Pirates Only

About Pirates Only

“Pirates Only” is a podcast series created by pirates, for pirates (AKA visionary startup founders breaking new ground). Each episode brings together innovative founders working within similar industries to openly discuss groundbreaking ideas, hard challenges, and the massive opportunities ahead. From deep-sea robotics to space tech, AI, and beyond, we’ll explore the bold futures these pioneers are building. Join us as we dive into what’s next, celebrating this adventurous future, and the pirates building for it.

Publisher

Black Flag

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Jun 2025

Latest episode

5 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

17 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   5 Aug 2026

   From Memes to Mission: Recruiting the Next Generation with Sitreps

   Sitreps began in 2019 as a military meme page Kyle Eberly started while doing M&A work at PwC, built on a simple insight: you do not need three million followers, you need a hyper concentrated audience of exactly the right people. Nearly every veteran in the professional world seems to follow it, and that reach became a recruiting flywheel once Kyle, Wyatt Frasier, and Max Cormier realized their community was the perfect talent pool for the defense tech surge. Their first real client, OneBrief, called and told them to point the platform at recruiting, and the crew listened to the market. Since then they have worked with dozens of companies and hundreds of placements, layering a serious business on top of the memes. From there the conversation widens into why this moment is different: defense tech in its current form is only a few years old, military experience finally commands tech salaries, and the hardest roles to fill are cleared technical talent and people who can sell novel technology to the government. Kyle frames the entire sector as a scalability problem, since no one can afford to fire a five million dollar missile at a five hundred dollar drone, which is exactly why venture money keeps pouring in. The founders argue defense tech is a frontier rather than a bubble, point to energy as the real constraint (one client is putting decommissioned naval reactors to work powering AI data centers), and tease what comes next for Sitreps: a pitch competition, community chapters, and possibly a fund of their own.

2. 

   15 Jul 2026

   EraDrive and Building Autonomy in Space

   Sumant Sharma, co-founder and CEO of EraDrive, joins Mat to explain why the satellites circling Earth today are effectively blind and micromanaged from the ground, and why that model breaks the moment constellations scale into the thousands. EraDrive spun out of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory in 2025, but its core vision-based navigation software was already flying first, demonstrated on four NASA CubeSats as part of the Starling mission, the world's first instance of multiple satellites navigating relative to each other using vision alone. That reverse order, technology in orbit before incorporation, became the foundation for a $5.3 million seed round and five active customer contracts spanning civil, commercial, and defense work. Sumant lays out the three problems EraDrive solves: a coordination crisis as roughly 30,000 tracked objects head toward 60,000 or more within five years, a contested domain where adversary satellites jam and shadow US assets on a weekly basis, and commercial applications like orbital data centers and in-space manufacturing that simply cannot run with a human in the loop. He argues that autonomy in space is not optional the way it is for cars, and paints a future where a handful of engineers steer a million satellites by typing mission intent and walking away. Every captain eventually has to let the swarm steer itself. The conversation closes with hard-won fundraising advice for hard tech founders: sell milestones, not vibes, and let revenue and signed contracts do the talking. Episode Summary: EraDrive spun out of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Lab in 2025 after its software was already flying on four NASA satellites. The team is 12 people based in downtown Palo Alto, deliberately near Stanford talent rather than the larger hubs in LA and Colorado. Falling launch prices and cheaper AI tooling have collapsed the barrier to building space hardware, though go-to-market remains the hard part. Roughly 30,000 objects larger than ten centimeters are tracked in orbit today, with credible estimates of 60,000 to 70,000 within five years. Space traffic coordination still relies on the 18th Space Defense Squadron emailing operators when a collision is predicted. China, Russia, and India have demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities, and adversary jamming of US assets happens on a weekly basis. Gen 1 of EraDrive's product retrofits onto satellites already in orbit using off-the-shelf cameras and existing flight compute. Eighty to ninety percent of EraDrive's revenue today comes from government and defense primes rather than purely commercial operators. The long-term vision is a handful of engineers steering a million-satellite swarm through natural-language mission intent. Sumant's fundraising advice is to sell concrete milestones and de-risk with real customer contracts and revenue.

3. 

