Jason Rathje, Director Office of Strategic Capital - DoD

Lauren Bedula 01:03 Welcome back to building the base. Lauren Bedula and Hondo Geurts here as part of our Mini series. We call it with DoD R and E, and today's guest is actually our first repeat guest. We have Jason Rathje back with us, the Director of the Office of Strategic Capital, and excited to dig into some of the progress he's made since he was on about a year and a half ago. So, Jason, thanks so much for joining us. Well, Jason Rathje 01:24 thanks for having us here. Hondo Geurts 01:25 It's great to have your back. Jason, normally we ask our guests for a little background, where'd you come from, and all that, but we already have that if you want to go back to Jason's episode about 18 months ago. So why don't you give us a little family update? How are things going at home, and how are the kids doing? Jason Rathje 01:41 Well, as you might suspect, raising twins is maybe the hardest thing we've ever done as a family. It's certainly right up there with starting a brand-new organization in the Pentagon. They're probably about the same amount of difficulty, but the kids are four. They're becoming independent young adults already. It feels like they grow fast, and we're just trying to hold on and be alert for the ride. Are Hondo Geurts 02:08 they already reaching out for investment from you to fund some of their projects? I Jason Rathje 02:12 will tell you they're extremely strong negotiators. Let me make a deal with you. Dad is a common phrase heard in our house. So they are, they are leaning forward in understanding their own fiduciary responsibilities to cater to mom and dad's wallets at all times, but make sure that they're making good investments to the future of their own satisfaction. Hondo Geurts 02:32 one ice cream cone at a time. Jason Rathje 02:33 Absolutely Lauren Bedula 02:34 love it. Love it. Well, today is a big day, so thank you for joining us on what is a big announcement out of the Office of Strategic capital. And as we talked about, there's been a lot of progress since last spring. So, could you tell our listeners a little bit about today's developments? Jason Rathje 02:48 No, it's a big day for us, who just released the first notice of funds availability, $984 million in available credit. We're pushing into the ecosystem to support the competitiveness of our US industrial base. This is the first direct credit program, not only from OSC, but from the Department of Defense. It includes a seismic shift in terms of how the department is engaging with our industrial capacity. The wonderful thing about today's release is it marks six months after receiving a very specific kind of appropriations, we have our own color of money. I'm sure many of the listeners to your podcast now understand after listening to your podcast what a color of money is. It is a very big deal inside of the DOD, and the fact that we have a unique color of funds focused on loans and loan guarantees, and we're able to act on that so quickly, has really made a meaningful impact, not only within the department, but within the market, and we're starting to see the market shift in ways already, just by the announcement today of folks responding with eagerness to be able to receive A loan to expand the production equipment that's required to grow industrial capacity in areas that they weren't able to grow prior to OSS existence. So Hondo Geurts 04:08 for those few people across our listenership that maybe didn't catch your first episode way back when, can you rewind the clock a little bit on kind of what the big idea was in standing up the office, and some of the goals you had initially kind of as the first director and what you wanted to achieve, Jason Rathje 04:29 no, it's really been a multi-year journey to get to where we are today. If you look across our industrial capacity broadly as a country, and you overlay that with the technology areas that are critical to national security. So, this is a big series on R and E. Well, the undersecretary for Research and Engineering, Ms. Heidi, she was responsible for the Department of Defense in determining what are our critical technology areas. And if you look across those areas intersected with the industries that support those areas. Is you'll see a systemic amount of under investment in the capital markets. What I mean by under investment is that much of our capital dollars have been allocated focused on industries that are research, light are in software, industries, enterprise, SAS and the shift of the capital markets over the last 30 years. I mean, back in 2006 45% of all venture capital was investing in hardware. Today it's less than 7% and all of the critical technology areas require significant hardware investments in order to materialize their impact for the war fighter. And so, what we saw was an opportunity to partner with the capital markets in the United States and with our allies to drive investment into the areas that are under invested today. But first we had to unpack why they were under invested. And the main reason why they were under invested is because, generally speaking, these industries have lower returns that materialize over a longer period of time, and capital is going to flow to the areas of highest returns, and these industries weren't it, but the opportunity we saw was, if the government can be a good partner, a good capital partner, then maybe we can get more investment dollars in. We started experimenting with things like app works to partner with private capital with government funding. But the problem is so large that direct government spending is a non-scalable approach, and the only way that we saw to be able to materialize the impact we wanted to find in the industrial base was to create a scalable financial approach to leverage the capital markets in ways that they understood. And then we came and stumbled across during covid this great thing called federal credit programs in the US government, federal credit programs are effectively government banks. They do loans and loan guarantees. Your VA home loan is a loan