44. John Conafay, Co-Founder and CEO of Integrate

[Music] Good morning everyone and welcome back to another episode of Chasing Space. I'm your host, Brendan Swannick. Today we're joined by a guest who has been in discussion for joining me on this show for quite some time now probably since the beginning. I'm glad we've held off because there's been a lot of progress in his life and his organization's life since those first conversations. And that is John Connefe. Co-founder and CEO of Integrate as well as a dear friend. John receives his bachelor's degree in design management from Arizona State University as well as his associate of science and avionics maintenance technology from the community college of the Air Force. John is no stranger to the space industry and ecosystem. He has held several roles in business development and operations across the industry at organizations including Astronis, spaceflight incorporated, ABL space systems, Spire Global, as well as some other roles like the executive director for students for the exploration and development of space, otherwise known as SEDS. The treasurer for the space generation advisory council and organization I am also a part of. And finally, as I mentioned, he's the co-founder and CEO of Integrate for almost four years at this point with the verbatim caption here saying, building the tool I wish I had at all his prior hardware companies. Let's welcome John and talk about how he is creating multiplayer project management for ambitious machines. So John, I think this may be closing it on three years ago. This is pre-chasing space. This is pre-S probably being friends, but I was talking about the concept of chasing space and you had Integrate off the ground, but I think both of us had a lot of progress. You've certainly had a lot of progress since the last time we talked, so super excited to finally have you on the show. This is a good full circle moment. Yeah, very much so it feels the same way. Awesome. I want to start in your background. So it seems like you've always had an interest in the space economy, right? You hit roles coming out of what looks like was the Air Force to start your career. So maybe we can expand it to just aerospace aeronautical interest. Is that a fair assumption? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, what got you into it initially? Is it childhood dream or? Yeah, so I've been obsessed with technology since I was very, very young and whether I knew it or not, that's kind of the through line. I remember taking part VCRs when I was five years old, that is a video cassette recorder just in case anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about. And trying to put them back together once successfully, being able to build my own computers when I was in sixth grade and all this was fascinating to me. And so the through line really is once I went into the Air Force, it was because I was fascinated by the technology. Once I was in working on heavy aircraft like the AWACS and doing communication navigation mission systems, the ability to really dive in and get just enough engineering knowledge to piss off all my engineering colleagues over the past 15 years since has been spectacular. Even prior to the Air Force, I had a record label that started when I was 17 but prior to that it was because I really wanted to get into audio recording. And so I was buying microphones to figure out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like obsessed with the actual act of recording and audio engineering and all of this prior talk to everything in space. I didn't know you're a musician, John. This is news to me. So that's like, that's a good distinction. I never, if I ever claimed to have been able to play an instrument or sing everybody that knew me at that time would laugh a lot. I was always kind of on this business and technology side. I never, you know, in front of the cameras, I run because that is to say, it was not, it was not where I positioned myself. So you and Peter Krauss, the, with Terran Orbital, will get along well. I asked him the same question in a previous episode and he had the same initial answer. When he was a kid, he loved tack and he loved taking stuff apart and trying to put it back together. This is a funny correlation there. So coming out of the Air Force, looks like you jumped right into industry here. Sounds like you had some contributions to SEDS as the executive director, which is amazing. Space generation advisory council a little bit later in your career as a treasurer, an organization I'm a part of also amazing. And beyond that, business development roles all over the industry, satellite servicing, general technology, space flight. So the way I look at this, based on what you're doing now, is just an immense exposure to a huge data set of customers. Absolutely. Absolutely. Especially for exactly for what we're doing now. Yeah, went to school after the Air Force. So I was enlisted. A lot of people come out and they were officers in the Air Force. So I was enlisted. So got my hands dirty with the tech and maintaining AWACS up in Alaska. Then went to school for initially economics and then tacked on design. So I had this interesting amount of machine called design management. And that's where I discovered students for the exploration development of space. And I literally started because I fell in love with the club and became their local treasurer and all of this. And then eventually ran the national space vision conference and just got deeper and deeper and deeper. It was a way for me to really stretch my legs and space generation advisory council was an extension of that when I became executive director of the national organization of SEDS. Kind of with a bunch of friends, ripped it up from its roots and rebuilt it from the ground up in a lot of ways. And it just drove home the point that I loved doing the business side of things. So it was a very natural extension into Bryce Tech even before I'd finished school. You know, one thing I wanted to highlight and I just think this is amazing. One of one of the things I love about LinkedIn is the people that don't take it incredibly serious. And you can actually see some personality shine through. It's my favorite thing in the world breaks up. You know, the monotony of the apps sometimes. Starting with the strontas description, deeply wish I had a tool like integrate moving on to other roles, ideating it how a tool like integrate could be built and how it could help the entire org. And this theme continues throughout all of your roles and I love