Tony Sewell:
00:06
Good day, welcome to Insiders. I'm Tony Sewell and I'm here with my mate Rob Ruyak. How's it going Rob?
Rob Ruyak:
00:11
I'm great Tony. How are you? Good to see you.
Tony Sewell:
00:14
Good. Excited about this episode today.
Rob Ruyak:
00:17
I am very, very much.
Tony Sewell:
00:20
Yes. So just a little teaser for everyone. So we're going be meeting Lucy Hoag today. She's the founder and CEO of Violet Labs, a SaaS company that's integrating various software tools to create better efficiency in the development process, the manufacturing process for space. So she's got an amazing background.
Tony Sewell:
00:47
She's worked at Google and Waymo and Lyft and Amazon Kuiper. Just an absolutely impressive background.
Rob Ruyak:
00:58
Fantastic, courageous Yeah.
Tony Sewell:
01:02
Nice. And it was a really good episode last week too, with Jana Spruce. And actually it was funny, we had all this talk about space suits and not a day after we recorded the interview, there was a really great article that came out, and we'll share a link to it, about the company that actually won some of the early contracts to develop the spacesuit. And that was Playtex, the bra and girdle manufacturer, which is just absolutely fascinating story.
Rob Ruyak:
01:40
Yeah, it was really cool. So Tony, when you sent that to me and I read it, I couldn't help but think about how great an example it was back in the 60s even, where it wasn't a traditional government contractor that actually won the work to do that. I I can't remember the name of the company that actually did win it. It was the prime, but Playtechs actually as a sub delivered the design and actually implementation, the build out of those suits. And it just reminded me a lot of what government's been trying to do for years, you know, and what a lot of us talk about.
Rob Ruyak:
02:17
And then, and I think especially now, biggest, I think one of the biggest topics of conversation, especially in the DC area, is how it's not going to necessarily be those traditional companies all the time. They need to win the contracts and do the work. It's going to be these non traditional defense contractors, commercial companies, software companies, hardware companies, you name it, that now might have easier access to government. It's still going to be tough, but I think we're going to see more frequency of it, which is super exciting.
Tony Sewell:
02:49
Yeah. And for folks, if you didn't hear the episode, it sort of came up where she was talking about when you go into the fabrication or in the sewing room where the space suits are put together and talking about STEM and STEAM, the introduction of art into these learning areas. So it just shows how different disciplines and functions can be involved in space, which it's really interesting.
Rob Ruyak:
03:24
Yeah, it was cool. There was even somewhat of a design thinking approach they took. They put it on, I think someone had to wear it and they had to play football
Tony Sewell:
03:33
in it. Football. Yeah. And he played it for he played it for a a couple of hours just to test out
Rob Ruyak:
03:37
how American football. Pretty sure it was American football. It was American football. It's still a great story.
Tony Sewell:
03:41
Aussie rules. It was pretty funny, though, and as I'll I'll post the lingo they talk about when they were doing the bake off and they had a couple of the other big defence primes there. Obviously, the Playtechs, they ultimately won the spot on the program in their own right, but some of the other defence companies, the helmet blew off one the suits. Just incredible.
Rob Ruyak:
04:05
It's cool. It's definitely worth a read. We'll add the link to it. It's great.
Tony Sewell:
04:09
Cool. So what else is catching your eye this week, Rob?
Rob Ruyak:
04:12
I think the thing that was most interesting to me, and I think this was about a week ago, was the announcement from Cerberus Capital that they recently raised a $75,000,000 fund to invest in companies across biotech, transportation, energy, AI, and defense. Yeah. And I believe the CEO was from In Q Tel, which is CIA's venture arm in the government. So why did I like that? I think it's because a lot of people have been wondering when is private equity, when is venture capital actually going to start, in full force thinking about investment theories around defense tech in supporting the country, both national security and defense.
Rob Ruyak:
04:59
I think a lot of them, you know, it's it's it's tough. You know? It's it's it's tough to work through. We've talked about this in previous episodes that it's tough to work with government. It's tough to understand the contracting around it.
Rob Ruyak:
05:09
But I think the opportunity right now is really, really good. Number one, because I think we're starting to see these large recompete contracts such as the next generation C2 contract potentially going through DIU, which means it's going to be awarded potentially to some non traditional government contractors with the government contractors. You look at that and you get excited because our government defense, now can hopefully access these great innovations. And I think with the rebalancing in defense across the globe, especially with The US, I think we're gonna see even more focus on investment over in Europe and other parts of the world as well, but in defense tech. So it's it's super exciting, I thought that announcement was was basically validating a lot of hypotheses people have been having the last couple weeks or a couple months.
Tony Sewell:
06:03
That is very interesting. I was listening to Chad Anderson from Space Capital recorded a a podcast and released it yesterday. They put out a quarterly report to see what they're seeing in the market. They were talking about how we're moving into a situation where the economy is going to be challenging for start ups. And I think they see some potential headwinds for start ups pursuing the commercial space, but real opportunity on the defence side.
Tony Sewell:
06:41
Some of these defence technologies that are going to be overlapping into these big programs like Golden Dome and space situational awareness, I think it was on this one they were talking about as different governments and the US government start thinking more about defensive capability, but defensive capability in space as well. Definitely moving into an interesting period.
Rob Ruyak:
07:11
Yeah. No, it's great. I I think complementing what our defense industrial base does really, really well is going to be exciting to see because I think the intersection of both is what's going to be the most powerful and frankly, most beneficial to the country and the warfighter and our partners and allies.
Tony Sewell:
07:32
Very good. All right. Well, I think that's probably a good time for us now to bring in Lucy. It's going to be a really fun discussion, hearing from someone that's come from the big names and taken that leap into entrepreneurship and starting a company that's been super successful. So how about we bring her in?
Rob Ruyak:
07:54
Let's do it. She's great. Can't wait.
Tony Sewell:
08:03
All right. Welcome back, and welcome Lucy Ho from Violet Labs.
Lucy Hoag:
08:08
Great to be here. Thanks
Rob Ruyak:
08:09
so Hey, Lucy.
Tony Sewell:
08:10
Thanks so much for coming. We really appreciate it. When were starting up this idea, you were one of the very first people to come back quickly and say you were keen to support us. So, really looking forward to the discussion today.
Lucy Hoag:
08:23
You're making me sound desperate.
Tony Sewell:
08:25
I didn't mean
Lucy Hoag:
08:26
to sound desperate.
Rob Ruyak:
08:27
I'm just
Lucy Hoag:
08:28
joking. Super excited to be here. Thanks very much.
Tony Sewell:
08:32
Yeah, awesome. So before we get in, perhaps you could just give us a little bit of a primer on Violet Labs and who you are.
Lucy Hoag:
08:41
Yeah, let's do it. I'll actually start with the second half of your question. Typically, do that just to give some context. My background is aerospace engineering. Spent most of my career on the hardware side, building really fun stuff and helping others build fun stuff.
Lucy Hoag:
08:58
Quit that about three years ago, three and a half, probably should start saying four, to build Violet Labs, which is a software startup. And what we are building is tackling the problem of when you're building hardware, you have all these different software tools you rely on, like typically maybe dozens, and they don't talk to each other. It's this very fragmented kind of disjointed workflow. And so our platform Violet solves that with no code connectors to all these tools and creates this really powerful home base for engineering teams. We're excited for that to hopefully transform how stuff is built.
Tony Sewell:
09:37
That's awesome. And you've got such an interesting background. I know you studied aerospace engineering, but you've worked at the tech royalty. Got Waymo, Lyft, Google, Amazon. You worked at USC, part of the Viterbi Lab.
Tony Sewell:
09:59
I mean, it's an incredible background. I'd just love to hear a little bit about that. What have been the experiences that really kind of shaped your early career and sort of how you ended up here?
Lucy Hoag:
10:11
Yeah. I feel super fortunate. It's almost a pretty embarrassing bingo card. Effectively, it all started in high school. I did want to be an astronaut, so I chose USC for that reason and studied astronautical engineering.
Lucy Hoag:
10:27
That got me into the Information Sciences Institute. We have a small space engineering research center, so building CubeSats in your early 20s. That was awesome. And first piece of good luck is it brought me to DARPA out of grad school because of some of the research we were doing. So right away thrust into the government side of the space world, which was pretty fascinating and actually just loved it.
Lucy Hoag:
10:55
I adored, frankly, kind of how important you feel. Like, work is truly, really important and you're read into these programs that just can't believe. You almost have a sense of responsibility to the country that you're getting to work on. So that was super cool. I was there for about three years.
Lucy Hoag:
11:15
Second piece of really good fortune, around that time, Google was starting their first satellite constellation. It was actually not Skybox, it was a secret program at the time. Was sub imaging like Skybox. It was doing internet from space. You can imagine some modern day kind of equivalence of that.
Lucy Hoag:
11:35
Yeah. That may have bits and pieces from that program. So that brought me to Google, was like, I still remember the day I've had the on-site interview and called my mom, like, I can't believe it. It was just like a dream. Working there was even more of a dream.
