32. The Chance to Build Something Meaningful and Enduring with Benjamin Kohlman

Brock Briggs  0:00  

Hey, there. Thanks for listening to the Scuttlebutt podcast. My guest for you today is Ben Kohlmann. Ben is a former F 18 pilot and after a few years at McKinsey consulting turned startup CEO, Ben brings a critical lens to how our military operates. Having led the Chief of Naval Operation’s Rapid Innovation Cell, Ben had a front row seat to how our military could or should be innovating. We talked about the faults there and the things getting in the way of getting true quick innovation to the battlefield. 

We also discussed his current role as the CEO of Farcast and their efforts and trying to find the ever elusive Product-Market Fit. Farcast as a company delivering cargo from airplanes without the plane landing. A particularly interesting problem we get into some of the physics of Ben calls being entrepreneurial the chance to create something meaningful and enduring. A lot of people may not consider themselves entrepreneurs. But isn't that what we're all here to do? Please enjoy this conversation with Ben Kohlmann.

Brock Briggs

I actually hope you don't mind. I actually poured myself a drink. I normally

Ben Kohlmann

That’s great!

Brock Briggs

The time of the evening, I was like, oh, you know, think that this might be right. This feels right. So, Ben, thank you so much for coming on today. I'm super looking forward to this conversation. Past episode, Michael Madrid recommended that I talk with you. And you were very adamant. You're also a podcaster. So you, I think that that naturally inclines you to be willing to go and do other podcasts. Is that, would you say that that's accurate? 

Ben Kohlmann  2:08  

Yeah, I love it. I think this is a great medium. And one of the reasons I started my podcast was I missed having fun conversations with people throughout my network. You know, as you get older, with family and kids and all that stuff, it's harder to really talk about deep topics. And it's just an unconstrained medium that's pretty powerful.

Brock Briggs  2:28  

I've never heard a pitch that way. But that's exactly right. Over especially in the pandemic as well, which I think is when you launched yours going and working remotely, you're kind of missing a lot of those connections and I almost exclusively listen to podcasts, almost no music anymore. And so I feel like I have such a good intimate connection with the hosts who of course, I've never met. But yeah, they don't know we're close. But we are. You have just kind of like a crazy track record. And I don't even know if we have enough time tonight to go through all of the individual things. What do you think you are most proud of?

Ben Kohlmann  3:14  

What am I most proud of? That's a great question. Yeah, it's funny, you mentioned that I have a, you think I have a great track record, you know, I'm about to approach 40 years old. And I have this sense that I'm barely getting started. And I've been frustrated with how little progress I've been able to make in the past 20 or 25 years since college. But what I'm most proud of, I think, honestly, it's probably raising my kids. And I know there's still a long route to go. We have a seven, a five and a three year old. 

But whatever, however they turn out, like that's gonna be the longest legacy. And I know some of you, a parent and seeing your kids grow up and not just copy who you are. But you can see reflections but also deviations and trying to help them become who they are. And even if you have hopes and dreams for them, being open to different possibilities that are unexpected. So I’m just proud of where they are right now. You know, they're young. They've got a lot to learn. 

My mom puts it very, very well. My seven year old is very precocious. And she says he's very smart. But he's not wise. And I think that is a very apt aphorism as we think about children because age really does drive wisdom and how can I help them accumulate wisdom, have things that I wish I had known but do it in a way that they actually absorb it and will grow with it. That's the challenge. But I think it's my kids.

Brock Briggs  5:10  

Do you ever find yourself trying to give them your entire life's worth of experiences so that they can improve on? Like they're three years old and you're just trying to like, okay, here's all of the mistakes that life you could make and like, let's use how to avoid them. Or are you kind of more just let them figure it out on their own style?

Ben Kohlmann  5:34  

I think I'm more of the latter, although I'm trying to strategize for when they're old enough to impart wisdom but not do so in an overbearing way. I think that's the trick. I know all of my hard fought lessons and wisdom was because of decisions I made that most of the time went wrong. And so I had to learn that way and had been told it growing up, you know, maybe I wouldn't have listened. And at the same time, there's certainly fundamental lessons that even if I hadn't listened, there would have been in the back of my mind. 

And so as I was going through hardship and challenges, I would have been able to okay, that was actually right and course correct a little bit earlier. So I don't know, like there were some things I wish my parents had taught me. And some things that I wish my father in particular had given me insight into. But I'm not sure if he could have because he didn't have the same experiences that I went through. And there are things I know now that would have been very useful. And so I wanna impart that to my kids. But you just never know, you kind of got to let them discover who they are at the same time.

Brock Briggs  6:44  

Yeah, it's almost like the kind of experiences what makes the journey or you know, the journey is not the destination. But whatever the phrase is, I'm butchering it. But the learning along the way, I think that that really speaks to your kind of like long term mindset and thinking about that legacy. That's something that's built over so many years. And that applies to kind of one of my first points that I wanna talk to you about. I read an interview with you and they pitched you the question, given the power to repeal a government regulation, what would it be? 

And I wrote down the quote here because it was just so profound to me, profound in a way that like I needed to hear it put this way. You said the 20 year retirement in the military creates a toxic culture of mediocrity that promotes seniority over merit and deeply impacts our ability to effectively execute warfare. Now that coming from somebody who chose to not do the full 20 on active, that really tells me that somebody is thinking long term. Can you kind of unpack that for me a little bit and talk to me about your mindset, kind of giving that type of sentence?

Ben Kohlmann  8:14  

Yeah, well, there's a lot to unpack there. 

Brock Briggs

We get lots of time. 

Ben Kohlmann  

And when we think about the 20 year vest, this is really, it was created to solve a problem. And it was both to push out senior people by giving them incentive to leave with the retirement but also create a stable career path for folks who were choosing to sacrifice their highest potential earning years in a profession that wasn't gonna make them super wealthy. So we think about what the reasons were behind it, it makes sense when it was put into place. 

I think this goes for a lot of government regulations. There is a reason why every rule is in place. There's a reason why Congress has very deep oversight over defense spending and acquisitions. And it goes back to the Constitution in terms of how the founders wanted to divide up powers and create sparring parties and oversight. But there are consequences to that. And as time evolves, the needs and the original reason why policies are implemented should change. However, within government bureaucracies specifically, there are very few examples of rules being repealed and changed. 

And so let's talk about the 20 year model in particular. So why is it toxic? The core reason is, you get a cadre of middle managers and folks who are literally holding on just to get to 20. And it can be for over half their career. Because you know, at the 9, 10, 11 year mark, you're being transitioned from the O-3 and the officer rank to the O-4 rank. The lieutenant commander of the Navy situation 10 commanders have sanctuary. They are able to just stay as Lieutenant commanders until they're 20 years and get out. And statutorily, the military can't get rid of these folks, can't fire them. You can't move them somewhere else. 

And so you have this whole cadre of folks who are just hanging on to 20. And they have no incentive to be innovative, to be creative, to drive change. They will outlast anybody who wants to have a three, four, or five or even six year plan because they will still be there. And then when they leave, you know, they get a nice pension. And what it does is it blocks up rapid promotion, potential for innovators and for thinkers who are truly exceptional but can't rise to the levels of their competence. And this applies to a very small portion of people. It's the top one, top three, top 5%, maybe at most. 

