Speaker 2
How did you get into sort of dual use? What happens before it's Mike Berg and startup guy?
Speaker 1
So did about five years in the Marine Corps. So I'm a recovering, hair covers up the lobotomies cars from the Marines. I hate the crayons away.
Speaker 2
I ate half of them
Speaker 1
before you got here. So did that for five years, went back to B school and then joined Deloitte doing M&A and commercial intelligence, competitive intelligence, and then started working with you, luckily, at Topler Associates doing M&A and competitive intelligence and then moved into the commercial startup
Speaker 2
world? Yeah. So we talk a lot about the challenges of speed, sort of synchronization and understanding between, you know, dual use, even pure place, sort of defense tech startups and the government, right? How do we get folks to understand how to optimize systems, how to make things move faster? You know, you could call it a cheat code to sort of get first win. And I want to even push it past that because I think we for years celebrated first wins, like, hey, you've got a sibber and called it a win, not being fair to that founding team that, like, hey, you've just entered a short room. Awesome. Like you're not outside the house, you're now inside the house. But where do you go from there? You know, as you're now, year seven, who've been at some really impressive companies have been driving some challenging technology, where have you seen or what have you sort of built up in your playbook on here's the places I should focus and here's the things I need to look for in order to understand the velocity and the scale you can sort of get customers to move at. So you're speaking
Speaker 1
my language when you say cheat codes. I'm a video game fanatic. Me, my kids play all the time, right? And if you get stuck on something, we're playing the new Zelda. What happens, right? We go online and we look at up, right? A lot of these things are actually just listed online. So you mentioned what are the cheat codes selling into the government because they are out there to accelerate companies, right? Especially for dual use companies like Gotena. So I'll take a step back. I want to talk kind of why I think it works for dual use companies like Gotena. So we were started in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy. So knocks out all of the comms in Jersey. You probably remember being Jersey boy, right? So knocks out the communications brothers to create a mesh network device to build a connect cell phones. So basically it was, can I keep family connected? So Gotena, we believe in sending the most important information at the most important times. So we are a mesh network low cost company that sends position location in comms. We do that leveraging our mesh network radio, which I just so happen to have right here for the people.
