When it comes to the defense tech sales G.O.A.T. debate, John Doyle is one of the most oft-mentioned names in the business. From his days at Palantir, to his robust advisory portfolio, John is both successful and generous.
His appearance on Crossing the Valley has been a long time coming!
This week, John joined us to talk about Cape — a privacy-first cellular carrier he started in 2022 after a decade at Palantir and a tour as a Green Beret communications leader.
The simple version of the story is “ex-Palantir guy builds secure phone company.”
The truth, of course, is a whole lot more interesting.
Here’s what stood out:
1. John chose to build the version of the company that’s almost impossible to copy.
There were at least two easier companies hiding inside Cape’s problem. One was a privacy app. The other was a cybersecurity consultancy that helped existing mobile carriers (e.g., AT&T and Verizon) patch their own networks. “That would’ve been a great business,” John admitted. He built neither.
See, the vulnerabilities John and co care about are network problems — they come from “transitive trust” in cellular: your phone trusts the network, the network trusts every other network, and the whole patchwork leaks your location and activity to anyone who knows where to look. You cannot fix a network problem from a device or an app. You need network footprint. Follow that one premise to its end and you don’t get to pick the easy company. You’re building a global cellular network whether you like it or not. Cape doesn’t build towers or own spectrum; it writes all the software that runs the network and rents towers wherever it needs them.
So in the case of Cape, correct diagnosis led to the founding team to a logical conclusion that required them to do the most difficult thing they could imagine.
2. Naïveté is a gift.
John raised a $5M seed and genuinely believed it would get Cape live. “I was like, we just need a couple more engineers, and a couple off-the-shelf vendors to round out the stack, and then we should be able to get live.”
It took $50M.
He calls this “the luxury of naivety.” If he’d fully priced the build up front, the spreadsheet may have talked him out of starting. So that early ignorance wasn’t a mistake to be overcome. In fact, it was the grease in the skids, and the only reason the Cape team stands to build a moat at all.
The painful founder lesson here was John’s advice on conviction: first, decide whether it’s an important problem. Second, decide whether you believe in the solution. If both are yes, “don’t let how hard or how expensive it’s gonna be even enter the calculus.”
3. John would gladly help a competitor.
Asked about fast-followers, John said his instinct would be to help anyone trying to start the same business. “I’d help them go faster and avoid all the pain and the crazy things you get wrong the first time.”
It’s not hubris, nor is it stupidity, it’s just a man who has spent four years and $50M learning exactly how long the road is. Advice alone isn’t going to shortcut the work.
4. The deal that made Cape was won in a red team.
Cape’s inflection point was a single exercise in Kansas City: a realistic simulated hostage rescue where rescuers used ordinary Pixel phones on Cape’s network, layered over 100 of another carrier’s towers. The opposing red team featured US Marshals doing close-in geolocation, plus a credible group with insider access simulating a compromised US telco provider. They couldn’t locate, let alone track, the operators.
That result was the Series A, and it was the leverage that got the carriers to take meetings. But the deeper lesson is about sequencing.
Cape was fairly confident it could beat the close-surveillance team because a lot of its early identifier-rotation work was built for exactly that. It was much less sure about the insider/compromised-carrier threat, because that’s nearly impossible to test outside a real scenario.
Stepping forward into the breach, despite the risk and uncertainty, ended up being the takeoff moment that turned the tide for the company.
5. Wins compound and unlock new doors.
After Cape beat the insider-threat red team, the company caught the attention of Navy CTO / PEO Digital Justin Fanelli. Justin owned a very specific problem: cellular connectivity in the Pacific. Even more specifically, connectivity on the island of Guam, which traditionally relied on using carriers compromised by China.
Justin recognized the implication of the KC result: if you can provide trusted connectivity over a known-compromised carrier, that changes how you think about communications in theater. So he sent Cape to Guam to prove it. They did. And that single validated hypothesis — trust over compromised infrastructure — opened a whole new set of use cases that drove much of the last year’s growth.
This is the most repeatable strategic pattern from the conversation: each win exposed another, more valuable problem.
John was clear onwhat he’s after: becoming “the United States’ answer to Huawei” — the place where American capital and talent accumulate around telecommunications, the strategic asset the US conspicuously lacked during the 5G race. It’s a much bolder vision than “a better privacy plan,” and one of the more audacious infrastructure bets in the game today.
For more on…
Cape: https://www.cape.co/
John Doyle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-doyle-48633227/
