The following interview is a conversation we had with Ian Kalin, CEO & Co-Founder of TurbineOne, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $22 Million Raised to Power the Future of Operational Intelligence
Brett
Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Ian Kalin, CEO and Co-Founder of TurbineOne, a defense technology company that’s raised 22 million in funding. Ian, welcome to the show.
Ian Kalin
Thank you so much.
Brett
Normally when I’m doing podcasts, I like to just skip the bio, skip the past, and just jump right into what the guest is actually building. But you’ve had such an incredible background, I’d be foolish and it’d be doing a disservice to our listeners if we didn’t talk about it a little bit. So let’s talk about your background. You were the first chief data officer for the US Department of Commerce, is that correct?
Ian Kalin
That’s right.
Brett
What was that like?
Ian Kalin
I loved that job. Obama appointee. I wish I had it longer. I came towards the end of the administration, and so the nature of my senior executive appointment meant that I only had about 20 months in the job, and I wish it was longer because the work we did was very impactful towards the nation, towards disaster response. Of course, there were some good techie and data systems that I cared a whole lot about at the Census Bureau, the National Weather Service, places like that, but I loved it. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.
Brett
And how do you get a job like that? I’m guessing that wasn’t just a random thing. You’re probably doing some amazing stuff. So tell us what you were doing before that point.
Ian Kalin
It was kind of random. I mean, it’s like any other government job I didn’t have. Despite the political nature of the appointment, I didn’t have any fancy political connections. It was a good old fashioned job posting, and 20 interviews later, I got a job offer. Or maybe it was ten, I don’t remember, a few years back now, but it was a long bureaucratic process of vetting where it really started with leadership. The cabinet secretary, commerce secretary Penny Pritzker, branded that government organization as America’s data agency and had a number of data initiatives that she was leading to make our nation stronger. And so from her leadership, she said, I need a technology executive that can speak language of policy, understands tech acquisitions, that can come in and lead a set of initiatives.
Ian Kalin
And so, yeah, it was just a good old fashioned throw your name into a random email box and work your way through. But the more direct answer to your question is, right before that gig, I was working as a product manager at another government focused Govtech startup company called Socrata. So I was kind of already in the space, and I guess I’ve been working around that highly regulated sector now for almost 20 years now. So it’s something I deeply care about.
Brett
And then if we move up from there, you were chief data officer at eHealth and you were CTO, and the company went public, I believe, when you were there as well, is that correct?
Ian Kalin
Oh, no, it was already public, but it had quite a run. So I joined. When the market cap of that publicly traded company behind Medicare.com was valued at about $300 million, I left at $3 billion market cap in valuation. So it was quite a, you know, ten x, not 10%, ten x increase in value. And in a large part of that rise was we shifted a largely telephonic business into a mobile and tech business. It was well covered, had a chance to ring the bell and Nasdaq and all that kind of stuff, a lot of fun, and also learned a lot about a set of technology systems that I had never led before. Also I’d never touched healthcare before.
Ian Kalin
My family’s all medical folks, and I avoided healthcare as much as I could for as long as I could, but then joined e health, I think, right after the Obama administration. And so that was my break into that category. And again, that was. That was a fun ride.
Brett
Now, let’s talk about the current ride, TurbineOne. What does the company do at a very high level?
Ian Kalin
Adversary detection. We’re helping the good guys find the bad guys.
Brett
How does it work? Explain it to us like we’re idiots. How does the technology work?
Ian Kalin
Oh, you’re not idiots. And I think this audience are some venture savvy, tech savvy folks. So the way I’ll describe it is not the way I would speak normally, frankly, to, you know, I don’t know, generals and admirals in the defense world where I work in, because they frankly speak a different language. Not good or bad, just different. Just a different language. But the way it works is that it’s software. It is a toolkit that anyone can use to find what they’re looking for on any hardware from any sensor. The category of what we’re working within is itself kind of new. So just anyone who knows selling software to the government is not something that’s natural. It’s almost unnatural, especially at the federal level, let alone the defense sector. They’re used to buying boxes, ships, and billable hours.
