Nick LaRovere spent years at Palantir before co-founding Pryzm with friends, including a Lockheed Martin alum. And in this episode of Founded & Funded, Nick shares his inside account of how AI is actually being adopted inside the federal government, and what it takes to sell technology into that market.
Pryzm is an AI-powered intelligence engine for government business development: it aggregates data across CRMs, email, Slack, and public procurement sources to help companies win contracts. Nick’s argument is that by the time an opportunity appears on SAM.gov, the deal is already decided. In this episode, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo and Nick cover: why there’s still no purpose-built CRM for government buyers, what Pentagon AI adoption actually looked like from the inside (workers hadn’t touched an LLM as recently as two years ago), and what forward-deployed engineering at Palantir taught Nick about building close to the customer.
If you’re selling into government, building for defense, or trying to understand how AI procurement works inside federal agencies, this is a useful map of how the terrain actually works.
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This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.
Chris: Nick, thanks so much for agreeing to do this and coming out here, and it’s going to be a super fun conversation, and it’s an interesting time to be having this conversation about defense.
Nick: Indeed. There is a lot going on in the world right now. But yeah, I’m excited to be here. It’s always great to be back in Palo Alto. I was here with Palantir for a long time and am always nostalgic to get back.
Chris: Yeah. Well, let’s dive right in. I mean, as we just said, super interesting time in defense, really timely to be having a conversation about what’s going on, especially in the digital world. But why don’t you start by just giving us an overview of the state of defense and public sector innovation? You see both sides of the market of Pryzm. What’s really going on right now, and what’s changed if you look back, maybe even since you started the company?
Nick: One of the things I remember was when I was at Palantir, and I was walking into work, and people were protesting because we worked with the military, because we were working in defense. And at the time, it seemed to be a very partisan issue; whether you engage with the military, you support defense. And I think I’ve seen over the last several years, thankfully, a very bipartisan movement to get around and to support defense, just like it’s a critical national security issue to support the warfighter and support those missions. I mean, fundamentally, that’s what keeps us safe at home and safe abroad. And so I think when you look at the state of defense and defense tech, that’s not by happenstance. How we got there, I think, has been one; unfortunately, there is danger in the world. There are a number of conflicts, which I am not qualified to speak about, but there are a number of conflicts going on in the world.
And so we need to be able to meet those. We need to meet those as a country. And so a couple of things have really supercharged this defense tech movement, even beyond some of that conflict. One is, I think, there’s a focus on commercial first technology, which has really erupted. I think for too long, the department has not always seen the best innovations of Silicon Valley finding their way into the department’s hands. And sometimes that means you’re building these really custom exquisite systems versus, hey, there might be these low-cost alternatives that are already mass-produced in the commercial market. I think if you look at what has happened in the drone market, that’s a super interesting comparable.
But hey, can we bring those in at a better unit cost, bring those in and ramp those up? I think in parallel to that commercial movement, there’s been a heavy emphasis on acquisition reform. That’s something that we at Pryzm are really excited about and trying to help lead the charge on. To not just go commercial first, but to use AI, to use first-class software systems, to train and trust our procurement officials and professionals to go out, take risk and bring in the best technologies.
For a long time, a lot of defense procurement was, I think, more focused on the process than the outcome. It was, “Hey, can we be compliant?” Versus, “Hey, can we actually achieve the mission and achieve the outcome?” And so I think across these realms of commercial first, better acquisition processes, and whatnot, along with just a surging defense budget, for the very first time, a $1.5 trillion defense budget. Now, there’s a little bit of color that’s within that of what it goes to and how much is base budget versus reconciliation, but you see all of those things coming to a confluence.
And that’s pretty interesting, especially when you see the Palantirs, the Andurils of the world starting to grow. That’s when I think venture really starts to say, “Hey, there’s something going on here, and we should be supporting this, and there’s an opportunity here.” So I could talk about this for a long time, but clearly it is an interesting time.
