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The MILCOM Founders Podcast

The MILCOM Founders Podcast

Di: Rod Loges
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Championing and celebrating veteran founders through weekly conversations. Each episode features military entrepreneurs sharing their journey from service to success, uncovering real strategies for business growth, capital raising, and applying military leadership in the private sector.2024 One Degree Financial Economia Gestione e leadership Leadership
Episodi
  • Fidel GomezTorres | American Veteran Arts Collective (AVAC)

    Fidel GomezTorres | American Veteran Arts Collective (AVAC)
    Oct 6 2026
    MilCom Founders Podcast, Episode 58: Building Workforce Pathways from Military Service into the Creative Economy with Fidel GomezTorresJoin host Rod Loges and guest Fidel GomezTorres as they explore how a Navy Seabee veteran turned his experience in logistics and community building into the foundation for the American Veteran Arts Collective (AVAC), a nonprofit creating workforce pathways for veterans and military-connected families into the creative economy. Fidel shares how he arrived in Washington, D.C. during a period of significant federal workforce disruption and recognized a gap between the 30,000 veterans living in the district and a $15 billion creative economy that rarely engaged military talent.In this episode:Fidel describes his decision to join the Navy after 9/11, driven by a sense of duty rooted in his immigrant background and a family culture of sacrifice, and how he was assigned as a Seabee builder, a role he had never considered before enlisting.He reflects on the difference between inspiration and motivation as leadership models, explaining how the military replaced the elusive, creative-world idea of inspiration with disciplined commitment, and why that shift shaped how he approaches building an organization today.Fidel shares how his first post-military job as an executive assistant to a fashion CEO in New York City revealed that veterans carry logistics and leadership skills that creative sector employers value but rarely know how to recruit for.He explains the founding of AVAC as a direct response to the wave of federal job losses affecting veterans in the D.C. metro area, and how he identified the creative economy as an underutilized pathway for veteran employment and economic mobility.The conversation covers AVAC's pilot program with the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, where targeting eight to ten participants produced sixteen, doubling the goal and validating both veteran interest in the creative sector and cultural institutions' appetite for military talent.Fidel describes AVAC's three-track measurement system, which captures feedback from veteran participants, cultural partners, and an independent field observer with no connection to either the military or the arts, as a way to surface what those inside the room cannot see.He explains how post-pilot feedback led directly to the creation of AVAC's workforce fellowship, a structured mechanism designed to remove financial pressure from veterans engaged in the program and improve the quality of impact data collected.Fidel addresses the challenge of making AVAC's mission relevant to people who do not identify with either veterans or the arts, arguing that veterans employed across more sectors means more resilient labor markets and stronger communities, regardless of personal connection to the cause.The episode closes with Fidel outlining AVAC's next phase: moving from pilot delivery into capitalization, proving repeatability, and eventually scaling the model to cities with large veteran populations and strong creative ecosystems, including Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.Key takeaways:Discipline is a more reliable engine than inspiration. Motivation means doing what needs to be done whether or not you feel ready, and that consistency is what allows founders to build before the vision is fully proven.Proof precedes scale. Fidel deliberately treated AVAC's first year as a pilot year, resisting the pull toward expansion until the core thesis was validated by real participant outcomes and institutional response.Reserving space for discovery is not optional. The fellowship, one of AVAC's core program features, did not exist before the first pilot. It emerged only because Fidel built in room to learn rather than locking the model down in advance.The field observer role is worth stealing. Bringing in someone with no stake in the outcome and no prior connection to the population or the sector produces feedback that insiders, no matter how thoughtful, are structurally unable to generate themselves.Veterans bring transferable value that the creative economy has not yet learned to recruit for. The gap is not a talent gap on the veteran side. It is a translation and awareness gap on the employer side.Community building starts with genuine curiosity about worlds outside your own. Fidel credits the military with teaching him to find common ground across difference, and names that skill as the foundation of everything AVAC does to connect two communities that have rarely shared a table.Making the business case matters as much as making the mission case. Social impact organizations that can articulate economic returns alongside human outcomes are better positioned to survive funding environments where feel-good is no longer sufficient.Guest: Fidel GomezTorres, Founder and Executive Director of the American Veteran Arts Collective (AVAC), U.S. Navy veteranLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fgt023/Website: https://...
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    36 min
  • Greg Cullison | QWERX, Inc.

