CEOs You Should Know Chris Taylor Aalyria Technologies Long Interview Final No Branding

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I grew up in South Buffalo,New York, Steeltown in the early seventies,
a very Irish Catholic neighborhood, stillso very family oriented, community owner,
but also one of those upbringings whereyou left the house at sunrise basically

(00:20):
and you came home when the streetlightswere on or unless until your mother called
you home. Lots of exploration asa kid all over the neighborhood. I
went to college. I took myfirst swing at college and realized that I
probably was not ready yet, soI joined the Marine Corps. I spent

(00:40):
fourteen years in the Marine Corps asan enlisted infantryman and for Suakon Marine,
and I loved every single day ofit. While I was in I finished
my undergraduate degree at night, andthen left the Marine Corp after fourteen years
to get my MBA at the Collegeof William and Mary, not too far

(01:00):
from where we are now. Wentto work for five for five years after
that, and then went back tograd school up at the Harvard Kennedy School
to get my master's in public administration. Well, thank you for all of
that, and I want to thankyou for your service, especially with us
where you're being interviewed right now inthe DMV. We're very appreciative of military

(01:23):
I do like to ask founder,CEOs and leaders about military experience and then
being a civilian and how that transfersover because everybody handles at it a lot
differently. But I think what I'mvery clear about is there's a lot of
structure in the military, and therecan be as you move on to civilian
life. So with that said,all those years, I mean, you
almost did a decade and a halfin the military taking over to being a

(01:45):
civilian, what did you transfer overfrom military life to civilian life that helped
you. Yeah, I think,particularly in the Marine Corps, the notion
that perseverance, hard work, andteamwork are the foundation of being what we
might call productive on the battlefield.Is it is, at its core what's

(02:08):
necessary to be successful. And Ithink, you know, I didn't act.
I did not have acts. Avery difficult transition from military to the
civilian world. I enjoyed it.I found it interesting to analyze some of
the differences between military life and civilianlife. But I would say that persistence,

(02:30):
grit is the most the most importantthing that I learned in the Marine
Corps that has transitioned with me tobusiness. There's lots of smart people with
good ideas that never go anywhere.There's lots of just smart people all around.
But unless you're willing to put yourback into it and make whatever vision

(02:50):
you have for something a reality,it's not going to get done. Things
don't happen on their own. Youreally really have to push finagle dance,
you know, anything that you cando to advance your mission is what you
need, is what you need todo. There's a common thread about what

(03:12):
you talked about with all our CEOs, and that's being relentless, having a
passion for whatever you're going to do, being relentless. And if somebody says
no, you're talking to the wrongperson. You move on to the next
one. So I'm glad you sharedall that. I did want to talk
to you about your company, andit's just fascinating as we get into it.
But I always like, you know, we spoke about your personal origin
story. But I'm always fascinated,and I know our listeners are too,

(03:32):
whether they're CEOs or future budding CEOs, about having that epiphany, that idea
that there's a hole in the industryhere. I think I've got a good
idea. I'm going to come upwith it. Here we go, tell
us about that origin story. Yeah, so it's probably going on three years

(03:53):
now. Three and a half yearsago a friend of mine called me and
said, hey, we're thinking aboutspinning out a couple of technologies from Google,
and we'd like you to be theCEO. And I said, tell
me more. So they explained thetechnologies to me and I was like,
I don't believe you. I learnedmore over time about it, and I

(04:15):
said, that is something that boththe commercial world and the US government could
derive great benefit from. So wetried to get a deal done. That
set of investors sort of it wastaking a little bit that sort of investor.
That set of investors walked away.I picked the deal up and I

(04:38):
took it to my dear mentor andboss in a couple of jobs now,
Arthur Patterson, who was one ofthe founders of Excel Partners out in Silicon
Valley, and I said, hey, I think this is a thing.
Do you want in and can westart these conversations? And we did and
we spent about sixteen months with Google, who they were wonderful. Look that

(05:01):
we wanted to get you know,I had wished that we had gotten a
deal done sooner, but it wasa fair deal. We got it done,
and we basically acquired two technologies.One is what we call a temporo
spatial software to fine networking architecture.That's a whole bunch of words that just
really means we can connect anything wiredand wireless to each other in all domains

(05:25):
land, sea, air, andspace and beyond. So that's one of
them. The other one is anatmospheric coherent light free space optics program,
so think and undersea cable without thecable through the air. Got it high
speed about one point six tarabits persecond through the air. For the geeks

(05:47):
who are listening, that's pretty fastand you can transmit a lot of data
in a short amount of in ashort amount of time. We still remain
partners. We do a lot ofwork with Google, Google Google Cloud particularly,
but we're also working with so manyother providers in the industry and it's

(06:10):
just wildly taking off. Okay,let's do this. I want to talk
about mission statement and also get alittle bit more into the weeds about capabilities
of the programs that you have andhow you kind of work with clients and
get into that and explain to ourlisteners what it is. But when I
saw the name of your company,and I'm sure, like a lot of
people, they're fascinated because it's different. There's nothing plain jane about it.