Ian Kalin
So how it works often goes into, well, it’s an app. It’s an intelligence application. We primarily are serving those in the intelligence community, and what we’re doing is solving the problem of overwhelmed warfighters. There are soldiers and sailors and marines that spend way too much time staring at screens, looking for things. Bad guys, bad ships, intrusions on bases, drone attacks. And a lot of it is, frankly, just, you know, humans with six screens up, just trying to not blink. And so a lot of our toolkit just simplifies that experience. Can we help folks find what they’re looking for? You tell the system what you need to be alerted about, and when that condition is met, you get the alert, and then you’re able to respond to that threat.
Brett
Take us back to July 2020 and the founding of the company. That’s a pretty interesting time to found a company that’s what, a couple months into the pandemic?
Ian Kalin
Almost in Covid. Yeah. I did not meet my Co-Founder live until after the company had been around for a year. That was super weird. So, yeah, were incubated in another unusual category, as we do this Frankenstein origin story of TurbineOne, the truth is that were. My Co-Founder, Matt Amaker, and I, were employees of a VC firm. I thought, given some success in the healthcare sector, I was going to launch a healthcare startup. Matt was working as an interim CTO for a bunch of the portfolio companies of the VC firm. And that’s how we met. We were employees under the same firm and the same boss.
Ian Kalin
And it was our Co-Founder, Dan Petillo, now the head of the general partnership, a VC firm that incubated TurbineOne as a Co-Founder with us, it was Dan and Matt’s vision for national security that led to this idea of, can we bring better tech forward? Dan himself had worked with the US Digital Service, a number of other mission driven organizations in the federal government, and they had this idea, and I had the business background of understanding government acquisitions. And so I guess that was brought in to Dan and Matt’s vision. And then we came up with this idea of spinning out the business, hence the name TurbineOne, and launching it, being fully focused on national security.
Brett
So you get brought in, you spin it out, and then what happens? For the first, let’s say, six months, what were the top priorities? What were you guys working on?
Ian Kalin
Oh, wild craziness. It’s Govtech, right? So, can anyone sell anything to anybody in its earliest stages? For those that aren’t as familiar with the defense industrial complex, there actually are a lot of front doors. There’s a lot of ways in which you can start to engage. There’s small business innovation, research hubs, there’s exercises, there’s competitions, challenge dot gov, and things like it. And what seems perhaps like foreign and inaccessible can actually be quite approachable for those that have served in the military. And the other part of the origin story that’s worth sharing for TurbineOne is that I wish I had this product back when I served became my experiences when I was in uniform, was the starting ingredients for Matt to figure out what to go fix. I say, hey, this is what I wish I had 20 years ago.
Ian Kalin
And Matt basically said, I can build that. And the arguments that we had became the initial roadmap and prototype of our product, which was called the frontline perception system. So those first six months, all right, this is what I wish I had, is that still needed? Like every good startup, you learn, you get out there, you test, but unlike whatever, a new food delivery app or, I don’t know, even some exciting piece of hardware, it’s actually really hard to do fast iterations with the government, because their definition of fasten is four to five years. So for you to be able to have iterative cycles led us to join a bunch of exercises. That’s what a lot of the first six months was like.
Ian Kalin
We were able to, with no special access and no extraordinary means, join commercial military exercises to test and demo and say, hey, do you need this? Do you need this? Frankly, what I thought was already in the military, in the, I don’t know, 15 years in between when I served and when I started this company, I thought a lot of the problems I saw had been fixed. It had to be. AI is common. Everyone’s got mobile apps, those level of systems that we use in our personal lives that I knew from social interactions that colonels and admirals had at home. So I just assumed they had it in their offices. To my surprise, a lot of the basic tech that I thought was so common at the Googles and the Facebooks of the world were not common to the Department of Defense.
