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Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Balan and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Regular listeners will know that defense is redot right now and it's been that way since the start of the Ukraine war when Silicon Valley began to embrace the need for speed and innovation. Agentic warfare, logistics systems, and dualuse tech like next-gen satellites are dominating the space. And no one knows that more than today's guest, Ross Fubini, founder and managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital. He built a VC firm off the back of his network with Palunteer alums and investors. He wrote
the first check to Andrew and now he's managing a portfolio at the intersection of defense, enterprise, software, and AI. Ross, welcome to the show. Rebecca, thanks for having me. Always good to see you. Yeah, good to see you, too. So, you've had a pretty cool history in Silicon Valley. You were trained as a computer scientist and engineer. You were at Netscape. Now, you're doing XYZ Venture Capital, which you founded in 2017, right? What was the founding mission behind that?
Thank you again for having me on the show. It's interesting. Maybe there's two parts of it. One was to go back to your comment really you know I was an engineer and a founder an executive and the first part of venture I think is somewhat tritly you just you know get a lot of joy of helping companies and going through the guidance process. So getting to do that in your own fund means you get to choose who you want to work with. So that's probably the the highest order bit. The second thing when you go start your own venture fund what you will discover is what's most important is what unique network can you go play in what unique network can you go back and the unique network that
I knew back in 2017 after a number of years doing venture was the Palunteer ecosystem I'd been part of the early days of Palunteer I'd introduced the first employee to the second and I just knew it was full of these very talented engineers years and really like building in really traditionally boring industries, government, insurance, and I wanted to back those people as they were building out businesses. And that ended up being um just being a correct investment of time and energy and network. Yeah. And I mean, you were one of the first backers, if not the first backer for Ander, right? And so I remember you telling me at the time you had a hard time convincing others to join you
in um early rounds for Andre. Oh my god. you know, the overnight success that it was not, you know, the so well. So, backing Andrew, the first thing I ever did was I got the pitch back then from Trey and Grim, two of the four founders before we even had the CEO. Brian join and the idea was there was an opportunity to build a new defense contractor. Defense is one of the biggest categories of spend by the US government. US government is the biggest spender of money in the world. And so it was exciting to go create that kind of a business to me. Then Brian Shy, who I'd been an executive coach for and friend to for many, many years at Palunteer, joined on as the CEO. And so in many ways, it was a no-brainer for me
to get involved uh in that seed round. The notable thing is how few people wanted to be backers at that point and then in subsequent rounds where now you know Andrew as you guys have talked widely about you know raising money at 60 billion very exciting all the press all the energy you literally could not convince the sequoas the excels the greylocks of the world to even take a meeting with the company because number one nobody makes goddamn money and selling the government period. Number two, you know, the government contractors themselves trade it so badly and they trade so badly because they provide a service to the government. By service, I mean you hire them to do a thing and for that they get
get paid 7% of the top line and it's just hard to build a big business that way versus what Andrew was trying to do which is really create products and sold for higher margin to the government. um one more you know sort of funny terrible thing which is when I then went to my LPs and other smart people and said hey you should give me even more money I want to invest more money into this company all the best LPs they're real fancy they knew all former heads of sectdev they knew all the traditional leaders and all those people basically said this won't work so it was universally thought of it to be a bad idea wow not quite Right. But directionally, and just, you know, a few years later,
they've, as you said, raising at a $61 billion valuation. Last month, that was a $5 billion round, doubling their valuation. And so, I think that's really interesting. Like, your firm is focused a lot on defense, right? It's about a quarter of your total portfolio. You said about what was it 40% of your total spend goes to defense companies. And now you're expecting to cross $2 billion in AUM this year. Correct. We're getting there. And yeah, and yes, uh it's a it's been a big area of investment. Android is certainly a part of that. We've also done some really interesting investments. We did a company called Cape SEC provides secure 5G network that a consumer a company then more
commonly a government wants to buy to secure all the cell phone and 5G communications infrastructure. um also a number of satellite companies that sell in good part to the government. So enabling you know different kinds of missions that would be delivered through constellations similar to Starlink. So companies like Apex and Astronis both of which have also announced big rounds recently. All these are companies that we were the first investor in and so they're all working in different parts of both the government and specifically defense ecosystem. It's been a big It's been a big area of energy and really an exciting place to see startups having to have real success.