Lucy Hoag:
11:50
The interesting part is right when I joined, they canceled this satellite program. It was a huge program and truly aerospace engineers from all over the country are now at Google and we're like, Okay, what do we do now? So it's just the beginning of a really interesting journey. What a lot of us did was the program turned into a drone based internet program. So we were building a high altitude, long endurance glider basically that had the ability to serve internet.
Lucy Hoag:
12:20
We tested that out in really cool ways at Spaceport America and drones. That was canceled. I started in space, then I went to air.
Tony Sewell:
12:31
Did this lead to Lune?
Lucy Hoag:
12:33
Part of that led to Loon. Yeah. So that was an X, actually a totally different part of Google. This was even pre alphabet. So we were in X, access and they were in X.
Lucy Hoag:
12:42
Lots of duplication at Google. When Ruth Porat came in, she really did a great job of being like, hey guys, we got to stop blowing cash. So it got a lot less fun. But a lot of that went to Loon. A lot of us went to actually wireless last mile.
Lucy Hoag:
12:55
So now I'm like terrestrial. And from there, I actually directly went into Waymo. So kind of interesting how it all came to be, but self driving cars are sort of like a satellite on the ground. It's kinda cheesy, but it's sort of true in many different ways. And so I had this detour away from space, which I had always wanted to to be in through air breathing stuff and then Waymo for self driving.
Lucy Hoag:
13:22
Then I went to Lyft, which is really cool because it was basically the opposite of my Waymo experience. At Waymo, you're with this gigantic team, super brilliant. Most of the cars were like already built, they're already testing. Lyft, we got there, there's 30 of us and this was called Level five, the group, and we had to start from scratch. And it was so cool.
Lucy Hoag:
13:42
Like, all right, what do we do first? Yeah. And to end the diatribe, after a few years there, I wanted to get back to aerospace. And so I went to Amazon Kuiper and, yeah, it didn't last too long before the itch to build Violet Labs became too strong. And why I'm here.
Rob Ruyak:
14:02
That's a great story, Lucy. Tell us a little bit more about what inspired you to start Violet Labs, and what is it exactly? Tell us a little bit more about it.
Lucy Hoag:
14:14
The inspiration for the company and the product is a pretty classic founder story in a lot of ways, basically born out of frustration. I feel really lucky to have worked at these world class institutions and you imagine you get there and they're building rockets and self driving cars, it must be the best software in the world. And it's the total opposite. In fact, was shocking to me how consistently, through all these different places and over all these years, it actually got worse in some ways. I don't mean to disparage Kuiper.
Lucy Hoag:
14:48
Amazon is a fantastic place and I adore AWS. But because they have this very narrative driven work style, it really made the lack of connectivity of your software and really your data, your engineering data, it made that very acute. So we viscerally felt the frustration. Yeah, so that's what primarily led me to quit my job and just stop complaining and see if I could build the software that I wanted. So again, speaking of like the problem that Violet is solving, it's connectivity, it's
Tony Sewell:
15:23
kind of
Lucy Hoag:
15:24
that connective tissue between all these software tools. If you imagine a hardware development life cycle, you start with ideation, requirements management, get into CAD, mechanical and electrical, into product life cycle, MES, purchasing. These are all totally siloed and the state of the art is truly to hire small armies of overpriced people like me that are basically human network switches for all this data. Instead, Violet is endeavoring to build no code connectors that any dumb hardware engineer like myself can use. You don't have to know what an API is or what a SQL query is.
Lucy Hoag:
16:02
Bring that data into Violet. It's structured into our own purpose built ontology and that allows some of the basics, which is like, I kind of describe it as the base of the Maslow's hierarchy for a hardware engineering team. You just get your data in one place. You can see it in a single pane of glass. You can report on it in an easy way and sync it between these tools.
Lucy Hoag:
16:25
And from there, the cool part is it opens up this whole world of really powerful features that are suddenly pretty easy because your data is already structured, clean, in the same place.
Rob Ruyak:
16:37
Yeah. That's awesome. So is it wrong to describe this as a one of the buzzwords you hear all the time out there, like digital thread, as an example? Or or is that is that the same kind of concept? Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
16:50
Yeah. I can I can throw so many buzzwords at you? You'll be surprised. Definitely digital thread is one of them. Even go harder on the buzzword.
Lucy Hoag:
17:00
We kind of call it like an organic digital thread within Violet or maybe an organic model based system engineering. Another couple of ways to describe it is like Zapier, but for hardware, you know, data federation. But, yeah, essentially, what you're doing is linking all this data in one common place.
Rob Ruyak:
17:21
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I think a lot of the work that at least I know Tony and I have done over the years, this is absolutely a very much needed capability across both older enterprise customers as well as you know, the new companies that are even born on the cloud, right, as an example. Yeah. So how have you been I think the hope that Tony and I have are that we give folks like you a voice to those that are, you know, kind of at the precipice of wanting to start their own company.
Rob Ruyak:
17:53
You know, so one of the things we wanted to ask you was, so now that we understand what Biot Labs is and kind of your passion and the problems you were trying to solve, how did you actually validate it, you know, as you were, feeling more confident that this is something that actually could be a capability that would be wanted and needed and you could sell it in the market?
Lucy Hoag:
18:13
Yeah. An important piece for sure. To be honest, a big part of my validation was kind of cheating. It was through personal experience and with all my colleagues and peers and coworkers knowing from these years of experience that they would need something like this or even more like they deserve something like this. So a little bit of a blind jump there, blind faith, but immediately upon starting the business, went into customer interviews and discovery and followed the mom test, which someone introduced right away and I hadn't heard of it.
Lucy Hoag:
18:52
Basically, can't just go and have a customer interview with your friend at Toyota and say, Hey, I'm building this cool product. It's going to do this, this and this. Does that sound cool? Would you like it? Like, of course, they're gonna be nice.
Tony Sewell:
19:04
They're gonna say, yeah. Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
19:05
Yeah. Sure. Right. You you you can't do that. You almost have to flip it on its head and
Tony Sewell:
19:09
Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
19:10
Ask what they need, ask what their problems are, how much they would pay to have it fixed. So we tried to do a lot of that.
Rob Ruyak:
19:16
So why is it the mom test?
Lucy Hoag:
19:19
It's not like mom your yeah. Good point. I guess I kinda lost over that. You know, your mom's gonna try and be, like, uplifting and, like, yeah, honey. This this sounds super cool.
Lucy Hoag:
19:27
I'm so proud of you. I don't know. I I didn't read the whole book. So
Rob Ruyak:
19:31
Yeah. No. I I I was half joking. I wanted I wanted you to to because I yeah. I mean, moms are I love my mom.
Rob Ruyak:
19:41
She's very supportive in everything I do. But she's, I don't know, I just wanted you to clarify it.
Lucy Hoag:
19:48
Yeah, I guess so. Leave it at
Rob Ruyak:
19:50
that.
Tony Sewell:
19:50
She's not gonna tell you you've got a bad idea.
Lucy Hoag:
19:53
There you go.
Rob Ruyak:
19:53
Exactly. Thank you, Tony. I'm glad that you Yeah, yeah.
Tony Sewell:
20:00
I think about sort of my own desire for an entrepreneurial journey a lot, and the self confidence and courage to do that, to leave a massive, massive company and the compensation and all that that comes with it must have been kind of daunting. I am interested though, were there things that were harder than you expected? Haven't started a company, so I don't know the full were there things that you thought, That's a slam dunk, but were actually really hard?
Lucy Hoag:
20:38
Oh man. Almost every single part of it was harder than I thought.
Tony Sewell:
20:43
Did start on your own or did you have a co founder?
Lucy Hoag:
20:47
I started technically on my own at first and then quickly was talking to a fellow Kuiper employee and she was kind of excited about similar things. We decided to start together. So the two of us started and I think for the first year or so, we're doing it together and she was fantastic. We ended up being quite similar, I think, in role. And so it really wasn't a good co founder pairing.
Lucy Hoag:
21:14
Interestingly, that is one of the pieces that is way harder than you think. And everyone warns you. This is the number one thing you have to get right first and most people fail. And that was so true. And I found through that, I think, you know, whether this is a whatever this says about my personality, I think I'm probably meant to be a solo co a solo founder.
Lucy Hoag:
21:33
I don't think I really would have done well in pair or with three of us.
Rob Ruyak:
21:39
Why would you say that? Why would you say that, Lucy? I'm curious.
Lucy Hoag:
21:46
I'm really greedy for data. It's maybe one way of putting, like, perfectionist, maybe control freak, but it's more I wanna understand how every piece works. I wanna understand why we're making the decisions we are. Mhmm. I'm also kind of, like, living and breathing this every second of every day.
Lucy Hoag:
22:05
It's sort of a lifelong kind of of thing for me. Goes back to my graduate research, which was on something vaguely similar. It was building a a tool for software design. So yeah. I don't know.
Lucy Hoag:
22:17
It it was just difficult, and I I'm sure it was difficult for her as well. So
Rob Ruyak:
22:22
Yeah. No. I hope you weren't offended by me asking. I'm super interested in how teams come together and how you can optimize the efficiency of a team and a group. But I've never started a company.
