Jason Carter is the founder and President of UNCOMN, an industry-leading B2B management and technology consulting provider he founded after serving 20 years in the US Navy after retiring as a commander in 2009. Jason’s Navy highlights include being onboard for a submerged collision with a Russian submarine, playing a key role in the largest maritime drug bust in US history; fighting fires in the Pentagon on 9/11; being the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN flag communications officer responsible for President Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech; and sailing across every line of longitude on earth.
Along the way, attained an MS in Information Technology Management from the Naval Postgraduate School; a Master’s degree in Military Operational Art and Science from the Air Command and Staff College; and an Executive MBA from Washington University in St. Louis. Jason also holds a Bachelors degree in Metallurgical Engineering from Missouri S&T. Jason is an active member of his community, serving as President of the Board of CyberUp, a national nonprofit that cultivates the cybersecurity talent pipeline; Vice Chairman of the Board of FOCUS St. Louis, the region’s premier leadership organization; and Board Member of the United Way – Greater St. Louis.
He joins us to talk about how he built a portfolio of government clients after leaving the military, and how he's grown UNCOMN by hiring uncommon people with an uncommon purpose, making an uncommon impact in the communities in which they live, work and play.
UNCOMN
Jason's LinkedIn Profile
CyberUp
Jason Carter is the founder and President of UNCOMN, an industry-leading B2B management and technology consulting provider he founded after serving 20 years in the US Navy after retiring as a commander in 2009. Jason’s Navy highlights include being onboard for a submerged collision with a Russian submarine, playing a key role in the largest maritime drug bust in US history; fighting fires in the Pentagon on 9/11; being the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN flag communications officer responsible for President Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech; and sailing across every line of longitude on earth.
Along the way, attained an MS in Information Technology Management from the Naval Postgraduate School; a Master’s degree in Military Operational Art and Science from the Air Command and Staff College; and an Executive MBA from Washington University in St. Louis. Jason also holds a Bachelors degree in Metallurgical Engineering from Missouri S&T. Jason is an active member of his community, serving as President of the Board of CyberUp, a national nonprofit that cultivates the cybersecurity talent pipeline; Vice Chairman of the Board of FOCUS St. Louis, the region’s premier leadership organization; and Board Member of the United Way – Greater St. Louis.
He joins us to talk about how he built a portfolio of government clients after leaving the military, and how he's grown UNCOMN by hiring uncommon people with an uncommon purpose, making an uncommon impact in the communities in which they live, work and play.
UNCOMN
Jason's LinkedIn Profile
CyberUp
All right. Welcome to the program everyone. Today we are speaking with Jason Carter, the founder and president of UNCOMN, an industry-leading B2B management and technology consulting provider that Jason founded after serving 20 years in the U.S. Navy, and retiring as a commander in 2009. Jason's Navy highlights include being on board for a submerged collision with a Russian submarine; playing a key role in the largest maritime drug bust in U.S. history; fighting fires in the Pentagon on 911; being the USS Abraham Lincoln flag communications officer responsible for President Bush's infamous Mission Accomplished speech; and sailing across every line of longitude on Earth. Along the way, he attained an MS in Information Technology Management from the Naval Postgraduate School, a master's in military operational art and science from the Air Command and Staff College, and an executive MBA from Washington University in St. Louis. He also holds a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from Missouri S&T, and he is an active member of his community serving asand this is just a few of manyPresident of the Board of Cyber Up, which is a national nonprofit that cultivates cybersecurity talent pipeline; Vice Chairman of the Board of Focus St. Louis, the region's premier leadership organization; and a board member of the United Way of Greater St. Louis. On your LinkedIn bio you state, "If you believe in the cause, you find it difficult to say no." So thank you for not saying no to our interview request this morning. And welcome to the podcast.
Jason Carter:Well, thanks, Fully and Dave, it's great to be here. And I didn't even think of saying no, so. It's a great cause, and I love to talk. So here we are.
Dave Costenaro:That's awesome. Okay, so before we delve into the work that you're doing, I think we need you to pick one of the stories from your bio, and just tell us a little bit more. Do you have a favorite that you would expand on?
Jason Carter:Well, like every sailor, we just love to tell sea stories, all of which have an element of truth in them, Dave. So I would say I don't have a favorite but I will tell one that I mentioned in the bio that I was on board when President Bush gave his infamous Mission Accomplished speech. What I didn't say in there is that I actually had the "privilege" may be the incorrect word, butof personally angering the President about two minutes before he went live on that speech. So I had decided I was going to be belowdecks because I was the communications officer and all the comms and the first ever live presidential television address from a ship at sea was my responsibility. So while everybody else was up on the deck, watching the President getting ready for his speech, I was below. And I managed to get a Secret Service agent to escort me up just a few minutes before the speech, but he wouldn't let me get any closer than the top of the ladder, well, where I was. Well, I wanted to get out where I could see. And I saw the President's communications officer, about 20 or 30 yards away, and we were doing about 10 or 12 miles, so there's a little wind over the deck. And so I said, "Hey, Steve." Steve didn't hear me. So I said it, you know, louder? "Hey, Steve." And again, he didn't hear me. So I use my biggest boy voice to overcome the wind and said, "Hey, Steve," and about that time, just to my left, I noticed this movement, maybe 10 feet away. What I hadn't seen was the President right next to me, preparing his thoughts, looking at his notes, getting ready to go live here in two minutes. And I looked over, and we made eye contact, and he didn't say anything to me. But his eyes said, "Hey, you, shut the hell up." So I shut the hell up. Steve did hear me the last time, he came over, and I got to watch the speech.