guarantee program. The Department of Veterans Affairs runs the ninth largest commercial lender in the country. Is the Department of Agriculture. The US, Department of Defense did not have its own title 10 loan and loan guarantee authorities until six months ago. Well, I guess nine months ago now. So, December of last year, OSC was granted the first purpose-built title 10 loan and loan guarantee authorities to be able to use this very scalable tool. Now, why is it scalable? Because loans, unlike spending, we protect we expect a return on our investment. So, because of that, we can have a relatively small amount of appropriated dollars from Congress to have an outsized impact on the market. So, for $49.2 million this year, we're gonna be able to do $984 million worth of loans. It's a 5% subsidy, effectively 5% of risk that we think will incur across that loan portfolio. But what it really affords the Department of Defense is a whole new way to work with the industrial base, not just the defense industrial base, but the broad industrial base. Because if you look across these industries, semiconductors, advanced materials, many of the industries that the other R and E speakers will be talking to you about, those industries, are not just the defense industrial base. Nobody thinks the semiconductor industry is the defense industrial base. Is it important to national security, absolutely. Is it important to the Department of Defense? Yes, but the vast majority of revenues for that industry were coming from the commercial sector. And so, the combination of the problem set the gap and the scalable approach we needed to accomplish but set us down this path for OSC. And when the Secretary established us, you know, a little a little under two years ago, it'll be our two-year birthday in December, he gave us the direction and the focus and a great partnership with the SBA, which we've been running for the last, you know, almost two years. But then he also allowed us to work closely with Congress and the interagency to get these new authorities and new appropriations. And now here we are, you know, almost two years in, and we've just launched our first big loan program. Lauren Bedula 08:54 Well, huge congratulations. That was no easy feat, and we know that I'm curious, if you have an ideal profile for the company you're looking for, is there a specific tech readiness level? Is it Series C seed, all of the above? What's the right fit for companies looking to apply? Jason Rathje 09:11 You know, there we have two products now operational, and we'll continue to bring more depending on future appropriations, as OSC builds itself as a federal credit agency, as a bank for the Department of Defense. That this credit product, specifically, the thing we just launched today, allows for companies to apply for finance between 10 and $150 million to procure, modernize, refurbish, install manufacturing equipment. The type of company we're looking for is companies who already have facilities that can take on this type of debt to go procure or refurbish the equipment, manufacture equipment they have across 31 covered technology categories that are in our statutory authority and their assets, meaning their supply chain. So. So for example, if you're the manufacturer of manufacturing equipment, you are also eligible for this financing. It is not stage of company dependent. That isn't there is no restriction in terms of the of the size of the company or the maturity of the company. But we will expect you all the companies, to be able to receive the loans on a risk basis the private sector would also expect to see, right? So, we're not going to lean so far forward in financing a pre seed company who doesn't have a manufacturing facility already to be able to acquire the equipment. But that being said, you don't have to be a venture backed company either to receive this lending, right? There's no part of the capital market that we won't be able to directly address through this, this, this financing. And the other thing that I would mention in terms of this specific NOFA is, if you're not really eligible for this, but you're still really interested in the government supporting manufacturing or production needs for your style or stage of company. We also have an RFI out on the street now. Everything's located on our website. We highly recommend companies and investors and banks to go assess that RFI and tell us where you see the capital needs in the market, because this is one of a number of products we plan to bring to market over the next few years, and the next product we pick will be heavily informed by the responses we get from that RFI. Hondo Geurts 11:25 So, Jason, what? What makes this attractive to a company, versus a traditional approach? Why is this an attractive tool that that will bring something new to the table? Well, what. Jason Rathje 11:41 we're seeing from the market today is that when companies are going to procure equipment, finance, capital markets are there. They're there with tenors and rates that are not conducive to many of the companies that work in supportive of growth in the national security apparatus, in these core industries. What I mean by that is, you might go try to find equipment, finance loan, and you'll get something for three to five years at a 15 to 20% interest rate. Now, if you're a company that has, you know, you know, 20 to $50 million in recurring revenue, and you need to get 100 $250 million loan, and you have to pay a you have to pay it back that quickly, at that interest rate, you're just going to say, hey, I'll pass until maybe these rates come down, or maybe the tenors extend. The issue with that is, as a country as that puts us in a less and less competitive position when you compared to where we're at from a strategic competition lens. And that's how the department is looking at this. We are in a strategic competition today, and we need an industrial base that is focused on growth in these critical technology areas to increase us competitiveness and so slowing down. It's not great competitive tact. Now this isn't going