how it ties into the specific role you're doing here talk about a B.L. A tool like integrate to coordinate with customers of SED rockets. And now that brings us to the beginning of April 2022. The founding of integrate. John was the initial inspiration and I'd love to hear a little bit more about you know the first 100 days or the really early days of integrating how you got it off the ground. Yeah, so the initial integration or the initial inspiration was back at a strontas when I was managing all the suppliers and all of these customers because I was doing operations in business development because it was employing number 80s at a strontas. And they were growing so quickly. So being able to wrangle all of these external organizations in a way that allowed me to see the entire picture in one place just wasn't possible. I had tools like Jira or Asana and things like this that that were really meant for internal collaboration but didn't let me truly reach out to the external world and systematize everything to one place. So it started it really truly did started a strontas when I moved to our supplier space flight. We were managing I think it was something like hundreds of spacecraft for a hundred different contracts and 80 different customers and we had the same problem. They couldn't see each other like they shouldn't be allowed to see each other but we wanted to be able to see all of their milestones and tasks in one place together. And so we remember starting to ideate and then I got to a BL and I had the exact same issues and problems and so I had to go and build it. So when you know we kind of sold out of rockets at a BL I had just turned a specific age and I was like oh my god I've been meeting the start of company and worked for all of these world class founders and have this kind of wealth of knowledge and this significant pain point. I've got to go build this. Did you always want to start a company or was the idea of starting a company from this idea that you've developed through your career that at that point in your life. Both the entrepreneurial journey stayed started very very early I think I was selling you know rebate Tomagotchi's when I was in middle school. You had in your blood yeah exactly very very much I pursued startups because I loved the act of building from a very early stage I loved the chaos I loved the you know pulling all of that together and raining it into build something great that's of ultimate utility. Whether it's using satellite telecommunications to lift people up in disconnected countries or the ability to get national assets on orbit faster through through space flight and maybe all. And it just came to a point where it was like I have this pain point I have this idea I need to go do this this myself. Do you remember either the day you and your co-founders, the first day that you opened up a document or you opened up a spreadsheet. Do you remember that day and what you did? The very first reckoning of integrate? Yeah, so is any good entrepreneur or any entrepreneur period probably has this type of story where I was like I love my job and I was gonna give myself a month to really cook and think about the world and take a break after so many so much I started about immediately woke up the next morning and was like okay I got to get to work and didn't give myself any time but I knew what I wanted to build and I was actually building something in bubble in a no-code application. In the beginning we actually had some former colleagues of mine and people that are still consider friends fundamentally validate the idea and that's really when I knew we had something to go off of. Then additionally the market had just taken a turn so I was like okay we've got to go raise money for this this idea and immediately hit the road about seven days after leaving ABL. No kidding. I'd imagine that seven day span of well actually that 12 hour span of between leaving ABL and starting to integrate your your mind was probably running in a million miles an hour. There's a tremendous amount of risk that I think a lot of entrepreneurs have some guts to take on because you're finally taking a risk on yourself as opposed to working in a company where the risk is dispersed throughout the organization as opposed to 100% on you. Yeah exactly and that's that's the something like the time has gone back and apologized to every single one of the founders that worked with previously because I just had no idea how much the obsession drives you and how everything that I was kicking and screaming about while I was working for them wouldn't have probably made the top 75 list of what I worry about now on a daily basis. Yeah that initial there was this tweet that I like to reference I wish I could find it and I wish I could see who it was but you'll never speak to someone dumber than a founder. And I think they were saying an actual pejorative sense. Sure. But the the reality of it is is you're so singularly minded and so focused and so ignorant to the things that are going on around you because it's so all consuming and impossible to get out of your brain. It's like the worst earworm that you've ever had the worst obsession that you've ever had that you can't really think of anybody else. So I think there's a lot of truth to that text or that that tweet. I would like for the folks that are listening to that may not have heard of integrator may not have heard of you yet John I'd love for you to give a quick brief overview of what integrates stands for and what this tool is that you wish you had at all your prior hardware companies. Yeah absolutely so we have built an ultra secure collaborative project management software that of the likes have not really existed previously. I say it's really akin to how Google calendar works or any of these calendar applications work where you have all of this context that you have to deal with on a daily basis even just in your own environment and so you have a calendar application that shows you all of your appointments. But what's really taken for granted is that you have the ability to then take one object out of all of those things in your calendar and place that context directly into somebody else's calendar for them to be aware of that one piece so that you if that calendar invite moves up or down in time you both have that context and see that movement real time. We've taken that concept and applied it to the world's most complex projects and programs. So I think James Webb tells Space Telescope F-35 program. You have hundreds of thousands if not millions of moving parts of