HeyJaredCrossing the Valley
Few companies make it from pilot to production in the defense market. Those who do often change the industry in the process. How do they do it? What lessons can startups take from their trials, successes, and failures?
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest episodes
Ep. 95: Andrew Markoff, Smack Technologies (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Before Smack, Andy Markoff planned wars in PowerPoint. He was the operations officer for a special operations task force in northern Iraq during the fight for Mosul. Marine and coalition special operations teams were embedded with the Kurds, and later the Iraqis, and Andy’s job was to pull together what they were seeing on the front and figure out how to go after the ISIS network so the partner force could take the next piece of the city. The tools were whiteboards and napkins. That got turned i
Ep. 94: A Replicator Retrospective (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Building Replicator: What it Took, and What it Meant Nobody in Washington gets promoted for grading their own homework in public. Dr. Kathleen Hicks and Aaron Sherman did it anyway. Three years after Replicator launched, they sat down and wrote an insiders’ history of the initiative. It’s called Move Fast and Scale , published by the Belfer Center, and it landed just at a moment when it seems that the whole building is racing to run some version of the same play (albeit with a lot more money beh
Ep. 93: Building Minimum Useful Products (opens the original)
Read excerpt
How Chariot Defense Replaced Product Market Fit With a Weight Test Adam Warmoth took this interview from Fort Carson. A division commander had called him the Friday before and asked him to be in Colorado on Monday, so he was in Colorado, sitting in a vehicle with a Starlink terminal doing the work of an internet connection. Ross Fubini, who wrote Chariot’s first check, opened by pointing out that this is every call he has ever had with Adam. One guest measuring things in the field, while the oth
Ep. 92: Conductor AI is building the layer between Law and Action (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Conductor AI: Building the Layer Between Law and Decision About Zach Long and Eric Schwartz Zachary Long and Eric Schwartz are the co-founders of Conductor AI. Both spent seven years at Palantir, where they met on a Department of Justice project supporting large-scale fraud prosecutions. But this wasn’t “start a company at first sight.” After collaborating, they split: Eric moved toward law enforcement and other USG components, then took what he calls “a bit of a rumspringa” into health tech; Za
Ep. 91 - John Conafay, CEO of Integrate (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Overview They were four people. They had ~$150,000 in the bank. And John Conafay wrote a check to an accreditation partner. That check was easily a double-digit percentage of the company’s value at that moment. And he risked it all on the conviction that a Space Force contract was going to land. Well, this is Crossing the Valley, so you already know that it did. Three years later that relationship became a $25 million, five year SBIR Phase III with Space Systems Command. We’ve covered a lot of a
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.