I do want to talk more about this kind of difference between like the pure play defense like Andreal versus these kinds of more dual use startups. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but you're you're almost always one of the first checks in. So like what are you seeing that others don't? Like is there any common thread between the companies that you just mentioned? Yeah, I think there's there's probably two things. The first is the dominant limiter, right? Well, So, defense has been having a moment. Lots of excitement, lots of energy. Buy your palunteer stock. It's all going to be great. That's We should just keep it
rolling. No, it really is having this moment right now of energy and enthusiasm and that's exciting for all the companies we've invested in. I think it's exciting for the government to get better solutions. That said, there probably two things that I'm thinking about right now. Number one is the main limiter in these companies is actually what's called the uh the capture teams. So in selling the government, you don't have sales teams, you have what's called capture teams. It's equivalent process of going getting money from the government. And honestly, there's only 40ish 50ish 40ish people that are good at doing government sales for products. is most of them are coming from Andraw,
Palunteer, Primer, a really small number of places. And so I think that's one really important aspect because it's so different than starting a SAS company where you can build a product or even AI company, build a product, carry it out to market. There are lots of people that can do that. Government sales and capture is really a bit of a black art and understanding how to do that effectively is very difficult. So that's one thing we spend a lot of time trying to understand. The second thing is because it's such a current hype cycle. I mean if I didn't see another five drone companies this, you know, this month, it just the tremendous number of people that are building the next and
when in fact Androl is the next Androl. And so a lot of what we're looking for now and seeking out in the world is more novelty, more you unique products. where there are so many folks that are building largely the same product and that's almost always a bad idea in venture. It's a particularly bad idea in government because government directionally they buy a solution and they're done. We have this new, you know, we have a new capability, we purchased the capability, we are we're finished. We're not buying 10 more variations of this. We've got we've got our selected vendors directionally. So again, unlike the enterprise space, it really matters to be that singular winner because there might not
be a number two or number three in many cases. So that's the things we're hunting for is that novelty of product and the ability to actually some history of being able to sell it. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. And I think that, you know, there is space to see what sells quickly today, right? So we talked about this a little bit before, but you know, we were talking about what's changed, right? you couldn't get anyone into interested in and therefore probably defense for a while right the Google project Maven stuff it was just not popular and then Ukraine happened and as you've said to me before there's a lot of engineers thought okay there's
a clear good and there's a clear evil and maybe I can back this now Ukraine is becoming sort of a real life highstakes sandbox and a lot of companies are testing there right yeah so there's there you just mentioned two really interesting things the first is in the past so for years as we talked about, you know, Andrew was difficult to get engineers to join onto that mission and a couple things all happened at once. Ukraine war was the biggest change because as you said, Ukraine really showed the world there was good and evil and that it motivated a huge number of people to be on mission to want to go build products for the government and products in defense. And that was just that was incredibly difficult before
versus the opposite of seeing people proactively going and seeking out those solutions. I'll tell you the other thing that happened at that point is um shortly afterwards Palunteer went public. So Palunteer stock then progressed forward and it really started exciting the venture community and showing that there was more money to be made. So money plus engineers like that's that's a perfect intersection for all the energy that went into government and defense work in the last few years. The second part is actually is happening right now which is the Ukraine war and the Iranian war now are becoming these testing grounds where it's possible to see if technology really works in a battlefield environment if it's really beneficial.
Let's pick a real to simple example. You go out and you got your idea of how your product is going to be the best new you know anti- drone solution or your dep your drone is going to work in a highly it's got a highly contested environment. This is environment where an adversary is trying to block your communications. It's trying to keep your system from working. Well, now you can go out and you can test in those environments and you actually see if that's true. And those things that do work, that do save lives, that do accomplish missions, those things are getting a lot of uh more energy and so they're getting accelerated and the things that don't aren't. So again, the difference here is
you're really able to get this real world feedback and that's causing the companies that do have good products to accelerate and accelerate really dramatically because there's so much need out there. This is also because fundamentally like the world of warfare just changed so much. It's it's shocking now these words that people throw out agentic warfare, autonomous warfare, they're really right or wrong, they're becoming very real in the world right now. You know, drones and all the other different autonomous systems are being used by adversaries and then by the government very actively. And so it's a huge pull for modernization of these solutions.
