast. Taiwan's 80 miles off the coast of China. It's on the other side of the world for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So you really have to have deterrence in place to make sure that they're not projecting what they view right and what they view the world should look like. And the world that the Chinese government projects and the CCP projects, we don't want to live in that world. Right, that's not a good world. A world where the US is not the predominant superpower, it's actually a really, really scary place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So we have to make sure that we're able to deter or defeat the Chinese in the South Pacific, if it ever comes to that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That's how you eat an elephant. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. So we have the capital. The next thing was founding team. Who's going to actually build this thing. And when you talk about how that actually came together, Again, there's something very special happening here that's outside of any one individual's control.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So three co-founders, Doug Lambert, who's our chief operating officer, Vibh Altikar, who's our chief technology officer, and then Rob Lehman, who's our chief commercial officer. What are their backgrounds? Doug was the head of engineering at a company called Liquid Robotics. which was a maritime autonomy company. That company sold to Boeing in 2017. He's been in maritime autonomy for 15 years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
He got recruited away from Liquid Robotics to start building an autonomous submarine in Austin, Texas. What are the odds of that? And he left that role two weeks before? We were like getting ready to start Seronic. And so I got introduced to him in Austin, wheeling up, we're like, I'm like, I want to go build this. He's like, that sounds awesome. We worked together on it for a few months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
He's like, we got along really well, you know, along with the other two who I'll go into in a minute. And he's like, yeah, we're like, let's go do this together. But what are the chances that somebody with 20 years of experience in maritime autonomy is sitting in Austin? Not high.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
vib was from andoril so he was employ andoril has i don't know who knows now 5 000 employees he was employee 22 or 23 he ran software computer vision sensor fusion across their product lines so i was talking with alex moore who's one of the partners at avc who helped start the business he's on our board And we had, I'll get into Rob's background. So it was me, Doug and Rob.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We need a software guy, but we don't just need a, we need like the software guy, like an absolute killer. We need the best software person on the planet. And we're just talking and I'm just going off on where I'm going to go, like how we're going to find this person. And he goes, oh, I got the guy. And I'm like, okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
like yeah okay and he introduced me to vib bib flies out to austin we spend the weekend together introduce him to other co-founders universally has like this guy's brilliant brilliant phenomenal software engineer able to art like able to make me understand the technology. That's a very special skill set for an engineer to be able to articulate, talk to customers, build things, manage team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
What was that? Was that Clinton? The last, yeah, I think so. I think so. The Secretary of Defense was Les Aspin. Since then, there's only been three massive companies that have started. SpaceX, Palantir, and now Anduril. SpaceX and Palantir started in the early 2000s, so call it 2001, 2002-ish timeframe. Then you had a 15-year gap. Man. Until Anduril was started in 2017.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
This is a guy. And we knew just like that. Rob, this is going to be a crazy coincidence. I met Rob on a hunting trip with some folks from AVC. So we're hunting in South Dakota. We're shooting pheasants in South Dakota. One of our good friends from Austin puts on this hunting trip, invited some folks from ABC, invited me, invited Rob, who he knows for a really long time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And so we're all together in South Dakota randomly. And Rob and I, former Marine, he was in the Marines for five years and then finished out his career as a reservist. So Marine, former Marine, former Navy, like we're talking or having beers, whatever. And then six months later, he actually ran his own consulting company, which helps small businesses contract with government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
He has this phenomenal background where he worked at large prime, was a registered lobbyist. You can talk about like how we understood how to lobby, how we understood how to navigate the hill, how we understood how to navigate the government ecosystem, Rob. Rob lived it for 25 years, right? Here's the piece that gets left out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And then it's like these little intangible things as what makes Saronic so special. Rob's uncle was the secretary of the Navy for six years. John Lehman in the 1980s under Reagan. Now, and John's an advisor to us now. It's not saying like, hey, his uncle's why we're successful. But here's a person that I met on a hunting trip.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
that grew up inside the Navy, that understands how to navigate that ecosystem in only a way that somebody that grew up in it could understand. And that's what you need to be successful. So once we had the team in place, then it was like, let's just start building. And we had a very, very laser-focused view from the beginning on scale. It's like, yes, we can build the best software.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Yes, we can go design really cool hardware. But if we can't put it all together and build at scale, like thousands of units, it doesn't matter. I don't care how good the software is. I don't care how cool the hardware looks. I don't care how cool the boat looks. If you can't build thousands, it doesn't matter. It's all irrelevant. So our next hire was a guy named John Morgan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
He was our third employee. Runs our manufacturing. The first question I asked him was, John, we don't even have a design for a prototype yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
