The Capital Stacking Playbook: How Defense Founders Fund Hard Tech Without Losing Equity | Mollie Jahner

What role does Mission Cultivate have in that aspect of it?

Yes, I'm thankful to have two really great business partners and I think creating community.

So Mission Cultivate is attempting to level the playing field and allow industry and government to have really candid conversations, which I think helps with the speed of which technology is advancing.

Because the older procurement processes, they are a little bit slower, but the tech is fast and the landscape is dangerous and fast.

So how do we get the right tech in the hands of the right people at the right speed? And so facilitating those conversations is something we're very passionate about.

And those conversations aren't necessarily always open and right out there for you to walk in and start participating in.

I personally am super familiar with a lot of back channel conversations and a lot of back channel places where you have some of these conversations.

It can be daunting to try to figure out how to get into these conversations, where they're being had.

And it's even now in the virtual and digital world, it's all of these signal chats and everything.

It's invite only.

It's very exclusive.

You've got to be really in tune.

That's one thing I love about Mission Cultivate is that it's really trying to cultivate those conversations in a way that's more holistic and organic.

open to new thoughts and opinions.

And it's not the same old boys club.

Is that what you see? I think you said it better than I could.

It's

true.

And I still think that the world is such where it's who do I know the way of it.

But I do think that there's a really big push to try and get more and different conversations happening in all the right places.

And to your point, it's not open on LinkedIn for all of our competitors or Russia to see, but it's actually in a safe vetted place.

So it still does feel like it's secure in a way, but it's not by any means siloed, which I think to your point is to the detriment of a lot of really good ideas.

Yeah.