Trae (Trey) Stephens

And one of the slides in that is like a list of things that we wanted to build.

We didn't know which thing would be the first thing that we wanted to build, but we had this list.

And it was kind of cool, like earlier this year, I opened up the slide deck in my Google Drive, and it turns out that we've built like almost all of them.

No kidding?

Yeah.

And it wasn't like intentional, like, okay, let's go back to the deck and do the next one.

It was just kind of organically how it unfolded.

So, really, the first approach that we made is, like, you have to build something that is going to be pretty fast.

Like, you have to be able to get it out into the field quickly.

You don't want it to be a science project.

And you want there to be a significant amount of political urgency around the thing that you're going to build so that you can drive a different kind of decision making rather than business as usual procurement policy.

And so for us, that meant that we landed on Century Tower, which is now deployed not only at military bases, but also on the southwest border in the United States, border with Mexico.

Obviously, in the first Trump administration,

This was a big concern.

Whether or not you have a border wall, you need to know what's going on.

And so we built this autonomous sentry tower that was completely off-grid, mobile, so you could pick it up and move it around.

Had, you know, a solid state metamaterial radar, a infrared camera, optical camera, communications network.

And it would just persistently look around itself and flag for the Customs and Border Patrol whenever something was crossing the border that they needed to take a look at.

And then it would enable them to make a decision.

Like, yes, that's something that we care about that we're going to go and take a look at.