Chris: One of the things we were just joking about was on the venture side, we care a lot about market size and in your world, you could just say, “Hey, I mean, the TAM has expanded from $800 billion to $1.5 trillion just in the last five years,” through both administrations, too. So, talking about the new budget and expanded TAMs and all these things, one of the things I’m hearing a lot about is flexibility in the defense budget now. What does that mean? Talk us through how we should think about that and the opportunities there.
Nick: So to boil it down first upfront, one thing that a lot of people don’t realize about federal contracting versus your traditional enterprise sale or enterprise SaaS is the idea of colors of money. Have you ever heard of this before?
Chris: I have not, no.
Nick: It’s pretty interesting. So, the colors of money basically say that, let’s say you’ve got $100, that’s your total budget, you actually can’t just go spend, as a government official, you can’t just go spend that $100 however you want. There’s particular compliance attached to different segments of that, so you can spend $20 on mashed potatoes, and you could spend $40 on entertainment.
Chris: Sure.
Nick: I don’t know why I said mashed potatoes.
Chris: Why not?
Nick: So you can align it to different things. And so, within the government, that’s things like RDT&E, research and development, procurement, operations and maintenance. But there are basically different things that the money is attached to.
And why that matters first, from a congressional and from a taxpayer perspective, is that it’s about oversight. It’s that, “Hey, we want to make sure that the money is being spent in the right way,” right? We’re not having corruption or fraud. It’s going to the things that the taxpayer actually cares about. So that’s the idea behind color of money is trying to set the priorities and make sure it’s spent on the right things. But the downside of that is that it also creates a lot of red tape, right? It creates a lot of overhead into how you do business.
And so one thing that the department is now moving into and exploring, obviously, this is a partnership, right? The department may want this, but Congress needs to approve it as well, is the idea of colorless money or more flexible pots of money. And so one example of that is what’s being done now with what’s called PAEs, but they’re basically now saying that for a given capability area, like unmanned systems, you basically have one person in charge of that set of budget, and they’ve got a ton of flexibility with how they can spend it. So rather than needing to stick to spend it on this, spend it on that, they can just make those decisions.
Now, the downside of that is, well, is there oversight? Is it going to be spent in the wrong way? But the upside is, well, maybe if a vendor’s not performing or if we see an emergent need evolving in a conflict overseas, we can reallocate money and put it towards where it needs to go, like any other business would do or any other organization would do.
So I think it’s pretty exciting to see this movement towards that colorless money, towards that flexible money. I think, in turn, the piece that we’ve heard from Congress that people would want in response would be transparency. So it’s, “Well, if you want to flexibly decide where you spend it, you at least need to tell us what you’re spending it on.” And I think that’s a give and take that’s still emerging, but I’m optimistic about it.
Chris: And that’s pretty well situated for the Pryzm approach and infrastructure.
Nick: We help with so much of that transparency. Yeah.
Chris: And one thing I’m curious about before we dive deeper into Pryzm, too, but just because you have such a unique perspective, broadly, defense has been dominated by the primes for a long time, and they have deep relationships, they’re super embedded, strong businesses. And we’ve just seen this wave of innovation, right? Palantir and Anduril have maybe been the tip of the spear on some of that innovation, but what else is driving that? Why now, in the last 5 to 10 years, have we seen this acceleration of just, call it Silicon Valley or just call it American technical innovation, going after this space, which was for a long time, really focused on a couple of large players.
Nick: I think one thing that I just want to call out, just it’s one of our mantras, and I think it’s important to keep in mind here is, first, we exist, we say as a company, we exist to get the best technology to the missions that matter the most. And the reason I say that is that mission statement is regardless of company. We just want to level the playing field and allow everybody to compete. And then we’re believers in the free market and fundamentally, whether it’s one of the stalwart primes or an upstart out of university, whoever can make the best thing and scale it, that’s what should get to the mission.
But I think what’s so interesting about the time right now, why now? Why is there this opportunity? I think one has been the tenor of this administration change. There has just been a very real focus to get this right and get this fixed. People have been talking about acquisition reform since the ’90s, even further back. I mean, it’s been going on for decades, but for once, we’re actually coming in with such a radical approach to change some of how we do acquisition, to change some of how we do procurement. So that’s one piece that is going on here.