Ian Kalin
In fact, they didn’t even know to ask for. And so that’s where those early six months of lessons and iterations and conversations led us to really refine down to, oh, actually, there is a very ubiquitous challenge out there that we can focus on by taking some of the best practices from industry with one key catch, and I think may or may not come up, why I’m excited to be on this podcast. We had to create a new category first in order to really differentiate ourselves.
Brett
Why is the military behind what you say in operate or using some of this technology? And, you know, I recently read the book Kill chain there, and they were just, you know, kind of painted a scary picture that we are reliant and using outdated technology. Why is that the case?
Ian Kalin
Democracy, whether we like it or not, the system incentivizes the situation we have. Like, it’s not an accident. And explaining government and funding and the stakeholders is a much longer conversation than the podcast can afford. But in short, it’s supposed to be complex. It’s the biggest technology market in the world, and therefore there’s all sorts of established power structures that prevent broadly new ideas from showing up. And that’s not just, by the way, like some startup perspective, that’s not intrinsically a startups problem. Even if you’re in uniform and you want to, I don’t know, take 100 forms and consolidate it down to ten forms, good luck with that. In government, having served myself in government many times, any change like that is immediately seen as high risk. Because the current situation, the current structures, incentives, acquisitions, budgeting, et cetera, is the low risk situation.
Ian Kalin
So to make a change is itself a revolution. There’s a lot of other great books out there. That hacky bureaucracy is one of my favorite, that is full of case studies and examples mostly in the past ten years, of how to transform government from within, how you can make those changes. But unfortunately they’re not broad enough. There’s still too much work to be done on bringing basic tech to all levels of government, city, county, state, federal, let alone defense. And so it’s a common problem with a chorus of disagreeing voices. But that, I think, is the fundamental reality of our system, is that we’re getting exactly what we asked for.
Brett
What are the pros of cost plus contracts in defense? So what I hear a lot about, and what I see a lot online is people kind of attacking it and just talking about the negatives. But I have to assume that there’s positives to that.
Ian Kalin
Yeah, but you’re kind of like asking me to defend something that I don’t know, almost have like an allergic reaction to. So it’s going to. I’m going to have to swallow some rage and frustrations in history to answer your question. But to really simplify, just think about. Sorry, sorry.
Brett
Oh, well, steel man it, right? I think that’s the proper term here. What would you like it? What would they say? Like, what would be their argument about them?
Ian Kalin
The reason to do cost plus is if you have no idea what you need, if you’re building a house on cost plus, how many bedrooms will you have? Probably as many as the contractor can get away with. But if you say, I want a two bedroom house with two bathrooms, that’s not cost plus, that’s a very different experience. Unfortunately, even despite the broad requirements process, which is a defined term, it’s a term of art in the defense industry. Ultimately, when it comes time to build something or deploy something, there is so much ambiguity from basically, I would simplify it with no criticism of the military contracting officers or the specialists or the labs that spend an insane number of hours making things better. This still comes down to non technical people overseeing technical projects.
Ian Kalin
And so when you don’t really know what you need, you’d say, all right, that’s when you need a cost plus. We’re like, all right, is this a four hour thing or a 400 hours thing? I don’t know, but let’s get started. We’ll figure it out later. The problem with that, if I may, having complimented when you need it, is that the incentive structure leads to waste. If something’s broken guess what? The vendor gets paid more to fix it. So guess what happens? They have to fix brokers up all the time. Well, that’s why shipyards take too long to, you know, build a ship and get it out to the fleet. Because if they’re building a ship on cost plus was always going to go over schedule.
Brett
How do we change that, though? It seems like there’s so much just lock in there that’s going to be impossible to uproot and change that system. Are you hopeful that we can change that and go away to a different model?
Ian Kalin
I don’t have the ability to change the system, but I know how to work within the system to make change. And so for, if there’s. If this is an audience of founders and builders and Category Visionaries, then I would say the way to drive forward is to not think that you can change the democratic system of congressional budgets, but instead say, all right, I. This is how budgeting works. How can any new widget break through at TurbineOne? We have this philosophy around power structures and risk. We say, okay, who are the decision makers in any new thing getting to anybody? It has to be anchored in mission. There has to be urgency for that capability. Someone has to say, I don’t want to deploy without this thing. I don’t want to deploy without TurbineOne.
