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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
  • Maury Argento | Immediator

    Maury Argento | Immediator
    Nov 10 2026
    MilCom Founders Podcast, Episode 62: Building a Neutral Settlement Engine for Personal Injury Law with Maury ArgentoJoin host Rod Loges and guest Maury Argento as they explore the path from Army Chem Corps and Signal Corps officer to legal tech founder. Maury, a US Army veteran and CEO of Immediator, shares how two decades of building technology systems in medical devices and aerospace led her to create Prism, a data-driven platform that tells both sides of a personal injury case when settling makes sense, before the legal costs spiral past the settlement itself.In this episode:Maury traces her path into the Army through an ROTC scholarship, including the moment classmates in Princeton, New Jersey questioned whether she would actually walk on stage to accept it, and her answer that it was a free education.Maury describes being assigned to Chem Corps against her wishes and how that assignment turned out to be fascinating, leading her to deploy to the Middle East in September 2001 and stand up one of the first biological decontamination centers in theater during Operation Enduring Freedom.Maury shares one of her earliest lessons in communication: rolling a CRT television into a gymnasium to show 800 junior officers a 1950s training film of a rabbit being exposed to a nerve agent and then revived, capturing the room’s full attention before explaining detection and protection protocols.Maury reflects on a senior officer’s practice of ending phone calls the moment someone walked into his office, and how that philosophy of putting people first shaped how Maury thinks about leadership and team building today.Maury introduces what she calls the Venn diagram of leadership: placing people in roles where they excel, then building the team so those areas of expertise overlap. She uses two current Immediator team members, a data scientist and a developer pursuing his master’s in data science, as a working example of that model.Maury explains the problem Immediator solves: 95 percent of personal injury cases never go to trial, yet both sides continue building cases and racking up costs long after they are already aligned on a settlement range, because they have no way to know alignment exists.Maury walks through how Prism works: a shared platform where both sides communicate, exchange files, and answer confidential questions, which the system uses to generate a probability-of-imminent-settlement score and, when alignment is high, enable direct negotiation inside the platform.Maury describes the go-to-market approach, including an active pilot with a top insurance carrier and ongoing conversations with five of the top 10 carriers. A member of Immediator’s sales team, with about 25 years in insurance sales, says he has never seen this kind of traction from insurance companies.Maury addresses the core trust challenge: because one side often assumes the tool favors the other, Immediator charges a fixed fee per case, takes no percentage of the settlement, and positions itself as fully neutral. Getting that message across remains the company’s biggest growth obstacle.Maury outlines the product roadmap beyond auto injury: expansion into property claims, employment and severance disputes, and eventually family law.Key takeaways:If you want someone’s attention, meet them where they are. Lead with something compelling, then deliver the information. The lesson lands only after the audience is engaged.A senior officer Maury served under ended his phone calls the moment someone walked into his office, because a person in front of him with a real situation mattered more than the call. Maury still subscribes to that people-first approach.You don’t need to know everything your team knows. Put people who love what they do in roles where they are at their best, then encourage and support them.People who are at their best in different roles, and who overlap with each other, make a team much more effective. Maury’s example is a PhD data scientist paired with a developer who is studying data science, a combination she calls phenomenal.Maury started a project on her own to see what she could do solo and learned that an expert who really knows something is far more effective than trying to learn it all yourself.Maury values building tools that help everyone involved and take from no one. Immediator charges a fixed fee per case and does not benefit from the settlement amount.When two sides distrust each other, a tool in the middle has to prove it is neutral. Maury says plaintiff firms invited into the platform often resist at first, then say they get it once the neutrality is explained.Explaining a new product one case at a time is an inefficient way to grow. Maury is reaching out to law school mediation clinics and judges, and a PhD on her team is writing white papers on how the tool works.Guest: Maury Argento, CEO of Immediator, U.S. Army veteran and former officer who managed communications infrastructure and operational...
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    37 min
  • Nicolas M. Chaillan | Unbiased Headlines

