EP. 05: Leave Your Ego at the Door | "In the Arena" Podcast

Hayley

One of Vannevar's core principles is "leave your ego at the door." And if you're working on hard problems, you want people you want a team of people who have high agency and high ownership on those problems. I want to talk about how to build and manage teams like that and what to watch out for as you grow. So I'll start by asking what ego means to you in a high performance team context.

Brett

I think people conflate self confidence and ego all the time. And it's not, like, a particularly useful thing. So you need self confidence in a start up. You you need you're gonna be doing things that, like, nobody's done before. They're gonna be really hard. You you kinda you know, you're gonna need to believe that you can do it, otherwise, like, you're not gonna try to do the thing for, you know, hard startup roles are hard. It's just that's something that you kinda need generally in, like, DNA of a startup. Ego, to me, is actually like a lack of self confidence that then expresses in terms of being like defensive and in some cases like antagonistic towards other people. So when I say, ego in a startup, I typically mean people that actually maybe are like, they maybe they're not actually super self confident and because of that, they're very prickly outwardly. And, yeah, they're not they're not because of that, they're also, like, slow to admit when they're wrong and that means they're kinda slower to learn and, like, your learning rate is everything in my especially for, like, any sort of key role in a startup. You you your learning rate is like the main thing that is like sink or swim for those roles because the company is growing so fast. Right? It's like two x ing every year. The role is changing every year or in some cases every six months. You need to be like adaptable and that means you're gonna make you're also gonna make a bunch of mistakes. You need to be able to learn from them. So when I say ego, I mean, like, you don't want people that are not gonna be able to learn quickly, I guess.

Hayley

Where do you think that line is between confidence and toxicity?

Brett

I don't mean to be, like, picking on other companies here, but, like, I've heard multiple times from defense companies this idea. Like, I'll just use, like, an example. We were talking to, like, a c level person at at another defense company. And the advice we were that we were talking about, like, a salesperson who historically was, a little bit difficult for people to work with on the team. And the advice that we got from this person multiple times is nice guys don't close big deals. And I've heard that from multiple companies and there's like multiple problems, I believe, with that statement. You don't have to be mean to be, like, relentless, effective, and good at your job. Like, these two things are not correlated for me. The line for toxicity is more about how that person is making other people on the team feel. This is like one dimension, it's sort of like impact on the rest of the team. And you can If you wanted to be really, startup ethos, like, kind of savage about it, which I'm not suggesting you do, but like, just to counter people that maybe have this point, like, you're maybe you only focus on how that person is impacting key people on the team, what you would define as, like, key high output people on the team. Typically with we've seen with, like, high ego, you know, or, like, toxic people, they are not just affecting everybody on the team, but they're actually affecting your best people. Not always, but sometimes in a way that is, like, significantly reducing their productivity. And so that's that's, like, one factor to look at. The other factor to look at is I think with, like, toxic and high or and or high ego people, their own individual output is actually usually lower, in my opinion, than, like, other people on the team in similar roles. And that's kinda makes sense because they're typically not because they're not as, usually capable of effectively working with great people from other functions, their outcomes are, like, naturally, like, a little bit lower than they would have been if if you have a great BD person that's able to work really well with engineering or vice versa. This is not always true. There are some, high ego people that actually recognize that and so they they do actually pick a couple of key relationships that they keep close and that allows them to be effective in their jobs. But, I think, like, the the key thing that for me is anytime you have somebody whose behavior is, like, creating net negative output, meaning, like, their output plus, like, the impact they're having on the team is negative, like, that is, like, a very clear decision to to take them off the team. But I don't think this is like again, this is not a commonly held belief among defense companies and honestly probably like tech more broadly too, startup startups specifically.

Hayley

How do you screen for that type of ego when you're hiring people?

