Ben: Welcome to Cleared for Takeoff. Today we have Mailani Veney, CEO and founder of Kana Systems. Aloha. Welcome.

Mailani: Beanie.

Mailani: Aloha. Aloha everybody.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. Mailani thank you for being on. One of the really cool things that you’ve told me about in the past is your origin story. Can you share a little bit with us about how you got into Kana systems, how you got into government contracting?

Mailani: Yeah, so it starts with a no. I was recruited by the Department of Defense. They asked for my help in modernizing technology at Offit Air Force Base, including ISR, weather data and nuclear weapons technology. I was already running another tech company. I was getting ready to be president of the largest volunteer organization in my state. And I just didn’t have a background in that. So I I passed and then they kept recruiting for multiple months. 

Right. And then I said yes when I understood the depth of the problem and why they needed my brand of help with which is innovative technology. Yep. That’s impactful in a short amount of time. Right. 

Ben: Right, absolutely. And bringing that to their processes to help them, you know, get the tools they need to do their jobs. Cool, very cool. And I know one of your one of your kind of guiding things is the Aloha Spirit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Mailani: Yeah, absolutely.

Mailani: Yes, so Aloha spirit, the way we define it is helping others to flourish without expecting anything in return. Growing up in Hawaii it’s something that’s very near and dear to my heart, which is helping others and really having that idea of being phono, which is good, and spreading that goodness. Right. People at the end of the day you know, want to be happy and flourishing and the more that we can do to help that, that’s Aloha spirit.

Ben: Yeah, that’s cool. I know you’re helping the government flourish, you’re helping your team flourish, right? Team is a big part of what you’re doing and making sure that they’re benefiting from the company and what you’re doing. Tell us a little bit about the problem you guys are solving.

Mailani: The problem that we ended up tackling to start with is the same problem seven years ago that’s still happening today. And that is that there’s just an overwhelming amount of data. Okay. And the types of missions that need to be made are relying too much on the manual processing of that data. Okay. With that, our logo is the wave. We help people to ride the wave of data and not get smashed by it.

Little surfing analogy. What does that actually look like? So bring in a lot of data. we can do all of the processing of it to get to a faster, smarter workflow, okay, more insightful decisions. I can talk a little bit more at depth. So the very first problem that we tackled was with US Strategic Command and the Nuclear C three Enterprise Center. They were taking five people two weeks to pull together data. 

from all over the world in all different formats and types, and then manually putting that into what they called a horse blanket of a spreadsheet. And then taking out bits and pieces of that information to put into reports to then flow up to the correct commanders, leaders, etc., to understand really the readiness for the nuclear weapons technology stance. And this had to do with strategic deterrence. So strategic deterrence is the core of our nuclear weapons philosophy. And so doing that every two weeks, some of the data would be two weeks old, some could be an hour old. and that flow was just too inconsistent and too manual.

We took that from five people two weeks down to one person less than thirty minutes. Using our automated tool and a really powerful platform that was able to take that information in using the human in the lead, not just the human in the loop. And then being able to spit out trusted information. 

Ben: When you say human in the lead, what’s what’s that idea versus human in the loop?

Mailani: You hear that quite a bit and especially with generative AI. We’ve been doing this for over ten years now. So this is before Gen AI came right. Not new to this space.  You hear a lot about human in the loop that hey the the machine’s not the only one making the decision.

Ben: Not new to this problem. 

Ben: A human has to come in and input something, right? Or…

Mailani: Decision or something. And I’m sure our I mean our audience is very well versed in this. But a human in the lead does what humans do best because there’s the things that we can do that machines can’t do, such as the the reasoning and the logic and even the different layers of intelligence that we as humans have. When we put human in the lead instead of just human in the loop, we get a better output. The two things that we we are known for, one is speed. And but the second is trust. And if you can’t trust how things were handled, that the data was that the correct data was was input and all of the steps along the way and then you can’t trust the outcome. Then it’s not it’s not helpful. It’s not a low hospital. You can’t flourish if it’s not trustworthy. So, speed and trust are the two things that we really are known for and the things that we really care about the most in this.

