About Phil Duong

Phil Duong is the CEO and co-founder of NODA AI. The son of Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the U.S. with little money and speaking little English, he grew up in a family of service members who had fought for their freedom. His heritage left him with a deep sense of patriotism and a drive, as he puts it, to repay the country “multiple lives’ worth.” He was appointed to West Point but walked away from it when a childhood medical issue blocked him from branching aviation, calling the Marine Corps instead because they needed pilots and were willing to give him a shot. After leaving active duty, he built a career at enterprise-AI company C3, rising to general manager of its federal practice before leaving to start NODA. He frames himself first and foremost as “a Marine and patriot,” a self-description that shapes how he runs the company and what he’s willing to say in public.

About Paige Craig

Paige Craig is the founder and general partner of Outlander VC. Growing up homeless, and raised in what he describes as a violent world, he was named for a grandfather who rose from enlisted soldier to an officer under General Patton. Paige was recruited to West Point — where he claims the distinction of being the most-punished cadet in his class — and left in his third year, recognizing he was “the wrong guy” for the institution’s barracks mentality. He moved on to the Marine Corps and the intelligence community, and in 2003 built a private military company operating at and beyond the forward edge in Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa, which he sold. As an investor, his entire lens is the founder and the mission, evaluated against a proprietary 38-point framework built around vision, intelligence, character, and execution.

About NODA AI

NODA AI is a startup building the orchestration and decision layer for autonomous warfare. Rather than building drones or vehicles, NODA aims to overlay government-designed tactics and strategy onto the autonomous platforms other companies are building. Their software seeks to re-create what a strike cell or operations center does today, fast enough to run in real time as robots take over more of the battlefield. The idea is that battle plays for defeating advanced threats need to be baked into deployable algorithms in advance, ready to push down to autonomous boats, planes, and submersibles the moment competition turns to conflict. The company started as a five-person team that prototyped for roughly a year unpaid, and is now working across what Phil will only describe as “very topical” combatant commands.

About Outlander VC

Outlander VC is an early-stage venture firm focused on writing first checks into exceptional, often low-signal founders others haven’t yet recognized. The firm runs a high-volume, high-selectivity funnel. Paige says that over 10,000 founders come in through the top of the funnel each year, with roughly 5,000 passing AI filters to a first call, a few hundred meeting the team in person, and 10 to 12 ultimately receiving funding. Paige keeps more than half his calendar deliberately unscheduled so he can take long walks with founders and go deep on the person rather than the pitch deck. The firm now has seven partners Craig has trained.

Top 5 Takeaways

1. A relationship forged over quitting (West Point) and joining (the Marines)

Both Paige and Phil got into West Point. Both left before graduating. Both then went to the Marine Corps. That’s where the similarities end; Craig left because he chafed against the rules and the “barracks mentality” — he says there “wasn’t a rule I couldn’t break” and he simply didn’t fit. Duong actually loved the regimented life but left anyway, giving up the prestige because a medical issue blocked him from flying and he wanted to be an aviator badly enough to walk. When you think about how rare that series of events must be to begin with, the backbone of this relationship becomes a bit clearer.

2. The first check got done over 72 hours in Florida without a pitch deck (opened)

Craig flew Duong out to his place in Rosemary Beach, on the Florida Panhandle, and they spent three days together without opening a single PowerPoint slide. Phil recounts falling for the investors as much as Paige fell for him. Because they’d lived somewhat parallel lives with shared values derived from their youth, Phil was convinced that Paige would “turn over every stone” to help him succeed.

The degree of connection between these two made me question what I thought I knew about a “first check” relationship.

3. The NODA AI team worked (mostly) for free for the first year

When Phil resigned from C3 AI, his team followed him without so much as a product thesis. A group of senior engineers, data scientists, product designers, and his co-founder got up and simply left because he was leaving (what he calls his “Jerry Maguire moment”). The inspirational showing of belief gave way to concern as the VC they’d been counting on fell through after 6 months, but the team stuck together. This group of folks with kids and real opportunity costs simply kept building, unpaid, for nearly a year. Paige shared that this level of belief and sacrifice is in fact simply normal for the rarest 0.001% of founders. But that in itself is a rarity.

4. Leaders eat last

It’s perhaps a truism that in the Marine Corps, leaders eat last. Not as a metaphor but as practice: people line up in reverse rank order so that if food runs short, it’s the senior people who go without. Phil runs NODA the same way. When the early checks were small, the people building the product got paid first; he ate last. He hands every manager and executive he hires a copy of the book on the idea. His larger point is that leadership is the most abundant, untapped resource a founder has — it costs nothing but character — and that most founders, and most VCs, have no idea how to recognize or use it.

5. The “triad,” and the beach demo that beat the people with real budgets

Duong’s framework for surviving government acquisition is what he calls the triad: the warfighter who owns the problem, the program office that represents them, and Capitol Hill that funds it — and you have to work all three vertices at once, not in sequence. But the most vivid moment is how NODA broke through. With no money to market, in a field where billions were being poured into autonomy and a lot of “vapor” was being sold, Duong told the government to simply show up to a beach. There, a five-person startup demonstrated with real vehicles and real integration the thing that better-funded players had been writing articles about for a decade. Craig’s point is that the government has created a mile-wide, inch-deep surface area where lots of people win small programs. But it’s seriously challenging to land the big one fast.

For more about…

NODA AI: https://www.NODAintelligence.ai/
Outlander VC: https://outlander.vc/
Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com

Follow:

Phil Duong: LinkedIn
Paige Craig: X | LinkedIn
Noah Sheinbaum: X | LinkedIn

Crossing the Valley

Ep. 85 - Building a first check partnership