The second is that we just don’t have time to wait anymore. There was a time when, hey, maybe we could be okay with stasis, or at least we thought we could. But the reality is, there are adversaries. I think we see that the time is now. We do need to step up and not just to be on the aggressive, but even to defend ourselves — the time is now. And so I think people in the administration are trying to make change. There are these real pressures that are coming that say we can no longer delay, “competition” is here.
And then the last piece, which obviously we’re beneficiaries of is AI. I think what AI is able to do around autonomous systems, around, for us, intelligent procurement workflows and fusing together all of this data — those three forces are all really come together to say, okay, there’s a really unique window now where we can actually make change on this.
Chris: Yeah, so it’s the convergence of there being a lot of technical innovation that has been happening, and AI has really accelerated it, and just the geopolitical realities are causing, for lack of a better term, a customer pain point, right? And a lot of demand for new solutions, innovations, and products in the space.
Nick: Yeah, definitely. And to give credit where it’s due, SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril — they didn’t just get here. They laid a lot of the groundwork for everybody else. Palantir and I think even SpaceX had to actually sue the federal government to get their right and get looked at as a solution. And I think what that’s proven out, those folks who did that hard upfront work is like, “Okay, well, maybe there is commercial technology that we can bring in here. Maybe there are some innovative players that we can bring in here,” and it’s opened up some of the eyes of the government as well and their appetite to say, “Hey, maybe we can accept a little bit more risk here and we might get a good reward as a result.”
Chris: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think that is … Credit where credit is due, right? Spending a little bit of time on Pryzm, which is your company, which is super fun to talk about. I mean, you guys are at first, maybe just explain a little bit what Pryzm is, and then we can dive into what’s so interesting about where you are in the market.
Nick: Yeah, definitely. So we built Pryzm as the AI-powered OS for all things government BD. If you’re a vendor and you’re trying to sell into the government, we will supercharge your workflow. You will win contracts, you will see your revenue grow, and your technology will get to where it needs to go.
Now, what does that actually mean? How did we even get there? So as I mentioned, I was an engineer in industry for a long time at Palantir. My co-founder was coming from Lockheed Martin, and we saw from both the new prime and the stalwart prime how hard it was and how difficult it was to actually work with and sell into the government. And so when we spun off Pryzm, we’d seen what good BD looked like, but we knew that that was not something that was accessible to everybody, and so we built out tooling to really help supercharge some of that workflow.
And if I’m to boil it down to a few things, it’s one: data pipeline. So if you’re trying to understand market intel, we pull from all these sources, and we’ll tell you who has budget, who that person is, how much budget they have, what opportunities they have, and what companies they are already working with. I mean, we’ll give you all of that intel.
But we don’t just stop there. One of the things that we’ve seen repeatedly is that by the time an opportunity is publicly posted, it’s already too late. So by the time you see a solicitation on sam.gov, you’ve already missed the boat. And so what we’ve built out is really tooling for … It’s basically a CRM stack. This intelligent CRM stack basically emancipates all of your data across your organization, your Outlook, your Gmail, your Slack, and your Salesforce. I mean, we’ll pull all of that together, and then we’ll use that to help you actually go out and shape and get ahead of these deals.
Chris: It’s an intelligence engine.
Nick: It’s an intelligence engine. And then the public data that we have is really just an enrichment layer that just supercharges it even further. And that’s a bit of a contrarian approach to be frank. I think if you look at a lot of the existing stack that people had been having to suffer through, it was these either highly generic tools or just these very low lift AI proposal writers, but to really say, “Hey, we’re actually going to focus on the harder problem, which is the people and who they are and how you shape them and your conversations, your workflows with them.” That non-linear synthesis type workflow, that’s a harder problem, but that really is actually how you win a deal.
Chris: Yeah, it fits into this idea that what you really want, especially for a lot of these AI-enabled workflows, is as much context as possible, right?
Nick: 100%.
Chris: Yeah, and so you have context on the government side, you have context on the customer side, and that allows you to build this intelligence and the matching between customers and opportunities and vice versa.