Rob Ruyak:
22:40
It's interesting, sometimes we meet these companies that are founded by two people or more, and you kind of wonder because you're trying to figure almost everything out. That's tough. Yeah. It's really messy, you know? If you do it in a larger company, there's rules of the road, there's role definitions, there's ways people operate and collaborate typically.
Rob Ruyak:
23:00
There's a culture already established, you know, with maybe even like a loose social contract, you know, there's something there. You know? So I find it really interesting how people start companies and how they can try to figure out how to have compliments, you know, and get it off the Because it's almost like everything you do as a small company getting started has to click, you know, because there's so many questions and so many unknowns. So, it's just interesting.
Lucy Hoag:
23:29
I I love that you use the word efficiency and and optimizing. That that too is all I think about all the time because it's all about how lean can you build this product and this machine. And by definition of having two founders at the helm, there's going to be some overlap and there's going to be some communication latency and it just, it didn't work for me. Yeah, it has to be as efficient as possible or it's just not going to Yeah.
Tony Sewell:
23:58
Awesome. One of the things we actually talked to, one of the earlier interviews, We were talking to Laura Crabtree from Epsilon. You probably know Laura.
Rob Ruyak:
24:09
I do.
Tony Sewell:
24:09
She's fantastic. Example of someone who's building software for a very hardware centric industry, which is space. It was super interesting how you talked about that, that's what you grew up in on the hardware side. Historically, and still today, businesses have been really slow to adopt cloud native process. What's been your experience from that respect, talking to these companies and having them start thinking about this more software centric mindset?
Lucy Hoag:
24:50
Yeah, it's a great question. It's pretty fascinating. I think there's a few reasons that feed into why aerospace and defense and probably some other highly regulated industries weren't able to adopt cloud until much later and as a byproduct weren't able to innovate on their software until much later. A lot of that is that regulatory aspect. So you simply can't use something on the cloud if you have ITAR and EAR compliance export control constraints.
Lucy Hoag:
25:23
And interestingly, in the last decade or so or less, that's been fixed. We have these technologies of GovCloud and Azure and GCP then. And that provides this foundation. And then it's a little bit of a unlock for the rest of the infrastructure to start building up and those kind of picks and shovels that actually make it a reasonable lift for these companies to use some of that. So I think that's how we saw the timing of it and strategized a bit about that.
Lucy Hoag:
26:04
But we also There's a few things that were really important to me when we started. And one of them was, again, maybe this goes back to I'm pretty greedy, but kind of anticipated that in order for us to have the diversity and the volume of customers that we'd need to be sustainable, it probably couldn't be just cloud. That just wasn't going to work. So from day one, we made a lot of pretty serious upfront investments and they were costly in terms of time. One was we are super flexible to all the security compliance needs you could have across the spectrum from nothing to fully air gapped.
Lucy Hoag:
26:42
So we are fully we're cloud native, and based on AWS, we have a completely identical platform that's AWS GovCloud, and identical to the user, I should say. And in addition, we architected everything from the ground up truly from day one to, sorry, in advance, to use as few, almost zero AWS services as we could. Because if you want to go be on prem with someone who's not on that, it's this huge lift. So we're fully cloud agnostic and we can be seamlessly deployed on prem and air gapped environments. And we're working hard on our compliance journey.
Lucy Hoag:
27:20
We have SOC two Type two working on CMMC and we'll get to hopefully FedRAMP someday. So yeah, almost by definition, you just have to be so many different things in order for it to serve a wide net of customers. And we are actually today kind of reaping those rewards. People are really surprised to hear, oh, you're on cloud, but you can also we can do either one. And it's a really valuable strategy, it turns out.
Rob Ruyak:
27:47
Yeah. I think it is a hard decision, especially for small companies, figure out what kind of optionality can I provide my because you have established companies, you have younger companies, all of whom could benefit from what you provided with Violet Labs, but they might have different backgrounds that they take even into a small company and familiarity with environments that they're used to doing? They come from a large defense contractor, a lot of folks in this industry are coming out of NASA, for example, right? So they all kind of bring with them their own experiences and understanding of how to use these different platforms. What is the target for Violet Labs with respect to your customers?
Rob Ruyak:
28:33
I heard you say FedRAMP, so I'm assuming that you have systems integrators that serve government and government itself. What are your target customers? And what might that mix look like or what does it look like?
Lucy Hoag:
28:45
Yeah. If you can share. Yeah. Our ICP, profile is pretty broad. If you're not getting my pattern here, making a bit of a broken record.
Lucy Hoag:
28:58
It's a bunch of different segments. So the primary is definitely folks building complex hardware products. And today our kind of sweet spot is for sure with smaller startups to medium sized startups to small businesses. But interestingly, if again, you picture like a spectrum and maybe this is small startups, commercial, and then, you know, DOD heavy primes, the most interest we get is on the total opposite sides of the spectrum and they have completely different need, but like the principle is the same. And then within that, there's multiple verticals as well.
Lucy Hoag:
29:35
So, we're mostly aerospace and energy and then broader defense, as well as medical and universities. That gets into kind of the system engineering. Pretty interesting. I did not anticipate that. We wanted to be very domain agnostic and we will have over time more and more verticals coming in, robotics, consumer.
Lucy Hoag:
29:59
But energy, we have a lot of energy customers, which is great. Think a lot of them are probably ex SpaceX and ex aerospace people.
Rob Ruyak:
30:07
Yeah. What what kind of what kind of energy companies? Because it sounds like the way you describe it is you've you've designed it to be agnostic to maybe support Yeah. High volume manufacturing as well as, you know, highly customized but low volume manufacturing, it sounds like. In energy specifically, kind of companies are the names, but what are they building?
Rob Ruyak:
30:29
What are they manufacturing?
Lucy Hoag:
30:31
Yeah. I can't share all the names or even details because I might give it away, but we do have some nuclear energy customers that we have on our website and that we can talk about. Actually a lot of these, our sweet spot again is more low volume. So when you get to that high volume manufacturing, there's less of a need for what we have, but it's the maybe low volume, high margin, high complexity, thousand line assemblies. And a key part of it is they're moving really fast typically.
Lucy Hoag:
31:01
That's kind of the important piece. That's where it's interesting on the government side. You typically don't have that time to market pressure, but you do have a lot of legacy tools that really need some connectivity.
Tony Sewell:
31:15
Can you give a I'm just looking on your website now. I mean, you see the logos of all of these super familiar software platforms that are used for a bunch of different tools. Can you give an example of a particularly impactful integration and what it means to the person who's executing the role in terms of, is this about saving cost, time? Obviously there's a big efficiency part of it, but I'd love to just hear a little bit more about that.
Lucy Hoag:
31:48
Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely cost savings and time savings. Definitely introduces risk mitigation earlier on, but it also introduces totally new features that you really would have a hard time doing otherwise. So I'll explain kind of what I mean. So for a couple of our earliest customers, our wedge and how we started to kind of monetize and really get interest was specific actually and pretty, pretty small.
Lucy Hoag:
32:15
It was getting data from a legacy PLM into your MES or a purchasing system or any of these downstream tools. So for example, team center, we're a big, we're a Siemens partner and that's been a huge piece of our product since day one. It's pretty difficult to integrate with Teamcenter. Very few companies do it. So we have the ability to get data out of this kind sorry, of archaic system, and that includes files.
Lucy Hoag:
32:44
Once that's in Violet, you have this much nicer front end to have any of your purchasing team or folks in the shop floor access these items. The licensing is fine. We're not taking away licenses that otherwise would have been purchased from Siemens because they aren't going be doing authoring of CAD models and NX or anything like that. It gets this data much more accessible in Violet and then they want it pushed to an MES, like ION or Fusion, or maybe their ERP, like NetSuite. And it's at its simplest, just populating inventory.
Lucy Hoag:
33:17
And otherwise, this is something that is manual, which is this drives me absolutely bonkers. We have all these engineers at these fast moving teams building incredibly important stuff, they're literally copy pasting part numbers. So huge waste of time, hugely inefficient.
Tony Sewell:
33:37
And really prone to mistakes too.
Lucy Hoag:
33:39
Very prone to mistakes. A lot of human in the loop. So just by doing that, it's this huge unlock. We are, you know, the best thing you can hear as a founder, as a small company is they're like, we would be scared shitless if you guys went away. Like, please don't go away.
Lucy Hoag:
33:54
We don't know what we do. So it's really solving pain, which is great. So, and then quickly just to add on to that. So, you know, that's the easy part or not easy. That's the kind of simple part.
Lucy Hoag:
34:03
Point A to point B data transfer. Now you've got your NetSuite POs, your manufacturing execution system, work orders and POs, your parts, your files, all in one system. They're structured in such a way that they share the same part numbers, revisions, we have full version history. So we have the ability to, if you're familiar with the tooling out of SpaceX, there's a very popular tool called Warp Drive that feeds their entire development. And what Violet provides is a Warp Drive like capability with the added power that it can be any system.
Lucy Hoag:
34:36
So it can be team center or it can be windshield or it can be duro. And you type in a part number or an assembly number and you get everything across all of these apps in a nice report that you can filter and sort, configure, and it'll update as things update in the source end. So that one has been really popular with a lot of our companies who are like in that design and build and purchase stage and they're purchasing and have inventory adjustments and tests across you know, a lot of different parts, and it's, a pretty powerful tool now for them.
