You're funding an eighteen-month plan against a customer who decides budgets three years out.
Nobody's lying about the timeline. The two calendars just don't touch.
That gap is where defense-tech companies die — usually with the technology working, the users asking for it, and nobody anywhere holding both the authority and the money to buy it.
Your strongest advocate is the one person who can't buy anything.
The people who can buy don't know you exist, and their budgets were settled two years ago. So the enthusiasm is real, the meetings are real, and none of it is funded.
What's missing has a name. Permission is two things at once: someone official has agreed, in writing, that the gap you fill is real — and there is money set aside for it, of the right kind, in the right year. Hold both and somebody over there is finally allowed to buy what you built. Hold one, and you have a pilot with a ceiling on it.
Then it can be taken back. Congress cuts the line. A program is restructured, deferred, or quietly raided to pay for something louder. The contract isn't the finish line — it's the midpoint, and the second half is the half everyone stopped watching.
So there are only two questions here worth paying anyone to answer. Does permission exist? And will it hold?
The solicitation is the last page of a book someone else wrote.
By the time a document reaches you, seven other functions have already decided what a winning answer looks like. Whether a program owns the requirement. What kind of money it is, and what year it can appear. Whether the price still works when you multiply it by the whole fleet. How it integrates into a baseline you don't control. How it gets proven, against endpoints you didn't write. Who sustains it for twenty years. Whether your books survive the audit that arrives with growth.
Contracting is what turns all of that into a contract that is legal to sign, and contracting goes last. Answer that document perfectly and you can still never get paid.
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The system isn't hostile. It's indifferent.
One of you pays for this answer in runway. The other doesn't.
If you're building it
I managed the Army’s $655M robotics portfolio and a $754M weapons program. I made the funding decisions your proposals are written to — from requirements to budgeting to project management — that is why I can shape the path your technology takes, not just describe it.
If you're funding it
Your diligence priced technical risk and competitive risk. The company will die of acquisition risk, and acquisition risk is not one variable — it is eight or more. A board that sets commercial revenue targets on a company whose buyer has no approved budget until 2029 has just killed it with good intentions, and will describe the result as an execution problem.
Two numbers change the model. Time to obligated dollar — the day money legally becomes yours, which is not the day you win and is emphatically not the day someone expresses "funding interest." And transition probability: the odds a prototype becomes a funded program, conditioned on how many of the eight seats currently have a written answer.
Either way, the same person
A fund may sign the invoice. The founder is never the subject of the memo. If you've watched an advisor talk about a portfolio company the way a fund talks about an asset, you already know why that matters — and why the founder will take my call.
Two questions. Two engagements.
The Permission Assessment
Fixed scope, one time. Does permission exist for what you've built, and if not, can it be made to? You get a written verdict traced to documents you can open yourself: which program could own the requirement, whether a line exists and in what year, whether the price survives being multiplied by the whole fleet, and which of the eight seats currently has no answer at all.
It can end in no. That is not the failure case — it is the cheapest thing I do. Winning the wrong market costs more than losing the right one: a year and six figures of engineering aimed at a customer who lacks the authority to buy.
The Permission Retainer
Standing, monthly. Permission you already hold is the asset most likely to be taken back while you are busy delivering. Every period ends in a dated artifact: what moved against your program since the last one, and the documents it moved in. Cuts made during Congressional review, money moved to another program, work pushed into a later budget year, requirements rewritten, a competitor's line appearing where yours used to be.
If nothing moved, the report says so and names what was checked. Vigilance is not a deliverable.
Anyone can hold an opinion. These cost me money.
I don't sell access, though my relationships can help.
I don't write proposals.
I decline work I don't believe I can materially help, and I refer it elsewhere.
I carry method across relationships. Never information.
I don't claim an outcome I can't trace to a document.
I don't cover every government seat. Nobody does. I'll tell you which two will kill you this year.
I work with no more than eight clients at a time.
I read the defense budget for a living.
Before that I made the decisions your proposals are written to: a $655M Army robotics portfolio, and a major weapons program with a $754M budget carried through development, test and fielding. Then I did it from your side — deep-tech product management that turned an expiring contract into a three-year, $10M-plus extension by aiming the technology at the customer's most critical need.
Of the multiple seats, I held two and worked with all the others. I assess the others, and I'll tell you which is which before you ask.
A deliberate fit.
We should talk if
You've built something real and you need to know whether anyone is authorized to buy it.
You have a roadmap and you want public money aimed at it rather than chasing it.
You hold an award and you can see there is no more money planned behind it.
You're underwriting a defense-tech company and your model has no line for acquisition risk.
We shouldn't if
You want a proposal written against a solicitation that already exists.
You want an introduction, and you want it to be the deliverable.
You want the answer to come back yes.
Start With a Conversation
An hour, free, and it is a fit test rather than a sales call. You'll leave knowing whether there's a real path — including when the answer is "not yet," which is the answer more often than anyone in this business admits. Tell me where you are, even if you're still in ideation. I read every inquiry myself.