Dave Costenaro:That's fantastic. Oh, yeah.
Fully Teasdale:I want to know about the drug bust. Just tell us a little bit, because I have watched some of the YouTube videos of, you know, the Coast Guard catching up to like drug dealers and submarines. And I find that all pretty cool. So just, just tell us a little bit.
Jason Carter:Just a little bit, I guess, which is: My job was to observe and then vector in the USS Cape St. George. Once the the ship that we were trailing was alerted to the presence of the Cape St. George, it was my job to say "Hey, they know you're here," launch the helicopters, and fly in. And so it was actually daybreak, the sun was coming up, and you've got this Aegis cruiser sailing over over the horizon at a flank Bell, and you're watching all happen while the sun's coming up. And yeah, I'm 25 years old, I think, serving as officer of the deck and feeling like king of the world. And you can almost hear the patriotic music playing in the background. WasThey did observe the alert, they launched the helo, and they flew over and landed on this 110 foot vessel, and then spent three days not finding anything on board. And we thought it was a complete failure. The whole story is much better, but I'll just tell you the short version, which is ultimately they ended up bringing in some ultrasound equipment, sounding the water tanks, and realizing that there were false tanks down in the hull of the boat. And there was 12 tons of cocaine onboard that 110 foot vessel. Andjust pallets and pallets of it. And so at the time, that was the largest maritime drug bust in U.S. history, it's since been eclipsed a couple of times.
Fully Teasdale:Wow. Can you tell us what part of the world that was in?
Jason Carter:We were in the eastern Pacific. So we had sailed through the Panama Canal from the East Coast into the eastern Pacific, and were actually headed out towards the Galapagos Islands when when it all went down.
Fully Teasdale:Wow, that is so cool. Wethis isthese are not the kinds of stories we normally get on this podcast. So thank you.
Jason Carter:Well, they may be the only kind you get, because I'm not really a technologist. I didn't tell you that before we came in here.
Fully Teasdale:We're cool with that. That'swe could just do this for the whole hour. Okay, but we should talk about work a little bit. So I know your clients include both public and private sectors, and that you've got contracts or have completed work for the DOD, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, USTRANSCOM. And I want to put like a little pin there, because I want you to tell us more about USTRANSCOM. But talk to us aboutobviously, this is your backgroundHow did you go about building this portfolio? And where does data science and AI come into play and all of this work?
Jason Carter:Yeah, that's a great question, Fully. As I mentioned in the bio and you mentioned up front, I did transition from the Navy in 2009. And I had managed to finagle my last three years in the Navy at Scott Air Force Base, which was near St. Louis, which is Hometown USA for me. So I managed to come all the way back around the world to Hometown USA, spent three years at Scott, and my role was as an IT portfolio manager. And so about $400 million a year of IT money flowed through my office, which made me very popular. Wasn't charisma, or good looks, or anything like that. It was, hey, he's got the purse strings. And so I got to know the mission of U.S. Transportation Command, the systems, the financials, where all the bodies were hidden, and everything else. And I retired from the Navy in 2009, and went to work for a defense contractor doing business at Scott. I spent about 18 months learning how to do business with the government instead of from the government's perspective. And I decided, you know what, I think I could do this myself. And I started a business the best way possible, which is, with a contract in hand on day one. IBM had won the contract to do that portfolio management work that was under me when I was in uniform. And their program manager had health problemshis father had health problems in Alabama, they were moving him down to Alabama, and they wanted to hire me to replace him. I didn't want to work for any organization that rivaled the United States Navy in size or global scope. And I said, "I don't want to work for you, but if I started my own business, would you hire me as a subcontractor, and I'll just provide subject matter expertise." And to their credit, and to my benefit, they said,"Sure." And so I started Aegis Strategiesat the time, we've rebranded over the past 10 yearsas a one-man defense contractor with a full time subcontract in hand on day one, and I always say that's the way to do it. It sure beats hanging out a shingle and waiting for work to come in.
Fully Teasdale:How did you know you didn't want to work for another enormous organization?
Jason Carter:One of the interesting elements about the the military was, promotions were not local promotions. They were all handled by a bureaucracy, in this case, Millington, Tennesseeused to be in the Pentagon, but they moved it to Millington, Tennessee. And I was a successful officer in my career and was kind of always, you know, one of X on any ship or station I was at. But my fit rap, my fitness report, always went off to Millington, Tennessee to be reviewed by a bunch of knuckleheads to determine if I was going to be promoted or not. And as it turns out, you get promoted when you've done the time. And I justthe whole bureaucratic inefficiency of that just made me say, I didn't want to work for any large organization, I wanted to work for an organization where I knew the CEO, I knew the leaders of the organization, they knew me, I could make a difference. And where I thought that merit and reward were much tighter coupled than they were in a large organization.
