Season two of Mission Possible closes with Priya Dalwadi, B/CORE's CFO and a finance leader who refuses to be the calculator.

Priya grew up watching her father build a CPA practice now in its forty-fourth year, with clients still flying across the country to see him. The inheritance shaped her belief in finance as a human discipline. She brought it with her to GW, into Lockheed Martin's financial leadership program, and through her first GovCon rotation in pricing where she sat in the back of every room and had to learn to use her voice. She was the lead pricer on a fifty million dollar program win, the biggest award in her division at the time.

In this episode, Priya talks about the early setback that forced her to speak up, the art of subcontractor negotiation, how she builds high-trust teams, and why pushing back on low-value work is a leadership move. She tackles imposter syndrome by admitting what she does not know. She frames AI and automation as tools to make finance faster, never as replacements for human judgment. Her advice to young finance professionals is simple: open mind, patience, grace, and a network you build one shoulder tap at a time.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:48 Meet Priya Dalwadi
01:33 The CPA's Daughter
03:16 First GovCon Rotation
04:33 Pricing Explained
05:56 Sitting in the Back of the Room
09:06 Negotiation and Relationships
10:44 Building High-Trust Teams
15:08 Imposter Syndrome
17:35 AI in Finance
19:27 Advice and Workload
21:58 Payoff and Closing

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Senior technologist Jake Huffman grew up in a North Carolina county with one stoplight, got rejected from architecture school, and fell into engineering because someone told him he wasn't an artist. A sophomore materials science class changed his direction. A steel plant nearly scared him out of metallurgy. A Coast Guard repair center gave him helicopter parts to build with no experience. And a graduate school math problem introduced him to writing code. Every turn came from the same instinct: go one level deeper than the job asks you to.

In this episode, Jake talks about why boring systems fall apart, what overconfidence looks like from the inside, and the moment he realized it was more important for his team to function well than for him to be right.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
01:01 One Stoplight, One Wrestling Team
02:50 Rejected by Art School
06:42 White Hot Steel and Walking Away
08:11 Building Helicopter Parts for the Coast Guard
11:03 Craft Over Mission
15:04 When Systems Don't Fit in One Head
18:34 The Blind Spots of Big-Picture Thinking
24:44 Team Function Over Being Right
27:41 Scar Tissue
30:16 Learn the Old Stuff First
32:58 Build Your Own RAG
34:44 What AI Should Scare You About
36:40 Wrap Up

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Troy Scoran is a technologist at B/CORE who built his career by raising his hand before anyone asked. He grew up in a western Pennsylvania town of two thousand people and three stoplights, got recruited off LinkedIn, and moved to Tysons Corner to join a fifteen-person startup with one condition: don't box me in.

Chad and Zil brought Troy on to talk about what it looks like to build a career through initiative. The conversation went somewhere honest. Troy described how saying yes to everything at a small company gave him a view of the entire business that most people his age never get. Now he's figuring out where to go deep and who to bring with him.

The three of them land on something worth hearing: the people who raise their hand early are the ones who get to choose what they become later.

This episode is for anyone who has been the youngest person in the room and earned their seat by showing up. For practitioners building range and wondering when to specialize. And for anyone mid-career who is shifting from learning everything to leading others through it.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome from the Plane

00:44 Peruvian Chicken and First Impressions

01:16 How Troy and Zil Connected

04:12 Three Stoplights and Sixty Graduates

05:58 Saying Yes to the Move

06:58 Corner Apartment in Tysons

08:13 Sports, Coaching, and Strategy

12:37 Keep Me in Pennsylvania

14:17 Imposter Syndrome as Butterflies

15:52 Taking Production Down Overnight

17:35 You're Already on the Team

19:48 The Trade-Offs of Range

21:57 JSON Meets SQL

22:55 Full Stack Mentality

24:53 From Taker to Multiplier

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.