John Conafay Podcast Transcript
John Conafay joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is John Conafay. John Conafay is a U. S. Air Force veteran and the CEO and co-founder of Integrate, building program management software with a systems engineering approach for the world’s most ambitious machines.
Previously, he was an early employee at 3Space Unicorns, head of BD at ABL Space Systems, was one of the first 10 employees at Astranis, and interned at Spire Global early on. He also worked at the office of the CFO NASA headquarters while at Bryce Tech and was the director of business development at Spaceflight.
Well, good afternoon, John. Welcome to the show!
John Conafay: Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. John, I appreciate it. Making the time today hailing out of the great state of Washington there in Seattle. Been there a few times. Love the city. I’m over here in Kansas City, so we got a couple hours difference, but love, love this stuff.
So, John, we’re going to jump right in here. Can you describe your transition from being a Air Force veteran to delving into the aerospace industry and how has your military experience influenced your approach to business and leadership in the civilian sector?
John Conafay: Absolutely. So, I went into the Air Force communication, navigation, mission systems on the AWACS.
Essentially to get a swift kick in the butt and just 1 where it might not have had it growing up and for all intents and purposes. It worked. I went to school shortly after separating in 11 Arizona State University. And a little-known fact about ASU. There are other reputational parts about it, but they have something close to 30 space programs and are incredibly active with NASA and other space programs.
So, I found an organization called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. Which was a club that was part of a national organization while I was at Arizona State and came for the technology, fell in love with the people ended up kind of ripping that the national organization up from its roots and rebranding it with a bunch of friends and raising a bunch of money for the endowment from Jeff Bezos and a few other notable names.
And that’s really how I got my foot pulled in the space industry. And a lot of the drive, determination and grit came from my military experience. And then, you know, went into work for 3 billion space companies as well as a stint at NASA office as chief financial officer and now running Integrum.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I love the back, the backstory there. Truly do. And I think we all. You know, as we talked before, we hit record here, you know, we both served in the military and that’s just I think that is foundationally helps a lot of people really do some great things throughout their career. It really does give you again that foundation.
So, I appreciate the share. I really do. And John, jumping into the next question, you’ve been an early employee at 3 space unicorns. Can you share key takeaways from these experiences and how they shape your entrepreneurial journey, especially with ABL space systems as Tranis and Spire Global?
John Conafay: Absolutely.
So, as I said, joining the space industry after students from the exploration development space. And I’ve had the fortune of working for multiple founders. The first founder that I worked for is Chris Bryce Christensen, who had an outsized impact on my development, both kind of, it was sort of like getting a master class in.
Federal and commercial business development from her and she was starting up a brace space technology. And then then got a call from some friends that knew my work that says. And they were starting a company for geo telecommunication satellites, small geo telecommunication satellites. So.
I was in the single digits’ employee over there after the raised 20M moved up to San Francisco. Work directly for trying to get marking right in the clinical and it really taught me a lot about the balancing act of velocity and experimentation versus perfection. You know, it’s, it’s a lot different in the hardware where things do have to be pretty.
Pretty perfect, especially in the space industry. But you still have to be able to prove that you can move fast, build things incredibly quickly while not completely tripping face planning. So that’s what I learned that astronauts, they put a small satellite up and I think under a year. When I, when I 1st got there, and then put satellite up in less time, sort of record time for satellites.
And then went to a space flight after that, which is a little bit more developed, but ABL space systems after that was in the 50s with regard to an employee counts I think they just raised 40M dollars, had a business development, sold a bunch of rockets to Amazon, Kiper and some other commercial entities.
And that’s really where has a really in the founders of a really spectacular sense of seriousness and duty and what they’re doing. And that really resonated with me coming from the Air Force background and really reflecting back on my time is really affected. How I approach, you know, leadership or management and integrate the things that we’re doing do affect, you know, people’s lives and work habits.
And you have to take responsibility for that and understand that when things break, it is a serious matter that they need to be fixed. So, bringing that that sort of scope to the startup journey has been really important. And then right when I was getting into the space industry, while I was still with SEDS, I interned at Spire Global.
I think there are only about 20 to 40 people and just kind of saw how crazy it was to actually build complex machines. I think they just launched their first 2 satellites. And just open up an office in Scotland and, you know, seeing what it was to wrangle all of these, all these people and everything together really affected me and helped me start to think about building Integrate even 10 years ago.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I love hearing the story of you cutting your teeth at startups and of course, not just any startup as well. You know, there’s a lot that goes into a project like that and to get something successfully launched. And of course, obviously, quality and safety are always key. So, I appreciate the share on that and John, the space industry is known for its high stakes and complex challenges.
We talked about that from your extensive background. What are the most significant challenges you face? And how have you navigated? Yeah.
John Conafay: So, going back to that you know, you only have 1 opportunity to send things to space and you can’t really get them back. Once you create them. So. When you hit it go on a launch.
It’s not only the complex vehicle that is that is being tested fully, but it’s the complex spacecraft on top of it. So, there aren’t outside of human rated systems, like, you know, F1 or airplanes. There isn’t really anything like the space industry and the quality bar has to be extremely high that the level of serious seriousness to the work that you’re doing you’re reminded of every day.
If you’re dealing with very large structures safety and mission insurance is a huge, huge part of the. The story and, you know, it’s, it’s different in software land where, where integrate sits. But bringing that that sense of seriousness and duty to your customers and things like this really resonated with a lot of our team for sure.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I can appreciate that for sure. You know, being in your role both starting out and, and as the CEO of your company, I can only imagine the complexities of running a project like that and keeping the quality as high as it is. So, thank you for sharing. And John, last question of the day.
Your company Integrate aims to build program management software for the world’s most ambitious machines. Can you discuss a specific project or collaboration where Integrate’s software has made a substantial impact? Yeah,
John Conafay: absolutely. So we do a lot of the work, a lot of work with government right now, which probably won’t and it shouldn’t go into.
But on the commercial side of things, we’re building program management software, as you said, the world’s most ambitious machines and whether you’re building. A dishwasher, a satellite, a rocket, or anything in between. It’s all about herding cats. You’ve got, it takes immense workhorses and very, very complex dealings and supply chains to build all of these things.
And I had a pretty severe dissatisfaction with all of the software tools that I’ve used before, because none of them were really built. Or building hardware so the collaborative nature of integrate is meant to make the process of hurting debts and getting these complex systems and processes together is substantially easier.
You can collaborate internally and externally with subcontractors’ customers on the same schedules that you’re actually working with without kind of giving up a ghost on all of your internal.
Essentially hundred to 3000 deliverables, tasks and milestones to coordinate between spacecraft, manufacturer, and rocket. And so when you have 13 to 80 of those on a single launch, it’s really hard to wrangle in spreadsheets and in an asynchronous way. So, Integrate really allows that collaboration to happen much more naturally.
And it was really hard for me to hear from this customer in particular say, you know, we couldn’t have done this in project. We couldn’t have done this without integrate.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. You know, we’re talking high stakes here and. This is just amazing how you can really bring efficiency. To a process or a project like that.
And at the same time, ensure some of those quality checks are there in place for a successful launch of a, of a project or in some cases a rocket. So, thank you. And John, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
John Conafay: So much a pleasure to be on and I look forward to speaking soon as well.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
John Conafay Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