Nick: 100%. Yeah. I like to think, I don’t know how you guys think of this at Madrona, but I’m sure it’s probably similar. I think humans, where we really can thrive in this new age of AI, is as the curator, almost like an editor, a museum curator. And so, I’m an engineer by trade, and so I’ve got Cursor running for me, or Codex running for me, writing code, and I’m obviously reviewing it, synthesizing it, pushing it to be as impactful as possible. Why can’t our federal BD people have that same level of tooling, that same level of stack to pull all that context together and then take action with them, really at the helm of this suite of power?
Chris: I’ve thought about it a lot in the context of discernment. You have a ton of information in front of you. Something like Pryzm does an amazing job of pulling that all together, putting that in an actionable format, but you, as the human, have the discernment to ultimately make the decision and tell it what to do.
Nick: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: How do you think about being a digital-only company in a space where most of the names you hear are hardware-only or very hardware-focused? How does that work as you think about positioning your company and you’re in this broader space that people are super excited about, but you’re the digital player?
Nick: Yeah, I enjoy it. Yeah. I enjoy that niche that we fill. One thing that we consistently hear from, we partner with a lot of venture firms and one thing that we consistently hear from venture firms is that when they’re investing in any sort of company that is going to market into government, you need someone already on the team, or you need a plan to hire someone who knows how to sell into government. It’s just such a funky sales world that-
Chris: We’ve thought exactly the same thing.
Nick: Yeah, and you can have the best hardware in the world, you can have the best stack in the world, but if you don’t know how to sell it and get into the hands, unfortunately that may be the end of the company, you may not be able to sell and then you may not have revenue and then you might have the best technology, but it just goes caput.
And so fundamentally, we saw this emerging, right? There were so many of these amazing hardware companies and software companies that are trying to sell into the government, but had firsthand seen and felt how difficult that pain was. And so for us, what’s I think needed is a software native solution, a really AI native solution to, again, help those teams to, one, if they’re new to this, to play up and if they’re already first class at this, to meet them where they are and help them sell even more and help them really go out and hunt.
And so that’s a little bit of how we think about it. I think we want to be an enabler, so that fundamentally, I see a world where eventually every company in America is part of the defense industrial base. I know the department shares the same view, but how do we pull in some of these non-traditionals? How do we pull in really every sort of company and engage them, almost like you saw in World War II. You would have all these automobile manufacturers actually stepping up and creating airplanes, and it’s like, “Well, maybe we need something similar now,” and maybe Pryzm can be a part of that with our software platform.
Chris: Yeah. Being actually personally from Seattle, right? Boeing and their role in World War II is something you grow up hearing a lot about.
Nick: Oh, yeah. Amazing. Yeah, critical.
Chris: We’ve talked about the AI on the customer side, right?
Nick: Sure.
Chris: And you might be working with customers who are much more comfortable with that or who are born AI native now or are trying to get there really quickly. How does it work on the government side? Because you have a view of that too, right? So how does the government think about using AI, embedding it in the workflows, meeting customers maybe on that, or suppliers right on that level as well? Are you seeing innovation there?
Nick: Definitely. Although I will say that it’s been a recent but dramatic change. We’ve talked to some folks who are either still in government or recently out of government, and anecdotally, I mean, these were folks sitting in the Pentagon, and even as recent as one to two years ago, they had never even touched an LLM. They just didn’t have access to it within their job, which is obviously starkly different than what you see, I think at the commercial sector. And so there has been dramatic change around that. I know XAI is even being brought in as genAI.mil being brought in to be used across the department, but really just writ large across the department. I think you’re seeing innovation in those workflows, innovation, and pulling AI into procurement and beyond.
I think if you look at the status quo of how a lot of these workflows were occurring, and we’ve seen some of this firsthand is a lot of workflows for these really talented, whether it’s program manager or contracting officer, a lot of the workflows that they were having to do were really on spreadsheets and systems that were coded maybe 20 years ago and were not really built for these modern, intelligent, automated workflows.