Dave Costenaro:So in your organization now, UNCOMN, you guys do B2B technology projects consulting. So what would you say the most exciting technologies and projects that you're working on now? And are they all at the intersection of the defense and the commercial sectors? Or is one of those weighted more than the other?
Jason Carter:I'll answer those questions in reverse order, perhaps, Dave. And I'll say that we grew up atin the Department of Defense, and the first eight years of the organization was almost exclusively federal government, Department of Defense work. And to the point that Fully put earlier about United States Transportation Command, one of the thingsand we're all sitting here, I think, in or around the St. Louis area, I know all of your listeners aren'tbut Scott Air Force Base is about 20 miles east of St. Louis in Southwestern Illinois. And many St. Louisans don't recognize that it is the home of one of the 10 combatant commands in the Department of Defense. And arguably, one of the U.S.'s strategic differentiators against all other militaries in the world, because of its logistics capabilities. The Department of Defense can be rivaled, I'd say by the large countries like China and Russia, in technology, and certainly in a number of people. But no, no military can match the U.S. Department of Defense's logistics capabilities, and the hub and the heartbeat of all of that is at U.S. Transportation Command here at Scott Air Force Base. Another interesting element about Scott is that it's one of the most cyber contested domains in the world, due to the nature of the mission. When the Department of Defense does command and control, and that's, you know, movement of forces and orders and things like that, it almost always does so on encrypted top secret or secret networksexcept Transportation. Because 70% of DoD transportation is not performed by organic DoD assets, but by commercially contracted transportation carriersyour FedExes, your DHLs, your American Airlines and your Maersks and Hapag Lloyds of the worldwhich necessitates all of that coordination being done on unclassified networks on the internet. And the bad guys know that, and if they can disrupt our logistics capability, they can disrupt one of our strategic advantages. And so TRANSCOM receives the cyber attention of the most sophisticated nation-state actors. And that's kind of the milieu we grew up in. And so as we take the capabilities we developed in the Department of Defense into the commercial sector, it's often not cyber security, per se, but secure technology development that is our differentiator. And so maybe one of the more interesting applications of that was a project we did last year for the state of Colorado, when the state wanted to pursue litigation against the opioid manufacturers on behalf of the citizens of the state of Colorado, they needed to bring in petabytes-worth of healthcare data into a secure data environment. And so they hired us to build a secure data environment. And we did it in the Amazon GovCloud, so we're an AWS advanced-tier your partner, and we're both a public and a private sector partner for them. And we built a data environment in the GovCloud, which the federal government uses to do secure cloud. Then we imported all of that data, cleansed the data, massaged it, and then did the necessary analytics and modeling on top of that to do damage modeling for the damage the opioids were doing in the state of Colorado. So that they might disperse funds appropriately when they when it came time to, to win the case.
Dave Costenaro:Wow. So setting it up, it's still in the cloud. It's a virtual private network that you set up in the Amazon Gov products. So then, you're, I guess you're probably doing all sorts of searching in, you know, data, exploratory analysis sort of stuff. So that's clearly a spot where the data science and the AI comes into play. Is it that sort of thing? Are there other use cases where you're seeing AI and data science pop up?
Jason Carter:Yeah, another case that is ongoing right now isand I won't say who our client isbut the President talked about them in a speech about a month or so ago, when he was talking about the nation's supply chain issues. And we are working with a national level port to provide, again, secure data, secure data brokering, to help solve some of the congestion problems at the nation's ports. And again, it was Amazon Web Services that brought us to them as maybe one of the premier organizations in the world at the intersection of cloud data, cyber, and especially logistics. Again, we talked about growing up outside U.S. Transportation Command. So when it comes to logistics and transportation in particular, we marry our technical expertise with the functional knowledge of the domain. That makes us, I would say, one of the top companies in the country in that regard.
Dave Costenaro:So it sounds like a lot of the stuff that you're doing is setting up secure environments and doing some work in there. Now, for those who aren't necessarily familiar, are there some like, you knowthe top three bullet points, like, "you need to have two factor authentication on when you have an environment like this", "there's only a certain number of VPNs that can even like knock on the door", so to speak. Yeah, what are, like, is there a bullet list of like, what people in the audience might, like, think about when they're thinking about a secure cloud environment?
Jason Carter:Well, one of the things I would say, Dave, is that people often think of cyber security as a perimeter defense, something that's tacked on at the end, right? I've, I've got my, my technology stack, people are trying to attack it, criminals are trying to attack it, maybe international espionage or whatever, so I need to defend it. And we often think of cybersecurity as defending against attack. One of the things we believe is that the best security is architected in from the beginning. And so, you know, we're mostly a B2B firm. And so I would be speaking to your, your business people out there that are thinking about,"What's our future technology stack look like?" You know, you can, you can hire any cybersecurity company to come in and provide you the best defense that you have against current attacks. Well, where are you going? What's, what's your future stack look like? How do you design that to be secure from the ground up? How do you architect it? How do you build your technology roadmap to get you there? And how do you avoid, as much as possible, the backdoors into your, into your domain that are often architected in from the beginning? So rather than, you know, having the right kind of passwords and multi-factor authentication, which are largely sort of protecting individuals against being compromised, this is, how do we make sure we architect security in to avoid the large-scale attacks that are often the most damaging?
