YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Finelli

lines on the record: 51
first: 2026-03-26
most recent: 2026-03-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Want to join and be pullers on the side of that bridge, do it on the folks who want to push things in and make a difference. I would just, number one, recognize that we're in a moment where we care more about results. We were focused on just kind of process and then some spray and prey. Now we're focused on results and we can measure those outcomes. So do that and bring us overmatches and show how much difference you can make. And we're going to increase value. We're going to increase impact. we're going to increase deterrence. And so just be a part of that. I don't have to tell people because this is the best support we've ever had, but the more folks who are kind of bringing, connecting the dots, speaking the same language, I think the better off we all are from a national security and economic prosperity perspective.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of across the board, I feel like at this point, I get a decent amount of credit because I have an office that's made some things happen. There are so many people behind the scenes. And so it's a little bit, I'm from Pittsburgh, City of Bridges. No one designs a city with 300 bridges, but it ends up helping, right? And so here's the point. Be a bridge. And so you mentioned from one side to the other, we have so many hitters. I was reading John Boyd this weekend and Oodaloop creator and history finder pilot. And at his eulogy, they mentioned that he was a warrior engineer. We have warrior engineers around right now. And we have the buy and trilingual people. We have lieutenants. We have a handful of the Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel who started the innovation challenge, C. McGee. He made things happen and he is, again, an amplifier who is funneling things in. And so I would say for people who”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't seem that hard. And when I said at the outset that the industry baseline is so low, that's what I'm talking about, right? And so the SRE team just did what they're supposed to do, they notified them and said you shouldn't do this. And by the way, we're going to use a different vendor for our Kalia compliance, but that's the state of play we're operating.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we picked one of the top ones and put them on a pilot, and we're getting them installed into our network and kicking the tires and whatever. And our SRE team, we maybe the only telco in the world was an SRE team, by the way, but our SRE team was evaluating the connection and looking at it. And they discovered in the installer that the vendor sent out to us when they unpacked it, there was an unencrypted text file that had the usernames and passwords. Every single client of that vendor. Insane. And this was literally three months before the Salt Typhoon news broke, and we learned that China had compromised the X1 interface of all these major circles. And I have no specific knowledge.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then rely on our architecture, which allows for encrypted traversal of the physical of the towers in our software our mobile core. Yeah. And we tested that, and that now has formed the basis of the work we're doing at Rakuten in Japan and elsewhere in the world because wars run on cellular networks just like everything else does. And so there's a lot that we can offer. The specific story I think is interesting is related to lawful intercept. When we were building our telco outs, we're live nationwide in the US right now. Consumers can self-drive and onboard. One of the things you have to build is your story for responding to lawful intercept requests from law enforcement. You're required by something called CALIA. You're responsive. Nobody builds that themselves because it's super administrative. The tech is actually quite easy, but there's a huge administrative burden to responding to a search warrant or a wiretap request. And so everyone, every telco in the U.S., certainly, and I think around the world, turns to one of a small number of sort of cottage industry vendors who will do that for you. You say, I want to hire this company, they'll plug into my X1 interface and do my wiretaps for me.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give you a broad version, and I want to tell you a specific story. The broad version is the way we've come to talk about Guam was rather than trying to ferret through the existing carriers on Guam and find all the China and to get rid of it and never quite know when you're done or know if you've succeeded. The basic idea was let's just do a clean install of a telco on top of the existing physical infrastructure.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be grand jury subpoenas, there could be all kinds of investigations underway, drug cartels, you name it. And now the adversary knows whose calls are being capped. Very scary, puts people at risk. Okay. And to the extent you can, talk to us a little bit about how CAPE can help mitigate some of this threat.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Call data records, who's calling who, duration of the call connection, the internet, websites. I mean, it's kind of everything that you're doing on your phone effectively. And what was interesting was when I started the company, when we started the company four years ago, part of the pitch was this idea that China can leverage telecommunications network to basically see everything about you and us and most importantly, the armed forces and the national security professionals in the US. And people didn't laugh us out of the room when we said that, but it also wasn't quite concrete in the way that it became after the salt typhoon was broke. And then we just actually, in fact, China has fully infiltrated the telecoms. And it has expanded now. The story has grown from just the US to now, not everybody, but effectively every major carrier in the world is somehow implicated in the salt typhoon story. The intelligence and the national security implications of that are enormous implications for everyday citizens are enormous. The extent you care about your privacy and security as you should.