Hey, it's Greg

This week's guest helped a drone detection company quadruple revenue and grow from a handful of customers to about 50. A surprising amount of that growth came down to deciding which customers to stop chasing.

Her take on focus is below, along with a discount code for Long Horizon next week if you've been on the fence about going.

What's the best opportunity you ever said no to? Hit reply and I'll share the best ones in a future edition.

In this week's edition:

Modar Alaoui’s new book, The Humanoid Economy (Wiley), looks at the economy taking shape around Physical AI and humanoid robotics. It goes beyond the robots themselves to the infrastructure, investment, industries, and workforce growing up around them.

If you’re building, hiring, or investing in this space, it’s a useful map of where the opportunities are forming.

This week I sat down with Melissa Swisher, Chief Revenue Officer at SkySafe.

Melissa has spent decades building go-to-market teams across enterprise software, healthcare tech, and AI. Along the way she went through IPOs and founded Socrates AI, which she later sold.

Since she joined SkySafe, the company has quadrupled revenue and grown from a handful of customers to roughly 50. It got there by narrowing its focus to federal, public safety, law enforcement, and critical infrastructure buyers, then building clear, repeatable buying motions around them.

Some of what we covered:

• Why customers buy outcomes, and why having the best technology isn't enough to win
• What very different company cultures taught her about accountability and performance
• Why startups can die from having too many good ideas
• How networked RF sensing shows where a drone came from, whether it's been seen before, and how it behaves
• Why drone forensics turns airspace data into an investigative tool for law enforcement
• The opening in critical infrastructure, from energy and utilities to oil and gas and data centers
• Why a use case is different from a market, and when technical founders should bring in commercial leadership

If you're a technical founder trying to turn real capability into a repeatable business, this one's worth the listen.

A few active searches that might be relevant to you or someone in your network:

Staff Propulsion Test Engineer | Los Angeles
Tier 1 supplier to global automotive OEMs and leading U.S. aerospace and defense companies. Take propulsion test capability for next-gen turbomachinery and jet engines from an empty test bay to first fire, then lead the test campaigns. Hands-on across structures, high-pressure fluid systems, DAQ, and controls. Onsite, and export-control eligibility is required.

Quality Systems Engineer | Los Angeles
High-precision advanced manufacturer. Lead internal audits, host customer and registrar audits, own system-level CAPA, and drive defect reduction with PPAP, FMEA, Gage R&R, and Cpk. AS9100, ISO 9001, or IATF 16949 experience is a plus. Up to 10% travel, and export-control eligibility is required.

Mechanical Engineer | San Francisco
Robotics company whose cells grind and finish metal parts in real factories. Design fixturing, end effectors, mounts, and guarding, then help deploy and debug cells on customer floors. 2+ years of experience and proof you've built real hardware.

Know someone? Reply to this email and send them our way.

Long Horizon, Encord's first Physical AI Summit, runs October 20 and 21 at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Still haven't grabbed a ticket? The Encord team gave me a discount code to share with my network. Reply to this email and I'll send it over.

If you're already going, let me know that too. I'd love to connect in person while we're both there.

Pentagon Names 4 Directed-Energy Weapons for Counter-Drone Program at U.S. Bases (Defense News)
JIATF-401 picked lasers from AeroVironment, Kord, and Boeing plus Epirus's Leonidas microwave for its first homeland directed-energy pilot, with a wider shoot-off at Dugway in December. It's another sign the federal buyers Melissa describes are moving from evaluation to spending.

Yandex Data Center Shut Down After Drone Attack (The Moscow Times)
It was the third Yandex data center taken offline in a few days, and Russia is now weighing drone defenses for its data centers. Melissa names data centers as one of the next critical infrastructure markets for airspace awareness.

Multiply Labs Raises $75M to Expand Robotic Drug Manufacturing (The AI Insider)
The San Francisco startup automates manual steps in biologics manufacturing. AstraZeneca and Teradyne joined the round, and the company says its robotic clusters cut cost per dose by 74%.

Mecka Raises $60M for Physical AI Training Data (Tech Startups)
Sequoia and Nvidia are among the backers of a company that turns human movement into structured training data for robotics teams. Mecka's bet is to supply the data layer to many robot makers at once.

Thanks for reading!

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