Yeah, I do want to talk more about that. But before we move on from Ukraine, you know, you mentioned that a lot of startups are able to kind of test there, I just also want to flag, I guess, that you know, it's the US government is not this administration is not like financially backing Ukraine. Um, which I think has caused for a more scrappy or helped contribute to a more scrappy, you know, startup vibe environment where there's like a need for innovation and it's happening really fast. Is there some kind of pipeline for US startups that want to test in Ukraine? Is there a Discord group or something?
Yeah. Yeah, there's there's some signal chats you can get on and but with that scrappiness, that energy and again that you know imagine like you are fighting for your life. You are trying to provide tools not to an abstract war fighter but to your friends and colleagues out there actively in Kev. It's almost hard to imagine how serious that environment is. As a result, there's a regular pull and welcoming of solutions from the US that can be deployed there. And in fact, when we see products go out in the field in Ukraine, they sometimes end up getting altered and changed. And if we weld this on here, we did this differently. We make it work. And we make it work, they make it work in that environment. So there is an ability if you've got a
solution to get fielded regularly. Think like every week things are being tested out there in the Ukrainian environment and seeing if they're effective, if they save lives. If they do, just go there. Are some of your port codes coming to you and being like, "Hey, can you give us some money so we can go do this?" For sure. I mean, specifically what happens is they see that there is they can solve a problem in Ukraine. And then there's there's going to be that's one buying signal. And then every other allied nation is looking to Ukraine and saying, "Hey, what works there is probably a technology we should be paying attention to." So, it's a further
accelerant both to some of the capture activities, but certainly to the um venture activities. It's a real proof point. Yeah. And it's one of the few places you can get that live information. And then Iran is a bit different, right? I mean or rather it accelerates this innovation need right you talked to me about the need for interceptors agentic warfare like where is the opportunity for startups are there any that you would call out that are really taking advantage of this now the US government is seeing the exact same and its allies are seeing the same things in the Iranian war which is you've got
an active adversary that's flying lowcost drones and doing other means of attacking you and so whatever is most cost-e effective way you can go and respond to that has urgent need from the US government and we can all read about this right you're you've got a inexpensive drone that you're throwing a million-dollar missile at to stop even if that trade makes sense because you save lives like so you will use those missile you run out of those million-dollar missiles very quickly so there's demand both for new solutions and then more lower cost solutions so that you can use more of them more often. So there's just a tremendous amount of demand right now from the US government for things that they can purchase.
They're also trying to use software that better helps them deploy and scale up all the different actions they're they're doing. And without going into the details of some of these deployments, what you could easily imagine is again you have this environment where you're seeing the real realities of what works and what doesn't in that hostile environment and then you want to buy more of the solutions that work and the ones that don't you're just going to skip over. So that's again why it's an accelerant for the overall defense ecosystem right now. You mentioned Terminal One I think before. What's is that a startup that's doing something interesting with Iran?
We've got a number of companies that are active uh right now. We can't otherwise talk to about which solutions beyond the ones that the government has talked about being deployed but across the board what we see is the government seeking out different startups that want to get deployed and deployed successfully. Interestingly u even recently there was an article about the sect of leadership trying to also get these companies large and small to work together in these very active environments. So how do I get all these devices interacting together? Think you know it's a more hostile environment than your house but you're trying to get your sonas to talk to your Siri to talk to your phone and have all things those
things stitched together. And what they don't in a warfare environment things are can be inefficient and people die right and so there's a real demand from the government now to come and say we want all these systems to go work together and so that's another sort of part of the pull is to get many of these modern systems all to be stitched together so that the government can use them effectively. This is something that Ukraine has actually done pretty well, I think. And I think that they're trying to sell that to other governments. But before we like completely leave Iran, I think that is a good example of one of the reasons why a lot of the rest of the world is trying to decouple from the US, right? That kind
of that strike was done without, you know, letting a lot of our allies know and I think a lot of people are pissed off about it, right? So there's this broader trend of countries that are looking to decouple from US systems right now. They don't trust this administration. and they don't feel like they can rely on the US. How does that change the funding landscape or your thesis? Are you looking to invest more in like European companies for example? Yeah, there's two parts of this. Um, one is there really is an opportunity for sovereign solutions. So what does that mean? means uh there is going to be a demand from individual countries whether India, Germany, the Nordics uh Poland
etc to go buy their own solutions and yeah I think the big undercurrent is exactly as you described it's a lot a loss of confidence that US is always going to deliver solutions and pay for the military support there. So people need to go out on their own and find their own products. And a lot of those individual countries and populations don't want to work with the US. They're sort of, you know, motiv they're motivated their own solutions and now they've that much more motivated because they don't want to work with the current administration. So because of that then it's creating an opportunity to go build new products that are specific to the countries to allied countries outside
the US. Their challenge is doing that. So yes, we're very active in investing in those and looking at those. I'll tell you the their challenge is the US is such a large single customer versus selling in Europe. It's not one customer. You're selling in Poland. You're selling in the Nordics. You're you're selling into, you know, the UK. Same thing, you know, whether across Israel and other areas. It just it's a you're you've got many difficult sales processes to do. But there's a huge opportunity because those folks are expanding their budgets and looking for their own solutions. Mhm.