Dave Costenaro:Makes sense.
Fully Teasdale:I'm really interested, I want to go back to the, sort-of partnering with AWS, and I'm curious, like, what is your take on the U.S., sort-of interplay between private and public? Or between, you know, government and commercial organizations like Amazonwhere would we be without Amazon? What are the, you know, plus sides and what should we be cautious about?
Jason Carter:Yeah, I'll try not to get too political here. But I will say that anybody who's worked in and around the government for as long as I have, and does not have significant libertarian streaks to them, is probably not up observing very closely what goes on. So, government by its nature is monopolistic. And it is non-competitive, it doesn't, you know, you don't have two competitions for which government's going to win a contract, right, you have the one you're stuck with. And so, at best, in my view, government's a necessary evil, it's something that we we need. And the beauty and the, and the genius of the American system is the unleashing of the private sector that is enabled by our public policy, right? And so, in my view, first and foremost, our public policy should be to remove barriers to innovation, and to foster that kind of innovation. And that innovation is happening in the Amazons of the world. And it's happening in the SpaceXs of the world. And yet, we do need government to provide the right sort of policy to make sure that innovation is not exploitative, and that it's fair, so that it's not being squashed. You know, I have a book on my shelf, called The Four by an NYU professor named Scott Galloway, and one of the observations he makes in thereand it's been a while since I've spoken on this, I might get this slightly wrong, but it's going to be very closethat the market capitalization represented by the top four companies on the New York Stock Exchange is larger than all but the six largest countries, GDP, in the world. And that is massive power. And it's the power to do good, but it's also the power to do evil. And we need to make sure that we are fostering an environment where the next Amazons and the next SpaceXs can be developed, because they're not being squashed by the monsters in the field, I guess.
Dave Costenaro:Yeah. So what would you say, Jason, about, you know, R&D dollars and spendingyou know, China, the government in China is spending a lot of R&D dollars on things like AI, cybersecurity, high technology. I think that in the United States, like, putting that on the, in the private sector, you know, these mega cap companies that you're talking about, they are the onesyou know, when I'm looking at, "Hey, what's the latest state of the art natural language processing model coming out?" It's always from Google or Facebook. It's, you know, it's not from the universities as much. It's certainly not from the national labs. And maybe that was, you know...It seems like there was a time when that was the case, when the natthe national labs and the universities were flourishing to a greater extent. What are your thoughts on that? Where should those R&D dollars be? And how is that current state?
Jason Carter:Well, I've mentioned one book, and I saw Fully nodding, and maybe you, too, Dave, when I talked about The Four. I'll mention another one here that I really like called The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. And Isaacson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Steve Jobs, um, another book he wrote. But one of the observations Isaacson made in The Innovatorsin which he looked at sort of the history of innovation from the late 19th century, the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, all the way through to the 21st centurywas he looked at this interplay between public investment and private company. He looked at the interplay between open source and proprietary information. He looked at the interplay between engineering and art, and all of those things sort of played off of each other, and were fostered at one time or another by that tension being pulled in one direction or another. And so, Dave, I think you've noted that, you know, China is investing nation-state dollars and R&D, while the U.S. is currently relying on companies like Amazon and Microsoft and others who, may notI'm not gonna call them unpatriotic, but they're int-they're international companies, and so we can't necessarily assume that their interests are equivalent to the interest of the United States people. That would be a bad assumption. And so as we move forward, I would definitely agree with what I think you're hinting at, that the U.S. government has a role to play if we want to remain competitive.
Fully Teasdale:I was looking upI get Scott Galloway's weekly newsletter. And he's just started also doing a chart of the week. And the one that came out yesterday is the share of solar panel cell shipments by country. And I'd be interested ifDave, if you haven't seen it yet, what countrywhat percentage do you think the US holds of share of solar panel shipments?
Dave Costenaro:Yeah, I saw this chart as well, fully dead. This drops to like 1 or 0%. The solar panel manufacturing industryI used to work in energy, and, you know, it used to be a United States thing, and definitely has shifted primarily to China manufacturers at this point.
Fully Teasdale:Well, his point, so yeah, US has 1%. China has 67%. And his point is that it's because the government invested heavily in the industry and in R&D, putting us out of the running in the process.
Dave Costenaro:Yeah.
Jason Carter:There is a flip side to that, though. And there's always this tension between government and private industry. And I talked a little bit about government being a monopoly. And one of the reasons why the capitalistic system has served us so well, is because the dollars flow to where the market is, and governments can distort the market. And so while solar energy is one thing, do we know that that is what's going to win the race and energy for the next 100 years? Or is it simply China making a decision that that's going to happen? And so that'sit's disconcerting at one level. And it's also a danger of the flip side of the equation, which is: when you make monopolistic decisions, you can distort the markets as well.
