Matt Grimm
speaker
244 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Matt Grimm’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They would consider our approach to technology development to be a threat to their style of technology development and their style of production. Yes. I don't think they view us as Andral. It's ourselves. I don't think they're thinking of us every morning. I do think they view cost plus versus firm fixed mindset as being particularly impactful to them.
Oh, we already do. We already do, yeah, for sure. And there's an agenda within each of these countries, within Australia, within UK, this isn't anything particularly new.
The British government, like the US government, or like the Australian government, wouldn't be comfortable taking British taxpayer dollars and funneling them straight to Andorra US in California to buy new kit or new technology or new drones or new missiles. So one of the strategic moves we have made is to invest in
teams and engineers and production capacities in each of these countries, including the UK, so that UK taxpayer dollars get spent within the UK to manufacture UK variants of a particular product that we make. We will see this in every country.
So the thesis is basically taking core IP and then localizing it to work with, you know, your radio standards, your existing platforms like helicopters or planes or drones or warships or whatever that requires like a little bit of customization, that it's just a slightly different platform, slightly different technology.
So we adapt it into the UK standard and then manufacture it here, deploy it here, support it here, field it here with British citizens based here in England. Like sovereignty agenda is what
would call it what percent of your budget is r d our budget yeah i'm just wondering comparatively to the one and a half percent of one of your primes yeah we spend i'd have to get you the firm number the number i'm gonna i'm gonna throw out it's gonna be range wise is it like 10 15 oh no no no no it's like 60 70 huge number Andrew, we're doing very well financially.
This year, revenue's off the charts. And then we reinvest every single nickel of that right back into future growth. We're still evident negative, as you'd expect for a growth stage startup like us. But we spend a massive percent of our revenue.
This is the venture capital. community, of course we do. Everyone who has come before us, of course.
Yeah, I think a few things. There's a political piece of this that I think we have a lot of lessons to learn on impacting the appropriations process, impacting the legislative process, having our voice heard in different kind of policy approaches coming out of Congress and coming out of the Pentagon. I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned there.
I think there are good lessons to be learned, especially on what in our business was referred to as MRO is essentially the long logistics tail that comes with deploying one of these products. Unlike a Silicon Valley software company where you hit upgrade on the cloud servers and then, whoa, all your customers have a new version.
Just fundamentally not how our business works where we have soldiers using our products deployed all over the world and you can't just click a button and magically upgrade everything. You can... upgrade some here, upgrade some here, upgrade some here. There's a real kind of logistics and fielding piece there. But as of today, they're better at than we are. I think we have a lot to learn there.
And then the last piece that I think is kind of an interesting one and might get us to some other interesting conversation topics. I think they've done a really good job at appealing to a patriotic current and influencing folks who want to come work and defend their country and be patriotic and influence the national defense sector and encouraging them to come work on these problems.
I think they've done a really good job. They hire a lot of people. They have a lot of employees. They have a lot of offices. They have a lot of production factories. They have a lot of folks who work there who believe a mission and a vision. And I think there's something to be taken from that.
I think they have done a, I think you kind of have to bifurcate a little bit, right? Because there's a, like an ambitious AI software engineer type of mentality. And then there's a production assembly line fielding training type of mentality or different people. Yeah, they have in a certain category. And I think that's where we have some learnings to take.
What have you not done that you wish you had done? Oh, man. My joke comment is that if I only make two mistakes before lunch, it's a good day. So it's like... There's a lot of things I would, I think a couple of things. I think taking a stronger corporate position on remote work, a frequent topic within your podcast and your world. You wish you'd said no to it?
Wish we'd taken a more definitive negative stance, yes.
I wouldn't say laissez-faire. No, we have a default in-office first kind of approach. But we, especially through COVID and then through kind of the spreading of people with COVID and then trying to get people back, it has been harder for us to get that kind of core group back together. I wish you'd been more definitive.
I wish I'd been more definitive, yeah, in the earlier days of that kind of evolution. What did you do that you wish you hadn't done? Oh man, again, a lot. There's a few things I would say here. First thing is we made a, I made a conscious decision a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, to attempt to non-linearly scale our GNA support functions.
So things like our business systems team that does our internal tooling, our HR team, our people business partners kind of support their managers in their organization, our IT operations team, our facilities team. And what we were trying to achieve is we were trying to achieve a nonlinear kind of return on those types of heads. Like, can we build in automation? Can we utilize AI?
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