Inside the New DefenceTech Race

0:00You are now listening to the EU Start-ups Podcast. Hello and welcome to the special episode of the EU Start-ups Podcast. We're here at the A5X conference in Singapore by Mutation, the National University of Singapore. Throughout this next few days we're going to be chatting about innovation, funding, and the developing bridge between Southeast Asia and Europe. Not to mention, they sing in port defense tech hackathon, whose winner is going to show up at our very end of the series in a special episode. So I hope you're looking forward to hear us talking about the challenges, the innovation, and how we're all comparing when it comes to localized markets such as Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe, and even the global challenges. Not to mention, the lessons we can learn from each other. Okay, Gary, thank you very much for joining me here in the EU Start-ups Podcast. It's a pleasure. I'm sure.

1:01Thanks for having this podcast. You know what? It's my very first podcast. Is it really? Yeah, I'm the right person. I hope it's a good one. So, a bit of background by myself. I spent 25 years in the military. I was trained as an infantry officer. Then I thought that there must be a smarter way to fight this war. I can do it in the trenches without, you know, showering for 10 days and a bar. So, decided to join the Air Force, took on a scholarship, and it was trained on the E2C Hawkeye. Which is an early warning claim. It was in the Top Gun movies. The very first one, you know. And we were at Mirama Naval Air Station. So, the very first movie where you see Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. That's a real bar because I was there. Okay. I'm sorry, I'm not a pilot. I was trained as a visual. So, as you know, the E2 is, it's like a flying submarine. It's got like three people behind. So, you got to do everything. You got to first study how the physics and engineering and the computation works.

2:02You go up there, then you need to learn how to survive in the plane if they are emergencies. Now, you start that all out, then you learn how to operate. And you need to know how the weight up performs, you need to know how the other systems perform and all that. If things go wrong, you have to fix it. So, you're talking about different tech coming together. So, this is something that I learned. I built a lot of confidence because if things go wrong, you just can't ask the pilot to land. You have to fix it. I then became the commanding officer of the squadron a few years after that. It was head of Air Force Intelligence, Director Policy. Then, they experimented with me. A first non-pilot to command a fighter base with three F16 squadrons and of course the E2 squadron. Had an F16 squadron in the US. So, I told the pilots, you know, put me on your most difficult missions. By the time I finished my three or two, I had 30 hours. I was in the backseat of an M-Mem firing in the United States. Flu rate-fac missions, which is the premier exercise in Nevada.

3:06In the US and of course some local missions here and there. So, that really was where I saw as a commander. How things came together within an Air Base and 2,000 fire people within me. And how it is important for teams to work together. Then I became Deputy Secretary of Policy. I was doing policy work in the Shangri-La dialogue where people just talk and they don't hack. So, having a single defense type hackathon because I want people to hack and not talk. Joy Tomasic for 12 years was involved in macro strategy. But I supported the investment teams when they came to things related to politics and all that. My team was mainly economists. I was a guy that came from a military to a translated below risk into things that impact investments. Now, opportunity to join NUS came up because my primary school friend, CN, who runs this place. Said, hey, in November, why don't you join me because defense tech is not investable.

4:07I said, okay, yeah. And what we do here is we translate technologies R&D into startups. Why don't you do it on a defense site? So, in a way, it was a natural evolution of my career in a military to Mars. And my father was a stockbroker. So, I've always had investments at the back of my head. And when I was in to Mars, I also found that there was more interesting investments in the VC world where things were being built from first principles. I was in MIT Sloan, so I had a business plan, an optical switch plan. So, I started to invest, we carelessly as, as, because I was, I could not become an entrepreneur because I was in a government in startups. And now invested into a 30-over startups, advice about nine of them. So, coming to NUS, I said, why don't I just, you know, replicate what I've done in the, in, in, in a public space?