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have control of those and they can just turn them on at any time and listen to during the last presidential campaign, then candidate JD Vance's phone calls were listened to and that got reported. That was an early, that was like a canary on the Salt Typhoon story.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's not surprising. The smartphone is one of the best products ever made, the iPhone's one of the best products, certainly the most exquisite communications platform ever built. So, of course, you run your life on it. What we learned was that China has infiltrated major telecommunications carriers in the US for all intents and purposes fully. So you can listen to the phone calls via the plug-in points that if the FBI comes and wants to put a wiretap on your phone”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strictly speaking, Salt Typhoon is the name for an APT and advanced persistent threat group, a group of Chinese hackers who work for the government and do hacking on behalf of the Chinese government. They have targeted critical infrastructure in the United States, and in particular the cell phone networks. And so when the story came out,”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a year Was in, this was shocking to me. I was at Davos last year in a cyber forum. And one of the speakers was talking about Salt Typhoon and had like kind of glazed over. A room of Room of 60 cyber folks. And she said, Wait, how many people know about this? Was five out of”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that is what we see. We're going to wrap up in a little bit here. I do want to mention salt typhoon because that's a huge story in all of our lives and something that we've paid attention to. But I still think because it was a little bit of a complicated story, it never quite hit the mainstream to the degree that it probably should have. Yeah. Explain to us what Salt Typhoon is and to the extent you can how something like Cape is a resilient alternative. Yeah.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. When people ask us that question that you ask, like, they have the desire, they're fully bought into the mission. Maybe they're veterans. Like we spend time with the commit foundation, which are helping people transition out of government service into the private sector. We usually tell them if they don't have an idea of what to do, they should go join a company like Kate. And we tell them, like, go get a startup experience. And then we try to tell them, like, try to work at a startup that's good because getting startup experience at a crappy startup actually does not help you. It's actually a negative. Because then you learn all the bad behaviors. Everyone wants to say you're probably going to hate it. Right, right. Anyone like it, right? Sometimes you learn what not to do, but that's not the lesson I'd rather you learn. I'd rather you learn what to do.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What often happens is if there's 10 modules, nine of them don't matter, but one is indispensable. And these are several tasks. And so whenever I say turn something off, find a way to make it fully severable because we're not looking to pay more for the one thing that they need, which will happen, right? So if go after that, not a whole problem, but a chunk of a problem and”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the problem that you read about is probably being covered by other people. If we start there and then we look at, oh, here is a system that doesn't need to be there anymore. I'll give you an example. We shut down a system this year that people have been trying to shut down for 10 years. Just couldn't put it in the coffin, right? So”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So go to, I'm going to channel my inner Steve Blank, go to where the problems are. And so there are a lot of ships docked in San Diego and Norfolk. If you are friends with someone else who's working in the area and you just want to learn, listening to their pain points, we have hackathons. So one of the players from the Innovation Adoption Kit is Structured Challenges that's now in the Defense Authorization Act. And so we're supposed to do structured challenges. This includes pulling people in who are problem solvers. Ultimately, giving the problems. And so here's the point don't do that from on high or over there. Be where the problems are and rank them by here is the size of the pain, right? We don't want to solve three headaches.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We actually put a guidebook out modern service delivery 3.0 to say here's how you loosely coupled here's an actual implementation of modular open systems here's how you pull those things forward and so for almost every domain where we're doing software there are too many systems and so if you can do secure data delivery with intuitive user interface, we will find room for you as long as you're taking things out and sending it to Operation Cattle Drive, sending it to the bone yard afterwards.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the software, I said, Well, here's the useful and interesting part. I think people recognize now that software networks, cyber, have a seat at the table across the board. For kinetic activity and soft activity, all of that highly dependent. And so what we've said is we want to get better at bending metal. But for software, there's just so much ripeness. So here's how I think about that. I can describe a couple problems, but realistically, the amount of technical debt is significant. And so what I always encourage people to do is say, hey, if you're going to look at logistics, here are all of the government systems that are here right now. Disrupt those. But make sure you're taking things out with them, right? We want to divest to invest. And so interesting. Kind of like what we had said in the past was there's room for everybody and we can just keep adding systems. That's just not the case. And so if you can take out five systems with one application, this is modern service delivery.