    Greg Cullison | QWERX, Inc.
    Sep 29 2026
    MilCom Founders Podcast, Episode 57: Defending the Network from the Inside Out with Greg CullisonJoin host Rod Loges and guest Greg Cullison as they trace a career path from the U.S. Foreign Service through Navy Reserve intelligence, a deployment to Iraq, and into the founding of QWERX, Inc., a cybersecurity software company that authenticates every device on a network every three seconds using one-time encryption keys derived from randomness in nature rather than mathematical algorithms.In this episode:Greg's career started in the Foreign Service, where he had his first overseas posting at 23. The predictability pushed him toward graduate school in public policy, then into government consulting, and eventually a direct commission into the Navy Reserve Intelligence program in 2002.During his deployment to Iraq with the 18th Airborne Corps, a colonel gave Greg six weeks of top cover while he built trust with Iraqi counterparts on a sensitive capacity-building program. Despite zero visible progress early on, that quiet backing made the mission possible, and Greg earned a Bronze Star for the work.The origin of QWERX was a letter in Greg's mailbox informing him that his SF-86 data was among the 22 million records stolen in the Office of Personnel Management breach. The root cause, static credentials manually rotated twice a year, was still not being fixed.QWERX authenticates every device on a network every three seconds, issues a one-time encryption key, discards it, and repeats. A stolen credential becomes useless before an attacker can act on it.Greg explains the threat quantum computing poses to current encryption, including the "harvest now, decrypt later" strategy nation-state adversaries are already using, and why QWERX's approach is quantum-resistant without relying on any algorithm.Greg learned QWERX was a finalist at the RSA Conference Launchpad competition the same day he found out payroll could not be made.For veteran founders, Greg recommends using AI for research and marketing, reading actual books instead of listicles, and staying honest about whether the idea is actually working.The question Greg wished Rod had asked: how do you shut it off? He credits learning drums and coaching youth soccer as the practices that force genuine presence and keep him from running in reactive mode all day.Key takeaways:Leadership of self comes before leadership of others. If your own mindset and conduct are unstable, what you reflect to your team will be too.The difference between failure and giving up matters. A wrong turn you can course-correct from is not the same as walking away because it got hard.Early adopters and mainstream customers are not the same people. Spending energy trying to convince skeptics before you have proof points is usually the wrong focus.Static credentials are still how most attackers get in. The cybersecurity industry has added complexity around a problem it has not fixed at the root.Time is the one resource you cannot recover. Intentional time blocking, even when it breaks down, forces you to start the day with a clear objective rather than handing your schedule over to whoever sends the first email.Guest: Greg Cullison, Co-Founder and CEO of QWERX, Inc., former Foreign Service Officer and U.S. Navy Reserve Intelligence OfficerLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregcullisonWebsite: https://www.qwerx.coGreg Cullison is the Co-Founder and CEO of QWERX, Inc., a cybersecurity company built on a direct challenge to the industry: static device credentials are not a security problem to be managed. They are a design flaw to be eliminated. QWERX replaces static credentials with dynamic keys that rotate every few seconds and vanish after use. There is no credential to steal, harvest, or exploit. Even if an attacker could capture a key, it already no longer exists. The company's patented infrastructure has been validated at the RSA Conference, demonstrated live over Starlink, and analyzed by a U.S. Government Lab to be quantum-proof.Greg began his career as a Foreign Service Officer before joining the Navy Reserve through a direct commission. He served as a Reserve Officer in the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence and earned a Bronze Star for counterterrorism work in Baghdad. He holds a graduate degree in public policy.The MilCom Founders Podcast champions and celebrates military community business founders. Each episode brings practical insights from successful veteran entrepreneurs.Sponsored by One Degree Financial www.onedegreefinancial.comHow ready is your business for what's next? Take the Ready Founder Assessment: https://bit.ly/4xp7jnqWant to support veteran entrepreneurs? Donate to the Dick Loges Veteran Entrepreneur Scholarship Fund: https://bold.org/funds/dick-loges-veteran-entrepreneur-fund/
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    47 min
  • Lindsey Chrismon | Oply