And now even on some of our contracts, we’re on some contracts with DIU and a few other spots within the Department of War, we’re being pulled in to actually apply some of what we’ve already done on the commercial space and pulling that in so that from one, a market intel side, they can tell very quickly what companies should we be working with. I guess a slight segue there is that a type of market research workflow today is very manual. People will go offline, they’ll go to VC’s websites, they’ll try and look at their portfolio, and be like, “Which companies do what? Who should we work with?” It’s another level to say, “Well, can we build an intelligent workflow that says, ‘Hey, these are X, Y, Z companies with such and such capabilities and they fit exactly what you’re looking for.'”
And so we’re being pulled in that regard, and I think you’re seeing that really across the department, just because the time is ripe and you really need to, I think, fix both sides of the equation. You need an industry that is able to sell and engage, and then the government, having first-class AI-enabled, accelerated procurement workflows.
Chris: Yeah, I love that you’re able to actually get some of your own AI tooling into those workflows for these really specific but high-value use cases, right? Finding the right companies to partner with and vendors to work with.
Nick: Yeah, 100%. And one thing that we’ve realized too is, and this is some of where our unique edge comes in. Government is a little bit funky. And so even if you’re evaluating a vendor just to go industry lingo for a minute, oftentimes you’re trying to evaluate things like TRL level, it’s things you wouldn’t typically find in a company database, but it’s technology readiness level, which is basically how mature is this technology on the maturity wave? The highest level of TRL is, “You can put this into the war fighter’s hands now.” The lower level is, “Well, this is an R&D project that we’re building out and trying to productionize.” And so there’s just all these little nuances, and that’s a place where I think having a first-class workflow that meets that person and feels fit to what they do, really matters.
Chris: Yeah. This may or may not be the right time to ask this, but I’m going to, which is that I think it goes to this digital and AI theme, which you mentioned to me as we were prepping this idea of the digital thread and the digital thread challenge. As I told you over email, I’m super excited to hear what you think about that. So explain to me what the digital thread is and how you guys are approaching that.
Nick: One thing that we’ve repeatedly seen, especially as we’ve gone to enterprises, is that oftentimes they’re operating out of anywhere from 5 to 10 different CRMs across their different business units and business lines. That typically comes together because of acquisitions or really just business units operating independently and spinning up their own stack. Now that’s just the CRM. Then you have however many different messaging instances and email servers, then you layer on compliance, whether that’s FedRAMP high or impact level 4. And so what that ultimately creates is a truly large enterprise, you’re just operating pretty independently.
And that actually, we’ve heard this verbatim from several of the largest defense contractors, that causes issues, then when you have this really important federal official, someone like a PEO or a PAE who oversees acquisitions for a particular capability, and they’re being hit by five different business units across your organization in an uncoordinated way.
So you’re seeing this behavior happen, and that leads to lost sales, money left on the table. That gets even more complicated when you then look into the CRM tooling that a particular government organization is working. And here’s a hint: there is no gov CRM, there’s no federal CRM. It’s everybody will take something that’s one of your traditional legacy enterprise CRMs. They’ll spend, and we’ve heard this verbatim, hundreds of thousands, but typically millions, to customize the thing to work for the government workflow, and then it’s immediately brittle, it breaks, you can’t update it, and it’s just not a good system.
And that’s really where Pryzm comes into play — through all of that mess, we’ve built out this actual digital thread where we can plug into some of your existing CRMs or operate wholesale as that CRM stack. We are built for GovBD. So the appropriations process, understanding the Hill, understanding the federal buyer, all of that sits natively; those workflows sit natively into what we do. So there’s no customization; you could pull it in today. We work with the rest of your stack so we can pull in all of that data, all of that technology.
And so, one, your teams, we talked about making decisions in context, as they’re going to a meeting on the Hill or they’re going to meet with this really important military buyer, they have all the context they need immediately to go in and kill that meeting. But even more than that, at the senior level, at the executive level, we then allow you to actually roll up, and for the very first time, you actually get a view into your business. One, you can get a view into your government business or we can roll up and you can get a view across, if you’re a dual use company, across all facets of your business and be like, “Okay, well, this is how much revenue we’re actually in line to make,” at a bit more of a real time basis than again, some of these legacy tools.
