Evan Smith, CEO Altana AI

Lauren Bedula 00:17 Welcome back to building the base. Lauren Bedula and Hondo Geurts here with today's guest, Evan Smith. Evan is the co-founder and CEO of Altana. He founded the company in 2018 after identifying a need for trusted access to supply chain information in real time, certainly something that is key to decision makers today. So, Evan, so excited to have you here and dig into what you're up to. Evan Smith 00:41 I'm honored to be here with you guys. Hondo Geurts 00:42 Thank you. So, Evan, we have lots of interesting guests on here. All have a different story, and I'm particularly taken back by the founder story. What's your background? What got you into, you know, founding a company in this particular problem set. It's not something that I think a high schooler wakes up thinking, Hey, I got to go figure out the supply chain stuff. Evan Smith 01:03 I don't know if somebody told you this, but actually, I was thinking about this in high school seriously. So, I grew up in in a very small town in Alaska called Homer, and super weird kid thinking about, you know, big picture stuff, especially given where I was growing up, in kind of the context. So, I wrote my high school senior thesis on the pending collapse of globalization all the way back in 2003 so, you know, drawing parallels to the collapse of Rome and, you know, monetary debasement and everything else. And so I was, I was directionally correct, but I was pretty early. So yeah, that's, that's kind of been how my brain works. And starting, you know, from 2003 going to college focusing on international economics, development, and environmental studies, my first passion was really renewable energy. So, the through line for my career is, I like big physical systems problems like Earth scale systems problems. And if you're into geopolitics and power competition, and if you're into the environment, if you're into economics, renewable energy is actually one of those through lines that actually has this huge leverage on the world, right? And so, I started a company when I was 22 worked for a startup for about a year, was kind of swept up in a lot of renewable jet fuel work we were doing for the Navy and for Boeing. And said there's probably a company in here, if we can, if we can figure out how to get airlines to buy uneconomic renewable jet fuel for a long time in the same or for a long time, and same way that, you know, solar and wind off take contracts kind of brought that industry skill. So anyway, long story short, I started a company there we were, you know, four years really built up a relationship with the Qataris as the principal client, helping their airline figure out their strategy there. That was all policy driven. And the policy driver, which was the European emissions trading system, was going to penalize Airlines for their carbon emissions, until it didn't at the 11th hour. And so, the policy driver went away, and that business opportunity went away, and I went on my way. So then act two for me was working with a family office to acquire companies. I became the CEO of one of those companies, and they were really motivated by environmental and economic efficiency in these big, physical industries. So again, think, like textiles agriculture, we did a deal acquiring a company in the textile and apparel industry. It was actually a legacy manufacturing business in the United States, they had developed some very interesting and still totally novel software. So, we said, there's an ability to turn this into sort of a digital textile design and sourcing platform, but we got to get out of the manufacturing business. So, I have my own little kind of I ran a supply chain for a moment in time. I had to digitalize and outsource the supply chain. And that kind of gets us to the third act, which is this supply chain data and AI phase of my career that I'm in now. And, you know, a quick, you know, between two and three, we work together with a supply chain data company that we help sell to S and P so as I got to know these supply chain network shape problems, I've been in the supply chain as a practitioner, I've really gotten into supply chain data as the way to sort of model and understand the network itself, the connections across this global supply chain network signal on what's happening, right, good and bad. And the idea for Altana was born in 2018 where we said, there really needs to be a Google Maps for the supply chain. If you're, you know, looking at the way the world is fracturing along great power competition dimensions. If you're looking at climate dislocation, you know, we. Predicted supply chain disruptions from the kind of just in time outsourcing. We didn't predict covid Literally, but covid shaped problems and their kind of bullwhip effect through the supply chain. So, in order to navigate all that stuff, you've got to have a common operating picture. It can't just be like everybody with their own little slices of data trying to make sense of it all. So, to have the conversation across stakeholders, to coordinate across stakeholders, to engage between the public and private sectors, you have to have the shared set of facts. So that was the idea for Altana. And you pretty quickly get to, well, you've got a pretty big data sovereignty, data privacy and intellectual property hurdle to get over, to pull something like this off, and that was what we founded the company to do, was we created this very novel technology and kind of legal approach and business model to create a network of data, but critically, a federated network of data that we access through this federated learning architecture. And I'm sure we'll talk more about So yeah, that's how I got here. Was I being, I