    Lindsey Chrismon | Oply
    Sep 22 2026
    MILCOM Founders Podcast – Episode 56: First Female Little Bird Pilot to AI-Powered Homeownership with Lindsey ChrismonJoin host Rod Loges and guest Lindsey Chrismon as she traces a path from a childhood picnic at West Point to co-founding Oply, a venture-backed AI-powered home management platform built to give homeowners the kind of proactive guidance their cars already give them. Lindsey became the first and only woman in US Army history to fly the AH-6 Little Bird with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, flew Apaches at Fort Bliss before that, and served as West Point's fourth female First Captain. She and her husband Gabe launched Oply out of Harvard’s Innovation Lab after Gabe’s restoration company revealed how many catastrophic home losses could have been prevented with basic, timely information.In this episode:How an 11-year-old Lindsey attended a family picnic on West Point's grounds and decided on the spot that it was the only school she would apply toWhat Branch Night looks like at West Point, how aviation slots are distributed based on order of merit, and the relief of opening an envelope with the right answer insideFlying the AH-64 Apache for three years at Fort Bliss before assessing for the 160th, and why the shift to training on the Lakota helicopter is creating real challenges for candidates who want to fly the Little Bird todayWhy leadership matters more in the civilian world than in the military, because the people following you can simply quitHow Gabe's water, fire, and mold restoration work revealed that roughly half of catastrophic home incidents could have been prevented if homeowners had known what to do and whenThe car dashboard analogy that drives Oply's product logic and what a home-specific maintenance platform actually doesTesting marketing messages for free through organic social media before spending money, and how millions of monthly views helped identify a winning content strategy to put budget behindOply's two-pronged go-to-market approach, direct to homeowners and through realtors, builders, inspectors, and mortgage companiesRaising a $1.2 million pre-seed round led by Hivers and Strivers, and how a mentor's dinner party led to a pitch in front of 13 Harvard deans and Bill Ackman, who investedThe three things Lindsey's mentor Reza Satchu says founders must demonstrate when fundraising: authenticity, inevitability, and momentumWhy pitching investors whose thesis does not match your sector is a guaranteed no, and how recognizing that earlier would have saved significant timeThe current focus on improving 60 to 90 day user retention, and why a leaky funnel at that stage makes every marketing dollar spent on acquisition nearly worthlessHow Lindsey and Gabe keep work and marriage separate by using Slack for business and texting for personal communicationCooper's difficult first 15 days in the NICU after inhaling meconium at birth, and how faith carried the family through that uncertaintyThe veteran-specific resources Lindsey recommends, including Warrior Rising, Hivers and Strivers, and the West Point Entrepreneurship Roadshow, which is open to all veteran foundersKey takeaways:"The Mom Test" principle applies: talk to as many homeowners, customers, or users as possible before you build. People who love you will tell you your idea is great, and that tells you nothing.Organic content is a free testing environment. Find what works before you spend money scaling it.Matching your pitch to an investor's actual thesis is not optional. If their portfolio does not include your sector, no amount of polish will close the deal.You cannot fail if you do not quit, but that only holds if you are honest about what the data is telling you along the way.Retention is where growth strategies either prove out or fall apart. Acquiring users who do not come back is just an expensive way to empty a bucket.If you are not the kind of person who can find something worth showing up for in the hard middle of building a company, the outcome you are aiming for will not be enough to keep you moving toward it.The veteran network is not just a nice-to-have. It can be the lead investor in your pre-seed round, the room where you meet your biggest check writer, and the community that keeps you from feeling like you are building alone.When co-founders are also spouses, keeping work disagreements data-driven and free of spousal emotion is not a soft skill. It is an operational necessity.Guest: Lindsey Chrismon, Co-Founder and CEO of Oply, West Point graduate and the Academy’s fourth female First Captain, Army Apache pilot, and the first and only woman in US Army history to fly the AH-6 Little Bird with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. MBA from Harvard Business School, where she launched Oply out of the Harvard Innovation Lab. Named to the Inc. Female Founders 500.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsey-danilack-chrismon/Website: https://www.oply.app/Lindsey Chrismon is ...
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    43 min
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