Ben: That’s awesome. And so the problem that you initially solved, we’re actually talking about like the folks making the decisions knowing the readiness of our nuclear arsenal and they were doing it on spreadsheets. Mm-hmm. Wow, that’s wild. That’s awesome. So that’s a huge problem you guys were able to come in and and solve and and bring that speed and trust. So I’ve heard you talk about this as like a continuum, right? Can you talk about that a little bit and where Kana fits in the in the kind of continuum?

Mailani: Yeah, so if I think about the problem, right? The if you have a completely manual process bringing in data and you’re physically looking at it maybe o maybe literally on a piece of paper.  All the way to very sophisticated enterprise tools, there’s a vast middle in here and and we talk about we’re what we’ve seen in the government and in the federal DOW and DOD space, probably 80% are doing some combination of manual and their own tools, it’s not automated, and it’s still very slow and cumbersome. Okay. So what we were brought in to do, and one of the reasons that I was personally recruited as an entrepreneur, is I brought over technology from my last company, my commercial company, that the foundation of that is called KanaWave. And KanaWave is a powerful suite of data processing tools. With KanaWave we’re able to ingest data, we’re able to do all of the different steps. So chunking it, summarizing, tagging, reasoning

Ben: Probably from a bunch of different sources, right? Different systems.  Some of them in the government.

Mailani: Perfect. Yes. Exactly. Exactly what you say. And the idea that we can then take that it’s an it’s an AI engine. That’s what’s trademarked and that’s part of our intellectual property. and that engine is so powerful. And then on top of that, then we can do we can tailor the workflow to whatever the problem set is. Okay. And that’s really our secret sauce is that this is not a commercial off the shelf. I don’t know of any AI tool that’s a peer off the shelf that is gonna be able to help at the level that many of these DOW defense organizations really need. We tailor that to their workflow and then at the output they’re able to do just tremendous gains. Some of the stats we have, you know, I told you the one from our very first project. we’ve recently had ones where one of our Pentagon customers measured the use of our tool internally. And was hoping for a 2X in productivity. Right. And she called and she said, We got a 38X. We got a 38X. That’s awesome. That made me so happy. So it’s it was definitely flourishing. It was really flourishing.

Ben: Yes, blew it away.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s fantastic. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about is you talk about providing and and I get the tying into the disparate information systems. I get it sounds like a platform plus services play, right? So you’ve got a platform, right, that does all these cool things you’re talking about, ingest data, you leverage AI.

But then you’re using services to customize it for the specific workflow, specific data sources of a specific customer in the government. Okay. All right. That’s awesome. you mentioned to me before providing folks with the tools they need to do their job. How does that tie into all this? Is that along the lines of what you’re talking about, like with the StratCom example? Like like what are some other examples of that?

Mailani: Yes, perfect. A 100%.

Mailani: So and this goes to your audience. Your audience is comprised of a lot of different types of people. So, owners of companies, executives, technologies. Technologists, etc. A really important tool that we use is a Gallup tool, and it’s called Q twelve. I encourage everybody to look that up if they’re not already using it. I’m not endorsed by Gallup, I just really believe in this philosophy. They’ve taken their vast amounts of data, and they’ve called it down to twelve questions. That signify the health of an organization. If we think about ourselves, right, then what’s something that people can’t take away from you? They can’t take away your health. It’s the same thing within an organization. So that is another another piece that we at Kana Systems really focus on is being a very healthy organization. Those 12 questions, it’s an anonymous survey that you can do it whatever increment you want. But those 12 questions really are insightful. So one of the questions is.

I know what the mission of my company is or I know what the mission of my organization is. I know what’s another question is I know what’s expected of me. And these aren’t verbatim, this is these are are pretty close. One of the questions is I have the tools and resources to do my job. Okay. So we ask this question. So we do the survey every year. We just completed it. And then we as a company go back every week or every meeting where we have our all company meeting and we actually discuss one of the questions.