was a kid at the end of the road thinking about the world at the grandest skill possible. And now I think this company is like very much an expression of the way that my brain works. Hondo Geurts 06:09 So, I'm gonna, before we get into the supply chain and some of those things I want to go back to. So, I just came from Alaska a couple weeks ago. All right, homers, and you know what inspired you at that young age for looking at world problems. And, you know, it's kind of ironic from, you know, in a small town, thinking about big, worldly problems, anything you can point. Evan Smith 06:33 My parents were always talking to us at the dinner table about what was happening in the world. I remember we were 12-13, years old, and we were arguing both sides of the Israeli, Palestinian conflict at the dinner table, almost like steel, Manning both sides of the debate. Right? So how would you put yourself in the issues? How would you put yourself in these shoes? The news was always on, you know, and the way my parents always talked to us as kids, was like when you leave, when you leave, when you leave home, or when you go out to college, when you go out to the world. So, it was never, you know, we never grew up with the mental model that we were going to stay there and fish. Lauren Bedula 07:13 That's amazing. And then to be thinking about the breakdown of globalization 21 years ago, for that paper, as the CEO of a company focused on supply chains, something we've talked about on our show in the past, is navigating deglobalization essentially. What's your take on the state of play? Just in general? Evan Smith 07:32 Well I'm not going to say anything novel about the breakdown, except for maybe that the world we've built over the last 75 years was really designed around outsourcing and the and, like, the attenuation of buyer supplier relationships. So basically, hyper optimizing around having a supplier of a thing and, or having, like, a customer of a thing you sell, and that whole value chain, right? So that multi-tier raw materials through the intermediate components, or the finished components through the sale and end use. The whole point of outsourcing was actually to disaggregate and spread out that value chain. So, you like the MBAs teach this like you shouldn't need to know or own the value chain, right? It's working capital optimization, inventory efficiency. So, the entire business model of globalization put us in the place that we are today. So, on the one hand, the good things are that we lifted billions of people out of poverty. We've managed to keep inflation down for a long, long time through the low-cost goods and services entering the West, we've certainly woven the world together in some amount of economic interdependency, which, on a net basis, is probably more peace creating than not. So those are all like very good things we should be happy about now the side effects and externalities of that globalization and the sort of pains of de globalization, I think, are artifacts of that, of that business model, right? So, whether it's climate externalities, environmental externalities, everything going to the lowest cost and usually the dirtiest and sort of least governed places, or security challenges, right? And the audience to this podcast is going to be well versed in these we're now in a place where the value chains of the things that are most important to us run through our number one competitor, right? And in most cases, with a with a total monopoly, or something very close to it. So, we've created this, this security and sort of environmental dilemma catastrophe, if you're being full throated about it, and it's going to be really, really hard to unwind, because the entire. Your way of working is, you know, purposely just designed to manage suppliers on one side of a business and customers on the other side. So, in order to get control of this, in order to navigate through this stuff, it's going to be necessary to actually not just see a value chain, but to take command of it, to network across it, to engage across it. And that's the point of our business. I would just say, like, you know, if you go to Oracle or SAP, or any of the business processes in any global company, there's not even a notion of a tier two supplier in their software, like in their data model, there's not a notion of a multi-tier value chain in a product life cycle management system, right? So that the business processes, the tools that we've created over the last 75 years, don't even give you the starting point to do the thing we're describing now. So, it's going to be a real transition. Hondo Geurts 10:53 And how do you see the trend? You know it's to your point is almost dilemma of it's very inefficient if everybody vertically integrates everything, yep. And it's very inefficient if you don't integrate anything, and it's impossible if you can't understand what you actually have before you start making those decisions. Is that kind of your take of the total situation? Evan Smith 11:18 But I think the technology now exists to have your cake and eat it too, right? So, the big north star thing we're aiming at is virtual vertical integration. So, you don't need to own the entire value chain of production in order to have visibility over it and coordination across it and some amount of control across it, right? You need visibility, you need the data, and then you need the network, and then you need to operationalize those networks. So, this there's, there's almost a mindset shift and a cultural shift that has to happen. You know, within the private sector there's, there's an antipathy, or there's like an anxiety around, well, you can't know my you can't know my suppliers. I supply you, but