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.