Rob Ruyak:
35:09
To your point around the customer being scared, about, if you went away, It made me think of some of these larger companies I used to work with probably fifteen years ago. Some of the work I did was around just complexity reduction, like looking at architecture and just trying to determine what would be a future state architecture to actually have a more integrated data story, you know, and be able to actually query information across a whole supply chain as an example.
Lucy Hoag:
35:40
Love that.
Rob Ruyak:
35:41
And I'll never forget, there was one meeting and had a technical one of my colleagues was like very deep with database design. And the first question he said is, so what does your data dictionary look like? And I remember this guy was at the table and he's like, where's Jim? Jim? Jim?
Rob Ruyak:
36:05
And and and Jim I I swear, it was a couple days later, but Jim enters this meeting. Jim was a data dictionary because he had worked at this company for thirty five years.
Lucy Hoag:
36:15
Obsessed with the story.
Rob Ruyak:
36:16
And he was, yeah, and he was used to writing SQL queries and understanding where all the data was. You know, I remember we asked him to write an entity relationship diagram, you know, if you're familiar with all these data models, just got up on a whiteboard and he started drawing stuff. It like, please, I hope Jim does not get hit by a bus because this supply chain, you know, visibility is not going to happen. So it just reminded me of that, which funny enough, I think, is a real concern with a lot of companies that do have a lot of their assets, IT assets, tied up in a lot of legacy IT environments with people that really don't program in Fortran anymore. Or frankly, funny enough, a lot of people aren't really designing relational databases anymore.
Rob Ruyak:
37:08
Right. So I think there's opportunity for companies like in what you all offer to provide that visibility and also I think some risk reduction in using more future state software platforms for some of this stuff. It's pretty interesting. Love that. Yeah.
Rob Ruyak:
37:28
I hope Jim's still around if you're out there, Jim.
Lucy Hoag:
37:32
Jim, we're hiring.
Tony Sewell:
37:35
So Lucy, just to kinda tie this all tie this sort of back. What what is what does the next three to five years look like for Violet Labs? What's your vision for the company?
Lucy Hoag:
37:47
Yeah, it's going to be exciting. It's obviously a really exciting time with everything going on with AI. Interestingly, thinking of entity relationship diagrams and ontologies, we're almost at this point where you can see a future where you can skip all that and have that purely driven by AI and Gen AI. We think it's going to be really helpful that we do have all this data structured. So we're obviously continuing on for that.
Lucy Hoag:
38:15
But yeah, the kind of North Star that we see for Violet and to this day is something I say in every demo, is for this to be the home base for your engineering team. The first tool you log into in the morning, so you get to the office and whether you're a mechanical engineer or supply chain or you're a manager, it's where you have all of the activity from your team across purchasing operations. It can be also a launch pad if you are a power user and some other tool to go there. I think this will really transform even what the day to day life for a hardware engineer is like. Obviously, that efficiency will be huge.
Lucy Hoag:
38:58
The network effects you get from having all your users immersed in this data will be huge. Similar to your point, Rob, about migration from legacy systems or trying to get legacy data digitized. There's also a need to just have things centrally because even if that person's there, you don't always ask Jim or you don't always know where to look. So many errors and inaccuracies and things happened in my career that I'm like, why don't we just have a place where you can look this up? So that's definitely how I picture us when I picture a modern engineering team.
Lucy Hoag:
39:38
And of course, from there, if you imagine having all of this data from very disparate different tool sets and it's structured and it's over time, it has a full version history. There's wildly powerful things you can do from an AI perspective. And we obviously have some cool plans around that starting from the very simple, which would be using open source foundation models, having a chatbot kind of capability, so a Violet assistant that can help you with your requirement generation. From there, actually training on your data, so you get this customer centric chatbot. So it's like, Hey, Violet, tell me about this design change.
Lucy Hoag:
40:17
What prompted that? Or three years ago, X, Y, V. And even from there, we picture this kind of wild capability where you can even train among customers. So obviously a difficult thing from like an IP perspective, from an opt If you kind of had this opt in methodology, you could have a couple or many different organizations who are building similar things. You could build this super foundation model based on that data and it becomes potentially this really valuable national security asset.
Lucy Hoag:
40:55
That's something that we might end up needing even though today you would never see Boeing and Lockheed training models on their data combined. We might not always have the luxury of saying no to that.
Rob Ruyak:
41:07
So Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
41:09
Little out there. But
Rob Ruyak:
41:11
Well, if you build a chatbot, I have one request. Can you call it Jim? And and I'm pretty sure
Tony Sewell:
41:17
Ask Jim.
Rob Ruyak:
41:18
That's Ask Jim. Yes. There you go. Yes. There you go.
Lucy Hoag:
41:21
You have my word. That's awesome.
Rob Ruyak:
41:25
Lucy, this was really fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for the time. Thank We love to end these, and we're testing this out a little bit. But we like to end it with that might tell everybody a little bit more about you on personal side. So here's the question.
Rob Ruyak:
41:43
What's your favorite space movie? Could be scientifically accurate or completely and utterly ridiculous.
Lucy Hoag:
41:50
Obviously, a very hard question for a space dork. So my first answer is gravity. I just will always remember the feeling of the scene where Sandra Bullock hits the ground and it's like, oh, thank God. Like this phenomenon that we see and feel every day. You're just like feeling it.
Lucy Hoag:
42:09
So yeah, I loved that one. A big Sandra Bullock fan. I'm also an elder millennial, I kind of grew up on space balls. Does anyone
Tony Sewell:
42:18
It was funny you mentioned that because I scrolling on Instagram today and the guy that was one of the The guys combing the desert. Talking about He was talking on Instagram about, I've been in 200, I've got 200 entries on IMDB everyone, all everyone remembers is I'm the guy that said, We ate brown shit.
Lucy Hoag:
42:46
I love it.
Rob Ruyak:
42:48
I think yeah. But he was in Police Academy too. He was famous actor. Yeah. My Michael I'm trying to remember his last
Tony Sewell:
42:54
Is it Winslow?
Rob Ruyak:
42:55
Yes. That's who it is. Yeah. He was also in Police Academy. He he was great.
Rob Ruyak:
42:58
He used to do all the sound effects and everything. I was gonna say that was one of my favorite movies, Number one, because it was super interesting, but it's also had a good memory. My my dad, who absolutely just loves that goofy type of comedy. I think, like, Leslie Nielsen was one of his favorite actors of all time. Like, all the, like, the naked guns and everything.
Rob Ruyak:
43:20
I remember he took me to go see Space Poles in a movie theater. And I excuse me. I think he I think he started laughing right when the ship started from the very beginning all the way to the end of the movie. Amazing. And I think to this day, if I were to watch it with a McGetty, it would still do the same thing.
Rob Ruyak:
43:37
But that movie is hilarious. I think I could probably quote 90% of it.
Tony Sewell:
43:41
Is that your favorite, Rob? I actually prepared this week. I wasn't prepared for the question last week.
Rob Ruyak:
43:46
It's better when you're not prepared, by the way, Tony. Just listen to the previous sessions. Was yours? I love it.
Tony Sewell:
43:53
Event Horizon.
Rob Ruyak:
43:55
I haven't seen that.
Tony Sewell:
43:56
It came out in the early 2000s. It had Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill. It was about this they created this ship called the Event Horizon that disappeared. And then this crew find it, and it was able to create a black hole and go through space, but it it ended up going into, like this other dimension was like hell or something. And then it came back, and it was like this.
Tony Sewell:
44:23
It was it gave me nightmares for ages. But I
Rob Ruyak:
44:25
Sounds uplifting.
Tony Sewell:
44:26
Yeah. It's such a it's such a cool movie. If it it is really it's a it's a cool movie if you're into that sort of stuff.
Rob Ruyak:
44:31
We could probably talk about this forever, but I like it. Innergelda was really good, and I I think it was the
Lucy Hoag:
44:37
Close second.
Rob Ruyak:
44:38
Was it the tenth anniversary, I think? They they just they re released it, in the movie theaters again. It was great. Yeah. I went and saw it recently, but but yeah.
Tony Sewell:
44:47
Well, Lucy, thanks so much for joining us. This was a really interesting discussion. If people would like to learn more about you and Violet Labs, where can people find you?
Lucy Hoag:
45:01
Violetlabs.com is the number one spot. We've got a place for you to sign up for a demo. It'll likely be myself or someone on the team. You can sign up directly. Sign up for our newsletter there, and we promise not to spam.
Lucy Hoag:
45:17
LinkedIn is also a great place. I think it's Violet Labs Inc. If you'd like to shoot us a note, hellovioletlabs dot com. We'll answer Thanks,
Tony Sewell:
45:27
Lucy. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Please rate and review. If you also want to follow us on LinkedIn or YouTube, because we're also producing a video as well. Other than that, great to see you both and look forward to seeing you all in a couple of weeks.
Tony Sewell:
45:46
Thanks.
Lucy Hoag:
45:47
It's a lot of fun. Appreciate it. Cheers.
Rob Ruyak:
45:48
Bye bye.
Lucy Hoag:
45:49
Bye. Bye bye.