(06:31):
So what's the origin and explain thename of the company. Well, I
don't want to disappoint anyone, butI made it up on the couch.
My boss, the Arthur Patterson,said the name of the company should begin
with an A. Okay, AndI said why and he said, because
you want it at the top ofevery list, right, And I said

(06:54):
okay. So trying to create aname for a really cool space communications all
domain communication companies hard because everybody's alreadytaken all the great Greek, Roman mythological
name. You can't find one,right. And so I was this is

(07:15):
God's truth. I was on thecouch watching the last episode of the expanse
Yes and so when they go throughthe rings, they are going somewhere.
We never say where they were,right, And I had been going through
a number of different names in myhead, and I said, I think
they're going to Illyria And that wasit. I wrote it down with two
a's to make my boss twice ashappy. And that's what we came up

(07:43):
with. So it stuck. Therewas lots of conversation in the company about
it. Some people thought it soundedlike a cholesterol medication. Some people thought
it sounded like nothing. It's thebest name we could have ever come up
with. It is stuck. Peopleask you about it, you just did,
yeah, and that makes it stickeven more. Well, it's all

(08:03):
about curiosity, and I think youpiqued everybody with the name of the company.
I should say too, for thepeople that are old and are like
me, back in the old days, back in the seventies, if you
had an A for a number fora company, that minute was first in
the phone book for all the olderaudience what a phone book is. So
that's true, and that is verytrue. All right, how about mission

(08:24):
statement of the company? What isthat? So I'm gonna be honest,
it's begun to evolve one of thethings that we've discovered by putting bringing a
Lyria into existence. By the way, it should be said that when we
acquired the technologies, we acquired theGoogle technical teams as well the original technical

(08:46):
teams Okay, they're the finest softwareengineers on the planet. These are the
I cannot say enough about them.They are phenomenal and do amazing things that
I certainly cannot do. I thinkwhen we first started, we had a
narrower view of what we thought wecould do. Now that we've been out

(09:07):
in the wilderness for about a yearand a half, a little less than
a year and a half, Ithink what we've realized is that the technologies
can have a far, far moreand wider reaching impact on humanity than we
ever considered at the beginning, andthat I think that's a good thing for
us. So, you know,right now we want to connect. We

(09:31):
say that we want to connect everythingto everything else. We're capable. I'll
give you an example. Our technologyis capable today of connecting the Earth to
the Moon today and ultimately we'll beable to go to Mars. One of
our advisors for the company is doctorVince Surf. Vince the godfather of the

(09:52):
Internet. He and his partner discovereddiscovered the TPIP technology, and you know,
he wants to create a solar systemconnectivity program, Like why do we
stop at Mars? Why not gofurther? And so we think about that

(10:13):
every day. How do we firstconnect everything here on Earth to everything else?
So imagine this. A satellite thatI imagine iHeartRadio uses to transmit to
your eight hundred and fifty stations cannow speak to ah altitude balloon that could
now speak to a plane that cannow speak to a ground station that can

(10:35):
now be sent out anywhere that weneeded to be at the highest speeds ever
possible to human stay on the planet. If we can connect all of those
things, think about how much moreefficient everything that you need can be.
Think about connecting the next three billionpeople on the planet where there is no

(10:56):
native infrastructure type beam. Our FreeSpace Officers solution can help manage that without
having to dig miles and miles andmiles and miles of cable, which is
just prohibitively expensive sometimes so and thenfrom our government perspective, from a national
security perspective, if I can connectnot I, we can connect everything that

(11:20):
we own today in land, seerand space to everything else that we own
today in land, sea, air, and space. It meets specifically the
goal of strategic deterrence because nobody elsecan do that, and once other competitors
can see that we're able to dothat, it could cause us all to

(11:41):
take a breath and not decide toengage each other as we have for the
last twenty years. Okay, SoI've got a lot of questions because you
said a lot of interesting things,but I want you to boil it down
a little bit in Layman's terms.For our listeners, there are maybe new
to all the technology that you weretalking about. If you do work with
a client, you don't have togive any names of who you work with
because some of them might be supersecret. But if they're not, you're

(12:03):
you're welcome to do that. Butif you're working with a client, exactly
how does the company work in yourtechnology? As you boil it down for
us, sure, So on thespacetime side, it's simple were we work
on what we kubern inities basis.That means it can fit into any set.