Dave Costenaro:Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I mean, a lot...It's a lot about allocation of dollars. And we all know, there are a lot of new dollars that the Fed is printing and putting into circulation. So all of those dollars, who decides where they go? In China, you know, the people in the government are making those decisions and saying, "Here's where we're gonna place our bets." In the U.S., that's also true. But there'sto a larger extent, you've got these mega cap companies, you've got, you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they're funding a lot, you know, talking about energy, they're funding a lot of research into nuclear. It's just interesting that the allocation decisions, like, in the U.S., we say, "Hey, it should be market based." And it's like, the groups and the crowds and all these people voting with their dollars. And you know, the allocation is more maneuverable, because there are smaller atomic units of decisions being made. And then now, there areincreasingly, with all of these dollars, there's the gravitational pull of an Elon Musk, of a Bill Gates, of Jeff Bezos, of a Google, of a Facebookthey have so many more dollars. They're enabled by technology, they're exponential, they're supercharged. And now they are the ones making these decisions of like, you know, where do we decide to go from here?
Jason Carter:It's a really interesting philosophical question, I think, Dave. And, you know, what'swhat does the international order look like, in 10 or 20 or 50 years? And what role do mega-corporations play in that? I mean, we've already mentioned that some of these corporations are equivalent to nation-states in their size, scope and global impact. How does the international order look when they start playing an equal role on that stage? And I don't know the answers to that. I guess if I did, I would be investing my money wisely right now.
Dave Costenaro:So this all kind of makes me think of, there's a lot of promise, or a lot of hype or a lot of speculation, in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world around allocating resources and smart contracts. And, you know, hey, startups, they can apply for a loan, take out the middleman. You know, according to metrics of growth, or sales, or whatever, they get paid out from the loan, they, you knowdecentralized finance. So all these things like, "Can we make these things algorithmic so that things are orchestrated and run a little smoother?" Those are some like, concepts that people are toying around with. A lot of the ideology behind blockchain is like, "Hey, let's, let's reclaim finance, let's reclaim all all this governance and stuff for the people." And then, then there's also likeyou know, right in your wheelhouse, Jasonlike, all these security and privacy and data issues. So I'd be interested to hear like, do you have someIs crypto something that's coming up in conversations with with your clients, and blockchain? Is that something that you guys are developing points of view around? Or is it still kind of like, "Hey, that's happening, and we're notit's not coming up on our radar as much yet."
Jason Carter:I would say cryptocurrency, per se, is not necessarily a topic of conversation that we're frequently having with our clients. I do think it's coming. The decentralized nature of it is something that's going to be attractive to companies as they're seeking how to remove friction from the system. I will say, we do a lot of work in the supply chain space, and blockchain has applications in supply chain that are wholly independent of cryptocurrency. You know, it's, "How do you have a commonly accepted secure ledger in the supply chain? Where's the stuff? Who's responsible for it? How did it get there? Where's it going next?" And all those kinds of things that put friction in the supply chain, there are definitely blockchain aspects to that that I think help to remove some of that friction. And that's where we're hearing more of the conversation.
Dave Costenaro:Interesting.
Fully Teasdale:Super cool. Um, I am interested to get yourso, when you look at these mega-billionaires, and the fact that they are so vocal about crypto...Is thatdo you havedoes your libertarian bend have a take on, is this a good thing for our country? Or is there some caution we should be applying?
Jason Carter:My libertarian bent does have a take on this, and I do think it's a good thing. I, you know, money is not neutral. And we're seeing, you know, kind of inflation today in a way that we hadn't seen since the Jimmy Carter years. I mean, so we're talking, what, 40 plus years of relatively low inflation compared to what we're seeing today. And people misunderstand inflation as being a rise in prices. The rise in prices is the effect of inflation, it is not the inflation itself. Inflation can almost always be understood as an inflation of the money supply. And that's what we we did as a matter of public policy, during the pandemic. And all of these rising prices are simply the result of more dollars chasing the same number, or in this case even fewer, goods because of how much the supply chain was disrupted over the last two years. And those were Fiat decisions made by bureaucratic agencies that are causing an effect on 330 million people in the United States, plus all the second order effects beyond. And insofar as we can have money be not tied to politics, but be a medium of exchange between free-trading individuals, then we're making progress. And I wouldI'm absolutely in favor of cryptocurrencies in that regard.
Fully Teasdale:That'sit's an interesting take. Okay, we're gonna switch and talk about culture a little bit. We noticed
this statement on your website:"We hire uncommon people with an uncommon purpose, making an uncommon impact in the communities in which we live, work, and play." I love everything about that sentence. Will you tell us more about how you came up with this "uncommon" concept and what it means in the way you all work every day?
Jason Carter:Yes, I will. Actually I'll tell the story of how we came up with our values. So, "celebrate uncommon genius" is one of our five corporate values. And I prefer to speak of them and think of them rather as"boundary values" or "guardrail values" than the commonly used phrase "core values." In the
Navy we had three core values:"honor", "courage" and"commitment". The Airforce, with which I worked for a fair portion of my Navy career, had"Integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do." And I kind of think of those as motherhood and apple pie. You could kind of shake them up in a bag, distribute them evenly amongst the military services, and nothing would really change, because everybody believes in those things. Well, whenwhen we were 10 people, I called it "the friends and family plan." Employee Number 1 was my little brother who was getting out of the Navy. With a couple of exceptions, employees 2 through 10 were people I knew from my time in the service, who I knew were really good people that I wanted to hire, and I brought them on board, because I was trying to do something different than the competition. But at the end of 2014, we won a series of contracts, and in 2015, we had to hire 50 people. And I didn't have 50 friends and family. So I had to, you know, put job rights on this.
