Host Intro (Gene Kim)

I'm so honored that we have a CEO of Edith's accomplishments and vision here, co-presenting with such a critical change agent inside of her company. Which is why I'm also so honored that our next speaker was willing to present.

Matt Jones is CEO of Sigma Defense, a firm deeply embedded in the defense community. So if you were like me, riveted and wringing your hands about the downed airmen who needed to be rescued far away from help, it was actually Matt's firm who created one of the key capabilities that enabled an unprecedented rescue of incredible complexity, daring, and scale.

So I met Matt eight weeks ago, and I've told him numerous times, it was one of those moments that changed my life. During those short eight weeks, I've gotten to work with him on a bunch of really fun projects, some of which you will hear today. And I spent the last two days with him and a bunch of other switched-on leaders who convinced me that to really get the full benefits of AI, you really do need not just top-level support, but literally the top level of support from the CEO. So here to model what that looks like is Matt Jones.

Matt Jones

Thank you.

All right. Just to level set before I get into the presentation. I believe I am the only person in the room who is still trying to figure out how to get on this Slack channel. So you should all just... I'm, like, 22 hours into my Slack journey, so just moderate your expectations of what I'm going to talk about today.

Okay. Next slide.

Nothing.

So let's say nine months ago, as a CEO of a private equity-backed firm, my private equity managing director sent me an email and he said, "Matt, AI is really important and we're trying to figure out what are all the companies doing in the portfolio, what's Sigma Defense doing?" And I replied, one word: "Nothing."

So that's what this talk will be about — my journey in meeting Gene and where things went from there. Next slide.

Quick thing about myself. I'm an unsuccessful college student. I have an unhealthy pickleball obsession. I was a Navy cryptologist for eight years, and now I've led and sold several businesses. CEO of Sigma Defense. Next slide.

The pickleball obsession is important here.

Two things that I'll say about Sigma Defense. We are a defense tech firm. We are the Navy's DevSecOps CI/CD pipeline, which is pretty impressive to do in a world-class bureaucracy. And then we also build the Department of War software mobility solution for how AI models get pushed to the tactical edge, which is the role we played in some of the recent events Gene mentioned. Next slide.

All right, so how it starts.

As a CEO that really empowers his team, I was going to this trade show in San Diego and my team was like, "Matt, we're doing this Vibe Coding workshop. We're sponsoring it. It's incredible. And then we're going to do a happy hour after. You got to go." And I'm like, "What's Vibe Coding?" And they're like, "Oh, you're going to love it. It's going to be great." I'm like, "All right. I'll see you at the happy hour."

And so for me, it was like I knew that AI was a thing, but I didn't believe it was mature. I didn't really believe that it had a place in the defense space. And I was just trying to understand what's the big deal.

So I got invited to do a Vibe Coding workshop with a bunch of switched-on Navy leaders. So on the next slide. One of the things that was super cool was actually seeing these young officers' Vibe Coding applications doing a data visualization exercise of AIS shipping data. This one — the person on the right — he's actually plotting shark attack data on who lost limbs. So he's a surfer. The one on the left, he's actually plotting ship traffic going out of San Diego Harbor. So that was pretty interesting, but it was nowhere near as interesting as what happened next. Next slide.

So I go to the happy hour and I'm hearing his team tell Matt about what these young sailors did. As a former sailor, he started nodding, and then he starts complaining about this application that he hates. I mean, not just complaining — like, really complaining. I think there was actually swearing involved.

[Gene Kim]: Yeah. There was two years of anger—

[Matt Jones]: Yeah.

[Gene Kim]: ...pent up that I released.

[Matt Jones]: Yeah. And so here was clearly a person who has been thinking about this app, about how he would rewrite it. And so I started recording it and I was like, "Matt, how about we Vibe Code it next week? We'll take 90 minutes and let's see what we can do." And then there was this Navy — let's just say a buying officer of some sort — and said, "You know what? For something like that, we would normally put out a bid to compete for 6,000 hours." And I just spit out my drink. I was like, "Oh, gosh, nothing takes 6,000 hours." I open my laptop, I tether my phone like, "We're going to build this right now."

And so over the course of two hours, I'm just interviewing Matt. I'm like, "Find out what about it makes you angry, what's wrong?" And he's getting so worked up, and it turns out the problem is that there's this pickleball scheduling app. As an event organizer, he has to send out these links to — let's call them retired people — who have never ever seen Google Sheets. And now Matt is spending more time in Google Sheets than playing pickleball, right, in this tournament.

And the look on his face — I show this all the time now. Look at him. It's like — we identify, we create some mockups. Claude identifies, like, oh, the Google Sheets is the enemy. Our goal is to create a workflow where Matt will never have to touch Google Sheets again. And now on the next slide — so on the airport, I'm talking to him the next day, and on the next slide, we actually — thus was the birth of DinkLink.

And it goes into production next week.

So that's really interesting. But not as interesting as what happened a couple of days later. So he's not a developer, he's a cryptographer. I was like, "Create a GitHub account." And I don't really expect anything to happen. But next thing I know, he's creating GitHub issues with fully formed ASCII art mock-ups, with the use case fully identified, all the edge cases covered. I'm getting goosebumps. And it's like these perfectly formed features that not only describe why — I'm sorry, what to build, but why. And it was just this revelation.