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That full through line on that for manufacturing across the board. And there's domain expertise, right? And so, hey, here's what it is for aviation. Here's what it is for maritime. Here's what it is for just front end users on ships. So I think that's like an area that we have started to see and continue to look for kind of big impacts.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Told that there's equipment out in the field where one little part is broken, and if you can 3D print a replacement part, you're back in service. And if you have to wait six months for something to come from some factory that only makes it once a year because they only make 500 of them, you know, you have a vehicle out of operation for six months. It's crazy.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are either working on point solutions where they're doing additive and just distributed manufacturing parts repair, that and the difference that can make if you think about, like, the point is there's a little bit of some of that's not sexy, especially if it's at the point. But the question is how much difference is it making, right? And so theory of constraints tells us that if you are blocked up.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, maritime industrial base, very large. We've been talking a little bit at the DOW level of, hey, here's the defense industrial base. And we look at the suppliers. We used to kind of distinguish, oh, that's from this service or this department. We're one organization. And so Honorable Michael put out, hey, here are the C6 key technology areas to say, hey, let's operate as a department with a unified demand signal. And so taking the lead from there, right, and saying, okay, within these six here areas that we can surge. And so the research and engineering department, like that used to be a, at times like us study the problem thing, they're moving with urgency so that we can catch. And so the answer to your question is, obviously, we want to get way better at scale and speed on manufacturing. And so the idea of like working with some of these companies, like I shouldn't name them, but.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had amazing warfighters and we have people who know they're part of the process. Right now we have economists and financial minds who can actually see the forest through the trees and tell a large story. And so if we have the data to feed them and we have a kind of a return on investment data substrate going, then we can choose better products that move the needle in a way that if we were all stovepiped, everyone's working on the same tree, it doesn't always turn into the forest that you want. Sure.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But bad news travels six times faster than good news, right? Right. And so you just need more good news or a way to carry. And so like the success metrics, like our whams, hey, if you just are talking about cyber, if you're like, we hit more of the zero trust activities than other people. That falls on deaf ears for a lot of folks. If we say we move the needle on operational resilience, right, in the nuclear navy, they say two is one and one is none. So if you're not resilient, you're a note good shape, right? The idea of doing resilience as a function, as a return on investment measure, as a success measure”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unclassified and shareable tech evaluations on Guam, we did something we shouldn't name the company, I guess, but we had an independent pen tester, a really credible third party come and do a deep dive on the tech and evaluate it at multiple levels of the stack. And they wrote a 50-page report that DIU paid for because they wanted it and it was the right thing to do. But also they made it unclassified and shareable. And now we can use that across services. We can use that with other customers within the US government. We got permission to share it with investors as we went out to raise more money. And that has really positive effects for the company because we don't have to convince people that it works and does what we say that it does. But it's also really beneficial to the government, not only because it helps our tech get out more broadly, but the fact that we're then available to go raise more money and more capital and go more quickly. Ultimately, all that money goes right back into government work anyway. It's a really super positive flywheel.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us, and maybe it's broadly applicable Work certainly the Navy is doing the work DIU is doing to do these tech validation and like move companies and tech more quickly through Stages of adoption. A really powerful thing is”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Group of just straight builders try and build everything to gardeners. And we're okay, that's coming along, right? We planted a seed there and it's springing, right? And so how we pull those through, we have an innovation adoption kit. We wanted to make sure these tools scaled and a cool story recently is I was with the special ops community and they said, yep, we're doing an exercise. And through the innovation adoption kit, we found these pilots and we're going to send them into Horizon 1. I was like, who told you to say that? And they're like, well, like sometimes we think of ourselves as the proving ground for the larger departments, big navy otherwise, right? And so if we are learning things within the special ops community on maneuver warfare, and that applies to the Marine Corps, then if they have the business submission case, why wouldn't we pull that through? And so it gives us an easier way to do that translation and conviction.