There's also, by the way, a number of modern players like Android that are trying to figure out how to better work in those environments. So, how can you be a provider, you know, of your products but still have some sovereign, you know, control and awareness? What So, like licensing the tech and it's like Ander made by Poland or something. Well, you know, this is still it's still being figured out, right? Like what does that look like? You know, an example of this that got done some years ago was a joint venture to build autonomous subs with the Australian government that was incredibly successful because the Australians really interested in covering the immense space uh of the
seas around them to monitor China and other adversaries. And so there was an opportunity to build a product together as a joint venture with a US Australia. So that's a model. Didn't that like blow up in flames? Like isn't Australia still waiting and they spent like billions of dollars on that or was that something else? No, that solution that's something else that solution has been very successful in terms of like fielding solutions that work. Okay. Um another, you know, and there's also a history for this of going and licensing technology that then is deployed in a sovereign environment. We're going to go build, you know, build a solution there. you know this is sort of you know get
get your 80s uh movies and watch gung-ho when the Japanese were building you know cars in the US. You could imagine a similar thing of going and having a factory that was located whether you know in India in different European sovereign zones and was going to be developed there but was using US technologies and we're still seeing how those all get played out but there's a tremendous amount of pull and desire for those for those solutions to come in and so Apex Space is one of them right so they do satellite buses but then they'll also like offer this like factory in a box like localized manufacturing in your country Right.
Yep. So, yeah. So, Apex Space is a satellite bus manufacturer. And so, when you say the words satellite bus, everything you imagine satellite, that's the bus. Solar panels, power systems, flight computer, all of those things. So, one of the things that you can do from Apex is you can buy uh a satellite and then you can go put up the TechCrunch satellite and you can go do all your work. Uh your TechCrunch constellation, you can sell a good Starlink likes like solution for journalism around the world. The other thing that we offer there is a factory solution. So you want to go build your own factory using Apex technologies. That's now a new product that is uh been made available. And so we see a lot of pull for folks that want
to build their own systems entirely under their control. You know, in part maybe using resources that are local to that environment. And that is a US-based company with technology they've done but can be deployed in a sovereign way. And that is an example of the kind of things that are happening in this environment because again huge pull outside the US and yet trying to leverage all of this these software and innovation technologies coming from the venture ecosystem. Apex is also a good example of a dual use technology, right? And so when I was first reporting on uh on defense, it was probably in that middle ground point when people were when most engineers were like, "Oh,
no, we don't just like do defense. We're dual use, right?" Like we're not um we're not a defense company. Softens are all about the edges, right? Yeah. And so it seems like now there's, you know, a lot more embrace of the true defense startups, the ones that are like primes and waiting. They're trying to, you know, be the next locked, the next Rathon. And is an example of this. There's also the dual use companies. And so talk to me a little bit more about like how you advise your startups that are doing dual use about balancing enterprise versus defense capture.
Yep. The first is the clarity of like you're either uh are you a dual use company or not. And it's worth figuring that out because we see mistakes both ways. We're an enterprise company but we're going to turn over and sell a bunch of stuff to the government. No, no, this is going to take a long time. And we see the inverse like we have a technology the government loves but you got to kind of look sideways and believe three more miracles before the uh the the before commercial use case exists. So Androl is a great example of that. And currently foreseeable future is really focused on being a defense contractor unlikely to have a lot of commercial use cases uh for their tech.