00:06
Good day, welcome to Insiders. I'm Tony Sewell and I'm here with my mate Rob Ruyak. How's it going Rob?
Rob Ruyak:
00:11
I'm great Tony. How are you? Good to see you.
Tony Sewell:
00:14
Good. Excited about this episode today.
Rob Ruyak:
00:17
I am very, very much.
Tony Sewell:
00:20
Yes. So just a little teaser for everyone. So we're going be meeting Lucy Hoag today. She's the founder and CEO of Violet Labs, a SaaS company that's integrating various software tools to create better efficiency in the development process, the manufacturing process for space. So she's got an amazing background.
Tony Sewell:
00:47
She's worked at Google and Waymo and Lyft and Amazon Kuiper. Just an absolutely impressive background.
Rob Ruyak:
00:58
Fantastic, courageous Yeah.
Tony Sewell:
01:02
Nice. And it was a really good episode last week too, with Jana Spruce. And actually it was funny, we had all this talk about space suits and not a day after we recorded the interview, there was a really great article that came out, and we'll share a link to it, about the company that actually won some of the early contracts to develop the spacesuit. And that was Playtex, the bra and girdle manufacturer, which is just absolutely fascinating story.
Rob Ruyak:
01:40
Yeah, it was really cool. So Tony, when you sent that to me and I read it, I couldn't help but think about how great an example it was back in the 60s even, where it wasn't a traditional government contractor that actually won the work to do that. I I can't remember the name of the company that actually did win it. It was the prime, but Playtechs actually as a sub delivered the design and actually implementation, the build out of those suits. And it just reminded me a lot of what government's been trying to do for years, you know, and what a lot of us talk about.
Rob Ruyak:
02:17
And then, and I think especially now, biggest, I think one of the biggest topics of conversation, especially in the DC area, is how it's not going to necessarily be those traditional companies all the time. They need to win the contracts and do the work. It's going to be these non traditional defense contractors, commercial companies, software companies, hardware companies, you name it, that now might have easier access to government. It's still going to be tough, but I think we're going to see more frequency of it, which is super exciting.
Tony Sewell:
02:49
Yeah. And for folks, if you didn't hear the episode, it sort of came up where she was talking about when you go into the fabrication or in the sewing room where the space suits are put together and talking about STEM and STEAM, the introduction of art into these learning areas. So it just shows how different disciplines and functions can be involved in space, which it's really interesting.
Rob Ruyak:
03:24
Yeah, it was cool. There was even somewhat of a design thinking approach they took. They put it on, I think someone had to wear it and they had to play football
Tony Sewell:
03:33
in it. Football. Yeah. And he played it for he played it for a a couple of hours just to test out
Rob Ruyak:
03:37
how American football. Pretty sure it was American football. It was American football. It's still a great story.
Tony Sewell:
03:41
Aussie rules. It was pretty funny, though, and as I'll I'll post the lingo they talk about when they were doing the bake off and they had a couple of the other big defence primes there. Obviously, the Playtechs, they ultimately won the spot on the program in their own right, but some of the other defence companies, the helmet blew off one the suits. Just incredible.
Rob Ruyak:
04:05
It's cool. It's definitely worth a read. We'll add the link to it. It's great.
Tony Sewell:
04:09
Cool. So what else is catching your eye this week, Rob?
Rob Ruyak:
04:12
I think the thing that was most interesting to me, and I think this was about a week ago, was the announcement from Cerberus Capital that they recently raised a $75,000,000 fund to invest in companies across biotech, transportation, energy, AI, and defense. Yeah. And I believe the CEO was from In Q Tel, which is CIA's venture arm in the government. So why did I like that? I think it's because a lot of people have been wondering when is private equity, when is venture capital actually going to start, in full force thinking about investment theories around defense tech in supporting the country, both national security and defense.
Rob Ruyak:
04:59
I think a lot of them, you know, it's it's it's tough. You know? It's it's it's tough to work through. We've talked about this in previous episodes that it's tough to work with government. It's tough to understand the contracting around it.
Rob Ruyak:
05:09
But I think the opportunity right now is really, really good. Number one, because I think we're starting to see these large recompete contracts such as the next generation C2 contract potentially going through DIU, which means it's going to be awarded potentially to some non traditional government contractors with the government contractors. You look at that and you get excited because our government defense, now can hopefully access these great innovations. And I think with the rebalancing in defense across the globe, especially with The US, I think we're gonna see even more focus on investment over in Europe and other parts of the world as well, but in defense tech. So it's it's super exciting, I thought that announcement was was basically validating a lot of hypotheses people have been having the last couple weeks or a couple months.
Tony Sewell:
06:03
That is very interesting. I was listening to Chad Anderson from Space Capital recorded a a podcast and released it yesterday. They put out a quarterly report to see what they're seeing in the market. They were talking about how we're moving into a situation where the economy is going to be challenging for start ups. And I think they see some potential headwinds for start ups pursuing the commercial space, but real opportunity on the defence side.
Tony Sewell:
06:41
Some of these defence technologies that are going to be overlapping into these big programs like Golden Dome and space situational awareness, I think it was on this one they were talking about as different governments and the US government start thinking more about defensive capability, but defensive capability in space as well. Definitely moving into an interesting period.
Rob Ruyak:
07:11
Yeah. No, it's great. I I think complementing what our defense industrial base does really, really well is going to be exciting to see because I think the intersection of both is what's going to be the most powerful and frankly, most beneficial to the country and the warfighter and our partners and allies.
Tony Sewell:
07:32
Very good. All right. Well, I think that's probably a good time for us now to bring in Lucy. It's going to be a really fun discussion, hearing from someone that's come from the big names and taken that leap into entrepreneurship and starting a company that's been super successful. So how about we bring her in?
Rob Ruyak:
07:54
Let's do it. She's great. Can't wait.
Tony Sewell:
08:03
All right. Welcome back, and welcome Lucy Ho from Violet Labs.
Lucy Hoag:
08:08
Great to be here. Thanks
Rob Ruyak:
08:09
so Hey, Lucy.
Tony Sewell:
08:10
Thanks so much for coming. We really appreciate it. When were starting up this idea, you were one of the very first people to come back quickly and say you were keen to support us. So, really looking forward to the discussion today.
Lucy Hoag:
08:23
You're making me sound desperate.
Tony Sewell:
08:25
I didn't mean
Lucy Hoag:
08:26
to sound desperate.
Rob Ruyak:
08:27
I'm just
Lucy Hoag:
08:28
joking. Super excited to be here. Thanks very much.
Tony Sewell:
08:32
Yeah, awesome. So before we get in, perhaps you could just give us a little bit of a primer on Violet Labs and who you are.
Lucy Hoag:
08:41
Yeah, let's do it. I'll actually start with the second half of your question. Typically, do that just to give some context. My background is aerospace engineering. Spent most of my career on the hardware side, building really fun stuff and helping others build fun stuff.
Lucy Hoag:
08:58
Quit that about three years ago, three and a half, probably should start saying four, to build Violet Labs, which is a software startup. And what we are building is tackling the problem of when you're building hardware, you have all these different software tools you rely on, like typically maybe dozens, and they don't talk to each other. It's this very fragmented kind of disjointed workflow. And so our platform Violet solves that with no code connectors to all these tools and creates this really powerful home base for engineering teams. We're excited for that to hopefully transform how stuff is built.
Tony Sewell:
09:37
That's awesome. And you've got such an interesting background. I know you studied aerospace engineering, but you've worked at the tech royalty. Got Waymo, Lyft, Google, Amazon. You worked at USC, part of the Viterbi Lab.
Tony Sewell:
09:59
I mean, it's an incredible background. I'd just love to hear a little bit about that. What have been the experiences that really kind of shaped your early career and sort of how you ended up here?
Lucy Hoag:
10:11
Yeah. I feel super fortunate. It's almost a pretty embarrassing bingo card. Effectively, it all started in high school. I did want to be an astronaut, so I chose USC for that reason and studied astronautical engineering.
Lucy Hoag:
10:27
That got me into the Information Sciences Institute. We have a small space engineering research center, so building CubeSats in your early 20s. That was awesome. And first piece of good luck is it brought me to DARPA out of grad school because of some of the research we were doing. So right away thrust into the government side of the space world, which was pretty fascinating and actually just loved it.
Lucy Hoag:
10:55
I adored, frankly, kind of how important you feel. Like, work is truly, really important and you're read into these programs that just can't believe. You almost have a sense of responsibility to the country that you're getting to work on. So that was super cool. I was there for about three years.
Lucy Hoag:
11:15
Second piece of really good fortune, around that time, Google was starting their first satellite constellation. It was actually not Skybox, it was a secret program at the time. Was sub imaging like Skybox. It was doing internet from space. You can imagine some modern day kind of equivalence of that.
Lucy Hoag:
11:35
Yeah. That may have bits and pieces from that program. So that brought me to Google, was like, I still remember the day I've had the on-site interview and called my mom, like, I can't believe it. It was just like a dream. Working there was even more of a dream.