Ian Kalin
If they’re not saying that, then you probably shouldn’t be wasting their time. But finding those people is important. And for those builders that are able to connect with those needs in the national security space, that’s the starting point. But unfortunately, it’s insufficient to get a contract from anybody to get it budgeted, to get it cyber cleared. And there’s still a lot of work to get done. But for us, the playbook is built from past experience. We’ve learned from companies that have come before us, and now we’re imitating the games of those with billions to sell contracts in the millions. It is accessible to any startup that wants to these practices, to break through the government, but you don’t have to. If you go in thinking you have to change the system, you’re probably going to lose.
Brett
You mentioned category creation there, which is, of course, one of my favorite topics in the world. So let’s talk about your category creation efforts at a high level. What is the category called?
Ian Kalin
Software. Ain’t that crazy?
Brett
Maybe we’re done.
Ian Kalin
Yeah, I mean, it’s great. It’s scary, but that’s kind of the point is in defense, that is like, why would you think that’s needed. You know, there is this phrase, there’s a couple of conferences last week, a bunch of leaders basically saying that they want to wrap hardware around software rather than software around hardware. The rhetoric is there, but the budgets are not. If you look at how our nation invests, we spend a hell of a lot more time on physical things and billable hours and cost plus contracts. So right off the bat, there are some folks that are probably deeply offended by what I’m saying right now. And I think that’s fine because there aren’t a lot of software companies that have found a way to break into the government. Maybe Microsoft office.
Ian Kalin
I think Palantir deserves some success there, but there aren’t a lot more than that. They kind of run out. The list starts to trail off pretty quick. Who else is out there that anyone else would recognize my name? And so that’s the first crazy idea, that you can be a true, proper software company and achieve what’s called a program of record in the US Department of Defense.
Brett
What would the line item be? That’s one way I like to think about categories.
Ian Kalin
Oh, you know this. Wait a second, Brett, have you. Wait, what’s going on right now? How do you know what this is? No one knows that. Your audience probably has no idea how brilliant your question is. But if you do, please contact me, because we’d want to hire you. We should be talking about recruiting somebody who understands how to ask that question. So that question implies that you understand congressional budgets. And that line item, as a direct answer to your question would be machine learning or intelligence or applications for such things. The funny thing about my category is that I am unlike the machine learning companies that have come before me. The US government has struggled for, I don’t know, 15 years to get onto the cloud. Now, because of the extraordinary success of companies like Nvidia.
Ian Kalin
And the lessons, unfortunately, the grim, horrible lessons of the battlefield of Ukraine. The electronic warfare spectrum has shown folks that the cloud is at best unreliable, probably going to be degraded, being spied on, or if you broadcast, you become a target. If you turn on a cell phone, the bad guys can find you. So that unfortunate truth of modern warfare means that those who need the most intelligence at the tactical level cannot get it, because the best intelligence, if it’s AI or machine learning, augmented or driven or whatever, you can’t access the cloud when you’re at the front lines. So that’s why my company’s category is edge or frontline. As terms of where we operate, we take the power of the cloud, find ways with wonderful inventions from my wonderful engineering team and co-founders to bring those capabilities to the front.
Ian Kalin
The other category that is kind of weird, from the world of data science and analytics and the DevOps and all the wonderful companies that operate in that space, we assume that our users will never be coders. And if they are, that’s great, but that’s not the operational truth. So if you have a no code, no cloud, no problem experience, we believe so far we’re the only company in that category.
Brett
How do you go about getting the government to create a line item like that? If I’m just looking at, in the private sector, I work with companies, I speak with a lot of founders, and they’re always trying to convince, you know, an enterprise to create a line item for a new category of software that didn’t exist previously. How do you do that in this world?