Brett

At the risk of sounding like too woo woo here. I'll just kinda tell you how I literally do it. I mean, like, the main thing is, like, you I'm really listening carefully to, like, exactly what people are telling me in the interview process and providing opportunities in the interview process for people to reveal certain things about like how they think and how they how they've operated in previous jobs. Our interview process typically has like three, components where you get can get a read on this. There's usually like a homework problem for all of our roles, somewhat similar. You have a top grading interview, which is kinda just going through their resume, trying to figure out how they thought about problems in previous jobs. And then you have reference checks. And you can kinda get signal on things in in any of those interviews. The specific, like, signs that I'm looking for are how does this per what's this person's worldview in terms of, like, how they think about other people? Do they have a mindset of it's everybody's out to get me? It sounds like kinda I don't know how else to phrase this, but this is like a common theme that I've seen. Like, people are out to get me. Past jobs, past bosses I've had have been unfair or, you know, like, cruel to me in some way. And therefore, that allows me to justify bad behavior at the places that I've worked. That's something that I listen for. And so I'm like asking them about previous jobs, hey, tell me about a time where you had a really great idea that somebody disagreed with. And I'm listening listening to how they are talking about the other people in in in the mix for that kind of situation. I'm also listening for grandiosity. I think this is like maybe, I don't know, again, like, maybe too I don't know, woo woo here or something, but like, when it when I say grandiosity, I I often find that people that are high ego, which again for me is actually they sort of lack self confidence, they sort of try to portray their work or their ideas or what they're talking about with you in like a really epic, grandiose, like, fashion with like very highfalutin language. Almost as like a veneer of, hey, you know, I'm I'm great. I did great amazing things in my previous job and it's just gonna sound so fantastic that you're gonna take my word for it. But then when you kind of probe and ask, like, okay, like, how did you do this? Like, tell me about a time where you were working on this thing and, like, something went wrong because something always goes wrong when you're working on a hard problem. Do they have details or not? And just keep asking, like, getting into the details with with people. Oftentimes, find that people with sort of toxic or these kinds of personality traits tend to not have detail in terms of what they worked on, and that's because they usually have tended to not actually generate the outcomes themselves. They tend to, like, take credit for other people that have generated the outcomes. And then the last thing seems really obvious, but, like, when I was a new hiring manager, I, like, just did not know how to do this. But, like, when you're going through their work history, like, you like, you really need to figure out, like, were they let go from previous jobs or not. People will lie to you. Straight up. We've had somebody lie to us that we hired and subsequently had to let go. And actually, the references were not forthcoming about this too. But you need to not take people sort of at face value sometimes. Also, they might tell you they were let go but they may frame it in a way that is not actually true to what happened. For example, a place I worked at, super toxic, everybody was terrible, my boss was terrible, you know, so, you know, like, you they let me go but it was so toxic that everybody was let go, whatever. Like, the When I hear people describe things this way, that's now a signal for me to, like, dig into that experience and then be really careful in reference checks. It doesn't it's not like a that's not like a blanket thing to apply, but, you'd be surprised. Like, there's, a decent, of the people that we've had to let go, there's, know, like, some percentage of them have fallen to that camp of either sort of lied about being let go at a previous job or, you know, lied about why why it happened. And so you kinda just listening to exactly what people are saying and sort of drilling in has been really helpful. I know this is kind of a The reason why I care about this topic so much from a Vannevar standpoint is it's way more fun to work at a place where, like, you don't have you don't have people that are kind of behaving in this way because even just having one person in, like, a 20 person team or 30 person team really can, like, drain and impact you. And I've seen that in in, like, work and people have probably seen this in, like, your personal lives too if you have, like, a toxic person around that can be very not good. And so just being able to identify, screen these people, and then also sort of make hard decisions when you make hiring mistakes is, for me, has been very important from, like, a van of our culture standpoint.

Hayley

Do you think that founders or leaders at tech companies in general need ego to succeed?