And so later, on Super Bowl Sunday, I end up — if Matt can do it, anyone can do it. And so I'm talking to my friend, Dr. Mike Stone. He was a Harvard ED doc for 12 years. He now has his own private practice. And months ago, we had talked about how he wants an LLM to go into his electronic health records to pull up lab reports and whatever. And I told him, "Here's what Matt Jones did." And so now he's creating GitHub issues.

And I just want to share one story before I turn it over to Matt, and then I'm going to say one word. I was telling this to my kids. I was driving them to school, and one of my 16-year-old twins says, "Dad, aren't you worried that they're now encroaching on your craft that you've spent 35 years getting good at?" And I just laughed. I'm like, "No." This is the most amazing thing ever. This is unleashing so much creativity. And I think it was in that moment, over the next couple of weeks — we put this in the Vibe Coding book — it was like, there's just no doubt that we're going to create 100x more developers in the next couple of years, right? And so say there's 28 million developers now — that's 2.8 billion developers on the planet. That sounds about right.

And so it was such a fun adventure. And I'll just mention one more thing to sort of tee this up. We spent a week getting this app to go into production, and we've now spent six weeks plus trying to get Twilio to work.

[Gene Kim]: How does that make you feel?

[Matt Jones]: That's my next slide.

And I know you guys are all switched-on technologists, but for me, in that experience was Gene interviewing me. I didn't even realize he was recording. And then it took what I said and turned it into mock-ups. And I think when you work with that every day and you know that exists, it just becomes sort of common. But I think for somebody who had a vision, who had been thinking about, man, I'd love to develop an app, but I have no ability, no power, I don't have the time — there's no way I could ever bring this thing to fruition without other people — to see that there's something out there today that makes that possible blew my mind. Those are real pictures.

And what it really did for me, and what I'm going to talk about now, is to really think about: what does that mean for businesses? What does that mean for CEOs? And what does that mean for where bottlenecks go? And I started to apply this DinkLink experience to my own business to figure out, okay, now it's clear, right? I'm the CEO who then showed up Monday, I'm like, "Guys, met Gene. Everything's AI." And they're like, "Take it easy, dude. Take it easy."

But as we roll that out, we're starting to learn lots of lessons. And we could go to the next slide.

What I've seen pretty instantaneously is that when the coding cycle compresses, everything else is where your bottlenecks are. And you can't really truly optimize the process. If you go to the next slide, it's the administration of the code that becomes your challenge and your problem.

And so Twilio — and by the way, if anyone is here from Twilio, I would love to talk to you. That's my first help ask. It's crazy. We're four days — we have an app that's ready for production, to be used to plan six courts, 80 people, seven matches — and I can't get things to work because Twilio says I have to have a website. And I'm like, "Dude, I registered with the IRS. You had me register with the IRS. You also need a website?" So it's insane to me that there are encumbrances around this process that have to be unlocked also. Next slide.

I look at this as it really is an inflection point, and it needs to be leadership-driven. There will be CEOs who look at AI as an efficiency gain, a way to reduce labor, a way to cut costs. There will be CEOs like myself who look at it and say, "Do we have enough ideas to do all the things we can now do? And how do we really assess the ROI if everything we think about we can incubate in a month? Then how do we even know which things we should be investing in? And how do I get my sales team and the people who understand my customers to be sitting legitimately side by side with my engineers?" Because the reality is, we could develop things quicker than my sales team can schedule meetings to figure out, is this even directionally accurate?

And so I think where we're at — a point where some companies' products will get cheaper, some companies' products will get more innovative — the whole landscape of how business works and how we compete is going to change. It's much bigger than just a technological revolution. I think it says in there, the entire organization, from my perspective, needs to be rewired, and traditional organizational structures might no longer be the right way to have your company organized. And the only people — and I said this about the idea funnel. Next slide.

And I really view this — when I think about what is my role as a CEO of a half a billion dollar defense tech firm — I have seen my job as external: bankers, shareholders, media. And then internally, I set the vision and make sure the culture aligns to what is our ethos.

But this is different. I — and any CEO in any organization — really is responsible for how the communications flow in your organization, and your organizational structure drives the communications. And so things are moving so fast, there isn't time for — like I said — sales and engineering to not be partnered together. It really is something that has to be CEO-led. No one else is looking across the entire company. And it has to be really supported across leadership levels. That's really how we're going to get true adoption for AI.

I think my sort of request is — this is kind of my view on it. It has been, and I'm so grateful for it — I said that my time with Gene was like a sliding door, if anyone's heard that before, where the door opened, I was able to walk through it, and now AI and how it is going to impact the business world is sort of top of mind for me all day, and trying to figure out how I get my organization to leverage it, to get more competitive — and like I said, not for cost savings reasons.

I'd be very interested in some of your experiences. What are your CEOs saying? What is your leadership team doing? I'm happy to have that conversation.

I'm going to continue to work really hard to figure out how to get into Slack. But otherwise, I will be here. And I know we're running a little bit behind, so I'll end there. But I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you all today.

And my only big takeaway is: it's bigger than technology. It is much bigger than technology. It's going to change how every business operates. And this group is at the forefront of this revolution. Thank you.

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[Gene Kim]: Thank you, Matt. And by the way, he's been so generous with his time, and so if you find an opportunity to interact with him over the week and can help, I couldn't recommend more highly.