What are you building now – and what is your thesis?

My thesis is that there are three crises approaching the West: the semiconductor supply chain collapse, the end of traditional encryption, and the shift to global, space-based communication in warfare.

Most people don’t realize that the reason drones were so useful in the Ukraine war is because Starlink enabled video feeds back to command centers. The next decade of defense will be defined by the proliferation of Starlink-like technologies.

However, the drone components used by both sides of the conflict are actually made in a single country—one that potentially has discovered weakened ECC and influenced the NSA to remove ECC encryption from the CNSA 2.0 list. Why does it matter? Any sovereign actor must be able to control the full stack: hardware, encryption, compute, and comms.

We are building foundational infrastructure tools to address these issues and enable distributed, sovereign deterrence infrastructure.

What draws you into defense?

Doing meaningful work in the defense industry is, at the very least, good real estate insurance for assets one might have in the country.

But jokes aside, I have always been attracted to topics requiring deep technical knowledge and building foundational infrastructure. What can be more foundational than making sure you defend everything else you build?

How do you want to approach company building after scaling Argyle?

The most important part of any company is people. As much as we love technology and like to talk about it, we have to remember that we are doing all of this for somebody.

Nobody exists in isolation. People strive to be useful and make an impact based on their core values and beliefs. As long as you get the right people with the right values, the technology—however complicated—falls into place.

I believed that when scaling Argyle to 100+ people in engineering in 10 months, and I believe it now. The only difference is that when you start over, you get the joy of building it all from scratch again.

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