Overviews
They were four people. They had ~$150,000 in the bank. And John Conafay wrote a check to an accreditation partner. That check was easily a double-digit percentage of the company’s value at that moment. And he risked it all on the conviction that a Space Force contract was going to land.
Well, this is Crossing the Valley, so you already know that it did.
Three years later that relationship became a $25 million, five year SBIR Phase III with Space Systems Command.
We’ve covered a lot of acquisition orthodoxy these last few years on CTV. This conversation was fun because of how John went a different path, and bucked convention.
He spent money he didn’t have.
He started the transition conversation before he’d delivered value.
He hired strangers to knock on doors for him.
And he pitched the hardest version of his product first.
Here’s a bit more from my awesome conversation with John Conafay.
About John
John is a US Air Force veteran and the founder and CEO of Integrate. He enlisted after a failed run at a metal and hardcore record label he started in high school, and spent his service in COMNAV fixing AWACS on the flight line in Alaska. He calls it “a swift swift kick” that he needed. Those early days on the flight lane have paid dividends to this day, by helping the “business guy” hold his own in engineering conversations.
After leaving the Air Force John studied economics at Arizona State, where he took over the national chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). It was during this time that he ran a coordinated campaign to win a donation from one particular individual: Mr. Jeff Bezos, himself a former SEDS chapter president. John and team had no idea they’d succeeded until Bezos folded up his $250,000 Heinlein Prize check and announced that it should go to SEDS instead.
His career spanned a variety of startups, including joining BryceTech, becoming employee number eight (roughly) at Astranis, Director of Business Development at Spaceflight, and Head of Business Development at ABL Space Systems. And he did all this before founding Integrate.
About Integrate
Integrate builds multiplayer program management software for organizations that build complex hardware. Founded in early 2022 and based in Seattle, the company sells what John describes as “a schedule that many organizations can share, without seeing each other’s private data.”
John describes the status quo they’re up against as “Microsoft Project,” a piece of software that shipped in 1984.
The company won a $1.25 million SBIR Phase II with the Space Systems Command Mission Manifest Office in 2023, then a $25 million five year Phase III in June 2025. It reached IL6 accreditation and deployed into a classified environment in under twelve months.
Key Takeaways
1. Conviction comes from seeing the same problem multiple times
John describes how he hit the same wall at Astranis, at Spaceflight and at ABL, time and time again. At Astranis he was managing 180 suppliers while also running federal and commercial business development, and he spent his days on a loop: receive, download, import, reconcile, export, send, so that somebody else could do the exact same thing. He was too busy reconciling risk data to analyze it.
At Spaceflight he tried to build the fix internally. They were flying 20 to 60 customers on a single launch, 25 launches a year, 3,000 tasks per customer, and none of those customers could be allowed to see each other. He could not make it work inside the company. He tried again at ABL.
It was hard to see this as anything other than a massive opportunity after he’d failed to solve it three times from inside three different orgs.
2. Build for the worst environment first
John’s rule was that anything the team shipped for a commercial customer should also be deployable for / by the government. He didn’t want 5 different stripped-down versions; he wanted it to be the same software.
That conviction came from having lived the alternative. We see it again and again: when you’re looking to buy a commercial product you can get a great piece of software. But when you move it into a CUI environment, you get ten percent of the capability. John and Integrate wanted to build “something our warfighters and our acquisition professionals can actually use.”
That decision cost money in the short term, because it required removing external dependencies. The team had to exercise extreme discipline on the software bill of materials and examine where it’s open source code came from. They had to deploy to AWS GovCloud from day one, at meaningfully higher cost than the commercial alternative.
But John emphasizes a critical point, which is that Commercial to CUI was not the moat. Plenty of companies have made that jump. The money gets made when you move from CUI to SIPR, as this is where the market thins out. For Integrate, their Phase III conversation did not become real until Integrate got to SIPR. The customer told them directly: happy to talk pricing, but if you cannot get us into classified environments, none of it matters.
3. “Spend money to make money”
The truism is silly, but in the case of Integrate, it was just straight up accurate.
John paid Second Front to get them to prod before the seed round closed, before the Phase II money, and before anyone asked for it. He bet it all on getting working software deployed.
Three weeks later he had a customer on NIPR and in CUI environments, using working software.
There is a huge difference between a demo and a customer laying hands on keyboard. John still recalls the reaction: “oh, you are actually delivering things.”
4. Rent the door knocking to earn the room
John knew he did not have the government relationships up front, and he was unwilling to wait the months / years it would take to develop them for scratch. So he is candid: he paid contractors with connections to book meetings for him.
Access can be a cost in government go to market; you still have to close.
He tells a great story of a meeting that felt like it was destined for disaster. He was scheduled to meet with a lieutenant colonel and a major. They were busy, so he got pushed down to a second lieutenant fresh out of the academy. He pitched her anyway. She took it back to her chain of command, and a captain called him 45 minutes later to ask whether the product actually existed because it was solving such an important pain point.
The honest answer was “sort of” but that call changed the game for John and Integrate as they’d found a maniacal believer in what they were selling; someone with acute pain who couldn’t take it anymore.
5. Find the fastest path to impact
When I asked John what he would tell a young founder, he said, “go straight into the smallest startup you can find and skip everything else.”
The network and pattern recognition he built in those years is a large part of why Integrate moved as fast as it did. There is no substitute for the frying pan of a small company pushed to move fast, with radical accountability and high stakes.
Call for Startups
Go solve disinformation. John thinks the proliferation of bots and synthetic video is one of the genuine existential problems of the moment.
For More:
Listen to the full episode:
Integrate: integrate.co
John Conafay on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/conafay
