"Age is a poor predictor of the quality of engineers. I'm looking more into curiosity, ownership, passion, motivation."

Martin and I have known each other from the early days of Harmattan, France's first defense unicorn.

Harmattan went from zero to 100+ people across Europe, the Middle East and the US.

We discuss how they built a talent culture that compounds on itself, how Harmattan is contributing to the next generation of combat aircraft, and why vertical integration is the real moat.

“I don’t believe AI is something that you can just buy.”

I sat down with Bertrand Rondepierre, Director of AMIAD - the AI agency of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces - to discuss what it really takes to make AI operational in defense.

Drawing on his experience at Google Brain, Bertrand goes deep on data, infrastructure, culture, and command - and how AI is reshaping the armed forces from the inside.

“Those are the only drones from outside of Ukraine that are still procured. The rest doesn’t work, period.”

This year, Quantum Systems tripled its valuation to over €3 billion. I sat down with Florian Seibel to dig into:

• How they actually won key contracts in the US and Australia
• What being truly involved in Ukraine looks like in practice
• Will they IPO soon

“Just because you’re not seeing it, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It means you’re in the wrong room..”

I sat down with Eric Slesinger, founder of 201 Ventures and investor in CX2, Delian and Polar Mist, to talk about spotting inflection points before they become consensus.

We discuss:
- Why the Baltics and Nordics are moving faster than the biggest defense budgets

- Why “build first, explain later” wins in defense

- When incubation makes sense — and why you should only do it with extreme conviction

A conversation about first-check investing, gray-zone competition, and building what doesn’t exist yet.

D3 is one of the only seed funds operating from inside a war zone. In just two years, they’ve backed 19 companies — all focused on one mandate: helping Ukraine win the war.

At the center of that story is Eveline Buchatsky.

She’s the investor founders call when they want to deploy next to the end user — not in theory, but in practice. She brings startups to brigades, into command centers, and into combat testing — scaling products in the most contested environment.

In this conversation, we talk about what she’s learning from the battlefield that the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet:

• Why next year may be the year of autonomous interception
• How robots are about to take over the zero line,
• Which are the next categories to watch

A rare, ground-truth view of what actually matters on tomorrow’s battlefield.

Biodefense has quietly moved from a public-health niche to a core national-security challenge — but most people still treat biology as healthcare, not infrastructure.

This week, I sat down with Max Breet, who went from military → Anduril → now leading biosecurity work at Ginkgo Bio. Few people have seen the shift from kinetic defence to biological risk as clearly as he has.

We talk about how cheap tools, AI and geopolitical competition are transforming biology into a strategic domain; the real (non-sci-fi) scenarios governments should prepare for; and what a “biological radar” looks like when deployed both conflict and civil zones. 

A conversation for anyone thinking about the future of defence beyond drones, autonomy and EW.

To learn more:

- Hoover Report on Biology (https://www.hoover.org/research/biosecurity-really-strategy-victory)

- Gingko Newsletter on Biodefense (https://thesignalbio.substack.com/p/introducing-the-signal)

A new class of European defense companies is emerging — full-stack, software-first, and ambitious enough to challenge the old order.

Delian Alliance Industries, founded by former Apple engineer Dimitrios Kottas, recently announced a $14M Series A to accelerate production of its autonomous and affordable defense systems — spanning sensors, software, electronic warfare, and interception.

What makes Delian distinct is the path that led to it. Before Ukraine, before defense drew the attention it has today, Kottas left Apple’s Special Projects Group and moved back to Athens — applying many of the learnings from Silicon Valley’s culture of rapid iteration, integration, and product discipline to a four-year-old defense startup now deploying systems across Europe.

A lot of people think they know what In-Q-Tel is. Very few understand what they actually do.

In this episode, JD Englehart breaks it down in a way I haven’t heard before — from how they scout technologies on the edge, to how they pressure-test them against real intelligence problems, to what founders get wrong when they think about working with government.

If you care about autonomy, sensing, C2, or how innovation enters national-security missions, this is worth listening to.

When people think of drones in Ukraine, they often picture cheap FPVs diving into targets.
But there’s another story unfolding above them — one of endurance, precision, and scale.

During my visit to Kyiv, I saw firsthand how Skyeton has built a completely different kind of company — one that flies at 10 kilometers altitude, survives dozens of missions, and is now nearing $100M in revenue. From a small Ukrainian workshop to a global exporter, Skyeton has become one of the most respected defense manufacturers to emerge from the war.

In this episode, I sat down with Pavlo Shevchuk to explore how they did it — and what Europe can learn from Ukraine’s defense innovators.

In Europe, a new generation of defense companies is emerging — vertically-integrated, software-first, and unapologetically ambitious.

Few capture that shift better than ⁠STARK⁠. Born in Germany, tested in Ukraine, and now expanding from air to sea, Stark is building the foundations of a new European defense industry.

I spoke with ⁠Philip Lockwood⁠, STARK’s Director and former Head of Innovation at NATO, about how to build a modern defense company from the ground up — in Europe, and for Europe.

🎙️ Episode Chapters
03:03 – The origins of STARK and its mission
05:39 – Building defense capabilities in Ukraine
08:32 – Expansion into the UK and Europe’s defense landscape
10:44 – Germany’s defense transformation
13:22 – Becoming a new European “prime”
17:09 – Global ambitions & ecosystem building
19:52 – A collaborative defense ecosystem
21:26 – Positioning STARK in the global defense landscape
24:13 – The future of multi-domain operations
26:08 – Unlocking swarming & autonomy
28:42 – What’s next for STARK