to be universal. Not every industry is going to be colored the same, but what US federal credit programs and the OSC Federal Credit Program allows us to do is offer rates that are over the useful life of the asset. So, if a company needs to buy a fermentation tank or a CNC machine or lithography machine, those assets may go for 1015, 20 years. OSC has the authority to go up to 50-year loans. And so based upon the equipment in this specific NOFA that we're looking at financing, we can provide terms and tenors that are over a much longer duration, because we're not seeking to have, we don't have some bottom line, some profit line. To achieve the goal that we're trying to achieve is national security impact. Now we also have to do it in a way that makes the money back. We have to have reasonable reassurance of repayment. But through that process, we can determine, on a loan-to-loan basis, what the appropriate amount of time or 10 or the loan needs to stay for. And then we can work off the interest rates based upon where the market is, based about the size of appropriations we've received. So, we offer a product that works hand in hand with the capital markets, hand in hand with the credit markets. In this case, we can work with banks side by side. The opportunity that we see is to fill up gaps where there is not available financing for the growth rates, we need to see in order to maintain competitiveness. Lauren Bedula 14:16 That's awesome to hear. There's an RFI that's scoping some of those external demands, requests for Hondo Geurts 14:22 information for those non acronym followers, Lauren Bedula 14:26 I'm curious how you're scoping internal demands. Are there DoD customers that are informing the process as well? Jason Rathje 14:34 Absolutely there are a, as I'm sure you have detailed on your podcast, there is a wide variety of demands across the Department of Defense. You know that there, there are some very specific limitations of us of our tool. We can't finance defense specific things, so you won't see in a lot of our calls for applications. Actions or RFIs, you won't really see a lot of, hey, this is a Department of Defense focused entity. It's a national security focused entity. What do we mean by that is, again, we can't do planes, tanks, subs, but we can do supply chains. We can do core strategic industries that support all of those other end capabilities for the warfighter, but we focus on the supply chain and the component level, and that's due to federal regulation, right? So, the federal credit Reform Act, if you're an acquisition person, you know, you know about the federal the FAR, Federal Acquisition Regulation, we don't follow the far. We're not a far based program or a thicker based program. Federal Credit Reform Act, program which governs all federal credit programs to include ours, and that program says that we can't lend to something that's inherently federal. So that's a big red line for us, that being said, there's plenty of supply chain challenges across the Department of Defense. We all are working closely with a variety of services and PEOs that highlight areas where there are supply chain challenges and then provide opportunities to finance those areas, whether that's semiconductors, whether that's critical minerals, whether that's things like glass In Yeah. Can we cut that part? All right, I think opportunities where we source those supply chain challenges, get that to us through our street to capital Advisory Council, the street to capital Advisory Council sits as a governance body over us, and the reason we have that in place is to be able to integrate those demands across the department and then form our priorities as an office, and those get vetted into our investment strategy at a 30,000 foot level. So we released our first investment strategy last year, which really highlighted our work with the SBA, and where that program was focused, which was really focused on emerging, kind of innovative, critical technologies, and now with these authorities, this next year's investment strategy, you'll see an expansion of that, because we're going away from just doing the innovative technologies, the emerging technologies, where we've really started our journey, and into core industrial based needs that do also support as an ecosystem, you know, core manufacturing for emerging biotech companies, right, or core tier two manufacturers for the drone industry. These core industries moving into may have been around for 3040, 50 years, but are required to support the innovative new companies as well. And so now, as we continue to expand the program, we're targeting different core parts of the market with different tools that take a holistic view across these kind of clear demand signals we're getting from the department and on the broader national security apparatus. Hondo Geurts 17:47 So laudable activity getting from approval to policy to execution and that kind of timeline, for anybody who's lived in the government bureaucracy. You started a little bit on kind of what's in your mind's eye for the future? Can you expand a little bit on, I know you haven't picked the next two or three initiatives, but just a little bit more thinking on where you see other unmet needs, where a tool like this might be useful, and maybe some unmet needs where a tool like this isn't going to be the right tool for the job. Now, Jason Rathje 18:20 you know, we are in a great position where we get to assess where the country's been in the lending space for the last 100 years and find areas where we think these things might be useful to the department, to the national security apparatus. But whether it's working capital, project finance, infrastructure finance, there's a wide range of opportunities we see on the horizon. I think this RFI is really important for us to have the market to tell us where they see an opportunity, because at the end of the day, we're a market facing program. We're not, we're not we're not doing contract source selections. We're not saying, Hey, we give you money, you give us widget x. We're saying, Hey, here's an