How did we score with our team? How did we score? How did we score from before? What’s the delta? And what can we do to strengthen this? Yep. And what can we do to answer this? So we just literally just ask this question of our own internal team. And we always score very high on this. But we ask our team, what else, what else do you need? What tools and resources do you need to do your job? Right. And we give it an open forum and people either chat if they don’t want to talk and then other people talk. And they are telling us things like, hey, I want 

this kind of training tool for AI or I want this kind of new mouse, this new ergonomic mouse. Right. I you know, I want this, you know, extra screen because I’m doing, you know, a lot of complex data. Right. So and we hear and then everybody hears from each other. So if we translate that to the defense world and the government world, the federal world, having been a a grand grand brat, a brat 

Ben: Could be anything, I guess.

Mailani: As a spouse of military. I see them and now with our customers, I see them living a dual life. They live the life on the outside as regular Americans, right? With our iPads and our phones. and a lot of tools. But then when you go into the federal space and especially when you go into classified spaces, then you all of a sudden you don’t have those tools and resources. So it makes your job more difficult. And if you don’t have the tools and resources to do your job, you don’t feel like you can flourish. You don’t, you know, people want to be heroes at work. So that’s where we step in in our way, and that is that we give them a tool that they can trust that they can do their job better. So the  2X to the 38X. We have other examples where we’ve taken a process that was multiple months down to a few days. And then it it frees the person up to be able to do more person centric things, right? Really get the high value out of the person. So being able to give the tools and resources to someone in their job, is something that doesn’t sound very glamorous, but at the end of the day, if I took away all your tools, you can’t do your job, right? It’s it makes it much more difficult. So that’s what we do. 

Ben: That’s actually really cool, right? So that’s what you’re doing for your customers, but then you’re also drinking your own Kool-Aid, so to speak, right? And constantly making sure your team, you know, knows what the North Star is, knows what their role is, has the appropriate tools, right? So you’re you’re actually you’re living what you’re selling, right?

Mailani: Yeah, and then to hear people thank us afterwards, one of my very favorite favorite stories is when we did one of these installations, the person in charge, he’s really tall like you are, and I was sitting and all of a sudden he dropped to a knee. I thought he was proposing to me and it’s like, what is going on? And he said, where have you been all my life? And I thought, you know what, he just felt so good about being able to do his job in a better way. And just that that sense of relief and you know that’s the thing that’s what gen AI has done, right? Look at how many people are using generative AI right now. Of course and that’s but it’s also introduced challenges, technology challenges to understand can it be trusted? And so that’s where we partner with you. 

Ben: It’s changed our business for sure. 

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. No, I I appreciate that. And that’s one of the things we definitely help our customers do is figure out how to use it responsibly with the appropriate guardrails and reach their objectives with it, right? Yes. With with AI of all different sorts. you mentioned, you know, building in these, you know, in these high security environments, right? I I’m interested in some of the different things you have to consider, some of the challenges that come with with working and building solutions in those environments. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mailani: Right. There’s a different level of expectation, obviously, in the commercial world versus the government world or the federal world. There are different considerations that frankly, again, when I was recruited, I didn’t even consider. The bluff on this, the bottom line up front is it’s much more difficult. As it should be.  Which is that makes it more difficult to get technology and I’m such a firm advocate of not just a toy, but a tool, something that can actually be usable. So to me right now one of the biggest barriers to this is a the ATO. Getting the ATO process the authority to operate in a in a in a federal setting or in a government setting.

Ben: You’ve got to have a sponsor, right? And then and go through a process, right?

Mailani: Right. Lengthy process. Very lengthy process. A lot of compliance checks, some you know, certifications. There’s different acronyms or different things for that. But the bluff is that it’s more difficult, but it has to be built in as part of the strategy. Right? If you know what you’re really actually looking to do is to be usable to help people flourish with your tool, you have to do this process. But planning for it in terms of time, money, resources. So who are the people that internally can do this work for you? Who are your who are your vendors? Who are your partners? Those all have to be really thought out. And we actually, I’d love to come back and have one of our engineers talk with you through this process. 

Ben: That’d be awesome. Yes. 