But if you look at where most of the world's innovations come from, where the for thinking policies are, it is the Pareto principle at the extreme. And this is somewhat controversial but I have a belief that the very best of society create the most value for society doesn't mean that the rest of society doesn't contribute. They certainly do. And everybody plays a role. But the outsize impacts of entrepreneurs, even those who fail in pushing the bounds of what's possible in society, it's a very small sliver of our culture. And yet they have outsized impact. 

And in the military because promotions and the path is optimized for the bulk, the middle 80% of people, you fortunately lose potentially the top bottom 10% because they get shuttered out. But the top 10%, they're the ones who really are the driving force for innovation, creativity, are stifled. And so they leave, leaving this mass of folks just kind of move through that 20 or 20 year timeline. And so if you had a more aggressive civilian like program with talent management and no cliff, you could do a lot more force shaping and people would voluntarily leave when their time was up in the service, I think more frequently.

Brock Briggs  12:42  

I certainly sympathize with the DOD problem of, you know, hey, we want the top people, you know. Of course, everybody does. You know, we want the absolute top tier people. But they also need to keep them. They understand and I think most organizations understand this as well as like, hey, if you don't give people the leash to do, you know, to do whatever inspires them or you know, it looks different in a variety of contexts, but you are gonna lose them. 

And they are limited on budget and all these other things. But that 20 year retirement thing is just such a, that carrot is a big problem, I think. And I don't even think that it's just for the people that you're talking about. Because people, that's the only question that people have to ask. It's a binary question. If you're in the services, oh, well, are you doing 20? That's the first thing anybody says, that's a problem. That shouldn't be the question.

Ben Kohlmann  13:51  

Well, the solution to that is radical and would never pass but is to pay people what they're worth. Think of the role I came up through, you know, I was fortunate to be an F 18 pilot for 11 years and active duty and were paid the same as everybody else. But it's a highly valuable skill set, just like a nuclear train submarine officer is and the wages they're paid are far below the value they bring. And this is a congressional thing. They'd have to fundamentally change how they pay all government employees. This would have deep repercussions. 

But there's no reason why as a first year McKinsey consultant, I was making more money in aggregate than the four star Admiral that I worked for previously, before I went to business school. And again, people in public service are doing it for public service. But if the military truly wants to retain the best, you have to incentivize them especially in a capitalist economy and society. Now, this raises the question, does the military need the best and brightest? I don't think one, they have the best and brightest. And that goes counter to whatever the Admiral general captain says about their people. 

But having been on the outside, I can unequivocally say there is far more talent outside the military than inside the military. Doesn't mean there isn't talent and that the people who don't serve aren't contributing meaning to our country, but just raw talent wise, the military does not have that. And do we really want our society to shuttle the most forward leaning innovative people from things like entrepreneurship or academics or science to serve in the military? I don't think the trade off our country wants to make. And so while we pay lip service to it, we have to be realistic about what service entails and what level of talent we absolutely need.

Brock Briggs  16:11  

It seems to me and I definitely don't bring the same level of kind of analytical thought that I think that you are bringing to this, but I don't think that the Department of Defense has ever been run like a business. And part of me thinks that it should be. And I think that that comes back to one of the first points that you made is pay, you know, the people that are serving. They're not doing it for money or doing it for other reasons. But that may need to change. 

On one of the last episodes, I spoke with Allison Jaslow and we were talking about people join for like, either money for school or, you know, maybe they wanna be a Navy Sea. Like there's some kind of elite war fighter or maybe a pilot, it's some kind of striving for some kind of elite thing. But I think that those reasons people join are changing. And they're gonna have to do more to keep the good people that they do have and attract new people. Otherwise, the recruiting problems that are already starting to surface are gonna be much more pronounced and in the coming years.

Ben Kohlmann  17:32  

But I don't know if the DOD needs to run like a business. I think there's trade offs to be made there. And you're certainly optimizing for something different than profit. There's a different measure of currency that you have to have in mind. But I will say having to make revenue, whether you're profitable or not and finding product-market fit is brutal. But it's brutal in the way that natural selection allows the best organisms to emerge from chaos and the best ideas and the best technology to emerge from collisions with reality. 

And if we think of like product-market fit in the context of the military, we haven't been tested in the past 20 or 30 years to find that. And just for your listeners who aren't familiar with what product-market fit is, this is a concept in startups especially where when businesses find product-market fit, this means that they've uncovered a technology or a solution that solves a very deep pain point amongst their customers. And customers can't help but want to give them money, large amounts of money to solve that problem. So if we apply that to the military context, what is product-market fit in the military context? Even if it's not profit, what should they be optimizing for? And ultimately winning our nation's wars and defending our country. 

And if we look at the past 20 years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were a failed startup for 20 of those years, not once did we find product-market fit on the battlefield. We had societies that were millennia behind us in terms of technology and societal mores that ran us out of third world countries because we did not know how to engage with them, even when we were fighting for. Additionally, you look at you know, what drove success in World War ll especially. The speed of iteration with which we had to have in our technology platforms based on what the market ie what the enemy was showing us, was so fast. We couldn't help but have to evolve our technology. 

Look at submarine warfare. You know, the first torpedoes that were used were total duds. And we lost many lives because of that. But very quickly got torpedoes that were very reliable. You look at Naval Aviation, you know, we had the Wildcat, which was vastly outclassed both by the pilots and technology, the Japanese with zero. And we evolved tactics first to do it but then created the Corsair and the Hellcat that were specifically designed to beat the zero, the P 51 in Europe, the B 29 superfortress solving a very specific warfare need. And you know, for the past 40 years, the US very fortunately has not had to engage on a force on force conflict. 

But if we did, is the aircraft carrier still product market fit? If we were to go to war with a large country right now, would aircraft carriers be irrelevant? We don't know. We haven't tested the market. We haven't had to do that. And so my hypothesis is that if we get into a big war, we're going to experience something similar to what Russia experienced. I don't think it'll be as bad. We have far better people than the Russians do. And we do have supply chain and all this stuff. Technology we're relying on though, is gonna come up against some harsh realities because we haven't been tested in the crucible of reality, which is what makes or breaks the best startups. 

And there's a reason why 90% of commercial startups fail because they have an idea to hit reality and they can't meet product-market fit. The 10% do succeed, succeed wildly. We, right now in the military, because we haven't had a force and a true war to fight. Again, this is a good thing. But it's also caused our technology potentially not be relevant for the threats and the forces we're gonna face.

Brock Briggs  22:05  

So how do you find product market fit when the market is changing, quickly and evolving? And you as the business owner or the CEO or in this analogy, the US government, you can't test it but every 20 years or so. What's the solution to that problem?

Ben Kohlmann  22:35  

I think the solution is you have to empower and create organizations like what the Army built with the Rapid Equipping Force, I guess version two, when Peter Newell was running it. He was a colonel in the army. He now runs a group called BMNT, out of Silicon Valley that’s built hacking for defense with Steve Blank. But when he was running it, he was tasked with finding rapid solutions to battlefield problems and deploying them quickly. And so an example of finding product-market fit on the battlefield is what we see troops doing all the time in dynamic situations. 

You have a Humvee, the Humvee drives over an IED. The IED explodes, the Humvee is broken in half because it doesn't it's not armored correctly. So what are the troops do? They go back, they have their Humvees and they slather on a bunch of metal plates. And the next time they rollover an IED, it still has an impact. But it's not as bad, it slaps on some more. And eventually, you get the need for the MRAP. Now the MRAP is a very niche product. But it evolved to solve a very specific need in the marketplace. They boot the ramp up production was found in 2009 and 2010. But within two or three years, it almost became obsolete because the enemy then adapted to what we were seeing. You know, look at the Navy on the exact opposite side hypothesis of small fast frigates or small ships. 