Brett

I think you need to be self confident. You don't need to be toxic. And I've actually seen for I'll just take defense. Not to name specific people, but when you look at the people that have been successful in defense, there are, you know, like, a few unnamed people that, like, people in the industry, I think, would be able to identify as, like, toxic or high ego, where their companies haven't been successful. And some of them have raised, like, a lot of money, have gotten, you know, billion dollar valuations and and they're kind of going down the drain a little bit because it turns out that as a founder, your learning rate is like everything. Like, you you really need to you have to be self confident, but you really need to be learning as you're going or else you're toast. Like, you're not gonna be able you're not gonna be able to keep up with the job. The and then contrast that with somebody like Brian Schimpf, who's extremely self confident, but he's also does not have an ego. He's not toxic. He's actually just like a really good guy. He's like a nice guy. But he's extremely effective. Like, this this is kinda like the whole counterpoint that I have. It's like, you can be a highly effective, highly self confident person who is not, like, mean to other people, you know? I feel it's like I sometimes I feel crazy, like, talking about this with folks at, like, other companies because and and this is also, like, not totally universally held with I have this debate internally sometimes too. But to me, it's just, like, we conflate these in tech, but I think also like kind of probably more broadly, you know, in America, for example. We conflate these two things when they I think they're like not related.

Hayley

What have you learned about managing your own ego?

Brett

I definitely – it kinda comes with like the self confidence thing and sort of like what I've learned is like you I'm not right like, half the time, probably. But I but I'm but I believe that I am right more than half the time, if this makes sense.

Hayley

Who among us?

Brett

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I've learned is, like, I kind of list initially, I would try to I'll just use product for, like, as an example. So I immediately learned that I was wrong about, like, this like, some decisions that I was making on the product side at Vannevar. Arabic OCR, over investing in that is, like, a great that's a great example of, like, I was wrong about that. People are gonna have these high agency people, right, that are on the team are gonna have really good ideas, and they're gonna have conviction behind those ideas. And some of those ideas are not gonna be consistent with, like, my current view of the universe. I've learned to just listen to where people have conviction and enable people that have conviction to make bets, even if it even if they are bets that I don't disagree with. That doesn't mean that I'm I won't provide feedback, like, based on my experience doing whatever thing, here's what I saw last time we did this, just FYI, use this in the future. But I don't override I try to never override somebody that has, like, high conviction on a thing when I don't disagree because I've been proven wrong now multiple times. I don't remember I think the first time I did this here's, like, a great example, actually. So the we built a LLM service around some of the data that we were collecting for one of our products. And we did this very early, like, very early GPT days. This is, probably two plus years ago now. And initially, I heard that we were doing this on the engineering team, I was like, no way this is gonna be a good idea. This like, we because we have limited engineering resources, like, our resources should be should be bet on search and, like, the current system, it shouldn't be betting on, you know, GPT whatever it was to something, you know, 2.0 or I can't remember what the model was. That doesn't work particularly well yet, like, whatever. Like, million reasons. But I said none of that. Because it it, you know, like, I think this and I think it was more just like an experiment in my head of like, alright, this person is like a deep expert on ML and is like way closer to this than I am. Their opinion like, they have high conviction. They're going to build this prototype probably regardless of what I say, you know. So it's just, like, let them do it and see how it goes. And that worked real like, it was immediately clear even, you know, whatever, two years ago when we first started experimenting with LLMs that, like, was going to be a better path in terms of ROI and for engineering investment than what I was thinking in terms of iterating on current search discovery for our current product. And we saw that in daily usage numbers, like, we're immediately, I don't know, like 30% of the user base or whatever was using this. It was without any sort of like customer touch points or whatever marketing. Yeah. That was like the first time where I was like, man, I was really wrong about that. And so now I just kind of listen to people with conviction that I believe have the right domain expertise to back that conviction up and sort of enable them to make those bets. That's like a way better model than trying to, you know, like, I think this, therefore, this is how it should be. It's like not how if we did it that way, we would be much smaller than we are now. Our revenue would be lower. We'd have fewer products that people are using. It's not the right way to to do it as a manager in any like, at any founder or not. It's like, probably don't do it that way.

