I grew up in South Buffalo, New York, Steeltown in the early seventies,
a very Irish Catholic neighborhood, still so very family oriented, community owner,
but also one of those upbringings where you left the house at sunrise basically
and you came home when the streetlights were on or unless until your mother called
you home. Lots of exploration as a kid all over the neighborhood. I
went to college. I took my first swing at college and realized that I
probably was not ready yet, so I joined the Marine Corps. I spent
fourteen years in the Marine Corps as an enlisted infantryman and for Suakon Marine,
and I loved every single day of it. While I was in I finished
my undergraduate degree at night, and then left the Marine Corp after fourteen years
to get my MBA at the College of William and Mary, not too far
from where we are now. Went to work for five for five years after
that, and then went back to grad school up at the Harvard Kennedy School
to get my master's in public administration. Well, thank you for all of
that, and I want to thank you for your service, especially with us
where you're being interviewed right now in the DMV. We're very appreciative of military
I do like to ask founder, CEOs and leaders about military experience and then
being a civilian and how that transfers over because everybody handles at it a lot
differently. But I think what I'm very clear about is there's a lot of
structure in the military, and there can be as you move on to civilian
life. So with that said, all those years, I mean, you
almost did a decade and a half in the military taking over to being a
civilian, what did you transfer over from military life to civilian life that helped
you. Yeah, I think, particularly in the Marine Corps, the notion
that perseverance, hard work, and teamwork are the foundation of being what we
might call productive on the battlefield. Is it is, at its core what's
necessary to be successful. And I think, you know, I didn't act.
I did not have acts. A very difficult transition from military to the
civilian world. I enjoyed it. I found it interesting to analyze some of
the differences between military life and civilian life. But I would say that persistence,
grit is the most the most important thing that I learned in the Marine
Corps that has transitioned with me to business. There's lots of smart people with
good ideas that never go anywhere. There's lots of just smart people all around.
But unless you're willing to put your back into it and make whatever vision
you have for something a reality, it's not going to get done. Things
don't happen on their own. You really really have to push finagle dance,
you know, anything that you can do to advance your mission is what you
need, is what you need to do. There's a common thread about what
you talked about with all our CEOs, and that's being relentless, having a
passion for whatever you're going to do, being relentless. And if somebody says
no, you're talking to the wrong person. You move on to the next
one. So I'm glad you shared all that. I did want to talk
to you about your company, and it's just fascinating as we get into it.
But I always like, you know, we spoke about your personal origin
story. But I'm always fascinated, and I know our listeners are too,
whether they're CEOs or future budding CEOs, about having that epiphany, that idea
that there's a hole in the industry here. I think I've got a good
idea. I'm going to come up with it. Here we go, tell
us about that origin story. Yeah, so it's probably going on three years
now. Three and a half years ago a friend of mine called me and
said, hey, we're thinking about spinning out a couple of technologies from Google,
and we'd like you to be the CEO. And I said, tell
me more. So they explained the technologies to me and I was like,
I don't believe you. I learned more over time about it, and I
said, that is something that both the commercial world and the US government could
derive great benefit from. So we tried to get a deal done. That
set of investors sort of it was taking a little bit that sort of investor.
That set of investors walked away. I picked the deal up and I
took it to my dear mentor and boss in a couple of jobs now,
Arthur Patterson, who was one of the founders of Excel Partners out in Silicon
Valley, and I said, hey, I think this is a thing.
Do you want in and can we start these conversations? And we did and
we spent about sixteen months with Google, who they were wonderful. Look that
we wanted to get you know, I had wished that we had gotten a
deal done sooner, but it was a fair deal. We got it done,
and we basically acquired two technologies. One is what we call a temporo
spatial software to fine networking architecture. That's a whole bunch of words that just
really means we can connect anything wired and wireless to each other in all domains
land, sea, air, and space and beyond. So that's one of
them. The other one is an atmospheric coherent light free space optics program,
so think and undersea cable without the cable through the air. Got it high
speed about one point six tarabits per second through the air. For the geeks
who are listening, that's pretty fast and you can transmit a lot of data
in a short amount of in a short amount of time. We still remain
partners. We do a lot of work with Google, Google Google Cloud particularly,
but we're also working with so many other providers in the industry and it's
just wildly taking off. Okay, let's do this. I want to talk
about mission statement and also get a little bit more into the weeds about capabilities
of the programs that you have and how you kind of work with clients and
get into that and explain to our listeners what it is. But when I
saw the name of your company, and I'm sure, like a lot of
people, they're fascinated because it's different. There's nothing plain jane about it.