you can't know my suppliers. Well, why not? Right? Like one of the one of our customers, is one of the biggest medical device companies in the world, and I was talking to the COO recently, and I said, this is a pretty provocative thing I'm about to describe to you as I'm introducing our product roadmap, and that whole multi-tier value chain management and collaboration, and so you're going to have the ability to reach beyond your direct supplier and engage the tier two and engage with the tier three. Now, I've had people tell me that's crazy like that. You that's just not how we do business. And he said, That's exactly how I'm going to do business. He said that this notion of there being tier 1234, suppliers, that's bullshit. I have suppliers, and we all need to be talking to each other. So that's thing. One is kind of like a cultural shift in the private sector. I think the same thing needs to happen in the defense space. So, this notion that, like, at the point of acquisition, we're gonna ask the prime contractor to make some reps about its supply chain. And that's kind of the one-time screen of like, you know, risk or multi-tier visibility and then after that, we have no right to see beyond what the prime is telling us. We have no right to see the tier two, the tier three, the tier four. We have no right to engage the tier two, three or four. That's crazy. So that, to me, that's, you know, a cultural shift and a mindset shift, as much as it is a business model shift. Lauren Bedula 13:26 So, on the defense industrial base, and you mentioned working with big players in the defense industrial base and past lives. As a founder, I know you have business now across commercial but also US government as well. Can you talk a little bit about your drivers or interest for supporting that space. Evan Smith 13:43 Our mission as a company is to fix globalization, and you don't do that either in the private sector alone or the public sector alone. You need to build the bridge between the two. And it's very clear to us, and I think you know, it's pretty clear in any election cycle you're paying attention to, that the world is moving in a way where governments are, are going to have, and should have a stronger role in the supply chains of the private sector. We can get into the policies and as much detail as you want, but so that's where I think the world is going. And so, our goal is to really create a bridge between the two. Now I have to explain a little bit about the founding story and the technology architecture to make this make sense. So, the idea for autonomous we needed a data Switzerland that would somehow render a common operating picture across all these sensitive data holdings, right? So, the point of the company at founding was to solve for the barrier around data sharing. So, we created a hub and spoke federated data, federated AI model that connects to all these siloed data sets where they are, but then applies technology, applies machine learning, creates a shared knowledge graph across that now everyone's looking at the same picture. Okay, so. So that can be true across the public and private sectors. It can be true, you know, within the DOD, across PEOs, it can be true across US, government agencies. It could even be true across governments, Allied governments. So that's like the technical underpinnings of what we've built now, as it relates to our go to market, we can say with a straight face to the regulator, hey, we're going to help you to enforce these new laws that are enforcing value chain level compliance in the private sector and giving you the visibility and the tools to enforce that. We can then go to the private sector and say, we're working with US Customs and Border Protection to enforce the Uyghurs labor Prevention Act. They're using us as their map of the world. We can help you to navigate that, and over time, we're going to facilitate a dialog where we hope we can actually bring the two together explicitly in a trade facilitation Public Private Partnership model. So that's the journey we're on, both in the go to market and the product development, and the same is true in kind of the defense space. So, you know, how do you not just have like a counterintelligence risk screening workflow where everyone's looking for bad guys in their supply chain and then throwing some confidential or classified information over the fence and hoping somebody deals with it. Let's just change the paradigm. So hey, you can know a theoretical value chain at the point of purchase. You can build in value chain monitoring and integrity to the requirements of the program, you can have an active dialog with the prime on an ongoing basis and with the tier two and tier three. So that's the journey we're on. Hondo Geurts 16:28 Any Lessons learned thus far in trying to be Switzerland and navigating between those two? Well, behemoth, you know, with lots of shared but maybe also, you know, opposing incentives. Evan Smith 16:42 I think you know, one of the, one of the things to just say, honestly, is you can't be Switzerland from a geopolitical standpoint, right? So, we've chosen sides, and then from a public private sector standpoint, I think the experience has actually been really emboldening, if anything, right? So, so all the obvious arguments, well, you know, I don't want the government to see my stuff, and if I work with Altana, then the government's going to see my stuff, and we've been able to navigate through that really well. And I there's some things I can't talk about, you know, specifically, but I'll speak generally the work we're doing, you know, in the civil sector, some of the national security work we're doing, we are very explicitly tying together business and