Hayley

Do you think it's possible to coach out an unhealthy ego, and how would you do that?

Brett

Yeah. So I think it's like a it really depends on like how extreme the situation is. Think we I will say we have been unsuccessful in we have always regretted not, for the most part, regretted regretted not letting people that were in this category of, like, high ego or toxic go, like, way earlier. Almost always when you keep somebody around, it's like this. There is collateral damage that's sort of massing that is probably you probably can't see because you're not deep enough in in, like, the details or the day to day, like, how people are being affected. And then when you kinda, you know, make the decision to move them off the team, then you start to realize, wow, this is actually like a much worse problem than I thought. So I think this is like very common for, you know, startup people say this all the time, it's like you're never gonna regret letting people go earlier if you've made that call. It's like especially true for people that are toxic regardless of how they are performing. I don't really know why that is, but we yeah. I've like we've invested in we're not we haven't always been super consistent about this, but I I haven't invested a lot of time in, you know, at least one instance where it was, like, particularly damaging and painful for us. And I I found it's very hard to change people that have this kind of You're trying to change someone's personality at this point and that's like not your job as a startup. It's like, your job as a startup is like build products, get those customers and like have that go well. Your job is not to like rebuild people's personalities, you know? So it's yeah. I think I I've been unsuccessful. It's kind of like a sad reality, but, yeah, I think it's just more better to move those people off the team early.

Hayley

How do you give those high agency people room to lead without letting them steamroll others on their team?

Brett

I think there's a couple things here. So the first thing is, like, when you're inventing something, there is a tendency for people that are currently on the team to sort of try to hold on to, you know, ideas of, like, what's worked in the past. That's why, you know, like, big companies are very, very slow to pivot and most of them are not able to. It's kind of like a key key thing here. You need to, build teams around people that are kind of doing something new or kind of like high conviction and making a bet that you think is important, you need to surround them with like, you you can't just kinda put them in your org in like a normal way. You kinda have to like surround them and set them up in a way to be able to run experiments without having to sort of run into like the friction that can be caused when you're trying to do something new in in in any organization. So I think about it as like, that's really important and it's, like, a 100% true. That, again, it's, like, doesn't have to do with the ego. The people that are able to make those bets are again, like, can be not me. But you do need to recognize that this is not, a consensus game. Like, innovation and inventing things is not a consensus thing. And so you're gonna have ideas that people in the company or in any organization are gonna disagree with. That's like totally normal and, like, part of the part of the thing. And you kind of have to build the team and the organization around people that are making those best for them to be successful. So that's one thing. The second thing is, like, if there is somebody who is high agency and is, like, creating a bunch of problems for their team, that's, like, an opportunity to to to figure out, like, okay, like, what's going on? You know, like, talking in direct reports, trying to get ground level information on, is this person having a, you know, kind of that equation I was talking about, their output plus their effect on other people, like, is the result of that equation? Are we in negative territory or is this trending positively? And then you you can kind of decide, you know, do I need to create a different team situation? Like, do I need to put somebody else on this team or do I need to create pull this person out of their current org and give them, like, a different set of people to work with? Or is this somebody that shouldn't be on the team? Those are kind of, like, all decisions that you need to make.

Hayley

You touched on our interviewing process a little bit, but I want our audience to understand better what the different stages of our interview process look like and what each of them screen for.