Ian Kalin
There’s, we have a three step process for that. First is that you have to prove that the line item is worthwhile to the warfighters. Always put the warfighter at the center of everything that we do. It’s all about keeping them safe, helping them get home safely to their families. Right? And so for us, we do that through exercises. The broader category there is what I call r and DA, R and D funds. Although in the commercial sector, to get to the first million of ARR, to get that $10 million contract, can be very hard. And famously, a lot of companies really struggle to get there. A million dollar software license or a small business innovation research grant in the government is not special. There are thousands of them every cycle, and they’re all over the place.
Ian Kalin
So it’s kind of a question of scale that becomes kind of weird in translation. But the line items for us start with R and D, and then the second category is transition programs. And then the third category is programs of record. All the big money flows through programs of record in the military, and then to a large extent, the intelligence community and department of Homeland Security, adjacent agencies like that as well. And so the goal is everyone wants to be a program of record. There’s this often cited valley of death between the startup land and the programs of record. There are more transition programs now than even five years ago. So the market’s better. And I guess I’m doing myself a disservice by explaining that because they don’t really care about what your capability is of these transition programs.
Ian Kalin
Things like project replicator or raider or apbit or Stratfi or tactfi. Anyone who knows those acronyms knows what I’m talking about in terms of there’s a lot more money spent on those than there were even 510 years ago. Now, that doesn’t solve the valley of death problem, but knowing how to leverage those and achieve those is how you go from $1 million contracts to 30 $50 million contracts to the all sought after billion dollar programs of record. Those are the three categories that have different tools. How to get into a paid exercise is very different than how to get a program of record. But each of those tools have their known tool set in order to be able to fund the business and go to the next stage.
Brett
How far away are you from getting a program of record contract?
Ian Kalin
Very close, and yet still too far away. I have a lot of ambition and excitement for a program of record TurbineOne, but we’re not at a stage yet where we can share any official.
Brett
News for you to pull that off. What would need to happen? And if you can’t answer that question, we can skip that as well.
Ian Kalin
What would need to happen? Well, lots of things. How to achieve one is its own podcast that I should describe slower. The most important thing about programs of record, I think that is underappreciated by most folks most of the time, is just how important government affairs and congressional affairs is in that structure. You asked earlier about why is it so broken? And I joked it’s democracy. Well, there’s also the power of the constitution. The House of Representatives has the power of the purse, famously right. The whole how a bill becomes law. For those of you that did whatever school of rock, or whatever that was, I can’t remember now, what was it called? I can’t think. I can’t think of the name of it. Schoolhouse rock, whatever. So those rules still apply.
Ian Kalin
And one organization has that power to create a new program of record. To add to one, do you transition from a company that’s failing? There’s a couple of the startups that are, I don’t know, probably five or ten years ahead of me, that when I look to their success for programs of record, they didn’t create a program. They were just a better widget for something that was already funded and failing. So they were just the new better capability for something that already had money. It just took a little while for folks to recognize that the old piece of crap needed to be taken away. So there’s lots of ways to do it. In our case, as a category creator, we are not changing the system. Obviously, everything is above board and compliant and ethical.
Ian Kalin
We just found a way to connect the right capability to warfighters that needed it urgently.
Brett
What about the shift in Silicon Valley when it comes to defense tech? And I’ll kind of unpack that because I have a few different questions mixed maybe with some observation. So what I had seen maybe like five or ten years ago is like the idea of defense tech in Silicon Valley was very much looked down upon. I think there were all of those protests with Google and Microsoft from workers saying, you know, they didn’t want to build technology that was used in that way. Now it seems to be shifting. Now it seems to be cool to work in defense. Are you seeing that shift as well when it comes to recruiting talent and bringing talent on the team that align with this mission and vision that you have?
Ian Kalin
Absolutely the cultural reception to government work, let alone national security work, has definitely changed. I live in San Francisco and people like to joke about what the culture is like out here. I think unfortunately global conflicts are rising and the concern and connection to things like the war in Ukraine, I don’t know what to call it. Genocide, atrocities, war struggles in Israel and Gaza, the concerns about future conflict around Taiwan. They’ve entered the conversations of folks at all income levels, of all education levels. And I think that recognition of the importance of national security is seeing a generational shift. I’m grateful to be working in a market that doesn’t need a lot of explanation.