Lucy Hoag:
11:50
The interesting part is right when I joined, they canceled this satellite program. It was a huge program and truly aerospace engineers from all over the country are now at Google and we're like, Okay, what do we do now? So it's just the beginning of a really interesting journey. What a lot of us did was the program turned into a drone based internet program. So we were building a high altitude, long endurance glider basically that had the ability to serve internet.
Lucy Hoag:
12:20
We tested that out in really cool ways at Spaceport America and drones. That was canceled. I started in space, then I went to air.
Tony Sewell:
12:31
Did this lead to Lune?
Lucy Hoag:
12:33
Part of that led to Loon. Yeah. So that was an X, actually a totally different part of Google. This was even pre alphabet. So we were in X, access and they were in X.
Lucy Hoag:
12:42
Lots of duplication at Google. When Ruth Porat came in, she really did a great job of being like, hey guys, we got to stop blowing cash. So it got a lot less fun. But a lot of that went to Loon. A lot of us went to actually wireless last mile.
Lucy Hoag:
12:55
So now I'm like terrestrial. And from there, I actually directly went into Waymo. So kind of interesting how it all came to be, but self driving cars are sort of like a satellite on the ground. It's kinda cheesy, but it's sort of true in many different ways. And so I had this detour away from space, which I had always wanted to to be in through air breathing stuff and then Waymo for self driving.
Lucy Hoag:
13:22
Then I went to Lyft, which is really cool because it was basically the opposite of my Waymo experience. At Waymo, you're with this gigantic team, super brilliant. Most of the cars were like already built, they're already testing. Lyft, we got there, there's 30 of us and this was called Level five, the group, and we had to start from scratch. And it was so cool.
Lucy Hoag:
13:42
Like, all right, what do we do first? Yeah. And to end the diatribe, after a few years there, I wanted to get back to aerospace. And so I went to Amazon Kuiper and, yeah, it didn't last too long before the itch to build Violet Labs became too strong. And why I'm here.
Rob Ruyak:
14:02
That's a great story, Lucy. Tell us a little bit more about what inspired you to start Violet Labs, and what is it exactly? Tell us a little bit more about it.
Lucy Hoag:
14:14
The inspiration for the company and the product is a pretty classic founder story in a lot of ways, basically born out of frustration. I feel really lucky to have worked at these world class institutions and you imagine you get there and they're building rockets and self driving cars, it must be the best software in the world. And it's the total opposite. In fact, was shocking to me how consistently, through all these different places and over all these years, it actually got worse in some ways. I don't mean to disparage Kuiper.
Lucy Hoag:
14:48
Amazon is a fantastic place and I adore AWS. But because they have this very narrative driven work style, it really made the lack of connectivity of your software and really your data, your engineering data, it made that very acute. So we viscerally felt the frustration. Yeah, so that's what primarily led me to quit my job and just stop complaining and see if I could build the software that I wanted. So again, speaking of like the problem that Violet is solving, it's connectivity, it's
Tony Sewell:
15:23
kind of
Lucy Hoag:
15:24
that connective tissue between all these software tools. If you imagine a hardware development life cycle, you start with ideation, requirements management, get into CAD, mechanical and electrical, into product life cycle, MES, purchasing. These are all totally siloed and the state of the art is truly to hire small armies of overpriced people like me that are basically human network switches for all this data. Instead, Violet is endeavoring to build no code connectors that any dumb hardware engineer like myself can use. You don't have to know what an API is or what a SQL query is.
Lucy Hoag:
16:02
Bring that data into Violet. It's structured into our own purpose built ontology and that allows some of the basics, which is like, I kind of describe it as the base of the Maslow's hierarchy for a hardware engineering team. You just get your data in one place. You can see it in a single pane of glass. You can report on it in an easy way and sync it between these tools.
Lucy Hoag:
16:25
And from there, the cool part is it opens up this whole world of really powerful features that are suddenly pretty easy because your data is already structured, clean, in the same place.
Rob Ruyak:
16:37
Yeah. That's awesome. So is it wrong to describe this as a one of the buzzwords you hear all the time out there, like digital thread, as an example? Or or is that is that the same kind of concept? Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
16:50
Yeah. I can I can throw so many buzzwords at you? You'll be surprised. Definitely digital thread is one of them. Even go harder on the buzzword.
Lucy Hoag:
17:00
We kind of call it like an organic digital thread within Violet or maybe an organic model based system engineering. Another couple of ways to describe it is like Zapier, but for hardware, you know, data federation. But, yeah, essentially, what you're doing is linking all this data in one common place.
Rob Ruyak:
17:21
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I think a lot of the work that at least I know Tony and I have done over the years, this is absolutely a very much needed capability across both older enterprise customers as well as you know, the new companies that are even born on the cloud, right, as an example. Yeah. So how have you been I think the hope that Tony and I have are that we give folks like you a voice to those that are, you know, kind of at the precipice of wanting to start their own company.
Rob Ruyak:
17:53
You know, so one of the things we wanted to ask you was, so now that we understand what Biot Labs is and kind of your passion and the problems you were trying to solve, how did you actually validate it, you know, as you were, feeling more confident that this is something that actually could be a capability that would be wanted and needed and you could sell it in the market?
Lucy Hoag:
18:13
Yeah. An important piece for sure. To be honest, a big part of my validation was kind of cheating. It was through personal experience and with all my colleagues and peers and coworkers knowing from these years of experience that they would need something like this or even more like they deserve something like this. So a little bit of a blind jump there, blind faith, but immediately upon starting the business, went into customer interviews and discovery and followed the mom test, which someone introduced right away and I hadn't heard of it.
Lucy Hoag:
18:52
Basically, can't just go and have a customer interview with your friend at Toyota and say, Hey, I'm building this cool product. It's going to do this, this and this. Does that sound cool? Would you like it? Like, of course, they're gonna be nice.
Tony Sewell:
19:04
They're gonna say, yeah. Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
19:05
Yeah. Sure. Right. You you you can't do that. You almost have to flip it on its head and
Tony Sewell:
19:09
Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
19:10
Ask what they need, ask what their problems are, how much they would pay to have it fixed. So we tried to do a lot of that.
Rob Ruyak:
19:16
So why is it the mom test?
Lucy Hoag:
19:19
It's not like mom your yeah. Good point. I guess I kinda lost over that. You know, your mom's gonna try and be, like, uplifting and, like, yeah, honey. This this sounds super cool.
Lucy Hoag:
19:27
I'm so proud of you. I don't know. I I didn't read the whole book. So
Rob Ruyak:
19:31
Yeah. No. I I I was half joking. I wanted I wanted you to to because I yeah. I mean, moms are I love my mom.
Rob Ruyak:
19:41
She's very supportive in everything I do. But she's, I don't know, I just wanted you to clarify it.
Lucy Hoag:
19:48
Yeah, I guess so. Leave it at
Rob Ruyak:
19:50
that.
Tony Sewell:
19:50
She's not gonna tell you you've got a bad idea.
Lucy Hoag:
19:53
There you go.
Rob Ruyak:
19:53
Exactly. Thank you, Tony. I'm glad that you Yeah, yeah.
Tony Sewell:
20:00
I think about sort of my own desire for an entrepreneurial journey a lot, and the self confidence and courage to do that, to leave a massive, massive company and the compensation and all that that comes with it must have been kind of daunting. I am interested though, were there things that were harder than you expected? Haven't started a company, so I don't know the full were there things that you thought, That's a slam dunk, but were actually really hard?
Lucy Hoag:
20:38
Oh man. Almost every single part of it was harder than I thought.
Tony Sewell:
20:43
Did start on your own or did you have a co founder?
Lucy Hoag:
20:47
I started technically on my own at first and then quickly was talking to a fellow Kuiper employee and she was kind of excited about similar things. We decided to start together. So the two of us started and I think for the first year or so, we're doing it together and she was fantastic. We ended up being quite similar, I think, in role. And so it really wasn't a good co founder pairing.
Lucy Hoag:
21:14
Interestingly, that is one of the pieces that is way harder than you think. And everyone warns you. This is the number one thing you have to get right first and most people fail. And that was so true. And I found through that, I think, you know, whether this is a whatever this says about my personality, I think I'm probably meant to be a solo co a solo founder.
Lucy Hoag:
21:33
I don't think I really would have done well in pair or with three of us.
Rob Ruyak:
21:39
Why would you say that? Why would you say that, Lucy? I'm curious.
Lucy Hoag:
21:46
I'm really greedy for data. It's maybe one way of putting, like, perfectionist, maybe control freak, but it's more I wanna understand how every piece works. I wanna understand why we're making the decisions we are. Mhmm. I'm also kind of, like, living and breathing this every second of every day.
Lucy Hoag:
22:05
It's sort of a lifelong kind of of thing for me. Goes back to my graduate research, which was on something vaguely similar. It was building a a tool for software design. So yeah. I don't know.
Lucy Hoag:
22:17
It it was just difficult, and I I'm sure it was difficult for her as well. So
Rob Ruyak:
22:22
Yeah. No. I hope you weren't offended by me asking. I'm super interested in how teams come together and how you can optimize the efficiency of a team and a group. But I've never started a company.
Rob Ruyak:
22:40
It's interesting, sometimes we meet these companies that are founded by two people or more, and you kind of wonder because you're trying to figure almost everything out. That's tough. Yeah. It's really messy, you know? If you do it in a larger company, there's rules of the road, there's role definitions, there's ways people operate and collaborate typically.