government in our in our community, in our go to market, and literally, in our product. And I thought that was going to be a 10-year journey, you know, we're in year six, and it's becoming true right now. So, the kind of world changing vision for the business, where you're really, you know, breaking down these silos, both between private sector participants, but also between the private sector and public sector, that's now just literally coming true. So, you know, and there's always going to be like laggards. It's not all roses, but we’re ahead of the schedule, I thought we would be on. Lauren Bedula 18:10 What you said was interesting. You talked before about your customers highlighting their tier two and below suppliers. I'm curious if you have any advice for those tiers two and below suppliers who are also maybe starting to think about not just knowing their direct customer, but the end user, understanding this landscape. Any advice to those types of companies? Evan Smith 18:29 Well, we do work with a lot of those companies too. You know, we work with three of the biggest chemical businesses on Earth, and you know, so these are polyethylene-based chemicals, intermediate chemicals. And so, they're really focused on who are my customers, customers, customers. And it goes all the way down to you and the big retailers and brands that everybody is familiar with and so some of those drivers for them are regulatory, so they have export control requirements that are now imposing value chain, multi-tier export controls. And then it's not just about the Russian oligarch or the named entity, right? So, some of its motivated that way. A lot of its motivated by environmental traceability and sort of product lifecycle compliance and then I think where the most forward leaning among them are they see an opportunity to better coordinate their own production planning and their upstream purchasing with downstream forecasts. So, if you're in the middle of a value chain or upstream at the raw materials level, one of the most valuable things you can get from that conversation is a forecast for where things are going to be six months, nine months from now and then, on an ongoing basis, adjustments to that forecast, right? So, where this, I think it's really like meat and potatoes, profit loss. You know, inventory, traditional supply chain, is where those planning and inventory coordination. And discussions are happening across multiple tiers. That's where it really solves, you know, trillions of dollars of problems. Hondo Geurts 20:07 I'm sure many of my former National Security colleagues could be thinking along those same lines of planning and adjusting and, yeah, forecasting. Think about if you understand it, what you know, you said something earlier. I'd like to pick on a little bit supply chain versus value chain, insight, or visibility. What's your How do you describe those two together, and, and, and how do you move above just supply you know, I need five. Do I have five thinking? And take it up a couple levels. Evan Smith 20:43 Yeah, you just said it well. So, there's no like, there actually, there literally, are textbook definitions of this, but everyone's got a little bit of a different version. So traditional supply chain thinking is I buy missiles and I need to get them to the field, right? So, I have a supplier of the thing I need, and I have a customer of the thing I need. And so, it's the thing I was speaking to earlier about the whole system is designed around a tier zero to tier one, upstream relationship, the movement of goods from them to me. What ports? Warehouses, three, pls. Steamship carriers Am I on, and then a delivery to my customer? So that's when, you know, anybody with supply chain, their title, anybody's run supply chain programs, is thinking the world that way. The value chain is, is with respect to a product. So, for this missile, where does the guidance system come from? Where are the antennas coming from? Where are the semiconductors coming from? Where's the graphene? Where's the upstream silicon, right? So, as you kind of unwind that whole bill of materials for the product, and then, you know, looking downstream too. So, who are my customers, customers, customers, and then who are the logistics providers, and, you know, financial service providers, that whole chain, so that that's what a value chain is. It's with respect to a product, or even, like an industry, kind of a class of product, thinking about that whole end to end worldview. And again, because of outsourcing, it's become impossible to know the answer to that question, right? Like all that data just is all over the world in these disconnected systems, but there's been no ability to put that picture together. So, you know, I actually just wrote a piece in Forbes. It's kind of an executive audience, and I said the businesses that win in the 21st century is going to reorganize themselves and transform themselves around managing value chain networks and not merely managing buyer relationships and customer relationships. Lauren Bedula 22:51 Fascinating. I want to pivot back to as a CEO of a company doing business both on the commercial side and US government side. If you could talk a little bit about the different approaches in each market, or any kind of takeaways from balancing both, as we have many founders who listen and are interested in approaching government markets? Evan Smith 23:10 I just got some good advice on this. A little cheeky, but I just got some good advice from an investor who's active in the defense space and the government sales space. Lowball your sales forecast to your investors. So, yeah, private sector revenue is much more predictable than public sector revenue. So, backing