opportunity for you to achieve these types of strategic objectives where we have these aligned incentives, right? We're expanding manufacturing to lower price point costs. That then has an effect on the department buying a core component, but also allows the US to stay competitive in these different industries, becomes really important to us. So, we're looking for market feedback. Where do they think their biggest capital, CAPEX expenditure needs are. So, we can build products. We can build the team to do this. As I'm sure you both have seen, the most important part to doing any of this work is the team that you build. And each one of these financial products requires different sets of expertise that we are highlighting we were trying to bring in. If I could just make a quick plug, we are hiring at OSC, we're doubling the team size next year. If you're interested party and you want to be part of the mission, you have an opportunity, please do check out our website, where we'll have a hiring page for open applications for openings in the office to come work with us. Where don't I think these tools. Will be impactful. Again, these tools won't be directly impactful, and things that are specific for the Department of Defense, we have critical technology areas that lean far more into the DoD monopsony area, which areas that we absolutely need, areas where we need to buy, we need to spend, because lending is not going to be a useful tool in that space, but I would argue the vast majority of what we actually need to do, it does have a dual use, or primarily commercial Nexus, and that by helping to secure and make resilient and expand those parts of the industrial base, we will have a more well-functioning and more affordable department of defense capability pipeline, because the things that we need will be available when we need them. Last thing I will just add to this is working with allies and partners. When we look at our global capital markets, half the world's capital is in the United States. The remainder, big parts, pots of funding, are with our allies. Opportunities that we've seen through the last few years to work collaboratively with the UK, with Australia, with the quad, many different frameworks for engagement across the different government entities or hybrid public private entities, with our allies and partners. We see that as an massive area of growth for us in the future, and relationships like AUKUS have really started to pave the way for how we're going to do that as a Department of Defense, and I think one step further from that how we're going to work together as these kind of government banking organizations to do opportunities to do co investments or strategic co financings around areas of mutual interest. It's an area where we are we are developing today. We're not there yet, but I see that as an opportunity on the horizon. Lauren Bedula 21:47 That's great to hear and maybe come back to that. But first, curious a company say they're listening. They fit the bill. How do they apply or go through the process, and what does that timeline look like? Jason Rathje 21:59 So, we the next three months will be engaging with companies. So just go on to our website. There's a link. You can just click on it. You can send us a note. We'll have a team reach out immediately. I'll walk you through the process. If there's something that you see as an opportunity or alert you, where the applications come out, the applications don't actually open for submission until January. So, while three months just to engage industry, we realize this is a very new product. This, this is different than how you've worked with the DoD before. So, if you're used to working with the DOD, don't expect the same thing that you've used to expect. But that's why we're giving ourselves some time to work with industry, but then in January, we'll open up the applications, the two-part application, process. Application part one allows for fairly low lift from companies. Where we'll screen for eligibility. We have a number of eligibility criteria that you have to pass. Just like if you're applying for a mortgage, you have to be eligible for the mortgage, same thing, you have to be eligible for a loan. We want to do that fairly quickly to let companies and vendors know if they're eligible or not. If they're eligible, then they can advance to part two. Part two is a much longer form, kind of traditional I'm going to go to a bank for this style or size of loan. It will be a pretty extensive diligence process, and then we'll start awarding intents to commit and doing disbursements after application part two. Lauren Bedula 23:20 Very helpful. Thank you. And my follow up to the international piece is this, for US companies only this. Jason Rathje 23:26 year is Yeah, so we're having a focus on domestic companies first, for a number of reasons, but it's certainly the intent is that we can continue to expand and work collaboratively across the Allied and partnered industrial base, where we see opportunities. Countries have different comparative advantages. They have different industries, where they've spent a lot of time energy and government resources of their own to help expand those industries, and where we have opportunities to partner in keyways that support the US, but also support strengthening integrated deterrence across our partners is going to be important, and so we're continuing to work with folks globally to find opportunities for collaboration. Hondo Geurts 24:12 So, Jason, let's talk people a little bit here, and I'd like kind of your take on in two directions. One, your office has been laudable in the breadth of the types of folks you brought in, and folks maybe before seeing this opportunity, wouldn't have thought of themselves working in national security or DOD. But now see new opportunity and get your take on how those broad perspectives have shaped your vision and shaped execution. And then secondly, for you, probably first time working across multiple federal agencies, and you know, lots of broad stakeholders, how did you change your approach to be successful