Okay. The second thing is that things that are dual use. So an example of this is a company like ours called nominal. Nominal is software company. They make software to test and run hardware systems and that could be everything from power plants to planes and those planes could be commercial and those planes could be military. So they have a dual use motion of getting money from the government and from businesses. The biggest thing that we advise is the companies to realize that those are different. They're completely different motions, even if they're the exact same product. An example of that is the government is always going to be lumpier dollars, usually bigger, but very lumpy uh in terms of when they
show up. So, for example, in the government side, we're usually organizing our companies on very wide error bars. So this year we're going to do five to 15 million. Next year we're going to do 20 to 35. And you're kind of organizing it. You don't know what's going to come through and is the budget going to slide the three months, six months. Is the mission going to shape? You have this huge amount of unknown. Every salespeople person will tell you they're the same unknowns on the on enterprise side, but they're kind of different, right? You know Netflix's CISO is only going to pay 100 to 150K for this thing that you're replacing.
You know that they're not going to buy 10 solutions. In fact, if your sales people are good, they're they're applying some sales technique and they know if it's going to happen this quarter or next. Like there's just you have a lot more visibility. And so you have to organize these things very differently. So all of our deluse companies have this very different go to market and different way that they plan and staff almost always if they blend the two you just fail or you fail to go fast. You kind of knock along really slowly and don't really make as much progress on either side. So number one kind of know if you're doing it or not and if you are really staff the two differently. So the federal defense budget just in April I believe
just proposed a 40% increase. So it's about you know $1.5 trillion in funding for the military for 2027. Does this create no small change? Right. Does this make your existing bets more valuable or does it just get crowded fast? Well the first thing see the unknown is like does that budget pass? Does that happen? We've got a midterm you know election happening. We got you know everybody getting friends right now. So I mean for the love of god uh the number of unknowns is just tremendous.
Yeah. And then actually I wanted to ask you about this in terms of unknowns like the DoD's new MOSA modular open systems approach. So that I think passed last year that's a mandate. So there's now no lock in from primes um like lock heat etc. There's open that opens the door for startups. It lowers the barrier to entry means a boost in competition innovation. But then you can just get booted out pretty quick right? like there's a lot of pressure on startups to to innovate or get lost. That is compliance overhead burdens and it's open source so their IP risk is really bad. Have you had to deal with this with any of your startups?
Yeah, we see it in a lot of different dimensions but the first is you know I mean this phone I have here right it's open in a bunch of ways you can port your number. You can, you know, you can use a lot of different cell pro, you can use different cell providers, but it's closed in a lot of ways, right? Because there's certain things that aren't documented. It only, you know, oh, if you want this part of functionality that only comes with these people. So, I think there's a long history in every industry and the federal government is no different of trying to avoid lock in, get more standardization, get more connectivity and communication in the ecosystem. I mean, there's there's more of that right
now than there has been in past, but I would say everybody isn't as open as maybe they say they are, and there's a lot of uncertainty about those systems working out. So, it's it's what we desire, but it just it's a bit of a journey. Got it. Yeah. That's probably the that's probably the biggest issue we're trying to see is where are their opportunities to go work with systems that are actually open and then you can go faster, better together with someone versus like they're at the worst they're lying and at the best they're like, you know, just all marketing material and they really don't even know what's possible or not, if that makes sense.
Right. Well, and then in the meantime, a lot of startups are just kind of like hanging out in this valley of death, right? that funding gap between winning the government prototype and then transitioning to a multi-year production contract. Rebecca, so this is the thing we think about the most, which is right now you can get, you know, you and I go start a company. We're already a cool drone company or anti- drone company or whatever it is. We actually probably go get million, two million bucks. You know, you're super charismatic. I we've built something that's kind of interesting. You get these small contracts called sibers which are relatively easy to get and you can kind of get off and going. The challenge is
from building a big business is can we go get a contract that isn't a million or $2, but can we go get a 40 or 50 million dollar contract? Can we go really go build a business with the US government? And that's the value of death which is you got a couple million bucks and you have a high hopes of getting 10 or 20 thing called a palm. Palm is a program of records. That's allocated dollars. It could be our dollars. You could go depend on them and do those show up. And the problem is the history of the government is for startups like you're still great. Here's five million bucks in Lockheed or Deoy, they get the 50 million because it's like well that's the known name. They're really going to do it. So that's the big
challenge. A really interesting thing right now is there's so many companies because the hype cycle, because the excitement, because the Palunteer stock, the annual story, all these companies have gotten backed on an idea that they're the one that's going to go from two to 20 to 50 to hundreds of millions, right? It's really unclear. It's not again, it's hard to execute. It's hard to know if that money comes to them. And if it doesn't, well, what are those companies going to raise money on? So, I think the value of death, we are going to see a we're going to see a lot of death.