So we built the Littoral combat ship program, which is an absolute debacle from the beginning. And the moment that the ships are rolled out, they're retiring the ships 10 or 20 years early because they break. They don't meet the mission. They didn't really have a purpose. It was a theoretical purpose but when it hit the real world, it didn't meet the need because there was nothing to test it against. So instead of having 5, 10, 20 year long programs, where you're projecting into the future what you think the battlespace will look like, you need to have small agile cells that when we are in combat, when we are in Afghanistan or Iraq or against, you know, other large nation states with more capable militaries, you can quickly ramp up the engineering capability to target specific threats that we'll face in the battlefield. 

And because our lead times are so long and things are so expensive, you can't do that. For instance, you know, we wanna use the Joint Strike Fighter for close air support. It's a great platform. I mean all the pilots who fly it love it. They say it gives the most essay of any system on the planet. And it's true but it's $150 million. Whereas if you wanna play close air support, could you create a T6 Super Tucano, which is a couple million dollars, has all the weapons you need, can fly over. That's a very niche solution for a battle space that has air superiority but it's cheap and rapidly deployable. 

Let’s think about China then. Well, what are you gonna do if you're going against fifth generation fighters over the Taiwan Straits? Maybe the F 35 and F 22 pair will work. But what if there's a cyber attack and it's just done all of our systems or all of our tankers go down because of some bug, like the whole system falls apart. Unless you have some agile, rapid way to build something quickly that directly targets the problem at hand. And we've tried a number of these things in DOD. But it's so antithetical to the culture and to how things are done and the speed at which things are normally done that they always die on the vine.

Brock Briggs  26:29  

You think that implementing that type of idea costs more money than what we're currently spending on a DOD budget? Because to continue your startup analogy in like a military context, that people funding your first year seed round or whatever you wanna call it, that's the American taxpayer. And if the bill is higher in a time of “peace” and we still need to maintain a certain level of readiness, they may not like spending more money when you know, it isn't even needed.

Ben Kohlmann  27:07  

Well, the military has a blank check right now anyway. There's no oversight of defense spending, it's a bipartisan agreement. And all they have to do is trot out the hey, you're against the troops. You're anti American. If you don't wanna go along with the spending bill, to get whatever they want passed. And in many ways, defense is a jobs program more than it is a national security first program. Now there's certainly overlap. And you know, all the dollars going to the Lockheed and the Boeing's and the Raytheon's is certainly providing some battlefield capability. 

But it's also providing a lot of money to go to jobs to Congressional districts. And you know, that's what the voters want. They're voting for these policies. Because it's hard to, in a peacetime situation, have useful metrics to understand if spending is useful. But there's really no metrics anywhere in government when it comes to spending. And very few programs, if any, ever get cut, they only go up no matter how effective or ineffective they are, how big if that's not the culture of those organizations. And so that creates a lot of perverse incentives.

Brock Briggs  28:26  

I think that that context is such an important thing to factor in, especially when looking at numbers. I saw somebody on Twitter going on some rant about how the face value dollar figure of what the defense budget was. It was so high. But you know, what does that really mean? You know, we just printed a couple trillion dollars and mailed out checks to the entire country. You know, that is literally helping to defend the country. And then, you know, how do you look at that as should we be spending more or less than we were during maybe World War ll or, you know, when the population was half the size that it is now. Like, what is the right number? And I think to your point there, I don't know if there is one?

Ben Kohlmann  29:17  

Well, I think the right number is a political question. And this might be a tautology. But in a democracy, whatever the budget line item is for a particular project, that is the right number because the people are electing representatives to create a budget and, you know, within plus or minus 25% of that line item. If there's no pushback, one way or the other, they're probably getting it right from a pure voter standpoint. Now is it effectively spent if you were to take a true auditors pen to it? No, this is why we talked about waste all the time. But the American public for decades has been willing to spend 780 billion or whatever the dollar is right now, per year on defense. 

There's been no outcry to drive that lower. There's some crime to drive it higher but not enough to actually change spending priorities. So it's the right amount to spend but 10 years from now looking back, will we have spent it in the right ways? And that's where whatever war or conflict into will prove that out one way or the other. We've had a very poor track record of it since 2003, but you know, maybe we're right. Maybe all the Joint Strike Fighters and you know, X 1000 AMRAAMs we have and the the number of ships we have is the right force distribution or could be wildly off. And we need to rely on people like Elon Musk to put up Starlink to give internet connectivity to Ukraine because there's no other source to do it like, I don't know. 

But that's the beauty of having a multifaceted economy is you're gonna see the entrepreneurs who are successful in commercial sectors being able to quickly pivot and help out the military when they need it most. I mean, you look at their production lines in World War ll. And because we had such a robust car manufacturing economy, that was again, driven by market forces in demand, we're able to repurpose those lines for the production of tanks and other materials that the government couldn't have planned for or the public was not willing to pay the costs to have those things on standby. 

And oh, by the way, the efficiencies in supply chain and assembly line that had been learned through the harsh mistress of the market, then were able to be directly translated to efficiency and production for tanks. Whereas had the government set up a tank line that was idle for 20 years, they would not have had all those lessons learned through the harshness of reality.

Brock Briggs  32:24  

You were part of and helped lead several entrepreneurial type initiatives while you're on active duty, including the Chief of Naval Operation’s Rapid Innovation Cell Task Force. I would love to hear like I had never even heard of that for one. But we'd love to hear about that initiative. What that was like being responsible for while you're on active duty and then what were kind of the results and your learnings from that.

Ben Kohlmann  32:57  

Yeah, it was a trip. So the CRIC, which like all good military organizations had an acronym embedded within an acronym. The CNO's Rapid Innovation Cell. And as we all know, the CNO is Chief of Naval Operation’s Rapid Innovation Cell. So we got the double whammy there. We did not come up with a name that was imposed upon us by the admirals, but it was still an appropriate name. But back in 2000 and I think it was 11, I had just gotten back from Afghanistan. I was in San Diego as a flight instructor. And one of the Marines, I was with the Marine Corps at the time, an exchange tour, one of the Marines who was one of our maintainers, he was arrested for drunk driving in San Diego or some alcohol related incident. 

And as a result, you know, as the military does, a draconian umbrella was put upon everybody where we had to call the next person or chain of command, if we wanted to go out to a bar on a Friday night. And I'm not a guy who parties a lot. I'm pretty, I'm a stay at home kind of guy but I was infuriated. Here I was six months removed from flying a $70 million jet being allowed to make life and death decisions with bombs to either drop them or not on targets in a rapid dynamic environment, leading for other planes into combat. And I got back to the United States in garrison. And I have to ask permission to go to a bar at 10:30 on a Friday night. And I understand where the military was coming from. 

But that is not the way to drive a responsible, ownership oriented culture. And so in a peak of frustration, I wrote an article called The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers and submitted it to a niche blog called Small Wars Journal. And within 24 hours of being published, it became the most widely read article in the site's history and started a firestorm in the Department of Defense. As I read it again, 5, 10 years removed, I said some pretty intemperate things. And you know, I kind of cringe at some of the analogies I used. But what it did was spark a bonfire that was about to be inflamed anyway. I got a lot of flak from senior and junior people, got a lot of praise from senior junior people for calling the military out for not being forward leaning. 