Fully Teasdale:You did, but maybe not that you'd want to employ.
Jason Carter:That's right.(laughs) So we had to, you know, do the standard, put a job rec out, do the interviews, meet somebody, try to make a decision about them, and hire them. And at the time, we were mostly a subcontractor, and we would bring them in on day one, I would give them a nice orientation into the company that lasted about an hour, they would get issued their laptop and get their payroll system, and all that kind of stuff. And then we would farm them out to a contract somewhere, and they would go to a Boeing facility or a General Dynamics facility or some other prime contractor, and spend more time with them than they spent with us. And so we didn't want to simply be a staffing agency. And we started asking ourselves, "What is it that holds us together and makes us unique and who we are?" So we hired a human consultancy, they called themselvesa local St. Louis firm called Big Wide Sky, who does this really well. And they came in, and they interviewed us and they interviewed our people, they interviewed our clients and our business partners with kind of the research question, "Who are these people and what makes them tick?" And amongst our other values, the one that took the longest time to find the right words for was this one we're talking about, "celebrate uncommon genius." And the reason it took so long is because we kept circling around something like "love our weirdos." And we knew we probably couldn't put that on the website, that it may not be a recruiting tactic. And so we hadwe had to find code. And so "celebrate uncommon genius" is code for "love our weirdos." And it's the idea that, most humans are uniquely gifted in some particular way. And if we can find a marriage between those gifts, and the job we're asking them to do, then we can put them in a place where they'reyou know, to use somebody else's phrase, "in the flow," right?and we do not try to make you walk like us, talk like us, and think like us at UNCOMN. We try to carve out those boundaries with our values and say, "Our values circumscribe the acceptable behavior in this organization. Inside those boundaries is this wide open space to be yourself, to be awesome." And that kind of philosophy came from my time in the Navy, actually. The Navy has a warfighting doctrine called"command by negation." And I qualified battle watch captain on a carrier strike group, and so you sit in this room and you have several people in therea surface warfare commander, a subsurface warfare commander, a strike commander, an air defense commanderand all of these voice circuits coming in and all this information coming at you at voice, coming at you on chat screens, people giving you reports...And there might be, you know, 1000 contacts out there that you're trying to keep track of. And if the battle watch captain has to give every order, there is no way you can prosecute a war that way. And so the Navy's official warfighting doctrine is "command by negation." All of those subordinate commanders take commander's intent, and then report to you what they're doing. And unless you negate, negate, negate that order, it's implicit permission to continue doing it. And so that's kind of the culture I've tried to build at UNCOMN, which is: "You all are way smarter than me. You're closer to the information that is needed than I am. You have better situational awareness than I do. You know where we're trying to go. If you're telling us you're doing it, and we're not telling you no, go be awesome, go do it." And that sort of unleashing of the creative genius of the people in the organization is what we mean by that and what we're trying to do.
Dave Costenaro:So that's making me think of, like, walking into like the X Men Training Center and seeing like Beast hanging upside down from his feet and Cyclops shooting a laser.(laughs) Is itare thereif theyonly if you think they wouldn't mind, are there like individuals at the company that like, have, likeare they like wind surfers or like...It sounds like there'sthat's like a tractor beam for eccentric, kind of like...a celebration of eccentricity.
Jason Carter:Well, I won't say his name, but if he's listening to this, he'll know who I'm talking about. One ofso we've got about 220, 225 people in the company, something like that. Probably 50, you know, software developer slash cloud engineers that kind of live in that space. One of my top people in that space was about 20 years old when I hired him. He was stocking shelves at Target. And he had no degree. But he had taught himself to program as a teenager, learned the PHP language, discovered security holes in the PHP architecture, started posting those security holes on the bulletin boards, got the attention of the original developer of PHP, and then became mentored by that guy, before he came to work for us. Well, he was the most nervous 20-year old you've ever seen in his interview with me, butby the way, I stillone of the partners in the organization interviews everybody that we hire. So I've got four partners. The last stage is a partner interview. By the time they make it to the partner interview, they're already hired. You know, we've got a special sense to detect axe murderers, and if an axe murderer comes in front of us, they don't get hired. But, so this guy is sitting in his interview with me, and the guy that was the hiring manager pre-briefed me thathe goes,"Hey, I found my prodigy, this kid..." And he started reading off his resume, and we had this assessment exam that we would give, and as a entry level developer, he had scored 20 to 30% higher than all the senior developers I had in the organization at the time. And so he was going to get hired, but he washe was sitting in front of me, and he was bone stiff. There wasn't a muscle moving in his body as I was interviewing him. And I said, "Hey, man, don't be nervous." "Of course, I'm nervous!", you know? Anyway, well, that was six years ago now. And he's since got married. And he married another equally interesting individual as himself. And we hired her about a year ago too, and so now we've got this husband-and-wife team of completely eccentric technologists. And it's hiring people like that, giving them a chanceI mean, we put him on as a junior developer and within six months, he was on a Boeing subcontract. Within six months, Boeing was making him a task lead, making him in charge of the whole task they were doing. And so he's probably promoted five or six times since he's been here. That's one example. You guys know Bryce...Bryce is one of our uncommon geniuses in the organization. One of the things we've done is take Bryce's passion for playing with things on the side and married them with actual client problems. And so, he works in an organization we call Ventures, which is our R&D arm. It's where I spend all the profit that that should be put in our pockets, I guess. (laughs) But I spend it on Ventures to do new and cool things for the future. And through a conversation between Bryce and another person in our organization, who had a passion in another completely unrelated field, Chris asked Bryce, "Hey, do you think you could do that in this industry?" And Bryce kind of thought, "I think so." And he went home from work that day and he stayed up until four o'clock in the morning working on it. By the time he came in the next day, he had sort of a prototype, and this industry. And we're working on that product right now to take it to market. So weI just love to provide people the opportunity to marry together what they love doing with with business.