up, it's culturally very different. I think you know, if you're doing high value sales to any organization of significance, my recommendation, culturally in the go to market is you need to be very mission driven. You need to show up with curiosity and empathy for your customers business problems, and you need to be in it for a long-haul partnership. So that's true. You know whether you're selling to Walmart or you're selling to the DOD, and there are other kinds of ways to build product and go to market, right? Like you could be lights out product led, you know, buy my thing, whatever. So, so if you're in, if you're in the government game, you should have that kind of DNA. And then where it gets different between the two is, is you can stage deals in in the private sector pretty predictably. You know, my first touches. Here's how I qualify a deal. Here's where I identify budget this is where I find technical buyers and executive buyers and could sign off. And these are the legal things I know I need to get, to get ahead of. And in the in the public sector, you know, you're, you're having to top down, bottoms up, and then sort of silver platter. The middle is how I describe it. And so, the bottoms up are, you know, you have people. That are that become trusted partners of the agency, that can walk the halls, often with a clearance, and be a little bit death side and build trust. You know, I understand you. I understand your pain. I can help you get to a win here. Top down is what it sounds like. You know, everything from the sort of agency level, Secretary level down some of the hill engagement, you know, doing working the appropriations game at, you know, some amount of scale. And then the silver platter middle is, you've got to really have a capture function that knows government contracting better than your customer does. You've got to, you know, this is the vehicle, this is the budget. These are the strings to pull. And you've got to hand that thing to them on a silver platter if you're going to play the game in any kind of real way. And so, if you're a founder that you know, thinking about getting into the government business, do not go hire the person who sold productivity software on the GSA schedule, you know, knocking on the front of the door that is, that is not how this works, and you guys are nodding. Hondo Geurts 26:08 And yeah, I think I often describe it. You know, in the public sector space, the buyer and the customer are not always the same person or the same organization even. So, you've got to have customer fit and buyer fit it. Yes, I like your silver platter analogy. So, you've been at this founder game for a good bit. Now for better and worse, for better and worse. Lessons Learned. We have a lot of, I think, aspiring founders out there, lessons learned in terms of, how do you stay fresh and resilient and motivated through what can be a pretty, pretty grueling grind and tips. If you were looking at yourself back a couple years ago that you would give dev aspiring founders as they're thinking about getting in the game. Evan Smith 26:54 I have a lot. I'm stealing this from Marc Andreessen, but he when, when asked, you know, how should I think about starting a company? Should I start a company? He always tells everybody; you should absolutely not start a company. Here's why. It's crazy. You know, you're going to sacrifice. You're going to sacrifice emotionally, physically. You know, it's gonna be the hardest thing to ever do. And if, after all that discouragement, you're still determined to start a company, okay? Like, then we can have a conversation. So, so I think you you're either compelled to start a company or you shouldn't do it at all. Like, have a problem you want to solve, and you just can't not do it right? Like, don't, don't say, I want to start a company. I go figure out a problem space to spend time in. Then you shouldn't do whatever you come up with. So that's thing one. And then I think my, my biggest like maturation through this whole thing is the importance of seeking and communicating reality to all the stakeholders that you engage with along the way, which include your customers. They include your investors, they include your partners, they also include your employees. So, here's what I mean by that in in building a startup, there's a fundamental tension between vision and reality. That's the whole point, right? Like, I'm, I want this, this vision of the world, to be true. I'm gonna go start a company and try to make that truth and tension gets resolved one way or another, right? Like, either, either vision collapses down to reality and the thing didn't work. Or, you know, you pull reality toward vision, or you meet in the middle, so, in a in a really ambitious kind of long term journey that is a startup, one of my, my central, you know, failures as an entrepreneur and as a leader has really been on the theme of believing in my own ability to pull reality to vision and my own, you know, work ethic, my sweat, my grit. You know, I can make things happen and I'm not saying this in like a Theano’s way, where, you know, where you're like, just being fraudulent, but, but where it's like, Okay, I think I can get to here. I can pull this deal off, or this person's going to turn around, or, you know, this customer is going to break our way, and, and it's just, it's just so hard when things don't go well, to have everybody mobilized in a supportive way, because things won't go well all the time, and so it when you, when you seek reality, that means you're, you know, you're curious about it, you're looking for feedback from the market, from your customers, from your team. What's not working? Why does our product suck? If you could change