They did not win the hackathon. They did not even place. Twenty-four hours in a room in Los Angeles, two hours of sleep, a 3D printer that would not cooperate, and somebody putting dubstep on at four in the morning to keep everyone upright. The judges said "cool, sounds good" and moved on. Ian Laffey posted what they had built, slept eighteen hours, and woke up to millions of views and a phone full of messages. Today that technology flies on the front line in Ukraine.

Ian Laffey is co-founder and CEO of Theseus. They build navigation that lets a drone fly with no GPS at all, which is the single hardest constraint on a battlefield where satellite navigation is jammed across every inch of ground that matters. He had never touched a drone before February 2024, and he met his third co-founder in the hackathon room.

Sam Cook sat down with him in Kyiv for the clearest account yet of how a defense product actually gets proven. Ukraine, Ian argues, is the closest thing to a free market that exists anywhere in defense: units buy what works, at brigade level and below, often with donated money, and there is nowhere to hide. Ship a hundred million dollars of kit here and if it is not good enough it sits in a warehouse and everybody knows. His line: you can prove you can sell a hundred million dollars of something somewhere else, but you cannot prove it works anywhere but here.

He is unusually hard on himself about getting it wrong. On the first visit in November 2024 the drone was launched off a catapult his team had never seen, and the product failed outright. There are three ways to do this, he says, and two of them fail. Fly in for two days and take photographs, which is worse than not coming at all. Come for a fortnight at a time and watch every relationship go cold the moment you leave, because nobody here is sitting by a laptop waiting for your Zoom invite. Or move here. He moved here.

Then it turns to Washington. The three most critical technologies in this war, two of them American and neither of them military: the Chinese commercial electronics supply chain, Starlink, and AI. Why he thinks building interceptors in the United States makes little sense when there is nowhere to get the repetitions. And why SBIR dollars spent on slide decks made in America could instead fund American companies to develop and validate the same technology in the one place it is actually employed.

And the reason he is here at all: a best friend adopted from Ukraine just after independence, a father who told him never to hit first but to hit back as hard as he possibly can, and his own conclusion that it is a terrible circumstance, but in a lot of ways a privilege to get to work on things that matter.

Recorded in Kyiv, October 2026.

KEY MOMENTS 4:58 - "Completely by accident": what Theseus builds 17:49 - His best friend is Ukrainian, and "I'm not a sniper" 19:17 - Jack's adoption, and his father's rule about hitting back 22:49 - 24 hours, two hours of sleep, and dubstep at 4 a.m. 26:44 - "You can't delay your stupid moment" 27:09 - Getting your ass handed to you by the real world 36:40 - Every combat drone in the world is in one place 38:29 - The closest thing to a free market in defense 42:53 - Three ways to come to Ukraine, and two of them fail 45:44 - "I just need to move here" 56:43 - The three technologies deciding this war 61:12 - SBIR dollars for slide decks, and what they could buy here 71:41 - "I'm not putting you in a Signal group chat from California" 76:21 - Price it so Ukraine can field it, and the money follows

Produced by the Borderlands Foundation. Support our work: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org

Why War Matters — Sam's San Francisco talk. Part I is free: https://ukraineforfounders.com/talk/

All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/

Guest: Ian Laffey / Theseus: https://www.theseus.us

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