Chris: It really merges the idea that you started with of, “Hey, you’re building the AI OS for this space.” But also the real vertical workflow intelligence, and I feel like in lots of verticals we talk about workflows and all these things and they’re unique and they probably are, but I mean in this world, it is a very unique workflow ecosystem in how things are done and that allows you to connect all the pieces having that deep layer of context and intelligence.
Nick: A hundred percent. Yeah, just giving you that context to make an informed decision.
Chris: Yeah. So I want to ask you something totally not about Pryzm, although you could talk about Pryzm, but more about you, right? Which is, you started at Palantir or you were at Palantir for a while at a critical time of Palantir’s development. I’m curious what you learned there and especially why you think there are so many ex-Palantir founders who have been so successful, and how that impacted your own journey as a founder.
Nick: Yeah. Can I talk about Tesla and Palantir for a moment?
Chris: Sure. Yeah.
Nick: Two of the foundational experiences that I think I had and saw were, I mean, first, when I was at Tesla, this was just an internship in the summer of 2018, and this story has been told by many others beforehand, but seeing it firsthand was crazy. I was over in Fremont, and we were aiming to build 5,000 Model 3s a month. That was the goal that Elon had said. That’s the goal that we had hit that investors were expecting. And unfortunately, we were falling short on that goal, and in just my second or third week on the internship, Elon built a tent behind the factory. He basically canceled a lot of what the rest of our internships were and put us on the factory floor. And I saw him sleeping on the factory floor. I saw him doing that level of work, and I was moving boxes and installing windshields on Model 3s with oversight and approval and whatnot. But that was-
Chris: You learned a lot about building cars?
Nick: Yeah, I learned a lot about building cars. I mean, I’m a software engineer, but I learned a little bit about some of the physical world there. But it was just such a … I think that was one really formative experience, and I just want to call that out because that’s something I repeatedly tell our team is like, “Yeah, I was working hard there, but Elon was working harder. He was sleeping on the floor, and he was putting in that time.” And so that was just an unbelievable lesson that the founder needs to work the hardest, you always need to be pushing, and things may seem impossible, but if you really just eliminate distractions and focus, you can do incredible things. That’s what I learned from the Tesla side, just because there’s a bunch of amazing founders coming out of Tesla and SpaceX, there as well.
And then on the Palantir side, as we get into some of the government pieces, I think the thing that Palantir does extremely well and has led to this diaspora or mafia of Palantir founders and Anduril founders coming out of this was leaning into the customer. I think forward deployed engineering is a term that’s very en vogue now, but if you actually look at it and you unpack what that term actually means, it’s, “Hey, engineers shouldn’t just be sitting in a room.” I’ve seen it at other companies before where your engineers never leave the office, you’ve got sales out in the field, and you’re almost passing the ball over the fence, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Nick: You’re, “Okay, well, I’ve got the deal, now let’s throw it over the fence.” And then an engineer is going to have to make decisions on product and make decisions on what they’re building, but they’re going to make it without the proper context to really make those decisions. And so the thought that I think Palantir really had that was pretty innovative was, how can we get as little latency as possible between the customer and the engineer who’s building it? And so I really saw that firsthand at Palantir.
I mean, an example was, I think I can tell this publicly, but over COVID, over the holidays, most people were on holiday break, but an opportunity came up to go and surge on some work with the CDC and responding to COVID. And so I ended up leaving my holiday, leaving my typical 9-to-5 job at Palantir, and kind of surged on that for a few weeks to a few months, and was daily on calls with folks from the CDC as they were real-time trying to work through problems.
And that’s the type of thing where I’m like, “Yes, there’s friction when you first start that,” because it’s like, “Well, we have to build the thing and we have to understand their need, and we have to move quickly here.” But in turn, you work through that friction, and you actually build something that solves their problem and is fit for their problem. And so Palantir’s done that tremendously well, that level of, again, forward deployed engineering, really customer listening and not being afraid to do the hard thing. Again, work hard, talk to the customer, and ship hard. And I think if you do that, I think those happen to be skills that then translate well into being a founder as well.