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have the pleasure of working with some of the best servant leaders you've ever seen. I can normally keep people up until they get offers about four times their salary. At that point, it's harder to keep them. But the amount of kind of talent on a small team, it would still be a bottleneck if we were trying to keep it in-house. And so what we do is always scouting, but more so it's a network of networks. So to go meta with CAPE, like we're looking at here's what's out there, here's what's available. And then we kind of have the unleashed people that we know in every community within the munitions community, here are the hitters, within the robotics and autonomous systems, here are the hitters, here are proxies, here are some investors who are looking at this. When a new company is in stealth mode, we probably know more about it than others, right? And so that landscape, I'd say in general, what's happened, and this isn't our team, this is the department under a really strong leadership, is we went from a”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At it, and we're saying we only have a handful of new investments. There aren't even as many investments as there are problems. And so I was like, when are we going to get after these next ones? And they're like, next year. I'm like, but there's going to be more. It's like me sprinting against you saying Bolt. If he has a head start, I'm not going to catch up, right? It's going to increase the distance. And so what we did at that point was we started wildcatting. And we said, hey, you did two pilots last year. How many do you think you could do? Well, if we really pushed it, we could do five. Great. We're going to do 25 this year. Oh gosh, figure it out, right? And so on the back end, how do you catch 25? Well, you need a funnel, right? And so what we did was we had a couple light cape that when they are really comparatively advantageous, it greases the skids on the funnel. And so no one was going to be able to do the Rue Goldberg all the way through. But if we had side by side, if we had AB and could show how much better that was, then I thought people would get a taste of that they did. And then what opportunity or...”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is defense acquisition system historically hinges on a requirements axis. And that's a slow axis. That's three years to write them, all of this stuff. This was ahead of need. And so this is a case where we're looking at things that we think could be game changers, but not following like the full formal process and small dollar amounts. And then like ultimately like little bets that could turn into big bets if they carry. And so you guys doing the business case and the mission case for us, like it made it a lot easier to pull that forward because there's still so many levers. So the continuation of that story, like what I thought about it was, hey, if these guys can get over the hump, then we have an ace in the hole here. And what we did and kind of what that looked like at scale was when we stood up the team, the tech director team for this program executive office with an acquisition when I'm at this point acting CTO.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the normal hey, we need to meet. We have a game changer. Yep, everyone has a game changer. We think we're awesome. I know. And so I go and see them and I'm impressed with the tech. But the translation is always the problem, right? Everyone who wants to meet with us, they're like, if I just convince this person, but then we have to go back and convince people and then ultimately there's going to be a room that we're not in where a decision is going to be made. And so this is why, and you tell that story, but I'm not surprised that it was annoying because the translation is what carries forward. So like what often will happen is like someone will say like we could do something with quantum that no one else can do. And like, yeah, but who's going to explain that to everybody? Like if we're talking about tech and we're not talking about outcomes, then like how many engineers do you think are in that building, right? Or can pull this forward? And so to this point, it's pretty clear that, hey, there's pain relief here. And it's actually, this is an interesting one to carry like things that we haven't really shared.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With whams. We call them success metrics. The same thing. Let's be rigorous and specific at the outside. What does winning look like? And what does that mean, and why is that important? And really transparently, you don't know the story, but we thought it was a pain in the ass internally. We're like, oh my God, we got to think because we didn't get hung up on contract and we get hung up on dollar amount. We iterated with your team several times on the whams, right? We got the whams got to be right. The whams got to be right. But they were. And we got them really crisp and we got really strong alignment between the Navy and between Cape on what success looked like. And then we went and executed this pilot. And it was ahead of schedule and under budget and we hit all the whams. And in the middle of that story is when the salt typhoon news in the US broke and it turned out to be the case that Justin and his team in partnership with DIU had incubated and validated this technology that then was critical for an emerging national security threat. So in my mind it's exactly the way that system is supposed to work. That's a little rambling. I want to hear your perspective on how that went.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And compromise, and it's strategically important ground. Of course, it's a really hard problem to unravel. Maybe we can just deploy. What if we just deployed the Cape Network on top of the known compromised physical infra? Could we trust that connection? And we worked with Justin and his team. And what I think was sort of on their end also a prototype of the system and the way of thinking that you've developed and really gone a long way towards implementing over the last four years to get a pilot together quickly and not spend a bunch of time wringing our hands over exactly all the kind of classic things that are hard to get in our contract. We worked as a sub with a major prime. We worked with Justin in his office to identify funding from DIU, the Defense Innovation Unit to help us go faster. And then we just went to Guam. And one thing I want to hear Justin's perspective on this story and his side of it, but a really important thing that you did early on that I have a ton of respect for and I've seen now play out many, many times over is insist from the beginning on defining success metrics. He calls him or they call them world-class alignment metrics.