5:09I don't end with, with, with a mission. Because at this point in my life, what excites me is going back to the roots again. It must be mission driven. So, this mission that we have here is building defense, building national resilience through defense entrepreneurship. So, there are two ways to do it. And they complement each other. One is to have a hackathon because in hackathon, you get talent. You get, and you convert talent into startups. So, that's done by the defense venture lab, which is what we are also building here. The sign-ups for the hackathon was, to see that it was a pleasant surprise is an understanding. It was about 1000 people signing up. And obviously we have to, this didn't come about by chance. This came about because two years ago, I had, I met Ben Wolba, who, who does hackathons in Europe. After the Ukraine war broke out, young Europeans wanted to help the Ukrainians, you know, defend. So, the Ukrainians military brought their problems to be hacked.

6:19And then some of them deployed and some of them became startups after that. So, that night in, in Berlin, two nights ago, you know what? We bonded over a vanilla ice cream because it was too late to have coffee. It was 9.30. He bite 20 minutes to meet a total stranger like me. And I said, well, one day I'm going to do this in Singapore because Singapore needs also to transform, to align ourselves to the new form of warfare, which is not, which is a departure from what we are currently. So, Singapore, we are small. We always believe that we could derive a quick and decisive victory if deterrence fails. So, we structure for quick wars, modeled after the wars in the Middle East in the 1960s and 70s. But today, learning from Ukraine and other wars, there are only long and longer wars. There are no more short wars. And all long wars are economic wars.

7:24So, you have to end looking at where Ukraine has done. They have translated commercial tech, you know, all the way from starting and counter drone solutions, even today interceptors, autonomous underwater drones that destroy, you know, navies. This is where warfare is going towards. So, or just one last point. So, the defense primes of today, they are tied to the current establishment where slow, expensive and few. That's what the current model is because there's a military industrial complex that likes that. But that has been destroyed by Ukraine, so to speak. Every military establishment today is built on that. It takes what? 10 years, 20 years, billion dollar programs. Today, it is about fast, cheap, and many. And this is what the hackathon is about. This is a new pathway. There's a revolution in military affairs that is happening and we are riding on that.

8:30Okay, so it's obvious to say and clear that you have one foot in both worlds, right, into the military side of things and as well, into the investment with your involvement with NUS and your pass background as well, which makes me curious then to hear your opinion on dual use. Because to me, that's an interesting term. We've had defense tech people on the podcast before, investors, entrepreneurs will have you. And they all seem to kind of approach dual use through different kind of perspectives, right, because you're talking about Ukraine and the development they've had throughout the war. But that's not dual use. That is very clearly a defense tech application. Do you believe that there should always be a civilian application to defense tech developments or as an argument to say, no, we're developing defense capabilities. And that's that. Everything technology is dual use like on this phone, the chips in there, okay, that in iPhone. It was possible because of a defense demand mobility, the internet.

9:33So, so why because I did over arc in a frame mode that we need to think about whether defense or dual use is there's always strategic competition between states and that drives technology. All tech is strategic. So, you could start, you know, like, Palantir started on the defense. I was post 911, right. I mean, nobody could bring could fuse intelligence. There was available or data that was available from different sources because, you know, they all stovepied. They didn't talk to each other. But look at Palantir today. Yeah, and there's applying what they did for the militaries for intelligence into the commercial side. Okay. Space access is a very good example. Space thanks built rockets by blowing them up in the early 2000s. I mean, this is crazy. It doesn't make sense. You know, but then there was a breakthrough and the government came in. The biggest drivers for space today. You know, it's defense. I mean, you can look at examples of companies that have been listed. Planet Labs, for example, they started with, you know, using Earth observation to look at climate changes, methane emissions and all that. But look at that.

10:44They are pivoted almost 90 percent. I would say based on their revenues to defense. Yeah. And they just built a plan in Germany. Even for AI, I mean, they look as a planetary intelligence. Why do you need planetary intelligence? You know, the coast, the scan of all the time. What is really worth looking at is only two reasons. One is for the hedge fund traders, which is a very small market. The rest of it is intelligence for state. So, it doesn't matter. If you suffer from defense, which is the most difficult problems for physics, mathematics and computation, you have to migrate to the civilian side. If you are in tech, like in video, you then move on to the military side. Yeah, there's so much crossover. So, I have no contradiction. Yeah. Tech is always bullies. Tech is just like that. I would never say bullies. You don't be both civilian and soldier at the same time. Why can't we coax this?