Ian Kalin
I think about those that have served in other times, Vietnam War era, and I don’t know if we’re quite at the greatest generational level of reception to this kind of work. But I am excited about the intersection of two worlds. The AI world, which itself is perhaps way too hot, and the military world that unfortunately is in too great of need. And I work at the intersection of those two worlds. Whats funny by the way, as you mentioned recruiting those two worlds don’t speak the same language. As I joked earlier, this way I describe my company to an admiral is not the same way I would to a machine learning engineer. I want to use the same language so that my job is easier. But unfortunately we do speak different languages in this country and not even on partisan or geographic terms.
Ian Kalin
Just where you come from, the language of any sector where you’ve worked in for 30 years is probably going to be different. I don’t know if you’ve friends that are ever go to a dinner party with all surgeons, isn’t it exhausting because you don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about. That’s what it’s like. These worlds of AI and tech, they have mission driven people that are maybe willing to make a little less than Google’s paying just to work for national security that were there at the times of the maven fallout. But we’re struggling to have their voices heard. And so for those that are interested in national security, in keeping people safe, in finding a way to prevent the next great war, companies like mine have an open door.
Ian Kalin
We all have our websites and we’re all recruiting as best as we can because the market is doing well for us. And we need folks that are willing to cross those cultural divides from the military or intelligence into tech and vice versa. Because when we do, that’s ultimately when we have the best breakthroughs.
Brett
If you’re just looking at fulfillment in career, I have to imagine that people will find a lot more fulfillment in working at companies like yours than building the next, I don’t know, feature on Instagram that is going to destroy the lives of a bunch of kids.
Ian Kalin
That’s exactly right. And that’s usually how we find some of our best talent. And that’s us on the engineering side. You’re right, there is a general call at our company for a higher purpose. We do this thing and a lot of startups do it. We focus on culture, we care about the nature of what we’re fighting for, and we provide opportunities for veterans to share their stories, both of those serving 2030 years in the military. Special operations folks who are able to share their perspective of why they are fighting so hard to get our tech into the not even the same branches where they used to work, it’s in the same building. When someone can come to my company and say, I was just working down the street, I know what their problems are.
Ian Kalin
And damn it, we got to get this capability over to them as soon as possible. And it’s really important for my community and my neighbors because they’re about to deploy soon. When an engineer hears that, they’re not going to be like, whatever. They’re like, oh my God, I got to work on this right now. Why is this so important? Then they end up saying like, well, don’t they have something like this? No, they don’t. Why not? This stuff is free out of Facebook. Are you kidding me? And so then they end up having these conversations about, okay, well, this is a transformative capability, especially in our category.
Ian Kalin
Then the work is like, well, how do we help folks learn about it and trust it and understand that what they’re doing is actually higher risk than this brand new capability that they barely even understand how it works. That is where a lot of the effort comes in. But you’re exactly right. Is connecting that mission with extraordinary builders is what our category is all about.
Brett
Preston, is it mostly people who have a background like yours? I think you had mentioned that there veterans. Is it normally veterans or are you getting a lot of those people who are ex Google or XYZ, big tech company?
Ian Kalin
Both. At least a TurbineOne is a recognition that experience matters. We don’t have a large number of junior folks. We have a small number of senior folks smaller than other by called headcount standards for a lot of other companies in the earlier stage and venture world. The reason we do that is in part because of culture and experience. But we needed folks to really understand how complex the problem is. And that means that we need veterans. Lowercase V from the Googles and the Facebooks and the Motorolos and the Ciscos. But we also need folks that had served in the front lines of military operations so that they can translate the needs and explain what’s really going on. And this doesn’t even get into the security clearance and all the other kind of complexities of the sector. Just good old fashioned, hey, unclassified.