why are we hiring ahead of why do we need a head of manufacturing now explain it to me from your perspective because he lived it he was at spacex for 10 years he was a direct report in the elon musk he took the falcon 9 engine from prototype all the way to production or the raptor engine excuse me from prototype all the way to production insanely talented guy i'm like We're not building anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I don't even have a design for you to build. If we don't start thinking about manufacturing now, in 18 months when you build your first prototype, you're screwed. You're gonna have to start all over again. You're gonna have to put the processes in place. You're gonna have to redesign it for manufacturing. Your product isn't even going to look like what your prototype looked like.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You have to start now if you actually want to produce at rate. Now, if your goal isn't to produce at rate, Start whenever you want. But if your goal is to produce that rate, you have to start now. And I go, okay, I'm sold. Right? So we had this core nucleus that was just A plus players. And it just built from there and built from there. And we just started building things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we had our very first prototype in the water in under six months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Yeah. We actually had one. That's our first official prototype. One of the very first things our engineers did, they bought an $800 raft on Amazon. An $800 raft, they put $30,000 of cameras and sensors and batteries and a motor, and they turned this thing into an autonomous boat. We just need something, we have to start programming.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The hardware's gonna take six months, we're gonna start programming in the interim. Went to Amazon. That was built in like three weeks. And we're building out the software platform that's going to power all of our hardware platforms. And we had a 5,000 square foot warehouse, which was essentially just one rectangle. There was one door in the front. And we had our first visit from a congressman.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And their last valuation was $14 billion. I think they're talking about raising at a $28 billion valuation. But those are really only, when you talk about what matters for the military, you really have to get to scale. You really have to be able to build thousands of platforms that are extremely capable. And that means you have to be a really big company. Right? There's only been three.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And this $800 raft is sitting on top of a, It was a dermo bin, essentially. It was a rectangular garbage can, was our stand for this boat. And it was cargo strapped on. And I'm like, what am I going to tell this congressman we're actually doing here? And he came in. I'm like, sir, this is what we're doing. Here's what we're building. Here's our first test unit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We're building so fast that we can't wait for the hardware to get developed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
this is the speed that the united states needs to be building at and he loved it um do you have a picture of the raft i do not actually i'm sure we do somewhere i'll send you one i'd love to see it yeah i'll send you i'll send you some photos so i had that built our first prototype in six months but more importantly we we sent that right out to the navy we're like Let's go start testing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Let's get it in customers' hands. We started using it with the Navy. We started using it with commercial customers. We started testing it. We started putting it in environments and saying, okay, where does it work? Where does it doesn't work? What needs to be better? And then we iterated on it and we made it better and we brought it to manufacturing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
In another six months, we did a complete design spin from June of 23 to December of 23. And then we're producing a rate by January of 2024.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
all in the same time we're launching our second product and then our third product to where in under two years we brought three different different product lines to market all ready to be manufactured at scale our six foot boat our 14 foot boat and our 24 foot boat now we did that again in under two years that's remarkable It truly is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I don't think, and we went and did the research a little bit, but I don't think there's been a hardware company, let alone a defense hardware company, that has brought products to market and has had them fielded in under two years. Now, that may be changing a little bit, but that is an incredible pace to operate at. And so from there, we're now launching three new products this year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So we're only speeding up because we've been able to raise a billion dollars. We have 450 employees and growing by the week. We have 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space to build these solutions in. We have, gee, I don't even know how many different locations. We have Austin, DC, San Diego. We just acquired a shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana to build large autonomous ships.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we can get into that. We're moving from autonomous boats to autonomous ships. And we're doing that now. And we're opening a Sydney office, Australia and London in the UK. So our focus on global sales and not just global sales. One of the things we focus on is production, right? As we partner with countries around the world,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
How do we really give them the same capabilities that the United States has? Well, if you designed a system that can produce platforms at scale, and those platforms are designed in a way where the whole production line is just set up to be easily replicated, then you can put that production line anywhere in the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So your production line and your manufacturing process and your end products actually become the product. And that's typically not how the maritime universe works. Boat building and shipbuilding has been a very bespoke process for a very long time. It's bringing the rigor and the processes back into manufacturing that let us scale.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
That would really change the game for the United States and our allies. Genius.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