Dave Costenaro:That's fantastic. That soundsthat's really cool. It's a really fun story.
Fully Teasdale:So great. I have to, likeI was thinking, like, the civilian equivalent of the"negation" concept in the Navy, is "Ask forgiveness, not permission," right? Which is something that you hear in startups all the time. But the truth is, I've been in a lot of them. And a lot of times it's,"Ask forgiveness, not permission," with the filter of,"but I'm pretty sure the leader would be okay with this." And so to provide that, like amount of space and sort of safety for people to really explore is cool. And it's I think it's rare. So.
Jason Carter:Well, when I told you up front, that I wasn't a technologist, the only time during this interview I started getting nervous was when Dave started asking me about my opinion on multi-factor authentication and how many VPNs, because I really am not a technologist.
Fully Teasdale:I saw your eyes kind of go, "uh..." (laughs)
Jason Carter:What I am, is a knucklehead, who learned leadership in the United States Navy, which I think was an excellent breeding ground for leadership, and realized the potential of surrounding myself with people smarter than me. And so my role in the organization is kind of to sniff out those uncommon geniuses, and coerce them somehow into the organization. You know, pay them fairly, reward them for great work, but provide them an opportunity to, I'd say, become the fullest and best versions of themselves. You know, so many times we think of our work as what we do to earn money to spend leisure, on the weekends or on our vacations or whateverwhen we spend most of our living lives, in our vocations in our work. And when we are exercising our gifts and solving problems and building things and creating things, we're working up a sweat, you know, a metaphorical sweat if we're in the technology industry, I guess. You know, you go home from work and you're metaphorically sweaty, because you accomplished something that day and you solved a problem, you delivered the code and it worked or whatever. There's a self-satisfaction about that. And tapping into that sort of"uncommon genius" is what I consider my role as the leader of this company being.
Dave Costenaro:That's awesome. So, Jason, we have a segment on our show that we call, "We Got Jokes." And I don't know if you have one, f you do that'd be awesome. If you don't, we can just say a few corny jokes and move on. But let me let me start by sayingInflation has really gotten out of hand, but that's just my three cents.
Jason Carter:(laughs) That's good. I did think about this, Dave, because Fully told me I needed to and she challenged me to come with a technology joke. But I warned you, I'm not a technologist. But I am a sailor, so I've got a sailor's joke. So in the 19th century, when, when men were steel and ships were wood, there was a ship that was escorting the king's son, the prince, from one country to another in pirate-infested waters. And one morning right as the sun was coming up, the lookout in the crow's nest called down, "Captain, sir. Pirates coming up the stern fast. Looks like one ship and 25 pirates. They're going to overtake us in about three hours." Captain says, "Very well. Sergeant-in-arms, arm the crew, prepare to repel boarders. Prince, Your Majesty, I suggest you go belowdecks, and First Mate, bring me my red shirt." So they did all those things. And a couple hours later the pirates come along board, and the ship, which had about 100 people on board, successfully repelled the pirates, sank their ship, but they lost about 10 or 15 people in the process. And so the next day, at daylight,, you know almost the same thing from the crow's nest, right at sunlight."Captain, sir. Pirates off the port bow. Looks like there's two ships, about 50 pirates." Captain says, "Very well. Sergeant-in-arms, arm the crew, prepare to repel boarders. Your Majesty, I suggest you go belowdecks, and Mate, bring me my red shirt. So all these things happen, and a couple hours later they've successfully repelled these two ships and sank them both, but they've lost almost half their people in the process. Afterwards, the prince comes up to the captain, he says, "Sir, I mean, it's really impressive what your crew has done, and I just want to thank you for protecting me, for my father. But I've got to ask you, I don't understand why, right before a battle, you ask your mate for a red shirt." And the captain says, "Well, Your Majesty, leadership comes with great responsibility. And in the middle of battle, my men look to me to make sure that I'm standing tall in the battle. And inevitably, I take a wound or two, and I don't want my people to see me bleed. And if I'm wearing a red shirt, it hides the blood, and they're inspired during the course of battle. And the prince says, "Wow, that is just really, really impressive. Thank you for that." And he goes to sleep. And the next morning, right at daybreak from the crow's nest, the lookout says,"Captain, sir. Three pirate ships directly ahead of us, they're going to catch us up in about an hour. Looks like there's about 200 of them." And the captain says, "Very well, lookout. Sergeant-in-arms, arm the crew, prepare to repel boarders. Your Majesty, I suggest you go belowdecks. Mate, bring me my brown pants.