Brett

Yeah. Yeah. So there's I guess there's kind of five stages if you sort of want to really elongate it out. There's sort of resume review, do you roughly have the right skills to do this job? There's a decomp, which is where I usually give people a live problem and just kinda see how people think on the fly. It's usually a problem that's mission oriented, has some national security component to it. There's usually a homework that this how we do the homework or like a skills test varies across teams a little bit, but the common theme there is, like, we are testing we're trying to give you a problem that looks exactly like what you would work on in the job. And we're doing that for two reasons. One is to like, hey, do you wanna do this job? Is this interesting to you or not? And the second is we wanna see how you how we think you would perform on similar problems. It's the closest thing that people get to like doing the work before they join. And then the last part of the process is a top grading interview, which is exactly what I'm talking about, just sort of going through people's work backgrounds. What we're testing for top grading is we're trying to figure out, like, have you achieved consistently top 10% outcomes in your previous roles? That's basically what we're looking for. And so we're kinda asking questions like, hey, tell me about the highest impact outcome that you achieved in a given role. And then we're just sort of trying to go really deep, like, okay, how did you do that? Did you run into any roadblocks? Like, what you know, you're making mistakes. We're just kind of digging in super deep on like how and why until to understand like how how much in the details were they. Like, did they really do the thing and like, you know, do we think that was a top 10% outcome or not? And then also trying to find people that are high agency to your point. So like the questions that we ask there are more, tell me about a time that you had a really good idea that somebody disagreed with. That's a positive thing for us. Like, it it is good to have your own ideas that people disagree with. You you need that. And we're more looking, okay, like, what was the thing? How much did you fight? Like, how did you navigate sort of If you really cared about it, did you get it done? Like, how did you sort of navigate getting it done? Are there any roadblocks? And then also sort of the ego check, like, how are you talking about the people in this process? Is everybody out to get you and, you know, the world is evil, that kind of thing? Or is it more like you're finding, you know, some people that, you know, you can't get as allies and that's fine. You found some allies and you got the thing done and that's great. So those are and then we do reference checks at the end, but that's roughly what the interview process looks like.

Hayley

The a similar realm of team building, what did the what was the profile of your first hires at Vannevar?

Brett

Yeah. So super startup-y. Yeah. The yeah. So just like I'm thinking about the two really key engineers on the team. One of them came from Apple, was an engineering manager at Apple, and just was like sick of, like, being in meetings. Like, 90% of his week or whatever was just meetings about meetings, I guess. And and he wanted to machine learning, we're we started in 2019, so like, computer vision and natural language processing were pretty, like, awesome areas at the time. Like, lot of research was going into it, a lot of stuff was new. And we were doing some deep learning on computer both NLP and computer vision. And so being able to build, train some of those models from scratch was, like, really appealing in a small startup context where he could just not be, like, a manager of managers in certain meetings, but actually learn a new piece of technology and write code for the first time in whatever two years or something for him. And yeah. I mean, that the his homework problem, I remember, he basically learned. I think it was a like an OCR computer vision problem. He, like, learned that from scratch, kind of. Like, he didn't like, the output he didn't, like, nail the output in terms of the homework problem, but he he put from going from zero into, like, what he was able to learn and do in, like, a whatever one week period, we're, this guy's nuts in a good way. Yeah. Like, I would just he would be awesome on the team. And then the other guy is really an early engineer for us. I don't even think he graduated college. He's just like straight up, like, you know, just has been an engineer for whatever, I don't know, you know, ten, twelve years when he joined us. Hates hates like working on big teams. Actually, prefers to only work by himself. Anytime a team gets like bigger than like one person, he's like, I gotta I gotta get out of here. Then we have to like move him to like a different team. He was just like pure startup engineer and we got extremely lucky. We hired him as a contractor first and then converted him full time pretty quick, basically, as soon as we could after that. Just like yeah. Just super startup y, not like somebody you would find working at a big tech company, like absolutely not. So those were like the first couple of really good hires for us.

Hayley

Without getting too specific, did you make any hiring mistakes early on and how did they show up?