11:46You mentioned at the very beginning when you were kind of talking about your background. You said that at the time when you kind of started joining NUS and this whole program six months ago. Six months ago. You said defense tech is an investable. It's investable. It's investable. If it's an investable, what I'm doing here. The VCs and all that. In QTL is a sponsor, B capital, OTV Ventures is the biggest... They call themselves dual use. VCs are the opinions want to be politically correct. But their biggest investment is such a high company. The reason why is the biggest ICA. It's because it's looking at the walls going on. So, in that sense, then. And of course, Kebis, I got to say that. That's Mendes Vse. Europe's reflect in the same pattern. Yeah, really. And obviously because of Ukraine, defense tech applications, technology, it's all coming out of Europe into Ukraine and vice versa. What do you think then that Singapore can take from the relationship and the kind of industrial push that Europe has seen in that defense tech sector?

12:52Well, you look at the problems that we have in the hackathon. It's derived from Ukraine, from our partners, from European defense tech hub Ben Wolberg. Ben Wolberg gave us a bunch of challenges that he used in the 30-year-old hackathons that he has done in Europe. And we translated them into problems of our own. You know, little red dome. Why the little red dome? Because we are a little red dot if we look at the map. The little red dome is to protect Singapore as a little... as to protect the little red dot. So every country has a dome. If you can protect Singapore, you can protect other cities around the world. There are thousands of cities around the world. So if you can build the tech stack for the little red dome, it's a very investible idea. New patellins, new patellins, derived from the drone wars. There are no more human beings in the battlefield. There, you go out there, you'll be chased by drones. Or you'll be chasing human beings with drones.

13:52So that is the fact that we want to then adapt. We do not need the kind of drones in Ukraine because every sin our weather, it's really hot. You put your iPhone out there in the sun. You go and look at it after 30 minutes. You know, iPhone is going to tell you. Yeah, iPhone is going to work after 30 minutes after it cools down. So this is the reality. We are in the tropics. We need jungle drones. We do not need the same drones as in Ukraine. It will be good to know what they are doing. But you need to customize here. Geography, as I always said, is destiny. I was an A2C hot guy. We fly 24,000 to 32,000 feet. It was so boring. I was always looking down at the geography. It looks the same all the time. Except for Singapore, we get a little bit bigger. Because we reclaim land up to our territory. It's very, very much. So you know why it's called beach road because the beach was without bad weather today. The whole beach road is full of sky scrapers on beach road. Can you imagine? What a stupid name for a beach road, right?

14:56Well, I can't give any comment. But that's history. It tells you where the beach was. So, but you know, I have already had many conversations today with different people involved in the US and different aspects. And the comments, it always turns to the benefits of international partners and when we can learn from each other. But I have to imagine that defense tech doesn't quite work like that because in of its nature is a national interest. And it's one thing to say Europe and Ukraine when it's such word together. It's a natural ally and geographically speaking. It's part of us. But if we're talking about Singapore and Europe, that's a bit of a more tricky relationship, isn't it? Well, I mean, it depends on how you define sovereign defense tech if that's what you're driving at. Yeah. You look at Singapore. We are small in terms of population. There are only like 3.3 million Singaporeans on this island. We have a population of 6 million people that's because of people who are PRRs and expats and all that that help grow our economy.