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tested this within the U.S. borders by simulating a compromise telco. Turned out to be a good thing to simulate. But when we talked to Justin in his office about it, Justin said, let me tell you about Guam, right? We have this problem on Guam, which is we believe that there's a real problem with penetration of the telcos on Guam.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The It's a great question. And maybe as a bit of framing, when I started Cape four years ago and I didn't make this up, the conventional wisdom was if you're going to do a defense tech startup or a dual use startup and sell to the government, go to the Navy last because they were the hardest to do business with. The Air Force was fastest. The Marines are also fast but don't have very much money. The Army is somewhere in the middle there. And then go to the Navy last because they're the slowest to adopt. And that was just conventional wisdom that got repeated over and over and over again, which is important framing for when I met Justin and had the opportunity to brief you on at PEO Digital in the Navy. I had the opportunity to brief them on an exercise we had just done at Cape where we deployed our network in support of a training exercise and had discovered, had done a lot of validation. It was a really good early, early proof point for us, and had discovered an interesting feature where we thought that we could offer a trusted cellular connection over known compromised physical infrastructure.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Startups and the companies to figure out how to work with the government, but the government has to figure out how to work with the companies. I think we weren't listening enough before. And it's definitely like a collective action thing. We can talk about the outside in, but the inside out was the bottleneck. And so we taken huge. Yeah, like the primes have had 70 years to refine the go-to-market motion of how to sell to the government. They already know how to do it. And it's a new muscle for startups to build. Maybe this is a good segue, John, to you. How did you meet Justin? How did you get to meet the Navy? And how do you sell to the government? Maybe we'll get to that last part later.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“haven't had experience just what three months ago now vice admiral total champion of these type of efforts initiator succeeder at many levels said hey let's do a boot camp together and so we took all the program managers and contracting officers most of them who had never worked with commercial or very little and said here's how you do this differently here's how you can do something in three months that used to take 18 months and so we had the folks who were doing that well and and pulling things through and then we had folks who had questions we kind of workshop that out it's it's a tale of two cities now it's really exciting see that answers excellent because when i asked the question i was just thinking about all the things that startups were doing wrong that they didn't know or that private sector wasn't partnering with the navy but what you just spoke about was really about internal education internal training rethinking about how they work with the private sector and maybe really is really takes really takes both halves you got you need the”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or what needed to change? I think reps. And so if everyone was previously trained on here's how you buy a plane, here's how you buy a ship, then everything looks like that. And so we started with what are the differences if you're doing software? And so we found the folks who are saying, hey, they think we can accelerate software acquisition. I think we can spot talent. I had done a little bit of VC work at that time. There were four VCs making investments in the space. There's 168 now by my last count, 42x in seven years means that we have private sector that's ready to go knocking on the door. We have some folks in senior leadership positions now who are saying, hey, come in. And so that was a shift for us from make everything yourself innovate to let's be adopters of innovation. And so that just between practice and kind of a different way of measuring yourself, that was a huge shift for us. Now, the good news is there's so much for support for this right now that even if people”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“pulling you back in. And I said, I really like what I'm doing. And he goes, It's different from when you left. We've slowed down. I said, oh. And he goes, and we know how to fix it, but we need you. And I did not want to go. And so we had just kind of this group of unleashed folks and they knew where others were. And so they kind of handed me, hey, here's a pipeline of winds that we'd like to get through. And so what that ended up looking like was it for us kind of forms part of the barbell strategy. And so like from a finance perspective, we're excellent at the high end, but on the lower tradable commercial, there hadn't been a lot of really strong experience of moving that through quickly. And I think I probably had the best team anywhere. And I had some experience doing it. It's not a sourcing issue or procurement issue or contracting issue, identifying the technology priorities. What makes the low end of the bar bow? Why hadn't that been moving?”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We rent capacity on towers from major carriers wherever we are in the world, in the US. The list of companies that that includes overseas. We just announced last week a partnership with Rakuten in Japan. We did a joint US and Japanese self-defense force military exercise on Rakutan's physical infrastructure with CAPES software in Japan that was really successful. But what that means is we become, and what we've built is a network of networks. So we stitch together physical infrastructure wherever we find it. And the result is that you're not reliant on any one physical infrastructure provider. I won't name any names, but in the last six months, two of the three major U.S. telcos have had significant outages. Those aren't as scary for a cape subscriber as they are for someone else because there's another network you can fail over.