   24 Jun 2026

   Odin and the Future of Maritime Dominance

   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 portfolio, and his first reaction to Amir's pitch was to tell him to pack up and go home. What changed his mind was a Tesla Plaid battery pack, the kind of first-principles energy engineering that the underwater world had never seen. Together they are building a system that functions as both a UUV and a torpedo, unlocking a mission set neither category could reach alone. The conversation charts why the ocean may be a harder build than space, where water is a thousand times denser than air and a vehicle is effectively blind past a few feet. Amir lays out the Tesla playbook of low idiot index, deleting parts that add no value, and designing for a hull every 20 minutes rather than a beautiful one-off. Jon makes the strategic case that undersea remains the last invisible domain, a place where whoever masses smart, long-endurance platforms first earns a decisive advantage. They close on fundraising hard truths, the value of functional hardware over promises, and a shared belief that for any founder ready to chart a course into deep water, the sea is their oyster.

4. 

   17 Jun 2026

   Drones, Drones and More Drones

   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 building artisan Ferraris and start stamping out Camrys. Firestorm now produces four drone models and its flagship XL product, a containerized expeditionary manufacturing facility that can be parked in any available lot and immediately begin printing drones at the point of need. Michael LaFramboise built Aurelius Systems around the other side of the same equation, bringing low-cost, AI-driven directed energy weapons to the counter-drone fight with the goal of collapsing the marginal cost of a drone shootdown to a dollar or less per kill, using electricity instead of missiles as ammunition. The conversation covers the full scope of where the drone arms race is heading and what it means for American defense. Dan lays out a stark production gap: Ukraine and Russia each plan to build three to seven million drones this year, while the U.S. will produce closer to 30 to 50 thousand. Both founders agree that the winners in drone and counter-drone are largely already decided, that new entrants face brutal supply chain and procurement headwinds, and that the real fight now is go-to-market rather than pure technology. They also look ahead to unmanned ground vehicles reshaping land warfare in Ukraine right now, the emerging threat of satellite blind-and-destroy operations in low Earth orbit, and the long arc toward directed energy systems in space. For any founder bold enough to chart a course into hard defense tech, the shared advice is blunt: hire a lobbyist first, demo constantly, and plan for everything to cost twice as much and take twice as long.

5. 

   10 Jun 2026

   Electroflow and the Battery America Needs

   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 electrode material on the planet. LFP goes into over half of all batteries produced today and 99% of it is manufactured in China. Electroflow's core innovation is a three-step process that produces LFP directly from lithium-containing brine waste streams, replacing the traditional 10-step method that relies on vast evaporation ponds and months of lead time. The target production cost is $3,000 per ton, half the current Chinese market price of $6,000. Fresh off a $10 million seed round and just over two years removed from a napkin sketch, Electroflow is weeks away from deploying its first full-scale electrochemical stack at a real brine site. The demand picture behind that milestone is staggering: Eric projects a 40X increase in global battery capacity between now and 2040, driven by grid and data center storage, electric vehicles, and what he calls the most under appreciated demand signal on the horizon: billions of humanoid robots. The episode goes beyond the technology to cover the equally demanding work of building the company, including how scientists-turned-founders need to rewire their pitch instincts, why over-secrecy about your idea harms more than it protects, and how the WHO hiring method helped Electroflow scale to 16 people without a single firing. The crew has barely lifted anchor.

6. 

   3 Jun 2026

   Galadyne and the American Missile Crisis

   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: congressional war gaming estimates suggest the U.S. has three to eight days of critical munitions available for a South China Sea conflict, and replenishing just 20% of THAAD inventory transferred to Israel during a recent conflict could take three to eight years. The cost picture is equally grim, with per-round prices on legacy platforms reaching $13 million before a standard two-shot doctrine doubles that figure. The root cause, Chandler argues, runs deeper than procurement dysfunction. Solid rocket motors depend on a single domestic ammonium perchlorate facility so hazardous that workers who handle it have historically been called "angel pushers," and standing up a new one would take a decade the country does not have. Galadyne's answer is to chart a new course entirely: liquid-propellant systems loaded at the point of use, so the production line handles only inert metal components and can scale toward gigafactory throughput, targeting tens of thousands of units within three to five years. The episode rounds out with hard-won advice for early-stage founders: build conviction from first principles before you pitch, and reach out to tier-one investors far sooner than feels comfortable, because the proof bar at large funds is often lower than founders assume.