So what's the origin and explain the name of the company. Well, I
don't want to disappoint anyone, but I made it up on the couch.
My boss, the Arthur Patterson, said the name of the company should begin
with an A. Okay, And I said why and he said, because
you want it at the top of every list, right, And I said
okay. So trying to create a name for a really cool space communications all
domain communication companies hard because everybody's already taken all the great Greek, Roman mythological
name. You can't find one, right. And so I was this is
God's truth. I was on the couch watching the last episode of the expanse
Yes and so when they go through the rings, they are going somewhere.
We never say where they were, right, And I had been going through
a number of different names in my head, and I said, I think
they're going to Illyria And that was it. I wrote it down with two
a's to make my boss twice as happy. And that's what we came up
with. So it stuck. There was lots of conversation in the company about
it. Some people thought it sounded like a cholesterol medication. Some people thought
it sounded like nothing. It's the best name we could have ever come up
with. It is stuck. People ask you about it, you just did,
yeah, and that makes it stick even more. Well, it's all
about curiosity, and I think you piqued everybody with the name of the company.
I should say too, for the people that are old and are like
me, back in the old days, back in the seventies, if you
had an A for a number for a company, that minute was first in
the phone book for all the older audience what a phone book is. So
that's true, and that is very true. All right, how about mission
statement of the company? What is that? So I'm gonna be honest,
it's begun to evolve one of the things that we've discovered by putting bringing a
Lyria into existence. By the way, it should be said that when we
acquired the technologies, we acquired the Google technical teams as well the original technical
teams Okay, they're the finest software engineers on the planet. These are the
I cannot say enough about them. They are phenomenal and do amazing things that
I certainly cannot do. I think when we first started, we had a
narrower view of what we thought we could do. Now that we've been out
in the wilderness for about a year and a half, a little less than
a year and a half, I think what we've realized is that the technologies
can have a far, far more and wider reaching impact on humanity than we
ever considered at the beginning, and that I think that's a good thing for
us. So, you know, right now we want to connect. We
say that we want to connect everything to everything else. We're capable. I'll
give you an example. Our technology is capable today of connecting the Earth to
the Moon today and ultimately we'll be able to go to Mars. One of
our advisors for the company is doctor Vince Surf. Vince the godfather of the
Internet. He and his partner discovered discovered the TPIP technology, and you know,
he wants to create a solar system connectivity program, Like why do we
stop at Mars? Why not go further? And so we think about that
every day. How do we first connect everything here on Earth to everything else?
So imagine this. A satellite that I imagine iHeartRadio uses to transmit to
your eight hundred and fifty stations can now speak to ah altitude balloon that could
now speak to a plane that can now speak to a ground station that can
now be sent out anywhere that we needed to be at the highest speeds ever
possible to human stay on the planet. If we can connect all of those
things, think about how much more efficient everything that you need can be.
Think about connecting the next three billion people on the planet where there is no
native infrastructure type beam. Our Free Space Officers solution can help manage that without
having to dig miles and miles and miles and miles of cable, which is
just prohibitively expensive sometimes so and then from our government perspective, from a national
security perspective, if I can connect not I, we can connect everything that
we own today in land, seer and space to everything else that we own
today in land, sea, air, and space. It meets specifically the
goal of strategic deterrence because nobody else can do that, and once other competitors
can see that we're able to do that, it could cause us all to
take a breath and not decide to engage each other as we have for the
last twenty years. Okay, So I've got a lot of questions because you
said a lot of interesting things, but I want you to boil it down
a little bit in Layman's terms. For our listeners, there are maybe new
to all the technology that you were talking about. If you do work with
a client, you don't have to give any names of who you work with
because some of them might be super secret. But if they're not, you're
you're welcome to do that. But if you're working with a client, exactly
how does the company work in your technology? As you boil it down for
us, sure, So on the spacetime side, it's simple were we work
on what we kubern inities basis. That means it can fit into any set.