Ian Kalin
I had this problem. You have anything that could have solved that for me and for an engineer, be like, oh yeah, here it is. How about this? And this, and this. You see their eyes light up. So for TurbineOne, the veteran status is incredibly important, but it’s not intrinsically military. It’s folks that understand the pain point, know how to build solutions for that pain point, and getting them together to deliver a capability.
Brett
Now, if we zoom out a little bit, this is a very high level question. You know, think about when the war in Ukraine was first starting. Did you think that things were going to go exactly how they’ve gone so far? Like, is this as expected, or did you think it was going to be different from like a warfare perspective?
Ian Kalin
I’m not an expert, but it’s rare that I get to use my undergraduate degree in conversations about work, and being a student in my teen years of international politics, I think is probably the best answer I can give. Less and nowhere am I going to share anything about actual military operations that we’re observing at termine. One, I think I can reflect on smarter people who have looked at this conflict with some degree of surprise that a land war can still happen in Europe. But the way in which I think what’s different, the takeaways this time around, there are some special surprises when the president of the United States told the world when Russia was going to invade, basically open source the intel, which is more my world, why did he do that? Well, he built credibility around it.
Ian Kalin
He was able to counteract the quote unquote fake news, and then things like, two new nations just joined NATO. So then when you see a level of transparency into the power of intelligence and being able to forecast the next invasion, yeah, that’s a bit weird. That’s not normal. There aren’t as many examples of that, I think, in military conflict. And then from the actual effect of ukrainian conflict, I think a lot of great folks have proven the level of ingenuity and the grim experience of ukrainian fighters that have been able to leverage modern tech in creative ways to combat an invading force from Russia. So that also was, I think, a. The second big surprise in this market, the third big surprise that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Ian Kalin
Perhaps in closing, in my personal reflection of just being a non expert student of history, people shouldn’t be surprised that Russia will eventually find a way to overcome with bodies and bullets, a way to achieve their objective. From napoleonic surprises to then Russia marching in France, to what ended up happening in World War Two, from german invasions to then Russia being able to eventually, three years later, return of courses in Germany. There’s a way in which Russia will eventually achieve their goals, which I do not want to happen in Ukraine, but I think some of the recent surprises from the russian advances shows that they learned from their mistakes in the early year, early months, and are now publicly seeking to win a supply chain war of being able to ultimately achieve their objectives in Europe.
Brett
Now, if we zoom out, let’s talk about the future of warfare. What do you think warfare is going to look like? I don’t know how far you want to go out? We can go out ten years, 20 years, we can go out 50 years, whatever timeframe makes sense. But what’s the future going to look like, do you think?
Ian Kalin
More autonomous, more robots doing more things with a whole lot of humans, putting them, I guess, in their harm’s way? And to some extent, that is probably good. You know, I’m a parent of three kids, and I don’t want any of my kids, if they choose to serve in the military, to be close to what’s called kinetic or active dangerous, you know, gun shooting environments. And I’d rather a drone go in first, given what I used to do in maritime interdiction ops and visiting boarding, search and seizure operations in the navy. I wish a robot could have gone instead of me.
Ian Kalin
The recognition of that from a moral perspective has led to major shifts in money, well covered by many a media publication in terms of programs like project replicator or things like it that are representations publicly of how the autonomous systems are becoming more common across the fleet, Marine corps, navy, air force, army. All, everything, to some extent, is pushing more of those robots in more places. Of course, that comes with also greater risks. How autonomous are those systems? Do they have weapons release authority? Are they. In my world, one of the biggest challenges is all these new robots. They’re not interoperable, they don’t talk to each other, and everyone has the nerve to be surprised about it. So that frustration is like, hey, we’re experimenting with these new tools. How do we do it responsibly?
Ian Kalin
How do we ensure that the right ethical controls are in place for what those machines can do? How do we govern them? And I guess from the business perspective, how to make sure they’re not throwing a bunch of money in some wasteful boxes that don’t do what these unfortunately exaggerating companies are claiming they should be able to do.
Brett
What will that look like then? Will it be robots fighting in other countries?