Dave Costenaro:Oh, jeez.
Fully Teasdale:Nice.
Jason Carter:That was longer than the inflation joke and I gotta apologize for that.
Fully Teasdale:Oh, no!
Dave Costenaro:I gotI didn't see that coming.
Fully Teasdale:I wasI was fully engaged. I was right there. Alright, you may have heard this one before. Why do Swedish military ships have a barcode?
Jason Carter:Oh, no. Why?
Fully Teasdale:So when they come in to port, they can Scandinavian.
Jason Carter:Nice.
Fully Teasdale:Alright, we want to be respectful of your time. So we haveour final section is called "Smorgasbord." We just ask you some random questions that have nothing in particular to do with anything. The first is, What is your favorite city in the world?
Jason Carter:I think Prague. I've managed to travel a lot in the world, not as many asnot as much as some or manyand most of my observations have been about infinite expanses of ocean and sky. I love Singapore. I love Hong Kong. But I think sort of the just, history of Prague, and wandering through the streets of Prague and seeing the old architecture, the ancient architecture. I really enjoy that city.
Fully Teasdale:Awesome. That's why we asked. Oh, gosh, um...Rome.
Jason Carter:I haven't been there yet.
Fully Teasdale:It'sfor the same reasons. It'sandyeah, it's just so walkable, and you just get lost. It's likeit could be any time, you could be, you know, it could be 3000 years ago. What about you, Dave?
Dave Costenaro:Gosh, I don't know. I think...I really liked Paris when my wife and I went there a couple of years ago. I might say Paris.
Fully Teasdale:Nice. All right. Dave, next one.
Dave Costenaro:All right. What is your weirdest phobia?
Jason Carter:Oh, man. I don't have many things I'm afraid of. I've actually been in a lot of interesting situations that has made you sort of come out of that saying, "Okay, I'm...I'm able to handle a lot of things. I will say the time I was most afraid in my life was actually when I was retiring from the Navy. I joined the Navy at 19 years old. I was still in college. The Navy enlisted me to finish my degree and send me to Officer Candidate School and New Power school and become a submariner. That's all I had known. And when I was retiring from the Navy, I was contemplating leaving behind an oath to the Constitution, a mission that I understood, principles that I believed in, and I thought, "I am wholly unprepared to operate on a profit and loss basis. I don't even know what that means." And I was intimidated, kind of existentially afraid to get out of the Navy, not knowing thatthat if I was going to be able to succeed like I had in the Navy, you know, notnow it's 11 years later, and I go, "I think I did all right." But that wasn't certainly known at the time.
Dave Costenaro:Yeah.
Fully Teasdale:What a genuine answer.
Dave Costenaro:Yeah.
Fully Teasdale:All right, last question. If someone were to gift you 100,000 shares of any company on Earth beside your own, that you could not sell for 20 years, what company would you want it to be?
Jason Carter:Whatever Elon Musk's next company is.
Fully Teasdale:Yeah.
Jason Carter:When I say"uncommon genius", that's what I mean. Right? That guy has just a sense of technology, of human aspiration, of business need and opportunity that I just think is unparalleled. To have done it not once, but twice. He's gonna do it a third time for sure. And I'm investing in that company.
Dave Costenaro:Yeah, nice.
Fully Teasdale:I'm a fan.
Dave Costenaro:Yeah.
Fully Teasdale:Dave knows I actually have a, like, portrait(laughs) of Elon Musk. From like a real artist. I paid a lot of money on the internet for it.
Jason Carter:Oh, that's cool.
Fully Teasdale:It's great. I'll send youI'll send you a picture.
Jason Carter:Please do.
Dave Costenaro:Fun stuff. Awesome. Well, Jason, it's been so great spending some time with you today, getting to chat with you and hear your thoughts. I appreciate your time. We like to give our guests the last wordis there anything that we didn't cover today, or that you want to mention or promote or say, in closing?
Jason Carter:Now, I would just say the one thing that's been a theme throughout this is people. And in a technology company especially, people can be left behind. Sometimes we can fall in love with our technologies. And ultimately, it's about people solving problems with technology and with technologies that matter. And Elon Musk, who we just talked about, may be a great technologist, but it's his understanding of the problems that people are trying to solve in their lives that makes him such a great business person. And so I would just encourage all of the technologists out there listening to this and the data scientists out there listening to this, to never forget the human side of the equation, because that's actually the side that drives all technology. And if we've had any success at UNCOMN, it's by being a people centric organization. And that's, that's been my role in it. And so I would just leave by saying, prioritize your people. It's worked for me.
Dave Costenaro:Absolutely. That's awesome.
Fully Teasdale:Great. Thank you so much.
Jason Carter:Thanks. This has been fun.
Fully Teasdale:Absolutely.