Mission Matters Podcast
Mission Matters Podcast
Podcast Description
The Mission Matters podcast from Shield Capital explores the intersection of technology, national security, and startups through in-depth conversations with early-stage founders and government technologists. Each episode reveals the opportunities, technical challenges, and innovations shaping the future of national security, offering insights from those on the front lines of technological evolution and national defense.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast covers essential themes related to AI in national security, such as the evolution of AI in the Department of Defense, infrastructure challenges, success stories in AI adoption, and innovative solutions for cybersecurity and electronic warfare. Examples include episodes focused on the AI infrastructure with Unstructured and discussions on autonomous cyber operations with Autonomous Cyber.
The Mission Matters podcast from Shield Capital explores the intersection of technology, national security, and startups through in-depth conversations with early-stage founders and government technologists. Each episode reveals the opportunities, technical challenges, and innovations shaping the future of national security, offering insights from those on the front lines of technological evolution and national defense.
AI made writing code cheap. Verifying it is the new bottleneck.
Peter Morales, CEO and co-founder of Code Metal, joins Maggie Gray and Pat O'Reilly to talk about modernizing the legacy code running US national security — and why formal verification is the durable moat in an era of commodity AI code generation.
Founded in 2023, Code Metal has raised ~$200M and signed contracts with the US Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba. Projects that used to take engineering teams months now take minutes.
In this episode:
- Why US weapons systems still run on COBOL, Fortran, and Ada
- How Code Metal pairs LLMs with formal verification for safety-critical code
- Why the verification layer is more valuable than the model itself
- Peter's advice for founders building in defense tech
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(2:10) Why would you want translate code?
(4:11) How does Code Metal accelerate this process?
(5:27) Customer interest in Code Metal
(6:22) Outdated weapons systems programming language
(8:39) Code Metal's formula
(12:14) How does Code Metal choose a model to use
(14:11) Lessons learned from working in international markets
(15:20) Navigating commercial and government customers
(18:03) Getting approval to work with classified customers
(19:46) Customer success stories
(23:06) Building trust with mission-critical customers
(24:10) Why did you decide to start your own company?
(26:22) How do you approach recruitment for working in a startup?
(28:47) Biggest changes in defense space over Peter's career
(30:11) Advice for founders and investors to leverage a board
(32:16) Lessons from Ukraine and Middle East conflicts
(33:10) Subcontracting as a way to gain access to larger contracts
(34:39) What's next for Code Metal?
(35:38) Biggest surprised building Code Metal
(36:19) Advice for founders building in the national security domain
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