Chris: Yeah. You can’t really solve the customer problem unless you actually know what it is, which requires knowing what the customer is actually doing.
Nick: Yeah, 100%. And so why try and do that in isolation? Get out, go talk to the customer. And that’s something that we really pride ourselves on now as well. One of the things that I think is one of the greatest competitive advantages of a startup is its speed. I don’t think that’s groundbreaking, but it is your speed. And especially when you first have that first cohort of maybe three, four or five customers, can you make them raving fans? Can you go to them, hear their need? And whereas at a big company, that feature might take months to ship. I mean, you’re just serving them so you can move quick and you can ship fast, and then they become an evangelist to what you do.
Chris: I think the other interesting thing about that point around getting close to your customers is the types of customers that people were getting close with were not traditionally the ones that your software business would be saying, “Hey, that’s an easy sale.” Or, “I can go work with them.” It was a very different type of customer. It’s so interesting that that is the type where people really embedded closely … Probably were able to solve the problem better because of that.
Nick: A hundred percent. Well, especially for these really hard problems, right? We’re not just building a hacky algorithm to go viral. It’s “No, no, no.” There’s something to these really hard problems. And ultimately, if you can solve it, it’s probably hard for a lot of people; if you can solve it, because it’s hard for a lot of people, people will probably pay a lot for it. There’s probably a lot of people with it, so you have a big TAM, and because it was so hard to solve, you probably have a moat. And that just happens to also then build, you’ve got a big TAM, a high willingness to pay, you’ve got a moat. Well, that’s probably the problems you should be going after — the hard ones.
Chris: Yeah, so work on hard things sort of holds-
Nick: Exactly. Yeah, it holds. It holds. It’s way better for your business.
Chris: Yeah. So one thing I’m always curious about, and we always have a bunch of founders who are listening and watching in, and I think trying to understand your journey, especially, and we’re talking about hard problems in the space that’s historically been hard. As you’ve built up Pryzm just from the founder journey, I’m curious, what’s been harder than you thought it was, and what’s been sort of most valuable from an experience perspective as you become more of a leader, CEO, running a much bigger company.
Nick: As a founder, the first thing I want to do is just give thanks to my team and our team. We’ve just got such a high talent bar and such a high talent density, and some people who work incredibly, incredibly hard. And they could be working at so many places across the world, and they choose to work at Pryzm, I think, galvanized by the mission, the technical aptitude, what we do. And I think what has surprised me the most is, I mean, if you’re persistent at it, I think you can find luck, you can create luck, but honestly, so much of your job shifts into hiring. And I think that’s the one thing that really surprised me and that I would call out. It’s definitely not; it’s something you hear over and over again, but it’s one thing to say it, and it’s another thing to do it. Hiring and keeping the talent bar high and your team motivated and all rowing in the same boat, that is a hard thing to do. That’s an inherently hard thing to do.
And I think I do a good job of keeping the team motivated and aligned in the same direction. There’s this saying that Steve Jobs had about engineers that, “The difference between the best engineer and the second-best engineer is not an order of magnitude of 2X or even 3X, it’s like 10X or 100X.” The best engineers are that much more valuable. And I think that that really percolates through across the talent landscape. And so I think that’s the thing about the journey that I would encourage everybody, and I would always be thinking about, am I keeping the talent bar insanely high? How am I attracting and retaining the best talent? And I think a lot of that is, honestly, even doing things like this, it’s getting out to sometimes talent that might not typically know you. Maybe they’re not already in the defense circle, but they’re amazing engineers somewhere else, and they’re looking for a mission just like this, a rocket ship just like this that they want to come in.
And so a lot of that is really, actually a lot of branding and brand awareness to get your message out there, your mission out there, and resonate with people who might want to join the cause.
Chris: I can’t think of a much better place to end than on that note. And Pryzm is such an awesome company, and you’re building such an impressive platform, and I really appreciate you coming in and having the time to chat with us.
Nick: Yeah. No, thank you so much for having me on. A long way to go, a lot of work to do, and excited to keep talking about it. So thanks, Chris.