I you know, I think we're going to see half the defense companies out there. Not our half. We did not know, you know, don't don't look this way. Yeah. No, but we're going to see these companies, they're going to go out of business and we're starting to see it now. We're starting to see, you know, folks that are coming knocking and, you know, it's the whole like we're not for sale, but, you know, we only have four months of re revenue, you know, left. We got this $5 million contract. It could be huge. It's funny like there's this all these prototypes that are just dying. We talk about Agentic Warfare 816Z um at the time of this recording just published a
piece arguing that the real failure point is sustainment, right? So you've got all of these like potential autonomous weapons, autonomous vehicles, but there's nothing out there to keep them all afloat or the maintenance costs of keeping them all operational in the field is astronomical. And so you can't actually get from I mean it's a similar problem to what a lot of companies are dealing with just like in terms of implementing AI at scale, right? It's like it works in the prototype, but then when you try to scale it, it's actually more expensive. You need more human oversight and it's really difficult.
Well, and also just these environments are very real. So, we have a cool thing that we've built for the TechCrunch newsroom. We're going to build it out and scale it. Yeah, maybe we stumble, whatever. Okay. You and I have built a cool technology that uses hydrogen uh energy to be our anti- drone solution. We roll that over and it works. It's amazing. You roll over with the Navy and you're like, you're going to put what kind of hydrogen on what kind of boat of mine that has 10,000 people on it? If it blows up, all those people die. Like, yeah, that's a very super high stakes. Yeah. And also like you go, hey, your new drone solution works terrifically, but this one piece always
breaks and that piece is a huge pain in the ass to actually get delivered to the four deployed team that's actually using it. Like this is a lot of the complexity of rolling out these systems. And it's that it is that same transition process. And by the way, this is why so many of the entrenched vendors has historically won because they're like, well, we understand to do that. We own the box that needs to be sitting next to your system on that boat. So we can do that and you can't. And so that's the opportunity is to go build new better solutions. But also say it's just hard. It's just hard to do. like this is it's hard work and it's we're not going to get many winners ultimately we're going to get a small number of probably very
large winners is what this ultimately looks like and again the pattern we talk about internally was because I'm freaking a million years old is uh what consumer has looked like in different phases you didn't get 50 Facebooks you got Facebook you got Spotify you got a bunch of dead bodies yeah um different reasons but the same the market dynamic is definitely playing out right now. But if you can do something really big and different, you know there's a huge demand for new solutions because people want to save lives and they want there to be new products out there in the world.
Yeah. You know, we only have like about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you if you could like lightning round if you could what do you see happening after defense or like what are you looking to write checks for in the future? Yeah, there's two things I'm really excited for. Every time we talk to people in the government side on the defense universe, the first topic is whatever is like the mission need they've got. The second topic for them is manufacturing. Can I actually buy the thing that's being offered? So, we're spending a ton of time right now talking about manufacturing solutions and what is needed to help create products particularly in the US that the government can do, but even just
innovative aerospace energy products. That's one. The second is everything we just talked about for the defense ecosystem is actually the same but for health and human services to improve how Medicare works for the FDA for every part of the government is now seeking new modern solutions from state to federal and so there's been an opportunity to build products there as well and we've got some folks that are operating at really big scale like paragrin which makes software that sells to law enforcement agent sees and state and local settings. Um things like promise pay which runs grant making programs and other money movement for state and local now federal government. So there's just lots and lots to build
there. So the things that we're looking for and I think are really exciting times to build. It's less weapon systems and less the next and more like what are other products you can build that serve government and help government serve its citizens better. And that's that's also one last thought. It's fundamentally exciting for me. You know, I really believe that if you build, you know, better software that makes better governments, you get just better societies and that's going to feel good and for a whole set of engineers, that's also going to feel better than working on a weapon system, which maybe they're not drawn to that mission. Maybe they're drawn to like making Medicare work better for their parents. And
that's really exciting. And getting to be part of those missions is pretty thrilling for me. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us about this. We're just about out of time. Where can our listeners connect with you online, find your work, etc. Yeah, you can always look for XYZ at XYZ.Vc. And you can always find me online at LinkedIn or Twitter or where have you, it's Ross or Fubini, FUB I. There aren't that many of us. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. To our listeners, you can find me on all the platforms. Just have a look. And you can find equity at EquityPod on threads and Twitter. Talk to you next time.