7. 

   1 Jun 2026

   Lux Aeterna and How Reusable Satellites Unlock the Next Space Era

   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 that loosening mass optimization constraints on a satellite opens the door to adding a heat shield, and a heat shield enables atmospheric re-entry, and re-entry enables reusability. Lux Aeterna has raised $15 million across two rounds and is fully funded through its first mission, a Falcon 9 rideshare in Q1 of next year, with a full re-entry and landing in Australia. The more consequential argument Taylor makes is not about cost but about lead time. The current two-year cycle from mission conception to orbit forces planners to design for problems they cannot yet see, leaving a vast treasure trove of shorter, time-sensitive missions completely off the table. Compressing that window to six to twelve weeks changes the calculus for defense ISR, rapid compute refreshes, and entire mission architectures no one currently bothers to conceive. Operating out of a 6,000-square-foot Colorado facility with a team of 17, Taylor also covers the company's aggressive AI adoption across hardware and software, why he actively recruits engineers who have experienced in-orbit failure, and the process discipline that separates founders who move fast sustainably from those who just move fast.

8. 

   26 May 2026

   Volund and the Future of Propulsion Manufacturing

   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 integrated factory model to produce low-cost jet propulsion systems for attritable munitions, counter-UAS interceptors, and low-cost cruise missile programs. The core insight is straightforward: defense is starting to demand what consumer goods have always required, namely lower cost, higher run rate, and faster development cycles, and the traditional defense industrial base is structurally incapable of delivering that. The problem Hostetler and his co-founder diagnosed at their previous company was a fractured and aging supplier ecosystem where a pool of 20,000 machine shops nationwide collapses to roughly 25 once you filter for aerospace certification, security compliance, and five-axis machining capability, shops so overwhelmed that lead times stretch to 18 months and a $300 part gets priced at $10,000. Volund's answer is to bring those capabilities under one roof, connect CAD directly to manufacturing artifacts and an ERP system through a custom MES, and run the whole operation on a digital backbone optimized for moving fast within the regulatory rails of high-reliability industries. Hostetler's 10-year vision is a network of small, targeted factories modeled loosely on Foxconn's playbook: each one highly efficient at a single product vertical, collectively capable of serving as the manufacturing layer that lets other founders focus on their engineering innovations without building a propulsion team from scratch.

9. 

   18 May 2026

   Aalo Atomics and the New Nuclear Age

   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 studying by candlelight during daily brownouts, watching his country's coastline literally shrink. Both were ready to charge into nuclear right out of university, and both got Fukushima'd. What followed were years in the wilderness: Yasir designing five reactors across programs including Marvel at Idaho National Laboratory, and Matt building and selling software companies while waiting for the right moment to return. When they found each other, the alignment was immediate, same vision, same values, same conviction that nuclear is the ultimate underdog technology. What Aalo is building is unlike anything else in the nuclear space. Rather than gigawatt-scale plants that take 15 years to construct, or micro-reactors suited for military bases, Aalo designed a 50-megawatt pod of five sodium-cooled fast reactors purpose-built for AI data centers. Sodium is 100 times more thermally conductive than water, operates at high temperature without pressurization, and enables thin-walled vessels that can be factory-fabricated in two weeks instead of multi-year pressure forgings. The fuel is commercially available uranium dioxide with no exotic supply chains. The architecture provides N+1 redundancy by design, delivering the 99.999% reliability hyperscalers demand. The urgency is real: the US needs 100 gigawatts of new power in five years just to feed AI data center demand, natural gas is hitting its limits, and nuclear is counterintuitively becoming the answer to NIMBYism rather than the cause of it. Aalo was selected to respond to President Trump's executive order to achieve nuclear criticality by July 4th, 2026, America's 250th birthday. While others in that cohort are running small test reactors into existing buildings, Aalo is going to full-power operation on a 10-megawatt commercial-scale system built from a green field in under ten months, for roughly $70 million in total company spend. After criticality, the roadmap moves fast: a co-located nuclear plant and data center with Crusoe, one of the developers behind Stargate, at the Idaho site, followed by a phased Gigawatt Factory in Texas targeting 100 reactors per year. The long game is bigger than data centers: drive costs down far enough to power developing nations, eliminate energy poverty, and unlock billions of acres of currently uninhabitable Earth for human settlement.