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for us, that just means deploying commercial cloud, employ industry. Perspective, we just build our own and we in house it. And so over four years now, we've been able to make real strides, and we are confident in saying meaningfully better than any other carrier from a cybersecurity perspective. And then resilience for us means we are what's known as a mobile virtual network operator. And the V, the virtual means we don't own any towers.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. Those all mean different things. When we talk about privacy, we are highly differentiated in the way we manage our customer data, the way that we assign identifiers to their phones. You need a bunch of identifiers on your phone for it to work. We rotate ours. It's kind of like Apple rotates Mac addresses on the iPhone. We do that for a bunch of other ones. More secure means it means a lot of things as we've four years now into starting and running a telco when the entire team with almost no telecom experience when we started a bunch of defense tech folks started at telecom. What we learned was that the status quo in the telecom industry was really, really poor when it comes to cybersecurity. And then I'm sure we'll talk about Salt Typhoon at some point a few years in. This became not just a suspicion, but a reported story.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ape is a global cellular network commercial cell network. So your phone hopefully yours says CAPE. Here's my say Verizon in the upper left-hand corner. Mine says CAPE because I'm on the CAP network. It's live in 190 countries. We're more private, more secure, and more resilient than any other commercial carrier on Earth.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing, super mission focused, kind of wild five years. We went public in the middle of all that. But it's also where I had the opportunity to learn about a whole host of vulnerabilities that exist in the commercial cellular network. And it was interesting to me. And then I was obsessed about it. And then I had ideas on how to fix it. And so in 2022, with the help of the American Dynamism team, who was really in the early days at that point, I left Palenter to start Cape.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool to be here. Thanks. My background, I was a computer science major, but then as soon as I graduated, I went in the Army. We had just invaded Iraq. I joined up, became a Green Beret. I was Army Special Forces from 2003 until I left in 2008. Brief detour to law school. Emma Law School graduate, Harvard Law School. Wow. Passed the bar. I figured out early I never wanted to be a lawyer and instead I went to Palantir. This was 2012 or 2013 in the way that people found their way to Palantir in those years. I did. I had an amazing run there nine years at Palantir, started as a Ford deployed engineer doing technical work, wrote code. But my signature contribution to the company was running the National Security Business from 2017 until I left in 2022.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think right now we have the most encouraging best set of pullers I've ever seen. So it's a great time to be in the moment and in the ecosystem. Awesome. Tom Doyle, who I've known for a long time. Excited to be investors in CAPE. We've been investors, I think, from the very beginning.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they end up adding up. And so I had an engineer way pointing through. So worked in the intelligence community, in the actual manpower and business systems, operational systems within Department of War and Department of Navy, went to DARPA, helped stand up two new agencies from scratch. So space development agency and ARPA-H, so DARPA for healthcare. Oh, cool. And then is that something that works with like the VA and things like that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so when I was at Defense Health, we were working with VA to try and connect the dots. This is during Trump won't let's make sure that we are flattening the government connecting where we can be connected, have synergies at one point there. The health records for the veterans were on a different backbone than the health records for active duty. It didn't make sense. So kind of trying to be, again, around people who want to make things happen, scouting for new capabilities, new technologies, and then pulling those through.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increased gang. And so across the board, it's a little bit of signal to noise detection. The good news is we have a really healthy and thriving and growing ecosystem. And so this is not a me thing. This is, hey, how do we make sure that folks who are super innovative are able to get in? How do we catalyze? And so my backstory is I'm an engineer, Air Force Picked Electrical Engineering. It was a pretty good time for that. This is just before the world starts getting eaten by software. When was this? What you're going to date me? So this is early 2000s. Okay. This is right after 9-11, but the hardware revolution and the internet starting. I think that quote from Mark Andreessen happens late autumn. Early 2000. And then we start to like kind of my office within the Navy at that point starts to ride the wave towards software. So really early glistenings on software-defined warfare.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In late 2024, the United States confirmed that Chinese hackers had infiltrated every major American cellular carrier. The operation, Salt Typhoon, gave China access to lawful intercept systems, live phone calls, and the communications of senior government officials. It was not a one-time breach. It was the product of an industry-wide failure in cybersecurity. Years before the story broke, a former Green Beret and Palantir executive had started building a new kind of cell network, one designed to operate securely on top of compromised physical infrastructure. The Navy was an early partner. Testing the technology on Guam before anyone outside the intelligence community fully grasped the scale of the threat. David Yulovich speaks with Justin Finelli, CTO of the Navy, and John Doyle, founder and CEO at CAPE.”
2026-03-26 · a16z Podcast · Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source