One of the people who was interested in it was a guy named Admiral Terry Kraft, who was at the time, the commander of Navy Warfare Development Command in Norfolk. And he said, “Hey Ben, intrigued by what you wrote about. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is at and come build a group that I'm putting together for Chief of Naval Operations to give junior officers a chance to put new technologies into the fleet?” And so I was actually looking for a job at the time, was about to transition out of my instructor tour and said, “You got it! Let's make it happen.” 

So, we went out and tried to assemble some of the most off the wall thinkers in the Navy. We got Lieutenant Jay Gee who was at NIC Wedge, which is a cyber warfare organization. Got one guy from DIA and other cyber guy got him Tyson Meadors, who was a Surface Warfare Officer but went to China for a year in the middle of his time at Annapolis, got a computer science degree, learned Chinese, had some crazy ideas on what the natives do right and wrong. A former DIA guy who was a counter intelligence dude in Iraq, he was an interrogator who ended up becoming one of my closest friends and is now an entrepreneur, couple enlisted dudes who had been disciplined for insubordination, a submarine engineer who was fired for insubordination and then a couple of straight laced guys who were just you know, on the command track but needed a break. 

And so we started traveling around the country and we had our day job. We were all doing what we were supposed to be doing. But then the CRIC was like an extracurricular and sort of looking at technologies. And we got a little bit of money to experiment with things and put stuff on the market. I ended up putting 3D printers on chips for the first time and kind of helped to rekindle that public movement, the 3D printing movement had been going on for decades in some of the outlying areas, the Navy, we kind of brought it to the fore. But mostly, it was a way for us to kind of realize we're not alone. 

There's a lot of junior and senior people who are questioning the way the military is conducting operations, how they're procuring technology and was our chance to make a difference there. And you asked about lessons learned and I think he was telling that you had never heard of it. So we were killed off after three years. Maybe, it was four years. I left after a year, two or three, because it was just the normal course of things. We were very good at getting a lot of press. We knew how to talk to the Navy Times and to advertise things and get people excited. What we were not good at and we probably weren't even allowed to do was understanding the politics of the Pentagon and how money flows and who the influencers were. 

And ironically, we were killed by a guy I was working for at the time. He was a captain. He was my Chief of Staff. He and I worked very closely together. He ended up working then for the CNO and he hated the CRIC. He hated the fact that no sex. He hated the fact that junior officers were being led into admirals only conferences. Here the fact that we were allowed to question what was happening and that we had the ear of very senior people. And so when he was in a position of influence and a new chief of naval operations came in, he quietly had us axed from the budget. 

And you know, he knew how to play the game and he's a very successful Admiral right now. 

And he is a quintessential warfighter. I can't fault them for his effectiveness on the battlefield. We just didn't see eye to eye on Rapid Innovation, but we learned that it wasn't enough to have, you know, a flash in the pan. You have to have long term sustainable solutions with stakeholders that have, and this is because of the entrepreneur journey, stakeholders that have such a deep pain point that can't do without what you're proposing. And we never got that traction that would have kept us around to solve those problems.

Brock Briggs  40:31  

I have a quote here from that article, The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers. Hopefully, this isn't one that you've read or might have worded it otherwise. 

Ben Kohlmann  40:41  

I'm open. What I said I stand by even if you know I was wrong. I reserve the right to always be wrong.

Brock Briggs  40:47  

Absolutely. That's the best way to go about it. You said, yet in reality, the very word entrepreneur is met with blank stares by courier service members. This is primarily because entrepreneurs see a need and without consulting higher authority, simply go ahead and try and solve it. Their very nature inclines them to disrupt the status quo. And of course, the one thing a vertically integrated organization like the military hates most its change.

Ben Kohlmann  41:15  

I stand by that. That was one of my, I think my better phrases, seem to be disputed like, I think that that's a good poll quote.

Brock Briggs  41:21  

A very fitting and accurate quote, even though this was written before, like you guys got shut down. 

Ben Kohlmann  41:31  

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this is the challenge any large organization faces, not just the military. And again, Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School built a career on describing the innovator's dilemma and how large organizations become addicted and accustomed to the thing that made them successful. And they have a deep challenge appreciating and then pivoting away from that when new technologies emerge. And I think you apply that to the military in 2005 through 2017. And it's the innovator's dilemma all over again. 

You know, we were built to have a force on force conflict, where we knew who the enemy was. We know where clear battle lines are drawn. And when we got drawn into an insurgency, that was the disruptive influence that we could not overcome. It was a low end, scrappy, cheap alternative that we thought our high tech tools could solve. We thought technology would do the work when national ally was cultural and political change that was not going to be overcome by technological prowess. And we were disrupted. And we saw what happened last August and the culmination, the disruption when we lost. 

And this is hard for any organization to do. I think it's especially hard in the military, where at least in let's say, IBM or Microsoft or 3M or any of these large blue chip fortune 100 companies. They can actually hire in entrepreneur people at the VP or SVP levels. Even CEOs, they can pluck and do that. You can't make a successful startup or a successful private sector executive an admiral and say, go run a battle fleet, go run the War College, like it just wouldn't make sense. And so what you get are leaders who have been institutionalized and had one experience in their entire lives that's the military, 100% of the time. 

And I see this at 40 years old. I think I'm very creative for many people. And I am becoming incredibly set my ways. And there are things I can't even imagine or fathom and I'm willing to challenge myself on. And I saw this amongst senior military members as well is they had only seen one type of problem their entire lives and could not break out of that solution mindset to introduce new creative ideas and solutions. And because the military can't bring in new ways of thinking into the senior ranks structurally, and I think there's probably a reason, there is a reason for that. It's much harder to implement change in a way that's even more removed than what a large private sector organization has to go through.

Brock Briggs  44:51  

Well, I think that that highlights the need for entrepreneurs and the military in general to be put in situations that challenge us. And we need to get outside that norm of what happens day to day. You pointed out some of your learnings from like the top level and I think that that's valuable. What I would be curious to ask about is what are the learnings for the intrapreneurs or entrepreneurs at the lower level in our ranks, maybe enlisted or even junior officers that, you know, maybe this Rapid Innovation Cell got shut down, but there are still surely opportunities to innovate and continue to bring new ideas to the table? What learnings do you have that may be beneficial for somebody in those positions?

Ben Kohlmann  45:53  

The first thing that comes to mind is if you wanna have a sustainable solution, you need to find a problem that is so painful folks can't live without your solution. That's the only way to make it work. On the flip side, the amount of time it takes to identify, develop, iterate on point solution is probably gonna be longer than whatever your PCS duty station period is. What's been really enlightening for me to see is I graduated from business school in 2017. And Stanford is a place that produces a lot of entrepreneurs. I think, maybe 10% of the class graduates and goes straight into building a business. 

We had our five year reunion by two months ago. And it's only now that the companies that survived are starting to get traction. They're starting to move from their series seed to Series A, they actually have customers. They have 20, 30, 40 employees. Taking them five years to get to that point where they're actually building something meaningful. And as I think about entrepreneurship in the military or intrapreneurship, it takes a long time. There was a gentleman who came to one of the first Defense Entrepreneurs Forum conferences and he won the contest. I think it was 2013. He had a really remarkable solution to the gas masks that are worn aboard ship. 

And they were comfortable. They integrated three different systems into one. They were robust. And I think just last year, so seven or eight years later, he finally saw a small contract and traction with NABC. But even then it was a pilot. And he did it alone. It is so hard to build a community of doers in the military because y'all have other jobs like you're not in the military to find a solution. You're there to fix the forward-looking infrared or to fly an airplane or to drive a ship. That's what you signed up for. And to do entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship right, it is a full time job. And you have to assemble a team around it. And so I think folks just need to go in with eyes wide open, that even the best solutions take years to get traction. I mean, we all take Google for granted right now. 