Rob Ruyak:
23:00
There's a culture already established, you know, with maybe even like a loose social contract, you know, there's something there. You know? So I find it really interesting how people start companies and how they can try to figure out how to have compliments, you know, and get it off the Because it's almost like everything you do as a small company getting started has to click, you know, because there's so many questions and so many unknowns. So, it's just interesting.
Lucy Hoag:
23:29
I I love that you use the word efficiency and and optimizing. That that too is all I think about all the time because it's all about how lean can you build this product and this machine. And by definition of having two founders at the helm, there's going to be some overlap and there's going to be some communication latency and it just, it didn't work for me. Yeah, it has to be as efficient as possible or it's just not going to Yeah.
Tony Sewell:
23:58
Awesome. One of the things we actually talked to, one of the earlier interviews, We were talking to Laura Crabtree from Epsilon. You probably know Laura.
Rob Ruyak:
24:09
I do.
Tony Sewell:
24:09
She's fantastic. Example of someone who's building software for a very hardware centric industry, which is space. It was super interesting how you talked about that, that's what you grew up in on the hardware side. Historically, and still today, businesses have been really slow to adopt cloud native process. What's been your experience from that respect, talking to these companies and having them start thinking about this more software centric mindset?
Lucy Hoag:
24:50
Yeah, it's a great question. It's pretty fascinating. I think there's a few reasons that feed into why aerospace and defense and probably some other highly regulated industries weren't able to adopt cloud until much later and as a byproduct weren't able to innovate on their software until much later. A lot of that is that regulatory aspect. So you simply can't use something on the cloud if you have ITAR and EAR compliance export control constraints.
Lucy Hoag:
25:23
And interestingly, in the last decade or so or less, that's been fixed. We have these technologies of GovCloud and Azure and GCP then. And that provides this foundation. And then it's a little bit of a unlock for the rest of the infrastructure to start building up and those kind of picks and shovels that actually make it a reasonable lift for these companies to use some of that. So I think that's how we saw the timing of it and strategized a bit about that.
Lucy Hoag:
26:04
But we also There's a few things that were really important to me when we started. And one of them was, again, maybe this goes back to I'm pretty greedy, but kind of anticipated that in order for us to have the diversity and the volume of customers that we'd need to be sustainable, it probably couldn't be just cloud. That just wasn't going to work. So from day one, we made a lot of pretty serious upfront investments and they were costly in terms of time. One was we are super flexible to all the security compliance needs you could have across the spectrum from nothing to fully air gapped.
Lucy Hoag:
26:42
So we are fully we're cloud native, and based on AWS, we have a completely identical platform that's AWS GovCloud, and identical to the user, I should say. And in addition, we architected everything from the ground up truly from day one to, sorry, in advance, to use as few, almost zero AWS services as we could. Because if you want to go be on prem with someone who's not on that, it's this huge lift. So we're fully cloud agnostic and we can be seamlessly deployed on prem and air gapped environments. And we're working hard on our compliance journey.
Lucy Hoag:
27:20
We have SOC two Type two working on CMMC and we'll get to hopefully FedRAMP someday. So yeah, almost by definition, you just have to be so many different things in order for it to serve a wide net of customers. And we are actually today kind of reaping those rewards. People are really surprised to hear, oh, you're on cloud, but you can also we can do either one. And it's a really valuable strategy, it turns out.
Rob Ruyak:
27:47
Yeah. I think it is a hard decision, especially for small companies, figure out what kind of optionality can I provide my because you have established companies, you have younger companies, all of whom could benefit from what you provided with Violet Labs, but they might have different backgrounds that they take even into a small company and familiarity with environments that they're used to doing? They come from a large defense contractor, a lot of folks in this industry are coming out of NASA, for example, right? So they all kind of bring with them their own experiences and understanding of how to use these different platforms. What is the target for Violet Labs with respect to your customers?
Rob Ruyak:
28:33
I heard you say FedRAMP, so I'm assuming that you have systems integrators that serve government and government itself. What are your target customers? And what might that mix look like or what does it look like?
Lucy Hoag:
28:45
Yeah. If you can share. Yeah. Our ICP, profile is pretty broad. If you're not getting my pattern here, making a bit of a broken record.
Lucy Hoag:
28:58
It's a bunch of different segments. So the primary is definitely folks building complex hardware products. And today our kind of sweet spot is for sure with smaller startups to medium sized startups to small businesses. But interestingly, if again, you picture like a spectrum and maybe this is small startups, commercial, and then, you know, DOD heavy primes, the most interest we get is on the total opposite sides of the spectrum and they have completely different need, but like the principle is the same. And then within that, there's multiple verticals as well.
Lucy Hoag:
29:35
So, we're mostly aerospace and energy and then broader defense, as well as medical and universities. That gets into kind of the system engineering. Pretty interesting. I did not anticipate that. We wanted to be very domain agnostic and we will have over time more and more verticals coming in, robotics, consumer.
Lucy Hoag:
29:59
But energy, we have a lot of energy customers, which is great. Think a lot of them are probably ex SpaceX and ex aerospace people.
Rob Ruyak:
30:07
Yeah. What what kind of what kind of energy companies? Because it sounds like the way you describe it is you've you've designed it to be agnostic to maybe support Yeah. High volume manufacturing as well as, you know, highly customized but low volume manufacturing, it sounds like. In energy specifically, kind of companies are the names, but what are they building?
Rob Ruyak:
30:29
What are they manufacturing?
Lucy Hoag:
30:31
Yeah. I can't share all the names or even details because I might give it away, but we do have some nuclear energy customers that we have on our website and that we can talk about. Actually a lot of these, our sweet spot again is more low volume. So when you get to that high volume manufacturing, there's less of a need for what we have, but it's the maybe low volume, high margin, high complexity, thousand line assemblies. And a key part of it is they're moving really fast typically.
Lucy Hoag:
31:01
That's kind of the important piece. That's where it's interesting on the government side. You typically don't have that time to market pressure, but you do have a lot of legacy tools that really need some connectivity.
Tony Sewell:
31:15
Can you give a I'm just looking on your website now. I mean, you see the logos of all of these super familiar software platforms that are used for a bunch of different tools. Can you give an example of a particularly impactful integration and what it means to the person who's executing the role in terms of, is this about saving cost, time? Obviously there's a big efficiency part of it, but I'd love to just hear a little bit more about that.
Lucy Hoag:
31:48
Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely cost savings and time savings. Definitely introduces risk mitigation earlier on, but it also introduces totally new features that you really would have a hard time doing otherwise. So I'll explain kind of what I mean. So for a couple of our earliest customers, our wedge and how we started to kind of monetize and really get interest was specific actually and pretty, pretty small.
Lucy Hoag:
32:15
It was getting data from a legacy PLM into your MES or a purchasing system or any of these downstream tools. So for example, team center, we're a big, we're a Siemens partner and that's been a huge piece of our product since day one. It's pretty difficult to integrate with Teamcenter. Very few companies do it. So we have the ability to get data out of this kind sorry, of archaic system, and that includes files.
Lucy Hoag:
32:44
Once that's in Violet, you have this much nicer front end to have any of your purchasing team or folks in the shop floor access these items. The licensing is fine. We're not taking away licenses that otherwise would have been purchased from Siemens because they aren't going be doing authoring of CAD models and NX or anything like that. It gets this data much more accessible in Violet and then they want it pushed to an MES, like ION or Fusion, or maybe their ERP, like NetSuite. And it's at its simplest, just populating inventory.
Lucy Hoag:
33:17
And otherwise, this is something that is manual, which is this drives me absolutely bonkers. We have all these engineers at these fast moving teams building incredibly important stuff, they're literally copy pasting part numbers. So huge waste of time, hugely inefficient.
Tony Sewell:
33:37
And really prone to mistakes too.
Lucy Hoag:
33:39
Very prone to mistakes. A lot of human in the loop. So just by doing that, it's this huge unlock. We are, you know, the best thing you can hear as a founder, as a small company is they're like, we would be scared shitless if you guys went away. Like, please don't go away.
Lucy Hoag:
33:54
We don't know what we do. So it's really solving pain, which is great. So, and then quickly just to add on to that. So, you know, that's the easy part or not easy. That's the kind of simple part.
Lucy Hoag:
34:03
Point A to point B data transfer. Now you've got your NetSuite POs, your manufacturing execution system, work orders and POs, your parts, your files, all in one system. They're structured in such a way that they share the same part numbers, revisions, we have full version history. So we have the ability to, if you're familiar with the tooling out of SpaceX, there's a very popular tool called Warp Drive that feeds their entire development. And what Violet provides is a Warp Drive like capability with the added power that it can be any system.
Lucy Hoag:
34:36
So it can be team center or it can be windshield or it can be duro. And you type in a part number or an assembly number and you get everything across all of these apps in a nice report that you can filter and sort, configure, and it'll update as things update in the source end. So that one has been really popular with a lot of our companies who are like in that design and build and purchase stage and they're purchasing and have inventory adjustments and tests across you know, a lot of different parts, and it's, a pretty powerful tool now for them.