Mailaini: So we’ve actually done a really deep dive on this. Feel very good about the process that we’re using. we’ve taken a lot of lessons learned from others. You know, our very good partner, AWS, has been just fantastic as far as as helping to guide and give advice on this. Which is actually how we how they actually matchmake us. It’s a business consideration that I a lot of people don’t talk about at the especially at the beginning. So if it’s a newer company looking to get into this space, know that this is something that you’re gonna have to plan for in your strategy.

Ben: That makes sense. So you mentioned one of your advantages being speed, right? It would seem to me that that speed and that type of environment are difficult to achieve together, right? So how are you fast without losing, the rigor you need to be able to to stay secure and do everything that you need to do to provide the customer what they need in that hyper regulated environment?

Mailani: So part of that is our secret sauce.

Ben: Okay, okay. Well we don’t want you to to share the secrets all.

Mailani: But more importantly it’s really that being able to work alongside our customer. So we already have this really powerful engine. There are companies that do just one part of what we’re doing. So for example, tagging data. There are companies that just do that. Just classify there are companies that just extract. The fact that we can in a in a really powerful way do all of that. And I talk about it like a little Lego that sits on top. So the ability for us

Ben: Classified it.

Mailani: Because we’re model agnostic, we’re as vendor agnostic and as unopinionated as we possibly can be.. So it’s very adaptable. And because of that, we’ve architected it that way. we can be very fast in meeting whatever our customers’ needs are, demands are. Right? So that’s that’s part of our speed issue is that we have a lot of options.

Ben: Go where the customer stuff is, right?

Mailani: One of my very favorite things to talk about is being an American. And my favorite thing about being an American is my freedom.  And the way I define freedom is freedom to create options and act on those options. Okay. So we’ve done the same thing within our company. And how we’ve architected our solutions and built our solutions so that we give our customers as much freedom of option as possible. So when we work alongside them, we’re gonna hold hands and we’re gonna work we’re gonna work towards a solution. Then we’re easy easily able to adapt and react. The other part is that we have a very intentional way to understand what the outcome is, what the workflow should be looking like, what that end result should be. So we work with the end in mind. And then it cuts out a lot of the noise. I mean I’ve been doing this for a while. Sure. It cuts out a lot of the noise absolutely to get to a really streamlined answer quickly. So literally we can do we can give them something that is X percent more useful in a week. We really work in a in a month to three month cycles for our customers. But what they’re seeing is I mean it’s it’s blowing past what their expectations are.

Ben: So it sounds kind of like part of it’s the flexibility in the platform, right? So you can meet the customer where they’re at from a technology perspective, but then also the the services component where you’re going in and you’re working, you’re kind of entrenched with the customer, figuring out what their problems are, and then you leveraging the platform, leveraging the services and delivering a solution, right?

Mailani:  Yes. Okay. That was a better way of saying it.

Ben: I don’t know, I’m just trying to just trying to make sure I understand ’cause I think it’s I think it’s really cool what you guys are doing. 

Mailani: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. and then I think just to build on that.So, Congress is supporting what we’re doing in a way that’s really important to me because when we’re saying hey we get we’re getting we’re getting this money from the government, right, to go execute and help solve problems. Our platform is so ubiquitous and our customers’ words, from our very first customer saying that no one’s able to give insights to data like we’ve been able to. We have, you know, Colonel Cameron was saying everyone in the DOD needs this and then we have then, you know, our one of our classified Pentagon customers, everyone in the federal government needs this. When they’re saying those types of things, for us we’re able to say, well then how do we actually execute on that without saying specifically we’re only gonna work with this this group or this services or this combatant command. So we can work across the DOW, we can work across the federal government. And that’s really our focus. We do have dual use, but really our focus is on helping the war fighter.

Ben: When you say dual use you’re you’re you’re talking about helping the warfighter and helping with other things like procurement and stuff like that?

Mailani: So no, dual use is actually a government term. So dual use dual use technology is something that has both a commercial application and a public sector application.

Ben: I got it. I got it. Okay. So commercial and public sector, but you’re focused on the on the government stuff, right?

Mailani: There’s a lot of need right now in the government section.