And I think it was Paul Graham today on Twitter. He had a great comment on this is, you know, it took them two years from 1998 to 2000. You'd have AdWords, which is their revenue model, the first 2 years of their existence. They didn't know how they were gonna make money. They just kept moving forward. And so like Google is now a BMF, but they didn't even know what was going on at first. They had to figure it out. And it's just so hard in the military to do it part time, especially if no one else is on board with few resources. So if you wanna be an entrepreneur, get out of the military and build a company.

Brock Briggs  49:35  

I think that that pain of the problem is such a good motivator for people to continue pressing on when you know everything is telling you, your body and your sleep schedule and your friends and everybody else on the list that you know it's probably not gonna work or or whatever. But sometimes those problems hurts so bad that you can't not do something about it. And, you know, not many people get that call. But that's why there's not very many successful businesses like you highlighted.

Ben Kohlmann  50:13  

Well, the challenge there is, you hear about all these apps that could be developed. I heard a story where someone went to the Air Force in and like he had to show his paper orders and they weren't gonna let him in. And he had to go on print them. He's like, why don't we just build an app to do this? He just showed it. And it's like, all pre cleared, which brilliant. I mean, that's solve a lot of problems. The problem is, if the military or the individual owns that when they move on, who does the maintenance on the app? It's gonna fall into disrepair. 

And this is why, to some extent, having a contractor that you're paying to do it. The reason that goes that way is because that will endure beyond one service member’s time and service. You'll have the maintenance contract from the XYZ company. Now, that may not be the best. And I won't go into the many contractors to the DOD employees right now that provide subpar service that they actually to compete in the real world. But it's actually better than having a service member pass down the maintenance from person to person. I remember the naval aviation had a program called SHARP. I think it was literally stood for shit hot aviation reporting program. 

And it was developed by a junior officer in like the late 90s. Because keeping track of flight hours and mission requirements and maintenance was awful. And so he just like sat down and built it. And he ran it for a couple years and then moved on to a squadron. And I think he ended up selling it to one of these third party contractors who then took it over and owned it because he knew that long term sustainability of that was just not in the job description of anyone as a service member. So to have an input of the military is so hard when you're serving in it, even when you're outside of it, like just know what you're getting into that you're probably gonna fail.

Brock Briggs  52:21  

Something about that is just so inspiring when you put it that way.

Ben Kohlmann  52:26  

Well, I'm not I mean, I like to be very direct and blunt with folks because like, I don't want them, it was all hard fought, you know. 

Brock Briggs  52:36  

Yeah. You mentioned the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum a few minutes ago and I'd love to kind of hear about that. That's a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that you helped co-found. Love to hear about the launching of that, what that looks like today. I think that it's got some really exciting opportunities for people like get involved in that are interested in the space.

Ben Kohlmann  53:03  

Yeah, so DEF launched around the same time that CRIC launched. I wanted to create an organization that was not associated with the military officially, but would bring together the lone wolves from across the services who would have a place to just talk. It was inspired by, at the time, it was pretty prevalent, the TEDx weekend, the Startup weekends. And the way I recruited the first cohort of leaders was I looked at the articles that were coming out in a lot of these military trade publications. And if there was a junior officer willing to say something controversial and challenge the status quo, I invited them to be on the board of the defense entrepreneurs forum and build the first Congress. 

And that was my heuristic of someone who I wanted on our team. Because what to me, it says, if someone is willing to put their professional reputation on the line for something they believe in, then they're gonna be doers and get stuff done. And we were right about that. And so this year is gonna be the 10th annual Defense Entrepreneurs Forum in the fall. I stepped away from formal leadership and even engagements about five years ago as I transitioned off. I wanted it to be junior officer run. I wanted it to be a junior officer enlisted run. I wanted the military to keep owning it. And like any organization, it's evolved there. It’s, you know, 1000s of people now, are involved in it. There's compasses across the country, even the world. 

The Australians and the British have outposts. It's inspired kind of Defense Innovation movements amongst junior officers in other allied countries. And like any organization, it evolves and changes. I was just having a discussion actually with Mike Madrid here about an hour ago, in terms of the direction that the conference is taking. So when we first started it, I was really disgruntled with the defense conferences I was going to. It was all very senior people who were saying the same things, there was no exploration of ideas, defense contractors and primes had big boot space. 

And I wanted something different. I wanted like a collision of ideas. And so we invited all junior officers to come on the stage and give talks. My favorite talk was in 2000, the second conference in Chicago, a woman who was a pacifist. She was a Quaker. And I invited her to come to a group of military officers and make the case for pacifism. And it was one of the most powerful talks that folks had heard, not because they agreed with her, but because they were just, they were really interested in the views that she had, because they were well thought out. And she was willing to engage on hard conversations with us. 

And that was the kind of thought leadership that I wanted to have. We turned down a lot of money from big sponsors that you'd normally see there because we wanted to maintain our independence. And I think as the leadership has changed, there's been a shift in philosophy there, in terms of how they're funding it and who they're featuring. But yeah, we'll see what it's like this fall. I'm gonna hopefully go back and kind of be a fly on the wall to see what I've wrought and how it evolved. But it was a fun project.

Brock Briggs  56:33  

In research of you and leading up to this interview, I was doing some research on DEF and saw that they actually have a Norfolk meet up in like two weeks too and so I'm gonna, I'm like trying to take work off to go 

Ben Kohlmann

Yup

Brock Briggs

And this is exactly the type of space and the people that I wanna be talking to. And I think that that's if there are anywhere in the ballpark of who you are and like what you're doing, I think that probably be some interesting people there.

Ben Kohlmann  57:08  

Yeah, no for sure, I’m absolutely sure it’s a great community. And I think the other insight we got from DEF was the best parts of that weekend that we had were not the awesome speakers. And there were a lot or the collectivities. But it was the unstructured time between 5pm and 10pm, where we'd have happy hours for serendipity to occur and people to meet and fun, lifelong relationships that can be formed. All bonded by this idea that, you know, there is a way to make the military service better. We don't have to wait our turn. How can we take action now and organize to build something meaningful? And that informality and unstructured time is just so critical to driving creativity and innovation. I think oftentimes, in the military we don’t have those, that space to do that. DEF provided that and hopefully continues to do so.

Brock Briggs  58:10  

In light of the sentence working to build something meaningful, I wanna talk about what you're currently doing. You're the CEO of a company, Farcast, a company looking to drop cargo without landing, which sounds like an interesting problem to solve. I'd love to hear about how that came to be, what the business is about, where you guys are in product development. Just give us the full story.

Ben Kohlmann  58:43  

Yeah. So when I left business school, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I think a lot of veterans face this conundrum as well. So I went to consulting, which for a group called McKinsey and Company, world's preeminent consulting firm. I learned a ton. It was, I learned a ton. But my heart wasn't in it. I spent four and a half years there. And by the end, I was absolutely miserable. For a variety of reasons, I made some bad career choices. I didn't advocate for myself when I should have, a lot of lessons learned there. But it always has this entrepreneurial bug. And I always wanted to start something but never knew what to start. 