anything about it, what would it be? Or, you know, you talk to your board like, what am I missing here? Or how do I go from being a $30 million revenue company to a $300 million revenue company? Like, what are the big pieces I don't see? And so, if you're in that kind of curious open mode, you're absorbing the information that can help you evolve. And then on the other side, you have to be communicating what's working and what's not, so that everyone's kind of brought into that, again, common operating picture, like, because in the good and the bad, now you've got people on the same side of the table just working through it with you. So, I've had to learn that the hard way twice, you know? I've had two startup experiences do not work, you know, and in various months of flames, and that's the through line for me. And then since I started really applying that framework I've had up into the right, you know, so, so far, so good. But I, I would really encourage anybody with a founder mindset, don't act like you have the answers. Don't like, don't act like you can kind of always deliver good news or pull something off, even if it's not working. Like, just communicate or bring everybody into it. Lauren Bedula 31:01 That is such great news, and hits on something you said earlier about establishing yourself as a trusted partner, something we talk about on our show a lot, is for DOD or the national security community to be working with new entrants. They have to have that trust, and it's so important to be communicating that reality, not pitching them like investors or in the art of the possible. So, I think that is fantastic advice. And on that piece too, you talked about all the different stakeholder communities. So, I have one last question. We talked about the problems technology can solve quite a bit, but at the end of the day, this is a human endeavor. What's your take on growing the business from a talent perspective? Are you seeing folks energized to work these issues. Evan Smith 31:40 Oh, yeah. I mean, we, I think there's so much mission surface area in Altana that we attract people that you know, are really world class. I mean, it helps to have a fast-growing business and, you know, great capital backing. But you know, it starts with mission. So, whether you're motivated by national security, whether you're motivated by global economics and understanding how the kind of economy works, or climate or labor rights, in the context of forced labor, there's so much surface area for people who care deeply about things, and then, you know, those are your best employees, right? Because they're showing up with a cause, with mission alignment to something that you care about, and you can get people pointing in a shared direction. So, I think you know that scales and just kind of doubling down, tripling down on mission as you get bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's about coordinating more people. And then I think one of the other things that that raises the talent bar, keeps the talent bar high as you go from you know 10 people that you hired, to 50 people you interviewed, to 500 people whose names you don't know, and we're kind of in that phase right now. I think there's something about pushing the vision and the ambition of the company continuously beyond where you are at the moment, and moving the goalposts that keeps the talent bar high. It's kind of hard to distill into pithy phrase, but, you know, once, once you get product market fit, once things are working, it's easy to just kind of settle in, and then you get mercenaries who come in, and I, you know, I'm the best product marketer, and this around the and if you, if you push the business, push The organization to always be going at something more ambitious and to do things better and to tackle bigger things. It just has this continuous side effect of pulling really hard charging really talented people into the business and, frankly, cycling the people out that have lost that edge. Hondo Geurts 33:58 Yeah, it's a I've often used the term positively discontent. You're optimistic and positive, but you're not content, right? And moving things forward, how do you how do you balance? I really am intrigued on this. You've got to be an optimist, right to go after I'm gonna go change your world, right in and you have 1000 people and telling you why it's not going to work, why it's, you know, you're not, you're not going to do this. How do you what tools have you come up with internally to keep that optimism without getting delusional, right? And so, you talked about getting, you know, real feedback and all that. Evan Smith 34:38 The one I just said is the big one. It's, it's that, you know, you really have to orient constructively toward the negative. You have to seek, you know, different opinions. You have to you have to seek bad news. I tell everybody at onboarding that. The fastest way to my heart is a hard truth. So, yeah, you have to continuously try to generate that. And it's hard. Like, I, you know, I just said that. But, like, I just had a meeting earlier today where somebody you know on my team said, no one's telling you this. Well, how the f*ck exactly, how is that possible? You know, this is the thing they should be telling me. So, um, so I think that's the big thing is actually an emotional orientation toward the tough news, where you can actually absorb that as constructive and not an attack on yourself. Lauren Bedula 35:37 Another great piece of advice to end on. Evan, thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through what you've built and your perspective as a founder operating this phase, we're so grateful for your time. This is a lot of fun, guys. Evan Smith 35:48 Thank you.