(12:24):
We're a SaaS company using SAS techniques. But because the government has very
different and it's required, has verydifferent ways in which they store and use
different technologies, we've designed it sothat it can fit in any of those
storage environments for them. Okay,for the commercial world, we run it

(12:48):
on top right now it sits ontop of Google Cloud, and you know,
with the largest cloud infrastructure on theplanet, much like you, you're
able to get all over the place, so are we. And then from
a type beam perspective, from thelaser perspective, the ability to grow those

(13:09):
networks and thicken them where there isno infrastructure is a maze. I mean,
man, it changes the world.So that's how we that's how people
buy from us. They can eitherdo it as a service or buy it
as you know, in that caseof type being by our we call them
heads optical heads. But I thinkwhat the world is moving to more is

(13:35):
X as a service as we know, and networking as a service, optical
network as a service. Those thosethings are where people are going because it
just makes everybody's life easier and faster. And if you can come to a
price that everybody is happy with,you've changed everything. That technology sounds like

(13:58):
it's also moving really quickly. Andjust a minute, I want to ask
you about AI because I think that'sbeen coming up a lot lately, so
I want to see if that's goingto be integrated in the future of what
you do with your team. You'reobviously a global company. When it comes
to working with clients, is itmore government based, is it civilian based,
or is it both? And youdon't discriminate what kind of clients do
you work with? It's both,we don't discriminate, and right now it's

(14:18):
roughly fifty fifty and by design rightbecause much of what the commercial world needs
or does the government needs, muchof what the government experiments with benefits the
commercial world. So we sit inthat that that nexus, if you will,
between the two. That's that wherewe're able to either translate uh something

(14:43):
into a solution for somebody or theycan share amongst themselves whatever whatever the technology
is or the outcomes of those technologiesof what they want to Our goal is
to be the digital cartilage for theplanet, so that you can decide how

(15:03):
you want to employ your resources andenter into some other agreement with somebody else
who has an asset that might bevery beneficial to your business or to your
government. And Chris as I listenedto this and once again Layman, but
it sounds like when it comes toradio, television, internet, among other
things, it's going to change everythingdramatically. I think it's good you're going

(15:24):
to with the with the compound annualgrowth of bandwidth usage across the planets in
the neighborhood of forty percent. Nowwe need more technologies that can provide more
bandwidth because spectrum is limited, right, at some point spectrum will be filled
right right, Yeah, you knowit's not atmospheric freespace, optics. Light

(15:50):
is not right, and so startingto integrate light into commercial companies ways of
doing things. I'll give you anexample. There are ships all over the
world, there are planes flying allor what if we could put one gigabit

(16:11):
of capacity to every plane flying onthe planet. What if we could do
that so that you don't have togo I don't know if you've been on
a plane recently and tried to WiFi. Yeah, I have. It's not
the greatest. It's a horrible experience. Yeah, it's not a great experience.
Um. Ships who are at seatright, Ships like planes, they

(16:36):
have to be moving to make money. If you could do a conditions based
maintenance program whereby you could send backhigh speed data from a ship or from
an aircraft so that when it stopsat the next place, fifteen things can
be replaced in two hours. Ratherthan having some sort of catastrophic break in

(16:57):
a system where it's laid up forthree months. You make it more efficient,
We get more business done around theworld, the global capacity of the
account of the global economy grows,and it's good for everybody. So those
are the when we're trying to thinkabout how we can serve the larger needs
of humanity, not just can Isell an optical head or can I sell

(17:21):
an instance of space time. Wereally do believe that we can have a
much larger impact on the planet Imentioned earlier, AI. I know what's
coming in very quickly for all ofus. A lot of people are still
being introduced to it. Whether theycan write your resume, whether it can
do a music log at a radiostation. How will it or will it
ever come into play for what youdo? As you can imagine, it's

(17:44):
a it's a topic of discussion.I think where it can help us is
as we decide as we grow,have more assets join the platform or more
companies, where governments use the platformto manage their own assets, they're going

(18:07):
to want to simplify how they changethings regarding their assets. So if it's
a function of just speaking into thesystem and having our solver engine make that
happen. That's great. Our solverengine is now we're reimagining how we solve
all these very difficult problems. Thenext generation solver will be done not too

(18:33):
far away. And as we thinkabout how AI can make things simpler for
us, it's also about being ableto keep, particularly for national security things
where a human being is necessary bylaw, by regulatory statute, etc.

