In this episode, we talk to Jennifer Torlone, co-founder and CEO of Technoedje, about how a strong partner bench helps companies scale under pressure. She shares what it took to move Unical Aviation to the cloud in just 12 weeks, how to keep up with the pace of private equity in an industry where downtime isn’t an option, and why security and data governance have to come before AI.

In this episode, we talk to Glenn Antoine, founder of Venture Strategy Advisors, about what aviation AI experiments are missing: ownership, strategy, and ROI. He shares why organizations should focus less on what technology can do and more on whether they can rely on it, and how piling on tech can get in the way of the problems they're actually trying to solve.

Key Takeaways from this episode:

• Stalled growth is usually an execution problem, not a market problem. Glenn walks through what he looks for first: slow decisions, weak feedback loops between customers and product, manual processes, and unclear ownership. As he puts it, if you have 10 owners, you don’t have an owner, and at some point more effort stops creating more capacity.
• AI multiplies whatever it’s dropped into, including chaos. Glenn explains why companies should start with the business problem they most need to solve instead of asking where they can use AI, and why the whole organization, from product and QA to infrastructure and security, needs to be ready before one team speeds up.
• The biggest AI wins come from augmenting people, not replacing them. Glenn shares how taking repetitive work off people’s plates makes teams more productive while they stay in control of the outcome, and why capturing experienced people’s knowledge in your systems helps new team members get up to speed faster. It all starts with good data.
• Every business needs a flight plan, and it needs to be revisited. Glenn compares running a company to a cross-country flight: plan before you take off, watch for changing conditions, adjust when needed, and lean on advisors the way pilots lean on ATC, while still owning the outcome.

The Department of Defense spent months trying to recruit Mailani Veney, but she kept saying no because she didn't think she had the right background. What changed her mind was realizing they didn't need a defense expert. They needed someone who could bring innovative technology and make an impact fast. Critical decisions were still relying on data that people processed manually, and getting the information together could take weeks. In this episode of Cleared for Takeoff, Ben Tosado sits down with the CEO and founder of Kana Systems to talk about how Kana helps defense teams turn huge amounts of data into faster decisions, why trust matters as much as speed, and what companies should plan for before they start working in the federal space.