working across. Uh, boundaries that you were probably not familiar with, and where, quite frankly, the DoD didn't have a lot of deep, you know, relationships in the past, like the Small Business Administration, Jason Rathje 25:13 the on the people front, I cannot stress enough how important it is to hire the right people in these types of endeavors early on, and by right type of people, I mean not only their skill set, but their mindset and orientation. Building a startup is never easy. You know plenty of plenty of people listen to your podcast. Know that firsthand, and there are people who have certain leanings that would allow them to be effective in a startup environment. But the thing that was really fascinating for me was, because we were we're building finance programs in the market sense, um, and engaging with investors, and we're engaging with bankers and lenders, we open up an opportunity for folks who had a national security background that may have won on to banking careers or investment careers, that have maybe even discussed their desire to see the department change and do things differently, and now we get to say, okay, great, now come back and help us change it. Right? We have job openings for you to come back and be part of the solution, to be able to do these things differently and provide a whole new set of tools to the DOD. And that call was answered strong. I mean, this last time, this last announcement we released, we had 300 applicants for one position, there's a lot of interest in coming over, because I think for the first time, we have an opportunity to hire people that are directors of capital markets or directors of credit programs or leaders for origination or underwriting skill sets. We may not have had in great numbers in the DoD before, but now we're starting to bring them in in real ways, and taking that kind of mindset to solving these problems is something I am learning, right? It's a language, it's an ontology, it's a way of thinking. And getting the diversity of thought becomes really important. You have to be able to bring that diversity of thought together with a common mission, which I think the team has done a really good job of. And I think many of our folks that have come in have had some kind of national security background in their history or their family's history, and so they're really aligned to the mission to begin with, which you get the opportunity, and I would say, really a leg up doing a startup inside the DOD, because the mission, right off the bat, is just everybody's aligned with right off the right out the gate. So, I've learned a ton working with these folks. We will double the team size next year, hiring a diversity of talent and expertise from everybody, from world's best contracting officers inside the government to the world's best, you know, underwriters outside the government, and bringing them in under one common roof is going to be, or continue to be, an exciting challenge for us, but certainly is what helps to drive the opportunity space quickly. I've also learned from them working with the interagency partners, because we're bringing in folks from interagency federal credit programs, whether that's the Development Finance Corporation or the Export Import Bank. Organizations have been very helpful to the OSC as we've been in our infancy, helping us understand how to do this work, how to work with the interagency on these opportunities, it's been a very welcoming environment. There's not a lot of federal credit programs like OSC out there, but where there are, they are they're always looking for partnership. They're very transaction-oriented organizations. They want to get deals done. That's how they drive their impact and I think building OSC in that light has been very effective way to partner with the interagency but the really unique thing with the with the energy that I found that has been very successful is finding these lightning rods of change in each one of these organizations and then partnering with them early on, and then just having an immense amount of endurance, right? So, like, the opportunity is, you know, you do something new in the DoD you do something new in any big bureaucracy, there's always going to be a lot of people who have brake pedals and are not interested. We've had a lot of support from senior leadership. We've had a lot of support from folks at the ground level, and even in this concept of a frozen middle we've had a lot of support there too. I've been fortunate to work at the DOD for the better part of a 20-year career at this point, which has been great to have that kind of background before starting something like this, but now doing that across the interagency, whole other world. And so, finding those guides, those lightning rods who want to do change, they want to get things done, and then working with them to have just an immense amount of endurance to actually see it come to fruition, has been the recipe that we've found for success. Lauren Bedula 29:59 I love it. A great opportunity for cross pollination, which we talk a lot about on our show. I have one more question, and I imagine you faced hurdles getting to this point. I'm curious. As you mentioned, a lot of our listeners are working to build something. Did you face any challenges and learn from them? And have advice you could give our listeners, any thoughts on that front? Jason Rathje 30:23 I have a lot of we face a lot of challenges. I don't know if the way that we solved those challenges was the right way to solve them. We've had a lot of failures. Absolutely, I think what I would go back to the one thing that I've always found to be true, and doing anything new is you have to have the amount, immense amount of conviction and what you want to do, and then you have to have the endurance to see it through. I think creativity is always a really important part of it, but creativity, in it of itself, won't, won't see the length of time it will take to make the change that you want to see. We had OSC was originally in a SASC mark, you know, going back three years ago, Senate