15:58So my point is sovereign defense tech need not be built by Singaporeans. It has to be operated by Singaporeans. So we can build, look at the hackathon here. I would say about maybe 75% of people are Singaporeans. The rest are people who are students in Singapore. You know, people from India, they're doing most of them are doing like master's program. Exchange students who are undergrad, are also here. And then people who are just flying in from all over Europe, from the US, they're hacking. They're hacking for on Singapore, derived defense challenges. Yeah. We've commercially available technologies. Let me look at the geography. You know, it's, how would I say? It's not difficult to know what our security challenges are. Right? Okay. And I mean, where, because you just mentioned students coming from India and all this,

16:58how important is the academic system to the development of defense tech? And how has that pipeline always existed? Is that something that's foreign exists now? Oh, no, no. This is just starting right now. This is, this is academics. So I'm looking at where, where they are. After they do the hacking, they may want to give up their, their academic careers or rather course. They take a year out. I've seen this. A year out, two years out. And after that, you know what? Successful startup, they give up university. All today, they are learning on the job. I always tell, you know, people who, who are entrepreneurs, they approach life very differently. They're risk takers. That's why you're crazy now. To be entrepreneur. Risk equals return. This way, they're always green for moon shots. Because they have given up the safe life. You know, Singapore is very comfortable. Like yesterday, one of the speakers for A5 that said that, you know, all, all the role models are civil servants because the best people are given scholarships. You know, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we need to have new role models who are entrepreneurs.

17:59And I'm hopefully able to build that. And you can't build that thing in Singapore. You've got to send them out. So I'm not sure whether you're aware that Singapore has a, we won the 100 meters goal medal in the real Olympics for butterfly. Oh, yeah. That's the guy, very famous guy called Joseph Schoeling. He used to come from my school. He used to do about swimming in Water Polo. He had talent. And the parents mortgage, they are home to send their son to train with the best in the United States. In Florida for butterfly. And that's how ten years later, he won the goal medal for Singapore. So you go to, you watch football? A bit. Okay. If you, if I'm a crazy Liverpool fan, if you want to play football today, you have to go to the Premier League. That's where the talent is. That's where the money is. So yes, I agree. If you, it's going to be difficult. But where there's difficulty, that's where there is a moat. And today, you're probably not aware, but Singapore has got four squarrants in the United States.

19:03We have our 16th in Arizona for like 30 over years. Our parties in Arizona F-15s in Moutainham, Idaho. And we're standing up our F-35 squarrant Arkansas. So I believe the future strategic partnership between US and Singapore, in 2005, and negotiated that agreement between US and Singapore, was actually in the White House when that was signed between Bush 43 and our Prime Minister. So I understand that markets, strategic markets, and in defense, tight, it will be a lot more mutual because we're talking about global supply chains. Critical minerals, critical supplies and all that. Yeah. And that is mutual. So Singapore has got something to offer in this supply chain, which is linked to long and longer wars, which is economic wars. You need global supply chains, or at least coalitions, to be able to fight that kind of a war.

20:03Okay. And so you said you just started six months, right? And then that you began this partnership here. No, I took up the job. I was giving up the job. Right, right. So then what do you see as a completion of your work here? Because you've talked to me a lot about where you want to see how it's going, the potential. But do you have a goal of my... Oh, the completion of my job, my goal here is when I get set. Because I'm a kind of like a virus within the system. Trying to corrupt the host or invade the host and change how the host behaves. And sometimes I might be thrown out. But there's the only way to move. Because you have to move fast. And universities tend to be quite traditional in that sense. But so far, first they got me in. They allow me to have my own title. I'm a professor of practice for defense, innovation and applications. How unwise is that?

21:04I don't think any other university has any of that title. And they allow me to have... They encourage me. They give me funding. Refuge to do this. The defense venture lab is a startup building other startups. I've got 62 teams running 62 teams in my WhatsApp group. 62 WhatsApp group there. What's happening to me? So I'm back to my days in A2C, how can I... Every text is like a contact I have to click and respond. I had six radios calling me at the same time. 400 tracks on my screen because the processing was you went. Now we want to change that to agents. And you don't even need a screen because upstream the agent will start everything out. Sure. It seems like you like person for the jobs. I don't know what that is. You're very much scary. It's a good pleasure. Thank you.