And so I had a friend who was the general partner at a venture capital firm. He called me up in December and said, hey, Ben, there's this company that we've invested in. They're looking for new leadership. They're about to run out of money. But, you know, if we find the right candidate, we'll recapitalize it and give the team, you know, enough runway to give another shot. And I was planning to build a company with another friend of mine for Business School, a Navy SEAL and we looked at it and said, “You know what? This is what we wanna do.” There's a 15 person team established. There's a product that's exciting, although there's a lot of work to be done. And we wanna both build a team and see if we can bring this to market. 

So earlier this year, I left McKinsey and took over at what was then dash systems and then we renamed it to Farcast. And our mission is to, what we call, bring everyone within reach. And so if you think about the world, there are 1 billion people in the world who are outside of a 10 mile radius from a paved road and they don't have access to rapid delivery capabilities. Our goal is to get them the things that they need not just in emerging economies but even here in the States. You know, one of our first target areas is Alaska, where it's very difficult to get critical medicines, food supplies, other technology pieces to these outlying villages and even to fishing boats. 

Well, instead of having to fly a cargo plane in, land in, unload it and deliver the goods via some other means, we believe you just fly over a point, drops it out of the airplane and land it. And for those of us in the military, this is not anything new. We've been doing air drops since the 1930s, dropping mail in Cuba. And I'm sure many of you who are in Iraq and Afghanistan experienced an airdrop. Now as JR who might my COO can attest to having been a CO on some of these fobs, the accuracy left something to be desired. And sometimes there were multi kilometer hikes to get the MREs that were strewn about the ground. 

But our goal is to create a system leveraging the precision guided munitions work that's been done to get packages to precise locations. And so we're in the process now of trying to find that product-market fit I reiterated earlier, which is very elusive. It's hard, like we have a really cool product. But finding that pain point that customers are willing to pay for is super hard. Even if you have a super sexy technology. And everybody loves it. They're like this is gonna revolutionize logistics. It's so awesome. You throw stuff out of airplanes that can land it. 

And then we say, okay, will you buy this from us to solve this problem? Well, you're not quite where you used to be. And this is not unusual, either. We knew what we're getting into. But this is our challenge. We have to really find that specific area where the pain point is so great, that people are willing to pay for it and we can deploy it. And that's a very important forcing function. Because it really redefines what your whole purpose is. And we're going through that right now.

Brock Briggs  1:02:59  

It's such like an interesting problem to try and solve. I think that there's been a lot of talk, I guess, in the last like year or two about the supply chain.“Everybody” talks about supply chain. Nobody knows what supply chain is. But everybody knows that their Amazon packages days late and the excuses it's out in a container and off the coast of Los Angeles somewhere. Do you think that like in a world 10 years from now, could this be how we get our packages? Is it something that like, is that even feasible?

Ben Kohlmann  1:03:40  

I don't think you'll be getting Farcast airdrops in your backyard. I think though, you'll probably for the smaller packages, there will be specific use cases where you're using zipline or wing drones to drop two to five pound packages, got a couple of books from Amazon, could be, you know, the delivery from local pharmacy. The third dimension is ripe for the taking right now. And there's a lot of optimization that's occurred on the two dimensions we use on the Earth's surface. You know, you've probably all heard the stories of UPS optimizing their routes not have left hand turns. Why is that, you know, you minimize the time that you're waiting in cross traffic. 

Amazon is vertically integrating their entire supply chain because it's just so much cheaper for them to own it and own the experience. And in doing so creating small little islands of businesses that aren't gonna grow beyond a certain level so they can maintain price control. And I do think that if our hypothesis is right, we can get the technology to a spot. We have a big chance to change the middle mile and by that I mean if you're transporting have a bunch of goods from Los Angeles say to Dallas, get off a ship, you loaded onto a plane, you fly to Dallas. Right now you land in Dallas DFW, you offload that. 

Maybe you give it to what's kind of part 135 operators, small operators, smaller cargo planes that are gonna load them to Lubbock, Texas, or up to, you know, Brownsville or whatever. Or you put it on trucks and those trucks drive to the Amazon distribution facility. Well, if you can instead fly directly over the warehouse or directly over Lubbock and drop a 1000 pound package into the backyard of a distribution facility, that cuts out a lot of time and saves money for ground transportation, which is a lot slower than air transportation. So a lot of kinks to work out there. But there could be a world in which, you know, you don't see any of this stuff. But the supplies and things that you're getting from the ground vehicles one step removed or actually been delivered via airdrop.

Brock Briggs  1:06:02  

If I'm like brushing up against the edge of what you're able to talk about what the company like feel free to stop me but it's sounding as if you're pursuing more of a strategy of like, you're focusing on the business case. Like every day, people aren't gonna be like interacting with Farcast. Is that accurate would you say?

Ben Kohlmann  1:06:24  

To a degree, you know, to get to that 1000 slash pallet size drop requires some steps. You know, our strategy kind of evolves every week as we get more and more customer engagement. But where we think our initial landing point will be are on price insensitive customers who need things delivered immediately. And so one of the examples that we've gotten over and over again is you'll have an oil and gas company or a fishery with a broken boat that will pay 25, 40, $50,000 to have a small part delivered because without that part, the oil rig or the ship is not working and that's costing them 100 to $1,000 a day. So they're willing to pay a premium to get those things out there. And there are some areas that can't be delivered to. 

But if we can deliver it with a Farcast pod, then you know, there's a big opportunity there. Or, you know, the fire service with forest fires. Right now pilots have to fly very low to drop the fire suppression gear to drop supplies to the firefighters on the ground. The pilots are in danger because they're flying through really difficult smoke situations. And oftentimes, their best estimates as to where to put the thing out the plane go arrive. But if we can fly it down 25, 5000 feet, drop something with precision and get the chain size the food supplies like there's an end customer that is price insensitive because they absolutely have to have that stuff where it makes sense to use our platform. So if we can get a landing and a foothold there to then expand that market and then devote more capital through subsequent fundraisers to develop into larger platforms that could open up kind of the middle mile opportunity.

Brock Briggs  1:08:27  

I like your focus on price insensitive. I think that anybody building a company, going after customers that are price insensitive is probably a good place to start.

Ben Kohlmann  1:08:39  

That’s the Tesla Model, right? What's the first thing they built? They built the Roadster, low production. They knew there are gonna be a couple aficionados who were gonna pay whatever it took to get it. And that provided the foot in the door to then go to the next market, which is still a luxury market. But ultimately, it's how can we then translate that to the mass market. And a lot of products actually have started at the high end. And then as the technology or the proliferation develops, it trickles down into the middle markets where you and I are able to take advantage of it.

Brock Briggs  1:09:18  

For anybody listening that's an Elon Musk fan, which I'm sure just by your several references, I'm sure that you are then. Everybody should go and read Elon Musk's early plan for what Tesla was. Like I think it was like 2004 his like company wide one page white paper or whatever talking about we're gonna build the Roadster and like that's gonna be, we're gonna sell this many and then that's gonna fund this, the Model S or whatever and then we're gonna sell this mini and then that's gonna fund the everyday like the model three. His vision and clarity on and then executing on that vision is literally unmatched. It's super inspiring. 

But definitely recommend and I'll put that link in the show notes for anybody interested. I wanna talk a little bit about the technology that's involved in this. You keep mentioning that this is like a precision thing. And I think that that's dropping something to somebody, it's only really valuable if it actually comes within a mile or whatever. Can you describe for maybe somebody that's not in this space, what does that look like? Are you guys able to, you know, we can drop something from x 1000 feet and be accurate within, you know, the size of a basketball court? Or what are those numbers look like?