Rob Ruyak:
35:09
To your point around the customer being scared, about, if you went away, It made me think of some of these larger companies I used to work with probably fifteen years ago. Some of the work I did was around just complexity reduction, like looking at architecture and just trying to determine what would be a future state architecture to actually have a more integrated data story, you know, and be able to actually query information across a whole supply chain as an example.
Lucy Hoag:
35:40
Love that.
Rob Ruyak:
35:41
And I'll never forget, there was one meeting and had a technical one of my colleagues was like very deep with database design. And the first question he said is, so what does your data dictionary look like? And I remember this guy was at the table and he's like, where's Jim? Jim? Jim?
Rob Ruyak:
36:05
And and and Jim I I swear, it was a couple days later, but Jim enters this meeting. Jim was a data dictionary because he had worked at this company for thirty five years.
Lucy Hoag:
36:15
Obsessed with the story.
Rob Ruyak:
36:16
And he was, yeah, and he was used to writing SQL queries and understanding where all the data was. You know, I remember we asked him to write an entity relationship diagram, you know, if you're familiar with all these data models, just got up on a whiteboard and he started drawing stuff. It like, please, I hope Jim does not get hit by a bus because this supply chain, you know, visibility is not going to happen. So it just reminded me of that, which funny enough, I think, is a real concern with a lot of companies that do have a lot of their assets, IT assets, tied up in a lot of legacy IT environments with people that really don't program in Fortran anymore. Or frankly, funny enough, a lot of people aren't really designing relational databases anymore.
Rob Ruyak:
37:08
Right. So I think there's opportunity for companies like in what you all offer to provide that visibility and also I think some risk reduction in using more future state software platforms for some of this stuff. It's pretty interesting. Love that. Yeah.
Rob Ruyak:
37:28
I hope Jim's still around if you're out there, Jim.
Lucy Hoag:
37:32
Jim, we're hiring.
Tony Sewell:
37:35
So Lucy, just to kinda tie this all tie this sort of back. What what is what does the next three to five years look like for Violet Labs? What's your vision for the company?
Lucy Hoag:
37:47
Yeah, it's going to be exciting. It's obviously a really exciting time with everything going on with AI. Interestingly, thinking of entity relationship diagrams and ontologies, we're almost at this point where you can see a future where you can skip all that and have that purely driven by AI and Gen AI. We think it's going to be really helpful that we do have all this data structured. So we're obviously continuing on for that.
Lucy Hoag:
38:15
But yeah, the kind of North Star that we see for Violet and to this day is something I say in every demo, is for this to be the home base for your engineering team. The first tool you log into in the morning, so you get to the office and whether you're a mechanical engineer or supply chain or you're a manager, it's where you have all of the activity from your team across purchasing operations. It can be also a launch pad if you are a power user and some other tool to go there. I think this will really transform even what the day to day life for a hardware engineer is like. Obviously, that efficiency will be huge.
Lucy Hoag:
38:58
The network effects you get from having all your users immersed in this data will be huge. Similar to your point, Rob, about migration from legacy systems or trying to get legacy data digitized. There's also a need to just have things centrally because even if that person's there, you don't always ask Jim or you don't always know where to look. So many errors and inaccuracies and things happened in my career that I'm like, why don't we just have a place where you can look this up? So that's definitely how I picture us when I picture a modern engineering team.
Lucy Hoag:
39:38
And of course, from there, if you imagine having all of this data from very disparate different tool sets and it's structured and it's over time, it has a full version history. There's wildly powerful things you can do from an AI perspective. And we obviously have some cool plans around that starting from the very simple, which would be using open source foundation models, having a chatbot kind of capability, so a Violet assistant that can help you with your requirement generation. From there, actually training on your data, so you get this customer centric chatbot. So it's like, Hey, Violet, tell me about this design change.
Lucy Hoag:
40:17
What prompted that? Or three years ago, X, Y, V. And even from there, we picture this kind of wild capability where you can even train among customers. So obviously a difficult thing from like an IP perspective, from an opt If you kind of had this opt in methodology, you could have a couple or many different organizations who are building similar things. You could build this super foundation model based on that data and it becomes potentially this really valuable national security asset.
Lucy Hoag:
40:55
That's something that we might end up needing even though today you would never see Boeing and Lockheed training models on their data combined. We might not always have the luxury of saying no to that.
Rob Ruyak:
41:07
So Yeah.
Lucy Hoag:
41:09
Little out there. But
Rob Ruyak:
41:11
Well, if you build a chatbot, I have one request. Can you call it Jim? And and I'm pretty sure
Tony Sewell:
41:17
Ask Jim.
Rob Ruyak:
41:18
That's Ask Jim. Yes. There you go. Yes. There you go.
Lucy Hoag:
41:21
You have my word. That's awesome.
Rob Ruyak:
41:25
Lucy, this was really fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for the time. Thank We love to end these, and we're testing this out a little bit. But we like to end it with that might tell everybody a little bit more about you on personal side. So here's the question.
Rob Ruyak:
41:43
What's your favorite space movie? Could be scientifically accurate or completely and utterly ridiculous.
Lucy Hoag:
41:50
Obviously, a very hard question for a space dork. So my first answer is gravity. I just will always remember the feeling of the scene where Sandra Bullock hits the ground and it's like, oh, thank God. Like this phenomenon that we see and feel every day. You're just like feeling it.
Lucy Hoag:
42:09
So yeah, I loved that one. A big Sandra Bullock fan. I'm also an elder millennial, I kind of grew up on space balls. Does anyone
Tony Sewell:
42:18
It was funny you mentioned that because I scrolling on Instagram today and the guy that was one of the The guys combing the desert. Talking about He was talking on Instagram about, I've been in 200, I've got 200 entries on IMDB everyone, all everyone remembers is I'm the guy that said, We ate brown shit.
Lucy Hoag:
42:46
I love it.
Rob Ruyak:
42:48
I think yeah. But he was in Police Academy too. He was famous actor. Yeah. My Michael I'm trying to remember his last
Tony Sewell:
42:54
Is it Winslow?
Rob Ruyak:
42:55
Yes. That's who it is. Yeah. He was also in Police Academy. He he was great.
Rob Ruyak:
42:58
He used to do all the sound effects and everything. I was gonna say that was one of my favorite movies, Number one, because it was super interesting, but it's also had a good memory. My my dad, who absolutely just loves that goofy type of comedy. I think, like, Leslie Nielsen was one of his favorite actors of all time. Like, all the, like, the naked guns and everything.
Rob Ruyak:
43:20
I remember he took me to go see Space Poles in a movie theater. And I excuse me. I think he I think he started laughing right when the ship started from the very beginning all the way to the end of the movie. Amazing. And I think to this day, if I were to watch it with a McGetty, it would still do the same thing.
Rob Ruyak:
43:37
But that movie is hilarious. I think I could probably quote 90% of it.
Tony Sewell:
43:41
Is that your favorite, Rob? I actually prepared this week. I wasn't prepared for the question last week.
Rob Ruyak:
43:46
It's better when you're not prepared, by the way, Tony. Just listen to the previous sessions. Was yours? I love it.
Tony Sewell:
43:53
Event Horizon.
Rob Ruyak:
43:55
I haven't seen that.
Tony Sewell:
43:56
It came out in the early 2000s. It had Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill. It was about this they created this ship called the Event Horizon that disappeared. And then this crew find it, and it was able to create a black hole and go through space, but it it ended up going into, like this other dimension was like hell or something. And then it came back, and it was like this.
Tony Sewell:
44:23
It was it gave me nightmares for ages. But I
Rob Ruyak:
44:25
Sounds uplifting.
Tony Sewell:
44:26
Yeah. It's such a it's such a cool movie. If it it is really it's a it's a cool movie if you're into that sort of stuff.
Rob Ruyak:
44:31
We could probably talk about this forever, but I like it. Innergelda was really good, and I I think it was the
Lucy Hoag:
44:37
Close second.
Rob Ruyak:
44:38
Was it the tenth anniversary, I think? They they just they re released it, in the movie theaters again. It was great. Yeah. I went and saw it recently, but but yeah.
Tony Sewell:
44:47
Well, Lucy, thanks so much for joining us. This was a really interesting discussion. If people would like to learn more about you and Violet Labs, where can people find you?
Lucy Hoag:
45:01
Violetlabs.com is the number one spot. We've got a place for you to sign up for a demo. It'll likely be myself or someone on the team. You can sign up directly. Sign up for our newsletter there, and we promise not to spam.
Lucy Hoag:
45:17
LinkedIn is also a great place. I think it's Violet Labs Inc. If you'd like to shoot us a note, hellovioletlabs dot com. We'll answer Thanks,
Tony Sewell:
45:27
Lucy. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Please rate and review. If you also want to follow us on LinkedIn or YouTube, because we're also producing a video as well. Other than that, great to see you both and look forward to seeing you all in a couple of weeks.
Tony Sewell:
45:46
Thanks.
Lucy Hoag:
45:47
It's a lot of fun. Appreciate it. Cheers.
Rob Ruyak:
45:48
Bye bye.
Lucy Hoag:
45:49
Bye. Bye bye.