Ben: Yeah, I’m I’m sure. I’m sure absolutely. Yeah, very cool. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about you as a founder and and then just your team. I think it’s really cool how you how you brought your team into the fold. You’ve talked about exiting, right? Which which you know founders think about, right? I’m a founder. but you talk about it in terms of your team, which I think is really neat, right? Can you talk a little bit about that and how and how you want to build the company around the team and then have them be involved in the success at the end.

Mailani: Right. So you know, it’s like it’s like being a parent too, right? Yeah. You know, parented my kids that so that one day they can go off and be successful individuals on their own.

Mailani: So it’s the same thing with companies. This is my fourth company. This company most likely we will do some type of an exit, whether all are part of the company. Because my team, a lot of them are at the in the beginning chapters of their careers. I wanna be able to set them up, not just in the money sense of things, but in the sense of the flourishing. Yes, we have a lot of young people on the team. 

Ben:Have a lot of young people on the team? That’s cool. How are you finding them?

Mailani: Well, most of it’s reputation. So I used to be a professor. And one of the people that our class went to go visit was a very successful businessman. Owned a portfolio of companies. and he said a couple of things that matter to me. One, he said reputation’s your only asset. That’s how the government, that’s how the department of defense recruited me. They heard of my reputation, my reputation for doing good and getting good results. That’s the same way that we recruit people. People hear about our reputation. In fact, I just interviewed somebody yesterday that we most likely are gonna work with and he had heard of our reputation and reached out. And a lot of our team are referred by other members of our team. So they it’s a healthy place to work. Full of Aloha Spirit. We don’t work every other Friday. It’s fine. We don’t work every other Friday. It’s called Pau Hana Friday.

Ben: Have the tools you need. Don’t work every other Friday.

Mailani: Pau means stop in Hawaiian and Hana means work. So Pau Hana Friday is every other Friday. Stop work. Stop work. That’s cool. So we want I started that ’cause I thought I want as many three and four and five day weekends as possible. Why wouldn’t my team want that?

Ben: Of course they do, yeah. No, that’s awesome. That’s so so really trying to strike a work life balance too, that that works for everybody, right?

Mailani: Yep. So reputation, we have a good reputation and we don’t build the reputation with the intent of building like a clout kind of thing. Like we’re just you know, quietly just do good things every day. Yep. share aloha. and then yeah, and that and that that person is Warren Buffett. Okay. Yeah, so Warren talks about reputation’s your your only asset in life.

Ben: Yep, absolutely. No, that’s awesome. Well cool. We’re running out of time. I want to take you through our lightning round. So just a few quick questions for you, right? What’s the most overhyped thing in AI right now for defense in the federal government?

Mailani: Too many AI wrappers. 


Ben:Okay, too many, and just one more sentence on that.

Mailani: When you say IRF, or what are you thinking about? So they’ll take a model and then they’ll just pretty it up, put their name on it and say, hey, we got AI for you.
Ben: Got it. Okay. What about the most underrated?
Mailani: Those who can get all the compliance right. In the federal government for AI, so getting their CUI enclave, getting their ATO, being able to work fed ramp. That’s the most underrated. 
That’s a great that’s a great competitive moat.

Ben: Okay, okay. Awesome. 
What should every technology leader in the defense industrial base and the government be paying attention to right now?

Mailani: The rapid innovation that’s happening in technology and staying on top of that. So how we handle that internally, 4 times a year, we do an internal hackathon. And so our team, we just got done doing one.  
So we just got done. Our our team internally bought, built 6 different tools using different nude AI services or combining them. So things are happening so rapidly and staying on top of that. 
That’s right in that right in that wave. You have to be very intentional about that. 

Ben: Yeah, I completely agree with that.

Ben: And then last, what does cleared for takeoff mean to you? 

Mailani: That’s like a surfing, uh, you know, emua, emua means to go. Hey, let’s go. 
Yeah, there you go. I like the emua. I like that. 
I like that.
Ben: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Mailani. 
We really appreciate having you unclear for takeoff.

Mailani: Yes, thanks. Thanks. 
Aloha, everybody. Yep. Aloha.