scheduled items of tasks and milestones and requirements on any given point with hundreds of contractors that you can never you're kind of playing this this version control volleyball as a customer recently said with sending files back and forth. We take away all of that and allow you to literally work in the exact same schedule but segment out the need to know information as necessary. You know there there have been heads of business development there have been project managers that have worked at these large companies in the past and I'm sure have had the same pain points that you do I'm sure there's been millions of these people. Why wouldn't something like this have existed before you know it like there are PM tools out there but it's everyone's always searching for the perfect tool and I see it all the time in the AMD industry and I'm sure you can speak to probably the complexities that you encountered when trying to build this. Would you say that's a major driver of why this hasn't really existed? Absolutely. Just this morning we had a customer say we tried to build this 30 years ago so we understand how complex and how hard something like this is to build. To be completely frank in the early days we had a competitor sort of say well that was years in say well we could just flip a few SQL queries and have collaboration and we're just like game dream and yeah because of all of the design considerations all of the security constraints all of the you know you flipped the wrong SQL query in a scenario like that where you haven't purpose built this for highly secure environments and you give up data that you shouldn't so all of the design considerations just the architecture that allow for this internal external organizational collaboration on ultra secure environments as so many founders have said before if I knew how hard it was before starting it. I've done it. Yeah there's a funny interview with Jensen Wong when he was asked if he would restart in a video again knowing everything he knows now and he goes didn't even stutter he said absolutely not there's no way I drag myself through the bed of glass that I did to get to this point yeah so I'm sure it's very relatable. Yeah can you speak to some of the elements of integrate that makes it such an incredible tool. Yeah everything is so deliberately designed in the application that it is hard to understand until you get to that point at which you share one part of this massive program with an external stakeholder and then they change a date you either receive approval or you just live see that date change and it clicks with you that you're like oh my god I never have to send a file back and forth I never have to resolve conflicts in a project file I'm not using a tool that is just meant to show people gant charts I am literally using a tool that's meant to do work and to work in directly with all of these hundreds if not thousands of stakeholders that I have to wrangle and collaborate with every single day had the experience called magical or I've been waiting this for this my entire career disability for me to see a whole picture and parse out individual parts of it to external collaborators and have them actively work on it is the real crux of it it seems like to get to that point it probably was I would imagine a trial by fire iterating talking to customer iterate again and do that 10 million times and I'm sure that process is actually still happening today just probably with a fine tooth comb not a chainsaw you nailed it it was pure piss and vinegar from the from the beginning in the first few years anybody that's built software can tell you the stability and performance and reliability concerns and we were well past all of that now and so we have this spectacular tuning in this amazing product enterprise and engineering enterprise that can take the time but building the initial structure with Andrew Sloan and Kelly he got like co-founders was so fundamental because if we didn't get the initial structure in the initial architecture and the initial designs and our concepts of how this was going to work right in the beginning the basics right there's no way we could have this entire organization supporting it now so we go from April 2022 to about seven months ago you had a huge win 25 million dollar contract from the United States Space Force assured access to space within space systems command not only is this a huge win but I think it's also a pivot in how the United States government especially large entities like the United States Space Force are willing to move quickly and your timing was probably key and so congrats I'd love for you to speak to to this win here first and foremost I mean the team killed it and being able to execute faster than any name that have ever seen I think we can't get the government to confirm it but we might have been the fastest to classify environments the fastest kooie networks all this I think it was the fastest phase three ever awarded but also our customers were absolutely spectacular we had this guy lieutenant leason who's since separated but it come from SpaceX and just I mean he was just running through walls to get this this done because he saw the need he saw the vision understood the purpose and how it could be effective for them. Just tore down walls right along with our other stakeholders, Major Allard, and Captain Loveham before them. And so getting the contract, I learned something very early on from a mentor who said, "If the government wants what you have, they will come and get it." And that turned out to be absolutely true. It doesn't mean it wasn't a wildly difficult process to prove, go through all the gates that we needed to get it, but yeah, it's a five-year contract with the Space Force, specifically for launching things, and coordinating that entire process with all of their mission partners. So we're onboarding mission partners weekly, daily, I think at this cadence now, to work directly with them. How do you build a team, well, first off, congrats again. That is a huge win. I remember celebrating with you at an integrate party when they saw it went down. So again, congrats. How do you build a team that's able to keep up with the pace that integrate needs to be able to secure big wins like this and compete with every other PM tool that's been existing for decades, half a century, et cetera? - Yeah. - 'Cause it seems like that's kind of the silver bullet, of being able to move just as fast as possible to make the best possible product. - Absolutely, absolutely. - And a little bit of luck, I love long