About Brian Spurlock

Brian Spurlock is VP of Growth and Strategy at Persistent Systems, and a self-described “boomerang” employee, meaning he’s had two separate tenures at the company. He came up as a Special Operations acquisitions officer at Fort Bragg, which means he’s seen the Persistent Systems story from both sides: as the government buyer evaluating the technology and as the company executive selling it. He left for a stint at AWS, returned, and is now the one figuring out how to bring tactical mesh networking from Special Operations into Army divisions. He is based in the Fort Bragg / Pinehurst area of North Carolina.

About Persistent Systems

Persistent Systems builds tactical mesh networking hardware and software: specifically, the Wave Relay and Cloud Relay systems, delivered on hardware called the MPU (currently MPU5, with MPU6 in development). The idea is simple and hard: create a mobile RF network that moves with operators, passes real data at real speeds, and requires zero thought from the person holding the radio. Founded in 2007 by two Johns Hopkins PhDs — Herb Rubens and Dave Holmer — the company has never taken outside capital. It manufactures in Manhattan. It has customers across U.S. Special Operations, conventional Army (currently scaling into division-level exercises with 4th Infantry Division), the Air Force, NATO allies, and public safety. It is on the verge of Army program-of-record status after nearly 20 years.

Key Takeaways

1. Persistent Systems bootstrapping a hardware company in defense for 18 years, and lived to tell the tale.

Persistent Systems has never taken a dollar of outside investment. That’s a constraint that shaped the company’s entire character. When you can’t hire ten people, you decide carefully about one. When you can’t burn cash proving out a market, you make sure the product works before it leaves the building. Brian describes the early years as a “patchwork of stories” — LAPD, John Deere, Army National Guard soft units — not a clean TAM story, just finding pockets where the technology solved a real problem and using that revenue to fund the next iteration. The absence of a VC clock means there’s no turn in the road where the car has to go 105 mph. It also means every dollar of growth is going directly back into the business.

2. SOCOM was the best place to stress-test a product for Persistent Systems. It is not necessarily a pathway to conventional Army adoption.

This distinction matters more than most people realize. Persistent Systems spent years earning trust in the Special Operations community, replete with honest feedback, serious users, and operationally intense environments. That feedback made the product better. But when the Army’s 4th Infantry Division started running NGC2 exercises at Fort Carson, something completely new appeared: 700 nodes on a single network. No SOCOM unit would ever need that. The RF physics, the network management, the latency behavior — all of it changes at that scale in ways that smaller networks simply don’t expose. So you may go to SOCOM because they’ll tell you the truth and they’ll use the product hard. But you cannot go there assuming that love from tier-one units automatically converts into Army programs of record. Those are different customers with different requirements, and you have to earn both separately.

3. The most underrated growth metric in defense tech is a question: are customers still bringing you their hardest problems?

When pushed on north star metrics (e.g., what does a VP of Growth at a bootstrapped company use to know if the business is heading in the right direction?) the answer wasn’t ARR, contract value, or unit count. It was: are the people we work with continuing to bring us problems they can’t solve anywhere else? Brian frames the inverse compellingly: when a user stops bringing you hard problems, that tells you something. You’ve either stopped being useful, or they’ve found someone else. The fact that the Army is now doing that — presenting Persistent Systems with problems at a scale they’ve never encountered — is itself the signal that the relationship is healthy and the trajectory is real. It’s a qualitative north star, but it’s a creative way of evaluating where a company stands.

4. Staying quiet while you’re figuring it out is a legitimate competitive strategy.

Brian makes an observation that cuts against the current defense tech marketing moment: if you stay quiet and fail early, you can recover. If you get loud — press, LinkedIn, podcast circuit, conference panels — and then deliver something that doesn’t work, that failure becomes your brand. In the Special Operations community especially, a product that doesn’t perform gets talked about. You don’t get a second shot at a first impression with that user group. Persistent Systems spent years being almost invisible publicly (indeed, this is their first podcast!) building reputation through product performance rather than narrative. The tradeoff is slower awareness growth. The return is that when you do show up, you show up with 18 years of product that actually works.

5. The next unsolved problem in tactical networking has less to do with connectivity and more to do with how to use data once it flows.

Brian’s “call for startups” moment is the clearest articulation of the gap he’s watching from his seat. The pipe problem is largely solved: there are many players ensuring that data can move. However, the knowledge problem remain. While platforms can display dots on a map, how to signal to a commander which dots require human judgment and which can be handled by machine, in real time, under cognitive load, in a kinetic environment, is still wide open. The companies that solve the data-to-decision layer — not another dashboard, not another COP, but genuine decision support that knows the difference between machine-executable and human-required — are the ones he’s watching for.

BONUS: Engineer where the conditions are hardest, not where they're cheapest. As a fellow New Yorker, I have to mention that Persistent Systems didn't pick Manhattan for talent or proximity to capital. Instead, the company located here because NYC is the toughest RF environment on the planet. Dense urban canyons, signal reflections, interference, and mobility all conspire against tactical networks. By choosing to engineer in the worst-case environment every day, the company built products that just work when they get to Mosul, the Hindu Kush, or a Pacific archipelago. See, told you NYC was the new defense mecca ;)

Follow Brian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spurs/

For more Persistent Systems: https://persistentsystems.com/

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Crossing the Valley

Ep. 80 - Persistent Systems (very first…