Ian Kalin
Robots, essentially, at least of the first wave, yeah. So those that care about this category should not listen to me. They should just look up many of reported organization and the nonprofits, the think tanks that spent all their time talking about what would a future invasion of Taiwan look like, what’s being done right now in the israeli palestinian conflict, and you’re seeing a hell of a lot more sensors. So, I mean, like cameras, you know, electronic sensors that’s bringing with an s sensors out on the battlefield that are being mounted on more devices, that are flying, driving, swimming. Those systems are increasingly more autonomous, what’s called without gps navigation, they can move through systems, sending more of that data to a map in an operation center where generals are trying to decide what to do about it. So that’s modern warfare.
Ian Kalin
What happens when more of those sensors have too much data? And then maybe you have tipping and queuing. One drone has the camera, the other drone has the grenade. Well, then you got coordination. Well, what about if electronic signature is 2 hours old? And so that is the work of modern intelligence, also known as automated target recognition. That’s a whole category of modern warfare. They are working on this problem of, well, this is the new truth. So how do we defend ourselves? How do we combat it? How do we get ahead of those capabilities? Where are these systems manufactured? Is publicly being debated right now in Congress so, yeah, this is all the nature, the dangerous, scary nature of the world that we’re living in.
Ian Kalin
I would say to balance it out with a bit of good news, there are also a great deal of good folks trying to help protect the good guys. Maybe TurbineOne is one of those small businesses that is seeking to balance the scales away from an apocryphal story of robotic invasions. Just something that’s more like, all right, well, how do we actually keep humans in the loop? For those that are tech savvy, is it fully autonomous, or is it semi supervised? Learning, there’s ways in which we can be more responsible to leverage these tool sets to ultimately keep people safe.
Brett
So I’d asked you there about the future of warfare. Let’s end with a question here about the future of TurbineOne. So let’s zoom out. A shorter time horizon, three to five years. What’s the future going to look like for the company, and what do you want the impact to be?
Ian Kalin
Overall, folks are safer. Our technology is not intrinsically military, although it’s obviously where I spend a lot of this time talking and where we do our work. But really, if you could get hurt at work and the wifi sucks, that’s really our market. We’ve chose intentionally to go to one of the most dangerous markets, national security, with, I would also argue, some of the largest business opportunities as a place to learn prototype. And if we can solve the problem for the soldier, maybe someday we can save it for the policemen or the fireman. And so that is a question for the future, as is typically the case with any good tech product, you know, essential to american national security as partnerships. So in the next three years, we will go international. That’s all.
Ian Kalin
We’re already getting pulled by the exercises and the foreign militaries that coordinate and partner with the american national security forces. They’re asking us, hey, why aren’t you going over here? Why don’t you go over there? So that organic growth is part of our business. The intelligence community is a natural adjacency to the US Department of Defense. And so you start putting all those international and adjacent markets together, that’s a hell of a lot of work for a long time. And then just a lot of it just comes down to the people I think about at the end of my week, it’s the great folks that I have the privilege of serving with that are able to inspire me to the next wave of what our company should be working on.
Ian Kalin
And a lot of it’s just very simply, more folks there’s too many problems out there for our existing team to handle and field. And so if anyone listen to this podcast, is a builder, is a technologist, a machine learning expert, a veteran in transition, wondering about where they could work that maintains their commitment to mission, but wants to find a great job that can help them, frankly, get paid a lot better than they’re making right now in uniform. If any of these stories resonate with something that you want to fight for, please reach out to us at TurbineOne, because over the next three to five years, we love to be your next chapter of your professional career.
Brett
Where do we send them to, Ian? Do we send them to turbineone.com?
Ian Kalin
Careers?
Brett
What’s.
Ian Kalin
You were taking the phone calls, Brett. Aren’t they supposed to call you down? We talked about now. All right, fine. Go to turbineone.com if you have to, but, yeah, obviously, we have a careers page, hiring in just about every category.
Brett
Amazing. Ian, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun. Really enjoyed it.
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