We're a SaaS company using SAS techniques. But because the government has very
different and it's required, has very different ways in which they store and use
different technologies, we've designed it so that it can fit in any of those
storage environments for them. Okay, for the commercial world, we run it
on top right now it sits on top of Google Cloud, and you know,
with the largest cloud infrastructure on the planet, much like you, you're
able to get all over the place, so are we. And then from
a type beam perspective, from the laser perspective, the ability to grow those
networks and thicken them where there is no infrastructure is a maze. I mean,
man, it changes the world. So that's how we that's how people
buy from us. They can either do it as a service or buy it
as you know, in that case of type being by our we call them
heads optical heads. But I think what the world is moving to more is
X as a service as we know, and networking as a service, optical
network as a service. Those those things are where people are going because it
just makes everybody's life easier and faster. And if you can come to a
price that everybody is happy with, you've changed everything. That technology sounds like
it's also moving really quickly. And just a minute, I want to ask
you about AI because I think that's been coming up a lot lately, so
I want to see if that's going to be integrated in the future of what
you do with your team. You're obviously a global company. When it comes
to working with clients, is it more government based, is it civilian based,
or is it both? And you don't discriminate what kind of clients do
you work with? It's both, we don't discriminate, and right now it's
roughly fifty fifty and by design right because much of what the commercial world needs
or does the government needs, much of what the government experiments with benefits the
commercial world. So we sit in that that that nexus, if you will,
between the two. That's that where we're able to either translate uh something
into a solution for somebody or they can share amongst themselves whatever whatever the technology
is or the outcomes of those technologies of what they want to Our goal is
to be the digital cartilage for the planet, so that you can decide how
you want to employ your resources and enter into some other agreement with somebody else
who has an asset that might be very beneficial to your business or to your
government. And Chris as I listened to this and once again Layman, but
it sounds like when it comes to radio, television, internet, among other
things, it's going to change everything dramatically. I think it's good you're going
to with the with the compound annual growth of bandwidth usage across the planets in
the neighborhood of forty percent. Now we need more technologies that can provide more
bandwidth because spectrum is limited, right, at some point spectrum will be filled
right right, Yeah, you know it's not atmospheric freespace, optics. Light
is not right, and so starting to integrate light into commercial companies ways of
doing things. I'll give you an example. There are ships all over the
world, there are planes flying all or what if we could put one gigabit
of capacity to every plane flying on the planet. What if we could do
that so that you don't have to go I don't know if you've been on
a plane recently and tried to WiFi. Yeah, I have. It's not
the greatest. It's a horrible experience. Yeah, it's not a great experience.
Um. Ships who are at seat right, Ships like planes, they
have to be moving to make money. If you could do a conditions based
maintenance program whereby you could send back high speed data from a ship or from
an aircraft so that when it stops at the next place, fifteen things can
be replaced in two hours. Rather than having some sort of catastrophic break in
a system where it's laid up for three months. You make it more efficient,
We get more business done around the world, the global capacity of the
account of the global economy grows, and it's good for everybody. So those
are the when we're trying to think about how we can serve the larger needs
of humanity, not just can I sell an optical head or can I sell
an instance of space time. We really do believe that we can have a
much larger impact on the planet I mentioned earlier, AI. I know what's
coming in very quickly for all of us. A lot of people are still
being introduced to it. Whether they can write your resume, whether it can
do a music log at a radio station. How will it or will it
ever come into play for what you do? As you can imagine, it's
a it's a topic of discussion. I think where it can help us is
as we decide as we grow, have more assets join the platform or more
companies, where governments use the platform to manage their own assets, they're going
to want to simplify how they change things regarding their assets. So if it's
a function of just speaking into the system and having our solver engine make that
happen. That's great. Our solver engine is now we're reimagining how we solve
all these very difficult problems. The next generation solver will be done not too
far away. And as we think about how AI can make things simpler for
us, it's also about being able to keep, particularly for national security things
where a human being is necessary by law, by regulatory statute, etc.