I told you this earlier, so this is a trick question, but my wife actually came up with it. I have to give her credit, otherwise I'm not going to be able to go home tonight. But... We were looking for names and naming something new isn't, isn't easy. So we're searching for what what's the right name for this company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And the reason is, again, it's just hard to do business with the government. And prior to 2017, and this is where I'll give Anduril a ton of credit, right? People, investors, weren't really interested in driving money into defense. It was a hard place to make a return. This is why I try to tell the government, look, you actually want Seronic to make money. You want us to do really well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we come across the story of the Battle of Salamis, which is the naval battle between Greeks and the Persians after the Battle of Thermopylae. So you have the Second Greco-Persian War. You have the famous stand of 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. Right after that,
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
there was this huge naval battle called the Battle of Salamis, where the Greek Navy was actually surrounded by the Persian Navy. They were outnumbered two or three to one. Themistocles, who was the commander of the Greek Navy at the time, basically writes a letter to Xerxes, tricks him, gets him to split his fleet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The Greeks are then able to pick off the Persians and they decimate the Persian fleet. And that all happened in the Saronic Gulf. So we're reading this story This is such a cool story. But we can't name the company Salamis. You just can't. And my wife goes, name it Saronic. And I think I'm like, nah, I don't like it. And for like two or three days, she just keeps coming back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
She's like, no, no, no, I really think it should be Saronic. I was like, nah, no, no, no. And then I think on day three, I was like, you know what? I'm starting to, I'll go with it. It's okay. It's okay. And I love it. It's the absolute perfect name for the company. It stands for everything we believe in. You know, the Greeks protected democracy for the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And that's what we're doing at Saronic. That's amazing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Sounds good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Don't worry about squeezing the margin because every dollar we make, one, we reinvest it back into the company for R&D. But two, the more money you make, the more that investors will be able to leverage private capital, will magnify any dollar the government puts into our company through acquisition or otherwise 10 times over, and we'll be able to build even better systems faster.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So it goes back to the story we were talking about earlier, just identifying the gap in the market, the real lack of technology, I'll call it lack of technological advancement, right? We saw, or what we were able to see was aerial drones, subsea drones, other things were moving forward and boats weren't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
and so that went back to the question okay does anybody actually care and goes back to okay yes without autonomous boats the surface fleet of the navy does not have what it needs to actually maintain naval superiority and so we started this company and said how are we how are we going to redefine maritime superiority, and just use autonomy to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
And we can talk about all the different ways we redefine it. We'll get into that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You started with a six-foot? We started with a six-foot, so half the size of a jet ski. Then we built the 14-foot. Then we built the 24-foot. So our 24-foot vessel, Corsair, 1,000 nautical mile range, 1,000-pound payload capacity. And the capabilities are, we talked about limitless earlier, really limitless.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
We're just starting to scratch the surface on how we employ autonomous systems across the battlefield as a country. We're just starting to scratch the surface. So what that means is as software evolves, as the technology evolves, the concepts of operations can move just as quickly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
But to talk about kind of like what those platforms are capable of, I just kind of spit out some hardware specs on you, 1,000 nautical mile range, 1,000 pound payload capacity. From the hardware side, they are completely modular. So what that means is the base platform's actually designed for defense and commercial applications that we discussed earlier, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
Whether it's military or whether it's Coast Guard, Port Harbor security, critical infrastructure, you may need different payloads or different sensors to meet those various uses. So we built this base platform to be completely modular and dual use. Why is that so important? Why do we have to be dual use? Well, it's actually critical because you want a commercial off the shelf supply chain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
You want to be able to build resiliency and robustness in your supply chain so that you can actually build the quantity of units that the military wants. So you design for dual use upfront.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
The other reason it's important is if you design that way, you're now working with companies that can leverage unit economics in the commercial market, and you can buy less expensive components that then drive the costs down for the military. So you're building attributable platforms and talking about defeating China, cost is a big component.
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So from the hardware side, we're delivering range and payload capacity with a completely modular platform that can be adapted to Any mission set or any use case on the software side, this is where it gets really interesting. And we should probably dive into kind of what autonomy means and all the different things, but completely autonomous vessels, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#205 Dino Mavrookas - Fmr. Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) / CEO of Saronic Technologies
So what is, what does that mean when Saronix has it? Well, that means you can actually control. 10 boats, you, one individual operator can control 10 boats, can control 50 boats, control hundreds of boats, right? That is limitless. The upper end is limitless because it's controlled by software and making a user interface that's very easy to work with and operate out of and say, hey,