HeyJaredDIB Innovators
The DIB Innovators podcast celebrates the brilliant minds behind innovation within the Defense Industrial Base.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 15
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 7, 2026
Latest episodes
EP 122 — AEVEX's Manan Patel On The Modular Drone Strategy That Won Army Launched Effects-Short Range (LE-SR) (opens the original)
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Manan Patel deployed to Iraq as a civilian engineer and mission commander on airborne ISR platforms, then left the government lab with no business plan to start Special Operations Solutions. A decade later, private equity merged his company with two others to form AEVEX , which went public on the NYSE and has delivered over 6,000 autonomous platforms. As CTO, Manan explains how AEVEX's CompassCore hardware-software stack runs across every platform size and domain, enabling mass production by des
EP 121 — Tidal Flight's Jude Augustine On Building The First Clean Sheet Seaplane In Decades (opens the original)
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Seaplane design hasn't changed since the 1950s. Jude Augustine , Co-Founder and CEO of Tidal Flight , is building Polaris, a hybrid electric amphibious aircraft designed to turn a four-hour coastal trip into two hours door to door while giving the military runway independence in the Pacific. Polaris is the launchpad for Tidal to grow into a next-generation aircraft manufacturer with a vision for aircraft across categories. Before even raising a seed round, Jude and his Georgia Tech co-founders s
EP 120 — Crow Industries' James Crowell On Why The U.S. Army Is Betting On Smaller Ground Robots (opens the original)
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James Crowell is an expert in extreme environment robotics who spent the first decade of his career developing and deploying polar, volcanic, and space systems at NASA, JPL, and research laboratories before founding Crow Industries in 2018. His team designs Fenris, a family of intelligent UGVs built for defense, mining, and eventually lunar and Martian surface operations, all from the premise that designing for environments with no GPS, limited comms, and no human access produces systems that ou
EP 119 — Baker Institute's Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes On Why Critical Minerals Are The Weakest Link In Western Defense Supply Chains (opens the original)
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Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes drilled the first unconventional wells in Argentina for ExxonMobil, built a nickel mining company in Western Australia, then served as DOE Deputy Director for Batteries and Critical Materials. Today she advises on critical mineral policy as a Nonresident Fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute and invests across the critical supply chain through her family office, Smoketree Resources. Ashley lays out a three-step framework for breaking Western dependence on adversarial-
EP 118 — CisLunar Industries' Gary Calnan On How a Space Furnace Accidentally Created a Power Electronics Company (opens the original)
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Gary Calnan , CEO and Co-Founder of CisLunar Industries , built power electronics to melt metal in orbit. A research partner noticed the same hardware could reshape electric propulsion. That pivot turned a space debris recycling startup into a power electronics company with a test platform on a NASA mission and Lockheed Martin and Safran serving as subcontractors on its Space Force program. Gary tells Dave Graff how a finance career, nine weeks at the International Space University, and $4.7 mil
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