Brett

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Made some painful ones for sure. Probably the most painful one was kind of falls into that category of somebody who is, you know, kind of high ego, I think born from a place a little bit of insecurity. And so I think was always on offense in terms of sort of when when they felt a little bit uncomfortable with how they were doing in their job. Because the the job early day in startup land is like really hard. It's like very hard for everybody. The like the first two or three years, you're just it's like you're getting punched in the face pretty much every day in every role, kind of. And so it's really really tough and it's hard to feel like you're maybe not crushing your job all the time. And so I think you can people react to that in different ways. I think this person reacted a little bit more externally, trying to channel that externally a little bit. And I think the some of the ways that I now do interviews, I think, were born from some of those really hiring mistakes. So for example, really listening to how people are describing the environments that they're coming from, Really list like, really listening and digging in on reference calls, not just kinda taking, like, the first surface level answer, but really sort of digging into it. And then really listening and and trying to map out, like, how did this person transition every role throughout their career? And do you, like, really understand what happened and what they were thinking and sort of how they were thinking about it? All that kind of stuff is really important. But yeah, I think everybody makes, tough hiring, mistakes in the early days, then you use those to learn. And it's not to say that these people were bad necessarily, it's just that they were not right for Vannevar. And some of them are doing pretty like, they're doing well at other places right now. So I think it's a good outcome. But yeah, many painful, I would say, for everybody everybody involved, like early hiring mistakes for sure. And I think that's yeah.

Hayley

If you had to pick one of Vannevar’s operating principles that you think most influences our culture, do you have one in mind?

Brett

I think the first two are are like obsessing over mission and then being extremely high ownership. Those are pretty common amongst everybody and I think are pretty representative of who we are. And it's why we're successful, honestly, like those two things. I'll just like give an example. We had a customer call us like a month ago now asking for us to deploy I may have told this story already in in some other forum, but ask asking for us to go deploy to a foreign country with with, like, the new hardware RF sensing kit that we built. And and it was, like, actually kind of a painful place to get to. It's not like you just, like, take a direct flight and hooray, you're there. It's like, no, you're, like, kind of doing a bunch of connections and you're also hauling equipment and, like, how do you get that through customs and what it was, like, lot of logistics. But we ended up, you know, in like, you know, sort of like an Arctic y type area with the you know, we're we're we're over the weekend and like, a few days prior, was a sprint to sort of, like, assemble the kits that were necessary to then go deploy and make sure we had the software ready to pull the data off the sensors that we deployed. The engineers and and and the other folks on the team were just, like, when they got that call, it wasn't a question of, like, are we gonna go to this place? It was, like, hell yeah, we're going. We're definitely going. Yeah, let's like do everything we need to Let's like let's let's like sprint to like get all this stuff done and let's like go overseas and test this thing. And that resulted in like us being, you know, like a foreign partner that, you know, we were kinda working with with a US government partner and did a thing, like, did kind of an operation, detected a thing, they, you know, flew something overhead to confirm that something was detected and that's was painful, like, took a lot of work and, like, was a lot of travel, but, like, that's the that's the kind of stuff that gets why we all work here. Everything else, like, at least for me, everything that's not that, I do because it allows me to then go do that with people. You know what I mean? Like, it's I think so I think it's like the mission impact and the high ownership are the two key things that we look for in folks.

Hayley

It's a lot about hiring and building a team at a very early stage startup, And Vannevar is now past 200 people at this point. So building a good culture looks really different at 50 people versus, you know, 300. What are you doing now to lay the groundwork for good culture as we scale?