Ben Kohlmann  1:10:47  

Yeah, right now our accuracy is about 50 to 75 meters so about the size of a soccer field. And it's driven by a three part system. The first part is an iPad app called the Farcast app, which for those aviators who are listening it's very similar to foreflight, which is kind of the standard iPad based navigation platform that a lot of folks use for their flight publications. But it's for flight on steroids. And that's optimized for air drops. And very similar to how the F 18 and the Joint Strike Fighter and other systems calculate ballistic launch profiles for weapons. We have similar algorithms that will take into account airspeed, altitude, wind speed, to know the exact point in space a pilot has to fly to in order to release the pod such that it will fall and hit the ground. 

And if you think about it, I can point to someplace on the ground. And there is some physical way with which you can drop something and it will hit that point in the ground, where does that calculating what it takes to get there based on all the environmental characteristics. The second part is a launcher that's tied into that iPad app that allows the perfectly timed push of the pod out of the plane to hit that exact release point to allow for that ballistic drop. And then the star of the show to receive is the pod itself. And the pod is right now a 30 gallon cylinder, think about two feet tall, about 24 inches in diameter. You've got actually about three feet tall, caters about 50 pounds of payload, has four lattice fins. 

So if you've ever seen the SpaceX ship that comes down those fins that come inside the directional stability, those lattice fins provide both stability and drag to minimize the terminal velocity that the pod is one VRF. And then about 300 feet above the ground, the parachute opens up with a drogue chute to slow the chute and to slow the pod. And then the larger parachute opens up to allow for the soft landing on the ground. And then the ground agent is able to go to the pod, take off the tail kit and grab the supplies from the cavity that's fallen in the sky.

Brock Briggs  1:13:18  

That sounds super interesting. And I'm sure that there's been a ton of hours that have been put into like making that happen. So what does the, I don't know again, if I'm brushing up against what you can talk about, then that's fine. But what is the price of something like this look like? What is the cost of the pod? What is the cost of implementation to the customer? And then what can you guys I guess sell that for?

Ben Kohlmann  1:13:48  

Yeah, that's a really important question. So these are expensive systems. We're working through pricing right now. And one of the challenges with aviation in general is it's expensive. I mean, even the plane itself is costly. At the mass market, the benchmark is like dollars per pound delivered. And so the more pounds you have, the optimize the route kind of the cost goes down. I think Alaska's like 75 cents to $1 per pound is like the standard air cargo rate. Because we're going, we're not 

Brock Briggs  1:14:33  

If I can jump in, compare and contrast that, what is something like in the States or in the lower 48?

Ben Kohlmann  1:14:39  

Like ground base do you mean, as opposed to?

Brock Briggs 

Yeah, yeah

Ben Kohlmann

I mean, it's not the same, like air cargos are the same no matter where it was.

Brock Briggs 

Okay

Ben Kohlmann

It's a very low margin and homogenized business. So like, you know, think 75 cents to $1 a pound or something, you know, ground transportations, like I think trains are the cheapest. It's you know, I'm gonna get these numbers wrong, five cents ish per pound and truck might be 10 or 15. 

So aviation's definitely a lot more. And so depending on how you're using the pod, that's gonna, there's gonna be a variable based on what that is. You know, we think, you know, we can outfit a system for 10 ish $1,000, which would include the launcher, and the iPad app, and then a per pod cost of anywhere from 1500 to $5,000. Now, there's a lot of levers and variability that goes into there. 

And so one of the things that we're working through in this customer discovery process is where the value chain accrues and how that should be divided up between the different parts of the ecosystem. So we're reliant on the part 135 air carriers to be the delivery platform for what we're doing. And our goal is to find the end customers to then facilitate that match and provide that delivery. But yeah.

Brock Briggs  1:16:17  

I think that what you guys are doing, it's super interesting. And like we we're talking about solving a very interesting and difficult problem. What was your mentality coming into this? I think that this wasn't your startup, like you're coming into sort of somebody else's problem. And maybe that's putting it a little bit too bluntly, but kind of. You're being brought in to like, take over and run this team. 

And I would have to imagine that this is an issue that you care about. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing it. What kinds of things were you thinking about when that offer came through of like, from the VC guy looking for leadership to come in? Because, you know, you may have been unhappy at McKinsey, but you're also making probably a pretty good paycheck. And then, you know, hey, come and work for much less pay. I'm sure on an unproven product that's running out of funding. That's like literally jumping off into the deep end.

Ben Kohlmann  1:17:31  

Well, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty insane. And I think that's a good summation of entrepreneurship. And you're right. Like there was a meaningful pay cut, at least in the short term, you know, obviously, you're betting on equity upside. But in your cash, you know, it's significant and the chance of success is low. But I think for me and JR, it was, we were fascinated by the problem. I mean, getting back to aviation was not intentional. But there's a deep seated love for aviation since I was a young kid and it's great to be back in this ecosystem and even the networks and people that I've been able to engage with. I was at a conference three weeks ago, called UP Summit in Bentonville. 

And it was all CEOs of aerospace startups. And it was just so inspiring to see what's on the horizon in the next 10 years between Evie tall, the electric, vertical and takeoff landing platforms, the space rocket companies that are doing fantastic reusable experiments, even the large companies that are have really interesting solutions to climate change and all this stuff, like it was just, it was amazing, the folks that are in this community. The second part was be able to build a team and drive a culture and take on really hard problems. I remember when I was in business school, there was a class I was taking on entrepreneurship. And the professor brought in the guest speaker and he asked the class, okay, how many of you wanna take over a failing business with six months of runway and a team of 50 people? 

And I was like, that's why we're here, right? So I raised my hand. And there were two of us in the entire class of 60 people that raised our hand. And I found that to be very interesting. Like, I thought we all wanted to lead hard problems and like be the one to drive those solutions. And not everybody has that mindset, which I should have known but I've come to appreciate. And this is that situation. It's kind of impossible when you think about it. Like we have cultural issues to take care of. We do have funding, which is great. But we don't have a lot of runway. We're trying to do hard tech and aviation costs so much money. It’'s hard to get up in the air and drop stuff. We are trying to find customers for a technology that's never been used commercially before in a meaningful way. 

A lot of our customers have low willingness to pay because they're on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Like everything about this company says do not invest, do not come close to it. And yet, there's something enticing about a really hard problem that if you crack this, will revolutionize a meaningful part of our economy. And at the end of the day, like, I've just always been attracted to hard problems, like I took on the whole defense department. 

Brock Briggs

That is our problem. 

Ben Kohlmann

I don't know, I don't think we won. But we made progress like there's a whole ecosystem of innovation now, whether or not they're effective or not. You can debate that. But like, had we not been there 10 years ago, would that have existed in a very different way, potentially? You know, flew combat in Afghanistan. It's, you know, very difficult situation, do we make a difference? I don't know. But like, took on hard problems. And so I think I'm just wired to do hard things and bang my head against a wall against impossible odds. And maybe we fail, more than likely we fail. But we need people to take big swings. And I'm at the point in my life where I've realized, no one's coming to save us like we are it. If we don't stand up and do something, no one else will. So someone's gotta get after it. I hope it'll be me.

Brock Briggs  1:21:58  

I have a quote from you in some article, I didn't really write down the source. But it just, it was so powerful, I probably forgot. But you called being entrepreneurial, the chance. And I think the chance is the most important word in this sentence, the chance to create something meaningful and enduring. And I think that that about sums it up from what you're talking about. It's not a guarantee. There's no guarantees in life and definitely not in this business.