10. 

    24 Jul 2025

    The One Big Beautiful Bill: And What It Means for Founders and VCs

    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 shipbuilding, and space-laser line-items send an unmistakable political demand signal, and why private capital is now expected to plug the gaps faster than a pirate plugs a leaky hull. We also riff on the macro ripple effects: deficit worries, tariff tail-winds, and the existential AI sprint with China, plus the new three-year QSBS on-ramp that could turn earlier exits into a liquidity cannon aimed straight back at innovation. TL;DR? Washington just rang the ship’s bell and shortened the plank: founders have four-ish years of clearer regs, generous tax treats, and a giant customer waving orders. So hoist your sails, build like you’ve got a frigate chasing you, and remember, when Uncle Sam says “all hands on deck,” it’s time to build. Highlights: 00:00 Introduction to the One Big Beautiful Bill 01:42 Breaking Down the Bill 34:36 Innovative Programs and Venture Capital Ecosystem 35:38 Political Landscape and Its Impact on Startups 45:08 Urgency in Government Spending and Startup Innovation 54:13 The Call to Action for Founders and Investors

11. 

    17 Jul 2025

    The Data Center Revolution: Including Discussions on Aerospace, AI and Energy

    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 dramatically different approaches. Sam’s Network Ocean is developing underwater and floating barge data centers that leverage the ocean’s natural cooling properties, while Philip’s Star Cloud is pioneering space-based data centers that can scale beyond terrestrial limitations. What struck me most about their conversation was how both are responding to the same crisis - the AI boom is driving compute demand that’s outpacing our current infrastructure’s ability to efficiently support it. The technical advantages each approach offers are compelling in their own right. Sam’s ocean-based solution achieves a Power Usage Effectiveness lower than industry standard, translating to cost savings for customers while eliminating the massive cooling infrastructure that consumes enormous amounts of water and energy. Philip’s space-based approach promises even more dramatic economics, with data centers costing millions less than their terrestrial equivalents. Both founders emphasized that they’re not just building alternative data centers - they’re fundamentally reimagining how we approach computing infrastructure at scale. What became clear during our discussion is that these aren’t competing visions but complementary approaches to humanity’s expansion into previously untapped frontiers. Sam envisions a future where ocean-based infrastructure could power entire floating cities and provide grid-level energy storage, while Philip sees space as the ultimate scaling solution for compute-intensive applications that will eventually require Dyson sphere-level energy harvesting. With Network Ocean’s 200-kilowatt pilot launching soon and Star Cloud’s first satellite scheduled for orbit in August, both companies are moving rapidly from concept to reality. The convergence of AI demand, energy constraints, and innovative deployment platforms suggests we’re witnessing the early stages of a fundamental transformation in how and where we build our digital infrastructure. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Data Center Revolution 05:08 The Technical Advantages of Underwater Data Centers 10:34 Building in Space: Challenges and Opportunities 16:00 The Future of Data Centers: Demand and National Security 21:33 Maintenance and Longevity of Ocean and Space Data Centers 31:15 The Growing Demand for Data Centers 35:58 The Limits of AI and Energy 42:21 Unlocking the Ocean Economy 51:50 Future Plans and Opportunities

12. 

