Pirates Only

Amir Khan and Jon Haase came to Odin Dynamics from opposite ends of the same problem. Amir built batteries and powertrains at Tesla, ARC, and Matternet, then spent mid-2024 cold-emailing admirals, sailors, and special forces to learn where maritime warfare was headed. Jon spent nearly 25 years in the Navy as an EOD officer and program manager who owned most of the service's underwater vehicle port...

In this episode, Mat sits down with Dan, CEO of Firestorm, and Michael LaFramboise, CEO of Aurelius Systems, two founders tackling the drone revolution from opposite but complementary angles. Dan conceived Firestorm after watching ISIS use $3,000 DJI drones to fight the U.S. military to a standstill in Mosul, and spent the years since rethinking drone manufacturing from first principles: stop buil...

Eric McShane spent a decade in battery research before discovering, during his Stanford postdoc, that startups were the path he had been looking for all along. Together with co-founder Evan, he launched Electroflow in San Bruno to tackle one of the most consequential supply chain problems in modern energy: producing lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, the cheapest and most widely used battery electrod...

Chandler Luzsicza spent nearly five years at SpaceX as a propulsion engineer on the Dragon capsule and Starship programs before a brief stop at autonomous vessel company Saronic convinced him to found Galadyne in late 2024. Backed by a pre-seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, his Austin team is applying the commercial space playbook to what he calls an American missile crisis. The numbers are sobering...

Brian Taylor spent 15 years in aerospace before founding Lux Aeterna, including building the first 60 Starlink satellites at SpaceX from zero to launch in nine months, followed by stints at Amazon's Project Kuiper and Loft Orbital. Those three organizations each took a different approach to the same bottleneck: satellites cannot be built fast enough to keep pace with demand. Taylor's insight was t...

Eric Hostetler spent years as a mechanical engineer building cult consumer brands, from Fox Racing motocross gear to Beats by Dre, logging nearly 100 trips to China and absorbing the high-volume manufacturing philosophy that governs those industries. That background turned out to be the map to buried treasure when he co-founded Volund Manufacturing, a Huntington Beach startup building a vertically...

In this episode of Pirates Only, I sat down with Matt Loszak and Yasir, co-founders of Aalo Atomics, the company betting that nuclear power isn't just making a comeback but is about to be industrialized at a scale humanity has never attempted. Matt grew up in Ontario watching smog days vanish when the province shut down its coal plants and went all-in on nuclear. Yasir grew up in Bangladesh studyi...

In this episode we haul anchor with Clint Brown, our very own Capitol-Hill insider, to chart the One Big, Beautiful Bill that just splashed down in D.C. We unpack how a $150 B defense-tech infusion, sweeter R&D expensing, juiced QSBS rules, and a four-year spending fuse light a fire under founders and VCs alike. Clint explains the process of how the bill came to be, how drones, autonomous ship...

I had the privilege of hosting two remarkable founders from Y Combinator - Sam Mendel from Network Ocean and Philip Johnston from Star Cloud - who are tackling one of the most pressing challenges in modern computing infrastructure: the exponential growth in data center energy consumption and cooling demands. Both companies are pursuing radical solutions to the same fundamental problem, but through...

In this episode of Pirates Only, I dive into the world of innovative weather technology with three incredible founders: Alex Levy from Atmo , Austin Tindle from Sourcerer , and Andrew Song from Make Sunsets . Here are some of the topics we cover: ✨ AI Meets Meteorology Atmo is revolutionizing weather forecasting by leveraging cutting-edge AI, similar to ChatGPT but for atmospheric science, delive...

In this episode of Pirates Only I invited two of my Black Flag colleagues Andrew Couillard , our Program Director, and Matias Zorrilla , who leads first-look reviews, to pull back the curtain on how we choose and champion deep-tech founders. In this mailbag-style Q&A we celebrate crossing 600+ applications since our April launch  and preview our first cohort . Andrew walks through the six-week...

In our latest Pirates Only adventure, we trade surfboards for star-ships and jackhammers for ion thrusters, asking a deceptively simple question: what happens when you treat the whole Solar System like one giant opportunity?   To find out, I sit down with two founders who are attacking humanity’s metals bottleneck from opposite directions. Matthew Gialich , co-founder & CEO of AstroForge , bel...

In this episode of Pirates Only I sat down with industry leaders Ben from K-Scale Labs, Ritwik Pavan from Hardware Nation, and Mehul Nariyawala from Matic Robots to discuss the evolving landscape of personal robotics and their potential to become commonplace in our homes. We explored how advancements in technology, decreasing component costs, and improved supply chains are paving the way for affor...

In this episode of Pirates Only , we sit down with three expert storytellers shaping the narratives behind leading deep tech startups: Emily Gold (OPFOR Media), Federico Gardin (Sentinel Studios), and Thomas Kim (Asimov Collective). Together, they explore why storytelling isn’t just important, it’s critical for deep tech companies navigating complex sectors like defense technology, robotics, and f...

In this debut episode of Pirates Only , we’re exploring the vast potential of blue tech, the frontier of maritime innovation reshaping how we view the ocean as the next great domain for technological breakthroughs. Joined by visionary founders Nelson Mills (Vatn Systems), David Zagaynov (Poseidon Aerospace), and Will O’Brien (Ulysses), we discuss the exciting developments in ocean technology and w...