Brett

Yeah. So I think yeah. You're absolutely right. Like, 50 people, everybody knows each other. And I've heard this described from other folks in the defense space too. Like, 50 people and less is, like, every every is friends, like, you know, you all have personal relationships. There's, like, default trust some you know, most of the time because you personally know know people, it's really easy to get things done cross functionally. When you get to a 150 people, you reach a point where now people do not all know each other. And so the like, everything kinda needs to change. Like, your org usually, like, the org chart that worked when you were smaller does not work anymore because you're actually trying to, like, do different things. So you need to set the team up to work together in a different way. The principles that you maybe used when you were 50 people don't some of them probably work, some of them don't. Yeah. Just like the default mindset that you want in in people, like, kinda some like, needs to change. The key thing I think that was not obvious to me when we kinda hit a 150 people is, like, you actually like, you kind of have you you need to be really specific about the business outcome that you're trying to support with the culture you're creating. So I don't know why this was not obvious to me, but it's like I think when you read like an HR book or you go whatever. You go to business school, like it's like culture in like very generic terms, like that is not what we're talking about in terms of like startup operations. It's like you you need to figure out what's the most important sort of like business thing you need to achieve in the company, and then you build your culture to support that. And so for us, the most important thing for for us is like, we are building multiple products as we kinda talked about. Like, we're building multiple products across multiple different business units. And in or and we're also trying to win programs, which are these, like, very large deals in the in the government. They take forever. The two things that are common for those things is, like, you need business development, engineering and product to work really well within those new product bets and within those new business units or customer areas that you're betting on. That's like the most important thing. And so we looked at our org chart, which was functionally aligned. Was like, alright, we got Eng over here, kind of in a silo. Not really in a silo, but like siloed ish. You have mission siloed ish, you have like product siloed ish. And we reorganized to put people against like the business unit and new product areas that we thought were important. And we sort of forced the, you know, had like a GM and then forced sort of like the engineering lead, the BD lead and the product lead to all sort of like, you're on a team now. Like, You all report to the the GM, the business unit lead, and your functions kinda go downward and like your job is to support and like hit the goals of the business unit. And that was like a big change but like an important one. And then you think about like, okay, what else are you seeing? So for us, because you don't know everybody anymore, because the company's big enough, you kind of need to bake in like a default assumption of best intent. And so we and also a recognition that for us as a company, our biggest outcomes have always been same thing, like it's always been cross functional, it's been like from a sales standpoint, it's been BD person with an engineer, with a product person, that team is able to generate like 10 x the outcomes of a BD person on their own. And so baking in the default assumption that, like, actually, you know, we call it win together, but, like, winning together across functions is, like, a thing. Like, that's the thing we're gonna do and, like, we're gonna try to performance evaluate everybody on that, give people feedback on that, and it's like a default You should be thinking about your role in that way. That's kind of the other major shift that we made. But I think it's more the most important thing with, I think, at least how I think about it now, is like making sure you're clear on the business objectives that you're trying to hit and then feeling out, like, how the team is operating. Are there areas that are sort of hindering what you're trying to do? And if so, are there things that you can change organizationally or, like, kind of the default operating assumptions to better align to what you're trying to do? I'm not I'm not like, you know, we're not experts in this. I'm speaking like, yeah, I really we really nailed it. I think we're doing a good job, but like, I you know, we're we're new. We're new to this.

Hayley

Yeah. Maybe last one on this topic. What has been the most difficult role to hire for so far? Whether it's profile or capability. I think every I mean,

Brett

this maybe is like a kind of a cop out answer. But every role is kind of hard to hire for until you've hired for it and then you've, like, figured out how to do it. Like, first engineering you hire is, like, kind of hard to do until you figure it out. The first BD person you hire is kinda hard to do. Kinda going back to, like, where we are in the stage of the company, like, we're really trying to build we're pretty being pretty aggressive about investing in new product areas and new business unit areas. And that requires people that can invent new products and requires people that can sort of like run a new business or kinda create a new business. And those are really hard skill sets that most people don't have the opportunity to even develop because there aren't that many, like, zero to one you're gonna invent a thing role. It's just in the universe. There's just not that many and that's especially true for defense. So I think for that, we are really yeah. We're looking at both, like, how do we grow people internally to do this and then also, like, how who externally, like, what backgrounds work for things like this. Because it's there's if you just focus on people that have that exact experience, your pool is like ten, twenty people. It's like a pretty small pool. And so you have to kinda carve out, okay, like what are sort of the adjacent experiences that might work. Like what's like You're doing like a network map and trying to figure out what would work and what wouldn't work in sort of running experiments against it. But I would say those are our hardest roles right now. It's like the GM and sort of product invention type roles. </details>