    9 Jul 2025

    Let's Talk About the Weather: AI Forecasting, Ocean Balloons, and Climate Control

    In this episode of Pirates Only, I dive into the world of innovative weather technology with three incredible founders: Alex Levy (https://www.linkedin.com/in/levyalex/) from Atmo (https://atmo.ai/), Austin Tindle (https://www.linkedin.com/in/austintindle/) from Sourcerer (https://www.sorcerer.earth/), and Andrew Song (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajsong/) from Make Sunsets (https://makesunsets.com/). 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, delivering unprecedented accuracy to governments and organizations around the world. 🌊 Oceanic Data Revolution Sourcerer's innovative long-duration balloons are gathering vital atmospheric data over oceans, an area previously lacking critical information, fundamentally transforming our predictive capabilities. 🌋 Cooling the Planet, Volcano-Style Make Sunsets is pioneering solar geoengineering by releasing reflective sulfur dioxide clouds into the stratosphere, safely mimicking volcanic cooling to combat global warming. 🤝 Strategic Alliances for Impact Atmo and Sourcerer’s just-announced partnership aims to deploy balloons for hurricane forecasting, potentially saving countless lives and billions in climate-related damage. 🌦️ Geoengineering Ethics Make Sunsets openly addresses the ethical and environmental considerations surrounding geoengineering, emphasizing cautious optimism and responsible innovation. 🌎 Climate Control for the Earth This emerging synergy among tech startups is creating a holistic approach to climate control, highlighting the human potential to proactively manage Earth’s climate. Bring your sun screen - this episode is hot. Show Links: US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spending-on-climate-damage-nears-1-trillion-per-year?embedded-checkout=true) 1991 Eruption of Mount Pinatubo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatubo) Exclusive: Sorcerer raises $3.9M for weather balloons (https://www.axios.com/pro/climate-deals/2025/06/12/sorcerer-seed-weather-balloons) EPA Press Release on Make Sunsets (https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-demands-answers-unregulated-geoengineering-start-launching-sulfur-dioxide-air) Make Sunsets Response to the EPA (https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0685/0042/2976/files/epasent.pdf?v=1747419131) Southeast Asia's AI Weather Transition Begins in the Philippines (https://www.atmo.ai/news/philippines-ai-transition) Sixth typhoon in a month makes landfall in Philippines (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg5j1k8w8qo) The World's Southernmost Active Volcano In Antarctica Spews Gold Dust (https://www.iflscience.com/the-worlds-southernmost-active-volcano-in-antarctica-spews-gold-dust-73779) Buy Cooling Credits from Make Sunsets (https://makesunsets.com/) Sofar - Unlocking Ocean Data for Science, Society, and Industry (https://www.sofarocean.com/)

13. 

    2 Jul 2025

    Mailbag Q&A: Black Flag, Fundraising & More

    Program Director Andrew Couillard and Matias Zorrilla discuss Black Flag's selection process for deep-tech founders, highlighting key application elements and strategic support offered, in this interview episode.

14. 

    24 Jun 2025

    From Cosmos to Quarries: Asteroid Mining, Autonomous Drilling, and the Trillion-Dollar Metals Opportunity

    CEO Matthew Gialich discusses AstroForge's asteroid mining plans and CEO Ted Feldmann details Durin's terrestrial drilling technology, exploring the trillion-dollar metals opportunity and the future of resource extraction in this interview.

15. 

    17 Jun 2025

    Robots: Coming to a Home Near You

    Industry experts Ben Bolte, Ritwik Pavan, and Mehul Nariyawala explore the evolving landscape of personal robotics, discussing advancements, challenges, and the potential for robots to become commonplace in homes; this is an interview episode.

16. 

    16 Jun 2025

    Storytelling on the New Frontier: How Deep Tech Startups Use Narrative, Branding, and Design to Raise Capital and Hire the Best

    Emily Gold, Federico Gardin, and Thomas Kim discuss storytelling's crucial role for deep tech startups in raising capital and building trust, highlighting the value of human authenticity over AI, in this interview episode.

17. 

    16 Jun 2025

    The Ocean is the New Space: Blue Tech, Robotics, and the $3T Opportunity

    Nelson Mills, David Zagaynov, and Will O’Brien explore blue tech's potential, discussing underwater robotics, cargo logistics, and ocean conservation, highlighting engineering challenges and future opportunities in the maritime domain; this is an interview.

Who has been a guest on Pirates Only

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Matthew Gialich
• Ted Feldmann
• Ben Bolte
• Ritwik Pavan
• Mehul Nariyawala

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

119

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Podcast Authority Score: 55 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

84

Social presence

0

YouTube

66

Engagement

0

Contact Pirates Only

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.