That that cognitive load for that person is simple, but when they need to
be involved, that helping them change whatever needs to be changed can make it.
We can make it so in a few seconds. Right, All those
things were discovering. But I'm on the side of I dig AI. We
should keep a careful eye on the speed at which it grows to do what
and how it's employed. I don't think it's I don't think it's too far
fetched to say that, as with anything else without without a lot of attention,
it could you could have people start to do things that we just don't
really want them to do. Yeah, just watch a Terminator movie. Yeah,
and then you know the other thing is too. I read an article
just the other day that this one person who wrote it, and it was
an opinion piece of white color people that are look out because your jobs might
be taken by AM one day. But I think there's we're still in such
infantile stages of AI that we really don't know yet, so there's a lot
of movement. But I'm glad you addressed him. As we wrap up our
conversation and put a bow on everything. If you were to maybe leave a
takeaway with our listeners and as they've been introduced to your company, maybe for
the first time, what would you want them to know about the company,
and that takeaway, I think we're a great example of what can happen when
non traditional companies are able to expose what the work that they've done first to
the US government to help it achieve its mission of strategic deterrence. Today,
if some of some of your listeners may have heard the term jad C two
or c jad C two join all Domain Command of Control, and we've been
putting lightning bolts on PowerPoint slides for three decades to demonstrate a connectivity that heretofore
just hasn't existed, not for not for not because bad people or they didn't
work hard, It just didn't exist. Today. The spacetime platform that we've
designed is the common control plane for communications for a real combined jad C to
environment. It exists today. So for people who are listening that are on
the government side, that's great. For people who are listening on the commercial
side. If you've noticed all of these satellite there's a lot of satellite companies
that are now merging with each other. Yes, so they originally were built
around their own orbital shell, their own frequency, their own altitudes, everything.
Now they're mashing these things together, and they have to have a way
to be able to use both of those all of the capabilities, whether they're
native or they acquired, to maximize and optimize one their efficiency for customers,
but two their profits. Right, they have to. So it's a really
good time for us to be a distance because we can help these satellite companies
make the very best use of all the assets and they just spend a bunch
of money on By the way, these mergers are not small dollar mergers.
Why does that matter? Because it means that everything that is being delivered from
space can be more efficient and more effective and ultimately cost less because we're making
it so efficient. So I think that's really important for people to understand both
sides, both commercial and the government use well. Your final thoughts. Also,
let me know that your timing with this company is impeccable. It really
is when it comes to all of that. Man, Listen, let's be
clear. Luck has everything to do with everything. That's also common thread from
a lot of our CEOs. Yeah, too much of my life has been
about just being in the right place at the right time, not because I'm
some sort of wizard, which I am not. But I having said that,
I have a bunch of wizards work that I work with. Yeah,
they're amazingly talented people, best people I've ever worked. So I think when
you can put all that stuff together where there's you know, need and you
have a technology that can help, and you can have that conversation, that
educational conversation says we really can help help them de risk their lives because it's
important because all changes new and that freaks people out. You really can get
to a place that is not just the next thing, but the next ten
things right. And so we hope we're moving in that direction. Chris,
you and your team have a great website. It's easy to navigate, and
there's a lot of education where you can pick up on there, but there's
also on the nab Our Careers. I know you have some openings. You're
probably looking for the best of the best. So with that said, what's
the website you arel that people can check it out everybody that wants to come
work for us www dot aleria AA L y r IA dot com dot com.
You don't have to even want a job, just come visit the website
and check us out. Chris, I can't tell you how much I appreciate
your time. I've learned a lot today and what it was explaining to me
today in layman's terms, it's really cool technology and I wish you nothing but
the best. I know it's still early on in the process, but it
looks like a very good future forging your team. Thank you so much for
joining us on CEOs as you know, thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.