    Nicolas M. Chaillan | Unbiased Headlines
    Nov 3 2026
    MilCom Founders Podcast, Episode 61: Building an AI-Run Newsroom After a $250 Million Exit with Nicolas ChaillanJoin host Rod Loges and guest Nicolas Chaillan as they talk about his time as the first Chief Software Officer of the US Air Force and Space Force and what he has built since. After selling Ask Sage to BigBear.ai for $250 million, Nicolas started Unbiased Headlines, a free news organization run entirely by AI agents, with no ads and no human editorial review.In this episode:Nicolas describes starting Ask Sage in January 2023, shortly after ChatGPT came out, to bring generative AI to the Pentagon. The company earned FedRAMP authorization and Impact Level 5 accreditation in six months, which he says was unheard of for a small business, and BigBear.ai bought it in December 2025 for $250 million.He explains how he came to government work with no military background, not even knowing the ranks. After serving as chief architect at DHS, he reached out to Pentagon leaders on LinkedIn and brought DevSecOps into the Department of Defense.As the first Chief Software Officer of the Air Force and Space Force under Dr. Roper, he helped create Cloud One and Platform One, and he says hundreds of companies now do business with the Pentagon because of that work.He shares why AI scared him for the first time in January, after he saw tools like OpenClaw automate complex work from end to end. He has been coding since he was seven and says he hasn’t written a line of code since.Nicolas talks about how his three daughters run their own company, Quest Books, using AI agents to write picture books about their family trips. They take orders through Shopify and handle the packing and shipping themselves.He walks through how Unbiased Headlines works. AI agents pull from 110 sources and run each article through an 18 to 20 step fact-checking process, publishing about 150 articles a day with no human review.AI agents also built the company’s iOS and Android apps in one day, and they launched a daily podcast that went from idea to live in 48 hours.Nicolas breaks down the cost. He estimates the same work would take at least 150 people and a $10 million payroll, and he runs it for about $10,000 a month in AI tokens.He explains the sponsor model that keeps the site free with no ads. Companies pay for two sponsored stories a month, but the same AI agent writes them with no bias, and the sponsor can’t change the content.He tells founders that generalists who learn to direct AI agents now have about one to two years before the field gets crowded. He also explains why he thinks blue collar trades are safer from disruption than white collar work.He talks about his book, Replacement, which he wrote to give people practical tools to still have a job in five years.Key takeaways:Generalists have an edge right now. If you know a little about many parts of the business, you can direct AI agents across all of them.AI agents only do as well as the person directing them. Nicolas could push his agents further on coding than on ad buying because he knew coding better, so keep learning the areas where you’re weakest.The barrier to building software is close to gone. If anyone can copy your idea in ten minutes, it isn’t a business yet, so build around something you understand deeply.You may not need to raise money. Nicolas says a founder can now build a business for a few hundred dollars in tokens instead of spending months raising a seed round.The window is short. Nicolas thinks founders have about one to two years before everyone is building the same things and it gets much harder to stand out.It’s hard to stay hungry once money isn’t the reason. What keeps Nicolas building is caring about the problem, which for him is media bias.Guest: Nicolas Chaillan, Founder of Unbiased Headlines and former first Chief Software Officer, U.S. Air Force and Space ForceLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolaschaillan/Website: https://unbiasedheadlines.comNicolas M. Chaillan is a serial entrepreneur, cybersecurity expert, and former senior U.S. government technology leader. He served as the first Air Force and Space Force Chief Software Officer under Dr. William Roper, bringing DevSecOps, continuous Authority to Operate (c-ATO), and modern software practices across the entire Department of Defense.In January 2023, he founded Ask Sage, Inc., the first generative AI platform to achieve FedRAMP High Authorization for government teams. Ask Sage was acquired by Big Bear.ai in 2025 for $250M, and Nicolas served briefly as Big Bear.ai’s CTO before departing in February 2026.In 2026, he founded Unbiased Headlines (UnbiasedHeadlines.com), an independent news organization built on one promise: Facts. Not Spin.Previously, he served as Special Advisor for Cloud Security and DevSecOps at the Department of Defense and Special Advisor for Cybersecurity and Chief Architect for Cyber.gov at the Department of Homeland Security.Nicolas founded 14 companies...
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    37 min
  • Sileon Murray, Jr. | SURV7X, LLC

    Sileon Murray, Jr. | SURV7X, LLC
    Oct 27 2026

    MilCom Founders Podcast, Episode 60: Rebuilding Hiring in Software with Sileon Murray Sr.

    Join host Rod Loges and guest Sileon Murray Sr. as he shares how a kid who sold Krispy Kreme by the box at twelve became a retired 20-year Air Force veteran and CEO of SURV7X, LLC. Sileon explains how unpaid invoices forced him to lay off half his team, and how that moment led him to rebuild his company’s hiring process in software as VAETHRYN, an AI hiring platform starting with trucking and other blue-collar industries.

    In this episode:

    • Sileon taught himself guitar at eight or nine by pulling fishing line tight and using it as strings, because his family couldn’t afford an instrument.
    • At twelve he took prepaid Krispy Kreme orders at $2.50 a box and sold extras for $3.50, buying them wholesale for $1.25.
    • He joined the Air Force hoping to fly, following his older brother, and started in Security Forces before fighting his way into the cyber career field.
    • As a government contractor, SURV7X tracked expiring contracts months in advance and had talent lined up, so vacancies were filled within hours.
    • When companies and partners stopped paying their invoices, Sileon had to lay off half his team and realized software could run the same process his people had.
    • With VAETHRYN, a truck driver can interview at 2 a.m. and be through onboarding within 72 hours, at a time when Sileon says fleets are short about 40 percent of the drivers they need.
    • The intelligence system inside VAETHRYN is named Orita, after his mom.

    Key takeaways:

    • Strong delivery won’t protect you from customers who don’t pay. SURV7X was filling vacancies within hours, and unpaid invoices still forced Sileon to lay off half his team.
    • Look at what your people do the same way every time. Sileon’s product came from automating a process his team already ran by hand.
    • Match the advisor to the decision. Sileon keeps about 18 mentors, taking business questions to business people and life questions to someone whose life he would trade for.
    • Make room for quiet. Sileon says the workforce intelligence inside VAETHRYN came to him in silence, not from a mentor or a book.
    • Trust what you see coming. Sileon believes veterans have a rare ability to spot what’s ahead and act on it, even when the timing isn’t perfect.

    Guest: Sileon Murray Sr., CEO of SURV7X, LLC and creator of the VAETHRYN AI hiring platform, retired 20-year U.S. Air Force veteran

    • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sileonmurraysr/
    • Website: https://surv7x.com/

    Sileon Murray Sr. is a retired 20-year U.S. Air Force veteran and the CEO of SURV7X, LLC. His first taste of entrepreneurship came at twelve, and SURV7X is his seventh business. He built VAETHRYN because candidates for driving and skilled trades jobs rarely wait. If nobody responds, the best of them are gone within 48 hours.

    VAETHRYN is an AI hiring team that works around the clock. Its 7XHire module sources and qualifies candidates at any hour and follows up in seconds instead of days, so interviews get booked before a good candidate goes cold. The platform is now in pilots with companies that hire drivers and skilled trades, and SURV7X is a finalist for the Utah Business Innovation Awards.

    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.com

    Take our Financial Clarity Self-Assessment. 16 questions. You’ll know where your weak spots are and what to work on first: https://bit.ly/4xp7jnq

    Want 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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    38 min
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