away. - Sure, yeah, as always. The thing that we learned in the early days, you have to have a relentless focus on the highest bar for talent, humanly possible. And it's really, really, really difficult to do if you care deeply about people, which I can confidently say every single person on this team does. And at the same time, it's absolutely necessary. The difference between someone who holds you back a little bit and amplifies your capability by 10X is astounding. And we have this collection of books like Extreme Ownership and, you know, the hard thing about hard things and all this on the wall. And we kind of learned early on that if you have to tell someone to read one of these books and they don't have that intrinsic motivation or that intrinsic concept of Extreme Ownership where, you know, you're not blaming everybody else for either your shortcomings or what you don't know or anything like this. It's probably too late. And at this stage of the company, it's really hard to take the time to imbue someone with. So hiring people with Extreme Ownership, fundamental intrinsic motivation and drive, and have seen some things or just have a skill set that they can build upon as critical. In a perfect world, that's what every company would want. Right? And so there are a lot of different kinds of character traits in their employees. And taking compensation, those things out of the picture, how do you find people that are willing to do that for you, especially in the days where you don't really have the ethos of X amount of customers to do so? Yeah. It seems like the talent battle is brutal. Yeah. And a lot of people for startups self-select, like there are people that are so hungry for contribution deeply meaningful and building something from nothing that they self-select into out of the larger companies and out of the medium-sized companies, and even the 50 plus person companies, and will seek you out because they want to build something great. And there is a difference between the want and the capability, of course. But what we've learned is being uncompromising on our hiring practice. So it doesn't mean somebody is not a great fit somewhere else. It just means that they might not be a great fit for us. But false negatives are better than false positives in almost every instance, unfortunately. So having extreme conviction in every hire is the utmost importance. And when we haven't had that extreme conviction is when it usually doesn't work out. I can actually speak to that. You hired some really incredible people. At least over the past six months that I've been watching, you have Chris Björger, heading up the Washington office. You have a couple other folks that I know personally that are just incredible people. So I commend you so far. Could you give me a little bit of insight on what the next five, 10 years of integrate looks like, how you want to grow, how you want to scale? And what that North Star dream is that you're shooting at 1,000 miles an hour towards? Yeah. It's probably the most miraculous realization I've had throughout this is that ravenous need to continue to build and progress and get to a certain point as it seems to never be sated. There are a million-- not a million, there are a few points along this journey where it could have said, great, we did it. We've accomplished what we need. I don't mean in a hedonic treadmill sort of way. I just mean in a-- I left ABL because I wanted to see my absolute upper limit. And I think everybody at this company feels the same way. They want to see what the upper limit is. So to answer your question more directly, we want to be not to steal from Timothy Chalmay's speech, but we want to be the greatest in how we want to want. Yeah, we want to serve our customers in such a way that we become an absolute need or continue to be an absolute need, and that every single per service member or service branch is deeply entrenched with us and us with them, because that's another part of integrates that service means the absolute world to us and is a very, very important part of our culture. Do you think that sense of relentless drive forward is intrinsic or do you think it can be taught? Maybe taught is not the right word, but acquired by the people you're surround yourself with. I think it can be acquired by the-- yeah, you are the five people that you spend the most time with in the world. I think it's absolutely true. Have some really spectacular people in my life, not to mention the people that are in the company that drive me forward every day. That's the age-old question, is intrinsic motivation imbued or does it come with the package? And I think there are a lot of contributing factors. And it's sort of like a college application, like what works for one person won't exactly how it'll work for the next. I think the battle for talent and the battle for people that have convention is the hardest thing pressing any company in any industry today. And that truth has probably existed long before I'd been on this earth. So love hearing the take on that one. Yeah. I look back and I think of some of my early bosses who are so patient with me and opportunities where it probably very much looked like I didn't have that intrinsic drive. And I look back at the bosses who are the hardest on me because they knew I could do more. And I think it genuinely imbued me with a different sense of urgency than I otherwise had. So I think it can be trained. Yeah. It's a tricky one. Yeah. John, you've built something amazing here. And I think beyond just the tool, the sense of entrepreneurship and surround yourself with incredible people has been a hell of a journey to watch over the last four years. For young founders, people in the aerospace and defense industry, or just people that are simply interested in maybe pivoting in a direction that you once took four years ago, do you have a piece of advice for them? Just keep going. Companies don't fail founders quit. And I think that can be applied to everything, everything. There are countless times where I thought the absolute hardest thing I'd ever been through had happened. And there was no possible way to keep pushing forward or moving forward. There's always a way. Asper help. And just keep going. Well, John, I'm going to link a bunch of information about you, integrate, and some of your recent wins are by out today. But really appreciate you coming on and telling the story of integrate and looking forward to another four years of incredible wins and scale. For sure. Thanks a lot, Ben. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]