Ben Kohlmann  1:22:35  

Right. Yeah.

Brock Briggs  1:22:38  

For anybody that is trying and looking for product-market fit right now, something that you guys are actively pursuing and trying to solve. What is the mindset that people should be entering that conversation with? Because I've, I'm like an over podcaster. I've read too many books and listened to too many podcasts. And all of the interviews and whatnot that I hear from people in this space, founders talk all the time about how they found the product-market fit, not where they were looking. Like it ended up being something kind of adjacent. It took a couple tries and it wasn't what they initially thought. What is it that people should be looking for when trying to pursue that product-market fit, get that first paying customer? And then another one? And then hopefully a few more after that?

Ben Kohlmann  1:23:43  

I don't know if I'm the best guy to ask because I have not yet found it in this business. Although I do think we found product-market fit with DEF. And I think the moment I knew we had product-market fit with DEF was in our first conference. It was scheduled in 2012, October 2012. And it was over the time when they had the big budget shut down. So the government stopped all travel. And we still had 100 plus people, junior officers take leave, pay their own way to come to Chicago and engage in a two and a half day experiment. 

Like when people are carving out time and hard earned money, especially junior officers, like that's something magical. You don't have junior officers paying money to go to defense conferences. Like that doesn't happen. And so to me, that was part of, at that moment I knew we had something special because people were paying to do this. I think similarly as we look at what product-market fit for Farcast will look like, it is people saying, take my money, deliver to impossible for me. No one else is gonna do this. And if we have it and we lose it, our lives will be irrevocably worse. I mean, that is the feeling you wanna have. In anything less, you're probably not gonna succeed as a venture backed startup. And there is a nonzero chance that we don't find that. 

And, but we're doing everything we can to do that. And at the same time, you have to talk to customers and really figure out what their pain point is because that's what people say their problem is, it's oftentimes not the actual problem. And they're not lying. They're not trying to be coy. They don't know how to describe their problem. And so as you search for that problem, you have to get to the root cause of what that is and be very attuned to where their emotional responses are going and what they're actually trying to solve for. And so it takes a lot of EQ to grok that and then also, oh, sorry excuse me, also a willingness to completely change your strategy if you discover something. 

You know, I'm reading The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, which is about August 1914 and World War l and the Western Front, on the Eastern Front, too. But what's remarkable to me is the Germans, the French, the Russians, all had war plans that they had been planning for, for decades. And when the moment of decision came, they were all so wedded to their plans that when things invariably fell apart, they were not willing to adapt to the emerging battlefield environment and either attack or retreat. And as a result, all of them ran into deep problems and caused a four year stalemate that killed millions upon millions of people. And that's an extreme example. 

But if you're in the entrepreneurial journey, have a plan. And you do not deviate from the plan. Despite what the world is saying, you are going to fail. And so having the intellectual humility to acknowledge that your initial hypotheses were wrong and prove something else, that's another skill set that, you know, it's a huge ego hit. Unless you go in with the mindset that this is my hypothesis. I'm not wedded to it. It's probably wrong. I'm gonna test and learn something from it. And then when I do learn something, I'm going to act against it. Like, that's the mindset that drives success.

Brock Briggs  1:28:02  

Unfortunately, I think that there's a lot of ego that's like, wrapped up in the entrepreneurial space. And maybe that's why there's so many failures, people willing or not willing to act on what the data is saying. And, you know, because it's counter narratives, what they think or believe or believed to be true about their company or what maybe even the future ought to look like.

Ben Kohlmann  1:28:31  

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Brock Briggs  1:28:35  

I have never done this on a show before. And if this doesn't go anywhere, it's okay. But I would love to kind of like riff on some ideas with you, if you have any about maybe products that should be built problems that you've seen, maybe in the aviation world, maybe in the military, maybe whatever. What are some things that you think should be built that haven't been built yet?

Ben Kohlmann  1:29:07  

It's gonna sound silly. I think we need a far better pool cleaning paradigm. So we got a pool in our recent house. And there's like a random service provider. And like the customer service is terrible. And like what they do is actually not that great. So I'm thinking like, okay, next business, I don't think, who knows? Maybe I do venture back again. I kinda wanna build something from scratch that serves a need. And this is where I think I talked about, you know, you gotta find a rabid, painful problem to solve for venture backed. 

The flip side of that is you can build a very good normal business by just solving everyday problems and doing it well. You're not gonna become a billionaire but you can build a good business out of that. And this is one of those problems that's, it’s annoying. But it's not annoying enough that like deep resource we put against it. But there's so much efficiency to be gained in better information for pool owners and like automatic cleaning systems and metrics and like having pool people understand what's going on. Like I don't know that would be interesting. 

When it comes to aviation, I think all the problems that are there are being solved. Like one of the really cool problems that, one of the cool companies is one called Venus Aerospace that's trying to develop a hypersonic commercial transport plan that can take you anywhere in the world in one year. I'm sorry, one hour and like mind blowing what they're building and they can get there like 10 years away, but it's just like, dang, there's some cool stuff on the horizon.

Brock Briggs

Yeah. Have you not invested in one of those like pool shark things? Like, why do you have a pool company or a pool guy? 

Ben Kohlmann

Well, because we have like a pool, like a pool vacuum cleaner that goes in there and cleans it. But like, he's got to skim the top. And then there's like growth that comes on the pool. That's like algae and so you have to put the chemicals in it. And then there's like the maintenance of the pool pump. And the filters like there's real manual work that has to be done. But it's all ad hoc and kind of like alchemy. They're like, oh, yeah, maybe your pump’s not working because the filter is clogged and they change the filter. And like it doesn't change the thing they say it's an anyway, there's a lot of improvements to be had in that service experience. But I think like it's these simple businesses that there's just a lot of room for improvement, that you can still make a lot of money on and provide value for people.

Brock Briggs  1:32:02  

As somebody who grew up maintaining a pool I can sympathize with that problem to the nth degree. A lot of hours spent troubleshooting oh, more chlorine tablets? No. Do we need to change the sand on this? You know 

Ben Kohlmann

Exactly! 

Brock Briggs

Such a pain. Ben, this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation. I would love to send people to wherever it is they can connect with you or how they can support you in any way. Where would you like to send people? 

Ben Kohlmann

Check out our website, www.gofarcast.com. Take a look at the aerial delivery platform we've built and we'll be deploying. And if you have the need to deliver, get something too impossible, let me know. We'd love to service you there.

Brock Briggs  1:33:00  

You never know who might be listening, right? 

Ben Kohlmann

Exactly. Exactly. 

Brock Briggs 

Ben, thank you so much. 

Ben Kohlmann

Good to reach, Brock! Cheers!

Brock Briggs  1:33:09  

Thanks so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. If you've listened this far, I think that that's a good sign. I've been talking with several startup founders on the show recently and we've talked at length about the idea of product market fit, a problem I'm currently working to solve with this podcast. There's something you can do to help me with that. 

If you wouldn't mind taking a few minutes, I would appreciate you leaving me a review for the show. Not only does the review help with discoverability on the podcast platform you listen on but it also gives me feedback on how I can improve. And certainly not here to ask for a perfect review. Just a review with some feedback would go a long ways for me in the ever elusive Product-Market Fit hunt. You're also welcome to email me at scuttlebutt pod1@gmail.com. You can find that email in the show notes of each episode. Also happy to chat about the show, take requests and generally talk just about anything. I appreciate you and thanks again so much for listening. Until next week!