Armed Services Committee, Senate Armed Services Committee, we were almost authorized to execute, you know, years before we actually became authorized to execute. And that was just Congress, you know, trying to, you know, for anybody who's raised funding before, when you go raise funding do something like this, you got to convict, convince 435, people, and then another 100 people. It takes a long time. And you know, a lot of that is just showing up day in, day out, with the same discussion and having and feeling the same questions, and sometimes you get some really interesting questions, but most of the time, you're just orienting people to what you want to do, why you think it's important, what problem this solves. And if you have a lot of conviction and you've researched what you're trying to do, you generally get a lot of positive responses, but you still have to go in time and time again, right? It's a, it's a, it's a, it's an endurance, it's an exercise and shoe rubber, right? You've got to make sure you're willing to go put the miles in to make this stuff happen. The more that you can stay with a concept like this and commit yourself to it and commit your team to it, the higher probability of success you have. Hondo Geurts 32:22 so we go back a ways, and you put yourself out there for our pretty early program your force had with Special Operations Command, is that something you would tell future version of yourself or younger leaders growing up to go, try and go after some of these initiatives to build up your both your kind of worldview, but also your resilience to doing new things and bringing a bunch of tool sets together. Did is that one of the experiences or are there others early in your career that gave you the conviction and resilience to see something like this through amongst all the other people that said and never been done not going to be done. Now, please go find another job. Jason Rathje 33:12 Absolutely, you know, I from that experience, to be frank, you know, I so when I joined the Air Force, I did it out of ROTC, and I think I have, like, four or five years at the time, and I had this opportunity to go work with Hondo as a first lieutenant, and at the time, I signed up for it because I wasn't super excited about what I was doing in the Air Force, and it probably wasn't going to be a career for me, but I thought that this program sounded exactly what I wanted to do, right. I wanted to go drive an impact. I wanted to act I was in the right time of my life to go do those things and so the program gave afforded me the opportunity to do it. What I learned from that program was really two things, one, stressing my tactical skill set, and that's something I implore every buddy to do in their career. Put yourself in a situation where you're going to stress your tactical skill set. You think you know what you know. Put yourself in a situation where you really have to use all the tools in your tool chest to go be effective that will sharpen you in ways. I mean, even plus, since I learned those three months, I carry forward, the ability to write a requirements document in Rod was vital to our success as an office, and that's something I did in a couple hours two years ago when we did our initial budget request. But the words I put in that document, I kid you not, were the thing that held our office together going through the appropriations process, and I learned that from that program. So first, definitely putting yourself in a position where you have to sharpen your tactical skill set. The second though is, is putting yourself in a position where you do have to gain a level of endurance and uncertainty, where you have to have conviction in what you're doing. You. Have to make decisions and then orient yourself to how effective those decisions were, but you're always going to be in uncertain times. When you go into unchartered waters like this, you don't know what's going to happen, you don't know how much buy in you're going to have, much support you're going to have. And so, positions like that where you know you had, you were in a good position, because you were going into an organization where they had your back, but they were expecting you to go operate in uncharted waters, to go do something that hadn't been done before. The things I got to do in that program were never done before. And I took some constructive criticism on how I did my job while I was there. But you know, there was never a never a question about the decisions I made at the time and the reasons I made those decisions. And I was always felt supported. And so maybe the last thing I would say, Hondo, on this, is it's a lesson I learned from you in the Air Force was, you know, making providing opportunities for the junior folks in your organization to do that as well, having their back right while putting them in a position where they can be effective. You hire great people you know, allow them to go do great things, and if you know they make a missed a misstep or a footfall, you support them, bring them back in, help them learn from it, or have the organization learn from it. But you know, put them always in a position where that type of risk taking is rewarded and not criticized in a way that would be non-conducive to continued growth as an organization. Lauren Bedula 36:28 Well, Jason, thank you so much for coming out on this busy day with the big announcement from your team. Congratulations to you and the full team for our listeners who are interested. As Jason said, The website has all of the information you need to apply to see the request for information, so I would direct you there with any questions. So, Jason, again, thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely. Jason Rathje 36:50 Thanks for having us in just one more plug. If you're also interested in working at OSC, please go check out our website for future job opportunities. Hondo Geurts 36:58 And what's your website's address? It's, Jason Rathje 37:00 I think it's just osc.mil, yep, so www.osc.mil, I'll take you right there. Hondo Geurts 37:06 Awesome, awesome. Thanks. Thank.