(18:57):
That that cognitive load for that personis simple, but when they need to
be involved, that helping them changewhatever needs to be changed can make it.
We can make it so in afew seconds. Right, All those

(19:17):
things were discovering. But I'm onthe side of I dig AI. We
should keep a careful eye on thespeed at which it grows to do what
and how it's employed. I don'tthink it's I don't think it's too far
fetched to say that, as withanything else without without a lot of attention,

(19:42):
it could you could have people startto do things that we just don't
really want them to do. Yeah, just watch a Terminator movie. Yeah,
and then you know the other thingis too. I read an article
just the other day that this oneperson who wrote it, and it was
an opinion piece of white color peoplethat are look out because your jobs might
be taken by AM one day.But I think there's we're still in such

(20:03):
infantile stages of AI that we reallydon't know yet, so there's a lot
of movement. But I'm glad youaddressed him. As we wrap up our
conversation and put a bow on everything. If you were to maybe leave a
takeaway with our listeners and as they'vebeen introduced to your company, maybe for
the first time, what would youwant them to know about the company,
and that takeaway, I think we'rea great example of what can happen when

(20:25):
non traditional companies are able to exposewhat the work that they've done first to
the US government to help it achieveits mission of strategic deterrence. Today,
if some of some of your listenersmay have heard the term jad C two
or c jad C two join allDomain Command of Control, and we've been

(20:49):
putting lightning bolts on PowerPoint slides forthree decades to demonstrate a connectivity that heretofore
just hasn't existed, not for notfor not because bad people or they didn't
work hard, It just didn't exist. Today. The spacetime platform that we've
designed is the common control plane forcommunications for a real combined jad C to

(21:18):
environment. It exists today. Sofor people who are listening that are on
the government side, that's great.For people who are listening on the commercial
side. If you've noticed all ofthese satellite there's a lot of satellite companies
that are now merging with each other. Yes, so they originally were built
around their own orbital shell, theirown frequency, their own altitudes, everything.
Now they're mashing these things together,and they have to have a way

(21:41):
to be able to use both ofthose all of the capabilities, whether they're
native or they acquired, to maximizeand optimize one their efficiency for customers,
but two their profits. Right,they have to. So it's a really
good time for us to be adistance because we can help these satellite companies

(22:03):
make the very best use of allthe assets and they just spend a bunch
of money on By the way,these mergers are not small dollar mergers.
Why does that matter? Because itmeans that everything that is being delivered from
space can be more efficient and moreeffective and ultimately cost less because we're making
it so efficient. So I thinkthat's really important for people to understand both

(22:26):
sides, both commercial and the governmentuse well. Your final thoughts. Also,
let me know that your timing withthis company is impeccable. It really
is when it comes to all ofthat. Man, Listen, let's be
clear. Luck has everything to dowith everything. That's also common thread from
a lot of our CEOs. Yeah, too much of my life has been

(22:47):
about just being in the right placeat the right time, not because I'm
some sort of wizard, which Iam not. But I having said that,
I have a bunch of wizards workthat I work with. Yeah,
they're amazingly talented people, best peopleI've ever worked. So I think when
you can put all that stuff togetherwhere there's you know, need and you
have a technology that can help,and you can have that conversation, that

(23:10):
educational conversation says we really can helphelp them de risk their lives because it's
important because all changes new and thatfreaks people out. You really can get
to a place that is not justthe next thing, but the next ten
things right. And so we hopewe're moving in that direction. Chris,
you and your team have a greatwebsite. It's easy to navigate, and
there's a lot of education where youcan pick up on there, but there's
also on the nab Our Careers.I know you have some openings. You're

(23:33):
probably looking for the best of thebest. So with that said, what's
the website you arel that people cancheck it out everybody that wants to come
work for us www dot aleria AAL y r IA dot com dot com.
You don't have to even want ajob, just come visit the website
and check us out. Chris,I can't tell you how much I appreciate

(23:55):
your time. I've learned a lottoday and what it was explaining to me
today in layman's terms, it's reallycool technology and I wish you nothing but
the best. I know it's stillearly on in the process, but it
looks like a very good future forgingyour team. Thank you so much for
joining us on CEOs as you know, thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.