16 trips in three months fighting dragons 🐉

Another redeye... 👁️

If you know me you know how much I h4te travel. It stresses me out. We've built this r1diculous system of false security that boxes us in, costs us hours more, and triggers me every time.

Still I can't let it be.

Most people in policy and procurement that I speak with would never tell you this, but they want to get off unmanned systems as fast as possible when the war ends.

One, because they h4te change, two because they don't understand unmanned systems, the culture, the people, and the speed, and three because defense primes do more predictable lobbying, if you know what I mean.

So I keep going. There are easier ways to earn money, somebody said to me recently. True.

But seeing a startup from Ukraine, the outer edge of Europe or, heaven forbid, the hardest place in Europe to build a defense startup (Germany), try extra hard to get an autonomous intercept right on an airfield, or built a drone detection system or long-range capability so audaciously low-cost and scalable that most neo-primes would be worried if they knew about it keeps me going.

Real progress is being made. Not by me, by the teams out there. Sooner or later, the walls in the heads, the people who think that shared control is loss of control, and the paper tigers will fall, and people in government will realize the eternal truth that wars of attrition are fought with mass, and that affordability and produceability are the key factors for superiority. As a matter of fact, this revolution in thinking has already begun, somewhere on the outskirts of Europe.

There are easier ways to earn money, I tell the founders. When your potential number of customers is so small and the people in charge are the world's best in "pretending to listen", as somebody very smart put it the other day.

Still they keep going.

These founders will be the pioneers that have pushed through all the procurement nonsense and the Valley of D34th, and the confused hype-buying investors and the lack of available testing and operator access and the human bittlenecks (don't get me started about the human bottlenecks). I couldn't be more motivated by their sheer endless motivation.

And so I keep going.

💪